#while also being a distinct character from the one in this story

[auren-zagarra]

Your psychological analyses are so cool to read! Normally I'd skip something like that but it caught my eye since you're in the profession and I'm more receptive to that (It doesn't help that I have the same opinion as your conclusions and while people can think what they want....it's satisfying to feel like you're right and have proof lol).

Would you consider doing an analysis on Jamil sometime? He's my fave and I'd like to understand his mind a bit better. And maybe you could make an educated guess on what he'll do in the future (like will he continue staying a servant, will he break free from it, will he keep contact with Kalim? I'd love to see him break away from servitude but still work for Kalim in a good position, like how Jafar was for the Sultan)?

Jamil Viper: A Psychological Analysis

Disclaimer: Although this post is written by a professional psychologist, it is not intended to serve as a formal diagnosis. Rather, it is a character analysis of Jamil Viper, created out of personal interest and passion for world-building. In psychological practice, accurate assessment should never be based solely on external observation.

Author Notes (edited): Hello! First of all, thank you so much for being so sweet - you're all incredibly kind, and I really appreciate the support. I just want to clarify a few things: Jamil’s analysis was especially challenging because his canon material differs between the Japanese version and the official English translation. So, I decided to stick with the fan-made translation of the original game. That said, his character is quite difficult to diagnose, it was a pain to write that </3. I just want to also clarify something: Jamil’s situation wasn’t one of ownership or slavery. There’s an important distinction between being a slave and being a servant, and I believe his case falls into the latter. That said, it's still a form of systemic abuse. Also, it’s important to recognize that his parents played a significant role in shaping who he is. Their influence likely contributed just as much to his personality and emotional responses as his role within the Asim household.

Jamil Viper is introduced as a dutiful student of the Scarabia dormitory and vice housewarden under Kalim Al-Asim. Jamil is the son of the Viper family, which has served the Al-Asim household for generations. From childhood he was raised explicitly as Kalim’s attendant, trained never to outshine or disobey his master. In practice this means Jamil maintains an outwardly modest and compliant persona: he avoids drawing attention to himself and consistently downplays his own abilities (as he notes in flashbacks, he “could never surpass Kalim” and would “pretend to be incompetent” whenever they played together). Narratively, Jamil initially appears as a loyal, if somewhat reserved, companion to Kalim, however, in the story’s fourth book (Schemer of the Scalding Sands) his long-suppressed resentment bursts forth: he concedes he plotted for years to unseat Kalim and publicly betrays him. In summary, canon portrays Jamil as a complex character shaped by his birthright - ostensibly a humble guard and confidant, but one whose hidden ambition and bitterness drive a dramatic reversal in Book 4.

Personality and Coping Mechanisms

Psychologically, Jamil exemplifies a blend of traits that reflect his upbringing. On the Big Five dimensions, he appears highly conscientious (dutiful, disciplined, tradition-bound) and relatively neurotic (internally anxious and resentful). For example, he meticulously plans his schemes and strictly adheres to social protocol, yet he harbors deep anger and frustration beneath the surface. He is neither overly extroverted nor warmly amicable; rather, he is soft-spoken and measured in public, which can be interpreted as moderate agreeableness mixed with a hidden competitiveness. Openly he defers to Kalim and maintains cordiality, but privately he covets recognition for himself. This duality may reflect Freudian dynamics: Jamil’s superego (internalized duty and family honor) conflicts sharply with his id impulses (rage and ambition).

Psychodynamically, Jamil’s behavior fits with classic defense mechanisms: repression of anger and frustration, and reaction formation. By unconsciously blocking (repressing) unacceptable impulses, he avoids direct confrontation. His loyalty and conscientiousness can be seen as a covert expression of anger, where he over-compensates with dutiful service (a form of reaction formation). Anna Freud’s definition notes that such defenses are “unconscious resources” the ego uses to reduce internal conflict. For example, Jamil may sublimate his anger into work and organization; by exerting rigid control over his duties he gains a sense of agency in an otherwise powerless role. Cognitively, he likely maintains schemas (core beliefs) of inferiority and duty, which shape his interpretation of events. When Kalim’s behavior upsets him, Jamil might use rationalization or justification to cope (e.g. reminding himself it’s his duty). In short, psychological theory suggests Jamil copes by erecting internal barriers and strictly controlling his outer world, keeping his true feelings buried beneath a calm facade.

A Life of Servitude: Trauma and Its Effects

Jamil’s upbringing meets the definition of chronic childhood trauma. Generations of Vipers have effectively lived under a hereditary servitude contract to the Asim family, and Jamil himself has known no other life. In clinical terms, prolonged exposure to such inescapable stress in childhood (akin to slavery or trafficking) predisposes a person to complex PTSD (CPTSD). According to ICD-11, CPTSD arises from prolonged or repetitive trauma from which escape is impossible - explicitly, authoritative sources list slavery and childhood abuse as triggers for CPTSD. Symptoms of CPTSD include persistent negative self-concept, emotional dysregulation, and difficulties in relationships. Jamil’s behavior aligns with these: he often feels worthless or trapped by fate (a negative self-view), shows intense anger when pushed but must hold it in (emotion dysregulation), and struggles to form normal peer relationships outside duty.

Learned helplessness also describes Jamil’s condition. Psychologist Martin Seligman showed that when subjects endure repeated, uncontrollable aversive events, they eventually stop trying to change their situation. Jamil has been “subjected to Kalim’s carefree whims” for years with no real power to refuse; he may have learned that resistance is futile. Thus he often simply complies, suppressing his own needs (which is consistent with learned helplessness and with repression). Over time, this could internalize into chronic stress and depression. In sum, Jamil’s servitude is a form of developmental trauma: it likely imposed persistent stress hormones in youth, disrupted normal family roles, and taught him to expect lack of control. Psychological research shows such trauma can cause long-term changes in self-esteem and mood; for example, people with CPTSD often harbor deep shame and guilt over “failing” or “not doing enough”. In essence, his life resembles a cycle of trauma: he was never free to refuse tasks, learned helplessness made him passive, and the chronic abuse of status lowered his self-concept - all factors that theory links to complex trauma outcomes.

Manipulation

In the events of Book 4, Jamil’s darker side emerges as he actively manipulates others to achieve his goals. Canonically, he hypnotizes the protagonist and even classmates to remain in Scarabia and remove obstacles to his plans. Psychologically, these actions exemplify Machiavellianism. Machiavellianism is defined as a personality trait marked by cynicism, self-interest, and strategic manipulation of others. High Machs “lack empathy” and see others as means to an end. Jamil’s calculated use of magic to control peers aligns with this: he calmly bends others’ will without overt remorse, and he prioritizes his objectives above their autonomy. His demeanor during manipulation is unemotional and goal-oriented, much like the textbook “ruthless and self-centered willingness to exploit others” seen in high Machiavellians.

Possible Diagnosis

His chronic childhood trauma and internalization of servitude suggest complex PTSD (ICD-11). CPTSD is characterized by the core PTSD symptoms (re-experiencing, avoidance, hypervigilance) plus enduring disturbances in self-organization. In Jamil’s case, the prolonged nature of his servile life (listed as an example trauma in ICD-11) likely led to chronic negative self-concept and interpersonal difficulties. Thus an ICD-11 diagnosis of CPTSD (code 6B41) is plausible: he shows affect dysregulation (repressed anger that flares), shame and guilt, and persistent relational issues. Under DSM-5, these symptoms might partly map to PTSD or an unspecified trauma and stressor-related disorder, but CPTSD is a closer fit due to its long-term scope.

Personality-wise, Jamil exhibits subclinical dark traits. He demonstrates entitlement and exploitation (mirroring Cluster B narcissism), yet lacks grandiose flamboyance. He also shows hyper-conscientiousness about duty and order - features that could hint at Obsessive-Compulsive Personality tendencies - though his motivations are rooted more in fear and shame than mere rigidity. We can say Jamil’s profile aligns most closely with trauma-related disorder criteria and some personality disorder traits (notably narcissistic/dark traits).

In summary: Complex PTSD is the most fitting diagnostic framework, supplemented by subclinical narcissistic and Machiavellian traits, all rooted in long-term emotional trauma, identity suppression, and chronic stress from a life of servitude.

[strangerthingsfanworkrecs]

I would like to nominate the wonderful @bettyfrommars

Betty is an amazing story-teller and world-builder who creates unique and immersive universes to get lost in.

Please ask her about her influences and inspirations and how she creates her reader characters and OC's.

<3

Introducing @bettyfrommars

We're highlighting Betty for her written fics! All recs tagged #bettyfrommars will be for her works. Betty answered a few questions about her process below.

What's a fandom interaction that made you really happy?

There have been so many. I feel lucky with all of the wonderful interactions and readers I have met through this fandom. The first one that comes to mind is meeting @somnabulic_thing who became one of my closest friends. They created art for a couple of my fics, including a clown!Eddie for my Nightmare Factory series that I cherish. I can't tell you how much meeting a fandom veteran like Somna meant to a newbie like me. They inspire me and are also the only reason I stayed active in the fandom after last spring when I started to feel like I didn't belong. Also, the amazing @dandelionfluff was a loyal reader of my biker!Eddie x reader series I'm on Fire (I kept screenshots of their comments that I look at to cheer myself up), and she handmade an incredible bind of the fic. The work they put into it blows my mind, and I'm just grateful for their continued friendship in general.

What's your favorite character or aspect of Stranger Things to create for?

Eddie Munson is my reason for joining the fandom, but I've also come to love my various versions of Steve that I like to plop into random au's. Lately I've been enjoying adding others into the mix like Wayne and Joyce and Robin. I also love throwing OC's into the ST world. Since I was a child, that's all I've known, so learning to create reader inserts was an interesting process.

What's your artistic process like? Any tools you favor?

My artistic process is a mess. I don't ever use outlines or have much of a plan at all when I sit down to write or paint, and I've learned that is the only way the muses will come and hang out. There is a wall of fear that blocks me occasionally, but as soon as I push through and start creating instead of just staring at the screen and feeling sorry for myself, it's fairly easy to get things flowing. There is a lot of trust in the unknown involved. It eventually feels like I am merely along for the ride while being used as a vessel for whatever tale I am telling. I'm one of those funny people who can't have any music or sound in the background when I write. It has to be dead silent. Sometimes I even wear earplugs. But the playlists I make for my fics are a very crucial part of daydreaming up scenarios for the story when I am cleaning and driving around. Oh, and reading. Reading the work of others is an important part of my creative process and growth.

What was it like to work on Death Becomes Us?

This was one I did not think I would finish, but I'm glad I drop kicked the doubt because that final chapter is one of my favorites ever. I rewatched a LOT of the series True Blood during. I never cared for Vampire Bill in the show and wanted to replace him with a version of Eddie everyone could sink their teeth into. I wrote most of it in the summer, so I'd retreat to a cool, dark space and disappear to visit Bob Newby in his vampire/human crossover bar. Also, I wanted a reader who was very distinct and really not a reader insert at all. Dove becomes more and more OC as the story progresses, and if I did it all over, I'd make her deeply OC from the beginning.

What was it like to work on I'm on Fire?

What a ride this series was! When it started out, I was stumbling with reader inserts for the first time (fandom writing in general) and had a very simple idea in mind for a tow truck driver who falls in love, but it became so much more than that. I rewatched Sons of Anarchy and really just let the characters do what they wanted to do, sometimes to the detriment of canon characterization. Many OC's were born from this fic, including Steve's son Oliver, who Robin helps raise, Robin's partner Katie, the evil villain Charlene, and the beloved Astrid Bautista that @texasblues helped me develop. She's been writing the Steve x Astrid backstory and it's perfect. I was pumping out a chapter a week back then, which is crazy now to think about it. I was absolutely living and breathing that story. A lot of my steam came from the fandom interaction; I made so many special connections with readers back in those days. Also, it was just a great world to disappear into. I make some reference in the fic to biker Eddie having dreams of being attacked by demobats, to link it to ST in a parallel world way. I'm in the process of a total OC rewrite of the story and plan to play more with those type of connections that each character would have to the original world.

See the art @texasblues commissioned for this fic from dr-aculaa here

[finitevoid]

I was tagged by @sparrowmoth to share 7 lines of my current WIP, and I have no idea what a “line” constitutes in this context, also I’m on mobile, so you’re getting like 4 paragraphs sorry lol. Reading this over is an absurd amount to post for this prompt but I hate breaking up my writing Sorryyyy cries

And I spat bile onto my vomit puddle, and then I laughed. I laughed long and loud, sharp and high. I sat there and I laughed, because the world was on its head; I was back home and my dad’s head was cracked open like an egg leaking scarlet rot and you were yelling at me. Even the sunlight seemed absurd. Like I’d taken a halfway trip through my own nonsensical, terrifying dreams.

“Is this funny?” You snarled. “Do you like flying off the handle? I swear to god, you’re insane!” You buried your fingers in your hair, tugging on it, hard. “I don’t get you at all! I think you’re not into me and then you’re kissing me! I think you’re pissed and then you laugh! I think you’re calm and rational and maybe— for once— actually handling yourself, and you punch my dad!”

“He killed him,” I gasped out. “I could tell from the look on his fucking face. Innocent men don’t look that calm.”

[thankskenpenders]

The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings review

The day has finally come. Many, understandably, thought we'd never get here. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten here. We've been through so much. Lawsuits, reboots, redesigns, unreleased NFTs, empty legal threats over the fact that movie Knuckles has a dad, an attempt to license out Scourge the Hedgehog to fans that immediately got canceled (in both meanings of the term), and many, MANY idiotic Twitter controversies. But now, here we are.

Thirteen years after first announcing it in the middle of his legal battles with Archie and Sega that changed the American Sonic comics forever, former writer Ken Penders has released the first part of his new series: The Lara-Su Chronicles.

Yes. I had to buy the book. I had to take one for the team. Look at the fucking URL of this blog, a blog I've been using to talk about the American Sonic comics for nearly a decade while the specter of this book loomed in the distance. The one time I've actually been paid to write an article about anything in any professional capacity, it was an article about the Penders lawsuits. I'm cited on his Wikipedia page. There was no way I was going to skip reviewing this, and there was no guarantee that scans would ever turn up online given the incredibly small audience for this trash. (Only 166 people preordered this, and even that number feels way higher than it should be.) No, I had to preorder it to ensure I could get a copy and cover it for the blog... even if that meant my name would be forever immortalized in the list of "supporters" in the back of the book. These are the sacrifices I must make as a woman who stumbled ass backwards into being an amateur Archie Sonic historian.

