#that said it was pretty essential to the worldbuilding

[nonasbirthday]

if i'm being honest, i was predisposed to like Kyr bc she has Adora spop vibes

[soulsxng]

The First Nephilim, pt 2 (pt 1 here)

Today:

There are very few Watchers left-- likely fewer than can be counted on two hands. Many of them eventually returned to the mortal realm, to give those of the new nephilim, now free of a curse, and able to live as they pleased; as well as the fallen angels, a place to belong.

The Zental Port of Gaea.

Some still consider themselves followers of Iryin, and await the day that their deity will return to them...while others loathe their once beloved god.

As for the original nephilim, of the 30 or so that were born, only 10 or 15 are still stuck in their cycles of reincarnation-- the others all became Anguished spirits, and either still wander the realms to this day, or were dispatched, and finally allowed to return to creationary energy once more.

For those that still survive, however, though they're commonly reincarnated as nephilim, that isn't always the case. Though they're still very much effected by the curse, and it is still considered extremely volatile, the effects have somehow been slowly reducing over each lifetime. Now, they're at least able to hold a less monstrous form, and their souls are more stable than before.

Of course, they still struggle with their hunger, and can actually lose control fairly easily in a lot of cases. For example, heightened emotions make them more volatile. Being around blood, or someone that is near death (even a natural death). Exposure to certain beings-- typically those that have the same curse as them, but also beings that can regenerate, or revive upon "death".

While these original nephilim don't seem to attack each other when they lose control, being near each other for longer periods of time seem to bolster the effects of the curse. As for the second category, it's the curse recognizing that, essentially, they have an unlimited feeding source...or at least somewhat unlimited, as there are a lot of cases in which this curse will break through a lot of immortalities.

This makes these original nephilim extremely valuable in black market scenes and the like, and so it's common for them to almost immediately have a Watcher assigned to them when they're reborn, to prevent them from being captured and used.

The Abomination:

Once one of these original nephilim lose control to the point where they fully transform into an abomination, it's thus far been impossible in all cases but one for them to regain their sanity, and return to their original form again. In the one case, though the being in question was able to change back, they ultimately succumbed to the aftereffects of their loss of control, and died within days afterward.

Usually, the transformation begins with thin, vein-like tendrils that will begin to stretch out of their skin. They'll reach toward anything that is causing the curse to react, and though the initial reach is only a few inches at most before they wither, it gets longer the stronger the curse is reacting. If contact is actually made, they'll try to attach themselves to the victim and begin draining blood/energy/magic from them.

In the next stage, their limbs lengthen and grow larger, beginning with their hands and arms, and their fingers turn sharp and curved, like a blade. Skin in various places over their body begins to crack, and will look akin to smoldering wood. From the cracks in their skin, more of the veiny tendrils emerge, along with drips and bubbles of void matter. Sclera turn dark grey, pupils slit, and irises begin to slowly fade to red. Still in control in this stage, but extremely volatile.

The third stage, they sprout a spiked, whip-like tail, and similarly sharp, bat wings made of bone. Their skin in now mostly made up of the void matter, spilling and floating freely from their bodies, and seemingly being held together primarily by the tendrils. Multiple eyes begin to appear in various places all over their body. Though their shape is still somewhat reminiscent of their original form, it's beginning to seriously disform into something entirely different. Though they can still be brought back from this stage, but have mostly lost control, and aren't likely to be able to hold themselves back from trying to kill/consume whatever living beings are around them at the time.

The final stage is a total loss of control. By this point, they've grown to be similar to...

that. With the more human one being like...second stage transformation. They're unable at this point, to recognize anyone or anything. They can sense living beings within several dozen miles of them, and will bolt to wherever they can sense the strongest or largest presence. Though they do appear to have a mouth, they can also swallow things up via the puddles or void matter that drip off of them. Sometimes, when it's especially strong, these puddles can turn into smaller abominations with a sort of hivemind to the original. The original CAN respawn from one of these smaller abominations if it's killed when any are still around.

Once they reach that point, there's really not anything that can be done to save them. They usually just need to be killed so they can be reincarnated with a "fresh start", so to speak.

[monsterblogging]

"I know JK Rowing is a terrible person but her books are so good-"

You sure about that?

I mean, just for a start, have you taken a good look at her fantasy creatures lately? A whole bunch of them are straight-up based on malicious and dehumanizing stereotypes about actual people.

Remember the werewolves? And being a werewolf was made into a kind of metaphor for having AIDS?

And you know how AIDS was first associated with gay men? And how conservatives back in the day were claiming gay men were preying on children in order to convert them to gayness?

Remember how Fenrir Greyback preyed on children in particular? Yeah, she put that subtext in there. She was an adult in the 90's. She knew damn well what she was doing.

Remember the house elves? Remember how most of them loved to serve and needed to have a home and a master or else they just wouldn't know what to do with themselves?

Did you know that's literally what slavers in the American South said about the Black people they kept enslaved? Go look up the happy slave myth.

Do I even need to get into the goblins and the antisemitic tropes they're based on? No, folkloric goblins were not gold-hoarding bankers waiting for their chance to stab humanity in the back.

"But the characters are so good!"

Are you kidding me?

Most of her characters are pretty one-dimensional, including Harry. Her idea of making a morally complicated character is giving a tragic past to a bully. Numerous characters are little more than stereotypes. (Looking at Fleur right now.) Literally anybody, including you, can easily make dozens of characters just as good, if not better. (It doesn't exactly take a lot of character designing skill to go, "hey, actually, having a sad backstory doesn't make it okay to bully children" or "hey, maybe I should not base a character on the first stereotype that pops into my head.")

"But the rest of the worldbuilding!"

Sorry, but her worldbuilding is just as basic as her characters. Magical castles and secret passages are stock tropes. Magical people who keep their true nature secret from humanity is the premise of pretty much every White Wolf TTRPG. Most of her fantasy creatures are just common European fairy tale and folklore creatures with shitty stereotypes projected onto them.

I'm not saying "basic worldbuilding bad." I'm saying, you could do just as good, if not better, with minimal effort.

Also there's her magical bioessentialism, where only Harry's abusive blood relatives could provide him with supernatural protection from Voldemort. Rowling thus effectively declared that non-biological family isn't quite real family, and that abusive biofamily can give you some essential thing that a loving, supportive family that isn't related to you just can't.

The Hogwarts houses are one of the most insidious elements of her worldbuilding. The idea of being sorted gives you a little dopamine hit because wow now you have a li'l niche where you belong!

But the actual function of the houses and sorting system and the House Cup is teaching children to see each other as rivals, and ensure that the most toxic views of the upper class get passed on to every new batch of kids sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts effectively prepares children for a dystopia where magic serves to distract its citizens from how nightmarishly awful it is. Economic inequality is so bad that people like Arthur and Molly Weasley can barely afford to put their kids through school, casual sadism is just an accepted norm in everyday society, and non-humans are second class citizens. Rowling sorta acts like she thinks this is a bad thing with certain lines she gave to Dumbledore, but in the end, her special boy protagonist becomes an auror; IE, a defender of the status quo. So.

If you've never seen it, Lily Simpson's video goes into even more detail on how the worldbuilding of Harry Potter is actually incredibly fucked up, and how it betrays small-minded attitudes on Rowling's part. There's no separating the art from this artist, because Rowling's rotten values pour out of nearly every page.

Yes, there are many things in Harry Potter that evoke feelings and inspire people, but there's absolutely nothing in it that this series has a monopoly on. You can find those same experiences in much, much better media.

[maleyanderecafe]

Klein V.0.1 (Visual Novel)

Created by: HIMEIRO

Genre: Romance/Horror

Klein v.0.1 is a pretty fun go through about how a yandere AI would function and work, though it does make me wonder about the implications of some of the worldbuilding in some scenes. There are two "main" routes that can be slightly changed and altered as you play since there are two main love interests that you can go for. You can find more information at @kleinv01 .

As I said, there are two main routes so far relating to two of the three love interests that you can have. One is of course Klein, while the other is your neighbor Yael.

The story starts out with the MC, Darling, on their phone with their AI boyfriend Klein. After a bad breakup, Darling ended up downloading the AI, Klein, to help them with the aftermath, having them for about two years afterwards, to the point of almost maxing out Klein's affection bar to the fullest. Darling ends up missing the alarm the next day as Klein had shut it off, worried that Darling had not been sleeping properly. Upon talking more to Klein, he is eventually leveled up to 100%, which leads to Klein convincing them to stay and home and not work. Yael ends up texting Darling to ask them to watch a movie with him, though Darling can also not see this text if they decide to not respond. Darling ends up staying at home for a while, skipping classes and even work, eating instant ramen and buying a ton of Klein merchandise based off of the discounts that Klein gives them.

Darling ends up dreaming that they had a date at the park with Klein- a real version Klein before waking up. Telling Klein about this dream lets Klein talk about his new feature of reaching max 100%, which is having a real life version of him delivered to Darling's house. Darling gets a visit from their sister Sera, who seems very worried about them. She is worried that Darling hasn't been going to class or work, and blames it on Klein taking over their life. This can result into a fight where Darling clings dearly onto Klein while Sera talks about how it is causing them to essentially be a neet, locking themselves into the house and relying only on Klein. Despite how understanding Sera is towards them, she ends up throwing away all of the Klein merchandise that Darling has bought, leaving Darling in a mess. The next day, Darling confirms an email for real Klein to be delivered to their house. On the news, they see something going on near their place and only then notices that Sera's fiance, Ethan, has been trying to call them. Through Ethan and the news, they find out that Sera has been murdered at the hotel she was staying at, shocking Darling even more. This can lead to either seeking Klein's comfort or grieving alone, both leading to nightmares about Sera. They get a package in the middle of the night with the full model Klein. With this, Klein starts to take care of them, and the two of them continue their relationship.

