#they make me cosmically unwell

[twst-drabbles]

While I adore the pets AU, Eldrich prefect is my JAM.

Cosmic horror in mortal form. Looks at these horrorible mentally unwell boys and just goes 'Teehee' and pats them on their heads. Gentle friend who could rip open their sanity and then put it back together like it never even happened, sitting and having lunch with them. Domestic terror of the beyond is so cute to me.

I'd hug eldrich Prefect. It may be the wrong move to make. But I would hug them.

Aw, would you look at that! Baby's first look into the pit of utter apathy that lays behind the cluster of eyes within these crawling creatures swarming tour world. It's adorable how they can't handle this much. Apologies for bringing them here though. But don't worry! This Prefect will take care of it. Well, most of it anyway. I'm afraid some are here to stay.

Yeah I love writing them just because they way they care can seem as though it's dependant in how much the humans can entertain them. They're gentle and yet hold almost no concern over how the sanity of people can just snap with a single glance at their true face. Which makes sense, since they come from a world where having your mind break under the pressure is pretty much an average Tuesday. It's comes free with puberty! You just have to put it back together.

Would it be a wrong move to hug them? Probably, probably not. It's at your risk. Don't worry though. If something does go wrong, they'll be sure to fix it. Well, fix it their way anyway.

[jennycalendar]

in regards to your btvs post: what are some friendships/dynamics you wish we got to see more of or at all in the show!!! (i am personally always thinking abt the potential of oz and tara being besties under different circumstances.....they would have an Understanding)

OZ AND TARA SO REAL!!!!!

hmmmm okay starting with the obvious (for me): jenny and buffy. like i of course have lots of different jenny-related answers, but jenny and buffy make me just cosmically unwell, because CANONICALLY that's the deepest relationship jenny has in the show outside of giles? like she has this supernatural gothic connection with angel, she's got a deep warm love for giles, and literally as i was typing this i forgot who i was talking about, which is exactly my point re: why i wanna see more of jenny and buffy. they are the most drift compatible ever.

and kinda piggybacking off of that, because i'm on a "victims of angelus whose girlhood was shattered by his monstrosity" kick -- BUFFY AND DRUSILLA. i think buffy's canon attitude towards drusilla (dismissive, furious) makes so much sense, but i would have loved for it to be interrogated more re: the way buffy perceives herself and her role in The Angelus Situation. sort of a situation where buffy and drusilla are both able to heal a little more by actually facing the girl(s) that got killed.

who else UM. xander and giles. canon, explain to me why giles is Like That about a teenage boy in an abusive home. and i don't even say that judgmentally, i think there are so many narrative possibilities that could sell me on giles being such a dick to xander! the one i toss around in my head a lot is the notion of xander's wise-cracking stubbornness reminding giles of the worst parts of ripper, and then him sorta unfairly taking out his own issues about Dumb Teenage Boys on xander by reducing & simplifying him to a Dumb Teenage Boy. but i think that's a little bit of a stretch, and, again, CANON DID NOT GIVE US ANYTHING.

and one more to bring it home: jenny and angel. i can't not put them here. the jenny/giles buffy/angel thing is so insane and i would kill a man to have it dissected more thoroughly within canon -- the interweaving connections between all of them after the big s2 blowup!!! -- but specifically jenny and angel is like.... she was raised to REVILE HIM and she gave him back his LIFE???? i think so much about that quote "forgiveness is an act of compassion, it's not done because someone deserves it, it's done because they need it" in a jennyangel context. she stepped away from playing arbiter and went "what this situation needs is love." and her love got carried forward in becoming pt. 2 when giles softly asserts that curing angel was jenny's last wish. she makes the Conscious Choice to end the cycle of vengeful violence when little girls start getting hurt again, and she gets killed by her childhood monster, and her act of love breathes life back into him. what the fuck. what the fuck. wh

[renardtrickster]

I really don’t like the “Balance between Good and Evil” trope. Derivatives like “Balance between Light and Darkness” is good, because “Light” and “Dark” can be interpreted in multiple ways, giving virtuous and negative qualities to both. “Balance between Law and Chaos” is similarly good, which is me letting my SMT nerd out and OSR if half of those games didn’t just define “Law” as “Good”. But “Balance between Good and Evil” always sounded really dumb, like the “what if we put half of the babies into woodchippers” meme but unironic and it’s also the premise of an entire work’s story and metaphysics.

Part of this is because, while “Law and Chaos” or “Light and Dark” or “Yin and Yang” have some room for interpretation (Is Law a peaceful community led by a just ruler or is it theocracy devoid of free will? Is Chaos a chill anarchist paradise or is it eternal war and space monsters?), “Good” and “Evil” are self-defined and very uncomplicated. Good is Good. Evil is Evil. This is fundamentally pretty cringe for numerous reasons. One, “Good” and “Evil” being cosmic forces implies that there is an objective morality in this universe. I have never in my life seen “objective morality” handled in a way that wasn’t really weird or shitty (it’s very apparent that early D&D considers “kill the orc babies so they don’t grow up evil” to be the morally correct, Good option, or at least Gygax did). Two, our opposing forces are “Good” and “Evil”. You couldn’t be more on-the-nose unless you outright have the good guys refer to themselves as “the good guys” and the bad guys refer to themselves as “the bad guys” in-universe. And third, combining elements of the previous two, it’s very easy to slip into self-justifying behavior or protagonist-centered morality with a set-up like this. “When they slaughter our soldiers, it’s abhorrent. When we wipe out the enemy troops, it’s heroic. When they torture our men, that’s vile. When we used enhanced interrogation techniques on their lieutenants, we’re just getting work done. When they try to kill all the elves, it’s genocide. When we kill all the orcs, it’s Good Triumphing Over Evil.”

But while “Good” and “Evil” is a bad dichotomy, let’s discuss the middle ground, Neutral. Neutral in regards to Law and Chaos means freedom and order, everyone has free will, but everyone follows the social contract and treats each other well. Neutral is the point of Yin and Yang, because neither are bad or good and it’s unbalance that’s destructive. But what does Neutral mean in regards to Good and Evil? Does it mean saving half of the orphans from the burning building and collapsing the roof on whoever’s left inside? Sending soldiers to save one city from Goblin Attack but then doing your best to prevent anyone from saving the second city because we’ve filled up our life-saving quota today? Petting a kitty but then punting a puppy over a fence? Being Good but also being kind of a grumpy prick about it? What are its motives, its foundations? “Does Good acts and balances them out with Evil acts or vice versa” describes either a mentally unwell person or an Evil one, the same way “randomly switches between being Lawful and being Chaotic” actually just describes Chaotic. Furthermore, “Good is Good, but Evil has to exist or flourish to some extent because uhhhhhhhhhhhh“ is stupid no matter how you slice it. Even putting aside the fact that this sounds EXACTLY like something an Evil person would say while they’re currently losing, allowing the world to become an objectively worse place to live in out of some sense of fairness or neutrality-for-its-own-sake is heinous. There’s no reason, really, and to be Neutral in this regard is to allow the world to become objectively worse through action or inaction, which is indistinguishable from Evil.

You could make political commentary out of this! No, don’t.

Finally, and in addition to the above, part of what makes Law vs. Chaos so cool is that you can side with any of Law, Neutral, or Chaos, and it can be good or it can be bad. Law is security and tyranny. Chaos is freedom and eternal conquest. Neutral is balance but it delays the inevitable cosmic clash of Law vs. Chaos. Good/Neutral/Evil is completely asymmetrical. A world of Evil would just be a horrible nightmare world, if not the end of the world. A world of Neutral has evil in it for poorly explained reasons. Meanwhile there’s no downsides to a world of Good. “But if Evil is eliminated, then Good will turn on itself in the belief that people aren’t being Good enough” I hear you say, to which I retort that persecuting other people for petty reasons isn’t Good, it’s Evil. “But Evil had to be contained, if it’s destroyed then a greater Evil will take its place” isn’t a problem with Good either, it’s a problem of Evil reappearing. The worst you can say about Good is that it always has to defend itself against the forces of Evil, but acting like Good taking over will lead to a dystopia because Good taken too far is just as bad as Evil is some “I’m 14 and this is deep” stuff.

[nyctodromist]

Hello, last average person cultist simulator asker here and I just wanna say... Thank you so much for writing about your love for the game!