So, what exactly is in this book? How much of it is new? How bad is it? How did we even get here in the first place? How can this exist without Sega pursuing legal action? What happens next? And, most importantly... why are there multiple depictions of an Archie Sonic character breastfeeding in this book?

I'm here to answer those questions as best I can, and in agonizing detail.

First, for those just tuning in to this decades-long saga or those who maybe don't know the full story, here's a refresher on the background info.

"What the hell is this?"

The Lara-Su Chronicles is Ken Penders' long-dreaded long-awaited continuation of his 1994-2006 run on Archie Sonic, ignoring everything written after he left by other writers like Ian Flynn. In particular, it picks up from the cliffhanger ending of the 2003-2004 arc "Mobius: 25 Years Later," which was set in what Ken considers the definitive canonical future of the series. It stars Knuckles' daughter from that future era, Lara-Su, among other new and returning characters. The project was first announced near the start of Ken's legal battle with Archie in 2011, and he's been posting WIP previews online for about a decade. Now, after all this time, a Lara-Su Chronicles book finally exists.

We'll get to the actual contents of that book in a bit.

"He can do that without getting in trouble with Sega?"

Believe it or not, yes, he can.

Thanks to the outcome of Archie Comics' woefully mismanaged lawsuits against Ken (yes, they sued him after he started filing for copyrights, not the other way around), he now has full legal ownership of every story he wrote for Archie Sonic and every character he created for the series. This was explicitly granted to him in the terms of the settlement between him and Archie (acting on behalf of Sega). He can even reprint his old Sonic material as-is to his heart's content. The main catch is just that he can't write new stories featuring Sega characters or trademarks, and his new stories also have to be distinct from Sonic at a glance to avoid confusing readers. As such, reprints can't use Sonic iconography on the cover, a few Sega characters (mainly Knuckles) have been renamed and slightly redesigned in the new stories, and the art style has been changed to less closely resemble Sonic. But otherwise, he can do whatever he wants with his own characters.

All of this is because Archie lost the original copy of Ken's work-for-hire contract that signed over the rights to his work. Without that (or any alternative that was considered permissible in court), his comics and characters are the property of their creator by default. Yes, those old comics are full of Sega stuff, but Sega doesn't automatically own the copyright for every drawing of Sonic in existence. And Sega put their stamp of approval all over those comics and let them get sold at retail for decades, even though (in the eyes of the court) there was no legal paperwork granting them ownership of any of it. It's almost like they were unwittingly distributing a fan comic for years and declaring it a fair use of their property, and now there's no takesies backsies. It's a strange and unique copyright situation. Again, they worked all this out in the settlement. And, yes, fans have long speculated that Ken stole and destroyed his own contract to regain the rights to his work, but frankly Archie was so incompetent throughout the lawsuit (it went so bad that they had to fire and replace their lawyers midway through) that I completely buy the idea of them just losing important legal documents.

Also, in case it needs to be spelled out: while Ken's a weirdo, it's ultimately a good thing for creatives everywhere that Archie lost their lawsuit against Ken. We do not want to live in a world where corporations can claim ownership of peoples' work without the contracts to back it up. That would be an incredibly dangerous legal precedent to set. And more comic creators, and artists in general, should own their own work! Corporations are not your friend! They'll delete your work for a tax write-off in a heartbeat! It's just bewildering that this guy, of all people, was the creator who ended up successfully getting his shit back, and that this is what he's doing with it.

"What about his old collaborators? Are they involved? Is he paying them?"

Ken is mostly doing The Lara-Su Chronicles solo, though he has, in fact, talked about compensating the artists involved in any material he's reprinting. The ones who give enough of a shit to get paid for a small scale reprint of something they did 20 years ago, anyway.

On the subject of his collaborators, it's also worth pointing out that Ken's wasn't the only contract that was lost. Most of the early Archie Sonic writers from before Ian Flynn's time seem to be in the same boat as Ken, with the ownership of their stories and characters defaulting back to them. Again, Archie fucked up big time. But like I said, most of them don't really seem to give a shit. For most of them, Sonic was just a random temporary gig they took to pay the bills while Marvel was busy going bankrupt in the '90s, not the thing that defined their entire careers.

The only other Archie Sonic contributor who's tried to do anything on the level of what Ken is doing was writer and editor Scott Fulop. In 2016 he attempted to sue Archie for the unauthorized use of what are now retroactively considered his copyrighted characters and stories, and he even announced a standalone comic about his most famous Sonic character, the recurring villain Mammoth Mogul (sort of a pastiche of DC's Vandal Savage and Marvel's Kingpin, with wizard powers added for spice). However, Fulop lost his lawsuit because he didn't put together a particularly compelling case. Since then he seems to have wiped all traces of his ill-advised Mammoth Mogul comic and his company, Narrative Ark Entertainment, from the internet. For now, this leaves The Lara-Su Chronicles the only project of its kind.

"What about those other Archie Sonic reprints he just announced?"

At the time of writing, Ken is once again claiming that he's trying to get the band back together to reprint all of Archie Sonic, now under the bad new banner "Floating Island Productions: MOBIAN LINE" that I can't imagine he consulted literally anyone else on.

So, like, look. As we've established, Ken can reprint his own stories. And if he can work something out with the other contributors whose contracts were lost, he can print their work, too. But there is no fucking way he's getting his hands on Ian Flynn's run, which Sega undoubtedly holds the copyright for. Even if they don't, Ian needs to maintain a good working relationship with both Sega and IDW if he's to keep his job, so he'd never go for this. Not to mention that Ian and Ken just... don't get along! Ken's whole plan here seems to be predicated on IDW going out of business (a thing he REALLY wants to happen) and freeing up the Sonic comic license, after which he knocks on Sega's door and goes "hey I've still got dirt on you guys," blackmailing them into giving him the Sonic license back so that he can reprint the later comics. Every step of this plan is ludicrous. It's never gonna happen.

He's been saying he wants to reprint the whole series for a few years now, though. This isn't really anything new. And despite his lofty plans that set Sonic Twitter ablaze, he quickly backpedaled. The only specific things in the works right now are a "two-volume omnibus" of all of his Knuckles stories and a collection of artist Scott Shaw's work on the very early Archie Sonic issues, since they're on good terms with each other. I have no idea how Ken plans on packaging these when he can't put any Sega characters or the Freedom Fighters on the covers, but these projects are small enough in scale that there's a decent chance they'll see the light of day. Scott Shaw only did like five issues. But anything beyond that? I'll believe it when I see it.

Or, y'know, this could've all just been a publicity stunt for his new book. I wouldn't put it past him. Let's just focus on the book that actually exists.

"So he finally did it? He made a whole Lara-Su book? It's out? He finished it??"

Yes and no.

The book that's out now is The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, a prologue for the series of seven graphic novels Ken somehow plans on making, even though it's taken him 13 years to put out literally anything new. I don't know whether or not this counts as book one of seven, because it only features 30 pages of new comics. 30.5 if I'm being generous.

Most of the book is actually just a reprint of his infamous Archie Sonic storyline "Mobius: 25 Years Later", which ran from issue #131 to #144 in 2003-2004. (Again, yes, he can reprint this, he just can't put Sonic on the cover.) Why's it infamous? Well, Ken had been building anticipation for this future era of the series for basically his entire run. We kept seeing King Sonic and Queen Sally from the future. Knuckles' entire backstory hinges on his dad having a vision of this future. Several years before Silver the Hedgehog was created, it was Lara-Su who was Sonic's equivalent to Future Trunks, the cool-looking child of one of the main characters who traveled back in time to try and prevent a dark future. Believe it or not, yes, there was hype for Lara-Su. And then we finally got M25YL, and none of that cool stuff happened. Instead it really ended up being about how unbearably boring the middle aged Sonic, Knuckles, Sally, and co. are in this peaceful future where Robotnik is dead and they're all married with kids, forced into traditional nuclear family gender roles. Lara-Su is present, but she mostly just does generic teen girl stuff and complains about how Knuckles won't let her do anything even though she REALLY wants to be the new Guardian of Angel Island, like, super bad! Come on, dad!!!

In its original printing, this meandering arc ended on an abrupt time travel cliffhanger that Ken was never able to follow up on before he left Archie in 2006. This new printing slightly changes that ending, using the unresolved timey-wimey shenanigans as a convenient excuse to alter the entire timeline. This creates the slightly different world of The Lara-Su Chronicles, where the few relevant Sega-owned characters have been replaced and everyone is ten times uglier.

After this, we finally get two short new stories picking up where M25YL left off: "The Storm," starring Acorn Kingdom super-spy and known creep Geoffrey St. John, and an early release of the first chapter of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows, the first full TLSC graphic novel.

And now that we're all on the same page about what we're looking at, let's actually talk about the book!

The cover

Let's start by beating a dead horse. The cover art: it's still bad! But why is it bad?

The cover is, of course, based on Patrick Spaziante's cover from Archie Sonic #131, the start of the "Mobius: 25 Years Later" arc. (Ken did the layout for that cover, though, so in the eyes of the law he's the original creator who owns that cover.) That cover was, itself, a tribute to the iconic cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, the issue that introduced the version of the team with Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, etc.

Ken seems to have forgotten that the point of both these covers was to hype up the arrival of a new cast of characters. The new guys are supposed to make a dramatic entrance front and center. That's the focal point. Meanwhile, the cover for Beginnings has the old timeline versions of the cast from Archie Sonic dramatically bursting out of a shattered crystal ball, while their new counterparts look on in mild bemusement - if they're even bothering to look at all, since most of the characters here are just copied and pasted from their profile pages. That's just not how you do this particular homage! The point is supposed to be "out with the old, in with the new." And why are they using a crystal ball to view the past? Hell, why are they even using a crystal ball at all? The original arc was presented as a magical vision of the future courtesy of Tails' uncle Merlin (don't ask), but the new story leans all the way into being futuristic sci-fi.

Of course, there is no real artistic intent at play here. The old versions of the characters are placed front and center in the crystal ball simply because Ken traced over Spaziante's original art of Lara-Su and Julie-Su (the only two characters on the Sonic cover he owns) and threw out the rest, ruining the composition in the process. Look at the awkward empty space where Sonic, Sally, and Rotor once were, and the new drawing of The Character Formerly Known As Knuckles who's no longer properly centered between his wife and daughter. Even if Ken can claim ownership of the cover because he did the original layout, this all just feels scummy and lame.

And, yeah, if it needs to be said, the new characters and Ken's new rendering style look like absolute fucking dogshit. Putting new Lara-Su directly next to old Lara-Su does her no favors. The shattered glass effect looks absolutely atrocious. I could go on, but we'll have plenty of time to talk about the art style when we see how bad the stories inside look.

Changes to "Mobius: 25 Years Later"

Overall, 99% of M25YL is presented identically to its original printing. Sonic, Sally, Knuckles, et al. are still present with no changes to their names and no tweaks to the art. Even the original cover for issue #131 is included only a few pages into this book with its Archie, Sonic, and Sega logos still intact and everything. Again, because of the weird copyright situation described above, these preexisting comics can be released without any changes.

There is exactly one bizarre change to the art, though, where a hand drawn shot of Angel Island is replaced with an unfitting photo background and the ugly Floating Island photobash that Ken has been using as his personal logo for decades. I think he only did this as part of a test for his motion comic app that nobody asked for. I don't know why this had to make it into the print version. It's like the book is firing a warning shot for what's to come if you keep reading.

The new content begins on the final page of M25YL. In the original wet fart of a cliffhanger ending, Sonic and co. accidentally alter the timeline with an old time machine of Robotnik's and Lara-Su begins to fade away. Then, after everything goes white, we just cut to the present day heroes going "gee, you ever think about the future?" In this new printing, that last bit has been cut, and the rest of the page has been awkwardly shrunk down so that Ken can fit in a new panel. We now see the hands of an off-screen villain, seemingly named "Override," proclaiming that "the Praetorian" (Knuckles) has messed up the timeline again and that they'll finally get their revenge.

Who is this Override? I have no fucking clue. The new stories in this book make no mention of them. You have to buy the next book to find out.

My confusion over the identity of this villain overlaps with another big problem: name changes. So many names and nouns have been arbitrarily changed in The Lara-Su Chronicles, even ones Ken didn't have to change for copyright reasons, and I only know what half of them are replacing because Ken's been tweeting about this shit for years.

The echidnas are now a totally original alien race called "the Echyd'nya." Even in flashbacks to events from M25YL attempting to mimic the old art style, if it's on a new comic page, they're gonna call themselves "Echyd'nya." Evil echidna faction the Dark Legion is now the "Cyberdark Dominion," hailing from the "Cyberdark Colony." The Brotherhood of Guardians is still the Brotherhood of Guardians, but now the main guardian is called "The Praetorian." Angel Island is still called "The Floating Island," like it was in the older Archie comics, but it's ALSO sometimes called "Avion"? When I read this I wasn't sure if he had randomly renamed Albion, the other echidna city from the Archie comics. But no. Now we have an Albion AND an Avion. Sally is mentioned simply as "Princess Acorn," while Sonic is referenced once as an unnamed "blue-spined Erinaceinae," using the scientific name for hedgehog to make it sound more sci-fi. In an incredibly ballsy move, Ken even mentions Robotnik as "the Insurrectionist Kintobor," retaining his original surname from the Archie comics that's just "Robotnik" backwards. Guess Sega never trademarked that one.

Aside from every name change being a downgrade, this leads to confusion when you're not sure if something is supposed to be new, or if it's just an Archie thing you're supposed to recognize despite having a new name and design. Is "Override" someone I'm supposed to know already? Am I just supposed to have read a fucking tweet from Ken where he said he changed the name of some existing villain to "Override"? The answer is no, but I had to term search his Twitter just to verify this.

Moving on!

New story #1: "The Storm"

If you've been following the WIPs, this is that story about Geoffrey St. John that Ken's been posting previews of for almost a decade. The title page copyright dates it to 2015, and that absurdly long gestation is probably why the art is so inconsistent here. Even the style of speech bubbles and the font change between pages two and three.

This is a problem when there's supposed to be a deliberate and noticeable change in art style here signaling the moment where the time travel stuff alters the timeline, replacing the Archie Sonic world with the Lara-Su Chronicles world. If you don't already know that's what's going on, the idea isn't conveyed clearly at all. It just goes from one hideous art style to a slightly different one with no explanation.

The main problem here is that Ken has hitched his wagon to a franchise about anthropomorphic animals when he can't draw furries to save his life. (Though a bit later in the book we'll also begin to wonder if he can even still draw humans.) He's shifted away from the cartooniness of the original designs and given them more human proportions and facial features, but this just ends up making them look incredibly uncanny and lumpy and gross. With some designs he's trying to lean into more of a Star Trek alien vibe, but then he still insists upon retaining the giant Sonic eyes on most characters even though he has no idea how to make them emote.