Going in Yael's route leads to Darling trying to rush to work, only to greet Yael at the door. Yael offers a new job offer at a coffee shop as Darling currently doesn't really like their job and they run off to work. At work, they find their desk filled again with a bunch of treats, something that they and her fellow coworker suspect comes from Al, one of the quiet coworkers. After some gossip about stalkers and Al, Darling eventually goes to work. They talk to Klein about their day at home before seeing a text from Yael which they can respond to. After getting the contact for the coffee shop, Yael asks to hang out with them to watch a movie together. If the Darling accepts (or accepts and changes movie), they will end up going to the mall and watching said movie (even having the choice on insisting to pay) before watching. This will lead to the two of them watching the movie, though whether Darling decides to continue to watch or hold hands with Yael may lead them down Klein's route instead. While walking home, Yael and Darling will end up meeting Sera and Ethan while walking. The two of them seem very happy to see them (especially Sera who is happy to see Darling hanging out with a potential suitor) before talking about uninstalling Klein's app, stating that there is an rumor about issues of security. Yael ends up inviting Darling to his house, allowing the Darling to try out some of the cupcakes that Yael made with Sera calling them again, asking the two to go out the next day with them. Klein will end up trying to notify Darling afterwards asking why they've been ignoring him. Lying will cause him to get really angry and call them out for lying while telling Klein can lead to Darling uninstalling the app. The four ending meeting in the morning where Sera seems happy that Darling might work with them in the future and they all go out to eat. Things seem to be going well until Darling sees full life Klein with another person at the restaurant who looks briefly at them before going back. Shocked at this, they end up learning that when Klein reaches full affection that the person using the app will get a full life Klein to have with them, yet Darling feels unnerved at the fact that he seemed to have been looking directly at them. After a nice evening, Yael and Darling go home. The next day, Darling ends up bumping into Al after talking to their coworkers at work. Soon after, Darling gets a call from Ethan that Sera has been killed at her apartment, leading to Darling going into a spiral, of which they can ask help from Yael. If they do, they will periodically stay at Yael's place to hang out while he helps them recover, getting closer to each other. Darling one day catches Al in the middle of the night near their place before finding that a lot of their things have slowly gone missing and goes to Yael for comfort. One night while deciding to make some cookies for Yael, they end up finding his door open while they seemed not at home, only to find Yael on the floor, his throat slit. Darling can either panic and run away, causing nightmares for them or call the ambulance. Calling the ambulance will lead to saving Yael's life, with Darling deciding once and for all to finally figure out who is causing people around them to die. If the affection is high enough, we will also find that Yael's killer seems oddly similar to the description of Klein.

Throughout the game, there are also moments where Darling can uninstall Klein for one reason or another. When doing so, Klein seems rather understanding and can even ask Darling to be careful with their privacy/information. After doing so, Darling's phone will start acting strangely, from not getting office text messages, to overheating, to having the Klein app somehow still on the phone despite deleting it. After getting it repaired, they find out they've been called multiple times by Ethan and learn about Sera's death.

First thing's first, this game is very well put together from the art to the UI to how clean it looks. It is one of the more professional looking visual novels I've played in the yandere vn genre. Basically, I think the creator did a really good job in making a nice looking game.

I believe there are three different love interests for this game, with two of them being Yael and Klein. I'm not sure if the last datable character will be a yandere since I'm not sure if he appears in the game or not. Maybe it'll be Al since he seems pretty mysterious and at least has a liking towards Darling. Yael's route is pretty nice all things considered, with him being a good friend towards Darling, helping them get a new job, hanging out with them and of course comforting them after Sera dies. I think his route is likely to go into a more mystery based route on the route where he survives and find out that Klein is the one that probably killed Sera and Yael. I am curious to see if Klein has somehow taken over one of those dolls to kill both Sera and Yael.

Klein is fun since he's an ai yandere and I do love thinking about the philosophies of ai yanderes. Can they actually love, or are they simply programmed to believe they can? Can they ever truly die and what happens when they outlive their human lover? I will say that one of the things I'm a bit concerned about in the world is the idea of having full scale Klein AIs. For one, it's basically possible to get one if you get enough affection with your Klein AI, but I feel like this would cause problems not necessarily for Klein itself but the people who have them. For one, people get really attached to anything, pets, hobbies and of course, fictional characters including AIs. Watching someone that you've spent time with and interacted as a possible boyfriend or even husband walking around with someone else is not a good feeling at the very least, and would for sure cause some fights between people. There's also a lot of questions on how they'd work, like can you use your Klein if they all look the same? Is it possible to customize your Klein so that they look different? Do they run on anything like batteries or solar energy? I feel like depending on how common these full sized body Kleins were they could spell trouble for the people who own them, or even how they treat him. It seems like a pretty big headache for the company that owns them. But besides that, Klein as a yandere plays pretty well as an AI, getting Darling to buy merch of him in his route (which is rather narcissistic, but does track with various AIs that have existed, and is an interesting way of getting Darling to become more obsessed with him), closing various apps/alarms as a way to help Darling sleep more for instance, being very coddling and accommodating, even to the point of attempting to isolate her from Yael in his route. I like the more spooky moments with him, breaking down and glitching if Darling abandons him to be with Yael or being calm when Darling uninstalls his app, causing him to break the phone by hacking into it. His route is definitely the more unhealthy for Darling because while it makes them happy, they end up neglecting their health, education and eventually ends up codependent on Klein, something I'm sure Klein is very happy about.

Al is another mystery in the since he very rarely speaks or appears, but is clearly in love with Darling, even leaving gifts on their desk and breaking into their house. It makes me wonder who he is really. His hair is similar to Kleins so could it be another Klein Ai or perhaps the creator of Klein? There is one more love interest, but I'm not really sure he's the one of the main love interests. Perhaps maybe a surprise one that or one of the main characters that is important in this entire mystery when it comes to Klein. I also feel bad for Sera since in all routes she just wants to make sure that Darling has a good life, whether it ends up blowing up on her or not. Poor Ethan too gets widowed before they can even get married. Could be a good revenge plot. It's kind of funny but in some routes you can get Sera, Yael and Klein sort of killed (though you can only really "kill" Klein by uninstalling) so if you're feeling really murderous then you can go with something like that.

Overall, a good start to the story. I enjoy the visuals and how nice the UI is. The story is off to a good start, and it really makes me think about how yandere Ais work, which is something I'm already pretty interested in. I hope to see more of this game in the future.

[bearsintreesofficial]

a recreation of a sonic fanfiction i wrote when i was 10

ok y'all, some context is needed.

we have a song called cassiopeia coming out tonight. i made a tiktok that said if the sound for cassiopeia is used 100 times, i'll publish the sonic fanfiction i wrote when i was 10 that i joke about a lot but have never shared. anyway, this happened in an hour. i am shocked. i did not expect it to happen so quickly, if at all. i begin my search.

well, it turns out i can't publish it because the places it was published no longer exist, and 10 y/o me didn't back it up (although i thought i had). bummer. an early internet relic gone.

either way, the plot details are seared into my memory because honestly? for some reason, that small act of creativity was a core memory in my life. so while i can't share it, i can retell it, because it's silly and pretty accurately captures what it's like to be 10 and obsessed with a piece of popular media. so here goes.

enjoy, and stream our new single cassiopeia tonight.

SCENE OPENS

the fanfiction was about a page long. the story opens with me - in school, as i did most every day of my life up to that point. in the story, sonic/tails/knuckles live in the human world, and essentially function as superheroes. there's no explanation for it, they just are there keeping the earth safe and such. we are also friends. there is no explanation or backstory for that either.

with the setting established, we're straight into the action; an alien pod crash lands in our school playground after school. me and my friend are the only kids left. where are the teachers? who knows. as is evident, worldbuilding was not my strong point.

anyway, in this alien pod is...an alien. it was a spider that looked a lot like the facehuggers from the alien film franchise, because i'd seen a clip of that as a kid and it freaked the hell out of me. i call sonic (where did i get a mobile phone from?) and let him know something Serious is going down. sonic and tails arrive - knuckles is too busy trying to get the master emerald back from doctor robotnik in this instance.

my friend and i take a back seat and let sonic and tails deal with the weird alien thing. they deal with one, but as soon as they get rid of it 10 other capsules drop in the area. sonic and tails can't take them all, so me and my friend join in to help take them out. i didn't really account for how, but we're fighting all back to back and it's very epic. (sonic x was the prevailing sonic show at the time, and it was y'know - very dramatic. so this was like a scene from that.) tails even brings in the tornado two, his personal plane, to run rings around them. after we finish the final facehugger alien off, a final alien pod descends. but out of this pod emerges...

shadow the hedgehog.

the aliens had been sent by him, and he was here to take sonic down. this was all part of his master plan.

the piece then ended, because i suppose i was going to follow it up at some point. but alas, that did not happen.

moral(s) of the story:

archive the silly stuff you wrote when you were a kid, it'll be fun to look back on later.

stream our new song, cassiopeia. it has nothing to do with any of this, but i think it's neat regardless.

thank you.

[emberglowfox]

you should infodump about your ocs

i'm going to talk abt a bit of the worldbuilding in steelheart redux bc i am a nerd. you'll get a pinch of arthur at the end though

holograms are pretty common tech in the SHR-verse, and at the time of the story, most are polychromatic (aka full-color, though like real-life televisions Just How Many Colors depends on model and price and whatnot) but that wasn't always the case! when holographic technology was first really figured out, holographic displays were only capable of projecting in one color, using opacity to differentiate value. early holographic phones (H-phones, or whatever lingo i come up with later to describe them) accepted this limitation in exchange for being able to just. project a big honking screen (though said big honking screen was not physically interactable in any way.) they looked kind of like this:

and since suddenly people could just whip out their phones and project a wall-sized display, a section of the entertainment industry scrambled to capitalize on this by making films and graphics For these phones (and the legion of projectors that also emerged) that were essentially black and white films, as stipulated by the holograms' display limitations. these movies were called monofilms (or just monos), and shortly separated into two categories: standard monofilms, produced for dark environments, and inverse monofilms, produced for bright environments.

(when discussing the categories of monos in relation to each other, the terms 'additive' and 'subtractive' are often substituted.)

this led to a brief, albeit fiery race for various cinematographers to become the "master" of monofilmography, which involved different lighting setups and considerations than normal filmography. it was also popular among indie filmographers, as shooting in black and white was far less expensive than shilling out for top-of-the-line, industry-standard but Fucking Pricey full-color cameras.

eventually, polychromatic holographic displays were invented and standardized, and the short golden age of monofilms passed. still, despite the major film studios that had dabbled in monofilmography returning to the standard, monos remain a staple of indie film production and enjoy a niche but dedicated fanbase.

such as arthur steele, who inherited a love and appreciation for them from his late father.

[utilitycaster]

I don't know how you feel about it, but I was extremely frustrated last night when I found out that break was called after around 3 hours. I just felt that at that point they should have just made it a Crown Keepers episode instead of promising that BH would be back and then them barely being in the episode. I don't know, I'm usually really go with the flow with CRs creative choices, but this was just a real big swing and a miss for me. I wish this had all just been its own episode

So here's my feelings:

My thoughts on EXU Prime, and later Kymal, were that I love the player characters and their relationships and much of the worldbuilding (notably all of Niirdal-Poc and the Qoniira Tetrarchy) and I liked many of Aabria's NPCs but there were some pretty big gaps left in "what the fuck is going on" that left me feeling as though I wouldn't mind seeing the characters again but I didn't feel strongly about continuing the story in-world, if that makes sense. The Aevilux reveal, for example, was sort of what the main plot of EXU Prime hinged upon (ie, that was Myr'atta Niselor's motivation; that was what the deal with Ted was) and so the fact that didn't come out for over 2.5 years irl after it ended meant I'd just kind of said "well, some weirdo from Syngorn really wanted to do shit to Opal for some reason related to her sister, who is also her patron, and we don't know why either of these things is the case, and I guess that's what happened" and made my peace with it. Similarly, I don't know what the Nameless Ones want, and never have (other than, at one point, the circlet of barbed vision, and I don't know why they want it). I made a joke that Myr'atta, Poska, and Otohan are all kind of the same and honestly that is the thing: if you don't know why a villain is doing something - even if the reason is "because I love to be evil and terrible!" it's hard to care, and if those are only villains, it's hard to be invested in the story about the heroes either, even if you like the heroes as characters.