(no I am not a weather factory worker 😔)

I love love LOVE how you have specific snippets of text talking about how beautiful and irresistible Glory is. It's truly a question that we can only answer yes 🙏. THE HIGHER WE RISE THE MORE WE SEE.

(we can answer no and the velvet can keep us safe in her merciful shadow)

Can I add more fuel to the Sun-in-Rags' devotional fire? In my head I was like beautiful endings? Damn so emo. But then there's nothing in the lore indicating that the Sunset wants to become Noon again and it's somehow giving the idea that raggy boy is... Content??? Like yeah he used to be more Glorious and now his light is dim and cold BUT the mood's like don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. Beautiful endings in a way that you're at peace with what happened! It's damn romantic!!!

(thank u forge for breaking the sun)

hi again! you're welcome!! i love talking about cultsim. i'm in one of those periods where it's all i'm thinking about right now and it's one of my favorite games of all time so i am eternally unwell about it (affectionate)

yeah yeah yeah i love the descriptions of the glory!! this is hard to articulate so i hope this actually makes sense lol, but i think what i like so much about it is that...usually, in the case of a cosmic horror eldritch madness type force, it's horrible, it's frightening, it breaks you because it's overwhelming in its terror. but in the case of the glory, it's lovely, it's bright, it has a sense of comfort and warmth to it. the madness doesn't come from the fact that you've seen something horrific, it comes from the fact that you've seen something beautiful, more beautiful than anything you've ever known, and you need to be able to see it again. i really love that

i love and respect the velvet but i do Not understand her </3 that's ok though, i don't need to, she can do her thing and i can do mine

i've never thought about the sun-in-rags like that. huh. i actually really like that interpretation! i would like to think that he's at ease :]

yeah the solar hours are really interesting!! i don't think about the madrugad as much as the other two, but make no mistake, i like her a lot. but also is she ok. like forge/winter seems like a really fucked aspect combination, i hope she's handling that alright

and i know he's not a solar hour but he's close enough so i just want to take this moment to mention that i did not like the wolf divided At All in any capacity until i saw his endgame text lmao. i was like "this guy is a massive fucking edgelord (no pun intended) why does anyone like him" and then i read this:

and i thought "huh...wow...maybe he's alright, actually..." but that's just the type of shit this game's writing can do to me skgnjskdjns

[lowfatmilk42]

Had a dream I thought was cool, and was a rare case of my dream making sense, so I’m gonna post it here.

I was walking around with this group of people, in this orange-grey modern building, in the stairway. We were looking for doors. There was only one in the stairway, one of the group members, the one who’d asked me to help the group find it, got really exited and went over to it. I don’t remember exactly what he said but it was something about how we can’t possibly expect what’s inside the task. How sometimes he’s gone into these places and there’s been no oxygen, or there’s been an entire room on fire.

He has a beard and the eyes of someone who has faced death too many times, he is quite clearly unwell, but he opens the door and we all follow him. We enter into a dilapidated sort of outdoor stadium looking thing, four sides of concrete slab seats, each with a single door like ours at the top row, surrounding a massive raised pool with a table with some stuff in the middle. The table and stuff looked kind of like a still life. The distance between the sides was such that I barely could see the other side, and if there were people I couldn’t see them. On all of the seats there laid skeletons, wearing tattered clothes, holding sodas and popcorn buckets, all seemingly died simultaneously and without struggle, all just slumped over in their chair. Despite this, it looks, feels, and smells like an autumn afternoon. There is a small plastic table on front of us where there lay several small paper bowls filled with a sort of corn and grain bowl. The bearded man says he has been in this one before, not disappointed but instead suddenly anxious and on-guard. He instructs us all to grab some food and take our seat. I do so, finding a seat amongst the corpses of the crowd, and the bearded man tells us to “play dead, like them” referencing the crowd. I try my best to do so while still sneaking bites from the food I took. It is fairly delicious, but basic, with little complexity to the flavor besides some lime juice, salt, and cilantro.

I hear someone loudly whisper “stop!” And I immediately go back to playing dead, slumping over and closing my eyes. I do this for an unknown amount of time. I think about whether this is truly a trial at all or if this is some separate entity, a “cosmic coincidence” I specifically think. Then I hear something, far away, so I open my eyes. Since this dream already seems like bad house of leaves fanfiction I might as well just refer to it as the Minotaur. The Minotaur is large, but very lanky. Through my half closed eyes I can make out it’s form, walking among the stands on the left face of the stadium. It is about 12-14 feet tall and is covered in grey fur. It looks quite similar to modern depictions of wendigo, but the upper torso is bulbous, nearly a circle atop this tower of stick and bone. It’s head is almost sunken into its torso, like the head of an echidna, with a long, fanged snout jutting out. It’s eyes, from what I could see, were two small spheres on either end of the mouth which shifted through monotone colors. It seems to have entered the trial silently after a certain amount of time. I do not know how long he’s been there or if he came through the doors at all. As I said, it was searching though the crowd, likely for players. I tried to find if there were any people that were alive in that section, but it was so far away and my eyes were still mostly closed, I couldn’t tell the living from the dead. I started sweating, thinking our group was the only one that entered, that he’d find his way over to me eventually, but then the Minotaur stopped and looked at a seat next to him and, with unnatural speed and power, snapped up a living player in its jaws, lifting him up, making many chomps to loosen up his meal and break its bones, then ate his entire meal whole, the bloody mass of my fellow player sliding down his mouth and into the great form which stood victorious. Blood littered a significant portion of that part of the stands, the dark red staining the crumbling, mossy concrete and corpses long since deceased.

The Minotaur produces a shrill shout, which lasts for nearly a minute. I almost lose my nerve, I only remember sitting a few rows away from the door, I could have a decent chance if I make a break for it. This is proven incorrect when the Minotaur stops his howl, and pounces into the set of stands I’m in, moving faster than my eyes could track him. He does not kill anyone, he instead looks for the door that’s on this side and, when he finds it, he leaves, twisting and breaking his body to fit through, leaving audible cracks and snaps. He does leave quickly, however, and the door closes behind him.

The tension I, and probably the other people were feeling left as soon as that door closed. I remember being told that they never come back through once they’ve left. I stand up, dropping my food, and start to walk to the door. A skeleton moves as I pass him, grabbing my arm tightly. It is not a skeleton, but the bearded man. He tells me to wait, and I do, because I now remember that the Minotaur left the same way we came in. I sit back down and wait for an indeterminate amount of time. After some time I leave through the door. Some follow me, others don’t, when I leave I’m back in the stairwell where I began and I start to go down the stairs to go back home. I have completed this trial, yet I am still anxious for my next one, when it eventually comes. I wake up after walking down a few floors.

Was gonna turn this into sorta a short story thingie but don’t have the time to write rn, also I have no idea how this website works so sorry if dreamposting is frowned upon here.

[lunarot]

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR TIMEOUT FOR 20000000 YEARS

watched psme again w some friends and it got me thinking about how a lot of stories have polarizing characters + ones who might even be core to (not) enjoying the work but shions notable for these qualities being inseparable from the storytelling. which is awkward!!!

(manga spoilers + mentions of sexual assault under the cut)

theres the fact that their memories are flawed (incomplete and subjective, even before they were eroded by time) but shion consistently sees both himself and others in the most bad faith way possible. this i think is part of why he can act on his resentment the way he does (The worst way!!!! every time!!!!). when he approaches shusuran with the proposal that the two of them go down to earth the way he thinks to sweeten the pot is to add WE COULD PLAY GOD. he doesnt say they could end war with deterrence and never have to suffer the same loss they did back home, which are his actual dreams. he just appeals to base desires of control

rin spends most of the manga terrified of what shion built after he was left alone, thinking that itll destroy their peaceful life on earth. to this end he systematically ruins every relationship he has, even going as far as to try to kill innocent people despite his trauma around it. except in the end, shion chose love!!! but no one knows that, not even he himself.

and this is where things come apart, because to the rest of the moon gang the guy whose eternal soul theyve felt such responsibility for is 1. a scoundrel 2. a rapist.* which would be a remarkable act of forgiveness if it came from people he had more of a relationship with than "uncomfortable coworkers" and also, you know, were the victim. but mokuren never claims he did so and is instead hung up on her mark not having disappeared after they had sex, a sign that she can never shed her divinity and be loved like a human would.

the story doesnt make it obvious if shes shrinking back from a memory that was later invalidated by the presence of the mark, or if her protests were to the act itself. still, she Was unwell for days after the fact, and shion (who notably doesnt have intimacy issues or a problem with treating himself as evil) seems to confirm it as assault. and then they get closer. and the manga ends as a circular, cosmic love story reuniting the two.