The rendering of these godawful designs doesn't do them any favors, either. Ken's going for more of a painterly look now, but it almost seems as though he's shading everything with Photoshop's burn and dodge tools that are designed to darken and lighten select areas of a photo. The result is a muddy, smudgy look that makes it feel like the color layer has been smeared in vaseline. And it only looks worse after coming off of 14 chapters of M25YL that have way more palatable art.

The backgrounds, too, are a complete mess, a jumble of low res jpeg photo elements (sometimes with extremely noticeable pixelation), stock textures, and smooth digital gradients. There's no real sense of place here, and it gives everything a surreal, dreamlike quality when you can't really tell where anything is supposed to take place. This first story is seemingly set in a high-tech stronghold below Castle Acorn called "the Bunker," but it could just as easily be confused for the bridge of a spaceship. This whole story features characters speaking to each other over floating video displays and hologram projectors from three different locations, but without a hologram effect and without a clear sense of where the characters are it often feels like they're just in the same room as each other. Characters will be in one location on one photo background, and then the camera angle changes and they're in a completely different place, because Ken just uses mismatched photos off of the internet. It's been like 25 years since he first tried using photo backgrounds in the Archie comics and he hasn't gotten any better at it.

When I had my boyfriend read the book to see if it made literally any sense to him (it didn't), Anthony said this: "This is the kind of shit I'd see linked on a Second Life world that hasn't been touched since 2004." I think he really hit the nail on the head. Now, there's actually a contrarian part of me that thinks that might theoretically almost be kind of cool, in sort of a messy counterculture way. I love weird indie shit. I was a Homestuck reader! But this isn't a scrappy mixed media zine, or experimental outsider art from someone just messing around with Photoshop, or a loving throwback to weird old internet art, or even something intentionally bizarre and offputting like Xavier: Renegade Angel or a PilotRedSun video or whatever where the fact that it's weird and ugly is part of the humor. This is supposed to be a sincere sci-fi epic drawing on Star Trek and Jack Kirby comics, made by a guy who's been drawing comics professionally since the '80s. This is supposed to look good. This is supposed to compete with mainstream comics that are on sale right now. He thinks any day now IDW's gonna go out of business and Sega will come crawling back to him so that he can stamp the Sonic logo on shit like this. It just doesn't work.

But, okay. It's ugly. We knew it would be ugly. But that ugliness would be much easier to accept if it was in service of an otherwise genuinely good story. So what about the writing? After all this time, how does Ken choose to kick off this new saga? Well, credit where credit's due. "The Storm" feels like a proper continuation of Ken's writing style from M25YL.

Because it's eleven pages of characters standing around and talking while nothing fucking happens.

Here's the synopsis: A dog woman named Brownie, an ensign in the Royal Secret Service fresh out of training and the only character who's almost cute, walks up to Geoffrey to deliver a report. He's immediately suspicious of her, asking who let her in and if she's a spy for Elias (Sally's brother, if you're new here) or Alicia (Sally's mom). The art style suddenly shifts when the timeline is altered, but the scene continues uninterrupted. Geoffrey points a gun at Brownie when she won't say whose spy she is. Geoffrey is distracted by a call and proceeds to have a conversation via a mix of holograms and video screens with Remington (head of Echidnaopolis security), Spectre (Knuckles' great great great great great grandpa, the one with the helmet who always looks evil), and a new scientist character named Dr. Zephyr/Zephur. (The spelling of this character's name changes multiple times throughout the 11-page story, because I guess nine years wasn't enough time to spellcheck this shit.) They say a bunch of made up technobabble nonsense about how it looks like the timeline was just altered and Knuckles and co. seem to be involved. It's complete drivel that I'm not even going to try to make sense of. Everyone decides to investigate further, and the conversation ends. Brownie tells Geoffrey she's his spy, then walks out and implies she's actually Alicia's spy in her inner monologue.

To be continued!!!

Yes, that's it. It's really just a bunch of technobabble where some characters talk about how it seems like the timeline has been fucked with. That's it. The whole time Geoffrey doesn't even get up out of his damn chair, which he's of course sitting in backwards to show how cool he is. It's just 11 pages of Geoffrey sitting in a chair and talking to people and looking uglier than he's ever looked. Nothing happens. Nine years for this.

I'm also struck by how meaningless all of this is to anyone who hasn't read Archie Sonic. The added context from M25YL may help a little, but "The Storm" focuses on characters who weren't in that arc, and the story does very little to introduce who any of them are. Brownie could've been super useful as an inexperienced point of view character who's only meeting the others for the first time here, but instead she's really just a passive observer who's here as part of some kind of 4D chess game between Geoffrey and Alicia, an off-screen character whose motivations in this era of the story are completely unknown to even returning readers. Who are the good guys and bad guys here? What are the conflicts and the stakes of the story moving forward? What do these characters want? Basic questions like this aren't really answered. I can't imagine a new reader being able to make heads or tails of this. Hell, I can't really imagine a returning reader who hasn't been following the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets about this story making heads or tails of it, either.

...Maybe more will happen in the next story?

New story #2: Shattered Tomorrows preview chapter

After another message from Ken, the story of The Lara-Su Chronicles proper begins with the redesigned Lara-Su walking along a jpeg photograph beach at sunset and crying while thinking about how Knuckles - sorry, his name is K'Nox now - is dead.

Yep! Straight into the dad stuff!

Look, I'm the last person to complain about writers getting super personal and drawing from their own baggage in their writing, but Ken's just no fucking good at it. There's no nuance, nothing interesting to say. He just keeps writing mediocre-to-horrible dads whose misdeeds are always justified by their "good intentions," and then sometimes they die and their kids are like "we may have fought but actually you were the bestest dad ever and I'll miss you forever, I'll never be able to fill your shoes!"

This is the only part of the new material here that feels like it has any heart behind it, because I know how much his complex relationship with his late deadbeat father means to Ken (there's an author's note in this outright saying as much). But the guy died 42 years ago, and it doesn't feel like Ken has had any new thoughts about this part of his life in those four decades. He's just not an introspective or self-aware enough artist to actually mine his personal baggage for anything beyond "father knows best."

Anyway, so then it jumps forward in time(?) and now we're following this human guy who looks like this.

Previously, Ken got a lot of shit for literally just using the likeness of Anthony Mackie for this guy, based on his IMDB profile photo. Ken has thus redesigned the character... and by that I mean I think he looks more like Ernie Hudson now? Ken's clearly just working off of photo references (if not straight up tracing), given his face is the most detailed and realistic-looking thing on any page where he's present.

But you may be wondering: who is this, and why is he here? Well, for one, he's here to run around in front of some low res space photos while making trite references to things like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek. Haha, he makes a joke about red shirts! Original!! But beyond that, Commander Mykhal Taelor (yes, that's really how he chose to spell it) is a human... from Earth! Archie Sonic readers are probably confused, because in those comics Mobius is Earth in the distant post-apocalyptic future. Well, despite being a Planet of the Apes fan, Ken always hated that particular worldbuilding decision from Karl Bollers, always preferring to think of Mobius as a separate alien planet. And now he gets to make that canon in his own stories and throw out Karl's ideas. So Mobius is basically just, like, a Star Trek planet now, with its own alien creatures that sometimes just so happen to look like anthropomorphic Earth animals.

Also, at one point Taelor wonders if the inhabitants of the dead Mobius might have been human, and the alien ally he's talking to over the radio says it's unlikely. "I don't understand why your kind has a problem understanding you're a minority within a minority." Perhaps poor wording for a line said to the only Black character in the story.

Anyway, Commander Taelor here seems to have discovered the uninhabited husk of Mobius after the vague time-space cataclysm everyone was worried about in M25YL has come to pass, and he finds an audio log from Lara-Su that I presume will explain what happened. I guess those are the titular Lara-Su Chronicles. In theory this flash forward establishes some sense of pressing danger, but when the threat to the planet is so unclear and technobabble-y it just kind of lands with a thud.

It doesn't take long before we get back to Lara-Su being sad about her dad. A good little chunk of the chapter is spent with this new timeline's Lara-Su recalling moments in her life, including echoes of the original Lara-Su's memories from M25YL, which feels redundant coming hot off the heels of a straight reprint of that entire arc. And boy, for anyone who read the later Archie Sonic comics, the protagonist having vague memories of the old version of the series from before a lawsuit-related timeline reboot sure does sound familiar, huh?

The art inconsistency somehow becomes even worse in this story, with Ken flip-flopping on whether or not he wants to use outlines, with the no-outline art managing to look even worse by relying entirely on Ken's awful rendering. By this point in the book, readers are also likely to start noticing how often Ken reuses art from previous panels. This is a shortcut that tons of comic artists use, of course. Invincible famously did a joke about this. It's often understandable. But, again... it sure does stand out in a book that took 13 years to make with only 30 pages of new art. Amusingly, Ken even manages to combine his inconsistency and recycling problems by reusing the same art with and without outlines. And, of course, any time Ken tries to draw the Archie era designs it's just... the worst.

And, yes, it's in this dreamlike montage sequence of Lara-Su's life that we get...

The uncomfortable family nudity scene, followed by the dual timeline Julie-Su breastfeeding scene.

Yeah, you might have heard about this one already. If this incredibly eerie presentation of Lara-Su's hazy memories of the two different timelines make it hard to tell what's going on, don't worry. There's another, clearer version later in the book as part of Julie-Su's character profile, because I guess Ken was just so proud of it.

(I censored these myself because I'm not playing Russian roulette with Tumblr's inconsistent nudity rules and risking getting banned lmao)

Like, okay. Is a mother breastfeeding her child really that shocking of a thing to see in a story? No, not at all. But, like... when it's two characters who you previously created for an officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comic for 7-year-olds... and some of those officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comics for 7-year-olds are reprinted in the same book... and when it's drawn like this... yeah, it's kind of a shocker.

It just looks so unnatural. Julie-Su is posed very deliberately so that you'll see both of her breasts, and in the new timeline version she's barely even holding Lara-Su so you can really get a good look at her supermodel body, showing zero physical signs that she just gave birth. Most people will immediately jump to this being Ken putting his fetishes in his work (a type of criticism that I'm incredibly tired of - it's 2024, all the cool artists are blatantly putting their fetishes in their work now). And my immediate response is that, no, this is probably just Ken trying to come off as really mature on a surface level, a thing he's been obsessed with since the Archie days. Free from the shackles of writing a licensed children's comic, of course he's going to jump immediately into depicting some nonsexual, artistic nudity to try and prove he's A Real Mature Artist For Grown-Ups who just thinks the human body is beautiful and breastfeeding shouldn't be a taboo etc. etc.

But then, like. You look at some of the other character designs. Like Espio's daughter Salma, who's now this horrifying alien lizard person who's always nude, and her scale pattern puts scales exactly where her nipples should be. Or you look at his comments about the Echyd'nya age of consent. Or you look at how he keeps drawing Lara-Su in this. Like, does the shuttle really need this, like... reverse chaise lounge thing in the cockpit? So that we can keep getting these shots of the 16-year-old Lara-Su lying on her stomach and posing with one of her legs kicked up, her naked ass in plain view?

The vibe isn't great, is what I'm saying!

I'm not going to try to ascribe authorial intent here. I don't know. I'm not a psychic. Given his very blatant reliance on photo references elsewhere in the book, it's entirely possible he just referenced some figure drawing photos that were maybe just a little too sexy. And also, he's an American comic book artist, and a boomer one at that. Those guys tend to draw women a certain way, even when it's not supposed to be sexual. I don't fucking know. It just sucks. I'm not gonna make some hyperbolic statement about how this makes him a literal pedophile who should be in jail, but it is deeply offputting and objectifying.

But if you already knew about the nursing scenes and were hoping there was some other really shocking stuff in there for me to talk about in this review, sorry to disappoint, but nope. That's the only shockingly weird new thing in here. Once again, not a lot happens in this story, and what does happen is pretty boring.

Once we get past the recap stuff and the human guy, the plot developments boil down to this: The timeline was altered at the end of M25YL... but not as much as you might think. In the new timeline, Knuckles ("K'Nox"), Cobar (now looking significantly younger), and Rotor (now a rhino just called "The Emissary") still traveled via shuttle to go find a time machine in the Badlands and fix the time-space continuum, like in the climax of the original arc. This time, though, Sonic wasn't there, and Lara-Su came along without having to stow away. Lara-Su watches the ship while the grown ups go deal with the time machine, and then after a couple panels Not Rotor comes back with Cobar and is like "Hey, Cobar got hurt, we gotta leave. Dunno what happened to your dad." And then they just, like. Presume that Knuckles must have died. Even though we have no idea what happened to him. And then they just fly away. And then Lara-Su is sad that her dad died.

And that's pretty much it!

This is supposed to be a really emotional sequence - it's literally the scene where Lara-Su learns that Knuckles is dead - but instead it comes off as unintentionally funny because of how poorly it's portrayed. Not showing Knuckles' actual disappearance is a huge misstep, for one, making his uncertain fate more confusing and anticlimactic than dramatic. But also, Ken keeps just using the same two drawings of Rotor for two pages, so he doesn't really seem to be emoting at all, and he's in this spacey hazmat suit that honestly just makes him look like fucking Moltar from Space Ghost. So the whole time I'm just reading his dialogue in Moltar's deadpan voice as he's like "I dunno. We did what we could. Anyway, let's leave."

After this, we get a two-page spread previewing the rest of the story from Shattered Tomorrows. It's basically like a trailer in comic form. It has one of the most mystifying layouts I've ever seen in a comic book. I have no idea what order I'm supposed to read this in.

Yeah, I kinda have a feeling this is the full extent of what Ken has drawn for the rest of that book. I'd love to be wrong, but I fear that I'm right.

Bonus material: Data files

These are mostly very dull, recapping a lot of events shared between Ken's Archie run and the new Lara-Su Chronicles timeline. It seems like almost his entire run is still considered canon to the backstory of the new timeline, just with some names changed, and things only really diverge at the climax of M25YL. But I'll share the interesting stuff here.

Lara-Su

The main thing you'll notice in Lara-Su's profile is the massive, unreadable wall of text where Ken felt the need to list the entire Knuckles family tree, split across both pages.

This is literally so long that Lara-Su's personal history has to awkwardly cut off mid-sentence and be continued on the final page of the book, after the rest of the data files.

Also, please note that this list gives Julie-Su's mom's full name as Mari-Su of the House of Atrades. Incredible on all levels.