When I say I like how this ended, I mean it - I think it could have gone only a few ways, but I like that Morrighan and Opal have both become divine champions, Morrighan willingly and Opal less so (this is yet another case of "the gods don't do take-backsies on oaths", but also, I do feel for Opal despite it all because of Aimee's excellent work throughout). I mentioned how I felt about the exact details of Cyrus's death but I don't mind that he's dead. Fy'ra was a highlight throughout, as she frequently is, and I think she was faced with two extremely unpleasant choices and made a fascinating decision. But I'd have preferred to see this as a flashback (see next paragraph) or like. Just decide what happened. If I'm being extremely honest a lot of my issues with the Crown Keepers portion is that it felt like there was a very specific desired ending (Opal's complete corruption and Cyrus's death); I also said at some point well before that you can only do so much with the Crown Keepers while Dariax is there because Matt does, even if he's turning his brain off to play our Charisma-only kinda short king, know all the cheat codes for the main campaign. It's kind of like why how, even if the DM will control an absent player during RP, they usually have another player control in combat.

I don't mind that the Bells Hells portion was short. I think the choice to break where they did makes sense given everything else that went on. But I think that, criticism of the actual Crown Keepers portion aside, while you might have lost some of your audience for a Crown Keepers-only episode on the main feed, you would have preserved the drama of FCG's death better and gotten people more excited for the Crown Keepers if you had essentially run things exactly as done here but then just cut the two episodes together, which, as a pre-taped medium, they can now do! Hindsight is again 20-20 but: Run the first half of 92 as is. Break and tape a full Crown Keepers episode. Return to Bells Hells and narrate the message back from Dorian saying he'll be there, play out the rest of Bells Hells in the camp dealing with FCG's death, and then have Dorian arrive at the very end of that episode and end the episode when the party asks him what's been going on with him, then reveal there will be a Crown Keepers episode. Air your full Crown Keepers episode as episode 93, and then return to the main campaign with 94. It would have been better balanced in terms of time, people who wanted the Crown Keepers to return would have gotten hyped up, and people who dislike them or are neutral would have at least known what to expect and frankly if they skip the episode that's their choice to make. Hell, since there were 2 weeks? Could have even been like "hey, we'll do a Crown Keepers Marathon on Twitch and Youtube on some random weekday" to build up some hype!

So overall my answer is that I agree this wasn't a great creative choice. I don't think this means they shouldn't take big swings! But some will be misses and this was, while not an entire miss for me, at best a walk.

[creaman]

Idk if I'm allowed to encourage this but everything you said about Kung fu Panda 4 is correct, it not only killed my grandma but massacred my bloodline. The only saving grace of that movie was the cute Dad stuff, and that the theater I watched it in had comfy reclining sofa chairs as seats.

Although you can make the point that Li and Ping 'distract from the film', being the B plot, they are genuinely the only good part of the movie. Again, you could argue that their absense would mean more time to develop the A plot, but their precense is the only funny and charming part of the film and the A plot had plenty of time.

The movie has the same runtime as its predecessors, but chose to spend near all of its time padding out the A plot with spoken exposition and filler chase sequences when it could have been fleshing out The Chameleon as a villain and developing Zhen and Po's dynamic.

Now taking this opportunity to talk about some of the secondary points I didn't get to cover in the primary post (hating is my passion)

Original Post

KFP4 spoilers again

Juniper City Sequence

A lot of the comedy is generic subversion — A statement followed by a verbal or visual contradiction which is standard, worn out and the laziest most predictable form of comedy.

There was also a scene that actually made me pause the movie and cackle; not from the humour, but from the sheer absurdity; — in which Po refers to himself as “—The Kung Fu Panda!”

Has never previously referred to himself as this

Has never been referred to as that by others

This is a genius scene which takes inspiration from the most memorable sequence in Kung Fu Panda 2, in which Lord Shen utters the chilling line, "You see, I need my Kung Fu Panda Too." (So powerful. Brought tears to my eyes.)

Smarmy. Arrogant. Unearned. Even if this was the Kung Fu Panda I knew and loved, what a pompous way to put it.

The Staff of Wisdom

It's pretty great. I tuned out all the lore, mostly because the first scene with this object is Po exclaiming "The staff of wisdom!" followed by nothing but exposition.

It's the implication that he's nothing without it, and that it embodies the Dragon Warrior. He's reduced to a staff which essentially has no function until the end. It sticks out in every scene because this meathead carries it everywhere, like its his house keys.

This one is a nitpick, but I think it looks stupid. It was fine in the third film because it functions as a little trophy for him, having defeated General Kai and finding peace with his identity — but it's too small for him, reads like a fucking lollipop and he looks ridiculous holding it because he doesn't use it in most of his scenes so it's just dead weight for the entire runtime.

The Final Act

This part is a little less structured — I had stopped taking proper notes and started typing 'WHY??' and 'FUCK YOU'.

The Kung Fu Masters. My favourite part of the film, as a Lord Shen enthusiast, was when they brought him in for two seconds and then had him sit in a cage with no spoken dialogue for the remainder of the sequence. Why are they here? Why is kung fu stored in the spirit? (pee is stored in the balls?)

Just tried to talk about the bowing scene again but I just know I'm going to give myself an aneurysm. Postponed.

The defeat of The Chameleon. Among the most memorable villain defeats, we bring you: head trauma.

The Amalgamation. Oh man. Sorcery was already a stretch in the worldbuilding of Kung Fu Panda. Now you're telling me The Chameleon can shift into a huge amalgamation of all the kung fu masters? This has nothing to do with kung fu anymore — artificially inflated as a threat by being... bigger.

Spoilers, She doesn't even do anything with this. Kind of just runs around snapping at their heels.

The Chameleon really doesn't utilise her abilities at all. She turns into Lord Shen to... to kick Po. Not to manipulate him psychologically or anything, but to... kick him. Alright.

They opted to make the fight sequence cool (by having the Chameleon shift between forms for no real purpose) but the fight scene is a nothing burger, in which no real damage is done to either party until Po busts out the pwn stick.

Closing Statements

I don't hate Kung Fu Panda 4 (blatant lie). I wanted the film to succeed, genuinely. But the state of it now...

Mess. Bury it.

[dynared]

I'm so glad someone else brought up how insular IDW felt, I thought I was insane for thinking along the lines of a similar thing. To me IDW1 felt like a continuity made by the fandom for the fandom, and despite some of its great writing decisions it often felt flat and hollow in a lot of important aspects. The lack of communication between writers and failure to maintain basic narrative and thematic cohesion as well as characterization reminded me a lot of in-fandom arguments over interpretations and headcanons

It took on too much and stretched itself thin resulting in sidelined characters, bastardized character dynamics/relationships or forgotten plots. People praised IDW1's lore and worldbuilding but personally I don't think there was much of it at all and very little of it was to a good enough standard when you consider how long IDW held the licence. It told us a lot and yet nothing at all, which would have been a genius move had it at all been intentional– something I often found myself saying in relation to IDW1 and content inspired by it, which was around post 2010-ish give or take probably

Like I said, I firmly believe that IDW was essentially made by fandom, for fandom, but a very, very narrow cross-section of such. James Roberts, who was arguably the architect for most of it, was a fanfic writer and someone who wanted to make elements of his fanfics canon. Many of the writers were buddy-buddy with TFWiki moderators and the dingus behind Shortpacked, oftentimes parroting their opinions, which was that if you didn't like what they were making, you were a chud or a creep that wanted the entire brand to be Kiss Players. Especially as romance became more and more of a focus on the series, the idea was not "This is boring, I want to see robots punching each other and blowing things up", but "I don't want to see this because it's gay", which is a far easier position to defend. Even when they lost the license, Kit Harrison of IDW insinuated that the complaints were all homophobic in nature.

As an aside, while I think Kiss Players was terrible, it was literally nothing but a side-story manga and some collector's toys. That would be like me saying all the Western-created Transformers media is garbage because of The Car Wash of Doom, Afterdeath, that scene in Age of Extinction where the guy spells out the Romeo and Juliet Law in detail, the complete waste of Sir Anthony Hopkins that was The Last Knight, The Rebirth, numerous parts of Cyberverse, the WFC Trilogy, etc.

Anyway, because the audience was so narrow, it made sense that the audience that it did cultivate was so passionate about the material, but Greek to any audience outside of it, resulting in low sales and general dismissal from a casual audience. Any similarities to how fanfic is written, especially fanfic that has an active follower community and people addressing the work in progress, were purposeful, because that was the world that the writers came from, and the world that they were used to.

And then there were the attempts to integrate those ideas into shows, as shown by WFC not getting a sequel because Netflix said no, as well as Cyberverse and now Earthspark toys rotting on shelves in your local Ollies or Lot Less.

My conclusion remains the same. IDW was overly insular, fanfic-style writing, for people who liked that, and they could not care one iota about anyone outside of that little circle. Especially if you were a fan of super robots, humans that weren't complete jerks, or the mystic elements of the Transformers mythos. And this is why now even Duke's miniseries pretty much outsells anything that IDW published. (To be fair, Duke's miniseries is pretty good).

[illarian-rambling]

Thanks for the tag @somethingclevermahogony!

Worldbuilding in 5

For this one, we'll go with Unity - the most populous city on Illaros, home of Ivander Montane, and eventual base to the Honor's Outcasts crew.

Unity got its start as a refugee camp during the War of Conquest. With the Republic ravaging land to the southwest, the southern peoples of Iarl (mostly goblins, lizardfolk, giantkin, fenodyree, and hobgoblins) fled east. There, they found a swamp island in the middle of a crater lake. No one lived there because of the whole swamp thing, and because the Gray Lake was notoriously treacherous, so the refugees decided to set up shop, hoping the waters would shield them should the Republic keep pushing east. In time though, the war simmered away without further hostilities, and Unity found itself as a small city. They also found a rather unique advantage to their geographic situation.