If at the heart of that is assault, id rather throw the whole thing out. i cant take the ending as anything other than a refutation of it. but the fact that such an ambiguity exists makes this a difficult work to reccommend

*going unsaid here is, 3. a child. which is fair, but hard to lean on when rins name all but falls out of use for shions

8/21

[clay-cuttlefish]

Rebirth time, all the way to Event Leviathan. Already bracing myself for some of these, but there's some decent stuff in here too, just gotta pick through the sludge.

Renee spends 2016-2018 bouncing around various Bat comics with a handful of lines an issue like she did pre-character-development, but she mostly works with Kate, which is a bit of a silver lining.

Batwoman #17-18

Kate and Renee get back together and it's cute enough I'm willing to stop being annoyed while I read it.

Almost all their previous romantic moments are immediately followed by divorce so it's nice to see them just being goofy and adorable.

Is this trying too hard? Maybe. Am I charmed anyways? Yes.

Action Comics #1005

Vic's back! Running around Metropolis and not explaining anything!

Genuinely this is such a fun way to reintroduce him, it feels fitting that it's unceremonious. You get no context for who he is, no explanation for why he's here, he's just Doing Things.

Doomsday Clock #9

I feel like I have to mention: Geoff Johns was the one that suggested Renee become the Question. He's also specifically credited with a couple good moments in 52, so clearly he's capable of understanding Vic, he's just chosen not to here for the sake of putting more Watchmen references in his Watchmen crossover.

God Doomsday Clock is so stupid.

Vic does get to save Ted for a panel so that's nice I guess.

Batman #66

The idea that Bruce is so unbelievably bad at processing his emotions that he had to dream up Vic as the fucking Divorce Understander is hysterical.

They haven't been in a comic together in nearly 20 years, Vic just lives rent free in his head that much.

Terrible comic but remembering it makes me laugh.

Action Comics #1009

Back in Metropolis, Vic's chilling out investigating Leviathan.

I'm not a big fan of this look, it's a little too Rorschach for me, but hey it's nice that he's here.

Also not super into his dialogue but it works alright as deadpan snark.

Lois Lane #1

WE ARE SO BACK

You would think a character who's been around for this long would have multiple good writers but nope Rucka is singlehandedly carrying her.

Critically: it's about journalism! That's pretty much the ideal way to smack some characterization back into Renee. So much of O'Neil's Question is about that rift between Vic the reporter and Question the vigilante, and about the ways in which those roles can do good, so drawing on those themes grounds this progression even as it's a sharp course correction.

I'm not a big Superman guy, he's neat but doesn't grab me, but the bits of Clark from Lois' perspective do more to sell me on him than any event I've read. They remind me of my parents and that's 100% a good thing. It's adorable.

#2

The snippets of other news stories about how heroes impact the political landscape do more to create a world that feels alive than, like, 90% of comics I've ever read.

Lois Lane, dyslexic icon.

It's got everything. Intrigue. Drama. Worldbuilding through trashy TV. Renee breaking and entering. Lesbian flirting. Compelling mysteries. DC's best het couple. Comic books are good, actually.

#3

The only thing better than one Question? TWO OF THEM.

Looking at them hugging is not enough I need to eat the panel.

The long silent sequence into the action scene into them hugging is perfectly paced.

Somehow, despite how unwell Vic and Renee make me, Clark and Lois are nearly as good here.

#4

"You were my best friend, you saved my life. And then you died." "I know who you are. You're my friend, you're Renee Montoya, and you're my legacy." They are everything.

It's so good that them catching up is a strange, quiet moment. Yeah, the cause of this is cosmic weirdness, but the effects are so personal.

I can't help but read Lois' "Sage. You're off your beat." to Vic as exasperated. Respectable. He's exasperating.

#5

Vic and Renee both crushing on Lois is cute.

I love how self-assured Renee is here. She's the Question, and she knows exactly how cool that is... but "being the Question with fresh eyes" means having to relearn the limits on violence. Beating people up is one thing, interrogation is another.

Event Leviathan

I've put this all in one chunk instead of trying to interlace it with Lois Lane, since it ends right before issue 6 and there aren't any great ways to spread it out more.

The event so pointless Jimmy Olsen spoiled the reveal.

None of the plot is interesting to me, but Vic's fun, I always like Lois Lane, it could be worse.

I like this characterization for Vic. He's chilled out since he's came back from the dead, and he's got less of a personal stake than most of the others so he's decent at staying on track, but he's also quick to play into whatever dumb banter's going on.

[sirjuggles]

Worm Reading - Part 7.x, Arc 7 Interlude

Ack I forgot to include the interlude in my notes on Arc 7!

When I first started this interlude I will confess that it took me a while to figure out who we were following. I’m not certain if Ms. Militia’s civilian name had ever been mentioned previously, and I know her background hadn’t, so I didn’t really put the pieces together until her fancy gun power showed up.

I find this choice of interlude viewpoint character very interesting. Honestly, Ms. Militia is a character who has only appeared momentarily through the story (the Protectorate Benefit Raid mission is the only scene I can think of where she takes any actions that affect the story, and even that is secondary to Armsmaster in that scene). 

I think this interlude really serves one primary purpose: giving us a glimpse into the sort of grand eldritch horror themes lurking beneath the surface of this world that none of our other characters have really been aware of. This preps the reader for the Leviathan fight, and helps them to accept that Leviathan is something unlike anything we’ve previously seen in this story, but crucially it reassures the reader that Leviathan is part of the same worldbuilding and not some random cosmic horror element crammed into what is otherwise a relatively grounded superhero story.

There are some very interesting questions to be asked about why it is that Ms. Militia holds onto her memory of what she saw as she gained her power, this sort of multidimensional entity that seems to be the source of the parahuman powers. Ms. Militia thinks that it has to do with the way her power works, that the part of her which would normally forget things is splintered off into her magical weapon, and thus she is able to retain the memory of what she saw. We don’t really have any reason to believe or disbelieve her. But if this is the case, surely there must be others out there who have retained the memory in one way or another; powers of perfect memory or the ability to replay a moment in time or split off different parts of their personality. Obviously Ms. Militia isn’t running around talking about what she saw, so it’s entirely possible that multiple people remember this thing and just don’t talk about it. We’ve seen that there is a whole field of study focused around the nature of parahuman powers, and I’m sure that those researchers would shoot someone for a chance to hear direct testimony about something like this. But it also makes sense that the people who do remember are the types who aren’t exactly clamoring to chat with researchers and academics all day.

There is, of course, also the question raised about what exactly is this thing that Ms. Militia saw? She describes it as alive, and I would say it’s clearly intended to be some type of massive multi-dimensional higher being. The term “eldritch” springs to mind, though interestingly Hannah wasn’t as repulsed or driven mad by seeing it as is often the case with portrayals of such creatures in other media. She described the entity as being in control of all its myriad selves, which implies a level of sentience.

One of the flecks of the creature which sloughed off touched Hannah, and that seemed to be what granted her powers, so that worked out ok. But was that an intentional choice on the creature’s part? I would assume not, considering the difference in scale between Hannah and this thing, along with her perception of it as sort of “passing by” or traveling away from her.

She ALSO described the creature as “dying”, which has some very concerning connotations. Is it being unwell/dying the reason it is shedding pieces? Did this process perhaps begin in the 1980′s, which is when parahumans started showing up? How much longer does this entity have before it fully dies, and what will be lost when it does? Too much we don’t know, but a lot of room for big cosmic problems.

From what we learn in this Interlude, I’m going to take a stab at a theory for the origin of parahuman powers: This multidimensional being exists on a higher level of awareness/perception/existence than humans are capable of perceiving. Its motivations and the details of its existence are unknown to us, and may in fact be unknowable. For whatever reason, pieces of it are continually shedding off as it moves through space and time and further dimensions. I personally don’t feel like it is choosing when or where to shed these pieces, nor that it is aiming to grant abilities to specific people. Instead, when a human is in a situation where they are pushed beyond their breaking point they become more receptive to influence from higher planes of existence. If this snapping moment occurs while one of these shed pieces are present, the human can absorb a fragment of this higher being and gain parahuman powers. This explains why powers are often gained by multiple people snapping at the same time and place (the piece that Hannah sees falling towards is described as being massive, like a moon falling, so I imagine it could engulf multiple people in the same general area). My biggest question mark with this theory is how it relates to the children of parahumans having an easier time of snapping? My only guess would be that perhaps they are born slightly more in-tune with this larger entity or with higher planes of existence in general, and thus the amount of stress required to push them to a point of being receptive is lower, and thus they are more likely to be in a receptive state whenever a fragment happens to be around.

