#such a central topic in my worldbuilding

[elizaellwrites]

Happy first WBW of 2024! In the spirit of new beginnings, what's an element of your worldbuilding that you've gone back and tweaked several times?

Magical abilities.

They started out as vague concepts with little to no limitations. I realized they needed limits, but I struggled with where to put them or how they would impact the characters when hit. This was particularly important with the healing (Riseda) and telepathic (Nalda) abilities since they could easily become overpowered, therefore making the plot unnecessary or nonsensical.

Defining each power from another was difficult, especially between air (Yaldu), water (Eswie), and temperature (Fasedi). I even replaced an ability that was generally less useful and unimportant to the plot, changing Eleanor's skillset entirely from influence over lifeforms to manipulating magnetic forces (Dasdae).

I've also changed dynamics with them, as Anna's character started like everyone else with one ability: Eswie, which she shared with Ben. Changing that about her character made her story much more dynamic as I get to explore why she has all abilities now- and is the only one to ever have that. I originally also had all those with Teleportation abilities (Oramoa) wiped out during the infamous attack, which is why no one could return to their homeland- excluding Anna's father and her sister (who survived until more recent drafts). This was also a great change that let me play around with so many dynamics that could prevent/dissuade characters from going home. Instead, there is a separate ability that was wiped out- besides Anna's use of it in modern times.

There's much more, such as addressing how these abilities impact societal expectations, hierarchies, etc. between the different cultures, but I don't think I'll go into that much detail here. I've made a few posts in the past about it, but let me know if I should address this more extensively.

I also didn't ever just want the magic to be the cliche water, earth, wind, fire setup. Nor did I want the temperature ability to become a discount version of Elsa from Frozen.

In short:

The rules and usage of Hecathian magic in my world, and how they affect characters, society, and plotlines.

[styllwaters]

KNIGHT ETHNIC GROUPS, ORDERS AND CULTURES: A GUIDE

MAP OF ETTERA (Knight Homeplanet)

Standard map [continents shown]

Regional map [territories shown]

✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦

I have here a weeks worth of writing and art because I for some reason enjoy torturing myself! I've been slaving away at this for so long but it's finally done and polished. So! As promised, I'm gonna talk a bit about the different Knight cultures/ethnicities, territories and general social structure.

Knights are one of my alien sophont civilisations from my Vivere 44 headworld. Here are more links from my previous posts:

Introductory post

Knight deities

Knight languages and names

With that being said, worldbuilding textwalls below the cut!

____

First, an explanation of the maps.

CONTINENTS

There are three main continents on Ettera. The two polar landmasses are Thannoeh in the northern end and Nahrui in the southern end. Thannoeh is divided by east and west, and is home to the two major Polar Knight nations. Nahrui is not occupied by any, aside from explorers or scientists. For many Knights, it is a strange, enigmatic land and a topic of great curiosity. In the middle is Val-srat; the central continent inhabited by Mountain and Plains Knights. The landmass is named as such because it is often represented in folklore as a Knight, with Valazear (the ‘Host’) being the southern Plains territories and Srati (the ‘Helmet’) being the northern Mountain territories. The Ihmna Stretch is the section of land connecting the two countries - ‘Ihmna’ is the Ferhahti word for the Integrator organ which joins the host and helmet’s consciousness.

Plant life on Ettera takes on hues of red and orange.

____

Before I get into the different ethnicities, I should elaborate more on how Knight Orders are structured and the different titles; some of the clothing articles are specific to status.

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Most Knights live in groups called ‘Orders’, which I talked more about in this ask.

The standard roles for an Order are as follows:

Commander - Makes decisions, protects and supports the group. Commanders lead the Order across difficult terrain, plan out hunts, and take care of their members. A Commander might be chosen based on generational succession, experience, or strength. Depending on the rules of the Order, a Commander might be challenged by a Knight who desires their position, although only an elite or lieutenant would be permitted to do this. In more traditional and conservative orders Commanders are always Pike-forts.

Lieutenant - Second in command. The Lieutenant is the Commander’s primary advisor and runs the Order when they are unable to. A Commander may train their lieutenant to one day take their place as leader, or a lieutenant might serve multiple generations of Commanders without ever challenging them.

Elites - A selection of Knight soldiers who are exceptionally experienced, strong and fast. Highly respected by the rest of the Order and carry out important duties such as organisation. They have the highest chance of being the next lieutenant or Commander. 

Soldiers - The main body of the Order, fully grown Knights who are proficient in all the skills necessary for survival. Soldiers are tasked with a variety of jobs to keep the Order healthy and running: they are also farmers, medics, entertainers, strategists, builders, etc. 

Scouts - Scouts are Knights who make reconnaissance trips for the Order. Their job is to gather information about a potential area to settle or travel through. Scouts also have a range of other responsibilities, such as acting as lookouts, messengers, and taking care of Pages.

There are two types of Scouts - temporary and permanent. Temporary scouts are Squires (16-17 years) who have completed their training and are performing Expeditions, which they are required to do before becoming a full soldier. On Expeditions two or three Scouts will travel a certain distance away from the Order, sometimes miles away, to deliver goods to other Orders or to simply evaluate an area/route. Permanent scouts are lower-ranked Knights who are unable to become Soldiers, prefer a caretaker role, or have been relegated to the position.

Squires - Knights in training. Squires learn from a Soldier assigned to teach them. They may be tutored one-on-one, or taught in a group. They learn the ways of the Order and the world around them. Squires will often be assigned small hunting trips with their tutor, or cleaning jobs. Typically aged 7-15 years.

Pages - The youth of the Order, Knights aged 0-6 years. The pages are fiercely protected by every member of the Order. A newborn Helmet or Host will stay with their birth parent/s until they have assimilated, in which care duty is passed on to a permanent Scout. The Scout raises the Pages alongside several others until they are ready to become Squires.

This structure originated from Mountain Orders and spread to Plains and Polar regions a long time ago. Of course, not every Order follows this plan exactly, and there are countless variations. Some Knights don't live in Orders at all, and may live in pairs (which is common for travelling merchants and explorers) or small groups. Very rarely, a Knight may travel alone. This is the case for exiles.

____

You may already be familiar with the Mountain, Plains and Polar Knight regional varieties, but within these subspecies are various ethnic groups.

THE ETHNICITIES

✦ MOUNTAIN ✦

✦ Ferhahti [Ferhaht]

The Ferhahti Knights are an ethnic group located in the Ferhaht territory of Srati. Their thick fur is of various shades of grey and grey-blue. Their clothing styles are typically beige and tan, often complete with rectangular tassels and red accents. The Ferhahti have a ‘New Years’ festival called Khulaam in which they call upon Etteran spirits to bless them with good harvests, hunting and rain. During these festivals there is music, food, dancing and socialising with others. Allied Orders, usually 2-5, will come together to celebrate. Celebrations last five days. Alliances may be temporary or long-lasting, but the Orders will go on a hunt on the final day to bring down a large quarry. Oftentimes there will be a ‘Herald’ dancer who bears a flag on their horn, depicting glyphs of good fortune. 

Since the Ferhahti and Kaata territories are neighbouring, and have no physical borders, Orders from both lands will often meet to trade goods and information. Many Plains-Mountain hybrids are of Ferhahti and Kaata descent due to the close proximity of the nations. 

NOTE: Plains and Mountain Knights are capable of producing hybrid offspring, although they will be infertile. Neither Plains nor Mountain Knights can produce viable hybrids with Polar Knights.

✦ Fejga [Fejg]

Fejga Knights (pronounced Fej-ya) make their home in the Fejg archipelago. They are generally of a bulkier physique than other Mountain Knights, have a coat of thick fur and are well adjusted to chillier climates. They also sport a ‘saddle’ marking on their backs and are likely to have mottled/freckled patterns and blue eyes. Their Orders are partially seafaring, with many sailing from island to island in magnificent ships. Fishing is a large part of their lifestyles as the sea provides a stable source of food. 

Their clothes are frequently made from leather and wool from domesticated animals. It is deceptively thin, as their pelts already provide natural insulation from the cold. Fejga Commanders wear three silver piercings on their Helmets.

✦ Svunacht [Svun]

Svunacht Knights live within the mountain-bordered territory of Svun and the island of Naahek. Orders have a special ceremony for choosing their Commander. The next in line, usually a chosen Host and Helmet born of the previous Commander and their partner, must journey across the Asall mountain range which borders Svun. It is a treacherous, long passage, and requires the Knight to wear a mask to block out the searing winds. They must also wear a spiked collar as a traditional accessory and safety measure to deter larger predators which roam the mountains. They are forbidden from carrying firearms, only armed with a knife, their wits, and natural defences. Ceremonial garments are required, passed down through generations, and three slips of fabric are worn on their horn for good luck: representing strength, wisdom and tenacity. The journey, called the Meha, is the final step in a long series of rigorous training for future successors. 

The painting of Helmets is also a large part of Svunacht culture. It is typically only reserved for Commanders, Lieutenants or Elites. 

★ PLAINS ★

★ Kaata [Kaat]

Kaata Knight Orders inhabit the deserts of Kaat. They are perfectly suited to desert life, their tan coats reducing heat absorbed from the sun. Kaata Knights make their clothing from woven fibres of plants that are garnished with gold pigments derived from a natural mineral found in the sands. They are especially known for their proficiency in fine crafts, and often trade jewellery to Ferhahti Orders across the Ihmna Stretch connecting Kaat and Ferhaht. Kaata clothing tends to be highly detailed and ornamental, with shiny beads adorning arm cuffs, necklaces, mandible rings and horn sleeves. The many gemstone and fossil deposits in Kaat are also incorporated into their styles. Like the Svunacht Knights, Kaata also paint their Helmets, although the practice is not restricted to any particular titles.

★ Saisala [Saisal]

Saisala Knights live in and around the deltas and rivers of Saisal, the southernmost territory of Val-srat. The area is filled with marshlands and everglades, and the weather is more wet and humid than the dry plains of Kaat. Saisala forts sport a dark reddish mane that grows right down their backs and bears some resemblance to maned wolves. Their pikes have hooked horns and sloping spines, as well as more ‘splotchy’ red stripes. Their Helmet eyes also have a pale ring around their pupils.

Saisala clothing styles are characterised by draping, ovular shapes and translucent sections of fabric. The green and gold drapes in the drawing are traditional wedding garments, complete with rounded tassels and a horn extension for pikes. The hanging ‘coins’ have engravings which tell a short but sweet poem.

★ Yaemioui [Yaemiou]

Yaemioui Orders live in a similar environment to Saisala Knights, in the wetland territories of Yaemiou. Their coats are pale like Kaata, but come in a greater combination of hues such as orange, grey and vermilion. Fun fact: all Plains Host pups are born with faint spots to help them camouflage, like lion cubs. Most lose these markings as they grow older, but Yaemioui hosts retain them even in adulthood. Their patterns are similar to painted dogs. The Yaemioui have a rich storytelling culture and have records dating back thousands of years.

Their clothing styles utilise dusky, non-bright colours that are usually two-piece. The outfit in the picture is worn by an elder Pike-fort who has carried and sired many offspring. The spine extensions are an indicator of age and experience, and a mark of high respect. The scarf around their neck depicts circles symbolising their Helmet children, and the circles on the larger cloth represent their Host progeny. 

★ Balkzaiinu [Balkzaii]

On the island of Balkzaii reside the Balkzaiinu Knights, who have dark stripes on both their Hosts and Helmets and short curly fur. Unlike other Orders, Balkzaiinu communities rarely ever hunt - they were one of the first countries to develop farming and agriculture, and import a lot of domesticated animals to Saisal and Yaemiou. They are also the only country that has no Commanders in their Orders, and decisions are made by a council of higher-ups. They live in a tropical climate which receives lots of rainfall and cyclones. They are also masters in boat making and sailing, and contacted the mainland several centuries ago. Balkzaiinu have different decency standards than other Plains Knights, and in their culture it is considered proper to cover the neck area. Their clothing is generally layered and contains colourful, square designs.