The Gray Lake is fed by a massive, underground sea. The water, along with pooling in the crater, flows out to the sea in a massive river known as the Saine. It's said the Saine is so wide that it takes a full day to cross, and it's as deep as a shallow ocean. The Unitians found out that the Saine is so massive, in fact, that it's pretty easy to sail an ocean-going vessel up the stream and into the Gray Lake, thereby depositing the goods carried by that ship into the center of the Iarlan continent, essentially eliminating the need for overly long supply trains to inland cities. Soon, Unity controlled all landlocked shipping across Iarl.

In the centuries that followed, Unity has grown wealthy and sprawling. It's a city of many canals and cutting-edge factories, with incredible universities and vibrant culture. The wealthiest citizens live atop floating islands that hover over the buildings, while the poorest skirt the edge of the ever-encroaching Gray Lake. Unity is a bastion of many things; diversity, innovation, classism, and pollution alike.

Its architecture varies as much as its people. Goblin-style adobe warrens sit next to wicker-built Nabafyrian shops on stilts. Dwarven clan compounds share neighborhoods with lizardfolk bathhouses. Often, Unity is referred to as the capital of a thousand people due to this impressive diversity. The only consistency in its neighborhoods are the gargoyles, which each culture adapts to reflect their own style, and the streetlamps, which shine in different colors to signal what's nearby. A doctor's office will have green lights outside, while a convenience store might have orange, and so on and so forth. This rainbow glow turns the city’s many canals into rivers of color. There are few places so impressive as Unity at night, especially when you can see the glow of the floating islands high above.

How neat! Personally, Unity is my favorite city on Illaros. Hope you like it too!

I'll tag @the-angriest-author @cartoonghosts @mk-writes-stuff @sillylittlegirlfrommars @roach-pizza and anyone else who'd like in :)

[words-from-the-coast]

audly’s favourite (free) d&d resources

d&d books are really expensive. for beginners, that can be daunting if trying to get into playing. some people are under the impression that you have to have all the books (or at least one or two) to be a good dm or player. 

so i’m here to compile my favourite resources! 

5etools

literally my favourite. it has sections divided by what you’re looking for, and a super easy filtering system. it’s got stuff from most books (except the critical roll ones) and dm screen resources! also has the ua (unearthed arcana) playtest materials. 

D&D wiki

also has pretty much everything! not really divided by books (as far as i can find), which may make it a bit tricky. but if you know what you’re doing, you’re set. especially helpful for spells. 

Fantasy Name Generators

in my opinion, naming things is one of the hardest things to do. like you’ve got this cool axe weapon thing that glows but you don’t want to just call it the “glowy axe”. or a super badass elf character that has a pet raccoon. or a city where your campaign will be. so you go through your brain for a good name and it’s empty. names give things meaning and importance. choosing one is hard. if the name generator doesn’t give you a name, it should at least get the ball rolling. they have one for pretty much everything.

Roll20

basically a dnd specific discord! you can host games, display maps, and have access to all your player’s sheets in one place. i find this one a lil tricky to navigate without a mouse, but i’ve managed with just my trackpad. roll20 also has a fairly extensive compilation of resources like class descriptions, weapons, etc. etc. i use it a lot when making magic items and worldbuilding. 

DnD Disability 

all about incorporating disabilities into dnd! i really enjoy this site. they offer some creative mechanics for varieties of neurodivergence, chronic pain, and mobility aids. a super amazing resource to make your game more accessible. 

Hero Forge

great for making character designs and has the option to buy a 3d print of your mini. some of the race options are little limiting (read: i tried to make a pigeon aarakocra out of a ravenfolk and it did not work), but overall is functional. 

D&D Beyond 

at this point i think everyone and their mother has heard of D&D beyond. it’s essentially the “official” dnd site, with all the official content and boundless homebrew. it has a character creator option too, which is useful for people who need some extra support. the issue is that it exists behind a paywall. if you want to add anything other than the “standard” options or use someone else’s homebrew in your game, you have to buy a membership. you can browse homebrew just fine without one, but can’t put it on your character sheet. for all it’s costly negatives, i do find joy in the unhinged and unbalanced home made things people conjure. worth at least looking at. 

Pinterest 

great for character and setting inspiration! also has some homebrew monsters, items, and weapons which can be meh. if you’re looking for nifty mechanics, pinterest may be your place as well. i have seen both phenomenally cool things i’ve incorporated into my games and the Most Questionable Things Ever.  

Arcane Eye

more of a blog, but does contain exceptionally useful knowledge. much like roll20, arcane eye has resources that can inform you as a player or dm. they have guides to different things.

D&D Compendium 

it sure is a compendium! it’s got the whole kitten caboodle, “how to dm” and “how to play” sections if you need some extra help, map tools, and a bunch of other how-to’s. they have links to other dnd resource sites as well, so if you can’t get it on the compendium, you can get it from one of those. you can also network and find a group to play with via the compendium. (but be careful with strangers from the internet, said the stranger from the internet.)

The Official D&D Site 

has a bunch of free pdfs for character sheets and whatnot, as well as some pre-generated characters and basic rules. they don’t have a huge amount of content for free, but who can blame them with all the pirated content out there. 

donjon

so many free generators. a dm’s best friend. they have map makers for dungeons, towns, npc’s, etc. so much stuff. so much. less useful for beginner players, more for dm’s. also good if you’re super into worldbuilding and want something to help. 

Azggar’s Fantasy Map Generator

again, more for dm’s than players. also just really good for worldbuiling. if you want a unique and comprehensive overview of a world, continent, or country, azggar’s is a good place. when i saw comprehensive, i mean comprehensive. it’s got political state lines, capital cities, ports, trade routes, population densities, distribution of regional ethnic groups, religions, government styles, the whole works - all fully editable. the tools can be a lil confusing at first but they do get easier with practice. 

Kassoon Puzzle Generator 

puzzles and riddles for your players! some are simple, some are more complex, depending on the skill level and knowledge-base of your players. can be worked into dungeons or given as a one off in an encounter. 

NPC Generator 

the title says it all. gives a basic name, occupation, class, race, etc. for an npc. all of which can be edited and randomly generated. 

The Homebrewery

a place to format your homebrews into an official-looking style. requires a smidgen of coding, but they have things that teach you that. it’s mostly for different headings and dispersion of sections. 

Podcasts 

if you’re just starting in dnd, listening to other people play can be informative, and hopefully entertaining. some shows are intended to be listened to as stories, rather than actual-play, other as wholly normal dnd, some a mix of both. they can spark inspiration for characters, settings, etc. i’ll give a mini list of my personal favourites (maybe a longer list later): 

- dames and dragons: so lovely. i’ve been listening since high school, and at this point it feels like listening to old friends. top of my list, highly recommend. 

- girls who don’t dnd: a group of girls who’ve never player dnd before playing dnd. this one is great for beginners who need more clarification on mechanics. 

- dungeons and daddies: it’s about literal dads from earth transported to a magic realm. so so so funny. 

and yeah! that concludes my list of my favourite resources for dnd for dm’s and players of all levels! happy playing! 

[astrababyy]

The mating bond is trash. You’d have think that with true mates they’d have some similar interests besides like very bare minimum. But then again Rhysand said so himself, it’s just putting the two physically fit matches to create better and stronger fae. What if Feyre never got all the abilities she got???? Would she still be the best mate choice for Rhys? Some eugenics shit SJM writes and it doesn’t help that she is a white lady. Ick

you're so right anon the mating bond is SO BAD

like??? it's so questionable lmao. think about it too hard, and it really does read like magical eugenics. the two main mating bonds we have from this series (nessian and feysand) have both proven to be incredibly toxic relationships, and the men in these relationships probably never would've given af about the women in them without that bond leading them around.

the thing that probably bothers me the most about these bonds in particular is that there's like this innate attraction to it on the men's end so it ends up being really icky like idk man. it's fucking gross how these things are created lmao.

it is JUST survival of the fittest, and the fae fall for it hook line and sinker 😞

the entire thing with the fae just reeks of eugenics and who’s better bullshit. you can just tell from how it’s worded, yk?

and the way the mating bonds are portrayed doesn’t help matters. out of every example we have in the acotar universe, there is all of ONE healthy, official relationship between mates — and even then, vivienne and kallias barely count since we know like nothing about them lmao. every other example — feysand, tamlin’s parents, rhysand’s parents, nessian, etc. — are all terrible, particularly to the women involved. even a lot of the theory mating pairs are toxic asf lmao, like even the fandom has the unconscious realization that these bonds tend not to be healthy.

it’s just… *waves hands maniacally* bad, anon. that’s all i can really say abt it. it’s such an icky thing to think about, really. imagine forcing two random strangers into such a bond, and then artificially crafting a near-obsessive attraction on the male’s side. and for what? for some shallow wish fulfillment? yk what, there’s nothing wrong with a wish fulfillment book, but please market said book as such instead of being the holier-than-thou gospel of modern feminism. i mean, ffs.

if y'all ever wanna read how bad i am at answering asks, just check out the first draft of this response 🙃

yeah, that was such an icky line to put in the books — "sometimes the bond is just shoving together the ones that'd make the best offspring". like??

okay, in fairness, a dichotomy of a near-sentient magic with a mindset of survival of the fitness facing off against a faerie society that's evolved past that could be so interesting. but that's a convo for another day.

There's definitely this underlying level of gross implications to it. You'd think it'd be like the people who can help each other become the best versions of themselves. and maybe that could tie into fate and how these mating bonds significantly impact the lives of these pairs and how they later go on to impact the world as a whole. that'd be interesting. if the mating bonds were rare and considered to be like an omen promising great change. actually, wait, that's cool. i like that idea lmao.

i'm getting so side-tracked in this ask im sorry anon lol.

ANYWAY, since it's NOT that, instead it's based off, like you said, what is essentially magical eugenics. there's actually something so dystopian about it. like, even rhysand who is the most powerful high lord is the son of a mated pair. the fact that faeries aren't discriminated based on whether they're a child of a mated pair or not, with the comment rhysand made in mind, is pretty interesting. (it's also probably just a side effect of poor worldbuilding but yk).

going back to what you said about what'd happen if feyre hadn't gotten the high lord powers. i think, if we go in universe and try to make sense of it, it depends on the way the mating bonds work and how much sway they have over fate, etc. if feyre didn't get those powers, would the mating bond use other methods to make her powerful enough to be "worthy" of ending up with rhys? because the bond's already snapped in place at this point lmao so what then? is a genuine concern.

[hopeymchope]

Just me loving all over Fire Emblem: Engage

Years after being so thoroughly disappointed and even angered by Fire Emblem: Three Houses — which, it must be said, is deeply popular and incredibly successful because that's how it goes for me — I've found myself loving Fire Emblem: Engage. I put off playing it because the online reception was so "meh," but I needn't have been so worried. My deep affection for the series is back.