There's also a reference to the dark timeline Lara-Su was originally supposed to come from. You know, the one where Julie-Su is the leader of a rebel movement fighting against a Knuckles who had gone mad with power? The timeline that would have been way more interesting than the one in M25YL? Here it seems to have been written off as the result of another "timeline disruption." Lara-Su allegedly has vague memories of this timeline, in the same way that she has vague memories of the M25YL timeline.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey's bio mostly recaps events from the Archie comics, which means the Sonic/Sally/Geoffrey love triangle has to be alluded to. His rivalry with Sonic is described like this:

"He would later resurface when Kintobor was transporting his latest hi-tech weapon, the Dynamac-3000. It was during that mission he discovered a rival for the Princess' affections. Whereas the Princess would be one of a line of conquests where St. John was concerned, the blue-spined Erinaceinae who protested doth a bit too much regarding his affections for the Princess for St. John's taste would prove to be a source of great sport and amusement."

Yes. It's gross. Saying that Geoffrey saw Sally as "one of a line of conquests" is gross. Ken writing this and then still treating Geoffrey as the coolest badass ever is gross. The "Princess Acorn" is also first on the list of Geoffrey's "female relationships" elsewhere in his bio, though I suppose how much of a "relationship" they had is left vague. Honestly, at this point the fact that Ken didn't explicitly confirm that Geoffrey took the underage Sally's virginity in the book comes off as a display of restraint. The bar couldn't be any lower, I know.

Remington

His bio is, frankly, shockingly long for such a minor character, though I guess he does get a large portion of the word salad dialogue in "The Storm." There's a lot of stuff here about how the identities of his biological parents are shrouded in mystery, a plot point that fans have long speculated Ken just straight up forgot about in his time at Archie. (Ian confirmed that Kragok from the Dark Legion was Remington's dad, though, so this isn't really much of a mystery.)

Lien-Da

She gets a bio even though she's not present in the two new stories, just so we get to look at her awful new design and compare it to how Steven Butler drew her earlier in the book:

Commander Taelor

We get to see two drawings of him with the same exact Ernie Hudson face side by side! That's fun.

Julie-Su

She gets a list of "known friends," but the only character listed is Knuckles' mom. Poor Julie-Su.

Also, Ken feels the need to reiterate that Knuckles and Julie-Su are still distant cousins. He made a whole new timeline where he can change whatever details he wants, but THAT had to remain canon. Thanks, Ken.

And then after the data files we get the special thanks page, listing everyone who preordered the book and/or bought TLSC merch from Ken.

With my name on the list. Because I had to buy a copy to cover it for the blog.

My name is on the very next page right after the breastfeeding panel in Julie-Su's data file.

Yep. He got me.

Is it at least a well put together book? Like, in terms of manufacturing quality?

Its physical quality is... fine. It's a nice, sturdy hardcover. The print quality seems fine, though mine does have a bit of smudging from some sort of printing error on one page. The pages don't seem like they'll fall out on me. The image quality is crisp. The colors are vibrant. This is a low bar, but this is one of the few places where I'm able to give this book anything resembling praise.

The formatting and graphic design work, on the other hand...

(I didn't crumple those page corners, it came like that.)

For one, the placement and sizes of the M25YL pages is inconsistent, largely due to the fact that the book doesn't actually match the proportions of a comic. A lot of pages aren't properly centered vertically. Some pages go all the way up to the top edge of the paper, while others leave a visible gap of about half a centimeter. Every page has a 1cm gap to its left and right, which is sometimes filled in with a solid color or gradient that doesn't quite match the page it's surrounding. I have to assume Ken didn't have any sort of source files or original artwork to work off of, as those ideally would've had more generous bleed to account for slight shifts in printing. It kind of seems like he just got the highest resolution versions he could find of the digital releases online and printed those. The colors are a dead ringer for the digital versions, which have always looked slightly more saturated and pastel than they did in print.

I can't say this bodes well for his further plans for Archie Sonic reprints - sorry, Mobian Line reprints. If they ever come out, please, for the love of god, do not buy those. I don't care how much you love Archie Sonic, they aren't going to be good reprints. For comparison, IDW's similarly priced hardcover Sonic collections have none of these formatting problems, because they're made by people who know what they're doing with access to the actual source files.

The book also has its fair share of text-focused pages, split between the data files and messages directly from Ken about the history of his career and this project, and these are formatted in the most amateurish way possible. Just massive walls of Arial text over either plain white backgrounds, simple gradients, or faded photos. I've seen school yearbooks with better graphic design. Even ignoring my subjective feelings about the art and stories within, this book does not feel like it's worth $36 USD.

It's frankly shocking how shabby he let this thing look considering it's supposed to be his baby. And doesn't that really sum it all up?

Closing thoughts

Obviously, I did not expect this to be any good. But I'm still left kind of dumbfounded by it.

I think what really strikes me about it is that Ken had a blank check to do whatever he wanted here. He got an opportunity many writers would kill for when he gained complete ownership of his most famous work. He's free from the limitations of a monthly licensed comic book for children, free to make whatever creative decisions he wants without editors or other writers or Sega to worry about, free to completely reinvent the series to his heart's content and finally tell the story of his dreams. And with that opportunity and 13 years of his time, he made... this. A direct continuation of "Mobius: 25 Years Later" that barely changes anything about the characters or world beyond their awful new designs, even though much of the word count is spent rambling about how the timeline has changed. A story that makes zero concessions for new readers, or even returning readers who don't already have the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets explaining his creative decisions burned into their memory. 30 pages where nothing really happens and the story barely moves forward an inch despite the decades-long wait - but maybe something will happen if you buy the next book!

Who is this for? Maybe this really is a project for no one but Ken. Maybe he just really, really wants to finish the story he started, a story that's personal to him due to the family history it evokes, and the number of people who enjoy it or buy it beyond that is irrelevant. I think that many of the best artists are incredibly self-indulgent ones working with that exact mindset, artists whose enthusiasm for their own work jumps off the page or screen. So, if that's the case, then why the fuck isn't he telling the damn story? What's stopping him? Why is he still spinning his wheels? Where is that passion for his own work? Because it sure as hell isn't there on the page. There's a huge part of me that really wishes I could say "Man, what a weirdo, but you do you, Ken. You tell your weird little story." But there's barely any story here. It's like he loves styling himself as a storyteller, but he's terrified of finally having to actually tell a story after all this time. He's still stuck in the exact same mode of writing he was in almost 30 years ago when he was doing 6-page backup stories about Knuckles, just killing time and stringing readers along until he's eventually able to truly realize his vision. If not now, then when, Ken?

Even the back cover blurb is mostly just a dry recap of the history of this thing. It was a Sonic comic, the original arc was published in these issues, it went unfinished, Ken left Archie, the lawsuits happened, now he's continuing the story. There's nothing about why anyone should give a shit about this as its own story, even though Ken has spent years trying in vain to convince people TLSC is its own beast that shouldn't be judged as a Sonic story. I think deep down he knows that there's no pitch for this beyond the novelty of it originating from Sonic. And that's why, despite declaring that he'd leave the site, he's still on Twitter riling up Sonic fans. It's the only attention he gets at this point.

Maybe this is too harsh when those 30 pages of new comics are just intended as a preview for the "real" book. But the elephant in the room is that we have no idea if that "real" book will ever actually come out, let alone the entire series of seven graphic novels that will supposedly complete this saga.

Ken is undeniably a complete jackass and all around unpleasant, vindictive person who's rightly become an industry pariah. He's a self-proclaimed paragon of progressive values who'll send Comicsgaters after his successors for the crime of not worshiping the ground he walks on, and then turn around and announce he's going to reprint their work without even consulting them. He's a sore winner who already won his copyright battle on a level most comic writers would never dare to dream of, and yet still won't truly be satisfied until he sees an entire major comic publisher go out of business, putting god knows how many people out of work, because he thinks this would get him back the license to a video game franchise he doesn't even like.

But I still have to pity him.

As an artist, the trajectory of his life is my nightmare. I think all of us fear dying before we can tell all the stories we want to tell. There's simply never enough time to do everything. And here's Ken in his 60s, talking about how he's still planning on making his magnum opus all by himself out of stubbornness and pride, despite demonstrably proving he can't handle the workload, and also talking about how if he dies before the project can be finished he'll have to pass the torch on to his kids and get them to finish it for him. It's so grim. Even just typing that sends a shiver down my spine. It took nine years of his limited time on Earth to finish and release an 11-page comic about Geoffrey St. John sitting backwards in a chair.

This is a purgatory of his own creation. And yet... I'm not sure he's ever been prouder. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I guess if I want people to take anything away from this review, it's this:

Lesson one: If you're an artist or writer of some kind, or an aspiring creator, don't wait around. No one else is going to tell your story for you. Start writing that novel. Start drawing that webcomic. Start making that game. If Penders can put out this damn book that no one asked for after 13 years of work, then proudly proclaim that he's still going to make six or seven more books and also reprint hundreds of comics he doesn't have all of the rights to, then show up to cons with that foul Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows banner and sit in front of it beaming with pride, fully aware of his critics but saying "fuck 'em, I know I'm hot shit," then you can do fucking anything. Tell the weird, sincere, cringe story of your dreams. If Ken Penders doesn't have imposter syndrome, then nobody should.

And lesson two: Don't buy Ken's books.

[luna-azzurra]

The Villain Checklist!

Creating a villain is a delicate art, much like crafting a masterpiece. To ensure your antagonist leaps off the page with depth, consider these essential elements for your villain checklist:

Motivation: Every great villain is driven by a potent motivation, one that fuels their actions and sets them on their dark path. Explore their backstory and unearth the core reason behind their villainy. Are they seeking power, revenge, redemption, or something more sinister?

Complexity: Gone are the days of one-dimensional villains twirling mustaches and cackling maniacally. Infuse your antagonist with layers of complexity and nuance. Perhaps they possess redeeming qualities or wrestle with inner conflicts that humanize their actions.

Flaws and Vulnerabilities: Despite their nefarious intentions, villains should be flawed beings with vulnerabilities. These weaknesses not only add depth to their character but also create opportunities for conflict and growth throughout your story.

Backstory: Delve into your villain's past to uncover formative experiences that shaped their present disposition. Trauma, betrayal, or societal pressures can all contribute to their descent into villainy, providing rich narrative fodder for exploration.

Goals and Ambitions: Just as heroes strive for noble objectives, villains pursue their own twisted goals with fervor and determination. Define what your antagonist hopes to achieve and the lengths they're willing to go to attain it, even if it means sacrificing everything in their path.

Antagonistic Traits: From cunning intellect to ruthless brutality, equip your villain with traits that make them a formidable adversary for your protagonist. Consider how their strengths and weaknesses complement each other, creating dynamic conflicts that propel your story forward.

Relationships and Alliances: Villains don't operate in isolation; they forge alliances, manipulate allies, and cultivate relationships to further their agendas. Develop the connections your antagonist shares with other characters, be they loyal minions or reluctant collaborators, to add depth to their character dynamics.

Moral Justification (from their perspective): While their actions may be abhorrent to society, villains often believe they're justified in their pursuits. Explore your antagonist's moral code and the twisted logic that rationalizes their behavior, offering readers insight into their twisted worldview.

Arc of Transformation: Just as protagonists undergo arcs of growth and change, villains should experience their own journey of transformation. Whether it's redemption, downfall, or something altogether unexpected, chart the evolution of your antagonist throughout the narrative.

Memorable Traits: Give your villain distinctive traits or quirks that leave a lasting impression on readers. Whether it's a chilling catchphrase, a distinctive appearance, or a haunting backstory, give your antagonist elements that linger in the minds of your audience long after they've closed the book.

[deception-united]

Let's talk about character voices.

Giving a character a unique voice in your writing involves several elements, such as word choice, sentence structure, dialogue quirks, and mannerisms. Incorporating these elements into your writing can really help create characters with distinct voices that resonate with readers and bring your narrative to life, as well as avoiding making all your characters sound the same, which is important especially when switching POVs.

Here are some tips you may find helpful:

Distinct vocabulary: Choose words that reflect the character's background, personality, profession, interests, experiences, and education level. For example, a well-educated professor would probably use more sophisticated language.

Dialogue quirks: Give each character specific speech patterns or quirks that set them apart, like repeated phrases, stuttering, using or avoiding contractions, or speaking in a particular dialect or accent, but don't overdo it to the point where it's distracting or it's hard to decipher what's being said.

Sentence structure: Pay attention to the rhythm and structure of their sentences. Some characters might speak in short, abrupt sentences, while others might use long, flowing ones. This can convey their confidence, hesitation, or urgency in the particular scenario, but also their general demeanor or manner.

Internal monologue: Show the character's unique thought process through their internal monologue. This can help readers understand their motivations, fears, and desires, further distinguishing them from other characters. (This may not necessarily apply to your story if you're writing in a third person omniscient perspective, or if you intend to exclusively follow the internal monologue of the main character.)

Physical gestures/actions: State what the the character's physical gestures and actions are while speaking. A nervous character might fidget, slouch, or avoid eye contact, while a confident character would stand tall and make direct eye contact.

Background & history: The character's upbringing, cultural influences, and past experiences can all shape the way they speak and interact with others.

Consistency: It's important to maintain consistency in the character's voice throughout the story and make sure their speech patterns, vocabulary, and mannerisms remain true to their established personality and don't contradict with anything.

Real conversations: Pay attention to how people speak in real life, and the tone, vocabulary, and speech patterns of different people, to help create more authentic and believable dialogue.

Read aloud: Reading your dialogue aloud can help you identify areas where the character's voice may not sound authentic. If it doesn't sound like something they would say, revise.

Hope this helps!

Previous | Next

[sakurapika]

A (possibly) helpful guide to the Nikki-verse for Infinity Nikki Players

❄️Updated December 28th

Although it’s not at all necessary to know the lore of the previous games (Love Nikki, Shining Nikki), here is some info that you might benefit from if you’re joining the fandom with Infinity Nikki!

❄️General Info:

Love Nikki, Shining Nikki, and Infinity Nikki are all stand-alone games with self-contained stories, but they have some commonalities that I will get into later.

Love Nikki (LN) has a 2D art style, and is where many of us "veteran" players began our journey. Shining Nikki (SN) has both 2D and 3D art. Both of these games are stunning, so check them out!

Before Love Nikki, there were two other dress-up games in this series that did not involve being transported into a magical world. They were called NikkiUp2U (released 2012) and Hello Nikki (released around 2016). These games are more obscure, with the latter currently only being available in China, so not much is known about them to international fans.

