#these things are eldritch constructs

[sewerdraws]

dd nation whenever i'm finished with all these sketches i've stockpiled we'll be eating good

[saturn-garden]

love that this episode was essentially "guys we really need to have a team meeting about the date for the Mysterious And Most Certainly Horrifying Project/Maybe Ritual also the labourers are probably about to unionize" and Gwen fighting for her life for like the 12th time in one week

[aquelondungeonmaster]

There’s an activity I can help run at my job about creating a drawing of the aurora borealis with oil pastels, white paint, and construction paper, and I realized a way I could play with that medium.

Y’know, when they light up the sky in the northern hemisphere, they’re the aurora borealis, but in the southern hemisphere they are instead the aurora australis.  And I guess you could say that if you use the aurora drawing materials to create fanart for @mawofthemagnetar‘s excellent Eldritch Horror Keralis AU, you could call it aurora keralis.

[beaktube]

Sort of thinking about going full feral with the headworld, omitting any cellular structures, and make everything based off of some archaic four/five elements sort of thing to tie into how everything was crafted by a deity.

Everything is a construct, life is a form of magic.

Or alternatively, make it so that the first living things are constructs in that vein, prototypes of life, and everything after became some form of the usual cell based life form, somehow.

HMMMM.

[frownyalfred]

eldritch green lantern ideas:

ring slowly starts fusing with the finger it's on until one day the finger just glows, there's no more ring

bleeding green (duh)

so willful that reality tends to bend around them in small instances, like coffee always being warm or never having to wait for the elevator, or someone nearby tripping

the ring stops translating other languages because they just start understanding/speaking them eventually

the constructs chosen by Earth Lanterns stop looking like Earth items and more alien, older, ancient

Lanterns slowly forgetting to take off their uniforms and just start wearing them all the time

separating them from their ring will cause very, very bad things to happen

not eating or drinking for several days, then several weeks, then several months at a time without noticing

unintentionally feeding (mentally) off of strong-willed people, and even encouraging disagreement just to sit in the middle of it and feel something almost warm again

[monstersighing]

Hello! I sAw your intro and was intrigued. I have a request,- you don't have to if its too much-

imagine AFAB reader who is a devotee to this Eldritch being, seeing them as a deity or a God. As the world grew more modern/OR there's a great war. SOMETHING that lead the other devotees to not believe in this being anymore, bUt ofcouRse, our reader are devoted n loyal to the being, iN which the being will RewaRd the reader

You could get creative with this! I imagine when the reader prays, the Eldritch will speak to them telepathically, (whether to ask for a sacrafice- oR other *orDers~*) SO, reader has a voice kink ;). And soMe other stuff too- like corruption, tentacles, anal, cunnilingus, edging, and over stim pleasee-! (if its too much I understand-)

Bonus if our devotee reader was rlly innocent before hand :)

Thank You!! ~ 💫

Eldritch Being/Deity x AFAB Reader

Title: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

NSFW, 18+, MDNI

Content: dubious consent, religious kink, corruption, tentacles, voice kink, praise kink, edging, overstim, mindfuck, double penetration (v and a), cunnilingus.

Notes: Thank you for the idea shooting star anon. This is probably the filthiest thing I’ve ever written. I hope you enjoy it.

Constructive feedback from readers is appreciated.

+++

Your God is one of secrets, veiled and hidden, his mysteries not fully known to you.

+++

When the army approaches, the convent Mother hands you a leather-bound book and tells you to run, as far and as fast as you can.

You stop after the sun begins to set. When you look back, you can see a thick plume of smoke rising in the air, above where the convent should be.

You find yourself alone for the first time in your life. All the temples to your God that you pass are ransacked and burned with no worshippers left.

When you pray, there is no answer. But you keep your faith.

You head east because that is where your God first revealed himself. You keep away from the towns, frightened of the men that gather in the streets with their loud voices and assessing eyes. You are innocent. You know what they would do to someone like you if you were found out.

The next evening, you page through the book that was given to you. Between prayers and invocations for your god it is illustrated: a penis twined in a feeler, spitting pearly beads of come from its fat head, breasts gripped by tentacles, men and women drawn with every hole stuffed, heads flung back in ecstasy.

You feel your crotch grow more sensitive and liquid with each page. You lie on your back and your hands roam under your clothes to pluck your nipples, then glide down your stomach to scratch at your thighs. When you can resist no longer, you open your thighs wide and rub two fingers across your soaking slit and push them inside.

You’re bucking against your fingers, almost at your climax, when you hear a voice.

Stop.

You freeze. There you are my little servant, the voice says, pleased.

After that each time you stop to rest and before you sleep your God is there telling you to touch yourself for him. You feel his presence as you push your fingers into your mouth to suck on and then rub at your clit. You chase your pleasure and each time your Lord tells you to stop, you do. Even when your body is shaking from the need to come. Your needy cunt throbs as you make your way to the place you will finally meet him.