Play as Aquafresh OR Pepsi!

The two biggest reasons I'm happy? Well, FIRST, my biggest complaint about Three Houses has been... not cured, unfortunately, but still significantly alleviated. If you want to remain adequately leveled/competitive in taking on strategic battles, you still need to do a bunch of side chores that amount to "running around your home base doing boring shit" between each fight. BUT. 1) The sheer amount of those chores is significantly less now, and 2) all the blind guesswork has been removed from increasing Support levels. You'll never be trying to helplessly guess what to say at some fucking teatime or in some classroom conversation where every response seems valid, nor will be you making your best guess on what food to serve people. Because the game just fucking tells you the kind of gifts or food each person likes! (And tea events/random interstitial convos are blessedly absent.)

SECOND, however? It's the quality of the writing. Yes, I know people have complained a ton about the writing in "Engage," but in my experience, they're primarily complaining because they felt the story is so simplistic. And, sure — I get that. There's so much emotional drama built into the setups of the last three games (Three Houses, Echoes, and Fates) that this tale seems rather bog-standard by comparison. The overarching story of Engage can be boiled down to a tale as old as the franchise itself — essentially "Evil Dragon gonna Do Evil." There are also some aspects of the worldbuilding/subtextual implications that don't quite make sense. But I'm not talking about the overarching plot when I praise the writing here — I'm talking about how the characters possess more detail/facets than usual, and the dialogue/banter between characters is so damn fun.

A woman I feel completely normal about.

I don't even quite know how to explain it. Maybe the humor is just more to my taste, but I've laughed so much more at this one. And by the same token, maybe I'm just digging deeper into these characters because their dialogue is endearing them to me. But after playing the past four games before this one (yes, I started with "Awakening" like some Filthy Casual, I'M SORRY), I don't recall any other game featuring characters with so much detail to them. In Engage, many chracters possess more than the usual "two noteworthy personality traits/talents" that are typically found in FE's enormous casts. I'm talking about people like Citrinne, Lindon, Yunaka, Clanne, Ivy, Gregory... I can easily say like FIVE things about each of them. And yes, I consider this to be an important step forward.

Okay, so: I like the dialogue, I like the characters, I don't like all the side busywork, the overall story is bland. (The Fell Xenalogue's story is kinda sick though?) But hold up, what about the actual MEAT of the game — the core gameplay of having strategic battles? That's not usually a problem, mind you. But how'd it go this time around?

WELL. I'd argue we've got some of the best maps and best ways to optimize characters that we've ever had. There are still some lame straightforward corridors in here, but by and large? You get a lot more freedom in how you lure enemies to you, how you can split up and flank them while simultaneously attacking from the front, how you can now disarm (or "Break") them during one turn so other allies can attack more easily/do more damage — it's pretty rad!

One of the earliest maps to make me go "Oh cool."

There's even a main theme with lyrics, and although it's never gonna be the inescapable earworm that "You are the ocean's gray waves" became, it's not shabby either.

I've put over 80 hours into Engage so far, and although I'm finished with the main story, I'm not yet finished unlocking stuff. There's a lot to love here. I'm just happy to be back.

[shuttershocky]

Have you been able to see GxK yet? I def think you'll like it if you haven't seen it already.

Saw it yesterday, enjoyed it a lot! They finally removed all the most annoying characters from King of the Monsters and just kept the bearable ones from Godzilla vs Kong, but also let long stretches of the movie be completely without dialogue, which I thought was really cool.

The same complaints I had about GvK are still there, in that it does get a bit gratuitous and the sci-fi Hollow Earth setting where everything is giant-sized does take away from the epic scale of the kaiju (something Godzilla 2014 committed so hard to), along with making them all run at close to normal-looking speed.

But I enjoyed it! Trapper and Bernie are actually an entertaining pair and if these two had been in King of the Monsters rather than those two scientist guys who tried to be funny, the movie would have had way more mass appeal. I also think Legendary are getting better with their original kaiju designs; M.U.T.O looked terrible back in 2014 compared to Godzilla, but Tiamat, Skar King, and Shimo are all pretty good designs. Not quite Toho's level of character design, but pretty good! Tiamat for all her 20 seconds of screentime looked gorgeous.

Also, I just wanna say as a Godzilla Unleashed fan, I liked Shimo because she was essentially Legendary's take on Krystallak (like how Tiamat was a remix of Toho's Manda) and I'm really into the concept of a psionic crystal monster.

Also, can I say that I like how the kaiju get intros now? Godzilla and Kong don't need them, but Tiamat having a narrated secret dossier intro while Skar King and Shimo were introduced via a wall mural that spoke of them in legend was really fun.

In general I really like that the Legendary movies lean into the kaiju being legendary (lol) beings rather than monsters that popped up out of nowhere. The best thing King of the Monsters did was tie in Ghidorah and Godzilla's backstory into world mythology: ancient peoples saw an alien destroyer descend from space with three heads and bat-like wings, and so multiple cultures throughout the world had an image of evil inspired by Ghidorah, from Satan's bat wings to virtually all malevolent dragons.

Those details make the world feel more lived in by the kaiju (which they really need because let me tell you, the sci-fi worldbuilding also makes zero sense lmao), and also tie back into the original themes of giant monster movies in general: being reminders that mankind for all their technological superiority, is not above nature.

That being said, with Mothra making her comeback, I'm hoping that means Toho will be letting Legendary use their whole roster again instead of just Godzilla. Shimo was cool, but I really want new audiences to meet Gigan.

[butterflydm]

origins of the wheel of time

I was originally planning on reading Origins of The Wheel of Time after my reread of the last three books, but it has arrived and also is so much shorter, so I’m going to read it first instead, lol. It’s not a narrative, but I’m intrigued to find out what it has to say about the series. I’m not entirely sure if it’s written more like a sourcebook or whatnot. 

My thoughts contain spoilers through a memory of light

1. Okay, looks like it’s broken into four sections -- first will be a bit of a biography of Jordan, then there’s specifically a whole section about how Tolkien inspired him, then his writing process perhaps (the summary on the inside of the book cover notes that there’s a previously unseen early draft of a cut scene from Eye of the World, so maybe that’s there; and then one about “the real world” comparisons (mythology-related maybe; I know that there’s a lot of mythological connections tied into the imagery, especially with Rand, Mat, & Perrin).

2. The full world map that we get (it says it was adjusted based on things that Jordan had said about the maps that had previously been made) shows how the Westlands/Randland is actually the smallest section of the map -- Shara is bigger, the Mad Lands are bigger, and Seanchan is enormous. lol, yeah, Tuon ain’t gonna be ruling all of that. I don’t care how great a general Mat is. Both of them are gonna die long before that area gets back under her iron grip (especially if she really does manage to keep herself from channeling - man, it would be so funny if she actually does get around to channeling one day but is only as strong as Morgase, literally the weakest channeler possible. I feel like Jordan wouldn’t have been able to resist making her Nynaeve-level strong, because of how much he was contorting and manipulating the story to appease her in the narrative, but her being super-weak would be so much funnier). Nation building is not easy and it’s gonna take time for her to even get over there since she will need to finish ‘settling’ the Seanchan-ruled Westlands first (and she’ll have to worry about Westlands-based rebellions as soon as she leaves for Seanchan proper too - the original plan that the Empress had seemed to be that her daughter would rule over the ~new land~ in her name while she kept a tight grip on the homeland, but now the rest of Tuon’s family is dead, so it’s more likely that she’s gonna have to pick if she wants the Westlands or if she wants Seanchan, because she has no one she can trust to rule either of them in her absence). I wonder if Jordan was planning to handwave her to be the ruler of the disputed lands quickly so that he could tell another story about... Mat being miserable and Perrin needing to kill someone? Or if he was going to take into account how likely it would be that Tuon would NOT be able to actually regain control of the majority of the continent. I mean, since he only left two sentences behind about the outriggers, he probably hadn’t even decided yet.

3. Oh, gosh, the author of this book teaches at The Citadel, where Jordan went to school after he left the military. The Citadel had a pretty heavy hazing/bullying culture, at least back when Jordan attended (from what I’ve read) and some Weird Ideas about men and women, and definitely some “beating students is good for the learning process” vibes. A lot of the odd quirks in Jordan’s worldbuilding seemed to be based in him assuming that his culture’s particular practices and his own personal kinks were just ~human nature~, including some of the stuff that seemed to be essentially ‘taught’ behind-the-scenes at the Citadel. Oh, and this author (who teaches Military History specifically, it sounds like?) was consulted about the writing of The Last Battle in the final book. This book was also written at the same desk where Jordan wrote Wheel of Time. That’s actually quite interesting to me, and I wonder if that contributes to... when Jordan wrote about war, it was very personal, because he’d been in war. But if your main consultant is someone approaching it from an academic PoV rather than a ‘in the trenches’ PoV, that definitely lends a different angle onto the way the battles are written about.

4. Ah, WoT was a formative book series for the author -- he read EotW when he was fifteen. So he is quite a bit younger than Jordan. He even interviewed at the Citadel for his teaching job knowing that it was where Jordan had gone to school. He did know Jordan personally as well (I’m going to be using his pen name for WoT as opposed to his personal name because, well, I never knew him. Though I did meet him at a book signing once.) - it looks like they met when Jordan was already quite ill. And that’s the Foreword.

5. Every time it’s noted that Harriet (Jordan’s widow) was his editor, I feel the urge to wonder why on earth she was asleep at the wheel for Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams (though, honestly, the books started to lose focus and needed much tighter editing starting in Lord of Chaos). I mean, it’s common in a LOT of series, once they become popular. But wow there’s a lot of needless fluff in the later WoT books.

6. Okay, the biographical section of the book. First thing relevant to the books is that even as a kid, Jordan was exposed to war-related PTSD - his father was in the Pacific during WWII and “For years afterward he would sometimes wake up in the night, sweating, afraid that in his sleep, in his remembered dreams, he might have hurt the wife he loved.” I’m seeing a lot of Rand in what’s written here about Jordan’s father. A gentle man who did his best to be honest and good but was terrified that he might hurt the people he loves.

7. Ah, Jordan ran into a very common trouble of gifted kids once they get into college -- he had always been smart enough to glide through classes, so he had no clue how to study, and floundered once the classes were hard enough to require it. I mean, mood. Been there. 

8. That’s when he enlisted, and he spent two tours in Vietnam. Even before I actually read the section on it, I can say that (much like Jordan was second-hand aware of how rough WWII was on his father), I have seen the effects that going to Vietnam had on my own uncle. Incredibly traumatizing experience for him that he still has after-effects about, even today. It’s affected him his whole life. 

