#starving doesn't work the same for fae as it does for people

[bigfatbreak]

Hello I love your art!!! I was reading through your changeling au and Felix mentions that fae are creatures of mirth. They literally need attention to survive. But what kind of attention? I guess I'm wondering because Adrien has been in the public eye for a while now, but has been personally neglected for even longer. What does that mean for him? Is he starving? Is he in danger of dying? Does he even know it? (I assume not given he doesn't even know he's Fae).

If he is starving / in danger of starving who is the first to realize this?

it depends on the mirth, on the attention, on what it is they seek. Without making things too complicated - I don't like to define everything into neat little boxes after all, there's fun in nuance - Felix is just explaining from his experience, the Fae he was with tended to be "entertained" by certain aspects of their playing, which was the mirth that kept them relevant. Relevancy more than anything is really what keeps their wheels greased.

In Adrien's case though, the reason he's cloying for so many names and to have so many thralls and attendants is because he SHOULD be a more social creature and has been kept woefully alone. He is kinda starving in the way a fae starves - he's relevant, but only in an image his father constructs OF him, which means it isn't REALLY him - and he has no one to play with. No friends, no lovers, and no rivals, makes a very sad fae

[theboarsbride]

"A Court of Thorns and Roses" Reading Update I

Page 101 - 24%

So, some major notes so far:

-I refuse to believe SJM knows how to write poor people. I refuse to believe that Feyre's family has been poor for a decade. How tf can the sisters be so dainty and act so oblivious and bitchy about work for survival after NEARLY 10 YEARS OF ECONOMIC DESTITUTION???????Just their mentalities, how they react to being poor, how they treat their belongings, how they treat their food, how they handle their money, etc. doesn't really line up.

-I can't stand SJM's writing style. SO MANY MF EM DASHES HOLY FUCK AND THEYRE IN PLACES WHERE THEY'RE UNNECESSARY. And also she reuses the same sentence structure, and it bothers meeeeee. (ex.- i was going to the bathroom, which was white and clean and shining. Then, I went to school, a place that was dull and bland and boring.) Like jfc. I wholeheartedly believe the conspiracy that no one actually edits SJM's book because good LORD.

- Feyre is dumb and deserves death. Like the instance with the Pooka. She suddenly sees her crippled father on Tamlin's land in Prythian in the middle of the night??? Given the wary hostility and aggression and distrust she's been displaying towards everyone and everything so far in Prythian, why isn't she doing the same in this instance???? She's said herself she is wary of faerie tricks, and acknowledged that not even whole, able-bodied humans are able to survive in Prythian without the help of a faerie, so why would she think her DISABLED FATHER, who is helpless in the mortal realm, be any different??? And why would she CARE that her father has come for her??? Did she not hope that her family starves without her, so that they realize she's important to them and she holds them in such an embittered contempt?????

- I LOVE Lucien <3 I like this fox-boy, he is funny and actually treats Feyre like the murderer she is (because yes, she's a murderer, and takes PRIDE in having killed a faerie. Which Feyre has some nerve being hostile to faeries who have been nothing but courteous and gracious with her, and thinking THEY are in the wrong when she was the one that MURDERED their friend).

- why couldn't Tamlin remain more like his beast form, making this more of a BATB retelling? I literally imagine him looking like Legolas but JACKED. This is where my ire of 'BATB but the beast is just a hot guy that growls or has behavioral problems' first began. It's such a shallow version of the story and completely misses the point. And the fact that this is also a retelling of The Ballad of Tam-Lin, a Scottish folktale, and does really nothing that's an homage to the story aside from Tamlin's name, the fact he shape-shifts (albeit BARELY), and there's (poorly written) fae really irks me.

-for once I want SJM to actually describe paintings rather than describing what the painting is of. I don't believe for one minute that SJM did more research into art, style, etc. because for the life of me I couldn't tell you what Feyre's art style is, nor do I really care because her having painting as a hobby is so pointless and has no effect on her character whatsoever.

