#very complicated creatures they are

[lets-try-some-writing]

This is very important and I am up at 1 am wildly asking you this

DO BOTS DREAM

And if so

WHAT DO THEY DREAM ABOUT? DO THEY HAVE BIT NIGHTMARES? IS THERE A BOT EQUIVALENT OF THE GO TO CLASS IN YOUR UNDERWEAR NIGHTMARE?

I NEED ANSWERS AND YOU FEEL LIKE THE MOST QUALIFIED EXPERT TO ASK

Mwahah! You came to the right writer for this dear anon! I have enough thoughts on Cybertronian culture and biology to write a novel!

Cybertronians and Recharge Cycles

As a general rule, Cybertronians do not "sleep" or hibernate as organics do. While there are certain medical conditions that replicate the phenomenon to a degree, those are rare, and often temporary. Instead of sleep, Cybertronians have recharge cycles which they use as their way to sort through data, clear their processors of unnecessary sensory information, and run through alerts and protocols that are hyperactive. In short it is a chance for their systems to relax and for their minds to be cleared of stress inducing data that may clutter the processors and make functioning harder.

The frequency of recharge cycles depends entirely on the level of stress a Cybertronian is experiencing. Sparklings recharge frequently so that their processors can go through the data they collect and catalogue or discard it. Younglings recharge less as they know more and have largely set up their processors with all the basic knowledge needed to function, but lots of physical activity can lead to more frequent recharge cycles. In fully developed adults recharge cycles are a rare thing since their processors have adapted and their frames have grown into an equilibrium.

Of course there are also minor recharging cycles that function almost like a nap, and those are taken rather frequently, often a few times in a human week and lasting for up to three hours. In those instances the bot in question shuts down a large portion of their sensory capabilities and higher processing to sort through surface level data and allow their systems to have a brief break. They can still perform basic actions, but they are largely unaware and will be left incredibly groggy if broken from their half recharging state. However true recharge cycles are long and rare things that are often only taken once every few human months, often lasting for a few days at a time. It is polite to allow a recharging bot to remain untouched and to offer them energon when they wake since they will be rather starved for fuel.

The concept of "dreaming" is a bit of a foreign one for Cybertronians as a whole. Most often bots do not "dream" in the human sense. Their processors instead review memory files from all over the course of the time in between recharge cycles. Often the Cybertronian in question does not recall this process as their higher functioning is nearly entirely shut off so their systems can recalibrate. However that does not mean they do not experience anything while recharging. Young sparklings often tend to "dream" in that their processors recreate an event as best as possible based on how the sparkling sees it to try and collect the most important data. The sparkling relives moments, usually small ones while they rest and that helps them to fully absorb what they learn.

Younglings can still have this happen, but more often than not their processors run through probability sequences instead. While recharging their processors use their memories and experiences to recreate possible outcomes to events that already happened. So if a bot were to have been anxious about classes but still have had a reasonable cycle going to them, their processors may conceive the worst case scenario just to test probability. In such an instance they may predict a situation in which their plating is not properly cleaned or where they are without any of their outer armor, instead left bare in their protoform through some inconceivable event. Such predictions are the closest thing they have to "nightmares".

With grown bots, these predictions stop for the most part, especially as they grow older and have more experience and thus less need to play the probability game. At most they will have an odd prediction routine run when they are particularly stressed or going into a new environment. But once again, as soon as they are acquainted with a new environment or situation, their processors will stop such "dreams" because experience makes up for it.

Of course these rules only apply to normal Cybertronians. With the war, recharging properly has become impossible, and that has led to recharging having some unusual consequences.

With shortened recharge cycles or little to none, when a Cybertronian fighting in the war does recharge, it is often not a fun experience. For younglings it is... intense to say the least. Often they can spend a week or more recharging when allowed simply because there is so much to review. Not only that, but their prediction routines run at high paces to try and get through the millions of outcomes, often leaving younglings groggy or even traumatized if they recall the "dreams". Their frames also tend to be so very exhausted from sometimes years of nonstop effort that when they do finally drop, they can be left passing out randomly for weeks afterwards as their processors try to get through whatever it might have been unable to fully review.

For grown Cybertronians, the consequences of little to no recharge come in a variety of forms. For some, they suffer much like younglings and are forced to endure horrendous prediction sequences that leave them struggling against their own minds. Others recall nothing but are left to endure complete and total shutdown, with absolutely no way to wake them until their recharge cycle is complete. They wake far more happy and effective than others, but during that time they are totally exposed and vulnerable, a glaring weakness during war. It certainly doesn't help that these recharge cycles can come upon a bot almost randomly with at most a few minutes before they drop.