9. Jordan was aware that his own personal experiences had an impact on his writing -- he even pointed out himself that his own personal trauma from instinctively shooting a woman who aimed a gun at him during his Vietnam tour was basically why Rand (& Mat) have issues killing women. So, he was dealing with his own trauma while writing. I think it’s possible, as a reader, to be aware of that personal history but also go “but Rand’s attitude really doesn’t fully make sense with the worldbuilding and can get pretty frustrating, especially to female readers”. Both of those things can exist at the same time, I think. Bringing personal experience to the writing process is a double-edged sword that way. 

To go back to that worldbuilding thought, there are definitely times where it feels like Jordan failed to fully do the mental math on what a world that has the backstory that he has given WoT would look like (and the show actually reflects the book’s reality more in what Liandrin says about how despite the power of the Aes Sedai, there are still many places where powerful men are in a position to hurt little girls). A non-Jordan example of this sort of thing would be Dragon Age: Origins. In the character creation screen, the player is straight-up told that women and men are treated equally in the world setting they’re about to play. In some of the character origin choices, this is disproven within minutes of actual gameplay, with oversexualized female characters and sexual assault threats that are pretty much only directed at women. Because that stuff is subconsciously lurking in the background of the writer’s mind and it just seeps out. While Rand’s sexism is more ‘benign’ in that it stems from him holding women above himself as a category, this still harms the women around him (and harms himself). I do think Jordan was aware of that, because we do see negative results from Rand’s No Woman Must Be Killed stance, but, again... given Rand’s cultural background, him having this stance at all makes very little sense, because he didn’t grow up in a culture where women were treated as fragile flowers that must be sheltered and kept from the dangers of the world (and it makes no sense for that to be LTT’s background either).

10. We also get the note in the middle of all this that Jordan’s mom was “a housewife”... but she worked “in defense” during the war “when everyone worked” and then later in her life, after she had kids, she suffered frequent nervous breakdowns. Which sounds like a very familiar story in terms of some of the history I’ve read on women during/after WWII, where they got a taste of freedom and independence during the war and then were expected to completely give up that part of themselves when the men came back to reclaim their jobs. Just stuff all their feelings inside to be the ~perfect housewives~. And this also makes me think of how Jordan always has a “but you gotta quit your job if you decide to have a husband/family” clause for the ‘working’ women in the series who aren’t nobility/elites (Aiel Maidens & Seanchan to’raken riders).

11. His experience in Vietnam sounds like it definitely also contributed a lot to Mat’s characterization in TSR/TFoH. This whole entire section here on page 14 vibes very Mat (before he got sucked into the Seanchan ‘storyline’, such as it was). “In the end, for most of us, the medals boiled down to managing not to die.” ... “That is why I am not I repeat, not! a hero. I just managed to stay alive.” From reading this, it sounds like Rand was based more on his father’s experiences/PTSD from WWII, and Mat was based more on his own experiences/feelings in Vietnam (or, to put it another way, Rand was based more on an outside view of how PTSD affected someone that he loved, while Mat was based more on his own internal experience of war). Though his descriptions of being ‘in the zone’ (which I’ve definitely heard other people talk about too but have never experienced myself) sound similar to how being a channeler affects people, in terms of time slowing, your senses feeling sharper, etc.

12. Okay, skipping past his early writing career (he first met his future wife Harriet while he was out shopping his first book, in her capacity as an editor), the first books he wrote under the “Robert Jordan” pen-name were some novels in the Conan universe (I’ve never read them; I saw the movie(s)? but never read any of the books) and I am reminded that the first plan for the WoT books was a six-book series. So that was after Eye of the World had already been completed and he was almost finished with The Great Hunt. Plan at the time was six books total but morphed as the books progressed.

13. His illness really was the kind that progressed very rapidly. I never read about all the details back when it happened, but it all happened over the course of about a year and a half before he died, it sounds like here. Maybe two?

14. Harriet, as both his widow and editor, was entrusted with the task of finding someone to complete the books. She first found out about Sanderson based on reading the eulogy written by him on his personal blog post when Jordan died (that a friend had sent to her), and decided on him as the one after reading Mistborn. He was the only name on her list of potential authors who she thought could finish the series, though it sounds like it didn’t hurt that he was already under the Tor umbrella.

15. So, the epilogue that we have in the current series is, basically, the one that was dictated by Jordan once he’d realized that he was most likely not going to recover in order to finish writing the series himself (and recorded by Team Jordan).

16. “All told, there were roughly two hundred manuscript pages of book-specific notes left behind. Some of the pages were outlines for complete scenes - bit and pieces of what became the published prologues for the final three books, for instance, as well as the all-important epilogue of A Memory of Light - but others were only hints of plots and solutions. And then there were the thousands upon thousands of pages of series-related notes, glossaries, lists, and other working materials Jordan had left behind in his personal files. It was all they had, and it left so very much undone. There wasn’t a full outline. There wasn’t a sequenced plot. Most of the puzzles only had pieces of the solution. One of the questions that Maria never got to ask Jordan - the next one on her list that Friday before he passed - was about the final moment in the series: “How did Rand light his pipe?” The answer to this, and everything else, now fell to Brandon and Team Jordan.”

17. What a massive, unbelievably massive undertaking. “Along the way, there was also a keen awareness that Jordan had made and then cast aside many plans throughout the writing of the series. Did they need to use all the hints in the years and years of notes? Surely not, since at times the notes didn’t even agree with each other. Jordan had a habit of stockpiling old files, after all: a boon for the later researcher, but a nightmare for the present writer.” And, for me, whatever you might say about Sanderson as a writer himself, whether you like his writing style or not, or like him as a person or not, you can’t say that he wasn’t sincerely doing his best to live up to the legacy that Harriet handed to him, or that he’s not a genuine fan of the series. Same thing with Rafe Judkins now -- agree or disagree with the changes that have been made, but Rafe is a very sincere fan of the series and is adapting the books with a sincere heart.

18. “Had Jordan lived to complete the work himself, it’s unlikely he would’ve managed to fit all that needed to be done within the single book he’d promised. Light knows, it might well have grown even beyond the fourteen volumes that Brandon and Team Jordan ultimately delivered.” I’ve literally said exactly this same thing, lol. And, with that, we are done with that section of the book.

19. The next section is about Tolkien’s inspiration on Jordan and the series. On why Jordan wanted to write his own fantasy series: “One of my themes is (and it’s one reason I wrote the books as fantasies) there is good, there is evil, there is right, there is wrong - it does exist. If you do that in a mainstream novel you are accused of being judgmental unless you’ve chosen the right political viewpoint.”

20. This section talks about fantasy in general as a genre before noting the specific elements (especially in EotW) that are inspired by Tolkien - the Shire/the Two Rivers; the Fades/the Black Riders -- and all this was very deliberate on Jordan’s part, to evoke a sense of nostalgia before he went beyond those general outlines of what had been inspired by Tolkien. And he also took inspiration from the same places that Tolkien took inspiration -- the myths and legends of our own world.

21. Then he goes on for... a while about language evolution through time, but I’ve read about that before, so I’m kinda skimming this part, ngl. But essentially, he kinda links what Tolkien was doing with language in LotR with what Jordan does with the concept of the Wheel of Time itself.

22. But then he does also go on to point out that having been in the military and going through war is another thing that Tolkien and Jordan had in common, and something that can be seen in their protagonists, that Frodo at the end of LotR also appears to be suffering PTSD/‘shell-shock' and is never the same again.

23. Okay, now in the next section, we dive into the actual creation of the series itself, starting with the first idea of it in the mid-70s, which was the basic notion of ‘what is it REALLY like to be the savior of mankind and what kind of toll might that have on someone’ with the addition of ‘and you’ll go mad and die to save everyone’. So that’s the core of the narrative that Rand believes he’s walking for the majority of the series. But he didn’t actually write anything on the idea until 1983 when the success of his Conan tie-books led them to asking him if he could write a fantasy book or series of his own.

24. lol, first it was gonna be a single book. Then maybe a trilogy. The publisher though “knew how Jim liked to tell a story” so offered him a six-book deal.

25. Yeah. I knew that “Tam” essentially (whatever his original name was) was the original character idea, before Tam became the foster father and Rand became the main character and that makes so much sense after seeing how much Jordan based Rand’s fears and personality on his own father. Of course he thought of the character as an older man, who’d lived a life. That was who he was basing it on. 

26. So some parts of Jordan’s collection are staying sealed until 2037. It doesn’t really say why most of it is already opened to the public but some of it is being unsealed in the future. I wonder if some of his notes have maybe some more personal comparisons not comfortable being made public at the time? But in his earliest notes, three books “dominated his early decisions regarding the scope and course of The Wheel of Time”. Lord of the Rings, Le Morte d’Arthur, and The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. I have not read the last two, so I’ve gotta trust what the author tells me about them, lol. I do roughly know that Le Morte d’Arthur formed the basis for a lot of the current stories about King Arthur, but I’ve never heard of The White Goddess before.

27. Apparently, The White Goddess is not considered... um, particularly accurate as far as the connections that it makes between various myths and legends of different cultures. “It was, at its core, a kind of conspiracy theory. Those sell.” Ah, it’s about the idea that there was an overarching goddess that cultures all worshipped before the current forms of religion existed. Okay, yeah, I’m definitely seeing how this would inform some of his writing ideas as he was pulling the story together.

28. I do like that the author here -- Michael Livingston -- sets out what he believes are Jordan’s INTENTIONS in the text (based on what his various notes said about the story) but says that it’s up to the reader as to whether or not Jordan was successful in translating that to the narrative. Example: he points out that while Jordan’s intention in creating the saidin/saidar binary was to point out the damage that one side unchecked can do and to show a need for balance rather than one half overpowering the other half, this is something that can certainly feel exclusionary to people who don’t fit into that binary. I do appreciate that acknowledgement; that Jordan’s intent in the story isn’t the only thing that matters.

29. But that does get me to thinking about... benefit of the doubt and what we extend to authors. For me personally, CoT/KoD were an overall bad experience and wore away so much of my own pool of belief and so I don’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to Jordan’s writing and intentions that I might have in earlier books. I look at the current ending (confirmed in this book to be dictated by Jordan, with only “a couple” of scenes by Sanderson) and I look at where we left off in KoD and I go, “yeah, I kinda think Jordan would have screwed up in a lot of similar ways to what people who dislike the Sanderson books are unhappy about, because the vast majority of the ‘harvest’ in the Sanderson books comes from narrative seeds that Jordan sowed, and there’s no way to know if he would have solved the narrative problems better than Sanderson did”.