✧ POLAR ✧

✧ Aikka [Ehtte Thannoeh]

Aikka Knights have domain over the Eastern section of Thannoeh. The polar word for East is Ehtte, and West Uesse. Since the country is so close to the Fegj archipelago, the two have been in contact for a long time.

Aikka have pristine white fur and a slightly bluish tinge to their Helmets. As with all Polar Knights, they are much smaller than their Plains or Mountain relatives, but are incredibly tough and hardy as a result of surviving in one of the harshest biomes. Ehtte Thannoeh is associated with scientific prowess, discovery and knowledge, and many famous Knight explorers are from Thannoeh. There are several research stations on Nahrui that are run and managed by Aikka; they have no difficulty working in the icy environment. Aikka Knights are also experts in carving, sculpting figurines and charms from the ivory tusks of marine animals. The outfit depicted in the drawing shows an Aikka Scout wearing a pendant with a carved basilosaurus-like animal for spiritual protection. These pendants are often given by parents to children. Their coat has six pockets for navigational instruments, goggles, knives, a spyglass, medical equipment and more. 

✧ Myet [Uesse Thannoeh]

Myet Orders have less contact with other regions than Aikka. Residing in Uesse Thannoeh, Many of them live further inland. Myet Hosts have a more yellowish tinge to their fur and their Pike Helmets have a tan stripe. The Helmets also have a more rounded 'snout'. They have managed to domesticate a large predator which defends their camps and is used as a mount/companion. Like the Balkzaiinu, Myet Orders have a different structure than most, having two Commanders, usually a mated pair, and no lieutenants or elites.

Myet clothing is more minimal than Aikka styles. They usually cover the back with a ‘saddle’ and manipulators with gloves. The outfit drawn is of a Commander, distinguished by the ring of fabric around their horn and eye makeup. In their backpack they carry hunting weapons, and wear a knife sheathed at their side.

_________________

And that's a wrap! Thank you for reading, this project is truly a delight to work on. I leave you with some messy concept art I did a while ago for Mountain Knight clothing styles.

[marrogerson]

Hi Margaret,

I absolutely adore Sorcery of Thorns. As an aspiring writer, I wanted to ask you how you started worldbuilding? The world just seemed so lively and detailed, just as if it was real. While reading I imagined it like in the Victorian era, were there special things you researched? Worldbuilding just seems so daunting to me.

Sending you all the best wishes, and I‘m waiting patiently and excited for new stories from you :)

Hi anon,

Thank you for the lovely ask. I was also daunted by worldbuilding when I started trying to write books. (Key word, trying... my attempts didn't work out too well for the first few years.) Since this is turning out to be a longer post, I'll put the rest under a cut.

Initially, the thing I struggled with the most was having a great idea for a world, fleshing it out, and then trying to populate it with characters and an interesting plot. This worldbuilding-first strategy works for some writers I think, but it didn't for me. I personally had a breakthrough when I started instead focusing on creating the main characters/their central conflict first, and then constructing the worldbuilding around them to support the story's needs. For example, the premise of the magic system in Sorcery of Thorns (sorcerers who summon demon servants at great personal cost) was one that I created specifically to facilitate the angst between Nathaniel and Silas.

I always say that I don't consider myself much of a researcher, but then I glance across my desk and see the stack of books that I ordered secondhand from Ebay because they're no longer in print. If you're writing in a similar time period, I highly recommend The Victorian City by Judith Flanders (this one is still in print and easy to find). The most curious one (to me at least) is probably The Victorian Bathroom Catalogue which is a book full of historical advertisements including illustrations of old bathroom fixtures.

My best advice when it comes to research—if it's something you struggle with—is to try reading things that are fun, which you would enjoy reading anyway even if you didn't have a reason. The most useful research I've ever done was just-for-fun reading that I did not realize was important research until much later. Forgive my weird analogy, but all that reading turns into sort of a yeast culture in the fridge of your brain, which you can draw from when needed instead of having to go searching for yeast every time you need it. And the yeast culture will also creep into your bedroom at four in the morning, and whisper tantalizing ideas into your ear... ok, let's stop there.

The nice thing about writing fantasy is that you don't need to sweat the small stuff. Just worry about writing a fun story first.

Some of my favorite specific topics that I've researched online lately include elevators in the first half of the 1800s, and whether gunpowder would have been used to demolish a large building just prior to the invention of dynamite.

Best of luck!

[mihai-florescu]

Putting a message i sent earlier under a read more, it has some thoughts ive expressed before tho. ES, of course

My thoughts as an EichiP... i view ! and !! as different stories in the way they're approached tbh, what i fell in love with enstars for was the character driven storytelling of one event seen through different perspectives, where you see the antagonist in one perspective become a protagonist in another story and can empathize with the entire cast like this. I fell in love with eichi's story of second chances, getting what you want and regretting your actions in the process, redemption, desperation, overcoming fate and asserting one's self into the story, saving a school in a dying industry that saved your life by giving you a dream; i consider it an arc fulfilling to the reader at the end of ! era. But we still had to continue... and it's not like we didnt get inklings of eichi's dreams of idol utopia, the idol soldier idea goes back to main story 1, but !! loses the charm of the original series through expanding the worldbuilding so much and shifting to a plot driven story that opens 10 cans of worms instead of offering resolutions. There's not really room to breathe if the stakes just keep getting higher and higher...

As for the colonisation plotline, it's been here since the beginning of ES2. The SS arc makes it obvious, but i remember even before, the talks about ES taking over from local businesses, trying to be seen as the standard, it was always the direction ensemble square as an institution would take. But the "antagonist in one story, protagonist in another" approach doesnt work anymore with such subjects. The guys responsible for this are your coworkers you share dorms with. I read the stories but cant empathize anymore, so i've been feeling disconnected from eichi for a while. I see enstars with eichi at its core but i didnt care for his center event, i read it, didnt like the ending, and overall felt off. Eichi becoming the villain of ! to attone for the war kind of loses significance if a year later he is a cartoon villain idol colonialist you can't even sympathize with anymore because of the magnitude of events. However i do think !! has done good things for some characters pushing them further or developing them in a way ! didnt. But for others...

I also have my issues with sci fi elements becoming the norm, even taken metaphorically or as hyperboles, when one of the central themes i love about enstars is humanity. Then again, i am a war era fan that relied on manipulating human desires and perceptions, and the fact that there were no monsters or gods, just humans framed as such, playing on people's fears and beliefs, it's a bit jarring to me to have them introduce AIs forming from escaped comatose brains (im minimizing the switch climax rn, i didnt even hate it as a whole, just this resolution im unhappy with)

It also feels like we've lost some of the meta aspects of the writing i liked, a certain awareness of being characters in a story and there being an audience. But im still struggling to word my thoughts on this matter. I felt it present in main story 2, even if it annoyed me at parts in its obviousness ("good thing we're not protagonists, no one would want to read about us" youre right aira you are not interesting to me. And yet i'll read your story to try and empathize nevertheless. I have other thoughts on aira too, perhaps for another time). I wish we explored a bit more what it means to no longer be the central protagonist, from trickstar's perspective...and brought back the successors topic. But i havent read every ts story yet so i'd be foolish to complain before really making sure i've checked everything. To me ! ended satisfyingly with room left for elaborations and imagination, but i dont feel like !!'s ending is really ending anything at all. Not necessarily bad since it's not like the game is shutting down, but overwhelming worldbuilding wise while underwhelming character wise...

Let's see... im not sure how to end this. Just a bit of a stream of consciousness as a ! fan who still loves enstars despite my critiques. Mainly, well, no one's gonna take away the stories that already exist that i do love and impacted my life greatly. And i do think !! had some really good things too it brought, or at least stories i hold dear too. Change is scary and i don't think it's always for the best, but it's also fun to see where it goes next...

[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs & Heteromorphobia (Introduction + Terminology + Arcs I - V, Entrance Exam to Sports Festival)

Being a project to observe and document the use of the term “heteromorph,” the people described by it, and the depiction of their experiences with discrimination in My Hero Academia

OR

“No, heteromorphobia isn’t new or a late-story retcon.  The non-heteromorph main characters just weren’t confronted with it for a long time, that’s all.”

Introduction

In this series of posts, I will be examining heteromorphic characters and heteromorphic discrimination chapter by chapter, arc by arc, up through the plotline coming to a head in the attack on Central Hospital.  My overall aim is to demonstrate that, contrary to widespread assertions otherwise, heteromorphobia had ample groundwork laid long before it burst to the forefront in My Villain Academia.  My analysis will generally fall into one of the following categories:

General observations about heteromorphs in the world: how the reader is introduced to them individually and as a group, their demographics, the language used to describe them, how they fit into the structure of professional heroism, etc.    

Aspects of the series—scenes, character beats, worldbuilding details, etc.—which I believe canonically point towards heteromorphic discrimination, even before that discrimination was explicitly acknowledged.

Aspects of the series that could be read as evidence for said discrimination, but which may or may not have been intentional on the part of the author.    

Discussion of how individual characters intersect, or could intersect, with this form of discrimination.

I would like to fold the Vigilantes spin-off into this analysis as well, as that series is very good at taking aspects of worldbuilding from the main series to their logical, street-level conclusions; I may also examine other extracanonical material (the data books, the movies, TUM and the novels, etc.) if I find—or have suggested to me—anything relevant to the topic.  More on this as I get closer to the end of the material in the series proper.

The current plan being to end my mainline analysis with the hospital attack is largely because, at the present time, Shouji’s response to the mob seems to be the series’ last word on The Problem of Heteromorphobia.  I may, however, continue beyond that point if the series circles back to the issue in a major way between now and the completion of this project.

In the meantime, join me below the jump as I lay out my thesis, explain the rationale behind the terminology used in this piece, and dive on into the canon material, from Chapter 1 up through the conclusion of the Sports Festival in Chapter 44.

   

The Thesis 

Anti-heteromorph discrimination has been present as a background element in the series from the very beginning.  However, this is obscured by the main character’s lack of awareness of it, the overlap between such discrimination and the broader dehumanization of villains, and, perhaps most crucially, the fact that the term “heteromorph,” while serviceable as a descriptor for a broad categorization of quirk types, is uselessly broad for discussing heteromorphic discrimination.

It’s very easy to say, “The idea of heteromorphs being discriminated against is a ridiculous retcon,” if one views the story as suggesting that all people with heteromorphic quirks are subject to the exact same levels of discrimination, while transformation and emitter types are never discriminated against at all, no matter how they look.  This, however, is demonstrably false if one instead looks for patterns in the types of discrimination demonstrated throughout the series.  The common element in heteromorphic discrimination is that it becomes drastically more likely the farther away one is from the “normal” appearance of humans prior to the Advent of the Extraordinary.  This is particularly the case for those with heteromorphic quirks tied to animals or those who live in rural areas.

   

On Terminology

Baseline/Divergence: “Baseline” is not a canonical term, but it is a useful one.  I’ll use it to describe bodies that look more or less “normal,” with features like those humans would have had before the advent of quirks.  Bakugou is baseline; so is Momo.  Tokoyami and Koda are not.  I’ll also sometimes use “divergence” or “divergent” in association with this concept, especially for people who have no more than one or two cosmetic differences that are not associated with an animal.  Jirou’s earphone jacks or Iida’s pipes would be examples of such relatively minor divergences from “baseline.”  It is, as I will argue, a significant factor in the extent of discrimination that heteromorphs face.