Cybertronians who have experienced more trauma than others may find their frames wandering the halls as their minds struggle against all sorts of predictions and scenarios. Their minds are more rested, but they often are left sluggish and unhappy due to how little rest the remainder of their frame received. A scant few who suffer the most may end up unable to recharge properly due to how severe the prediction routines are. Those unfortunate few end up living near entirely off partial recharges and can only endure a day or so of proper recharge before they wake barely rested enough to continue onward.

However its not all doom and gloom.

Cybertronians can have happy "dreams" too. It is a rarer thing, but in response to extreme stress or increadible joy, Cybertronians can pull up old memory files of happier times, or when none are available, create predictions based off of hopes and dreams. Those sorts of "dreams" are rarely remembered, but they have shown to have a soothing effect on a strained mind.

[secretmellowblog]

One thing I feel people almost always overlook about Javert is that:

The book’s narrator is usually harsh/sarcastic towards Javert, and that harshness is why his character has pathos. Javert is able to be sympathetic because Victor Hugo has basically no respect for his beliefs. Javert is so pitiable because Hugo mocks and drags him on basically every page he appears.

I’ve mentioned before that the message of Les Mis is (paraphrasing) that ACAB— Javert is the best police officer it is possible to be, and he is terrible, because the laws he enforces are terrible. His law & order ideology is terrible. Everything he believes is fundamentally wrong, and so deeply wrong that it deserves no respect.

Yes, Hugo acknowledges that Javert occasionally has a misguided kind of nobility— the nobility of holding yourself honestly to a set of bad rules, the nobility of following a terrible moral code even when it hurts you. But Hugo has no respect for Javert’s bigotry, or his bootlicking, or his deranged obsessive worship of law and order. Hugo portrays the way that Javert martyrs himself for his ideology as strangely honorable— but the ideology itself is mocked and condemned. Hugo thinks martyrdom is cool, but that Javert is martyring himself for a terrible cause.

In his most sympathetic moments, Javert’s worldview is portrayed as pitiable…. not a worldview that’s worthy of true total genuine respect, but a worldview that’s deeply pathetic in its wrongness.

Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs.

This is part of why those old 2012-era les mis fanfics always threw me off, if anyone remembers the fandom trends at the time. XD People used to write Valjean and pre-barricades Javert having political debates, as if the two of them could make arguments about law that were equally valid and worthy of respect, and pre-barricades Javert had a worthwhile set of beliefs that Valjean could learn from. But to me it’s personally kinda like, no XD. Nah. The whole thing about pre-barricades Javert is that he does not have any valid points to make. He has nothing resembling a point. He is “ignorant” and determined to stay that way because he literally believes that thinking is evil. He is a violent authoritarian whose worldview is just “mindless self-destructive bootlicking and bigotry.” I joked about it in a previous post but if we want a character who offers a genuinely meaningful counterpoint to Valjean’s philosophy, who could debate him on politics, and who could represent justice while Valjean represents mercy— that character is Enjolras, not Javert.

Valjean has a fascinating complicated relationship with law and politics and violence, but Javert is just a deeply pitiable brainwashed creature who martyrs himself for Wrong things.

Hugo pities Javert, but he does not treat Javert’s worldview --‘authority is always right, rigid social hierarchies must always be enforced, human life has no intrinsic value, the police must violently suppress any kind of crime or rebellion’— as something that deserves to be genuinely respected. It is not something that’s even worthy of debate. It is wrong, it is nonsense, it is an incoherent cruel self-contradicting ideology, and Javert only believes it because (to quote Hugo’s sarcastic narration) “thought was something to which he was unused.” (Or to be more charitable, Javert believes these terrible things because he was born inside a prison and has been brainwashed from birth into internalizing a cruel carceral view of the world.)

And I think Hugo generally does a good job of walking that tightrope — having pity for Javert without portraying Javert’s ideology as something worthy of genuine admiration. He sympathizes with how rigidly Javert holds himself to his own moral code, while condemning the moral code itself for being idiotic. He has empathy with Javert’s sincere self-destructive dedication to what he believes in, while pointing out the things he believes in are all stupid. He pities Javert’s martyrdom, while condemning the nonsense that Javert martyrs himself for.