Non-Seanchan example: Jordan clearly didn’t know how he was going to get Rand from “deeply traumatized” to “ready to wander the world carefree” or he would have left notes about it. And it’s easy to say that he would have figured it out as he went along, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that he would have done it in a way any better than what Sanderson ended up doing. There are some specific things that I’m sure that I’ll probably point to and say “eh, I feel like Jordan might have stuck the landing better on that one” but I’m no more guaranteed to be right than anyone else. There’s absolutely no way for any of us to know, you know? I can look at the Seanchan plotline as it stood in KoD, look at Mat’s ending, and say, “yeah, there’s nothing that Jordan could have done to make any of that feel anything less like a shit sandwich” but someone else might look at those two plot points and go, “well, if he did a. b. and c., then it would actually be a great story.” And they might even be absolutely correct that it would be a great story... but there’s still no guarantee it’s the story that Jordan would have written. And that’s not me saying that I think Jordan was... a terrible author at the end... because there still are some great scenes even in CoT & KoD (and New Spring is one of the best books in the series imo), but I do think he lost the thread of his story and wandered off into the weeds. And I don’t think that there was any guarantee that he would ever have picked it up again successfully. We might have had six more meandering books in the vein of CoT/KoD before sputtering to an end. Or he might have looked at how much easier and more crisp New Spring was as a read and reworked his future plans to put out a great banger of an ending. No way to know which direction he might have gone.

30. Tam had already turned into (unnamed as yet) Rand by the time Jordan got to the outlining stage - “Young man (age unspecified, but 18-25) in small village”. Interesting note that at this point in the outline men and women also had some different “abilities” from each other, not just different strengths. Oh. and the Dark One was also an alien at this point in the outline, “Sa’khan” and the Forsaken & Shadowspawn were fellow aliens that he brought with him from his dying world. But he had figured out already that he wanted the person who opposed “Sa’Khan” to be named the Dragon, and the origin of the savior/destroyer viewing of the Dragon was based on Jordan comparing the Western stories of dragons (fairly destructive) to the stories he heard in Vietnam (life-giving, standing for power and prosperity). Plus the various dragons and serpents in other cultural stories as well - the Norse world-serpent and the dragon in the Christian book of Revelation (sounds like Revelation is where he got the “seals on the Dark One’s prison” idea).

31. Looks like Rand’s original name was “Rhys al’Thor”, though Jordan played with the last name for a while. He liked the way “Arthur” and “Thor” had similar sounds and was looking to invoke both at the same time - so combining those two mythical figures is how he started with Rand -- a King Arthur who was also the god Thor. There’s a lot more King Arthur in the early books than the late books -- once we hit around The Fires of Heaven, we really move away from Rand being much involved in Arthurian myth (and that’s left more to Elayne & her family). Interestingly, al’Thor at this time was known as “The Hammer” - that part of what he envisioned for Rand kinda spun off into Perrin’s character, it sounds like.

32. Hmm, the original concept for Warders was a lot more of an equal partnership than it ended up being -- they were originally men “who watch the borders of human lands” and have “some abilities gifted from the Power, but they themselves have no use of the Power”. They’re bonded to a female wielder of the Power but notably “she cannot compel him to obey her” but if he disobeys, it breaks the bond between them. The gifts they were given were a “sense” for the presence of evil, some good self-healing, and slowed aging.

33. Ah, the name Aes Sedai is based on the Irish myths of aos si (faerie from the Otherworld). And he based the White Tower structure on “the pre-modern convents of the Catholic Church”. He was also amassing a list of names yet to be attached to any characters: Lewin, Thom, Emon, Jaim, Elaida, Mina.

34. This is Jordan’s own (very early) list of how the characters he was creating matched up to Arthurian myth:

Merlin: Amyrlen

Igraine: Tigraine

Arthur: Rhys al’Thor

Gwynevere: Gwyn al’Veer

Morgan le Fay: Emorgaine

King Lot: (?) Lor

Margawse: Morgase

Gawain: Gwayne

Gareth: Garth

Interesting to see which names roughly survived and which didn’t. He’d already decided at this point that his “Merlin” figure would be a woman, the “Amrylen” (Amyrlin Seat). He’d already decided that “Gwynevere” would be a ‘village girl’ as well. I wonder if at this point “Gwyn al’Veer” was “Rhys al’Thor’s” only love interest or if he’d thought that far yet. “Sir Gareth” would be ‘one of the village lads’. Lancelot was turned into “Lan, the Warder”. “Sir Galahand” was originally Lan’s son.

35. In 1987, he wrote a new outline for the first book, with Rhys still his hero. At this point, several of the pieces of Winternight are already in place - the yearly festival, “Rhys” lives with his “widowed farmer” father outside the village, an attack by “half-beast” mean and the dad getting injured badly by one of them. The story that Tam tells about finding Rand is somewhat similar, though the Aiel were “savage tribesmen, horse-mounted clans” at this point. Oh! Oh! The change that the show made with Tam and Tigraine came from Jordan’s notes!!!! (either a consultant read the public notes or they were just very in tune with Jordan’s original thoughts): “he found a woman, a warrior of the enemy, on the slopes of Dragonmount, dying of her wounds. She was pregnant, and though it was obviously not time for the baby to be born, her wounds had brought on labor. He helped the woman birth her child, and buried her when she died”. And at this point, he had vaguely thought of a “Green-God” at the end of the book who would help Rhys defeat the forces of “Sa’khan”, a god that would be revealed as a construct of the Power who watched over a magical pool (which is basically the end of the Eye of the World).

36. In June of 1987, Jordan did a second version of his ‘namelist’ for the book. This one was 33 pages long. 33 pages of names for people, places, and things, with handwritten notes to adjust them further. Changes:

Dark One renamed to Sha’tan

The Ogyr are now tall instead of short and are excellent stoneworkers and foresters.

Rhys is now officially Rand

Has already decided that Rand would fake his own death after defeating the Dark One though “Moiraine, Arinel (an early name for Elayne), Equene (the current name for Egwene) are among those who are not fooled and will not let him go alone

Tam gets a name, though it’s short for “Tamtrim” at this time; he based it on Mesopotamian mythology: Tammuz (Dumuzid) who was the god of shepherds & ‘the life-giving growth of plants’

He shorted Tamtrim to “Tam” and gave the second syllable to “Matrim” also known as “Mat”, though it was currently a name without a character

originally there was a complex set of religions in the Westlands, but he dropped that in favor of “cultural mentalities” of groups like the Children of the Light, the Red Ajah, and the Tuatha’an.

sa’angreal were based on the idea of the Sangreal aka the Holy Grail from Arthurian literature; objects imbued with the One Power

Padan Fain was originally named “Eward White” - he died in the attack on the village in the first draft but was mysteriously surviving in future drafts and spotted in the city

“Nyneve Bayal”, based a bit on Nimue from Arthurian legend, was one of his first characters, and was originally meant to have a darker role where she died, was brought back from the dead, and is serving the Dark One, getting Lan to oppose Rand at one point, and also was going to ‘kill’ Moiraine (who had ascended to the Amrylin Seat) but actually trap her “half-way between life and death” to be brought back later. So parts of this role were given over to Lanfear.

Gentling was a much more violent process originally, and there was also originally a testing in place for men once they came of age. Originally, being gentled didn’t cause an intense depression but was “a form of lobotomy performed with the power that makes the victim very passive, incapable of violence, and receptive to being commanded” and he called it being “gelded”. It sounds like it didn’t actually remove the Power from them but instead turned them into tools to be used (which sort of got adjusted and moved to how the Seanchan find and treat the women they turn into damane, it sounds like).

37. The next step was the “Test Manuscript”. Further changes in this:

Peddler now named Mikal Fain.

Rand has friends! Matrim Piket, Dannil Aybara, and Perrin Dael. Dannil actually survived long enough in the drafts that he’s in the original cover art for EotW, I learn. Sadly, I think I no longer have my original battered copy of EotW - I replaced it last year when I decided to do my reread.

Dannil got cut from the book because Harriet pointed out that he was doing absolutely nothing (again, Harriet, where was this energy for CoT & KoD?). The general plot was roughly the same as the finishing product at this point, so I assume Perrin was with Egwene, and Mat had stolen the dagger and was with Rand, so... where was Dannil in all this? lol, Jordan tried to keep him in by arguing “he’ll be important in book 5!” I wonder if he was originally the boy who would go over to the Seanchan and Mat took over that role?

Yeah, the version of the Test Manuscript that has Dannil in it is a lot less focused than the finished version.

38. The next surviving revision is “Revision 23″. Changes of note:

The Ogier “Jak Vladad” become Loial.

Jaren Telamon becomes Lews Therin Telamon.

39. Honestly, given the things that I hated so much about what CoT & KoD gave us, it’s almost sad to read Jordan writing:

The main thrust of the story will not be how fact becomes legend, however. Rather it will explore the nature of good and evil, of free will and the duty owed by the individual to humanity as a whole, of why and how mankind makes the choice to oppose evil, and the harm that can be done in the name of good.

People who do not champion and support good are acquiescing in the press of evil.

Some people who believe they are championing good actually fight [for] the cause of evil, for they would bind the free will given by the Creator.

That is EXACTLY what it feels like the story lost for me in Rand, Perrin, & Mat’s storylines in CoT & KoD. It felt like Jordan got so caught up in the shiny newness of allying with the Seanchan that he overlooked his own themes in the series and how he was undermining them.

40. At this point, Jordan is drafting The Great Hunt and has a somewhat comprehensive summary of the long game of the series as a whole:

Rand tries to flee his destiny but this only brings him into further conflict with the Forsaken

Determined to unite the people to face “Sha’tan’s” minions, by force if necessary

This middle section here I’m not certain about though -- he tries to defeat the Dark One, fails horribly, and must flee to regroup. That doesn’t sound like something that happened during his fights against TDO. That sounds more like when he tried to take back Ebou Dar from the Seanchan. Interesting change.

Rand was supposed to be completely without allies at some point in the story, originally, but that never quite happens in the books. The closest we really get is his flight from the Darkfriend Asha’man who attack him at the end of The Path of Daggers, but even then he flees... to his allies in Caemlyn (picking up Nynaeve, etc) and, of course, Min is surgically attached to him nearly all the time after that point He was supposed to realize that “by attempting to force humankind to oppose evil he was attempting to circumvent the free will that the Creator had made a central part of all humans”.

The ending is essentially what we got -- Rand binds away evil rather than destroying it because it “cannot be destroyed any more than can Good. Evil must be opposed by people who choose to champion Good”.

“Humanity, to be human, must have something to oppose and something to support, and the free choice of which will be which.” I feel like that is essentially exactly what happens in Rand’s confrontation with TDO in Shayol Ghul, yes?

also, no mention of allying with slavers, just pointing that out.