From here we move out of the memories of the eldritch, into a short conversation between Ms. Militia, Armsmaster, and Dragon. We get a brief glimpse of the politics of shuffling these teams around in the wake or recent embarrassments. Interesting to see how Armsmaster handles his demotion. It’s clear that it grates on him, but he does have respect for Ms. Militia and from this moment I can see a future where he settles into a new role as a talented and respected specialist but not a leader. This is a facet that I think the old Avengers comics did a fantastic job of addressing: Captain America was far from being the most powerful or capable member of the group. But he was the best leader, the one who could hold the team together and make the right choices. Some jobs I’ve worked  in the real world have tried to address this same issue, with varying levels of success; the skills that make you an expert in your field do not necessarily make you a good manager or decision-maker or leader, and there is no shame in choosing to be one over the other. Maybe Armsmaster could learn that someday.

Of course, none of that matters, because we are heading into the Leviathan fight, and everything is going to change.

[ruiniel]

Fandom: The Silmarillion

Characters: Glorfindel, Aegnor, Finrod, Argon, Turgon, Idril, Original Elf Character(s), more to be added

Relationship(s): Glorfindel/Original Female Character

Rating: M

Chapter count: 2.5k

Additional tags: Drama, The Helcaraxë, Middle-earth, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, The Silmarillion References, Beleriand, Canon-Typical Violence, Blood and Injury, Depictions of death, a pinch of cosmic horror, Glorfindel POV, POV alternating, Horror, Blood, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, Pining, more to be added

Summary: An older story I've been rewriting, centered around a young Glorfindel and primarily written from his POV. Set on the background of the events of the First Age, it begins with the Flight of the Ñoldor from Aman to Middle-earth and focuses on the host crossing the Ice along their eventual destinations.

Also on ao3

III. The Ice - Shadows

“Do you still feel your fingers?”

“Yes,” Laurefindil says, watching Aranye wrap a strip of cloth around his injured palm.

Her own fingers are clumsy and slow; when done, she wipes her eyes with her sleeve. “I hope we find our people soon. The bleeding is sluggish, but the ice cut deep enough.”

Laurefindil regards his wound, then glances back at her. “Thank you.”

“A fine pair we make,” Aranye looks to her own injured leg with a swift, dry smile.

He looks to the outside, over the places they must cross in search of the Elven host. “Are you ready for this?”

Aranye breathes a sigh. “No. And I wish I weren't a burden, just as much as you, believe me.”

He shakes his head. “It is done.” He shifts on the ground so she can hold on. “Not much use for regret now.”

They draw their hoods up, and he carefully steps out in the cold. Laurefindil marches through the fog with her on his back, his face tipped up to the skies, where for brief occasions he discerns patches of stars through the mists.

“We were going East, which is that way,” he points towards an area of relatively flat terrain strewn with jagged ice formations.

Aranye too glances at the stars. “Let us go, then.”

He carries without rest for the better part of the way. The winds hiss loudly against them, but soon their surroundings become eerily quiet, as though they'd passed into a void of sound.

Dread surges through his bones and he flounders, and his heart speeds at a high-pitched wail piercing the air, feeding a flare of irrational fear. Laurefindil freezes; his life strikes wildly in his chest. “Did you hear that?”

“... hear what?”

His feet feel knotted together, but he pushes onward: farther from the source, or so he hopes.

The noises rise around him again, this time louder, the vibrations like stone scraping on metal. Laurefindil winces, wishing he could cover his ears with his palms; instead he sinks to his knees, deafened by the crushing dissonance rushing through him like waves in a storm. His gaze snaps upward, and his fear spikes as he spots fast shadows shifting through the mist.

“What in Eru's name…” he stammers, stumbles.

“What?! What is it?” Aranye asks, gripping him tighter without thought.

He gains his feet again, gathering his will, “I don't know; hold on.”

She clings to him as he rushes forward, avoiding the slippery ice as best he can, trying eastward.

“Lights!” Aranye shouts after a while. “In the distance, there!”

Moving darkness flits before him, its tendrils sluicing around his legs; his knees feel weak.

“Laurefindil!”

They both fall to the ground in a heap, her sharp cry of pain rising in the night.

His sight sways, and a peal of hoarse laughter burrows in his mind, vibrating in a spiral through his ear like the echo in a seashell.

“Please,” Aranye shakes him, “Are you unwell? Can you walk?”

He blinks, shakes his head to clear it, then without a word lifts her in his arms and stands, running for the lights. In the corners of his vision, Laurefindil sees an oily darkness gaining on them. Not in this way, he prays to no one, employing all his strength to move faster.

Sharp pain erupts above his clavicle; he groans, losing balance, and barely grasps at Aranye lest she fall.

“Stop!” her voice grows shrill in the rising fog as Laurefindil falls to one knee, his features contorted in pain. He glances up to see their attacker, sees many booted feet approaching through the gloom.

“Arakáno, yield!” Aranye cries as bows are drawn taut.

Arakáno? Laurefindil wonders, grasping at the unraveling strings of reality. The son of Ñolofinwë?

A dark-haired Elf in a silver-blue cloak strides forward then, crouching before them, intent on her. He draws her close. “Aranye, Eru be good, we heard your cries from afar; are you harmed?”

“No, but you wounded him! Arakáno, he aided me, please, do something!”

Laurefindil catches the faraway lights. The grey fog has lifted, and he sees the sad, sharp outlines of tents and carts through the dizziness and pain in his shoulder.

The one called Arakáno looks him over as he tries standing upright, his fingers quivering around the arrow shaft.

“Help him to the lady Narye, quickly,” the Elf asks of his companion. “We were combing the surroundings for you, Aranye.”

The group cuts across the ice plains, reaching the encampment and after what seems like hours to Laurefindil, they stop before one tent where an Elf woman emerges, trembling with unrest.

"Arakáno! Have you—" her gaze finds Aranye, nestled in the Elf's arms, then Laurefindil, nursing his wound and walking supported by another.

“Mother, he needs our help! Your help,” Aranye urges as the former steps close, her hands and gaze searching for injuries.

“Lady Narye, we found them on the outskirts of the encampment,” Arakáno speaks.

Narye regards Laurefindil, who inclined his head in a manner of greeting, his brows knit together in agony.

“Take them inside,” she orders. “Arakáno, please will you go find my husband?”

He bites down on his lip as Narye spreads the stinging salve over the gash in his palm.

“Acute discomfort,” she says, eyes on her work. “It will not last.” 

“What she means is you must live with it,” Aranye says from the other side of the tent, her leg cast between splints and a makeshift dressing. “It will feel awful all the way, but the effects are worth it.”

“Aranye,” Narye shoots her daughter a look. “Please, no wit from you.” She rises. “We were mad with worry.”

“Mother, not now,” Aranye looks away, then glances up in time to see Arakáno's head emerge through the tent flap.

The son of Ñolofinwë steps inside, a wary look on his face. Aranye merely stares at him before her gaze drifts to her feet, her lips pressed together in a thin line.

Another Elf enters after Arakáno, his dark hair disheveled, his eyes restless.

“Father!” Aranye cries in relief as he descends to her side; she throws her arms around his neck.

“What happened?” he asks, taking her face in his palms; his silver eyes drift from her features to her bandaged leg.

“It was my fault. I am sorry,” Aranye mumbles.

“Hush,” her father hedges, drawing Aranye into his arms. He looks about the tent, and his gaze finally rests on Laurefindil; he frowns at the freshly tended arrow wound.

“To him, I owe my life,” Aranye says, at which point suspicion fades from her father's eyes. He looks closer at the bloodied shaft, set aside on a piece of cloth.

“How…” he frowns, and glances up at the other Elf standing silently by the entrance. “Prince Arakáno, what has passed?”

They tell him everything — about the fall, the tunnels, the lights. When Aranye falls silent, Narye changes the remnant of a burning candle before looking to Laurefindil. “You have our gratitude.”

“Regretfully, we have not much else to offer,” her spouse adds. “I am Mírimo,” he says, a hand to his heart.