- SJM is lazy as fuck with her world building. ex.- Lucien saying capital 'h' Hell, as in Christian Hell, when humans are agnostic/atheist with a sparse number of fae-worshiping cults (and were once implied to have had a polytheistic religion) and fae worship the Cauldron and other faerie deities so like.....why not use a few extra braincells to create her own version of Hell rather than using lazy cultural shorthand that, by the logic of this book's world, doesn't work????; underutilizing fae lore so now they're either underdeveloped spectral entities or LOTR elves... BORINGGGG!! GIVE US ACTUAL FAE IN LITERATURE AGAIN!!!! (*applauds Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries and Krystal Sutherland's House of Hollow*)

These are my major thoughts for the first quarter of the book.... See y'all again at 50%!

[liminalchasm]

hey (<-zonked outta my goard on delta-8) do you guys wanna hear the beauty and the beast retelling that keeps getting into my head

it's about anti-monarchy and the beast's castle is magically transformed at the brink of anti-aristocratic tipping point, and the spell mostly targets his parents and their dukes and fiefs and shit. but he gets turned too. and they get so transformed into the heartless monsters they are that they die, but he's like. 10. so he just gets weird. but alive.

but the thing is the servants sort of turn too but the spell isn't just like 'oh whatever servants are just extensions of their despots' it's that anyone who chooses to stay in the castle stays objectified like that. and they can just leave. and as they leave they'll start to feel human again. and once they're out of sight they'll start to transform. so it's also about leaving a toxic situation in a way

but also because the servants are objectified they can 'break' or rather, be broken, bc beast is a traumatized 10 year old prince. who has always had a habit of just physically throwing shit. he's a spoiled asshole kid. still a kid but yknow. he's thrown tantrums and smashed pottery or filigree worth a lifes savings for a peasant and just gone 'eh whatever get me another, who cares'. he has specifically trashed rooms / stuff to get servants in trouble before bc he's also a petty despot in training. duh. and like 10. his tantrums and lashing out and not taking care of "things" is a symptom of not knowing or caring about the work or materials or people that created them, and the violence often done to "just make a new one"

but when the servants transform... his anger can't kill or hurt them. they can't feel anything they're a silver candelabra and a teapot. the servants can just fix themselves or each other. they'll get really scared about it because it does hurt in a non-physical way, and it's... the curse has been going on for a while (im thinking like decades or better part of a century) but no one knows when the fae queen/trickster/whatever will... if she will ever lift it.

but the servants can leave. and once they leave, they never come back. (they turn human but beast assumes they get killed by a mob, sort of like his parents whole court after turning into various horrible half-dead beasts and fleeing only to run into protests of peasants who were already like 'what the fuck are you feasting about when we're starving you tax hungry despots' (the former king and queen were not well liked. because fuck monarchy))

he's also like. not exactly biological in the same way he was. he doesn't sleep. he doesn't need to eat. what would he eat? the brambles outside the castle? roots from the dead garden? what's left of the orchards? the rabbits that wander in? he's tried it, but he feels no hunger, really. instead of sleep, he curls up somewhere high and becomes stone: a gargoyle.

he can still... sense. sight and smell and hearing and touch, and all the things he used to have physically. it's different, but he has it, when he's awake. when he "sleeps", he doesn't dream, exactly. but it sharpens his awareness of... the castle. everything in it. it's walls. the moss on the stones. the mice and the owls hiding in its crevices. he doesn't generally focus on any one thing. no point. it's all just going on without him. nothing much happens. no one wanders by. no one comes back. the castle seems lost in time to anything human.

[loominggaia]

How did Evangeline manage to enslave Elska's tribe? How does a bunch of humans overpower a village of centaurs?

That's a good question! I will first say that Kelvingyard slavers are not only human, there are other commoner species working for them as well. Ogres and even some trolls can overpower a centaur in a one-on-one fight. A roshava on horseback would give them a run for their money as well.

It's still possible for a battalion of humans to successfully raid a centaur village, but simply charging in with weapons swinging is not a smart way to do it.