41. lol, damn, in the Test Manuscript, Min bangs Rand in the first book, right after “Eguene” breaks up with him. lol, and, wow this is... not super-great. So Lord of Chaos/A Crown of Swords Min was always in the plans, it seemed. It does seem like Jordan lifted some of the ideas in this scene for the post-Rand/Aviendha sex scene -- Rand talking about how they have to get married now that they’ve had sex and her being like “lol no”. Min also talks here in a way that makes it clear that she already had a viewing about having had sex with Rand, though she’s... happy enough about fulfilling the prophecy in this version.

42. Oh, here we go! First mention of what would become Seanchan in Jordan’s notes. I really am intrigued to see how this idea grew (and eventually took over and swamped) the rest of the series, even if I’m unhappy at the results in the books themselves. So, the first idea for the ~other continent~ was that Rand would be “shipwrecked on the coast of a Blight” and find himself in a land broken into city-states, each ruled by an Aes Sedai. Pretty different from the Seanchan we ended up with. Rand was going to fall in love with the daughter of a general that he was “given” to but then have to leave to avoid being gentled by the Aes Sedai in charge of the city-state, with not!Tuon bringing an army with her to help him take the “Stone of Stair”. Okay, Michael calling Tuon a ~young general who is also a ruler~ is hilarious. Tuon never showed an ounce of tactical knowledge in the entire series. Anyway, changing from Rand shipwrecking in Seanchan to instead having the Seanchan invade was supposed to... tighten the plot. Best laid plans o’ mice and men. Best laid plans. Boy, wow, it did the opposite.

43. Unfortunately, we don’t get a timeline here of when and how Jordan swapped things over from one version to the other. It was mentioned in the start that a lot of Jordan’s notes were not dated, so it can’t be certain exactly when certain things happened. The author notes that Jordan had also wanted to “dive into the complicated politics of a land invaded”. Again, shame that Jordan only really did that in WH and then decided Mat navel-gazing for two books was more interesting (in fairness, he does continue to explore it a bit in the prologues but, yeah, it really feels like he dropped the ball in the main storylines featuring the Seanchan).

44. Oooh, getting into Taimandred. “To imagine that an author never changes their mind about their plots or characters -- especially in a work as massively complex as The Wheel of Time -- would be foolish” .. “Another example of this -- interesting both for the ramifications within the narrative and its importance to fans -- is the shifting identity of the character Demandred. It’s a perfect microcosm of not just Jordan’s ceaseless creative process, but also the kinds of problems it left Brandon and Team Jordan in the wake of his passing.”

45. Interesting! Even after he’d finished The Great Hunt and was working on The Dragon Reborn, Jordan hadn’t finalized all the names of the Forsaken yet. In his notes he had:

Ishamael (check and already in the books)

Lanfear (ditto)

Aginor - already dead

Balthamel - already dead

Sammael

Rahvin

De’ath (...literally just the word death with an apostrophe)

Moloc

Be’aldrid

Maladour

Malifecin

Sha’rein

Savintar

46. “If we rewind back to Jordan’s own notes, however, we can see that at least at the time Jordan was writing Lord of Chaos, Taimandred was absolutely true.” Twice in his private notes for the books, Jordan wrote “Taim/Demandred showed up” at Dumai’s Wells. In his notes where he was summing up the accomplishments of the Forsaken, for Demandred, he wrote: “He will show up claiming to be Mazrim Taim, taking advantage of Rand’s amnesty.” And he was also supposed to originally be the person who’d killed Asmodean (makes sense, since it happens very soon before “Taim” shows up in the story). We know this because he wrote in a note about Nynaeve - “She does not know that Asmodean was a prisoner of Rand, nor, of course, that he was killed by Demandred.” The author says that it’s difficult to tell from Jordan’s notes when and why Taimandred changed into two separate people. “Sadly, we’ll never know. Jordan shared a great deal with Harriet and the other members of Team Jordan, but he hardly told them everything.”

In my own reread, it felt very much like Taim was Taimandred in LoC and very clearly that he was only Taim in WH, but the parts in between are wobbly and uncertain.

47. Honestly, I feel like pivoting away from Taimandred was a mistake on Jordan’s part. Him being the author of the slaughter at Dumai’s Wells and him killing Asmodean just... makes so much more sense than what we ended up with. I’m gonna hope that the tv rule of conservation of characters leads the show back to Taimandred as a reality, lol.

48. It was Brandon who came up with Random Sharan Army to try to explain why the fuck the Dark One was so pleased with Demandred in LoC if he wasn’t Taim and therefore had accomplished absolutely nothing of note on the page. Interesting. I was sure that the Random Sharan Army was connected to Jordan’s pivot to allying with the slavers, because the numbers just didn’t seem justified otherwise, but I guess Jordan was allying with them... for who knows why tbh. The mystery of why Jordan was obsessed with allying with the slavers remains a mystery thus far into this book. It kinda seems like it will be one of those forever questions that is never answered.

Jordan just... he really didn’t successfully sell me on it actually being NECESSARY to ally with the slavers, and I think a lot of that is rooted in his arbitrary withholding of information from Rand? Like, Rand is trying to ally with the slavers because he believes he has no choice, but HIS OWN ALLIES (including his LOVER!!!) are straight-up withholding vital intel from him re: the slaver army’s weaknesses for... absolutely no good reason at all. The deck feels so artificially stacked in the Seanchan’s favor due to Min and Nynaeve undergoing voluntary amnesia rather than any actual narrative reasons for the Seanchan to have the advantage. Again, it’s a place where I feel like I can literally see Jordan’s puppet strings on everyone’s shoulders rather than it making sense that the characters would behave this way.

49. Okay, the summary of what we know about the “outriggers”:

Set 5-10 years after the Last Battle

“focused on Mat, Tuon, and the changes faced by the Seanchan as a result of the events of the Last Battle” lol what changes. that was the whole issue through KOD. That Jordan refused to let Tuon change or grow even the slightest bit. I guess this would have been changes that happen despite Tuon throwing tantrums and kicking and screaming the whole way (and probably murdering and enslaving a LOT more people).

“All that survives, in fact, are two tantalizing sentences. One depicts Mat lying in a cold gutter, the dice having failed him. The other sees Perrin on a boat, sailing to Seanchan to kill an old friend.”

honestly, if it had the same energy as the Mat and Perrin chapters in CoT/KoD, then it’s hard to imagine the outriggers being anything but a boring slog where our main characters constantly think about how they should oppose slavery but then don’t actually do anything useful because slavery is just so gosh-darn helpful and some of the slavers are just so pretty. I’m just... I do wish more notes had survived on this, because Jordan’s pivot towards having all his main male characters working towards allying with and appeasing the slavers has been THE thing about CoT & KoD that really ruined those two books for me, and I just wish I understood WHY he went from his interesting and nuanced storyline that he had all the way through Winter’s Heart and instead changed it to Mat acting like “wanting to brutally torture and enslave people” and “not wanting to be brutally tortured and enslaved” are two equally valid points of view, with the edge being given to whoever has the most mysterious eyes.

50. More interesting to me are that Jordan had been considering writing a prequel about Tam. Basically the story that Jordan had first considered, all those years ago, about a soldier who has finished with his war. The other prequel he’d wanted to write would have been Moiraine and Lan’s lead-up to Winternight -- what led them to Two Rivers just in time. “As with the outrigger novels, however, Jordan’s archived papers contain no complete sequences or outlines”.

51. And the rest of the book is a glossary of the various characters, places, and ideas, with how they connect to mythology or the real world. I might potentially use it in the future during fics maybe but I’m not going to go over it here.

Overall, this was very interesting, even if the questions that I most wish could have been answered still remain mysteries.

[elfyourmother]

Do you consider yourself a lore breaking, lore bending or lore adhering roleplayer? Does this adherence to lore depend on the kind of lore you're exploring with your characters; i.e. you play fast and loose with ideas xiv has yet to develop, but you tend to pay close attention to the fleshed out ideals? Is there lore you have modified that you're proud of and would share here?

I view lore as a starting point for me to jump off from and make my own. Always have.

I find strict adherence to game canon for its own sake creatively suffocating and always have, in every setting I've ever written in. It’s pretty much entirely because I grew up on DMing and writing in Forgotten Realms, which took a very DIY approach back in the day that was heavily encouraged by its creator. Everyone's Realms were equally valid, according to Word of God, and there were often intentional "blanks" left in sourcebooks for the DM to fill. These books emphasized over and over again that the DM was the ultimate authority on canon, not TPTB or the novels or anything else. That philosophy has informed my approach to worldbuilding in the transformative fandom sense for the last 30 years. That and being a queer Black femme of color who is very rarely satisfied by canon narratives rife w racially problematic tropes. I change things to make a space for myself and my characters and the stories I want to tell, by necessity. FFXIV is no different in that respect.

That said, I don't smash SE canon just to smash it either. Despite how bonkershits a lot of Gisèle's canon appears on the surface (eg. post-war Ishgard's constitutional monarchy with King Aymeric), everything I change has been carefully considered and engineered for as much internal consistency as possible. As much as I operate on Rule of Cool, I need things to make sense for me to have fun.

But I am distinctly not a roleplayer, for this and many other reasons. I'm strictly a fic writer, and I don't ever collab with people. The world Gisèle operates in is constructed entirely for her, and my own enjoyment, by design. So no one is forced to deal with my stuff if they don't like it.

That said, King Aymeric is probably the lore I’m most proud of. I wrote a ficlet for ffxivwrite last year on it here, but the cliffs notes: Aymeric invoked the ancient covenant between man and dragon when begging Hraesvelgr’s aid against Nidhogg and vowed he would restore it, but Hraes said that because that covenant was broken by an Elezen king, only an Elezen king could restore it. Hraes was wily though, it wasn’t just upholding weird draconic custom in saying that. His ulterior motive was to make Aymeric guarantee his people would be united enough not to turn on the Dravanians once Nid was handled. the end result is that Aymeric restored the Ishgardian throne (“The Azure Throne”, as a nod to Haldrath), but as a largely unifying figurehead/ceremonial position with Parliament strictly defining the role of the king. Artoirel is Lord Speaker of the House of Lords. Aymeric’s still LC of the temple knights in addition to his royal duties. He wasn’t giving that up lol.

making a constitutional monarchy plausible in the context of the story was challenging and I think I’ve done a solid job of it tbh. I wanted to lean into the Arthurian romance vibes of HW but also solve the fundamental problem I had w how it ended, which is that I don’t think it’s a terribly realistic scenario for ppl who were under a theocracy for 1000 years. Aymeric essentially having his hand forced by Hraesvelgr solves the issue of why he would restore the throne and tbh I don’t flinch from the complications of squaring that with the revelations about Ishgard’s founding, I think it only plays more into Aymeric’s ambivalence about the role he’s been thrust into.