Igyou/Heteromorph: The Japanese term Spinner objects to in Chapter 220 is igyou, literally meaning “fantastic; grotesque; strange-looking; suspicious-looking” per Japanese dictionary site jisho.org.  It’s often appended with gata, “type,” and people who have quirks of that type labeled as igyou-gata no ningen.  The Viz release translates igyou to “heteromorph,” and igyou-gata to “heteromorphic” or “heteromorphic quirk.”  It’s much more clinical-sounding to an English ear than a more literal translation of igyou would be; thus, when Spinner suggests that the word is not very politically correct, the Japanese reader will have a much clearer understanding of why than the English reader.

Another thing Spinner says about igyou is that, despite the fact that it’s not a good word for formal contexts, everyone uses it day to day.  However, as far as I can tell, and troublingly for fans who want to avoid using an offensive word, there is no polite alternative.  We see people using the word to describe themselves, Aizawa uses it freely in discussing how his quirk affects the type in question, but we don’t get to see an academic paper or expert interview letting us know what we should say instead.

I’ve only seen two alternatives.  One is buried in Vigilantes and is less “a polite alternative” and more “a mouthful of words to prevaricate around not having a polite alternative”: tokushuna taikaku no mochinushi, or, per the Viz translation, “individuals with unique bodies.”  The other, used by the firebrand PLF advisor leading the hospital riot, is kotonaru katachi, which means, roughly, “differing forms.”  It’s better, but still more of a descriptive phrase than a noun, and runs into the issue that something vague like “differing forms” could also apply to, for example, congenital anomalies or amputations. It also uses the same kanji as igyou, just a different reading of the characters, so it’s unclear if Spinner would find that wording just as objectionable.

It’s tricky to navigate this, too, because it’s not all 1:1 translation.  Spinner doesn’t object to being called igyou while thinking that igyou-gata or igyou-gata no ningen would be fine—that is, he’s not saying he doesn’t like being called a heteromorph, but being called a heteromorphic type or a person with a heteromorphic quirk would be fine, in the way that you see debates about person-first versus identity-first language in e.g. the autistic community.  It’s the word igyou/“heteromorph” itself that he dislikes.

Why?  Well, the obvious answer is that the word itself, down to the kanji involved, denotes the people it’s used to describe as being strange or different from normal.  Transformation-type quirks have a similar if less pronounced issue: henkei can mean “transformation” or “metamorphosis,” but it can also mean “deformity.”  Emitters are the only ones who don’t have this problem at all, with hatsudou meaning simply “invocation” or “put into operation.”

When that kind of normativity is baked into the language itself, it’s impossible to even talk about without Othering the people you’re discussing.

While neither addresses the language issue specifically, Ujiko and Re-Destro both offer some useful insight on why the issue exists.  Ujiko says, “With each passing generation, quirks become more mixed, more complex, more ambiguous(...).”  Re-Destro, meanwhile, asks, “Isn’t it odd how society insists on conforming to the old ways of thinking while eliminating anyone who doesn’t fit the mold?  Especially since we as a species have moved beyond the very notion of normal!”

My suspicion, then, is that no polite alternative exists because the concept itself is so nebulous, and talking about it—as we will see—leads to thorny, difficult-to-categorize places when people prefer to keep things nice and tidy, easy to sort and put away.  This is convenient for people who are uncomfortable talking about it, since policing people about their language is a great way to shut down discussion entirely.

Indeed, I’ve seen as much in the fandom—thoughtful, well-articulated posts wholly dismissed with snotty rebukes against using the word “heteromorph” on the basis that it’s equivalent to a slur, with no further engagement on the posts’ actual content.  I often see “mutant” used instead, but I don’t view that as any kind of solution, for two reasons.

Firstly, and more simply, using “mutant” creates confusion due to its overlap with the idea of quirk mutations—situations like Eri’s.  Indeed, in the Japanese, while Pops uses the Japanese word for “mutation,” kanji that would normally be read as totsuzenheni,[1] the furigana show that what he's actually saying aloud is the English word, giving the reading as myuuteeshon.  The word igyou is totally unrelated—it doesn’t even have any kanji in common with totsuzenhi—so I feel it’s best to not add ambiguity where none exists in the original text.

Secondly, and more irksomely, “mutant” is what the most widely available fan scanlation used as a translation for igyou.  Scanlation!Spinner says it’s the word “mutant” he dislikes; it’s not dodging offense to use the scanlation version instead of the official when they’re both placed in the exact same objectionable context![2]

Pictured: me being extremely unimpressed with people who use “mutant” accusing people who use “heteromorph” of using slurs.

All that said, in the absence of any polite alternatives provided by the canon, and in the interest of not throwing out the only word we have in favor of a nonexistent nicety the story’s victims themselves have no access to, I will be using the word those victims themselves use: “heteromorph.”

For further specificity, I will use “heteromorph” to describe anyone, regardless of quirk type, with a physical form that diverges from the pre-Advent baseline, while using “heteromorphic quirk” to denote quirks of said category and those who bear them.

Categorizing Quirks & the Division of Arcs:

Usually, when I denote a quirk as a given type—emitter, transformation, heteromorphic—I’m using the English fan wiki’s classification.  However, note that, while these broad quirk classifications are discussed within the series, there is no canonical source that categorizes the vast majority of the quirks we see in the series.  In character sheets, data books, narrated quirk explanations or the anime’s tic of showing characters’ names and quirks on-screen, the only information given is the quirk’s name and a brief explanation of its function.

Fan wikis, however, are run by curatorial fans, who want to have that information all down neatly, so I’m sure there are whole discussions behind classifying some of the more borderline cases.  I will be discussing the insufficiencies of the current system of classification, but any time I declare a quirk as being classified as a certain type, that’s based on the wiki, not the text itself.

The wiki was also my reference for the breakdown of arcs in the series. They are equally noncanonical, but convenient for the purposes of keeping this piece broken down into digestible pieces.

Let's get started.

   

Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia Chronologically

The Entrance Exam Arc (Chapters 1-4)

Chapter 1: 

On the very first page, we meet li’l Tsubasa, the winged boy who is implied to eventually become the Winged Noumu during the Stain arc.[3]  No longer in Bakugou’s friend group by the time they’re in middle school; according to the data book, that’s just because he changed schools, but that information does come with an ominous ellipsis trail-off…    

The very first villain we see is a heteromorph, yelling at heroes to go away.  We’re told he’s a purse-snatcher who transformed into his large size—he maintains his base appearance even after being captured and shrinking back down to a normal size—when cornered.  Called “pure evil” by Kamui Woods and while that does speak more directly to the dehumanization of villains than that of heteromorphs, it’s notable that this very first comparison between what heroes and villains look like shows such a stark difference between which one looks human and which one doesn’t.        o  Kamui Woods himself is a transformation-type rather than a heteromorph-type, but he blurs the line between quirk categorizations.  Even at “rest,” his limbs have a wooden appearance; he transforms their shape and size, but not their basic nature.  In that sense, he has a heteromorphic body.  His humanoid size and dimensions, though, as well as his mask, make him appear baseline at a casual glance.  I’ll be discussing him in more depth later, but note that if you read this first confrontation in light of later reveals about heteromorphic discrimination, it’s the one who wears a mask that’s a hero.

But with Mount Lady getting the final blow, note how everyone in this picture is baseline except the literally muzzled villain.

Of twenty-four visible kids in Deku and Bakugou’s class, only two have clear-cut heteromorphic quirks.  One girl has horns but no other divergent features nor other apparent power in use; the other is of the “different head” style, a boy with what looks like a pair of needle-nose pliers in place of a normal head.  One other boy has gnashing, sharp teeth; it’s unclear whether they look like that all the time or whether it’s a transformation effect.  The rest of the students all seem to be emitter or transformation types.    

Introduction of the Sludge Villain, whose body is entirely fluid.  Implied to kill those whose bodies he possesses, at least the ones he intends to fully hide himself within.  We’re now two-for-two on villains being heteromorphs.    

The crowd full of bystanders are all baseline:

Keep this image in mind for when we get our first crowd shot of villains.

Chapter 3+:

You can identify both Shouji and Tokoyami in this chapter, but Deku doesn’t talk to either of them, so they don’t have anything solid in the way of dialogue.  Shouji does get one focus in the art, though: a shot of him from behind, typifying the information-gathering type.  Nedzu first appears in silhouette but also has no speaking lines beyond a shared impressed noise with the also-silhouetted Vlad King.  One or two other heteromorphs can be spotted throughout the exam, but they’re definitely fewer in number compared to the rest.    

+: Others will crop up as Deku has his first day with Class 1-A and Aizawa in the following chapters; Tokoyami, befitting his eventual Number 3 placement at the Sports Festival, has his name regularly shown near the top of assorted exam/class activity rankings.  Shouji’s name appears likewise in Chapter 7’s track and field test rankings.    

The Quirk Apprehension Test Arc (Chapters 5-7)

Chapter 5:

Iida is, strictly speaking, the first named heteromorph in the class.  There will never be any particular sign that Iida is subject to the judgement and bias that more divergent heteromorphs are.

Chapter 6: 

Tsuyu is the next named heteromorph, the first one with an animal-associated quirk, and the first student whose facial features are clearly intended to be anything other than baseline human.  Her quirk is not yet officially introduced, but she’s identified as a froggy type by her hopping, her long tongue, and her ribbit talk bubble.    

In the same chapter that gives us our first instance of an animal-type heteromorph, we also get our first instance of animal-type name-calling:

Note the ever-stoic Shouji’s pointed lack of a response.

This is not particularly highlighted in the moment, but it will get a callback over 300 chapters later as something that warrants an apology.  Note that both Sero and Mineta are themselves heteromorphs, but neither are animal-associated. This already sets up a discrepancy between what kinds of heteromorphs experience significant discrimination, even though the reader won’t get context for that until Spinner introduces us to the CRC.    

The Battle Trial Arc (Chapters 8-11)

Chapter 11:

Shouji is formally introduced, name and quirk alike.  Tsuyu proves to be relatively outgoing despite her demeanor, grouped with the affable Kirishima, Mina, and Sato in introducing herself to Deku after the indoor battles.    

The first appearance of the League of Villains in the stinger with Shigaraki, Kurogiri and the USJ Noumu.  None of them have heteromorphic quirks, as we’ll eventually find, but it’s immediately apparent that—like both of Chapter 1’s villains—they’re much more monstrous in appearance than the heroic cast.  This correlation of appearance with criminal activity will continue to bear itself out throughout the series, getting more prominent and more explicit in the text as it goes along.    

The U.S.J. Arc (Chapters 12-21)

Chapter 12: 

Contains Ojiro’s character sheet, which notes that he always has to ask for clothing alterations when he’s shopping, which has become standard practice since the proliferation of quirks.  Another profile page leading Chapter 32 will note similarly that he has a hard time sitting normally in a chair.  Indeed, despite U.A. being the premier school for heroes, their accommodation seems to top out at exaggeratedly large doors; there doesn’t seem to be any accommodation in things like desks given for people with differently shaped bodies, like Ojiro’s tail or Mineta’s small stature.     It’s possible that specially made desks, like clothes alterations, could be provided upon request, but that puts the onus on the person with the need to ask.  Between the people in question being teenagers and Japan’s culture of meiwaku (not causing trouble for others), that’s a pretty significant disincentivization compared to just incorporating different desk sizes into the class by default, either by having a selection available in all classes or by proactively asking students about their needs during the enrollment process.

Chapter 13:

Bakugou calls Tsuyu “frog-face,” starting a trend he will continue for a long, long time of immediately going for animal traits when he’s reaching for an insult to use against an animal-type heteromorph.    

Thirteen talks about how the use of quirks is heavily restricted and monitored because, “It only takes one wrong move with an uncontrollable quirk for people to die.”  The series will go on to provide all sorts of examples of conflicts that arise from this state of affairs—reduced bodily autonomy, repression of biological compulsion, quirk-based discrimination—but Thirteen doesn’t bring up any of that.  As Mr. Compress will call out later, the UA kids are seldom given much in the way of opposing viewpoints, and that’s visible here, where Thirteen provides a very basic explanation of the status quo with zero historical or sociopolitical context.[4]

Chapter 14:

As was the case for Shigaraki’s chapter-ending stinger at the bar, it’s very noticeable that the group at USJ have a far higher ratio of frightening appearances in crowd scenes.