The developers of the game are Chinese, so expect to get a lot of goodies around Lunar New Year and other major Chinese holidays!

According to Hello Nikki, our main character is around 19 years old. In Shining Nikki, she talks about how she used to go to college before getting transported to Miraland. Her birthday is December 6, which is why Infinity Nikki came out last week and why we got a free outfit (we’ll get a new one every year!)

Nikki's Chinese name is Nuan Nuan, how cute!

Momo claims he’s not a cat, but a member of the “Momo Clan” (LN). He was a little annoying in Love Nikki, but he’s more endearing in later games.

Nikki and Momo are the only recurring characters in the franchise.

The biggest advice I can give as a veteran is: Don't bother with trying to make a visually cohesive outfit for styling battles unless you have a lot of clothing. We've all tried it. It won't work. For now, just layer on everything that has high stats. You're always free to wear your fashionable outfits during regular gameplay, and "glow up" your favorite clothes when you have enough resources, so that you can make better outfits for later battles.

I've seen a lot of people in other places asking about whether the Nikki games will have more androgynous or masculine clothing, and they probably will! It took a while for these clothes to appear in LN and SN, but there are definitely several options out there, from ouji fashion to streetwear to military-style outfits. Read about the seven nations below to find out more.

A lot of people also seem curious about representation for people of color. Unfortunately, the options can be quite limited, as it took a while for textured hair options to appear for players in Love Nikki, and I'm not quite sure about the situation in Shining Nikki. Different cultures are represented in Miraland (as explained below) but they still have their limitations. With Infinity Nikki being more oriented towards an international fanbase than previous games, though, perhaps the developers will be encouraged to branch out more.

❄️Worldbuilding

The world that Nikki has been transported into is called Miraland.

Miraland is composed of seven nations, each with their own distinct fashion style. That means that if you do not like the style of clothes we’ve been seeing so far in Infinity Nikki, do not worry! They’ll have everything eventually.

For some reason, they changed the names of the countries in Infinity Nikki, and I’m not sure why (I’m going to keep mixing them up…). Below, I’ve listed their LN/SN names first, and their Infinity Nikki names second.

The seven nations are:

🎀Lilith/Ninir/Heartcraft Kingdom: In the older games, it was known mostly for fairytale-inspired clothing and lolita fashion, with the occasional “pastoral” suit. It looks like Heartcraft Kingdom in Infinity Nikki has been leaning more into the pastoral aesthetic, but Nonoy’s outfit seems to be in the lolita style. Also, the suits we have been crafting so far for catching bugs and petting the animals is at least lolita-inspired. (People who wear lolita fashion, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the Chinese version of this fashion is a lot more loose with the rules than the Japanese version I am more familiar with). This kingdom is always the first to be introduced in these games. Expect drama to follow whenever we get introduced to the royal family of this kingdom…it always happens. Nikki's first friend is always from this kingdom--we started with Bobo in Love Nikki, then Joy in Shining Nikki, and now Nonoy in Infinity Nikki.

🐉Cloud Empire/Lanling Empire: Known for traditional and modern Asian fashion. A vast majority of the fashions are going to be inspired by Chinese fashion, so if you’re a fan of period dramas or xianxia, you’re in luck! Aside from hanfu and qipao, they also usually have some representation of other East Asian cultures, featuring several kimono and the occasional hanbok. (Due to some controversies in Shining Nikki relating to conflicts between China and Korea, however, I’m not sure if the developers will continue to add hanbok in future games). Love Nikki also included some outfits for Chinese ethnic minorities like the Miao, and Vietnamese ao dai if I remember correctly. All games also have at least one Peking Opera costume—it’s like an industry staple. Overall, Cloud Empire is usually the second kingdom to be introduced in the game, so I’m sure we’ll see it pretty soon. Maybe we’ll go along with Tan Youyou, depending on how the story will go.

👠Apple Federation/Starhail Federation: Known for streetwear, high fashion, and casual clothing (like what you’d wear on an average day). I think Dada and Bebe’s outfits would be classified as Apple, even though they live in Heartcraft. Unlike the rural towns we have seen so far, Apple tends to be a very urban, city-based environment, filled with spies and shady businessmen. Nikki's girlfriend, Kimi (from Love Nikki), is also from here.

👑Pigeon Kingdom/Twinmoon Kingdom: Known for European fashions, including fairy costumes, witch/sorcerer outfits, Rococo dresses (with long skirts, compared to the lolita style in Lilith/Ninir/Heartcraft), and anything else you’d expect to see in a Western fantasy or period drama. Funnily enough, there is always at least one scene in the Pigeon Kingdom that has to do with a cathedral, so expect some fashions with gothic and Catholic-inspired imagery as well. Some of the inhabitants who live there are elves and fairies, like Timis. Although most of the ability outfits we have so far look like they're from Lilith/Ninir/Heartcraft, the "purification" outfit strikes me as something more typical of Pigeon.

⚔️North Kingdom/Empire of Light: A cold country best known for winter clothing—heavy scarves, overcoats, and hats—as well as military attire. There is also at least one "ice queen" style suit in every game. If I recall correctly, this kingdom has been having civil wars since Love Nikki, so expect a lot of action in this area. I suspect that Bettina is from here, but I'm not sure yet.

🐪Wasteland/Terra Alliance: The original name of this country sparked a lot of controversy, so I'm glad that they have changed it. This kingdom usually has desert-themed clothing, ancient Greek/Egyptian clothing, clothing inspired by nature, bohemian clothing, South, and Southeast Asian clothing (the cultural representation isn’t always the best, unfortunately…but I am optimistic that Shining Nikki and Infinity Nikki are more culturally sensitive than Love Nikki).

🤖Ruin Island/Whaleport: A mysterious island that features “futuristic” or sci-fi inspired clothing. In previous games, we have seen medical doctors with dubious legitimacy, scientists who experiment on themselves (?) and androids, so I’m curious to see who we’ll meet this time. Many players from the previous games who liked this style have felt that the developers often neglect this kingdom, unfortunately.

❄️Story and gameplay advice

Without spoiling the older games, I can say that, generally...

Most of the story is based on conflicts between different characters and sometimes different kingdoms. These problems, as mentioned before, are solved through styling battles.

Infinity Nikki seems to be going for a cozier vibe. However, both of its predecessors have sometimes gone into dark territories, featuring themes of war, violence, and betrayal. (I may or may not have cried over the death of a certain someone in Love Nikki...)

Therefore, dramatic things could very well happen in Infinity Nikki. I'm not saying that it can't be your comfort game if that is what you are hoping for, as the other games can still also be light, funny, and cozy. I just want to warn more sensitive players who might not be expecting it from a dress-up game.

When I first wrote this guide, I initially thought that the miracle outfits were like the "lifetime suits" of previous games, where crafting them was optional and not necessary to progress through the story. However, this seems not to be the case. Nevertheless, take your time while crafting them--there's no need to rush.

I'm not sure how f2p-friendly Infinity Nikki will be, but I haven't spent anything on either of the other games and I've been able to buy many of the suits I wanted. Just make sure that you budget accordingly and remember that if you want one suit but can't afford it at the time, another suit with a similar aesthetic might come out in the future. Also banners can re-run!

Keep an eye out for redeem codes! These are often posted by the game's social media, and you can get a lot of free stuff.

The fan-favorite kingdoms are usually Lilith/Ninir (Heartcraft) and Cloud (Lanling), followed by Pigeon (Twinmoon) and Apple (Starhail). The other three tend to get neglected, so if you like the sound of those the most, I'm sorry... :(

The last two sections include speculation, trivia, and an explanation of some inside jokes from the other games. Feel free to skip them if needed!

❄️Continuity and Fandom References to Other Nikki Games

Like I said earlier, the Nikki games can all work as standalone games, and the only returning characters are Nikki and Momo.

However, I've added this section to discuss possible theories and connections, as well as catch others up to speed on some of the inside jokes and characters that we Nikki veterans like to talk about.

If you keep hearing names like "Bobo," "Lunar," "Kimi," and "Nidhogg," these are characters from Love Nikki.

Bobo and Lunar are some of the first characters we met in LN. Kimi is the closest character we have to a canon love interest for Nikki. All of them are fan-favorites, so we're hoping to see any references to them in Infinity Nikki as well.

I can't say much about the very controversial and very popular Nidhogg without spoiling LN, but at least you now know where the name is from.

In Love Nikki, there is a "blood curse" that prevents people from using violence. Therefore, people often resolve conflicts by entering styling battles and destroying each other with the power of a good outfit.

Never ask a Love Nikki player what happened in Chapter 15.

Shining Nikki takes place roughly 700 years before Love Nikki, where there is no blood curse (which means certain people have managed to commit certain crimes...). Several SN characters are the ancestors of, or otherwise related to, LN characters.

Nikki veterans often like to make references to Ashley, Lilith (the person), Joy, and Qin Yi. These are all Shining Nikki characters.

So far, we haven't seen such a connection between old games and Infinity Nikki, so a lot of people suspect that this might be an alternate universe. When more about this version of Miraland is known, I might make another post.

❄️My predictions for future updates

Every time we enter a new country in Miraland, we will have new ability outfits to craft to fit the style of the new setting. This is because most of the outfits we have so far look like Lilith/Ninir suits in previous games, with very few influences from other nations.

The next country to be introduced will most likely be Lanling. I originally thought that they'd let us visit Lanling in time for Lunar New Year, but with the scope of the story, I think it may take some more time before that.

The next big update will be around Lunar New Year, where they'll probably hold some five-star banners, give free diamonds as a login event, and make a new short story, if they celebrate the same way as in Shining Nikki. They're probably also going to give us another free suit. (I hope it's Legend of the White Snake themed, since next year is Year of the Snake!)

Then, we'll probably see the equivalent of the Apple Federation, followed by Pigeon Kingdom.

We will get a new version of this stunning dress. It's called the Star Sea and has shown up in every game so far. I'm actually surprised we haven't heard about it in Infinity Nikki yet.

Please let me know if this guide has been useful, and if there's other parts of the games you'd like me to cover!

[starcurtain]

Detangling Mydei's Backstories Backstory?

My last post, casting doubt on 3.2's revelation that Mydei's immortality is deliberate on his part, led to some interesting discussion in the comments that definitely reinforced my earlier thoughts that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are too numerous to be accidental. Star Rail is not known for its flawless continuity (Robin and Sunday's backstory, I'm looking at you lol), but usually the inconsistencies are not so overt, and repeated so many times, that they become central to the entire plot of a character.

So I wanted to refine my earlier theory a bit: I'm cautiously optimistic that there are enough signs that the inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory are deliberate, and that the Mydei of the current cycle in Amphoreus is actively experiencing an entanglement between two different timelines, without (yet) consciously recognizing the incompatibility of his own "memories."

When we work from the standpoint that the events of Mydei's backstory can be separated into two distinct timelines, the inconsistencies vanish:

The "Sea of Souls" Timeline

This is the most prominent timeline, and the one that appears most accurate for "our" Mydei. In this timeline, Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as a tiny infant and spent the first nine years of his life there. This is confirmed both in the flashback we're provided early in 3.1, as well as in Mydei's voicelines and character stories.

After nine years, he crawled out of the sea (possibly motivated by witnessing Tribbie's "star" in the sky). On the same day (or very near it), he met with a band of Kremnoan exiles.

Whether this was a larger group already, constituting a small "detachment" army of exiles, or just started with the five exiled friends and Mydei then grew into a small army by picking up other exiles over time, is still unclear. However, at this point, Mydei makes no mention of returning to Kremnos and instead goes straight from "leaving the sea" to "living ten years in exile:"

This is the key point of inconsistency between the two "halves" of Mydei's story--either he lived in Kremnos or he didn't. We can handwave here and say "Yes, he returned to Kremnos with his friends and they just hid their identities, leaving Kremnos years later in a self-imposed exile," but the story gives us absolutely no indication that this realistically could have happened. Mydei never once mentions hiding his identity, changing his appearance, or living a double life in the city, and never explains how he would have had access to the inner city of Kremnos ("as befitting a crown prince") and the royal library, yet still go totally unnoticed by his father or anyone loyal to Eurypon, including Krateros. (There's also no explanation at all for why he would have wanted to return to a city ruled by someone who tried to murder him and where he would have had to live life under a fake identity just to get by, but you know...)

Instead, the game does give us several pieces of information indicating that the five Kremnoan exiles did not return to Kremnos after meeting Mydei:

First, Mydei's character stories confirm that Mydei deliberately hid his name while traveling in exile across Amphoreus, indicating that he knew he would be recognized by Eurypon/Eurypon's loyalists if he didn't hide his identity. This awareness suggests it is extremely unlikely that Mydei could have returned to Kremnos without being identified:

This also suggests that, at this point in this timeline, no one in Castrum Kremnos knew for sure that Mydeimos had survived being thrown into the Sea of Souls and returned. This is further confirmed by a memory fragment where Krateros says there has been a "rumor" that the leader of the exiled Kremnoan army is one who "defied death." Krateros alone makes the assumption that this could be Mydei and decides to defect to aid him:

This memory suggests two things clearly: Mydei was not living in Kremnos at the time Krateros defected, and the exile of all of Mydei's friends must have taken place before they met Mydei, years in the past, as there is no way an entire small army could have been exiled from Kremnos, with Mydei in toe, and not at all attract Krateros's attention until after they were gone.

The idea that Mydei never returned to Kremnos is further enforced by Eurypon, who did not recognize Mydei when he confronted him, to the point that he didn't believe Mydei was even Kremnoan. This suggests that Eurypon not only didn't know Mydei's true identity--he'd never seen him before at all, making it extremely unlikely that Mydei was walking around Castrum Kremnos, talking to Chryseus Leo, and reading in the royal library all under some false identity for years. Eurypon certainly wouldn't have been capable of exiling someone he'd never seen before from Kremnos, in any case!

Therefore, we can assume the series of events in this timeline is pretty straightforward: Mydei entered the Sea of Souls as a baby, came out nine years later, went straight into a life of exile with his five friends, amassed power and support for ten years, and then returned to seek vengeance on his father.

The only remaining question in this timeline becomes "When did Mydei join up with Okhema?"

I think, in this timeline, it makes the most sense for Mydei to have only joined up with Okhema after killing his father. In 3.1, Mydei confirms to Phainon that all his friends died before he was able to kill his father, and that none of them ever made it to Okhema:

Therefore, the final order of events for the more prominent timeline is:

Dumped into the sea as an infant, nine years in the Sea of Souls

Ten years in exile with his friends amassing strength and support

Returns to Kremnos, kills his father, and the last of his friends dies that day

Then he defects to Okhema, leading any of the Kremnoans willing to follow him there.