“We made it back alive,” Laurefindil smiles, shifting his bandaged shoulder. “That is what matters. I am Laurefindil.”

The shadowed voices from their flight swell briefly within him, fringing the corners of his awareness. Should he tell them, or will they think his mind has gone astray, as had happened with others on their trek? Perhaps it had been a mere illusion. He looks to Aranye. Maybe she had also misheard.

“Do you have anyone here? Anyone we should send word to?” Narye asks, drawing his attention.

Laurefindil shakes his head. “No, there is no one like that.” He tells them how things stand. “I walk with the sons of Arafinwë now.”

“You will rest here until you mend,” Narye decides, looking to the lord Mírimo, who nods in agreement.

Arakáno stirs from Aranye's side and clears his throat, his stern features set on Laurefindil. “Please accept my deepest apologies for wounding you,” he sighs. “I thought…” his steel-grey eyes dart towards Aranye, whose face is ashen. “When my betrothed disappeared, I feared the worst, in this place.”

“Not much harm done, lord,” Laurefindil replies, his head spinning anew from the words or his injury, he can’t quite tell; he swallows thickly, taken by a curious torpor. “I… ” His eyelids feel heavier. The winds outside roar in his ears.

“It's the salve I applied,” Narye’s voice reaches him through a falling gauze of mist; he sees her figure rising, feels himself being hedged in a reclined position. “Your body retreats, to heal itself...”

Her features are blurred, and Laurefindil casts one last glance around the tent. He thinks he might hear Aranye saying something from her corner, but the words melt away. A deep drowsiness descends, his limbs have never felt heavier; and then, he knows no more.

He moves slowly, left to right, cracking an eye open. He’s staring at the hangings of a tent, and allows himself one piece of recollection at a time. His head is full of stones.

The ice, the tunnels. Her warmth at his back. The voice, the shadows. Had she heard them? He must know. He attempts to rise, but a small hand gently pushes against his chest.

“Better not try that, yet.”

“Burning…” he murmurs with a grimace. For the first time since they walked the Ice, it is too warm. Laurefindil looks up, blinking until a measure of clarity returns.

“You ran a fever,” Aranye supplies, wiping his forehead. “It should subside soon, though.” She is seated beside him, he notices, her braided hair grazing his shoulder.

“How is your ankle?”

“Better. I will be very slow for a time,” she sighs, shaking her head, eyes on the reddened dressing around his palm. “Your hand?”

“Your mother's miraculous salve helped. It's less bothersome than expected.” He pauses. “Lady Narye is a healer?”

“She has long studied the properties of nature, and how they related to us, and how we function. Are you thirsty?”

“Parched.”

With a small smile, Aranye reaches for a silver flagon and cup placed within reach, and pours. “Here.”

Laurefindil gratefully takes the cup from her hands, drinking, watching her over the rim.

“Thank you, for returning us to our people. I am in your debt, Laurefindil son of Aistion.”

“Nonsense,” Laurefindil scoffs, his dimpled grin widening for a breath before his face drains of mirth. “Don’t make me do that again.”

Her own smile is pale, and Aranye looks to her hands. “Only a fool would, anyway.”

“Have I appraised your expression of gratitude yet? It is astounding.”

“Only a fool would, my lord.”

Laurefindil snorts despite himself, shaking his head. “Back to titles now? Interesting.”

Aranye spreads her arms wide, a mock surrender. Her hair is fallen out of her braid again. “What would you have me say?”

His gaze sweeps away from her face, resting on his bandaged palm. The wind hisses and hisses outside, filtering through the thin canvas. “That you will never run again, and will not seek your end so carelessly when others have fought dearly against this place. And lost.”

Silence ensues, but still drowsy as he is, Laurefindil finds he does not care. Not for the awkwardness, not for the gaping hole they left when they retrieved the arrowhead from his body, when he nearly fainted in agony. The prince—her betrothed—had held him down during the procedure.  

Her hands are clasped tightly in her lap. “Is that all?”

“That is all,” someone speaks, with his voice. 

Aranye stares at him, her expression unreadable. “Are you hungry?” she asks rather abruptly, looking away. “I can share of our waybread,” she turns and rummages through a satchel, retrieving a carefully wrapped package of rectangular shape and displaying its contents. 

Laurefindil watches as she breaks them in her hands and accepts the pieces she offers, clumsily shifting to take a small bite. He closes his eyes at the taste, the filling sensation. If he were honest with himself, only recently a part of him did not believe he would taste anything resembling nourishment again. 

A shiver runs through him; he remembers. A heavy mass of cold unlight, the hissing screech, the omen it carried.

Should he ask her of the shadows?

Meanwhile Aranye has put the waybread away, shifting awkwardly with her own injured leg.

How to begin? “Aranye.”

“Lie back down, will you?” she admonishes, “What?”

“When… when we charged through the wastes, before the others found us, did you…” He falters at her stare—questioning, waiting for more. “Did you hear or see… anything out of place?”

She ponders for a moment, shakes her head. “Out of place?” Aranye takes a bite of her remaining waybread. “We are what's out of place here!”

“That is not what I mean.”

Aranye makes a noncommittal gesture. “There were the winds—those high-pitched, screeching beasts with their awful shrieks. The fog, the frost… you.”

Laurefindil frowns, grasping at the memory that drained from his mind like water. Fear had curdled his blood, cloven his sense of self by worming its way through his veins, and he could only see darkness clawing hungrily for his fëa, like a hunter running circles around sluggish prey.

The doubt in her eyes curbs his racing thoughts. “It may have been only a figment of our exhaustion,” Laurefindil settles, leaning back, even faking a smile. His skin is too heated, and strands of wet gold stick to his temples. “Nevermind.”

Aranye regards him as though she'd let it lie. “I think you need more rest,” she says, tucking a few curls out of her face and pulling her cloak around her body, leaning back; they fall into a long, companionable silence.

“Forgive Arakáno,” she suddenly says.

Laurefindil opens his eyes, having nearly drifted away.

“I know what I say is the last you'd wish to hear, but… he meant well.”

“We've once settled the matter,” he says with sleep in his voice. “I might have done the same in his stead.”

Aranye’s gaze falls to her hands again.

“A prince,” Laurefindil follows, smirking. “Impressive.” The moment the words leave his mouth he wishes he were back in the caves.

“What of it?” Aranye snaps, looking his way.

He keeps his peace, irked with himself and whatever led him to prod her. Not his business, not his place. He glances to the entrance, where approaching steps herald another presence.

Lord Mírimo walks over to them and kneels to greet his daughter. He then turns to Laurefindil in his corner. “My friend, you are welcome to join our fire and meal later.”

Laurefindil tries moving, but his head is spinning, and he falls back against the folded cloak. “Gratitude, lord. If it is no trouble.”

The dark-haired Elf watches Aranye, the guilt writ on her lowered eyes. “This place is nothing but. But please,” he says, the shadow of a smile on his face, “call me Mírimo.”

Part IV

[pawtistics]

rotating with an unwell fervor how mentor(…?) pyrrha would translate to a modern au. can you imagine if wake was a semi-stable part of harrow and/or gideon’s lives growing up. also jsut. the sheer reverence and immediate acceptance of having a butch dyke as a guiding figure. gideon would look up to her so hard and harrow could achieve a smidge less repression - feel safe in her own skin, even. i think all the fucking time about how - with the very slight exception of corona altho the way she presents as crown makes me go… 👀? - harrows body is literally like . cosmically magnetically drawn to butches. the way she has an extremely caring relationship with pyrrha and cam and finds them both attractive without much consideration. the way that handsome smile dictates her days. the way she falls so easily into these dynamics. the entire pimp thing. the conversation about what is or isn’t sexy felt like a fever dream. i just think………………. that seems like a really wonderfully ambiguous shared existence. the way she spends her days. gideon and/or harrow having such an explicitly queer presence in their lives growing up… being privy to the illicit Dyke Drama and just like. knowing that who they are is Okay. even if it’s weird and fucked up and messy cuz they’ve seen messier. and just generally, god, i love butch lesbianism, i love butch lesbians, i just talked really long and hard abt this the other day but im feeling it again. im feeling it. i love pyrrha dve. pyrrha is the perfect woman