Venus fly-trap hands, paper ofuda body, three with weird heads, face-chest dude, the dude with four legs: some of them might well be transformation types rather than heteromorphs, but either way, they’re a lot creepier across the board.

First use of the term heteromorph, from one of the villains Shigaraki brings to the USJ attack.  It’s followed up with Aizawa distinguishing “heteromorphic types” from “operative” and “transformative” types.  As I said in the terminology section, “heteromorph” is less fraught than the Japanese term igyou, but one might guess that Caleb Cook didn’t see a discrimination plotline coming—especially since the first person to use the word is self-describing!—so went with something a bit drier.

   

Tsuyu provides the first example of a character’s quirk being named simply for the animal they resemble with the formal introduction of her quirk, Frog.  I have to wonder somewhat about the politics of this—who chooses what to name a quirk?     Do the parents themselves do it, choosing a name and the kanji to use, and then just have to get the name approved when turning in a registration form at the local government office?  Or does the clerk at said office do it after getting a description of how the quirk operates?  Is there an appeals process if your choice is rejected/you don’t like what the clerk saddled your kid with?     Are heteromorphs, especially animal-types, more likely to just get assigned the exact same quirk name as their family members, regardless of any difference in their abilities?  Both of the Iida brothers, for example, have their quirk listed as Engine, though their pipes are in different places on their bodies.  We’ll later be told that Spinner’s whole family has reptilian quirks, but his is particularly weak.  Nonetheless, it’s still called Gecko, the same way Tsuyu’s is called Frog, even though she has a whole suite of abilities—she can do anything a frog can do!—and all Spinner can do is stick to walls.  And I wonder what the culture is like on that, and who makes that call.     As a further thought experiment, consider that if heteromorphs are more likely to get blanket names of their quirks than emitters, what does that mean for the quirk registry as an investigative tool for police?  Sure, there might be a lot of fire-users in the area, but the name and description of those quirks in the database will offer more ways to distinguish between them and how a fire-using suspect wielded their flames. You don't get that when your suspect had a lizardish quirk, there are fifteen petty criminals with lizardish quirks in the city, and all the quirk registry says is, “Lizard: Has lizard-like abilities and features.”     This homogenization of people who are already discriminated against compared to the apparent effort made to distinguish people with desirable emitter-type or colorful transformation quirks[5] leaves a lot of room for lazy, shoddy or even actively vindictive police work.     (Incidentally, Hound Dog and Gigantomachia both have quirks just named Dog.  Machia’s version only grants enhanced smell and hearing; he lacks Hound Dog’s canine features completely.  This would seem to indicate that simplistic quirk names aren’t limited by family groups, but rather assigned quite widely.)    

At the end of the chapter, Tsuyu’s character page notes that she gets cold easily—a weakness to cold that fellow ectotherm-based-quirk-haver Spinner does not seem to share, despite his appearance being considerably more divergent than Tsuyu’s.  On the other hand, his power set is much, much weaker.  Possibly the more abilities you have from “your” animal, the more of their more “negative” traits you also have to deal with? This would track with Mirko’s panicky “rabbit survival senses” kicking in the instant she saw Shigaraki in the tube.[6]

Chapter 15: 

Nedzu is introduced as the Principal.  Nedzu’s an interesting case.  He must be assumed to have a heteromorphic body as he’s clearly not a baseline mouse!  And his quirk is heteromorphic in the same sense that Ujiko’s is—its effect is both limited to his own self as well as being inherent to him—he can’t turn it on and off, and he can’t affect others with it.  Yet we can’t quite assume he experiences heteromorphobia in the same way humans do because he isn’t human; if people assume he’s animalistic or less-than-human, well, he is an animal, and he isn’t human.     Personally, I think Nedzu’s experience of heteromorphobia is most interesting for how it might intersect with that experienced by human heteromorphs—for example, what do people assume about Nedzu that’s similar to what they assume about other heteromorphs, and what do people assume about heteromorphs because of Nedzu and other rare instances of animals with quirks?

Chapter 21:

Introduction of Cementoss.  His quirk’s an emitter-type, but his body, and particularly his head, is very clearly not baseline.  Similar to Tokoyami, his appearance is technically independent of his quirk, though there are visual ties.  This begs a lot of questions about the arbitrary categorization of quirks and the insufficient language to talk about people whose appearances are very far afield from the old human norm, if the only word there is for a very different body is a word that’s also used to talk about a quirk category, and it’s considered a somewhat rude word at that!     In any case, with his squarish, cement-block head, he’s also our best look so far at someone with a heteromorphic body who has a visual tie to something that is a) a recognizable, extant thing in the world, but also b) inorganic in nature.  He won’t be the last or the weirdest of these.    

Introduction of Sansa, our first animal-type civilian heteromorph.    

Shouji’s character sheet, noting that Horikoshi thinks he’s cool even if he’s not the type of guy to stand out in the crowd, and wants to feature him in the story but isn’t sure when it will happen.  The character pages often—not always, but often—show what characters look like underneath various masks and costumes.  Shouji is the first exception, with his face remaining covered by his mask even here.  I see very little reason for that to be the case unless Horikoshi was concealing his scars for a dramatic later reveal.     Horikoshi also mentions here, for the first time, that he really enjoys drawing non-human-looking characters.  Given that he will also later say that he really enjoys thinking up personal details and backstory stuff for characters, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that he might have had the idea that “rural areas are still discriminatory” from the very beginning, even if he didn’t know how much of a role it might wind up playing.  This is especially the case if he had already begun conceptualizing the members and stories of the League of Villains, as discrimination is inseparable from Spinner’s reasons for becoming a villain in the first place.    

The U.A. Sports Festival Arc (Chapters 22 - 44)

One thing that stands out to me about the Sports Festival—no particular chapters, so I’m putting it at the beginning; keep an eye out next time you read it!—is that the audience members are far more varied in terms of how they look than the street crowds tend to be.  This is particularly the case as you get towards the finals and get more crowd commentary, and thus comparatively more detailed crowd shots.

Unincluded but equally telling panels include the ones with the skeleton knight or the parasitized snail guy.

While some of this can probably be chalked up to Horikoshi’s assistants getting better at drawing colorful random extras, I don’t think that’s the only reason, given how consistent the patterns in crowd make-up are throughout the series.  Rather, it’s notable that the attendees to the Sports Festival are, by and large, Hero industry people—most of them are, judging by their costumes,[7] heroes. We know from later on in the series that Japan has hundreds, probably thousands of active heroes in the modern day, and heroism is a good path for heteromorphs who don’t want to become villains but feel stifled at the prospect of being civilians; if nothing else, having a license is a preventative against being harassed for public quirk use just because you exist!  So it’s not surprising that the mid-ranks of heroes—people with middling quirks who are, For Some Strange Reason, not popular enough to make it to the tops of the charts—are flush with heteromorphs.

Chapter 26:

The full roster for Class 1-B is shown, though only a few of them get much in the way of dialogue through the Sports Festival material, most prominently Shiozaki, Tetsutetsu, and Monoma.  Class B is where a lot of the really weird first-year UA heteromorphs wound up.  Class 1-A has got nobody even a sliver as Downright Bizarre as Fukidashi Manga and Bondo Kojirou.

Chapter 27:

Hatsume Mei’s character sheet implies that support goods are mostly a thing for heroes—a government license is required to produce them; using them requires a hero license.  Most notable from her page is the sentence, “For those whose quirks impede everyday life, permits for special life-improving items may be granted after a rigorous examination.”  That’s a lot of qualifiers, isn’t it?  You might get to have support goods that improve your quality of life if you can prove to someone from the government that your life is sufficiently impeded by your quirk—oh, and that examination is going to be really demanding.  There’s an obvious example in Aoyama’s belt, and Aoyama’s certainly no heteromorph, but it’s easy to imagine that kind of thing affecting heteromorphs disproportionately.

Chapter 29:

A small thing, but Tokoyami notes that the only person he has previously told Dark Shadow’s weakness to is Koda, another of the Class 1-A kids with a more significantly heteromorphic appearance.  We will eventually find in a volume extra about the CRC that one of their branches is a group that rejects those who have strange heads—Tokoyami and Koda are the clear examples in Class 1-A, give or take Shouji’s unmasked features and Mina’s horns and odd coloring.     The wiki notes that Koda and Tokoyami were together for the USJ attack, so the weakness may simply have come up there, but I don’t believe it’s explicitly specified anywhere what the circumstances were for Tokoyami telling Koda that information.

Chapter 30: 

A “raccoon eyes” from Bakugou aimed at Mina, a reference to her black sclera.  The Japanese here just translates to black eyes, though—still a reference to a heteromorphic feature, but not an animal insult.

Chapter 32: 

Opting to rest up during the Sports Festival’s pre-final break, Tokoyami, the bird head guy, does this by stashing himself up on a tree branch.  While I don’t think Tokoyami tends towards a lot of avian mannerisms, he will later be deeply impacted by Hawks encouraging him to fly.    

In a strategic tactic to rile up Midoriya by insulting his classmate, Shinso derisively calls Ojiro a monkey.  It’s super-effective!

Chapter 33: 

In a not-so-strategic patch of angry internal monologue about Ojiro spilling the beans on his brainwashing quirk, Shinsou thinks of Ojiro as a monkey.

Chapter 35:

Mount Lady comments on Shiozaki’s strength by calling her another plant user when talking to Kamui Woods.  We’ll see this sort of quirk solidarity in a number of other places—Endeavor’s agency full of fire types, a fire-type dude on the street expressing his support of Endeavor, Hawks quipping about both him and Tokoyami being birds—but this is the nice, safe version of something that raises a lot more questions when it’s e.g. Tsuyu’s parents both being frog-type heteromorphs.  More on that in the relevant bonus chapter.  In short, the solidarity’s nice, but pushed too far, it’s easy for that kind of thing to turn exclusionary.

Chapter 41:

The introduction of Stain.  Stain’s another interesting case of someone not being denoted as heteromorphic—Bloodcurdle is an emitter-type—but, like Cementoss, having physical traits that clearly fall in line with their quirk.  I would say Stain’s an even more borderline case than Cementoss, actually, as far as having a quirk that blurs the line on typing.

Cementoss is clearly strange-looking—less scary than Stain, but also less human—but his physical features do nothing whatsoever to facilitate the use of his Cement quirk.  Stain, though, has his tongue: too long to be a normal human feature, and certainly helpful in terms of making it easier for him to taste other peoples’ blood.  Yet we don’t call Stain a heteromorph because, in contrast to a feature like e.g. Sero’s elbows, Bloodcurdle would work the same way even if Stain had a totally normal tongue.  So how would one discuss any discrimination Stain might ever have faced over it?     Thus, my belief that the discrimination we see in the story is based, not simply on having a heteromorphic quirk, but on having a sufficient number of heteromorphic features.

---------

Thanks for reading so far! A lot of this first post was introduction and set-up, but the hints will be growing more overt as we press on. I'd like to make this series either weekly or biweekly, time and other projects depending, but it's written all the way up through the Edgy Deku arc, so I don't anticipate major delays.

I hope you all enjoy; this one has been in the works for a long, long time.

Next time: the Stain arc on through the License Exam, plus the (very telling) Tsuyu bonus chapter.

------------------- FOOTNOTES -------------------

[1] AFO uses the correct reading when he’s explaining Decay’s sudden appearance to Tenko in Chapter 222.  I assume this is because Pops is a mobster while AFO has been married to a quirk scientist for seventy years.

[2] Also too, even if I were inclined to pick one word to use as the rude word and one to use as the more formal term, “mutant” is closer to the rude connotations of igyou than “heteromorph.”