By itself, this story makes perfect sense. If this was all the information we'd been given, there wouldn't have been any gaps.

Unfortunately, we also have a whole other set of information that massively conflicts with these events, which can only really be explained two ways: Either Hoyo messed up (again) and really dropped the consistency ball when it comes to writing Mydei's backstory... Or there's an entire separate timeline going on. Personally, I'm leaning toward the latter, because there are just too many seemingly deliberate fingers in the story pointing toward the inconsistencies for them to feel entirely unintentional to me.

Therefore, I propose that Mydei's memories are actually getting infiltrated by a second, entirely different timeline:

The "Gorgo Lives" Timeline

From 3.0 all the way to 3.2, we're given numerous pieces of information that point to a wholly different order to the events of Mydei's life, contrasting the story that Mydei tells Phainon in the Garden. At first, these events seem scattered and nonsensical, contradicting the "main" timeline in too many ways to be anything but errors... But when taken as a whole, we can build a second coherent timeline out of these events if we make one assumption: There is a timeline where Gorgo lived longer.

In the second timeline which is intruding on Mydei's memories, there appears to be one key point of divergence: Gorgo did not die dueling Eurypon. Either she never challenged him to the duel, or (more likely) she was never successfully poisoned, and therefore it's possible she won the duel, allowing her to rescue Mydei from the sea.

Working from that possibility, a second complete timeline emerges:

Mydei was thrown into the Sea of Souls as an infant but did not drift there for nine years. Instead, he was rescued and brought back to Kremnos, where he was allowed to grow up in the inner city, with access to both Chryseus Leo, who served as his teacher, and access to the royal library, which he is proud enough of to call "his" library. He is able to lead Phainon and the Trailblazer around Castrum Kremnos even in its ruined state because he grew up there, spending enough time there to know the city like the back of his hand:

This is where we can slot in the inconsistent memories Mydei has of Gorgo:

(By the way, although Mydei writes this scene off as a dream, you can actually hear Oronyx's whisper play in the black screen seconds before this "dream" occurs...)

But okay, let's say this is just a wishful dream. Maybe this scene never happened. If all we got of Gorgo supposedly raising Mydei was this moment in 3.1, I might agree that it was just a dream (other than there being no reason to play Oronyx's sound effect there, but you know). However, in 3.2 they then hit us with this:

That's multiple moments now pointing to a timeline where Gorgo raised Mydei. Once is handwave-able--twice? That's deliberate.

In this secondary timeline, Mydei appears to have grown up as Kremnos's beloved crown prince, being warmly embraced by his people (at least until Kremnos fell into calamity). Apparently his days consisted of eating pomegranates, training for combat, playing with Kremnos's kids, and hanging out with his five friends. We see snippets of this idyllic life (along with his five friends appearing to be roughly the same age as him--something that likely wouldn't be true in the "main" timeline, by the way) on Mydei's long march back into Castrum Kremnos:

I know some people took this to be Mydei hallucinating or just wishfully imagining a life where he was able to be happy with his friends, possibly even some metaphorical "encountering the souls of the departed in a paradise," but I don't think this is true. Every single time Mydei phases in and out of this "hallucination," the visual effect and the sound effect of Oronyx are distinctly played--the exact same sound and visuals that play when Trailblazer activates Oronyx's prayer to jump between timelines.

Mydei himself doesn't seem to quite understand what is happening to him in this moment, as you can hear him stumble and pant as he repeatedly goes through flashes of Oronyx's power. You can listen to comparison video clips on the prior post I made about Mydei's backstory.

Furthermore, if we work from the assumption that these moments actually represent a rupture between timelines, then the rest of the inconsistencies can finally be cleared up:

In 3.0, Mydei says that his choice to leave Castrum Kremnos was not a forced exile but a "self-imposed" one:

And this aligns with what he stated in the Garden of Life to Phainon, that he and his friends "left Castrum Kremnos" to go into this self-imposed exile, rather than having never returned to Kremnos from the sea:

Furthermore, this also aligns with the angry NPCs in the past version of Castrum Kremnos that Trailblazer and Castorice travel back to:

Remember that this version of Castrum Kremnos was supposed to be occurring while Eurypon was still alive, so there is absolutely no way this line makes sense in the same universe where Eurypon didn't even know Mydei had survived. There isn't any way, in "our" timeline, that Mydei could have been both the "crown prince" of Kremnos for these NPCs and completely unknown to his father, the king.

These NPCs, furthermore, directly accuse Mydei of "deserting Kremnos," suggesting that Mydei was living in Castrum Kremnos as their prince, and then abandoned them to join Aglaea in Okhema, getting himself and everyone who went with him labelled as "traitors to Kremnos" in the process. None of this makes sense in the context of a timeline where no one in Kremnos knew he had even survived.

Instead, all of these elements point to a different sequence of events:

Gorgo lived, likely winning her duel and thereby (likely) giving her the right to save Mydei from the Sea of Souls and bring him back to Kremnos. He was raised by his mother as the beloved crown prince of Kremnos. Then, years later, as his father and Nikador both descended into full madness, Mydei and the Kremnoan detachment defected.

But what would have triggered this sudden need to defect after years of leading Kremnos as a well-liked prince?

The flashback between Mydei and Eurypon actually suggests a possible reason:

Apparently, at some point, in some timeline, Mydei knew about Eurypon's plan to break Nikador's divinity into separate parts and seal him away, harnessing the power of their titan for himself.

Yet the Mydei of 3.0 seems to have no idea about any of this, never able to give any explanation for how Nikador has degraded so much nor why Nikador is seemingly unkillable. Castorice, Mem, and the Trailblazer have to come up with the idea to go back in time to the past Kremnos by themselves, because Mydei never makes any mention of there ever having been a plot to break up and seal away Nikador's divinity, even when they walk past the very blades that did the sealing.

Finally, there's one last piece of conflicting information: While talking to Phainon in the Garden of Life, Mydei states that all of his friends died before the detachment could ever join up with Okhema and that all of their deaths occurred by the time he went to kill his father. But this conflicts with the NPCs above, who state that Mydei had already defected to Okhema and joined the Flame Chase Journey as a Chrysos Heir while his father was still alive.

This inconsistency is further reinforced by a memory fragment with Krateros, who confirms that Mydei had joined up with Okhema already before killing his father:

Putting all of this together, the complete series of events for this second timeline becomes:

Infant Mydei is quickly rescued from the Sea of Souls, is instead raised by his mother, and grows up as the crown prince of Castrum Kremnos with his five friends.

At some point, years later, he discovers Eurypon's plot to break up and imprison Nikador's divinity, and he and his friends and supporters defect from Kremnos as a result.

Either they go straight to Okhema (I'm inclined to say that "ten years of wandering" doesn't fit, chronologically speaking, into this secondary timeline) or they do wander a bit, but ultimately, Mydei reaches Okhema and aligns with Aglaea before killing his father.

After aligning the Kremnoan Detachment with Okhema, Mydei returns to Castrum Kremnos to kill his father, possibly to halt Eurypon's evil plan to harness Nikador's power.

At some point in this timeline, presumably before Mydei returns to kill his father, Gorgo likely still dies (possibly killed by Eurypon and/or Nikador), which explains why the Gorgo in the Sea of Souls seems to be the one convinced that she raised Mydei.

And this is just pure personal speculation, because there isn't enough evidence to really confirm it, but I almost feel like we can even pinpoint how/when the whole decision to defect to Okhema took place. At the end of Mydei's flashbacks to the "peaceful" Kremnos, Peucesta says that Mydei has been away from Kremnos for a while.

Leonnius assumes that Mydei was away on some apparently extended training trip, but this moment specifically ends with Gorgo welcoming Mydei home and asking him one very important question:

Obviously these lines are doing double duty, symbolically welcoming the present Mydei back to the ruins of Castrum Kremnos and asking him whether he's finally ready to take on his role as the "Guardian of Amphoreus." But as the wiki notes, this takes place in a flashback to the past, and for the "Mydei of the past" (aka the Mydei of the alternate timeline), this could very well have been Mydei disappearing from Kremnos to make contact with Aglaea in Okhema, and Gorgo questioning him about his decision to commit himself to the Flame Chase Journey, leading up to an ultimate and permanent defection from Kremnos. (This is just speculation though, trying to tie the last few loose ends together.)

Anyway, when taken from this perspective, that there are two separate backstories here, one from a world where Gorgo lived and the more prominent one where she died, we can sort all the seeming inconsistencies in Mydei's backstory into two surprisingly tidy and complete timelines.

I haven't yet found anything in any Mydei scene that doesn't fit one of these two scenarios, so I'm starting to definitely feel optimistic here that this writing was intentional, and that the "contradictory" backstory we're seeing for Mydei isn't "the worst continuity Star Rail has served up to date," but instead an actual deliberate choice to present us with a character whose memories are a hodge-podge of two divergent timelines, snippets of one timeline constantly erupting and "filling in the blanks" of the other.

I think this would be a fascinating way to lead up to the idea that Amphoreus's world isn't real, that it's a cobbled together story or set of memories that someone is barely holding together, and that it's constantly cyclical in nature, with events repeating with slight variations across times. The idea that Mydei is actually experiencing two different sets of memories crushed together into a tangled jumble and that he's only just now starting to become aware of the discrepancies would be such an excellent way to reinforce the "unreality" of Amphoreus's plot as a whole.

I really hope this is the direction that they take the story... Or at least that I won't one day be looking at all my Mydei posts and sadly thinking to myself that I put a lot more thought into the character's backstory than his own writers did, RIPPPPP. 😂😂😂

Cope with me, people!

[akakris10]

DAY 14: Shijima Mei (Toilet Bound Hanako-kun)

Hanako-kun's artwork is stylistically distinct, colourful, and really cute but also appropriately menacing when the tone calls for it. I like this story a lot though MY TWO FAVOURITES HAVEN'T SHOWN UP FOR A WHILE NOW………… Shijima Mei I will never forget you.

Fate also plays with the same rules of "the rumours of the living affect the perception of the dead" and it bangs as always. Shijima was born from a simple and hopeful wish to draw, but ended up being the medium for twisted rumours of people looking to make a creepy story out of Mei's death… It's always really interesting when a character is created specifically for the sake of someone else and lives faithfully by those rules to their own detriment or tries to break free of them… There's a lot of different paths those stories can go. It's lovely.

"I am a fiction. A dream. And a supernatural. I am the ideal self you wished for. I am one of your drawings." "You are my drawing. My dream. And my hope. It's because you're here that I will open my eyes again today."

They were so good. Why can't Shijima be included in the main cast.

ALSO THE ARTWORK OF HER ALWAYS BANGS SHE IS SOOOOO CUTE AND SO COOL

The dynamic between her and the real Mei. Look at this artwork. AidaIro know whats up.

[bbybluemochi]

can you drop sinner’s lore or just more information about this oc?👀 you probably already wrote about this somewhere, but I can't find it(

No, I haven't posted much about her story (or any OC story) anywhere. With my original characters I tend to take a very relaxed approach; they're something I draw for fun, and their stories/personalities are revealed to me slowly, almost as if I'm getting to know them rather than creating them. That's why their story is subject to constant change, and I'm reluctant to post about them outside of my irl circle, because what if I change my mind about something, yk?

I recently found these two moodboards I made a long time ago of Sinner and Frankie from my Band AU, so I'm leaving them here! (more about sinner below↴)

For Sinner in particular, I was heavily inspired by 80s music (glam rock, hair metal, heavy metal, etc.). Each of my fictional band members is based on different musical genres, depending on what kind of music I'm obsessed with at the time. The 5 band members are at different stages of the design process (Frankie, Sinner, and the drummer (who doesn't have a name yet!) are the ones I finished; the leader and singer are still in the works).

It's taking me a while because I want to give them all a personal/distinctive aesthetic, but also keep their designs somewhat consistent - I want them to look like they could be in a band together (and in the same decade!) while being inspired by different eras and genres ranging from 70s rock to 90s britpop, and it's hard! That's why it's taking me so long to finish the whole band.

Sinner in particular has become my muse, the character I draw when I'm feeling burntout or just want to doodle. My friends and I always joke that she has orange cat energy (chaotic, not the brightest person in the room, but we love her for it). She loves dad jokes, beer, her bandmates, the rock n roll lifestyle, the road. She has a reputation for being a “player,” spending every night with a different girl (something that will make her entire relationship with Frankie a mess, as no one expects her to catch feelings or commit to a serious relationship). Big heart, laid back attitude, a thirst for adventure. Terrific guitar playing skills. Lives for the music!!!!

I love her so much and I feel like I’m doing her a disservice by describing her this way, because there’s so much more to her personality, but I wouldn’t know where to start! I’ve spent so much time thinking about her and imagining different scenarios with her and the rest of the band that summing up her entire personality in one post seems impossible! Maybe I’ll do an OC Q&A in the future so you can ask her directly :D

(re: the moodboards. I want to clarify that the musicians featured on the moodboards are there for aesthetic inspiration, and my characters are in no way inspired by their personalities or personal lives! I don't condone anything a man from the 80s has ever done/, and neither do I share their political views. Just wanted to say that before anyone takes it the wrong way! I'm just stealing their gender bc 80s men fashion is so lesbian coded to me.)

[imbecominggayer]

Giving Your Characters A Unique, Distinct Voice (With Examples)

What does "unique voice" mean? Basically, every single person has their own manner of speaking. This difference can be from politeness, the volume or "loudness", confidence, emotional quality, maturity, accents, cultural slang, and other variables that can be shown in a character's voice.

This can also be shown through "prioritization". Prioritization is what a character or narrator decides is worth focusing on for any given scene.

For example, Tree of Heaven is a cynical cinematographer whose inner life is primarily eclipsed by beautiful landscapes and settings. However, Jukka is a highly dedicated actor who neglects the trees for the people, whether they be strangers or loved ones. While Jukka and Tree of Heaven could be walking through the same park, they would be focused on entirely different things. Heaven would be focused on the way the sunlight scatters through the autumn-coated, gold-platted leaves while Jukka is people-watching!

Sometimes, I use other stories and their tones as inspiration for my characters!

For Haun, their inspiration for tone came from "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". Specfically, AM's monologues like the "and I began to hate" or the bee monologue describing AM's thoughts on bees radio play! The reasoning behind this was the fact that Haun Anatemori, my character, is someone with deep-seated resentment. Rage and hatred born out of a feeling of injustice, self-loathing, and a feeling of deep-seated betrayal. However, Haun confines their emotions to logical actions and long-term planning meaning there is no outward way to express these emotions. Leading to his entire inner voice being coated in hatred.