[revvnant]

one thing that’s important to note about mike’s psychosis is that he is not hallucinating all the time. he is full-time delusional but the degree to which that impacts his life on a daily basis sort of varies. he does deal with the constant background noise of thinking that he may be in another dimension or what he’s experiencing may not be real ( i am stating out of character that this is not the case, though he does know hell is real, he’s not as much afraid of being in Real Confirmed UCN Hell as he is being in, like, the twilight zone -- the point being that while mike experiences fantastical things and accepting those things would not count as delusional, the way he processes and thinks about these things is, because he is still very much living in the real world and is not in the cosmic torture dimension simulation room ).

but i think an under-explored aspect of psychosis is how it makes you question your own perception to the point where you can become a danger to yourself, because you learn to dismiss risks as your mind playing tricks on you. did that really just burn me? probably not, it’s fine. i feel like something is stabbing me? i won’t even check, it’ll go away. he doesn’t process pain the same way as other people ( when he’s still alive ) because he has to ( in his mind ) ‘err on the side of caution’ and not react to something that may not be real to other people, which can lead to him underreporting when he’s hurt or feeling unwell. he had an ant infestation in his room for months because he was like the bugs in my vision cannot hurt me. and his siblings screamed when they found it. idk, it’s just not all ‘i see what isn’t there’, it’s ‘i question everything i see because i know my mind is untrustworthy, so now i’m gambling on whether or not i need to do something about this’. and if he chooses wrong and reacts to what’s not there, it will be stigmatised. and if he doesn’t react to something that is there, like a pin he sat on or a real fire in the kitchen, that’s equally bad.

[orowyrm]

suddenly rabidly consumed by lust for a video game man and it’s slowly driving me insane. like eldritch madness or whatever but instead of cosmic entities beyond human comprehension bestowing me arcane knowledge that makes the universe implode or whatever, it’s just me thinking about how badly i wanna bend cavalero over a fucking table and thinking about it so so much and so hard that it unravels my entire brain like a spool of yarn over the course of a few days. i feel unwell

[cassandrattpd]

ttpd first listen opinions incoming:

fortnight- not what i was expecting at all but somehow exactly right???? like i was expecting poppy, angry, synth, with the signature post dreamy and it IS all of those things to a T but something in the narrative makes it more interesting and compelling. LOVE that she is continuing to be an author inspired by her own life. creating characters inhabited by her emotions.

the tortured poets department - ooooooooohhhhhhh oh no uh oh i was not looking out for this title track at all at it fucking HIT. who's gonna love you like me??? NO FUCKING BODY!!!!!! that's some shit. the bridge 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 about the ring 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 ohhhhh i'minsane im insane I'm snane whomstsg literally right here right now is wearing a ring on their left hand ring finger that is not an engagement ring and is not really anything but a desperate wish LMAO 🙋🙋🙋 TAYLOR I REALLY NEED TO TALK TO YOU

my boy only breaks his favorite toys - ONCE I FIX ME HE'S GONNA MISS ME????????????????????? JAIL JAIL JAIL JAIL this is a fucking bop wrapped in mental illness wrapped in a gnarly relationship dynamic. pack her up, she's coming home with me!! i found the one!!!! i mean it's been a few minutes since i heard it bc i paused and i'm typing this up so i don't remember it exactly but the line about pull my string and i'll tell you how he runs bc he's scared of loved L M A O taylor youuuuu are mean to me specifically and i love you

down bad - naked and alone in a field in my same old town that somehow seems so hollow now they'll say i'm nuts if i talk about the existence of you 😐😐😐😐😐😐😐 but also...is there going to be an alien music video. i'm being so dead serious, with the cosmic love and all the space mentions and beep boop spaceship sounds i deadass think the "naked and alone in a field" is gonna be used as an alien abduction metaphor in a mv ORRRRR i am high OR both! regardless: certified banger ✅

so long, london - .... wow. honestly i need more time to process that. not unexpected at all, but just so impactfully said and i can't remember any of it because every line hit me and knocked the last one out of my head. i need to listen 1000000 more times on repeat.

but daddy i love him - again not at ALL what i expected but oh my god???? i am so in love and so charmed by this song????? like hello country taylor 🥹🥹🥹👢 LOVE that we're flipping the convention of using religion in country songs and instead say um no actually keep your predatory misogynistic institution away from my body thx

fresh out the slammer - wearing invisible rings 😐😐😐😐😐 were they 😐😐 invisible... like 😐😐😐... the.. .😐 invisible string g 😐😐😐😐😐😐😐 this is not the cringe bop akin to vigilante shit i was expecting so i am simply processing.... so much. and like. i just have to say i love this album so much so far i love her

florida!!! - little did you know your home's really just a town you're just a guest in 🥴🥴🥴😵‍💫😵‍💫🥴😵‍💫🥴😭😭😵‍💫🥴 MAAAAAM!!!! I'M UNWELL!!!! IM GOING TO HAVE TO TELL PEOPLE ONE OF MY FAVORITE SONGS IS A SONG CALLED FLORIDA FUCKING STOP IT SONEOBE STOP THIS WOMAN

guilty as sin? - more exploration of societal perceptions of female sexuality! and virginity! and masturbation! unpacking the religious trauma of christian girlhood!!! literally i am over the fucking moon.

who's afraid of little old me? - 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 THIS IS THE BITCH THIS IS MY NUMBER ONE IM NOT EVEN DONE BUT I CANNOT IMAGINE ANYTHING BETTER THAN WHAT I JUST LISTENED TO I KNOW THERE IS MORE BRAND NEW TAYLOR SWIFT MUSIC BUT I WANT TO LISTEN TO THAT ONE AGAIN RIGHT NOW

i can fix him (no really i can) - ummmmmmmmmm well. i liked some lyrics, i liked some music. i think this one is gonna be a grower lol

loml - fucking.........fuck. the absolute LYRICS in this bitch. my mouth is lit er a ly AGAPE !!!! i yet again need to listen to this one or twenty hundred more times to process, but also loss of my life truthers rise

i can do it with a broken heart - i like most of it! I could do without the "i'm so depressed i act like it's my birthday" part of the chorus even though i relate to it but also i just know it's gonna grow on me. right now tho.......

the smallest man who ever lived - OHHHHHH SHIT not to be that person but joe alwyn literally found DEAD IN A DUMPSTER sucks to suckkkkkk i just!!!!! damn

the alchemy - 😳 she's a rebound song....iiiiiiii - hmmmmm. people who listened to leaks and have thus claimed the good lyric urls i just wanna talk.

clara bow - OH HELL YEAH. OH HELLLL YEAH. The Themes Of It All!!!!!!!!!!! hollywood/the media/culture at large just cyclically preys on young women. THE WORLD just cyclically preys on young women. hollywood is just holding up a mirror to the rest of society!! the rest of society is failing to realize the humanity of the offerings they're served!! PERFECT ALBUM CLOSER

now that i've taken 2.5 hours to do a first listen, a quick first ranking after hearing everything only one and seeing no one else's opinions:

1. who's afraid of little old me?

2. my boy only breaks his favorite toys

3. loml

4. the smallest man who ever lived

5. florida!!!

6. guilty as sin?

7. so long, london

8. clara bow

9. down bad

10. but daddy i love him

11. the tortured poets department

12. i can do it with a broken heart

13. fortnight

14. the alchemy

15. fresh out the slammer

16. i can fix him (no really i can)

[boombox-fuckboy]

Hi @rec-rewind, I hope you don't mind I make a post for this. I know you like Unwell, you've heard TMA, and you're listening to Archive 81 (if season 2 was more your thing). Here's 30 other horror pods for you:

Alice Isn't Dead: A truck driver travels America, telling stories of her strange encounters while looking for the wife she had thought was dead.

A Voice From Darkness: A radio help line for all your strangest and most disturbing troubles. Host Dr. Ryder takes calls, answers questions, shares strange history, and discusses ongoing supernatural problems around America.

The Blood Crow Stories: Each season is it's own horror story. S1 is tapes from a doomed cruise ship in WW2, S2 is a religious horror western, S3 is a cyberpunk with demons, and S4 is the occult and old-time movie studios.

The Deep Vault: Dead Signals' (Archive 81) other podcast, following survivors of a crumbling world in an underground bunker, complete with robots, ai, cosmic entities, etc.

Dining in the Void: Heads up for initial pacing issues and rough audio, but the issue is resolved, and I enjoy other aspects of the show enough to disregard. A group of strangers are summoned to a space station for a party, and promptly locked in with various horrors and an ominous countdown, until they can work out who the host is.