You had been kept pure in the convent, awaiting the ritual that would make you your Lord’s bride. But when he demands you debase yourself you follow his command. He tells you where to go, and in these places, there is always someone willing to take your body and use it.

You will offer up your pain and your pleasure to me, your God says, and I will grow strong again.

You kneel in a stable, a cock pushed in your mouth then down your throat until tears leak from your eyes. At an inn, a man spanks you so hard that when you bounce in his lap after, the fingers digging into your ass leave you gasping. In front of a campfire, two men fill your mouth and cunt with their cocks so the movement of one pushes you deeper onto the other; after, a third man slides into your dripping cunt and his thrusts buckle your arms into the dirt. He pulls out to come and stripes your back with his spunk.

Each time, you climax to the rumble of your Lord’s approval in your head and his name on your tongue. The bruises on your knees, the ruined rasp of your voice, the spilt seed dirtying your flesh. All are marks of your devotion to him.

His voice becomes more powerful, a constant buzz filling your head that makes you shake and tremble.

+++

The temple you find is abandoned. But the altar is still there, surrounded by burnt-out candles.

A cloth-covered statue stands in front of the altar. You remove it, fold down to your knees and gaze at your God. The statue is the green of old copper. A shrouded face devoid of detail except for six eyes made of ruby. Numerous tentacles spill forth from under a mantle. You imagine those tendrils tight on your tender flesh.

You strip yourself bare and read the prayer to invoke your God. The cool air of the temple brings goosebumps to your skin, and you shiver. The anticipation of his arrival makes you wet. You clench your thighs around nothing, aching to be filled.

You know he has arrived by the scent that appears, like the air before the storm.

My most devoted one, he says.

The words warm you, but you are afraid to turn. You keep your eyes on the statue and reply, “My Lord”.

His tendrils slide across your arms and pull them behind your back. Your thighs are forced apart. A sticky tentacle pries its way into your mouth and holds down your tongue. Two more slide up your thighs where they rub in an alternating rhythm across your slit, sliding but not pressing in.

The first tentacle pushes in and seems to grow fatter. The stretch burns. The other rubs against your clit hard and insistent, and you whimper. Your hips twitch, wanting more. You feel your Lord touch the edges of your mind, and then push deeper, into your memories, even as the tentacle pushes deeper into your hole.

You are pressed to the stone floor of the temple as the length of the tentacle inside you rams in and out of your cunt with a squelching sound. The one in your mouth twines with your tongue and pulls. You feel the chilled stone floor against your cheek but also –

-- your hair being pulled as your face is fucked and –-

-- your already red and puffy nipples being bitten and --

-- come spattering over your face as you grind your hips back on another man’s cock and --

-- you feel your orgasm seize your body whole and --

Time stops, and you are held on the precipice of your orgasm.

You have made yourself my perfect servant, and you will reap the rewards.

And your orgasm crashes down and your God says, Now we begin.

Tentacles lift you and you are splayed on your back over the altar, your legs held wide. Your hands are released, and your God looms over you. You cannot see his face, only the suggestion of many eyes that makes you dizzy to look at. Your God dips his head, and a ridged tongue appears from under his hood. It rasps over your nipples making you squirm and then trails down to your stomach where it stops.

Hold yourself open for me.

You pull your cunt lips wide for his inspection. You see yourself then, through your lord’s eyes – your chest heaving, and your hole stretched ready to be fucked into - and feel his hunger.

So delicate, he says. So desperate.

His tongue laps against you, the irregular surface causing shocks of pleasure when it flicks over your clit. It wriggles inside you, torturously slow until you are filled to the brim. When his tongue begins to move your hands drop to the cool stone of the dais and you scrabble uselessly for purchase.

You cry out with loss when the tongue is removed, and then again with delight when he sheaths himself in your cunt with the thick tentacle that juts out of his mantle where a man’s cock would be. Two smaller tentacles spread your cheeks and drip fluid across your asshole, circling and pushing in you in a sinuous glide. Your body is full to bursting, and it trembles, overstimulated. The exquisite ache builds and when you climax again, it rips through you with every muscle tensing and then relaxing.

Your now limp body is buffeted by the three tentacles’ increasingly punishing thrusts, and you hear a loud “uhuhuhuh” echoing off the walls of the temple. Your foggy mind realizes that the noise is coming from you.

The tentacles press deep with a final hard grind and fluid spurts from them. The liquid fills your cunt and asshole. The two tenacles in your ass slip out, and you feel the fluid leak out of you and drip onto the floor.

A feeler plucks the hood from your God’s head. Another holds your face so you cannot look away.

You see your God’s face.