[3] Knowing what we know now, it’s possible that l’il Tsubasa is fine, and that said Noumu only has a copy of his quirk via Ujiko.  Its impulse to save/grab Deku could be chalked up as something caused by said quirk’s vestige, which the lower tier Noumu might simply lack the brain function to filter out.  It’s difficult to say if the current story will find time to address this.

[4] One has to wonder if hero schools save all the crunchy classes about Hero Civics and Modern History for the third-years, if the younger grades are learning it but Horikoshi thinks it’s too dull to show, or if students are just never taught about it at all beyond the bare minimum necessary to do their jobs by the book, and anything more than that is the reserve of higher education or specialized study.

[5] Consider the simplicity of animal-type quirk names and then compare them with e.g. Helflame vs Hardflame Fan, Explosion vs. Landmine, Float vs. Air Walk, Magic vs. Poltergeist, Bubble vs. Clean Bubbler, or Scalemail vs. Scales vs. Shield.  And that’s limiting myself to only quirks named directly in the manga!  It gets even more ridiculous if the patterns in the anime’s invented names for quirks are taken into consideration.

[6] Of course, lots of people get chills from being around Shigaraki, even before the surgery but especially after.  Everyone else has that response to a conscious Shigaraki, however.

[7] Conversely, when Mei scopes out some Support industry dudes in Chapter 35, the two she focuses on as well as nearly everyone seated around them are just baseline dudes in suits and ties.  Only one of the fourteen visible faces in that panel is a probable heteromorph.

[zeldassecretwell]

listen. listen. hear me out.

trans zelda and trans link (of course), HOWEVER (long speculation and gender worldbuilding/headcanon follows):

link, afab and genderfluid. as a child, shrimply does not Care about gender. does not cross her mind (homeschooled and fucks around in the woods too much for it to be relevant to his life). But when they pull the sword, suddenly there's all this attention on them and guess what? The Hero Of Legend is a boy, and so Link must be a boy, always. He doesn't really mind at first, because it isn't like he cared anyways, but it eventually becomes stifling as he realizes that he, as The Hero, is expected to perform a certain kind of masculinity (and only ever perform that kind of masculinity).

zelda, amab and trans, she/her. grows up as aware of gender roles as a child can be (given that those roles are tied to the monarchical power structure that she's born into). Sees that her mother is 1) the one with the divine heritage and 2) I'm going to assume favorite parent since I dislike Rhoam intensely. Is like, yeah sure I'd like to be a girl, sounds neat! Rhoam et al. are like but your roles...no...be a boy... And then her mom dies when she's like 6 and everybody's like well shit The Princess Of Legend is a girl, and Zelda is an only child, so now we will choose to see you as a girl. And at first Zelda doesn't mind because she thought being a girl was neat anyways, but then it becomes stifling as she realizes that she, as The Princess, is expected to perform a certain kind of femininity (and only ever perform that kind of femininity).

I just think it's incredibly interesting how gender can play into the themes of destiny/expectations/personhood/choice/self discovery if you operate off of the assumption that the botw/totk universe has an (even slightly) different system of gender. because most societies do in one way or another. FOR EXAMPLE:

- link starts dressing more fluidly and expressing themself more after he wakes up post amnesia, moving away from rigid, stoic masculinity of pre-calamity

- zelda cuts her hair post botw. she cuts her hair. oh my fucking god! she cuts her goddamn hair! she is louder and more outspoken, and she leans into being a scientist. and she cut her hair!!! because she IS a girl, but not the one that her father wanted her to be.

- and on the topic of how this influences the rhoam-zelda dynamic: you could read an element of rhoam projecting onto zelda (and zelda very much perceiving this) "well, if only you had been 'BORN' a girl, maybe your powers would work sooner" or "well you wanted to be a girl, so why do you complain about the kind of girl that you must be for the good of the kingdom (read: the kind of girl I want you to be)"

- THUS. INTENSE ZELDA LINK BONDING (romantic or platonic doesn't matter) VIS A VIS BEING TRANS AND THE WAY EXPECTATIONS SHAPED THE WAY THEY WERE PERCIEVED AND THE WAY THEY PERCIEVE THEMSELVES. CAN I GET AN AMEN.

- also, last little note - because I'm assuming (as much as one can) that the kingdom of central Hyrule is to some degree imperialistic and subjugating other regions in the country pre-calamity - other societies in hyrule could have gender systems that differ from that of Central Hyrule (and this is sort of present in canon but. you know. in the way that canon is the way it is. well.). ERGO. none of the Champions have to be in line with the central hyrulean concept of a cisgender person. I rest my case.

[ohsuchoh]

Some thoughts on Bucchigiri?!

As I write this, Bucchigiri?! is about to release its last episode

Arajin from Bucchigiri?!

First things first. I have a weird feeling about the cultural appropriation of stereotypical arab "aesthetics" thing here. But it's a complex matter that I'm not addressing now, I have to educate myself more to talk properly about it. Though, as I've seen other people say, it seems Utsumi is following the original plot of 1001 Nights and I think I understand why she chose it. The original Aladdim is a horrible person, the perfect matrix for a selfish, coward and irritating Arajin - a main character who is the opposite of the shonen hero trope. Almost as hated as Shinji Ikari from Evangelion - a much older and bigger project. By the way, I see some references to Evangelion and other classical anime across Utsumi's works and this is something I would like to address in the future. 

Another topic is that I had already noticed with Sk8 the Infinity how interesting Utsumi's approach on masculinity is, especially queer masculinity. No wonder a considerable part of the sk8 fanbase is masc-oriented, either trans men or non-binary people. Now, with Bucchigiri?!, masculinity seems to be the central topic of the work. I wanna write more about it in a future post. Please mind that I don't take too much into consideration protocol, evasive answers in interviews. Rather, I prefer to study the author's work, worldbuilding, plot and characters, using interviews only as a side consultation sometimes. I'm not immune to misunderstandings and confirmation bias, though, so take my analyses with a grain of salt. 

This post started to get too long, so I decided to break it into a series of shorter texts. I intend to update this main post with the links to the other ones (if I happen to have time and energy to write them). Mind that I'm not doing extensive research. It's just a collection of thoughts that may or may not make sense. For me, well posed questions are more interesting than categorical and definitive answers.

Mahoro as all women

Sk8 the Infinity: a beef parallel

Katabasis and tragedy in Bucchigiri?! 

Masculinity as a central topic of Utsumi's works

[thricedead]

Im sad so ill list my currently worked on original projects to destress 👍🏻

CURTAIN CALL! Is an universe encompassed by two visual novels, Curtain Call! A Requiem to my Star and its prequel, Curtain Call! Miniature Moon. Both thematize cycles of trauma and how abusive constructs reproduce themselves. Requiem is an idol thriller with a stronger focus on sexual abuse and emotional/codependent abuse while Miniature Moon is a detective story with a stronger focus on war/colonial trauma and gendered abuse. Both have ensemble casts of 10ish central characters but span over their families and work environments too

VITA NOVA is an erotic vampire love tragedy. It will probably end up a short VN with branching routes. It discusses mainly sexual and emotional abuse in relationships, BDSM as a coping mechanism for past abuse but also as a tool of re-traumatization and power dynamics in traditional Balkan families. Despite the serious topics, I had a lot of fun with vampire worldbuilding and fantasy fashion/weapons

SPIEGEL AM SPIEGEL will either be a graphic novel or an illustrated story about an older man raising a teen boy grown from the cells of his dead daughter. It is largely an allegory for transmasculinity, but also thematizes patriarchal familial dynamics and the question of what is neccessary to constitute a human being, much less a 'man' or a 'woman'

[unleashthegoats]

Hey y'all! Loved the new episode, and wanted to chip in on one of the later points - videogames, especially in relation to the "Grey" Jedi concept. Knights of the Old Republic II really did some irreversible damage in that regard, as much as I love the game (though I prefer the first one). Kreia is one of the most central characters in regard to shifting morality debates in Star Wars (in universe and from fans alike) imo, and I'd honestly be super interested in hearing you three cover either or both of the games in the podcast, although I understand that's highly unlikely since none of you have played them. But she is extremely relevant to this topic because she preaches about neutrality and that there's more than just ~dogmatic thinkings of light and dark~, and your relationship with her suffers if you are kind and altruistic and get too rooted in the light side and she's like...one of *the* characters that kind of gets credited with developing a "grey" philosophy in-universe? But people always bring her up as if she's this great point of sensible consideration and not actually, as it turns out, a master manipulator trying to purge the Force from the galaxy (or something like that at least? It's been a while since my last playthrough lol) that lies to you all the time to get you to do what she wants (because she was so crazy bananas both the Jedi and the Sith said "no thank u :)" - well, with a bit more nuance but you get the gist). Really, it's a bit like people falling for Palpatine's anti-Jedi points all over how they talk about her philosophic arguments without bringing that up. But yeah, I thought you might be interested in that. Also, I think KotOR might be what people meant with being able to unlock Dark Side powers as a Light sider but you are absolutely correct that it's a mechanics vs story issue (especially since some powers are indeed alignment-locked AND making dark side choices does impact the character (apart from story, ending and relationships to your party members). It's a bit of a simplistic gimmick, of course, but the further you get into the Dark Side on the alignment, the more it's visible - sickly skin colour, cracks in the skin and flesh, your eyes change...stuff like that. I don't think using Dark Side powers actually pushes you further down the alignment, but the intent is obviously not for Light Siders to mix and match however they like).

Anyway, I'm so sorry for rambling on for so long, but I thought you (or someone, at least :D ) might appreciate that additional info. Keep up the good podcasting! :)

OUR FIRST ASK! I'm so glad you're enjoying the podcast, thank-you so much for listening to us ramble on for an hour once a month!

This is all really interesting! I've read a few metas about the Star Wars video games and the characters within them which is partly why I chose to briefly include them in the episode (and also because I am familiar with Jedi: Survivor which has its own "dark side" mechanic for the main character that was relevant to the discussion). Aside from Jedi: Survivor, I wasn't necessarily referencing any one specific video game, I assume it's probably a thing that's come up more than once.

As far as my reaction to Kreia goes, just based on your description of her, the idea of there being "too much light" just isn't how Lucas's own worldbuilding worked. It's clearly trying to hit on the idea of "balance" being equal amounts of light and dark usage, as opposed to balance being acknowledging darkness EXISTS (in yourself and in the universe) in order to keep yourself from acting on it. There just isn't a way to be "too light" or something like that, there's never "too much" kindness and compassion and selflessness in the world. In this sense, the video games are just going to fall into the same category as the rest of legends and EU stuff, in that they often just do their own thing based on their own interpretations of Star Wars, but it doesn't mean it actually fits with what Lucas himself was trying to get across about the philosophy of the Force and the Jedi in his own stories, and that's primarily what we're using as a base to discuss Star Wars from.

If any of us ends up playing KOTOR, we can certainly try to bring it up more often. I don't think we have any plans of doing more video game stuff currently, but if the KOTOR remake ever comes to pass, maybe I will!

-Mod Sugar

[pemokiandkenacia]

A More Thorough Introductory Post:

Hello, friends, and welcome to our semi-official P&K content blog. I'm @smzeszikorova, and I'm working with @adrielcastlyre on a series of four books, currently titled Pemoki & Kenacia, though that name may be subject to change. We've spent about ten years world-building and character-building. Not an ideal timeline, but I regret nothing. The joy's in the process.

We've laid out the foundations for all four of our books—made the transition from pantsers to planners. The outline's all there, and though there's a few important details to work out, we know what direction we're taking. Phase one's complete. Once I've submitted my thesis (UPDATE: SUCCESS) , we'll be set to hammer out our drafts.