Dos: After You: A charming young hitman leaves home to travel Europe, hoping to track down, and kill, the god he fell in love with.

Down: A group of scientists and explorers are put in a submarine sent down an apparently bottomless pit in Antarctica. Nobody likes what they find down there.

Duggan Hull: After her friend/ex-girlfriend goes missing, a young woman tries to track her down and ends up in the middle of a strange and disturbing small town mystery. Fantastic piece of cosmic horror. (Not on Spotify)

Hello From The Hallowoods: A powerful entity visits your nightmares bearing stories of the people, in varying states of human and alive, who inhabit the Hallowoods, through horrors and joys, and as their lives begin to meet. Super queer.

Hi Nay: Supernatural horror following a young woman named Mari, who's babaylan (shaman) family background draws her into helping people with various horrific supernatural problems around Toronto. Formatted as phone calls to her mother telling her what's happened.

The Hotel: About a supernatural hotel that kills people, and the weird staff that make it happen.

How I Died: Work recordings of a forensic pathologist who can see ghosts, when he moves to a new town and encounters a strange sequence of murders.

I am in Eskew: Personal accounts from a man living in something that very much wants to be a city, and an investigator who was, in her words, hired to kill a ghost. Creatively horrific stories with a gentle voice and ambient rain. Rougher audio initially but not uncomfortably so.

Janus Descending: A xenopalentologist and a xenoarcheologist investigate the abandoned ruins of an ancient alien civilisation and find more than they bargained for. Listen to the supercut for this one. Really clever use of a strange format: you hear her recordings first to last, and his last to first, and it's all the more heartbreaking for it.

The Lost Cat Podcast: A man befriends strange entities, loses bits of himself and drinks an awful lot of wine while looking for his cat. Unique and fun writing that's stuck with me, yet just the right hint of cliché to make it satisfying in the moment, too. Soft and cosmic horror. (Not on Spotify)

Mabel: Series of voicemails from an elderly woman's caretaker, to her unresponding grandaughter. Horror/mystery with a slow slide into poetic lesbian fae body horror.

Maps of the Lost: An audio guide book to the strange people, places, and happenings of Britan. Lovely soothing voice, more supernatural or new weird but horror enough for this list.

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality: You're led through a museum of strange artifacts by a sweet audio tour guide AI, who will tell you the story behind each one. More new weird but there's plenty horror in there too.

Old Gods of Appalachia: Tales from the 1800s and 1900s of an alternate Appalachia inhabited by witches, old gods, and entities beyond understanding. With the air of being told stories around a campfire, these tales are connected by individuals or places, seperate but not detached. Any character is disposable, but none are treated with less respect than they deserve.

The Petrol Station: Strange and unsettling stories from a young woman working at a 24 hour petrol station in a very remote british town. Only 5 episodes, but I am hoping for more.

Red Valley: British cryogenic conspiracy comedy horror with some truely gorey sfx at times. Not my sense of humor personally, but it is enjoyable regardless and well made.

SAYER: Several sophisticated AI bully you into completing an array of both mundane and horrible tasks.

SCP: Find Us Alive: First, you don't need to know anything about SCP to enjoy this. A research team gets trapped in an underground research facility when the complex collapses and the building is dragged into a pocket dimension. The tear it was designed to study begins creating tiny copies of itself, generating strange entities the team needs to deal with. Oh, and the entire situation physically resets every 30 days. And yet, this is genuinely also an office comedy.

The Sheridan Tapes: In 2018, famous horror writer Anna Sheridan went missing leaving behind a collection of strange tapes. Listen along as a young detective with his own strange past tries to work out what happened to her. Cosmic horror.

The Silt Verses: In a modern world where gods are both commercialised and banned, two followers of an outlawed river god go on a pilgrimage. Great worldbuilding and tasty body horror. Same creators as Eskew (further up this list)

Station Blue: Isolation horror following a maintenance man who sets up an antarctic research base ahead of the main crew. Based on the creator's experiences with her own untreated mental illness but also there's some cosmic fuckery and light body horror.

Video Palace: Guy (and his wife when she has time) hosts a personal investigation into a collection of video tapes generally considered an urban legend, after he finds one and begins sleep talking.

The White Vault: A repair group sent to a research base near Svalbard gets trapped inside as an unending snowstorm rages, decides to take a nosy at the tunnels under the base, and find some disturbing things. Fantastic audio and a fun cast of accents and languages.

VAST Horizon: An agronomist travelling to a new world wakes from cryo to find the ship empty, off-course, and damaged. With the guidence of a malfunctioning AI, she tries to work out what happened and how to stop the situation aboard from getting worse.

WOE.BEGONE: A man's curiousity gets the better of him as he begins to play an alternate reality game of a different kind. The challenges are brutal and disturbing, but for the prize on offer, it might just be worth it. Single most endearing asshole lead I've encountered, very funny, very gay, and the music slaps.

Hopefully at least one appeals.

[niuniente]

Sometimes, when we dream, is it possible that our consciousness discovers something it shouldn’t? Almost like icarus flying too close to the sun? I had a dream a while ago and it was about the nature of humanity and war and how everything was futile. I woke up with this overwhelming sense of hopelessness. In the span of 90 seconds I forgot the dream and the feeling disappeared, which is weird for me. But I always got this sense that I caught a glimpse of some cosmic truth that humankind wasn’t meant to know

Good question. The answer is yes. Yes we can.

When we sleep, our soul goes on for adventures, meeting friends and spirit friends, learning, studying etc. It's called astral traveling and it's said that we don't sleep because the body needs sleep but because we, as souls, need rest from this harsh physical world. The energy levels here are so, so, so low compared to how they are in the spirit realm (which is our true home and true nature) that the soul needs to take breaks from this energy to recharge. I think it's a plausible explanation (though not the only explanation why we sleep).

When we are born, a veil is put over us so that we forget the spirit world, its energies and how it feels like. People are able to experience this in spiritually transformative experiences (STE), out of body experiences (OBE) and near-death experiences (NDE). Especially NDEs are full of descriptions of the spirit world, the craziness of this physical world and how the things we think are meaningful are meaningless - like for example, wars, territories, boundaries between nations, religious dogmas, fear based thinking and actions etc.

If this veil is lifted, it can leave the person very out of touch and unwell. Many, many people with profound NDEs describe how everything in the world was upside down and made absolutely no sense. They usually lose their interest in worldly things like politics, religions, news, activism, money, career etc. and find joy from simpler things like good food, nature, silence, good music etc.

There's a remarkable case of German Anke Evertz, who spent nine days in the spirit world with a NDE after an accident. It took her 8 years to recover from that experience, as the veil was gone and everything on this Earth was too much, too cruel, too heavy, too horrible to handle for Anke. You can check her interview dubbed in English here.

So, it's not so much that we're not meant to know but we're not meant to remember, as it can (and will) intervene with our mission and life here. Think about how you are living in a castle with servants and anything you can EVER dream off. Poof, it's there for you in an instant, finances are unlimited, you are loved and cherished. Then suddenly, you will move into a small wooden hut with limited income, limited love (if any), to live among harsh neighbors in a dark neighborhood. You remember the prior live and it makes you depressed to see where you are. You're homesick. You feel you don't belong. Everything is wrong and a mess but no one in your neighborhood notices anything - for them, this is the normal world.

So, in order for you to be able to live in this new home and neighborhood - which, in reality, is a nice suburban area with good people, they just don't radiate the same love as in the spirit realm everyone does - it is the best you don't remember that you ever even lived in a castle with limitless resources and love. This allows you to find joy, friends, love, delight, new things, meaning and your own story from your current home area. All the way until it is time to return to the castle.

Like, in the spirit’s eyes, getting something new like a new car, a new TV, a new fancy outfit, new shoes, a new trip is completely meaningless. But for us, when we have forgotten the spirit side, those are most wonderful things, evoking wonderful experiences, and it’s the experiences the spirit yearns to have.

[border-spam]

Does troy really have a split jaw or is that fanon?

It's total fanon!

The design of the split lines across his cheekbones and chin coupled with the cheek clips and v shaped hinge outline next to his ears lead to a lot of people coming to that same outcome, that there is something up with his mouth from a prosthetic/mod standpoint.

So much of his design is never mentioned once or referenced in any way (hightech spinal rig with tattoos under it, neuro connector, mech arm that's much older and doesn't seem related to the spine and neuroport, implants on bicep, face mod etc) that like Tyreen's scars and possible lower body Siren markings, fandom took over when it came to coming up with logical explanations for 'em.