Kelvingyard slavers often use underhanded tactics to capture large groups like Elska's tribe. If they feel like the reward is worth it, they're willing to play the long game. Sometimes their plans can take weeks, months, or even years to fully pan out, but their patience and persistence is what makes Kelvingyard particularly successful.

The story "To Fight the Fog" explores some of these nasty tactics. In this story, Elska notices armored humans skulking around her village and doesn't know what to make of it. They flee when they see her and she can't get any information from them. Little does she know, these are Kelvingyard scouts gathering information about her people.

Shortly after, the local nymphs start disappearing, as well as the surrounding wildlife. This is because the slavers knew Elska's tribe was too strong to tackle, so they decided to weaken them first. They did this by poaching local wildlife almost to the point of extinction, and also harassing the nymphs to scare them away, which hurt the centaurs' foraging yields.

The slavers camped nearby and continued damaging the local ecosystem for a period of years. They caused a famine which weakened Elska's people and even killed some of them. Once enough of the centaurs were demoralized and weak with hunger, the slavers finally moved in for their attack. They showed up on horseback in large numbers, armed with chains, tranquilizer darts, blades, and clubs.

Many centaurs died in the raid, but enough were captured that the operation was still deemed profitable. You can bet that Elska's tribe was not the only one they hit during this time either. In "Unbreakable", we see another shaghoof centaur in Kelvingyard's slave pen. Shaghoofs all hail from the same region, so while this guy wasn't part of Elska's tribe, he couldn't have lived far from her. The slavers likely plucked him off the same mountain around the same time they raided Elska's people.

Roughly a decade before that, they pulled the same move on Olof's tribe, which wasn't too far from Elska's either.

Going back to "To Fight the Fog" for a moment, the story mentions that some of Elska's people started to go missing around the time she saw the scouts. They didn't starve, their bodies were never recovered, they just...vanished. This is another tactic Kelvingyard uses when dealing with species more powerful than themselves: they stalk victims until they're isolated, and then they ambush them and snatch them away.

If you're a fae or gaian living near Evangelite territory, just stepping into the woods to take a piss could be the biggest mistake of your life. Slavers could be hiding anywhere, and by the time you notice them there's already a tranquilizer dart in your neck.

There are many ways Kelvingyard overpowers these tribes, but these are the most common tactics.

*

Questions/Comments?

Lore Masterpost

[dreaminginvelaris]

A Response to a Feyre Anti

I made a post recently explaining the dread of having to watch Feyre be abused by her sisters and father, in the Tv adaption. And a Feyre anti made a response, to something that should not be criticized at all considering what I said was just the truth? Feyre was abused. Not only that but they went on and completely twisted the narrative to fit their own ideas and in the process made Feyre out to be cruel and Nesta a saint. complete bull.

I will not be tagging the anti bc they have me blocked (shocker), but also I do not want anyone to go after them, if you come across the post, I don't want it to be through me. it's as much respect I can give to them.

I usually do not respond to those who have something to say with a post of mine or are blatantly talking about me on their blog, unless they're just spreading absolute lies about me or what i "said", it's usually a waste of time to do so. but this post attacked Feyre with outrageous lies and a complete backward interpretation of what actually happened in acotar, so as respectful as I can be, I will be analyzing the anti-response and what truly happened in acotar.

"the audience will only see two sisters fighting-not abuse" "it’s not Nesta you need to worry about. It’s audiences calling Feyre a big dumbass and a bitch" -from anti

if the audience has basic human compassion and empathy for humans IRL or fictional, they will see what's obvious from the start. Feyres abuse. how is it going to look, when they see Feyre walking through the woods, shaking from the cold, starving from hunger, and struggling to find food for her family? only to later see Nesta's treatment of Feyre?"

in the anti's post, they said Feyre was just as "heinous" to Nesta.

is Feyre the one calling Nesta a pig? a smelly pig? ordering her to take her clothes off?