For newcomers:

Pemoki & Kenacia's a bit ambiguous, genre-wise. The closest thing to it's probably hard fantasy. As for our target audience, I'd go with "adult". our POV characters' age range is pretty broad, and their interests and concerns vary accordingly, but they're written with adult readers in mind. I'm cautious to reduce P&K to a string of TikTok tropes. That said, here are some things you can expect to find here:

Multiple protagonists. Our cast is large. We've got approximately 90 named characters in-universe whose appearances in the end product are more or less guaranteed. Granted, most of these aren't central to the plot. But our main cast is on the large side. Each book generally has one to two protagonists; they change from book to book.

Multiple POVs. And to ensure that each character's arc comes to a satisfying conclusion, I switch between points of view somewhat regularly. (My tendency's to head-hop. For college degree reasons, I read a lot of old-timey Russian literature in the vein of Anna Karenina, and it influences my style, but I know head-hopping's a bit of a controversial writing choice these days. Whether we'll try to shift toward a purely omniscient style is currently under debate. Regardless, expect to get to know a lot of characters.)

War and international conflict. Our story's very concerned with the personal struggles of our characters—familial conflict, romance, friendship, betrayal, etc.—but it all takes place within the broader backdrop of these warring countries we've invented. And the war takes center stage often.

Deep worldbuilding. This universe is large—well suited for such a large cast. Currently, it involves five multinational regions, eleven countries, and nineteen cities. With limited space to explore all these places, we highlight what's essential and let the rest inform the narrative in subtler ways.

More reality than fantasy. People who’ve had a look at our works in progress say that we’re pretty grounded in reality for a couple of fantasy writers. All our main characters are human. Magic is a genetically-inherited phenomenon with rules loosely based in science. And while none of our fantasy regions, ethnicities, or religions are meant to be read as directly analogous to any real-world ones, they do draw influence from the real world at times. I’m sure you’ll notice this in the Russian-based languages of the Sitrii Elariny, the English-based language of Kenacia, and the language of Qhiron, which draws from both but perhaps not quite so obviously. In our worldbuilding, we make a point to give our invented nations believable complexity, heterogeneity, and political and economic motivations. We’re not too big on the “This region is inhabited by the stouthearted, down-to-earth Welverpeople who universally prefer farming tools to swords, are warm and inviting to outsiders, practice simple domestic magic, and make for extremely loyal allies” vibe.

Conlang. Fairly self-explanatory. Usually I'll just say, "[Insert sentence here]," Character X said in Pemokese. But now and again, when I feel it enhances the narrative, I'll leave it in my invented language and let readers draw their conclusions about the meaning.

Problematic characters, dark topics, and complex, incomplete redemptions. It's very important to us that we approach our darker topics with caution and sensitivity, but we're not writing Aesop's fables. Don't expect comfortable, obvious answers to the ethical questions we pose. Folks looking for escapism or retributive justice narratives should probably look elsewhere.

Queerness; disability; ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. Our story isn't really about these elements, per se, but our characters come from a variety of backgrounds, both real and invented, and it does inform the story. (We're both white and culturally Christian, and in terms of our relationships with queerness and disability, we'd both make for lousy representation, so we're operating with the understanding that we're gonna need hella beta reading once all this is done.) And on a similar note . . .

We take some unusual liberties with our world. Fake religions (Dzulyan, Kvotian, etc.) coexist with real ones. And though our languages and cultures are obviously influenced by the real world, they're all explicitly invented. We're not too concerned with making our universe consistent with real-world history, so while we do touch on issues related to queerness, ethnicity, etc., we don't go out of our way to align the experiences of our cast with those of people living within a certain real-world time period. When we decide what scientific knowledge and technology to include, our key is internal consistency. We'll guide you through the rules of this universe as needed, but if at any point you find yourself wondering what time period we're supposed to be in, just know that the answer is "none of the above".

Now, with all that said...

What are you likely to find on this blog?

Updates. If you want to know how P&K's coming along, here's where we'll ramble about the process.

Art or other related side projects.

Requests for beta readers, once we get to that stage.

This blog's a writeblr of sorts, but we won't discuss anything unrelated to P&K here. My coauthor's not very involved with social media in general, and I'm in and out of the writers' community on this site. So if you're here for tag games, community events, etc., @smzeszikorova's where you'll find all that. This blog's essentially a dumping ground for P&K materials. I can't imagine it'll be too effective as a hype builder, but once our books are released, everything we post here will be available for our readers to see. And on the off chance that our books get big (which I'm not counting on, but it'd be pretty cool), those of you who join in the fun now will have special clout. "We were here from the beginning." Do with that what you will.

We take asks! If you're interested in putting our characters in (non-erotic) situations, feel free to send in an art prompt.

As for the books themselves, I've tried to be sparing about plot reveals. (That'll be truer from here on out than it was on my other blog. Current mutuals, I swear I'm not kidding when I say all those art posts, quotes, and snippets I used to post are basically void. That's how much we've changed over the past few months. But the first book's premise remains the same:

As the threat of war looms on the horizon, Catherine Leures, an impoverished Kenacian woman living in the north of Pemoki, enlists in an effort to pull her family from the depths of financial ruin.

(I think I'll hold off on descriptions of the other books for now. They'd be pretty spoilery. But I'll post more thorough blurbs as I start getting these published. We do have titles for the second, third, and fourth books: Fledgling's Descent, Stirrings of a Silent War, and The Fallen Star of Thaeryvon.)

What do I mean when I say everything's changed, then?

I mean the process of filling plot holes, removing extraneous plotlines, and accounting for sensitivity in our characterization has resulted in a good number of our characters' personalities, relationships, and arcs being completely revamped. Lucky you! Aside from knowing the names, national and moral alignments, and general appearances of most of the first book's main cast, you'll be on about the same page as new readers if/when P&K gets published.

Before I go, a couple updates about P&K:

Since I started writing my thesis, my writing style has changed significantly. We've been making stylistic revisions to our original draft. Thankfully for our future editors, our first draft's gotten a lot more concise.

All the canon events are essentially set. The "outline" I did for my thesis is basically one long synopsis. All that's left for our first draft is to fill everything out with dialogue and detail. (Easier said than done, but I'm excited anyway.)

My coauthor and I have been playing with the idea of a character narrator: someone with a personal investment in the story. We're not sure yet, but it's a fun experiment.

If you've gotten this far, thanks so much for reading this incredibly long post.

[blue-kyber]

May I have a ramble about your favorite WIP?

(Any topic you wish My leige)

I'm so sorry it's taken me a thousand years to get to this ask. Thank you for being so patient. :)

My favorite WIP...

Well, I have 2 in the works;

my original novel, "Out There: The 1K" (editing book 2 of the duology)

my Getting In Deep fan fiction, "A Test of Will."

At the moment, I'm happily working on "A Test of Will." I love writing it, I love the characters, the plot I've come up with, delving into the details, and being in Will's head the whole time.

MY FAVORITE...

...Is "Out There."

It is my baby. My pride and joy. My heart and soul. I've been working on it since September, 2018.

If you don't mind, I'd like to go off on what I love about it.

None of the characters are based on a real person - not even their appearances. The closest I get to using a picture to represent a character is a picture of Eugene Fitzherbert from "Tangled" as inspiration for Yune Darrak's appearance.

The worldbuilding is such an adventure! I have an entire galaxy of my own creation to build, expand, change, destroy, and save. I love putting in small details about the characters and worlds. I create bits about their culture, the things they're used to, social details that play a hand in how they act.

I've got an intergalactic coffee chain called "Darkmatter." I even designed a logo for it. :D

It's basically space Starbucks. :)

In book 1, there's one scene I included where Yune takes the kids (Will and Terra) to a Darkmatter in Cos Besta on the planet of Ilthall. The scene shows an o'alli girl (a blue skinned alien) bored as hell behind the bar. It shows that even on another planet, retail life sucks.

Yune is a coffee addict. Their to-go cups show up in different parts of the ship where Yune has abandoned them. That bachelor life on a spaceship. :)

In my universe, there's coffee and chocolate. Period. I am God and this is my playground. If I want chocolate and coffee, there will be chocolate and coffee. And yes, I created lore for why it's in space.

THE LORE ALL CONNECTS!

I created a linguistic translator and how it functions.

Coming up with the 4 human species was fun. The characters only know about 3 of them until book 2.

THE HORIZON!

Oh, my lovely, lovely ship, The Horizon. <3

The Horizon is a mik-human designed ship from Mikra's infamous (and dangerous) orbital shipyards. It's an ACC-1200 Mercury class mid-size transport vessel. ACC = All Crew and Cargo. It's function was to sustain a crew of 4 on long-haul journeys, so it has all the amenities people would need to live and be somewhat comfortable in space. It's built with the anatomy of mik-humans in mind. Masakan-humans (who are similar to terran-humans - Earthlings -) and most other humanoid species would find everything just big enough to be challenging. Mik-humans are the biggest, most dense, and strongest of the human species with adults reaching a maximum height of 8'. The average male adult is around 6'6" - 7'8". The average female adult is 6' - 7'5". Reaching 8' is rare.

This is Yune's ship and his home. It becomes Home for the main cast. The ship has a personality. It's a character on its own.

I designed the entire ship from the ground up.

Deck 1: cargo deck. Deck 2: command deck. Deck 3: crew deck.

THIS SHIP HAS STAIRS! :D And 1 central lift.

All 3 decks and everything on them down to small details like Yune's yellow reminder post-its (called "Stik-Its" in universe) stuck to different spots reading 'replace this' or 'Find C.I link. Crate 2B,' or 'Fix this,' or 'Get parts from crossroads station,' or 'Bad junction. Zappy.' ect so he remembers what projects he didn't get to yet.

The medical bay has a hologram that's pretty much the ship's AI. Yune's only used it a few times.

Since he's been the only one onboard for 2 out of the 5 years he's had it, he modified the AI to respond to vocal commands to perform functions he either can't do because he's doing something else, or needs help with.

I did a rough sketch of the hull design a while ago, and tried to create it in the Sims with just the base pack

I know that ship from top to bottom, and she is beautiful. She's perfect. She's a mess, but she's perfect. :) If I could ever find a program that lets you design a spacecraft so that you can tour it in 3D, I would spend all of my time creating the Horizon.

Yune named it after he stole it. He named it the Horizon because his engineering teacher - Gregor Ryder, a 7'1" burly mik-human, the only person in his life up to that point to ever truly care about him (that he remembers) and who took him under his wing, gave Yune advice when he was at his lowest;

"There’s a spark inside you that shines brighter than anything in the sky, and no one can kill it, because you’re stronger than they are and they know it. You made it this far, you can keep going.

But you have to look up. Keep your eyes on the horizon. Keep moving. As long as you do that, you’ll find your way out. You’ll break orbit. You’ll reach the stars, because that’s where you’re meant to be. That’s where you belong."

VELCRO is called SHRIPP , named for the sound it makes. :D

There are programs and movies people like to watch. Yune's favorite show is "Laki Rift," an ongoing drama. He got Terra into it, so they're both Laki Rift fans.

Will is gifted a tinkertoy-esque engineering set call Kinetics. Very simple, but hey. :) He's constantly leaving pieces around the ship (it is his home after all.) Selka's always telling him to pick up his toys or she's going to put it away.

All of the Milky Way galaxy has NOT been explored yet. 3/4 of it has.

Selka's ship, the Tapheila, is pristine. It has a class 5 Adakorian hyperdrive that Yune wants to be left alone with. :)

The Horizon's lounge on the 3rd deck has out of place furniture bolted to the deck, rugs, a galley that smells perpetually like burnt walnuts and toast, and Selka has a meditation cushion toward the corner in front of the wide panoramic window.