It is beautiful.

It is terrifying.

Looking into your Lord God’s many eyes, the most afraid and most joyful you have ever been, you think that this is what you were made for. To service your God in any way he sees fit.

You feel his approval clamour through your body. You come again clenching on the tentacle still spearing your cunt, and shake apart.

Then, all is dark.

+++

After, you crawl down from the altar and stand on legs that are as wobbly as a newborn colt. And it does feel like you have just been born, changed into something new.

Your God wraps you in a robe of silk, embroidered with a coiling design you remember from the convent. Draped in it, you walk out of the abandoned temple with your Lord God’s fluids still leaking out of you.

There is no fear left in you. You know what you must do: go and create new converts in any and every way your Lord asks.

[cannedinternets]

Yanno, a thing i see a LOT in fics is that the Batfam think Danny is a meta, b/c ghosts don't exist. Which is valid, i mean they ARE a team of detectives with a shitton of wacky themed rogues and, at least on batman's part, a noted distaste for and disbelief in magic and the supernatural.

But bruce and tim have both worked with ghosts directly. (Maybe the others too? fuck there's a LOT of comics and animated series and-) So i think it would be much funnier if they think he's not a ghost, b/c Ghosts Don't Work That Way.

In fact, b/c Communication Is Not The Batman's Strong Suit, I think it's funny if all of them are wrong but for different reasons.

Bruce - has worked with Deadman. You can't see or interact with ghosts without magical outside intervention. Thinks Danny is a magic user who transforms a la Shazam/Captain Marvel.

Dick - Clown trauma? Mind control Trauma? One of your rogues tried to brainwash you to be his son/weapon? Damn kid you're like me if i had it even worse. Thinks Danny is a "regular" kid vigilante with a schtick.

Babs - Well the video evidence she can find deffo lines up with him being a super, but there's a hardcore blackout around his town, he doesn't legally exist, AND any outside info she runs into is usually cutoff by someone (tucker or technus depending), AND he's mentioned cloning. So he's probably a designer "cloned" (ugh dc that's not how cloning works) meta kid that's being taken advantage of by the government and/or cadmus.

Cass - Thinks Danny is a terrible liar (true) who is counting on the refuge in audacity to keep people from realizing what he is (also true). Thinks he's someone who got themed meta powers in a lab accident and is playing up the ghost thing b/c he fights ghosts constantly.

Jason - Glowing green eyes? Ability to manifest green constructs that look like they're made of goo? Constant death jokes? Aww, this dude is just another me but he is also a meta/somehow got anime girl powers out of getting dunked in the lazarus pits.

Tim - worked with Secret. Ghosts can fly, shapeshift, go intangible, teleport, posses people. Thinks phantom is an actual ghost that is possessing/overshadowing Danny, possibly consensually? He's looking into it. Ironically, is the closest to the truth.

Steph - Hasn't seen Danny do anything that the other bats can't do, and HAS seen him work on an engineering project for 16 hours straight. Thinks Danny is something like the bats, either under-powered or completely non-powered and makes up for it with tech and mystique. Also thinks Danny is a great ally in gremlinship.

Duke - his Ghost Sight does NOT play well with ghosts, ironically. Thinks Danny is some sort of eldritch horror with a human guise. He seems cool tho, Duke isn't gonna judge someone based on looks even if they do give him migraines.

Damian - thinks that Danny is a Pit Demon and you are all insane.

Jarro - thinks Danny is a Green Martian. Also thinks Danny is awesome.

[aziraphale-is-a-cat]

DPxDC Warlock Batfamily

They're not warlocks in the traditional sense, no fancy spell work or obvious theming. In fact, most anyone less magically attune than John would just assume they were metas like anyone else on the team, but they weren't.

It took a while to notice, just passing off the magical fluctuations around them as the ebb and flow of the natural world, or maybe some residual curse vibes from Gotham (ew). But it was too consistent. When Batman slipped into the shadows it pulsed, and when Oracle seized control of nearby computers it surged. When Nightwing took his inhuman leaps into the air simply trusting that he would reach his lading point it soared and when that nightmare of a Robin brought a room to darkness it rested like a heavy weight on his shoulders.

They weren't individual users, their eclectically cohesive group structure was too uniform for that; but they weren't some family of sorcerers either, being quite obviously unrelated by blood save for a few. The most likely answer was that they were all warlocks in service to some common diety, taking on aspects of its power to enforce it's will upon the mortal world- and John really hoped it was a helpful entity, because they were in deep shit.

Peeling the partially liquefied tentacle off from across his chest, Constantine sat up and brought his hand up to cup his bruised face. He prayed to whatever was least likely to hold a grudge that their little hail Mary there had bought them enough time to perform a summoning.

"Hey Bat, get your patron on the phone, this is getting fucking Eldritch."