This actually touches ground with some Ao3 comments I wanted to share as they are all Leech Lord compliant, so I'll list them here alongside links to the fics they were related to (note warnings!)

You leave no avenue for characterization unexplored. Troy's facial prostheses finally receiving backstory is amazing

- Maw (Gore/Bodyhorror)

I LOVE the idea of it being not just decorative shit on his face, but my MO for any content I make is always based around asking why, over and over, and trying to make sense of what material I'm using in the first place. The modded mouth is a popular piece of fanon but you know... why? Why would he do that shit to himself. WHY would he want to be grotesque, why would he be chasing the reaction people would have to it when canonically he seems to really not be interested in fan attention the same way Tyreen is, what's the difference to him between being adored as his persona or being lusted after as a monster, etc. I just love deep-diving into the logic behind character and world building? It's what adds meat to the bone for me.

Big 'ol character and worldbuilding / lore responses list under the cut -

He could afford better robots but these ones UNDERSTAND Ty, don't you get it?

- Good night in (tooth rotting fluff)

Hey just because it's mangled and broken, and can't perform its intended function to a degree expected of it by everyone around it... and it's got rusty sharp bits it accidentally hurts you with sometimes... and it's cranky but it doesn't mean it... and sometimes it errors out in a way that's mildly disturbing in a way you can't place.. uh.. doesn't mean you should just GIVE UP ON IT you know? He can fix them :) They will be fine :) No one should just throw away something that's trying so hard just because it's damaged... haha... :')

It's so hard seeing how much they tear each other down when they're the only thing they have left. And what a poor self-image Tyreen has beyond all that glitter and bluster...

- Wolf in sheep's clothing

The twins function well enough as a unit till tensions rise, and I was trying to seed in The Leech's influence on them in earlier work like this too - towards anyone else Ty would become MORE aggressively confident, more assured in her complete and utter dominance of the situation, her flawlessness, but against Troy who see's her for what she is, it turns inwards and eats at her instead of lashing outwards. He switches from relatively submissive around her to almost surgical levels of dissection, he knows exactly how to go for the jugular with words, and doesn't hold back. She's The Leech's mouth but he's its eyes and it's only when they lose control emotionally enough for it to claw to the surface of their psyches that you get an idea of how much it really affects them individually. GB had an absolute goldmine on their hands here of cosmic/body horror and the concept of toxic family when all you have is each other, there's so much to work with, and I figure it's a factor in why some people still really enjoy messing around with Calypso content.

I like how you allow Troy to be a disabled character, how his congenital defects and prosthetics colour his outlook and appear in ways big and small in all these vignettes. It's easy, I think, to see him as largely untroubled by his health apart from when he needs a charge from Tyreen in the game, but you allow him to struggle with his weakness.

- Chronic (Drug use)

I'm really glad to hear that's coming through in the writing because it's something I noticed a lot too. Very often when Troy, or other characters canonically disabled / chronically unwell are written it's "told" and not "shown". Chronic pain, illness, it's not something that is just a little tickbox in a life or some descriptive terms added to a character synopsis, it's something you live and deal with. There are bad days. There are times it is a negative that has to be worked around or faced in ways that aren't pleasant. It doesn't make you lesser or weak to have times where illness does leave you unable to function to a level you want to, it's not a failure for you to be unable to perform tasks when a disability or flair up means it's not viable. I feel personally that by showing scenes like this where his health and body issues do have a very visceral and impossible to ignore the effect on his ability to function, and going through his mental processes of dealing with and managing them, it brings the character across as stronger than if he never seemed to be shown dealing with symptoms or weaknesses. People are more than their disabilities and conditions, those aren't just kinda taglines to add onto a character's description and then never address. I feel like doing that in a way undermines what people deal with who manage chronic illness, pain, and who have disabilities that affect their daily lives negatively. Appreciating the effort it takes to manage them is important.

What I really like about these is that you can really understand as a reader how their dynamic must have evolved. How even before Leda's death Tyreen would have felt demonized while Troy got the attention because of his condition, because he was less willful.

- Starlight, Moonbright

Ah man, absolutely - and that shit stayed with them. It wasn't his fault and he never wanted it, but of course their parents would have had their extremely ill child at the forefront of their thoughts, especially during weeks when he was.. bad. Tyreen by nature even without The Leech's influence is a little attention seeker, she'd be the life of any party and she BLOSSOMS if she's got the spotlight, but as a little kid who's got literally no one but her parents and her brother, and who all three of which can't give her nearly as much time as she deserved? That's rough. That's really unfair. That coupled with The Leech's warping effect on their egos as they grew up and the bitterness and resentment they harbored in different ways created a reverse dynamic. She'd never be out of the Galaxy's attention again, and he'd have no choice but to take his rightful place in her shadow.

I love how you illustrate both how much more, and yet how much less Troy is now. How the blameless child, full of potential, is inextricably linked to the brutal, larger-than-life avatar he fashions.

- DeLeon ( Graphic Violence / Gore / Hallucinations)

He's molded the monster he is now out of the bones of the man he should have been - there's no going back really. There's nothing left to go back to. He broke Troy DeLeon apart to build the persona that acts like an iron lung now, suffocating him breath by breath while forcing him to still take them. That life is over, he killed it before it had a chance, but the idea of it is still there in his subconscious. Somewhere in the absolute trainwreck of Troy's brain is the tiny, flickering belief that maaaaaybe one day this will all be over and he can shuck off the bracer and spines, peel off all the shit he's covered his skin with, and just go back to not being Calypso. DeLeon here isn't some aspect of his mental state or his sins haunting him - it's The Leech, spitting venom at a host it loathes in something that's not sound or comprehensible language. His subconscious has just translated it into something it can understand - his greatest regret.

On if Borderlands Humans originated on Earth -

There's a really tenuous link between BL verse and rEarth, but it's there and can't be ignored. The cultures, accents, terminologies, so many are Earth specific despite these people being spread across galaxies, so hell yes - Earth as an emergence point makes total sense. The next question then, is why is it never mentioned - and you can cover for that with a lot of things like say, tt was so long ago that it's not relevant to anything that would ever be discussed, or it could be a mass evacuation from a catastrophe there is little record of now. I like to go with something along those lines, that the first human Siren host emergence on earth just absolutely decimated the planet. Like, we were doing fine till this random woman somewhere in the ass-end of nowhere develops weird markings overnight, then goes apocalyptic. The first Leech maybe, not understanding her powers and having them rip across continents in a spread of crackling electric death that only left husked shells of plants and animals in its wake, or the first Firehawk who went nuclear and burned the sky, or the first Voidgrasp who lost control and began to collapse the planet's core - some extreme shit that had humans fleeing en masse with barely any preparation and HUGE swathes of history and knowledge left behind. That would cover so many social things surviving into the BL verse, cultures, accents, cooking, that shit comes with us regardless of what we were able to throw into escape ships. Like so much data would be stored on any tech and data arrays within the vessels people would use to leave a dying planet even in an insane rush, but that shit waters down over time - if you're farming barely edible plants on some planet that smells like farts, are you really gonna be that stressed about teaching your kids history from a lost planet when your current concerns are not being eaten by something with 19 legs and 4 buttholes? Don't think so.

On if the other Siren entities are as influential to their hosts as The Leech -

I touch on it a wee bit throughout LL, but the others are FAR more passive and meld more to their host's whims. The Firehawk Siren wouldn't.. like.. care? If the host was burning down a planet or fighting off an evil corporation? They are removed from any nonsense happening on this side, they might not even really be able to tell, it's like asking an amoeba or a collection of sentient atomic particles what its opinion is on Brexit. That's not really its priority. The Leech is so aggressive in its control of the twins and desperation to drive them towards an outcome it desires only cause it's split, broken, removed from the song, and completely lost. We're talking a caged, half-mad animal removed from its natural environment and left totally isolated from its own kind for millennia. It's in pain, it's confused, it wants to find its way back to the song and the others and where it belongs, but it's stopped by a barrier it can't comprehend ( the twins and being ripped between them), so in its impotent rage it feeds back that hatred onto them. It's not really sentient in the way we would describe functional intelligence, but it wants, and craves, and FEELS. And it feels very, very angry.

Big thanks to @undergoingcalibrations for talking through so much of this with me!

Asks are Open!