Selka is an Ai Hiri sen - kind of like a knight status in the Jedi order as far as skill and ranking goes, but not the same. And they don't make the same stupid mistakes. Their discipline is based around honing their mental abilities gifted to them by their deity, Shora - (which is how they interpret the Source Field, or the "Light.") They can connect to the Field the same way an altaran naturally can by using a large amoradite gem known as the Eye of Shora. The Ai Hiri tend to stick to their solar system to protect it, and stay to themselves. They don't go out "fighting for justice." They're more like monks...who can fight. Those who venture out usually become advisors for high ranking leaders. Outsiders are not allowed into their mountain top temple on their home planet. An Ai Hiri is more powerful than an average felorian, and has more mental abilities besides the two that all felorians have; empathy and telepathy.

Selka left home because she didn't think it was right that the Ai Hiri stayed out of the fight against the Keth. She thought they should be out there protecting the innocent from the Keth and the dark forces of the known galaxy.

SOURCE ENERGY!

The power the kids can use is a blue energy that's unseen by everyone except for 3 other people. Creating the Source Field, and explaining how Source Field energy and Living Source energy work - the nuances of it - took me a while. I keep the mystery of it in there as well.

It's not the Force - they're similar in many ways, but definitely not the same thing. They don't "work" the same way. A Source user would have a difficult time navigating the Force, and vice versa. They could do it, but it would be challenging.

Yune's crystal is the one that I wear. His has a living source in it. It's sentient. As is the planet, Ilthall.

Creating the world through the eyes of Will and Terra who are seeing all of this for the first time since they were taken from Earth and then kidnapped is tricky, but fun. It's like they're the reader, learning as they do.

There are details about the galaxy itself that I can't wait to write about.

Like the Great Galactic Garbage Patch simply known as "The Patch."

It's a 2 light year diameter region of space filled with space junk that's been accumulating there for thousands of years by thousands of species. It's the galaxy's dumpster. It's been there for so long, it's a large trash-based nebula. It was initially formed around a small star away from the populated worlds to keep discarded ships and whatever in orbit, or some would fall into the star. It's obviously expanded since then. It even has condensed bodies of compacted trash asteroids (trashteroids) in various sizes called Junk Moons, or Mudballs by Spacers (nomadic people who live primarily in space). Some of them create their own gravity and have their own moons of trash orbiting them.

I got the idea from our own Great Pacific Garbage Patch. For context, our solar system is 1.8 light years across.

It's big.

There's also the Kelset Void.

It's an apx. 1000 light year wide expanse of dead space that contains small pockets of real space swiss cheesed all over it. Ship's cannot jump to hyperspace within dead space zones of the Void. They have to jump from pocket to pocket. If you leave a pocket, you're stuck "walking" until you get to another one. There are paths charted between them, and some of the pockets contain entire solar systems.

What makes it impossible for ships to jump to hyperspace is because the void part of the Void is completely ....devoid... of Source Field energy. Making the jump requires the presence of the Field. The lack of the Source Field would make anyone in tune with the Field - like Will, Yune, Jeina, and Terra - feel cut off, alone, like they're suffocating, and blind. They would get irritable, have various physical issues, hallucinate, and feel 'starved.' People in tune with the Field subconsciously "read it" and use their own living Source energy in conjunction with it. Without it, all they would have would be their own Source energy, that of others compatible to them, and the Field energy trapped in the ship. Many would keep a Source flare (a highly concentrated flare of Field energy) on the ship when needing to pass through the Void just in case to keep themselves going and maintain their sanity. That whole area to them feels dead. They do not like it and want to avoid it.

Source Field energy is the life of the galaxy itself. The Kelset Void is akin to a cancerous lesion, or a bullet hole. It's dead space. Literally. That area of the galaxy is dead.

And then we have the space dwelling creatures called ASTROTHOPIDS. :D These guys are extremely durable and can thrive in both a vacuum and various atmospheres.

They have 3 sub species:

Carbonites: (Inspired by soot sprites. They look similar, but are definitely not the same.) These soft, fuzzy, 4-legged little guys can fit in the palm of your hand. They live in colonies that share one brain cell and keep losing it. They eat metal. Although dumb as rocks, they are more intelligent in other ways. They either have black fuzzy bodies or navy blue fuzzy bodies. Albinos are pale pink. You can find these guys pretty much anywhere there's metal. Their mouths are too small to really harm a human. One or two, or a handful carbonites can't cause much damage. But a colony will wreck your shit. They can live up to a hundred years - if allowed to live. They're not fast breeders, but fast enough to create colonies. They're considered pests. When on a spaceship, they can float. (I love these adorable little dumbasses. ^_^)

Oobo: Bigger versions of carbonites, about the size of a loaf of bread, with more intelligence and 6 legs instead of 4. They live mostly in space. They're also metal eaters. In the absence of metal, they can survive on nebulonic gases, as can all astrothopids. They can live up to 200 years - again, if allowed to. They come in star blue, black, and albino pink.

Spacers hate these two because of their metal eating habits. Putting their ship through a macryon radiation scrub station (like a car wash) is how many prefer to get rid of them.

(Patch on Etsy)

(redbubble Isopod)

Ceenak: The much, much, much, MUCH bigger astrothopids that can live up to a thousand years or more. Their design is based off tardigrades (water bears) but not an exact. There are physical differences. They have 6 legs, a wider, bigger mouth, no fuzz, two very large solid black eyes, and a shell like an armadillo.

They eat iron asteroids and live in asteroid fields. They're kind of like bees. They're the 'clean up crew' of the galaxy munching on asteroids. They live in space and travel in pods. They can become large enough to completely swallow a mid-size ship like the Horizon without a problem. They are incredibly intelligent, and damn near impossible to kill. Ceenak create a crystal within their stomach called a mycathyst that felorians (Selka's telepathic and empathic humanoid species) use to enhance their mental abilities. To obtain one, a felorian puts a ceenak into a trance while another goes in and harvests the crystals. They used to kill them (they figured out how) for the crystals, then quickly learned how to subdue them and not to harm them. Felorians value life. The only felorians who are able to put a ceenak to 'sleep' are the Ai Hiri - their order comprised of those with high mental prowess. The only other gem more potent for felorians is the rare amoradite.

All astrothopids see primarily through the Source Field. They have a special affinity for altaran-humans due to altarans being the only sentient species who are in tune with the Field and can use their own living Source energy. They can see the "light" of an altaran and are attracted to it. The love the way it feels. Altarans learned how to use that to their advantage. They would sometimes keep them as pets and work with them, but would not kill them. Oobo are like cats. Altarans can also connect with astrothopids - even the little dumbasses. Thousands of years of working in a symbiotic relationship have allowed astrothopids to trust them.

Astrothopids will instinctively act to protect an altaran in danger.

Ceenak have been known to defend altarans, keep them alive, and take them to a safe place.

THEN THERE'S......

An old Yondi and Altaran legend, "The Tale of Belaketh and Yuneath." - it explains how the Yuneath - the third moon - became the ring, and how its Light (it's Source Field energy) and that of Ilthall's protects Ilthall's children from the eyes of dark forces beyond the two sister moons. Ilthall's children = anyone born on that planet. They have a deep connection to that world.

The planet is sentient, sparsely populated, on the outer rim, and actually does protect them, and can affect them when they leave if they don't ask for permission first. It's a legend no one takes seriously. Feeling homesickness, headaches, dizziness, feeling like you left something behind and need to go back, and nausea is normal. The need to go back the entire time you're away is also normal.

It's not.

That's the planet basically saying, "I did not give you permission to leave. When you get back, you're grounded, and we're going to have a little chat."

If Ilthall deems the danger for someone leaving is too great, or she lost them once and refuses to lose them again, she can render them unconscious until they re-enter the moons' boundary. This has happened a handful of times in recorded history.

This only affects people born on or around Ilthall within the dual moons orbit.

And DARK MATTER STORMS.

Basically what it sounds like; A cell of roving dark matter in space.

Thankfully they're rare. The odds of running into one are small, but it happens enough that Spacer culture made up stories about them.

They're undetectable. Ships can't jump to hyperspace in them, so if you find yourself in one, you have to slog through it and hope it isn't a large storm you'll be stuck in for days, weeks, or months. Communications and sensors don't tend to work in them either. A combination of chemical reactions within the gases of a dark matter storm with the Source Field woven through it cause "thunder" and "lightning." The Field exists in it in ribbons of energy that are carried by it, so that's not why ships can't make the jump. It's because the hyperdrive activation will react badly with the elements in the storm. If you try to jump to hyperspace... BOOM.

And of course I wrote a short story where the Horizon family (Yune, Will, Terra, and Selka) get stuck in one.

There's so much more I love about this galaxy!

This is just a fraction of what I've created. :D

I want SO BADLY for people to enjoy the stories enough that they want to create their own stories in this galaxy...which is the Milky Way galaxy. :) I want people to find themselves in one of the One Thousand and write their own adventure.

I've wanted that from the very start.

[trillscienceofficer]

🌈🌿🎀💞💌 - pick and choose if you don't wanna do all!

Thank you so much!!

🌈is there a fic that you worked really fucking hard on that no one would ever know? maybe a scene/theme you struggled with?

Answered here :)

🌿how does creating make you feel?

Ouf, complex question. I've tried not writing at various points in my life, thinking that it was childish, what's the point anyway and it's not as if anything I make is particularly good or relevant... but despite these rationalizations not writing always made life tangibly worse for me. I used to fill notebooks with stories as a teenager, I left word documents full of half-written fic in all the computers I've ever put my hands on, it's just something I do. That said though... putting something on paper is usually a distressing emotional roller-coaster for me. I know this sounds fucking overdramatic for someone who writes silly Star Trek romance fic but it's just the way it is! I oscillate between almost 'manic' episodes of elation to depths of despair previously not known to man, and the difference between them can simply be 'reading an opinion that disagrees on the approach I've taken in the story I'm currently writing'. I love talking to other writers (it's what made me start posting fic publicly in the first place, I want to talk to people with whom I share interests and sensibilities) but if I have the wrong conversation at the wrong time it can make me stop writing for literal months. I probably should work on that and make writing less of a sensitive topic because this is definitely a me problem lol, but I'm also not exactly sure how to put more emotional distance between me and the act of making up a story with characters I love. Something I'm definitely thinking about, nonetheless!

🎀give yourself a compliment about your own writing

I care about these characters so much and the amount of thought I put into them and the relationships between them shows in what I write.

💞what's the most important part of a story for you? the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the technical stuff (grammar etc), the figurative language

Characters for sure, they always come first for me. I care about grammar as well, though this is a complicated subject (how exactly I am proficient in English is a question I'm very afraid to ask, even to my beta readers when I have them). I'm not a big plot person, but I always try to have a central 'conflict' in every story I write, something that helps bring out the differences and similarities between the characters involved. Figurative language is admittedly not among my main concerns, and lately I feel like I should concentrate more on prose, I realize my writing can be too dry sometimes. Worldbuilding is complicated for me... I feel like anything I make up ends up sounding silly, so in general I try to keep things close to canon, or at least close to interpretations of canon that can be recognized.

💌share something with us about an up-and-coming work (WIP) that has you excited!

This question kills me because I'm writing the assignment for an exchange right now and I can't really share anything that would make the fic recognizable! But I definitely AM excited about it, as well as a little apprehensive because it's for a fandom and characters I haven't written about before. Stay tuned ;)

fic writer asks

[theclearblue]

As a fan of both One Piece & JJK, can I ask you somethings?

- Which majority of characters will survive if their universe is swithed (OP charas in JJK verse or JJK charas in OP verse)

- People in JJK verse have stronger mental than in OP verse because the death rate is higher in JJK than OP (do you agree?)

- From plot and art, which do you think is better (JJK or OP)?

Thx :D

Yessss both have a special place in my heart so talking about both of them at the same time is my dream lmao.