One of my Top Ten Favorite Pathetic Javert Moments is this one, when Javert recognizes Marius’s body after the barricades:

A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was to die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his elbows leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.

Because Javert martyrs himself so earnestly for this terrible cause! He “takes notes” even when he believes he’s going to die and the notes cannot possibly be of any use to anyone, simply because taking notes is the thing he has been ordered to do. He’s so self-destructively dedicated to performing these useless pointless tasks because he believes there is real ~dignity~ to his mindless bootlicking— when there isn’t.

That’s why Javert’s emotional breakdown and suicide hit so hard for me, in a way that it wouldn’t if the narration was forgiving towards his stupid belief system. The contrast between Javert’s sheer pathetic terror and the often harsh/sarcastic narration is just….wild. It makes Javert sympathetic without making his awful ideology seem good, reasonable, or valuable. (And while this is only adjacent to the point I’m making- the harsh narration in Derailed also emphasizes the way Javert has been trained to view his own thoughts/emotions with contempt.) Javert is deeply pitiable/sympathetic without his ideology being framed as correct. And the whole tragedy of his character comes from the fact that he is utterly entirely wrong.

If I were to summarize the pathos of Javert, I wouldn’t say “he’s sympathetic because he’s a noble anti-hero with good strong morals who makes some valuable points about the importance of law” or w/e. I’d say that you can feel sorry for him because he’s a wretched brainwashed creature who’s never done anything right even though he wants to, and is deeply ridiculously pathetic without ever realizing it.

As Hugo puts it: “without himself suspecting the fact, Javert (…) was to be pitied.”

[latimeria-fell-from-heaven]

i'm throwing myself off a cliff if i can't get this stupid thing (◉ _ ◉)

[thebuttsmcgee]

Ive seen some people get mixed up (also sorry if this comes off pompous I swear I'm not I just really fuckin enjoy these movies ghggb) so I'd like to clarify that the Big Bad Wolf is an already established character in the Shrek world.

And he's just some guy. He also might transform into a human woman with a strong accent when there's a full moon according to a halloween special but ya know.

The wolf that chases Puss in Last Wish tho is, Death, straight up, as he said.

Some promotional media did advertise him as the double b wolf but that was just to not spoil the surprise. (Apparently some promos would also just call him The Wolf so yeup.)

However, it's also not unreasonable to mix up the 2 since in Shrek's ogreverse (ogre universe I NEED to coin the phrase c'mon now) there's been a few number of soft rebooted characters from a lot of Shrek media.

But to go off strictly from the movies, the 2 most obvious examples are Rumpelstiltskin and the 3 bears.

The left depictions are really just one-off jokes/background characters that rarely appeared in more than 5 scenes from previous movies (Shrek 3 and 1 respectively), while the right depictions are the later focused antagonists that got plenty of screen time (Shrek 4ever after and Puss in Boots 2 the Last Wish respectively).

The difference tho is that the original depictions are really Just one-off jokes. Nothing more than just something in the background. The Big Bad Wolf however is an already established part of Shrek's friend group alongside the 3 little pigs, Pinocchio and Gingy.

Basically, not someone they could just easily make a soft reboot about like with the aforementioned 2 examples.

It is incredibly likely tho that DreamWorks did base Death a bit off of the real life folklore of the Big Bad Wolf. Considering how much they love old tales, and how much old stories had him as the main antagonist. (Plus c'mon. Wolf from Bad Guys literally says he's the big bad in every story, they're definitely self aware at this point.)

Having the penultimate depiction of the end of life itself in their fairytale inspired long-running world be loosely based on the most popular antagonist from old folklore stories is most likely on purpose, and I gotta say, based.

It's also likely that Death can take whatever form he chooses. But I'm cool with gnarly wolf form. 👍

[creaturetap]

horse sketches

(ID in alt)

[chickenmcnuggies]

now that im finished with this gay fates update i figured i’d show off the other modding project i’ve been working on, which is a dwarf fortress mod to add a lot of stock fantasy creatures i was disappointed weren’t in the game (or any other mods)

This isn’t all of them, but the sprites im most happy with

cockatrice male and female (megabeast, the snake head on the tail injects a venom that paralyzes their foes)

centaur male and female (sentient and similar to animal people)

peryton

various different ent caste

mogalls (a la fire emblem, shadows of velentia’s design specifically)

quetzalcoatl

wurm (megabeast, based on the wurm design from dungeon meshi)

wyverns (come in 4 different colors!)

phoenix (megabeast, skin made of stone and blood made of magma)

griffon and hippogriff (hippogriff are common domestics)

[michael-pemulis]

even if you don’t play DnD definitely go see honor among thieves; it’s super fun and well-done and accessible to people who’ve never played. if you want a slightly enhanced experience, do what I did an go with folks who do play, and ask them some of their favorite settings, character types, creatures, or tropes on the way over so you can be delighted when you recognize something.