Education and social standing often has the most outward influence on a character's external voice. That's the unique thing about protagonists and narrators. Because narrators don't have to worry about social standing and protagonists can have visible inner life, protagonists often have "two" voices. Their "outside" voice, aka the voice they use to speak to others, and their inner voices they use for their own feelings.

Haun's inner voice is resentful with metaphors and analogies of disgusting things such as bodily fluid used to provide an artful crassness to his voice that shows Haun's education and anger but his outer voice is far more innocent and self-contained with less verbosity as Haun is attempting to portray an innocent, less literate farmer type in order to trick others as he rises the social ladder.

Another highly influencial factor is maturity! If a character is emotionally mature, then they often have a more composed tone of voice with simple, yet profound metaphors that often express clear motivation and clear emotion. They often have accurate ideas about others and themselves. This is different from how emotional a character is! A mature character can be emotional but they have a clearer understanding of their emotions. Not the mood swing type!

Nonkosi Tyali is the most compassionate yet mature character I have with their inner voice and outward voice both having a sense of "refinement". Nonkosi understands what they want, why they want it, and how to get it. Despite their cheerful tone, it's obvious they aren't naive or out of control. Nonkosi also has remarkable observational skills as they are deeply intune to the thoughts and emotions of others which allows them to have accurate and insightful observations about other characters.

Verne Lawless, in contrast, is highly immature with a tendency for rapid mood swings, ranting, and catastrophizing. They rarely compose their emotions with them having to spend far more time detailing and failing to "accurate" translate their emotions for the audience. They rarely focus on the emotional lives of others. While Verne can use flowering, verbose words and nostalgia, this fails to counteract the obvious desperation and run-around Verne has in their thoughts.

Finally, just think about what their emotions are. This doesn't have to be something as simple as "happy" or "sad".

Verne is a nostalgic person who constantly references old classics like Jules Verne with long, verbose poetry. This is influenced by Verne's obvious intellect and his emotional center of love. However, whenever they are emotionally in a tailspin, they often resort to manic, modern slang with firey self-hatred and self-deprecation. This is due to the fact that Verne adores love but he believes that he will never find love. This desperation often leads him to be more psychologically "fragile" with his ability to contain his emotions constantly threatened.

Emotions: Mania, nostalgia, desperation, and love

Nonkosi is an optimistic person which can sometimes veer into surpressing negative emotions and experiences. They maintain the belief that they can be eternally strong and compassionate as they act more like a force of nature then the human they actually are.

Emotions: Awkward optimism, gentle melancholic, and confidence

Jukka is mostly possessed with a quiet melancholy for most of life with pretentious verbosity surrounding the nature of society in a similar vein of "No Longer Human" by Osamu Dazai. However, whenever Jukka is bound up in the passion of acting, Jukka can often dance with mania, emotional highs, and life coated in fandom and acting. Jukka's language is primarily references to media such as Main Character Syndrome, tropes, rivalry, found family, and some not really 4th Wall Breaks because Jukka believes he lives in a series but he doesn't know he is actually a written character.

Emotions: melancholy, sentimentality, and minor resentment.

[galedekarios]

Dragon Age: Veilguard | The Ultimate Preview Summary

shinobi602 on twitter shared this amazing in-depth summary of all new information about the game that we have so far:

Coming to PS5, Xbox Series X and PC in Fall 2024

Consoles: Quality and Performance modes (60FPS)

Photo mode is confirmed

Fully offline single player, no EA account linking, no micro-transactions'

Play as a human, elf, dwarf, or Qunari

Choose your backstory, 6 factions to choose from when you create your character, all with "deep roots in Thedas": Antivan Crows, Grey Wardens, Shadow Dragons, Veil Jumpers, Lords of Fortune, The Mourne Watch

Each faction offers 3 distinct buffs each, like being able to hold an extra potion or do extra damage against certain enemies, and the odd reference in dialogue

You can customize your Inquisitor from Dragon Age: Inquisition in the character creator and "make a few key decisions that will impact how The Veilguard begins"

There are some "killer cameos" from past games that show up

Warrior Class: Use a sword and shield or two handed weapon to send enemies flying

Rogue Class: Utilizes quick movement and reflexes. You can wield a bow or dual swords with "powerful, precise strikes for lethal damage"

Mage Class: Use magic to incinerate, freeze, electrocute and crush. Some cast from afar, while others prefer close quarters combat

Each class also has 3 sub-specializations, such as duelist, saboteur, or veil ranger for the Rogue

Classes also have unique 'resource system's, for example, the Rogue has "momentum", which builds up as you land consecutive hits, and each will always have a ranged option

One Rogue momentum attack is a "hip fire" option we saw for the Rogue's bow, letting you pop off arrows from the waist

Another momentum attack for the Warrior lets you lob your shield at enemies

Quests are more handcrafted and mission based, curated with alternate paths, secrets to discover and optional content

There are also open ended explorable areas

Party size of 3 during combat, ala Mass Effect

Combat is focused on real-time action, dodge, parry, counter, "sophisticated animation canceling and branching", using risk-reward charge attacks designed to break enemy armor layers

Enemies have elemental weaknesses and resistances, and you can chain together elemental combos for extra damage

One example is a squadmate using a gravity well attack to suck enemies in, another slowing them down, and the player then unleashing a big AOE attack

You don't take direct control of companions like past Dragon Age games, but you can still pause and issues ability commands for you and your allies

There is a hub area for the player like Skyhold and the Normandy, called The Lighthouse

Companions can eventually start romancing other characters if you opt not to romance them

Each companion also has unique missions tied to them that play into the larger story

Nudity confirmed - romance scenes can get "a little spicy"

"Incredibly deep" character creator: 5 categories including: Lineage, Appearance, Class, Faction, Playstyle

Players can also choose different body sizes and shapes

Dozens of hairstyles to choose from, with "individual strands of hair rendered separately and reacting quite remarkably to in-game physics", pulled from EA Sports

Character creator lets you adjust the lighting so you can be sure your character looks good

The team wanted to balance the look of the game with both light and darkness. "When everything is dark, nothing really feels dark. For this one, we really wanted to build that contrast again."

Skill tree is "vast", you can also set up specific companions with certain kits, from tackling specific enemy types to being more of a supporting healer or flexible all-rounders

There are tarot cards you go through during the character creation process that will let you choose decisions from past games to implement into Veilguard

The team teases you may lose some characters during the story

[thewriteadviceforwriters]

Master Dialogue Writing Techniques for Engaging Fiction (For Writers)

(Beware, long post!)

As fiction writers, we all know that effective dialogue is essential for bringing our stories and characters to life. After all, the way our protagonists, antagonists, and supporting players speak to one another is one of the primary ways readers get to know them on a deep, intimate level. Dialogue reveals personality, uncovers motivation, and propels the narrative forward in a way that felt narration simply can't match.

But nailing natural, compelling dialogue is easier said than done. It's a craft that takes serious skill to master, requiring writers to have a keen ear for authentic speech patterns, a nimble handle on subtext and implication, and the ability to strike that delicate balance between being true to real-world conversation while also keeping things snappy, dynamic, and laser-focused on the story at hand.

If you're someone who struggles with crafting dialogue that truly sings, never fear. In this in-depth guide, I'm going to dive deep into the techniques and best practices that will help you elevate your dialogue writing to new heights. By the end, you'll have a toolbox full of strategies to ensure that every exchange between your characters is as gripping, revealing, and unforgettable as possible.

The Fundamentals of Effective Dialogue

Before we get into the more advanced nuances of dialogue writing, let's start by covering some of the foundational principles that all great fictional conversations are built upon:

Reveal Character One of the primary functions of dialogue is to give readers a window into who your characters are as people. The way they speak — their word choices, their tone, their body language, their turns of phrase — should provide vivid insight into their personalities, backgrounds, values, quirks, and emotional states.

Think about how much you can glean about someone just from how they communicate in real life. Do they use a lot of slang and shorthand? Are they verbose and flowery with their language? Do they struggle to make eye contact or fail to respond directly to questions? All of these subtle linguistic cues are powerful tools for crafting multi-dimensional characters.

Drive the Plot Forward While revelations about character are crucial, you also want to ensure that your dialogue is constantly pushing the story itself forward. Each exchange should feel purposeful, moving the narrative along by introducing new information, triggering plot points, creating conflict, or prompting characters to make pivotal decisions.

Dialogue that feels aimless or extraneous will ultimately bore readers and detract from the forward momentum of your story. Every line should have a clear intent or function, whether it's uncovering a hidden truth, setting up a future complication, or escalating the tension in a high-stakes moment.

Establish Distinct Voices In a story featuring multiple characters, it's crucial that each person has a clearly defined and differentiated way of speaking. Readers should be able to tell who's talking just from the rhythm, diction, and personality of the dialogue, without any additional context clues.

This doesn't mean every character has to have an over-the-top, hyper-stylized way of communicating. In fact, the most effective character voices often feel grounded and natural. But there should still be distinct markers — whether it's word choice, sentence structure, tone, or speech patterns — that make each person's voice instantly recognizable.

Convey Subtext While the literal words being spoken are important, great dialogue also traffics heavily in subtext — the unspoken emotional undercurrents, power dynamics, and hidden agendas that simmer beneath the surface of a conversation.

The most compelling exchanges happen when characters are communicating on multiple levels simultaneously. Perhaps they're saying one thing out loud while their body language and tone convey a completely different sentiment. Or maybe they're engaged in a subtle war of wits, trading verbal jabs that reveal deeper wells of resentment, attraction, or vulnerability.

Mastering the art of subtext is key to creating dialogue that feels layered, lifelike, and imbued with dramatic tension.

Strategies for Writing Snappy, Realistic Dialogue

Now that we've covered the foundational principles, let's dive into some specific techniques and best practices that will take your dialogue writing to the next level:

Omit Unnecessary Details One of the biggest mistakes many writers make with dialogue is bogging it down with too much extraneous information. In real life, people rarely speak in perfectly composed, grammatically correct full sentences. We stumble over our words, interrupt each other, trail off mid-thought, and pack our speech with filler words like "um," "uh," and "you know."

While you don't want to go overboard with mimicking that messiness, you should aim to strip your dialogue of any overly formal or expository language. Stick to the essentials — the core thoughts, feelings, and information being exchanged — and let the subtext and character voices do the heavy lifting. Your readers will fill in the gaps and appreciate the authenticity.

Master the Art of Subtext As mentioned earlier, crafting dialogue that's rich in subtext is one of the keys to making it feel gripping and lifelike. Think about how much is often left unsaid in real-world conversations, with people dancing around sensitive topics, conveying hidden agendas, or engaging in subtle power struggles.

To layer that sense of unspoken tension into your own dialogue, consider techniques like:

• Having characters contradict themselves or say one thing while their body language says another

• Utilizing loaded pauses, interruptions, and moments of uncomfortable silence

• Injecting subtle sarcasm, skepticism, or implication into a character's word choices

• Allowing characters to talk past each other, missing the unspoken point of what the other person is really saying

The more you can imbue your dialogue with that layered, emotionally-charged subtext, the more it will resonate with readers on a deeper level.

Establish Distinct Voices As mentioned earlier, ensuring that each of your characters has a clearly defined and differentiated speaking voice is crucial for great dialogue. But how exactly do you go about accomplishing that?

One effective strategy is to give each person a unique set of verbal tics, idioms, or speech patterns. Maybe one character is prone to long-winded, flowery metaphors, while another speaks in clipped, efficiency-minded sentences. Perhaps your protagonist has a habit of ending statements with questioning upticks, while the sarcastic best friend always punctuates their barbs with an eye roll.

You can also play with differences in diction, syntax, and even accent/dialect to further distinguish how your characters communicate. The key is to really get to know the unique personality, background, and psychology of each person — then let those elements shine through in how they express themselves.

Lean Into Conflict and Confrontation When it comes to crafting gripping dialogue, conflict is your friend. The most compelling exchanges often arise from characters butting heads, engaging in verbal sparring matches, or working through deep-seated tensions and disagreements.

Conflict allows you to showcase the high stakes, unresolved needs, and deeper emotional currents that are driving your characters. It forces them to make bold choices, reveals aspects of their personalities that might not otherwise surface, and generates the kind of dramatic tension that will really hook your readers.

Of course, you'll want to avoid making every single dialogue scene a full-blown argument. But learning to sprinkle in well-placed moments of friction, confrontation, and clashing agendas is a surefire way to elevate the energy and impact of your character interactions.

Read Your Dialogue Out Loud One of the most valuable tricks for ensuring your dialogue sounds natural and lifelike is to read it aloud as you're writing. Hearing the words out loud will quickly expose any clunky phrasing, overly formal grammar, or inauthentic rhythms that would otherwise go unnoticed on the page.

Pay close attention to how the dialogue rolls off your tongue. Does it have a smooth, conversational flow? Or does it feel stilted and unnatural? Are your characters' unique voices shining through clearly? Are there any spots where the back-and-forth starts to drag or feel repetitive?

Actively listening to your dialogue — and making adjustments based on how it sounds in the real world — is an essential part of the writing process. It's one of the best ways to refine and polish those character interactions until they feel truly alive.

Hopefully, this can help you all!

The key is to always keep your focus on authenticity. Ask yourself: how would real people actually speak?

Hey fellow writers! I'm super excited to share that I've just launched a Tumblr community. I'm inviting all of you to join my community. All you have to do is fill out this Google form, and I'll personally send you an invitation to join the Write Right Society on Tumblr! Can't wait to see your posts!

[comicaurora]

Just saw the announcement about Heartwood Coven, and I'm super excited!

I know that when you're exploring a genre, either for the first time, or just the first time in a while, sometimes inspirations for new Trope Talks emerge, and as a fan of spaces adjacent to Magical Girl media (Kamen Rider, mostly, but Ultraman, Super Sentai/Power Rangers, and Garo also exist, just to scratch the surface), I honestly find it kind of difficult to think of any tropes in the space that don't just devolve into little trivia factoids, or a 'Yup, that sure is a thing they do!', despite being in the space for decades. But I also know you have a keener eye for media tropes than I personally do.

So, all that is to ask, are there any tropes in that space that have caught your attention recently? This isn't even specifically asking about a potential future video, just in general.

The ingredients for a Sentai/Magical Girl story are very distinctive, especially when compared to other superhero genres!