"What the hell are you talking about," Hal Jordan pushed himself out of the rubble with a massive green fist construct. "Bats isn't a magic user."

"Hm." Batman grunted as he picked bone shards out of his gauntlets. "I'll need to get something for the ritual."

Everyone present sat up to look at him like he'd grown another head, except Superman and Wonder Woman who seemed a little excited.

"I'm sorry, you're a magician?" The Flash pipes up from behind the ruins of an old altar, only to receive a level glare from his black clad coworker.

"Warlock."

"Oh."

Constantine grabbed onto some chains hanging from the precariously damaged ceiling, rising to his feet. "We don't have much time; that thing's off licking its wounds in space or something, but it'll be back. You go off and collect whatever artefact you have from wherever you hid it and I'll start drawing the circle, where are we pulling your Patron from?"

Batman nodded in agreement. "The Infinite Realms."

"Fucking Hell."

-

The Watch Tower was crowded when Batman returned flanked by two other members for his little hero coven, carrying a small case decorated with constellations and nebulae.

Wonder Woman stepped up to look at the container, obviously curious, but not touching it.

"It will be wonderful to see him again, Batman. After this is dealt with I hope to hear the tales of my sisters from beyond."

"He'll definitely be happy to chat after we're done," Nightwing commented. "I hear he's been training with Pandora."

Red Robin nodded to that, an exasperated look on his face as he likely anticipated a long and drawn out conversation about different kinds of swords. Amazons liked their blades.

John gave that idea some concideration, Amazonian ghosts probably get up to some killer fights without having to worry about, ya know, death. He called out to the Dark Knight, "I've got the circle done, now we just need your call."

The three of them walk over to the summoning circle unceremoniously carved into the watch tower floor, Batman narrowing his eyes at the damaged paneling but saying nothing otherwise. The Dark Knight opens the case in his hands and pulls out what appears to be a small model space station.

The Coven spread themselves evenly around the circumference of the circle and Batman begins the ritual. "Salve patrōnem, egō stellam vocō." He throws the model space station into the circle where it appeared to float as the symbols in the ground lit up.

Slowly, a figure formed in the center, first as hands holding the model and spreading out over its arms and to its body in the shape of a young boy. He seemed to be wearing a black rubber hazmat suit with white accents and green lichtenberg figures crawling up his left arm. White hair appeared and with it piercing green eyes that seemed to be fixed on the toy in his hands. A cape flowed out behind him less like fabric and more like the endless void of space littered with stars and a cold weight settled on the room.

"Damn B, y'all really fucked up the floor this time."

Red Robin snorted, "Nice to see you too, Danny."

[satellite-slickers]

I like how the twist in Slay the Princess isn't that the princess is some kind of ever shifting reality bending eldritch horror. That much was obvious to everyone and their mother even before the game came out. so the game doesn't even try to play its cards close to its chest.

the twist that the game slowly builds to is that you are also an ever shifting reality bending eldritch horror. That all of of your presumed limits are self imposed, and have been the entire time.

The princess changes and becomes as powerful as you believe her to be, but the same thing is true for you as well. the game is about the princess finding the pieces of herself, to learn who she is. meanwhile you are slowly learning WHAT you are, and once both of you fully know who and what you are you become fully fledged gods

You only die because you believe the narrator when he says you do, and as soon as you decide to not be dead, you suddenly cannot die because you've stopped believing in that limit.

You can only starve if you believe you need to eat.

As soon as you decide to stop playing around with the razor you summon the long quiet and easily trounce her.

As soon as you have the thought that the narrator isnt as strong as he pretends to be. that maybe he doesnt have final say in things. he loses any and all ability to control you or the construct.

[katakaluptastrophy]

The ships … the ships were still full of people. I reached our hand out into space. I extended. I struggled. He said, I bit through the sun first. It’s human nature. That started things going.

Imagine being on those ships (and remember, not everyone in those ships was a nefarious trillionaire) zooming away from earth.

Maybe you've watched mushroom clouds blossoming across the face of the earth as you pulled away, the lines of communication fizzing out and going dead.

Watched...something...happen to the earth. Watched the sun flare and then flicker out.

I sliced through Venus, Mercury, Mars … by that point a couple of the tugs had already launched through the Kuiper. I had to kill Jupiter and Saturn in a fucking hurry. I reached … they blinked away from me … all I could do was hope that they’d watched what I was doing and all died from fucking terror. You and I went full fucking Hungry Caterpillar. We took Uranus … Neptune … crunched down Pluto … found every satellite and craft, reached in, crunched up all the humans, moved on.

You try to make contact with the installations as you pass - the small city on Mars, the helium-3 capture facility at Jupiter, the mines on Saturn's moons, the skeleton crew constructing the shell on Uranus, the Kuiper platform. Maybe the comms are eerily quiet. Or perhaps, you make contact for just a moment, enough time to witness what happens when god doesn't kill people "clean".