no, it's not, it's dear Nesta. the text goes as "I took my time, swallowing the words I wanted to bark at her" oh yes... how cruel of Feyre. how heinous of Feyre to...stay quiet... at the verbal abuse.

in the same image we see Feyre ask Nesta to do something (kindly might I add) and then inquire why she didn't chop wood like she needs to.

what does Nesta do? acts like a brat and insults Feyre...once again.

considering I'm going off by the story and not the actual screenplay, and assuming they stay true to the story; will the audience not be disgusted by Nesta's behavior? I mean they just saw Feyre struggle to find food and they expect Feyre to go home to a family happy and appreciative of Feyre but instead, they get this familial abuse.

the anti said Feyre basically tells Nesta this:

"If you keep bitching at everyone like this no one will want to be around you or you can’t marry this guy because you’re a waste of space to me"

but what do we see?

"Believe me... the day you want to marry someone worthy, I'll march up to his house and hand you over. But you're not going to marry Tomas."

the word worthy, did that not catch your eye? Feyre said Nesta will have to marry someone worthy, someone, who will treat Nesta kindly and give her the life Feyre thinks her sisters deserve. bc Feyre does think that IDK why anti feyres think Feyre despised Nesta so much, Feyre loved her sisters.

what the anti fails to realize here is that Nesta marrying Tomas would have been actually pretty great for Feyre. in the sense that, Feyre would no longer carry the burden of her sister. Feyre would not have to worry about feeding one more mouth. or worrying about Nesta's constant stealing of Feyre's money. Feyre does not think Nesta is a "waste of space" to her, if she did, it would have been easy for Feyre to discard Nesta, and allow her to marry Tomas. the anti has that twisted.

but that is not even the worst part of the scene. did you see the shameless slut-shaming that came out of Nesta's mouth? how will the audience take to that? do you think most of the younger generation will take it lightly to see a sister slut-shame a sister? a woman putting down another woman? in this social climate? where the feminism movement is alive and flourishing. will they be okay with it? will they still blame Feyre and be mad at her the way the anti says they will be? I hope not otherwise I'm losing faith in humanity.

Lovely words Nesta spews at Feyre. I admit Feyre should have told her then and there that Tomas is abusive. but let's think: Feyre is 19 years old, the youngest, has never had any raising by a parental figure, has been neglected by her whole family, where would Feyre learn to calmly talk to an overgrown brat like Nesta? Feyre telling Nesta who Tomas truly is the duty of a parent, not a sister. I will not condemn Feyre for not knowing that was the perfect time to tell Nesta who Tomas is. especially when Feyre is being tormented and verbally/emotionally abused, its kinda hard to think about something else while you're being told all these horrible words. to us its easy to see where Feyre went wrong but unless you're in the exact position Feyre was in. no one has any room to talk. and even then, every person is different in situations like these.

this part was me analyzing the interactions between Feyre and Nesta since anti had reasons to believe Feyre was just as bad to Nesta and that the audience would see that and hate Feyre. I am now going to respond to the second part of the Feyre Anti's response.

"How will an audience of non-fans react to her not reaching out to her family to tell them she was okay after the reconciliation between her and Nesta? Or not inviting them to the wedding?"- from anti

moving onto acomaf now.

Idk maybe the audience will see Feyre, a depressed, lonely, individual in an abusive relationship while being manipulated by other individuals she called friends, and understand and empathize with her. all throughout the beginning and half of acomaf, Feyre is in critical depression. she wholeheartedly believes she should not be alive. that she is not worthy. she doesn't eat, all she does is sleep, self-care is not important to her or others so why would letting a family know she's okay, a family who BARELY ever cared about her, be a priority? it doesn't seem like Nesta or elain or her father was really fazed by Feyre's lack of communication. her father left on a trip, elain got engaged and Nesta, well we didn't see a tearful welcoming to Feyre on Nesta's part did we?

anti, where is the outcry of her "family" not even really caring if Feyre was safe or not, of what happened to her? it's not like they thought she had died, otherwise, where was the mourning or funeral? no, they just didn't care.

see this is where I know when anti is just full of bullshit. why, WHY, would Feyre invite her family to wedding full of fae? the creatures elain and Nesta fear and hate? for all the talk many anti's spew about Feyre being inconsiderate to Nesta, to her family, you would think Feyre maybe just knows a fae wedding would be the last thing they would want? even then, does Feyre owe them an invitation to her wedding? does she owe them an update on her life? nope. Feyre owed them nothing.