[imabiscuitinthousandworlds]

rock climbing. chafed hands. hit your knee somewhere against a ledge you shouldn't have. almost put your hand into a bee nest. great view. your partner has got you. rock climbing. neck hurts from staring up for too long. unsure where to put your feet because there's not that much space, much less even, but you gotta keep your partner in view. you got chalk in your eyes somehow. the rope is sliding through your hand as your partner climbs higher. life is good.

[blujaydoodles]

WELL I made this mostly for reference for myself, but in honor of tiddies being made legal again(?) on tumblr AND the fact that Nyssa got flagged back in 2018 despite being fully clothed, here's a quick ref page of my sweet little nudist 😌

[cypriathus]

The Äylcephomus

WARNING: There is a brief description about androgynous genitalia.

Äylcephomus (name meaning: burning messenger or they who announce our blessedness):

This particular Æylphitus breed is considered to be the first and most precious creation amongst the Hirczalotepus Tejasozuri. This majestic breed is commonly referred to as angels or heavenly beings amongst other species. However, they prefer to call themselves the Äylcephomus because this sacred name derives from their creator goddess, Äylcephinozur. They are viewed as sanctified guardians and shepherds who strictly follow a life of untainted righteousness. They have their own celestial hierarchy that ranks each angelic breed from those close to the incorporeal universe down to the material universe. Within their superlunary abode, heaven is separated by 10 concentric spheres. They even have control over the 7 terraces of purgatory, the leaders who were once angels, and their respective trials for the limbo-goers. Similar to the Tejasozuri, most Äylcephomus are given titles that associate them with a specific concept and/or living creature. Due to this customary tradition, Äylcephomus are the most common avatars of the Hirczalotepus Tejasozuri. Unlike the titans, they do have true forms and are all physically androgynous. These true forms usually reflect the personality, strength, celestial title and hierarchical breed of an angel. It’s extremely rare for an Äylcephomus to have no true form. They have snow-white or ashy skin with greyish freckles, massive wings, and somewhat porous bones to allow flight to be easier. As mentioned before, all angels are physically androgynous, but that’s in reference to their genitalia. All angels reside in male-shaped or female-shaped bodies and they have a main genitalia corresponding to their appearance. However, there are a few that do possess both male and female characteristics, but that’s more common amongst the older generation. Females possess a medium-length translucent, extremely flexible penis with spiked external glands and faint blue, purple, and orange veins. It’s hidden in a duct with two bulbous testes that can be located in front of the womb. In order to properly use it, the penis comes out of their pseudo-clitoris. Their saliva can burn through things that are naturally sinful and metamorphose their golden ichor into certain weaponry such as blades. They can also use their organic mass to retract their wings, heal themselves, and create barriers and certain eldritch weapons such as tendrils. They're immune to all divine-based and low level infernal abilities.

[enclarice]

Happy Halloween, from Kaolin of porcelain and Ichi of the 4th dimension !

Also...

Last year's art , Happy Halloween from Syringa the shifter and Ampersand the hedgehog!

[just-some-guy-joust]

in response to the submission i just got: i'm so sorry this is for. the creatures. from real life. the guys that are actually down there in our world. irl guys

[nemographe]

my cryptic twine game, wip since the year of our lord 2021, currently back in the works

has tons of weird stuff that will be seen by the 0.3 people who will have chosen the exact series of choices leading to it

also typos

[genderqueer-karma]

also btw i think a lot of things would be fixed if we stopped trying to make my babygirl (manfred) out to be more than he is. at the end of the day he really is just Some Guy and i appreciate that so much.

[daydreamerdrew]

The Incredible Hulk (1968) #247

[watchmakermori]

deeply glad I persisted with attack on titan. the first half of season 3 was a bit of a mixed bag for me but the second half was fantastic. I knew bits and pieces about the lore but I’m genuinely surprised that the truth about the titans and the world beyond the walls was so satisfying