As you speed away, the rings of the gas giants burst asunder and the planets seem to desaturate, the readings go haywire as their magnetic fields suddenly destabilise. And something, oh god, something seems to slip away from each one, some absolute acid trip of horror, like some kind of writhing, fleeing ghost.

The moment I found the fleet spinning up to enter FTL, it was too late … I could only grab one of them … and you and I held it in the palm of our hand. I was in there with them. All those frightened people. All those runaway rats.

And then something physically stops one of the ships. Alarms are going off, sparks are flying, lights are flickering, and there's a horrifying sense of presence (if John feeling Alecto's presence was unremitting screaming inside his head, what does the presence of the newly combined John and Alecto feel like? Because I don't think that invovles less eldritch psychic screaming, somehow).

And then you break free, and spin off into some kind of warp of time and space, with the knowledge that you are the last humans left alive in the universe and that something truly terrible lurks on the husk of the earth.

Imagine 5000 years of that tale being passed down through humanity (that's equivalent to the time that passed between the stone age and the present day), as civilisations rose and fell across planets and systems.

And then imagine, one day, being the ship that encountered something they'd never seen before. A ship, of an entirely unfamiliar design, bearing an unfamiliar symbol: a skull. The whole ship is covered in bones. Sleek, designed, inlaid bones. Human bones.

When they hail you, you see humans, but not like you've seen before. They're dressed in strange outfits: military uniforms and robes that look like something from a textbook of the most ancient history. They're carrying swords. Swords! Many of them seem starved and sickly, as if their bodies are consuming themselves. They speak of their empire and their god in strange, archaic words - an impossibly ancient language from the earth that was - of the resurrection of the dead, of the Lord over the River, of necromancy.

And you realise that however horrifying the tales of the earth's death in fire, there are things worse than death.

[inhonoredglory]

Defining Ineffable Love (or, Aziracrow Learn the Rules of Romance)

(In response to this ask about ineffables and asexuality)

One of the major threads this season was Aziraphale and Crowley asking themselves what exactly is their relationship. Not what it is in terms of how much they love each other. (That's a given.) But what it is in terms of the human implications of their love.

Crowley and Aziraphale definitely come at the relationship with different perspectives, in terms of what they’re willing to admit to the relationship being. I don’t think we can entirely interpret it in human terms. –David Tennant (source)

For 6000 years, they’ve never put a name on their relationship. They didn’t, because they’re inhuman, genderless, sexless beings and they didn’t grow up (as it were) with labels. And even when they did learn them, they couldn’t say it was love, because admitting that was a death sentence.

All of Aziraphale’s heart eyes and pining could live comfortably in his mind if he never admitted what that said about him as an angel (trauma compartmentalization). Crowley tries desperately to be cruel and nasty to add white noise around the blatant reality of his constant loyalty to Aziraphale. If you don’t put a word to it, it’s not real and they can’t punish you.

After the Not-pocalypse, for all rights and purposes, Aziraphale and Crowley chose humanity as their identity. We see Aziraphale “playing house” in various human roles (as a landlord, a private eye, a magician).

We even see Crowley intentionally taking on human behavior to handle emotional issues: “Just breathe, that’s what humans do.” They’re slowly and intentionally enculturating themselves into the world they want to belong––earth.

Yet it’s setting up Maggie and Nina that makes Aziraphale and Crowley start thinking about their relationship as a human construct.

Because fundamentally, Aziraphale and Crowley are not human. Like Neil Gaiman tells us constantly, they can’t be defined in human terms when it comes to gender and sexuality. They can shift and move through each and any of those markers at will, purely for the pleasure of the thing: “angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort.”

IMO that makes them originally asexual, in the sense they were created without the need for sex. And it makes them fundamentally transgender and genderfluid, because while on earth, their sexless, eldritch spiritual bodies take on human, gendered forms and clothing. What gender (and sexuality) they identify with while on earth varies through the eras. Crowley definitely has a fluid gender identity, while Aziraphale appears to have settled on gay man (aka THE southern pansy) for his internal typology (although all of these identities are subject to change).

In the midst of all this fluidity, it’s no wonder Aziraphale and Crowley haven’t thought of their relationship in human terms before. There’s just so much different in them and their bodies than what they see in humanity. And there are no books and songs that show the kind of love they have, in the malleable, sexless bodies they have, with the background they have; it’s all ineffable.

Aziraphale and Crowley didn’t start out thinking they were in a romantic relationship. Whatever feelings they had were long repressed, redefined, and shuttled away. But they did love each other, without question. And it was that love which scared them, because it was bigger than anything they saw among humans, a love that was beautiful and blasphemous and unfathomable.