This is an easy question to me, I think One Piece characters would do better in the JJK world, and that really comes down to the fact that One Piece characters are built different from regular people. Look at Skypeia where I think almost every character takes at least one lightning strike if not multiple, and other than passing out for a bit they were fine after lmao. Zoro should of been dead ten times over at this point in any normal world. If you drop the JJK characters in the One Piece world, with the exception of a select few, most are regular humans and they're gonna be fucked against any OP character that's a moderate threat honestly.

I'd honestly say that it's about the same? It's very interesting because I think that Gege and Oda both go about character deaths in such different ways. It's clear to me that Oda is such a romantic writer, he wants a happy ending for the characters that he writes. Gege is writing JJK with the central theme being death and what a "good death" is, and is very clearly pretty cutthroat with who gets to live and die. But I think there's a LOT of similarities between Yuuji and Luffy as protagonists, and I think they are both incredibly mentally strong, but not invincible. You can see it with Ace's death for Luffy and Nanami's/Nobara's death for Yuuji, they both break at these points. But in both of their situations, with Jinbe talking to Luffy and Todo talking to Yuuji, they're able to get back up. I think they have a similar mental strength to each other, and both worlds pose very real threats and problems even if in One Piece we see less deaths, One Piece has never shied away from heavy topics like racism, genocide, corruption, sexism, and totalitarianism, and when it comes to backstories, can be equally as devastating as JJK, yet these characters are able to survive and grow from these situations.

(For the art) oof this is difficult lol. I guess a disclaimer, I am not an artist whatsoever, and I think both of them are incredibly talented artists. I'd say stylistically I probably do prefer Gege, I generally like the character designs a bit more and I do think his paneling is a little bit easier to read and cleaner. On the other hand Oda has some really beautiful art as well, he has a lot of really great double panels, his color spreads are always great, and it's really cool to see how his art has evolved over 25 years.

(for the plot) I'd say One Piece wins this almost easily, but it's got a lot of advantages over JJK that make it possible. The main thing being length and how as much as people complain about the length of One Piece, everything connects and progresses the plot and characters and worldbuilding forwards, even if that doesn't become apparent for 5,10,15,25 years later, the setup and payoff that Oda does is incredible. And honestly Gege is pretty good at this setup and payoff as well, particularly with Megkuna being setup since the beginning and it still surprised everyone, but to be honest nobody is doing it like Oda. I think that both series achieve similar highs, I'd say Water 7/Enies Lobby and Hidden Inventory/Shibuya are all 10/10 arcs and similar quality. But as we enter the final saga of One Piece with Egghead and are reaching an end with Shinjuku Showdown, I'd say Egghead is a 9.5/10 with a good chance of going into 10/10 while Shinjuku Showdown has sat at about a 7.5/10 for me (I'd say I've been happier with it ever since Gojo v. Sukuna ended though so I can see it rising hopefully).

[dr-astormylasthurrah]

How detailed were your outlines when writing ASLH?

It really depended, they got more detailed as I wrote on. I'm not sure if this quite answers your question, but here's my process! Generally, I'd break things into broad levels of detail:

The outline I wrote for the whole story focused on a few specific story beats, like the ch3 case, the mastermind reveal, and certain deaths. I had a clear vision for specific moments and a general idea of what arcs I wanted certain characters to go through, but the clearest scenes were all at the beginning of the story. As I wrote, I'd often think of more specific scenes or plot lines that I wanted to resolve, and I made sure to write them down somewhere (mostly in a planning Discord I had with some friends, I found the different channels really helpful for organizing information). I don't think I actually wrote a full outline for the story at any point, I think I just infodumped everything once in a server and then copy/pasted that to make my outline LOL

Once I actually got to the casing chapter in question, the bullet point outline that I wrote went into more depth about specific storylines I wanted to hit. Well, to be honest, I didn't do one of these for ch1-3, because I didn't have a writing process then, there were a lot fewer storylines to keep track of, and I didn't fully know how I wanted my characters to develop at that point. After ch4, having a bulleted outline became necessary. There's obviously the culmination of the killer and victim's storylines, but I also had to keep track of things like the overarching mastermind plot/storyline or specific character beats that I wanted to integrate. I didn't do this back then, but nowadays I'll also attach things like playlists or images to my outlines to get a general sense of what I want the case to "feel" like.

From the broad strokes of my casing chapter, I'd decide how I wanted to pace the chapter (like, how many daily life chapters felt appropriate), and I'd also have a general sense of the scenes I wanted - whether it was something as specific as "conversation between these two characters when they're doing this specific thing that touches on xyz topics" to "I think we're gonna need a scene with this guy's character arc I don't have any big plot things planned for them". A rule of thumb I like to follow is that each story chapter should have at most one high-tension moment that advances either the mastermind/worldbuilding plot, the killer/victim plot, or a central character dynamic in a major way. If I put more than one high-tension moment in a chapter, I ran the risk of cheapening either moment since there was no feeling of normalcy/status quo to contrast the reveal with. (Sometimes, like the first half of 5-1, there were plot-advancing scenes that didn't necessarily have an overemotional aspect to them. In this case, I'd consider the last scene of 5-1 to be the high-tension moment.) I'd divide these types of scenes among the daily life for pacing, or make a note of which things I wanted to be revealed in deadly life (occasionally with notes on how I wanted to do it). I wouldn't necessarily plan Every scene of every story chapter at this point, but I had a feel for what had to go where and what the general tone of each story chapter should be.

From there, once I got to the story chapter, I made a bullet point outline with the specific scenes I wanted in the chapter. In addition to the story beats that I came up with in the casing chapter outline, I also slotted in some filler events using underutilized characters to make the high-tension moment seem worthwhile, or to come down from that moment. I used these to either dump random characters to flesh out spontaneous dynamics which could be expanded upon as subplots later down the line (in ch1-3) or address subplots that hadn't been brought up in some time (in ch4-6). A beautiful byproduct of this process is that I got to delete the outline as I went along, which was extremely satisfying.

So basically, they got more detailed as I got to the points where each story element was relevant. I hope that's helpful!

[sam-glade]

Happy STS, Sam!

Writing about a world other than our own involves choosing some elements of our world to include and others to leave out. In your writing, do any such elements stand out, like a real topic you put in your fictional setting, or a significant everyday detail of our world which doesn’t exist there?

Did anything work its way in without your intent, e.g. sayings or traditions or units of measurement you didn’t consciously include, but noticed later on? If so, did you remove them or leave them in place?

- @verkja

Happy STS, Verkja💜

I very much bring to attention what real-life elements I add to my main setting. It's been created to celebrate the aesthetic of 18th century Central and Eastern Europe and explore Slavic mythology. I want to double-down on it, since I find it VERY underrepresented in fantasy, while it's a goldmine for cool details. So I'm going to quickly link fashion and architecture info dumps.

The significant details I left out deliberately are plants and animals brought to Europe from the Americas (so no pumpkins, potatoes, tomatoes, etc.). In part, it's a thought experiment, what would our cuisine look like without them, and in part it's motivated by in-setting geography and non-expansive policies.

With the amount of research I've done, I could probably pull off historical fiction at this point, and I'm toying with this idea, however, it doesn't sound appealing to me personally. I want my setting to be my playground, and specifically 1. I want it to be queernormative and 2. I don't want to include real-world countries and their baggage of historical tensions. And at this point I might just as well go into fantasy, and add magic swords to the mix.

As for unintentional inclusions...

(I'm going to preface it with: my method of worldbuilding involves writing what 'feels' right, but then looking up if the detail is feasible in the setting. E.g. does it require technology that wasn't yet discovered or is it an invasive species from another continent. Then it's cut/replaced with something. It's noticed pretty quickly, by the 2nd draft.)

For The Fulcrum, the backburner sci fi with bronze/iron age birdfolk: I'm using it as an excuse to brush up on biology and archaeology, and also run a fun simulation 'what if our evolution ran a different path'. That's a deliberate choice though. One thing that appeared there unintentionally is a fast growing, light woody plant - it was needed for constructing cheap buildings which can be destroyed during monsoon season. It's bamboo. It wasn't meant to be bamboo, but bamboo by any other name will work just as well.

I've got a slightly longer story for Days of Dusk. The setting is based on Slavic mythology, which permeates the stories I was told as a kid, by my family. I'm brushing up on them and reading the less kid-friendly versions now, and I deliberately choose which demons to include. However. The demon possessing the protag feeds off his energy/lifeforce. As I was trying to explain this metaphysics and I've had a nagging feeling that I've read about it, but it's meant to be added to the setting, not based on myths, so whatever, don't need to look it up.

Prompted by all the Dracula-related stuff on my dash, I was talking to someone about vampires, explaining that Slavic vampires are a little bit different. And then it clicked. I re-discovered mares. There are upyrs/vampyrs, which feed on blood, and related to them are lifeforce-devouring mares. So that stayed and got highlighted during editting.

And whenever I need to give a character a hobby or a task to do, I write what I know - and I know some odd things independently of writing. E.g. I bake rye sourdough bread since I got some starter as a birthday present a few years ago, and so I can describe the smell and feel of the dough when a character is mixing it during a conversation.

[archon-maenad]

umei no mai singlehandedly ruined me for almost every warring state's period naruto story about building konoha by actually doing so realistically. I'm going to make that your problem as well because I just can't stop myself anymore I need to scream about this.

I literally can't fucking comment on any fic involving the idea without feeling the need to preface it with an "ignoring the inherent unrealistic way you're portraying the village being built," which leads to me just not commenting at all because unsolicited criticism is rude. but every single story that even touches on the topic I can't read without all the flaws glaring out at me like neon signs.

it's just. it's so fucking stupid. it's so fucking stupid. people don't immediately change everything about their ways of life that easily. you don't just go from a ceasefire right into living together! other clans don't immediately jump on board! what the fuck!

in hindsight it's so obvious why konoha failed. hashirama put people who were killing each other not even a year ago together and forced them to coexist, then strongarmed all the other clans by virtue of the uchiha-senju alliance being so powerful that not joining would be a death sentence politically, economically, or literally.

in contrast umei no mai actually approached the idea realistically, the uchiha and senju weren't forced to abandon lives to live together from the get-go. konoha began as a trading town and neutral ground for centralization of mission offices that people could voluntarily move to.

this began to attract other clans not out of fear but with economical and safety incentives. uchiha and senju guarding konoha made it an attractive place to put your noncombatants. it being a trading hub meant tradespeople both civilian and clan would gravitate towards it for the opportunity.

and as the wounds of grief were given time to heal, as senju and uchiha got used to spending time around each other as allies, they moved of their own accord when they were ready. konoha was built on a foundation of people who were ready to believe in what it stood for, not those being forced to relocate from their ancestral grounds to an entire new way to life.

because of this, because of umei's beautiful worldbuilding about how konoha could have come to be, I now can't enjoy any fic that jumps right from ceasefire into a ton of clans joining together in a centralized village under the control of the senju and uchiha. it's just too fucking stupid.

I haven't even mentioned yet how konoha's canonical creation fucked with the entire balance of power in the elemental nations and forced the other countries to create their own villages in order to keep up, leading to warfare being fought on a countrywide scale instead of between single or smaller alliances of clans. because that is absolutely a thing that happened.

umei fixed that too of course, by not only having konoha be a civilian town which staved off a lot of potential conflict but also showing how using policing action would decisively resolve wars in a timely and less bloody manner. if one side is loudly proclaiming that they have dozens or hundreds of hostages they'd be willing to ransom as soon as y'all stop throwing that temper tantrum, citizens would pressure their leadership to make peace in order to get their loved ones back.

yeah lmao good luck waging war when your people are rioting in the streets over you throwing more soldiers into the meat grinder instead of signing a treaty to get back the ones still alive.

I'm not even going to touch on the political and economical repercussions of the bijuu, that's for another post. this one is about how konoha was doomed from the very start even ignoring how unrealistic the timeline and methods of it's creation were in the first place.

hashirama senju is an idiot and umei no mai has shown me the light. thank you for coming to my ted talk