"How about her shit-talking Nesta to a bunch of strangers then having the audacity to ask her to get involved in a war. Oh! This is after she comes into her house and insults their hospitality." - from anti

I hardly think Feyre confiding in individuals who she learned to care about and laying out all the trauma Feyre endured with her family is "shit-talking" but for argument's sake, let's say it is. I still don't see what's wrong? after years of pent-up anger and hurt, would you not let go of everything you withheld inside and explain what was done to you? how you felt? Feyre telling the IC her life story, which contains Nesta's abuse and her family's neglect, was a form of therapy for Feyre. I never read a line where Feyre calls Nesta a "cold-hearted bitch" or called elain "a lazy ditz" she just said the truth. no added embellishments. Cassian was the one who shit-talked Nesta during the dinner scene, never Feyre.

I still don't understand why antis are so against Feyre asking her sisters for help? like the war didn't involve them? they're humans, and you know what the war was about? Hybern wanting to take control of the human lands like they once did and turn them into slaves. those humans included Nesta and elain.

"They could have left the continent" correct, except elain was engaged and refused to leave Grayson. which meant Nesta refused to leave elain. but even so, isn't it the duty of humans to band together and work to overthrow a race of people who want to torture and keep them as slaves? the queens certainly weren't doing their jobs. Feyre asked to use "their" house to meet the queens bc where else would they do it? the queens trust the fae less than Nesta or elain did. but even so, Feyre asking to use their house was a courtesy, that house is rightfully Feyre's. she is the one who sacrificed herself to leave with Tamlin. she did it bravely, courageously, and they got that house thanks to her. they owed Feyre everything. and the only one who acknowledged that was Elain.

that war involved elain and Nesta whether they or Feyre or the anti's liked it or not. not even considering that Nesta and elain are Feyre Archerons sisters, yeah, their family name alone puts a target on their back.

How did Feyre or the court insult Elain's and Nesta's hospitality? You mean when Feyre realized human food differed from fae food? something she did not know about bc she's barely been turned to fae and only had eaten fae dishes? Feyre's grimace towards the human food was an involuntary reaction to someone who is still learning their new body. or was it when Cassian called out Nesta for her cold treatment towards Feyre? if that's the case then fuck decency, I would call out a fake bitch in my presence from minute one. you cant call what Nesta did "hospitality" when all she did was insult Feyre when she didn't even care that Feyre had died, or lost her love bc of abuse, or that her body was changed against her will.

hospitality: the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.

did y'all read something different bc this for sure was nothing Nesta gave to her guests?

----

the rest of the anti post moves towards Rhysand and his actions UTM which I won't go into because I'm mainly just addressing the false interpretations this anti had to say about Feyre and her family.

I'm not sure how to sign off now lol, but I guess just that I hope this was enough to show how this anti's arguments were completely ludicrous and have absolutely no compassion for Feyre, and instead all the compassion for Feyre's abusers. This anti had a real spin on what the actual story was, and I hope the evidence I provided was enough to show that. Anyways yeah my brain is fried, and I'm done arguing with Feyre anti's for a while now, I need to go praise my queen Feyre so I can receive some semblance of peace.

anyways, stan Feyre for clear skin xx

[void-inked-pen]

Pen Rants About Fantasy BNHA Fics For Too Long

Aight people, I'm sharing the same thoughts on here I did on twitter but with more to add because twitter won't let me rant long like I can on here.

its "pen talks at length about fantasy au's and fanon around said established au's" so I'm a huge nerd for fantasy au's if the original story isn't fantasy and I'm even MORE a nerd for it if one of those characters becomes a shapeshifter or something. With BNHA it already has a kind of canon au where horikoshi literally made a fantasy au ending sequence and I remember all the hype for it back when it came out and that love for it resurfaced recently because... again... I'm a nerd for it.