Kinda like what David Duchovny said about Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, “I don’t know if they’re in love. In a way, their relationship is deeper than that, because they cannot live without each other.”

Now take this profound, ineffable love and drop it into the little boxes and labels human culture has created for itself.

Full disclosure: I’m an asexual demiromantic person in a queerplatonic relationship, so I’ve done a fair bit of research on what romance is and how the rituals of romance are, in many ways, social inventions that vary from culture to culture. There’s love and then there’s romance, and they don’t always overlap. So my interpretation of Aziraphale and Crowley comes through this lens and the fact that Neil Gaiman has affirmed the validity of an ace-spec reading on our ineffables.

Which brings me back to my thesis: That only now are Aziraphale and Crowley thinking of themselves as a romantic couple, precisely because they are interfacing with humans and taking on their social rules.

I like this one asexual person’s description of their experience, which feels very much like our ineffables (from a very good article, I def recommend):

If there is a border between friendship and romance, then in my internal landscape, it goes right through a misty forest where no one has ever bothered to place signs.... Neither of us had intended to start anything even vaguely romantic, but the activities we did and the intense kind of immediate connection we had was coded as romantic in our culture.

That’s what Crowley realizes when Nina confronts him about his relationship to Aziraphale.

“It looks like that from here.” What Crowley and Aziraphale share is beyond definition, but Nina cannot imagine the anything beyond the human labels she was taught. The tragedy of an everlasting love is that it can only be conveyed properly to other humans if it is cast in such small human words––partner, boyfriend, husband.

Because when Crowley denied those human roles for Aziraphale, Nina slid down the path of thinking Aziraphale was just his “bit on the side,” because there were no labels left she could imagine for them. If you don’t put a word to it, it’s not real.

That’s the purpose of labels, to culturally validate a person's identity. Labels, of course, DO NOT create reality; people's experiences are always real, in all their varied ineffability. But labels allow a space for culture (ie other humans and political and legal society) to recognize formally your lived reality.

So Crowley started really thinking about him and Aziraphale, about the ineffable love between them and realized that in human terms, those would be the things he’d call Aziraphale, because those were the words that gave Aziraphale that place of importance in his life.

But with that realization comes all the human trappings and behavioral patterns around those words (the candlelit dinners, dramatic rescues, drinks at the Ritz, etc.) which Crowley had never thought of before, and yet… maybe romance is what he and Aziraphale have been doing all along.

That’s why this season centered so much around Aziraphale and Crowley using cultural artifacts (film and literature) to understand romance, because romance is so deeply socially-defined.

Aziraphale himself has been leaning hard into the romantic social cues (he’s more well-read in the cultural trappings of romance than Crowley is), especially post-Blitz. But when he watches Maggie and Nina dancing, he works up the courage to do something with Crowley that’s even more explicitly loaded as “traditionally romantic” than anything he’s done up to that point.

Because while risking their lives for each other and defying everything for each other is love in its purest form, dancing (specifically in Jane Austen’s world) is a public performance coded for potential marriage partners. It's an intimate ritual of the entire body. (And in British slang, dancing has been used as a euphemism for sex.)

Crowley's "We don't dance" is really telling, because it shows Crowley’s awareness of the unknowable devotion between them vs the human roles Aziraphale is asking him to fill, specifically its physical aspects. Aziraphale is asking to make their relationship more public, more physically explicit, more coded as romantic in a setting specifically intended to couple individuals.

While Maggie and Nina inspired Aziraphale to progress their relationship into a publicly physical direction, Maggie and Nina inspired Crowley to think of the emotional implications of their human roles: the commitment, security, and monogamy of a husband, a partner, an us.

That’s what he decides after Maggie and Nina confront him in the end. “You never say what you’re really thinking.” He wants to codify his relationship so they each become responsible to one another. Aziraphale has always been his soulmate, the one he could always rely on. But he wants to place a word and a role to their love that will bring with it Aziraphale’s commitment and dedication to him.

And that's another reason why Crowley kisses Aziraphale, because he knows Aziraphale was willing to make their relationship physical, and he wants that, too. To consummate this bond in the way humans do.

But Crowley doesn’t really know how to kiss; he’s not as worldly as he makes out to be. (It’s Aziraphale who owns the gun, and Crowley who’s never fired one.) He uses the kiss as a tool to get across to Aziraphale what he wants for them, in the physical language Aziraphale has been using, because "one fabulous kiss and we're good," right?

But it doesn’t work, because real life and real emotions don’t work like that; life and love don’t follow a script, despite the novels and plays and songs.

Aziraphale and Crowley spent this entire season trying to figure out what their relationship is and what they wanted out of it, trying to make sense of the unfathomable thing they share and the human implications of it, and not quite landing on the same page.

Part 2 of this Analysis, covering a correction in Crowley’s statement (“You don’t dance”) and the further implications of dancing/sex.

[sonnyaavce]

DP x DC Prompt ALT #04

This is an alternate version of my original prompt # 04, so it isn't a continuation of the last one (sorry guys :<) This one is just based on the TV series of the Justice League at their very beginnings of the animated series (2001-2004).

______________________________________________________________

Space Eldritch Deity Danny

The newly formed Justice League has envisioned a magnificent future OPCenter, built upon colossal blueprints, for their upcoming space station. This stunning structure will be positioned in orbit, strategically away from any other government satellites, ensuring seamless operation. As its fixed rotation will be following Earth's natural magnetic orbit 24/7.

After completing their preparations and getting ready to relocate the newly constructed watchtower, the Green Lantern Corps suddenly found themselves amidst a formidable disturbance that violently shook the earth. Instantly, they assumed defensive positions, their eyes fixed on a void-like anomaly in the sky, steadily advancing towards them. A mysterious, black figure emerged from the depths of the sky, revealing a captivating form. Within its body, a myriad of stars and constellations twinkled, nestled in its chest. Its clawed hands stood out, glistening in a radiant white, as though one were gazing upon the brilliance of the sun. A majestic, snow-white silky mane decorated its head, crowned with an icy crown, while dark horns added a touch of intrigue and macabre. The face of this enigmatic being lay concealed beneath an otherworldly blackness, heightening its aura of mystique, leaving only the mesmerizing glow of its hazardous green eyes visible.

"Why are you moving those to space?" The creature's screeching voice echoed as it leaned forward, posing an inquiry that perplexed everyone. Despite Green Lantern's attempt to communicate, his ring failed to decipher the enigmatic language. The entire Justice League stood in awe and veiled, holding their breath as they beheld this unsettling Lovecraftian entity.

"Why do such things? Have you asked me if I will permit it?"

“Wait hold on! Blimmey studd!! I might found a solution” cursed Constantine being the one to be there when the creature appeared; quickly doing some sigils and spells to make the creature speak the language of the living, grunted “now, come on big fella what do you want”

"Why have you trashed my domain, isn't earth enough for you humans?" The voice of the creature intones, making the Justice League members shiver at the potency of the words as it spoke with such divinity and pressure "have you asked me if I would allow it?" It asked again, anger now in it's voice, a wisp of cold air and pressure onto them as it moved closer.

"Ask and you shall receive, for I Phantom, Lord of the Dead, King of the Infinite Realms, Lord of Space and Infinity"

"Well shit" curses Constantine, a cold shiver in his spine "we are royalty fuck"

-TBC-

masterpost

[wolfiso]

Girl Genius Self Insert OC Poll

The world of Girl Genius is frightfully well populated for a setting of Marvelous Manic Mad Science. It's very easy to imagine all sorts of folk in the background feuding, flouncing, fighting, (and other verbs that start with f ;)) without necessarily crossing paths with the main story. With that in mind, let's imagine for a moment...

[blackat-t7t]

The first Mandalorians were the Taung species, and the Taung were originally native to Coruscant

I think that could be a fun jumping-off point for an Eldritch Coruscant Guard story

Something to do with an Old God of War, maybe, and spilt blood that finally, finally drips low enough to touch the barren earth, far below the layers of glass and steel and concrete that stack on top of one another, like layers of rock hiding fossils from different ages

Taung blood. Impure, because there are no pure Taung anymore; yet Taung nevertheless, for some of the genes persist within populations in Mandalorian space, hiding in people that are otherwise Human (also called Zhell, the other species native to Coruscant)

A God of Change Through War, whose eternal adversary is a God of Sloth, Consumption, and Stagnation. And what else would such a war god see in corrupt, complacent senators?

The Force is clouded on Coruscant, smothered by the Sith darkness spreading like plague over the planet. Even the Jedi, who are called "the Force make physical", can't fully sense it though the fog. But gods are contained within the Force, as all things are, and they aren't so easily obstructed. The struggle between light and dark is a war too, neverending. The war god may care only for battle and bloodshed, may not care which side is victorious, but the Force tilts everything towards balance, and the Sith Lord has pressed it too far.

Old ghosts of Taung Mandalorians long gone- the Dha Werda Verda themselves- prowl the surface of the planet, far below the vaunted skyscrapers. They appear to other warriors- other Taung- other Mandalorians, linked to them by the universal soul of the Manda- and whisper to them of glorious battle: kote, darasuum kote.