But one thing i've noticed fantasy fics do often is they kinda just... don't do the leg work with what it means to make a whole new world with magic and lore. they just assume the reader will read "oh they're a fae" or "oh they're a dragon" and get it which... pls dont do. There's a lot of fun that can be had figuring out legistics of how magic and creatures look and work and I get it if that isnt your cup of tea but if you have a fantasy world... you gotta usually do some extra work with it.

So fanon has this thing with bnha where whenever they write certain characters, they kinda automatically are always the same across the board in various fics. which is fine, I appreciate consistent headcanons, but when it comes to PORTRAYING those headcanons... I get bored. There are only 2 FICS (if you wanna know which I can toss them your way) that I have read for fantasy au which both actually do leg work for the world and put thought into how these characters work and out of the literal thousands (over half just being plain boring smut because they are just weird and horny) it bums me out.

One thing that seriously gets stunted is Bakugou as a barbarian which... what would that mean in a fantasy world? not many fics go into that but they def go into it more frequently than some of the other concepts. I just think there's more that can be messed with there. Like, what kind of culture did he grow up in? how did he meet Deku? did they still grow up with each other and if they did how? are they from the same villiage? Horikoshi's art makes it seem like they were born in different cultures, so how would they have met? would their interactions still be the same if they didn't grow up together? there are a LOT of questions to be asked with interactions I think

It's even WORSE with kirishima tho. He is a dragon in some fics, part dragon in others, but they hardly ever go into the logistics of what that means for him. They never touch on his culture or how people treat him or ANY ANGST and as an angst lover with my favs it suuuuucks. Kiri in general has hardly any well-written long-form angst and I'm starved for that kinda content. Also, when people write dragon Kiri they always, ALWAYS introduce him to Bakugou by him somehow being captured (I wrote him that way too but its mainly for a specific situation to happen and a scene that's been stuck in my head for ages now so I'm calling myself out) but then, they do that to him and expect him to... what be fine afterwards? Tangent but not many people write good angst for my boy and I'm DEPRIVED.

but anyway, I think there's more that can be done with some of these concepts. like if Kiri is a dragon, would he still breathe fire? If so, how would he use it? if not, why/how does he work? Can he shapeshift willingly or is he forced to or does he need outside assistance like a ritual or something? is his hardening just his scales, in which case if he's in dragon form and has his hardening magic is that just a special ability he can do to make his scales harder? there's a lot about shapeshifting that can be messed with as well! (both those fics i mentioned before have major consequences if Kiri doesn't shapeshift frequently and I love it).

In general, I feel like people see the au with these characters and just don't think of the nuances and it bugs me. And then the fandom also has fanon about it and some of the tropes are tired... so I started thinking about scenes around fantasy au and ye a lot of what I'm deciding to do with it isn't really... how I normally do it. like there's thought into what I'm imagining because it's me we're talking about but world-building I'm leaving a bit up in the air and to be interpreted however.

anyway, thanks for coming to my Rant-talk lol, if you have fantasy au fics that are long form, arn't constant smut, have kiri or bakugou angst and good world building I'd love to hear recs. the two fics I was talking about are:

the (I think discontinued) fic Blood Of My Hand by PurplePersnicety - its about Kiri being captured by humans and possibly sold but his fire got locked away and he can't shapeshift, while an exiled Bakugou is a barbarian who has a problematic goal and the two make a blood pact to try and help the other and then shit hits the fan And the currently still updating fic, Wandering Home by Milligramme - Kirishima was raised in a human town and told to hide his beastly traits when one loud blonde shows up, tries to steal and then eat said stolen lemons before the two decide to travel together and help Bakugou return home and Kirishima figure out what he is.

(links are being weird so i could only add the link on "home" on the second one idk why)