The words are a chant that all clones know, like they know the beating of their hearts: one of the few pieces of Mandalorian culture Fett deigned to share with them. One of only a handful of songs given in its original form, in Mando'a, without the words twisted out of true to fit the clones' service to the Republic. The clones of the Guard never learned the true Dha Werda Verda chant. That was a privilege reserved for the Nulls and Alphas, and the commandos favored by Mandalorian trainers. But they heard it, in passing; heard the beat, even if they couldn't make out the words. And now when they wake from dreams with those words ringing in their heads- Dha Werda Verda a'den tratu, Manda'yaim kandosii adu- they know the meaning in their bones.

The god, the ghosts- they're reaching up from the planet's surface, though the levels of construction piled like layers of stone, like ages of time; feeding on blood and blaster smoke and all the traces of war. They're wrapping their claws around the only beings they can touch and urging them to fulfil their destiny: to go to war.

[my-forgotten-notepad]

Writblr tip and trick link Masterpost

the followring a bunch of links to a variety of tumblr blogs discussing things from fight scenes, types of romance, antagonists and how to flavour dialogue descriptors and how to build the voice and logic of your characters.

emotion chart

subplots

emotional writing tips

words other than said

character profile

body language

types of villains

elements of a fight scene

romance

action scenes

writers block

character flaws/buffs

rules for writers

Character's voice

sci-fi/dystopia/utopia genre post

virtue to vice spectrum

eldritch madness definition

dialogue options

expression descriptors

eldritch madness 2

trope, theme, archetype, motif and cliche

example of predestined outcome

a unique perspective on female representation in fiction

disguising a character's powerlevel with dialogue and physicality

notebook.ai (character construction/worldbuilding app)

narrative archetypes

how to create an impactful action heroine

eldritch madness 3

villain value system

writing advice

use of lifespan in a work

character profile 2

dialogue options 2

I want to have all these links here and easily available for reading and re-reading if an when I need them rather than needing to relentlessly dig through all of my likes to find any of the relevant material I want to look over. I hope other's find them as accessible and as usable as I do.

[grunckle]

Some disjointed thoughts on the Void Sea and the subconcious

I really just wanted to write something quickly on this, it’s not so much a theory as it is just a small analysis on the general mood of the ending, with a little contextualizing with in game dialogue.

So the subconscious is such a mysterious yet integral part to understanding the more spiritual/alien parts of Rain World. This isn’t a world in which the eldritch and unknowable lurk in the far reaches of space, but rather appear through our own minds and subconscious.

Echos appear in dream like sequences, where all other life except scavengers (in vanilla) fall asleep.

Karma flowers allow us to contact imagined worlds, other selves, dreams, and memories.

Eating a neuron of an iterator allows us to perceive voidspawn.

Our karma is raised through the mark of communication, which is linked to the brain in some way judging by Five Pebbles’s slideshow.

And, beyond that, plenty of cerebral/brainy imagery and concepts are present.

“Cabinet beasts” (the organ-like worms found in Memory Crypts) are likely some sort or mutated brain tissue, I talk about it more in this post.

Void worms also have a neural texture that covers their skin.

There’s the cut brain tree, which made it back in the game (though pretty unceremoniously) in Downpour.

And then of course there’s iterators, massive brains that are the last long-standing remnant of the benefactors’ civilization, and serve as the main driving forces of the game’s side plot.

I bring all this up just to show how cerebral and subconscious elements are pretty prevalent throughout the game, and it provides some context to my thoughts on the Void Sea.

That being said, I think the Void Sea acts as a collective unconscious, a place where the many worlds and selves of the subconscious coalesce into one, dream-like existence.

Echos appear in dream-like sequences, but are still experienced by nearby scavs. They even have different personalities and reactions to it, some being curious, while others are afraid.

Continuing on this, benefactors experienced the same dreams we do in Subterranean, shown through white pearl dialogue.

“Oh, interesting. This is a diary entry of a pre-Iterator era laborer during the construction of the subterranean transit system south of here. In it they describe restless nights filled with disturbing dreams, where millions glowing stars move menacingly in the distance”

These go towards the idea of the Void Sea and other void related phenomena existing as a sort of collective unconsciousness, experienced through hazy dreams and hallucinogenic plants by many.

But then there’s the “egg” sequence, where you swim in unison with others just like yourself. I think these are the “selves of other planes” mentioned by Moon in the Karma Flower dialogue, and I think that same dialogue is indicative on what the nature of the Void is. It’s detaching yourself from your carnal body and coming in contact with your own subconscious, and possibly the subconscious of others. Think of it like a big mind soup.

Anyway this really resonated with me because I distinctly remember the feeling I had the first time I went through Depths. As the caves around me started melting, it felt like I was descending deeper and deeper into a dream I couldn’t wake up from. That packed with the genuine horror of seeing the worms, and the dreamy ending, it really left a lasting impression.

Halfway through writing this, I realized it’s a bit longer than I was initially expecting, but I hope I managed to convey the general vibe I got.