Comes As A Set! Everyone in a thematic team has acquired their powers the same way, and the powers are very minor variants off of each other - one character might have The Specialest Version where their powers are strongest and their heart is Most Pure, but everyone else will be running at the same power level with almost no specialization. This sounds obvious, but almost no other superhero team does this. Even the X-Men, whose powers are all Being Mutants, come across as a seriously varied menagerie with wildly disparate power levels. Everyone being The Same Thing In A Different Color is pretty unique to this space!

Monster Of The Week: Not the only genre this appears in, but one of the only spaces where it's straight-up down to a science. The big bad of a series like this will only make a real appearance in the grand season finale. Until then, the team will be fighting their lieutenants' minions at a rate of one per episode. The big bad doesn't even usually deign to make the minions themselves, since they're much too busy standing in their recycled animation evil lair. The minions will have unique gimmicks, but will share similar levels of thematic and structural closeness with one another that the heroes do - they'll all be kaiju, or walking evil spells, or disgruntled citizens gifted thematically inconvenient superpowers. Where are these minions coming from? Sometimes the answer is "they cook em up at home" and sometimes it's "they corrupt innocent people so the heroes have to go nonlethal." It doesn't make much difference in the execution, so it's mostly dealer's choice.

So Many Wonderful Toys! These heroes aren't afraid to accessorize, and the merchandising department also says we have to. When the formula needs mixing up, just give someone a new weapon or vehicle or mech or powerup macguffin. And unless you're only giving the upgrade to the Designated Specialest Pure Of Heart one, make sure to bring enough for the rest of the team, because this is a good way to bring in a round of powerups for everyone and give them some new stock animations to reuse every episode!

There's Only One Way To Win And It's Teamwork. My personal gripe with a lot of these stories is that, by nature of the formula, the characters usually end up becoming largely interchangeable in a fight, because nobody is allowed to win before they do the Big Finisher they always use. And if the Big Finisher is "the most specialest pure of heart character remembers their job and blasts them with the Friendship Laser" that means the rest of the gang is basically on minion-punching duty and repeating "no way! my attack had no effect?!" Every fight has to run through everyone's big canned moves, usually one at a time, and since none of them will do any appreciable damage then they'll combine their giant robots or wait for the leader to bust out the Friendship Cannon and the fight will be over. I think this one's genuinely kind of a weakness of the format; it's pretty rare for a single non-leader character to get a day in the limelight or end up having the exact ability the week's bad guy is allergic to. Nobody gets an individual chance to shine unless the writers intentionally break the formula to make it happen.

The Sixth Ranger! You thought your team of five color-coordinated thematically linked cool guys was complete, but surprise! There are more colors/planets/dinosaurs than just the starting five, and some powerfull badass with unknown morals and a frightening reputation has just turned up wearing your team's matching outfit! Because the team comp is so ironclad compared to other superhero formats, this is always very disruptive and kind of a big shakeup that could restructure the whole status quo, unlike in typical superhero teams where individual attendance is optional and it's not a dealbreaker whether or not Wolverine is in this week.

And Your Friend Steve: someone's will they/won't they significant other is constantly hanging around the fights, in or out of a secret identity of their own, and their main contribution is to get kidnapped by the big bad, brainwashed by the big bad, or kidnapped and then brainwashed by the big bad. Outside of their busy schedule their main narrative role is to reinforce the Secret Identity concept that would otherwise risk slipping out of relevance. It's easier to remember your identity is supposed to be secret when Your Friend Steve keeps turning up at fights.

Bumbling Minions, Serious Boss - this is just an observation on my end, but it's quite common for the villain's crew of lieutenants to be somewhat more comedic than the main Big Bad - whether they're just a couple wacky minions or the comedy comes from how flustered they get when they inevitably lose, comedy is derived from them experiencing the wrath of their evil boss after the good guys win. But all this levity drains away as the lieutenants get whittled down and the finale approaches, and even if the villain has seemed clownish in the safe confines of their lair, when they actually go on the warpath and become the main present threat, they stop being funny entirely. Or, failing that, they get usurped by a new, worse villain, and they become the cartoonish lieutenant to the new guy. Villain chains of command get complicated.

The magical girl equivalent of the shonen anime Super Saiyan transformations is Pretty Dresses. The escalating ornate-ness of a magical girl's Pretty Dress corresponds one-to-one to the Bigness and Glowiness of a Super Saiyan's hair and reflects the reality-warping power contained within. Sailor Moon in a lacey bridal gown with gauzey diaphenous wings and a tiara is the kind of threat Goku would save in his contacts as "new sparring partner"

[david-talks-sw]

Part 2.5 of the 4-part post series interweaving George Lucas' words in a curated meta post. Here are PART 1 and PART 2.

In George Lucas' words: The Fall and Return of Anakin Skywalker

- Does The Clone Wars count? -

When talking about why Anakin Skywalker falls to the Dark Side, it's easy for many fans to point to events that Anakin goes through in the series The Clone Wars.

However, while George Lucas himself stated he doesn't make a distinction between the series and the films, it's important to bear in mind why that series was created in the first place.

The Clone Wars connects Episode II and III. As a TV series, it gives more depth and understanding about how the Republic fell, and what a fantastic hero Anakin Skywalker was.

In-universe, this conflict is really the centerpiece of the downfall of the Jedi Order and the ultimate rise of the Empire, but in the films, we get so focused on Anakin turning into Darth Vader that it's easy to forget that he was one of the biggest heroes of the entire Clone War.

But as far as George is concerned, the Star Wars epic itself is basically this mythological uber story about one man: Anakin Skywalker. That is the saga shown in the six feature films, a narrow-focused story with a beginning, a middle and an end, the story of one man's struggle against evil and the redemption by his son.

So when you switch from Episode II to Episode III, you can imagine a little asterisk that says, “more about the Clone Wars in the animated series” but it's only an asterisk because those specific stories don’t have anything to do with Anakin Skywalker, really.

In the films, they're skipped over. You hear about it, but you only see the very beginning and the very end of the wars.

But whereas the features are Anakin Skywalker’s story, by contrast, The Clone Wars is basically a footnote in the saga (which is why George later decided to make it in an animated form, so it doesn’t get confused with the saga).

And just because those ideas don't have much to do with Anakin Skywalker's fall to the Dark Side, doesn't mean they're not worth sharing. Ignoring these tales would be sad because there’s so much stuff to explore.

After all, this was a turning point for the Republic. So the show's stories deal with individual clones, we get to know them. Same thing with Jedi, who in the films only zip through real fast, and never get explored on a personal level.

Mostly, in terms of character development, this time-period develops Anakin and Obi-Wan's relationship.

In Episode II, they are not really that friendly, don’t get along very well, they’re very standoffish with each other. So the idea was to see how they become best friends, in Episode III, how they become partners, how they become a team of equals.

And with the series, you see that it's because they’ve been sort of been through the Clone Wars together. So this really helps build that relationship, something which is also facilitated by the creation of a new character to take the role of the younger person who is being taught, in these TCW stories.

In order to make Anakin a little bit more mature, (seeing as in Episode II, he was kind of a wild child) George gives him somebody to teach: Ahsoka Tano, his new Padawan, a young woman who holds her own with him.

His reasoning is that, when you become a parent, when you become a teacher, you kind of have to become more responsible. It kind of forces you into this adulthood thing, it makes you more mature simply because you’ve, suddenly, got to be a good example for somebody younger than you are.

Thus explaining Anakin’s rise to being a fully-fledged Jedi, and why, in Episode III, his character is more settled down, and less petulant.

To conclude:

The Clone Wars is like a footnote to the live-action features. In this show, Anakin is simply a normal person, as well as a great Jedi Knight. In the movies, you never see Anakin as a normal person. He’s always struggling. Again, the films are about pivotal points in his life.

However, while throughout the Clone War, Anakin does has moments where he overcomes his attachments...

... and moments where he instead gives into his fear of losing them way too much...

... even being warned against doing so by other Jedi (it's not as if this flaw went unnoticed)...

... but also encouraged by Palpatine into continuing down this path...

... at the end of the day, what this comes down to is something that Dave Filoni explained when talking about the narrative constraints of writing episodes for The Clone Wars:

Though Anakin may briefly overcome flaws, he never solves any of those problems fully.

He'll start embarking on a path of understanding, but can never take the final full step to being this more enlightened person, because he keeps getting pulled back down.

Which is why when we're talking about events that caused Anakin's downfall, I'd say that The Clone Wars counts... but in only in terms that all these events do is cement the path Anakin has begun to undertake in Episode II, through his lack of discipline, emotional unruliness and attachment.

For better or for worse. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

That includes something like Ahsoka leaving the Jedi Order. George Lucas was originally just gonna have her brought back into the Jedi and be done with it, it's Dave Filoni who insisted on that taking place because it was unexplored territory, narratively-speaking.

But in the context of the bigger Star Wars saga about the fall of Anakin Skywalker, a character like Ahsoka is inconsequential.

Because while The Clone Wars gives George the chance to get out of dealing with the psychological underpinnings of why somebody gets to be evil (as he does in the films) and show that, “Anakin was a regular guy,” just like he was in Episode I... it doesn’t really have anything to do with Anakin’s story, about his fall to the dark side.

Sources:

Attack of the Clones, Director’s Commentary, 2002

Gizmodo/io9, 2008

ScreenSlam, 2008

Parade, 2008

Contra Costa Times, 2008

ComingSoon.Net, 2008

Sky Movies, 2008

Star Wars - The Clone Wars (movie) - World Premiere, 2008

The Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, 2009

SciFiNow, 2011

Dave Filoni, “The Slaves of Zyggeria” video commentary, 2012

Dave Filoni, “The Wrong Jedi” featurette, 2012

[thisisnotthenerd]

putting the tl;dr at the top as a poll and the commentary under the cut because it’s quite rambly and it’s also late and i’m tired.

*whether dorian is one of these is up for debate

there’s some discussion of bell’s hells not having the “it” factor for a lot of people. even though it’s my first campaign and the only one i’ve mostly watched live, i kind of have to agree.

there’s a distinctive lack of investment in backstory for the group in terms of what they’ve spent time on in campaign. i think fearne is the only one who’s been done justice, even though we’ve seen other exploration, because they’ve been to her home multiple times, and while her backstory isn’t central to the main plot, it is close. it’s enough distance for her to be able to develop as a character but also for us to see where she came from.

imogen’s is tied directly to the main moon plot, so she’s had screen time aplenty, but less time to develop quietly, as laura does really well. i might argue for orym, but that’s because his is kept simple but with depth. his backstory comes through in the acting because he’s put up against his family members occasionally, but he’s a little guy at root.

for everyone else it’s been short detours. sometimes not even that. the spotlight oscillates between moon plot and god arguments with indecisive wandering in between.

while not everyone in vox machina inherently had a deep personal connection to the big bads of their campaigns, they didn’t need to. they did it for their friends, because they loved and trusted one another deeply. they made decisions about what they were facing and stuck to it, even when it meant sacrifice. they made multiple levels of friendship around and across the table.

at this point bell’s hells has been told a bunch of different things to do. and honestly i don’t know if they ever decided on one.

that’s not the point of this though.

there’s some archetypes or dnd players out there: roleplayers and power gamers. people who are all in it for the story and people who are all in it for the game. and it reflects in the characters they build.

somehow bell’s hells (collectively) is neither.

they don’t have strong investment in the plot collectively. the character concepts range from simple to deeply complex, and i have to say that i think the simpler has worked better for a plot-heavy campaign, because the characters that started simpler had a chance to develop over the campaign rather than competing for time between the plot and their own stories hanging over their heads.

take dorian. he was a humble bard, a former noble, who’s trying to make his way in the world. he refused great power from an evil source and paid the price in the loss of his brother. he fell in love as the world ended, and is still trying to sing the songs of the people he loves because he wants to bring people joy and bring them together. he’s invested in stopping predathos because of his friends, but also to avenge loss, and to protect the people of his homeland and take up his responsibility as heir to the silken squall.

it took a paragraph. but at the table, even when he was with the crown keepers for a few months, he fits right in. he’s had growth while keeping true to his core.

i’m not going to get into the rest now but there’s a definite element of throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.

anyways, beyond the difficulties of backstory, they’re not super optimized. i’m of the belief that optimization works in tandem with roleplay—the characters are growing and changing over the course of the story, and having the mechanics trace that and make choices impactful is a big part of the appeal of the game.

watching vox machina and the mighty nein fight is a treat because not only are they level 20 and therefore godlike in power, their mechanics support interesting combat where failure hits hard because they’re built to succeed. when someone fails a save or misses it means something. they have options in their wheelhouse but they’ve found their niches and know how to play to their strengths.

bell’s hells is playing high level combat right now, but they have middling stats: lots of dump stats, 10-14s in the middle and some attacks/spell saves that aren’t as high as you’d expect of level 15 characters. they have several characters with perhaps too many options, and have made some weird strategic decisions. they’re indecisive. in combination with fluctuating luck from the dice, there’s times where they can wreck house, but also times of them failing saves, missing on full turns, losing resources, and overall failing more than they succeed.

also bell’s hells don’t make big decisions in combat unless they’re absolutely forced to. in the last arc pre-final battle, the big battles were otohan on ruidus, dominox and ludinus in aeor (+delilah), zathuda and the unseelie in the feywild. with otohan, they were dying all around until fcg’s sacrifice. literally end of the line. then in aeor, they fought to end dominox, got whammied with downfall, and then had the delilah fight, but then her sealing came later. they fought in the arch heart’s temple, but the big revelations came on the heels of that, between the arch heart themself and then zathuda being strung up on the loom.

but of a tangent: i don’t think naddpod and critical role can be fairly compared, because they’re different in tone and telling very different stories. i relistened to naddpod c1 recently along with the last few episodes of c3 as we approach the finale, and while they have gotten more creative on the character building side, the story is still well done and combat is fun to listen to. they have had moments of deep tragedy on naddpod. they’ve had cameos of old characters, and even had one of them as a pc for a full arc mid-campaign 3. they’ve explored the future of the world of bahumia after the events of c1.

and while the story is satisfying and fun, the combat is also satisfying and fun. not just because murph is really good at building combats that are interesting in theater of the mind, but because the characters are built to be good at what they do. and when they go down, when they miss, when they fail, it hits harder. but they bounce back and keep going even when the circumstances suck. and they make narratively important decisions during combat.

with bell’s hells, i have often noted a split between their combat and roleplay. i like matt’s combats. i think they’re fun and make good use of a variety of enemies, terrain, and complicating factors. with vm and mn, it makes for really engaging episodes of combat, where they make use of the environment tactically and get to discover elements of how the field is set up as they go. i’m using the recent examples, which are not entirely inclusive but generally reflective of their combat trends.

vox machina fought their way off an airship, onto a chaotic battlefield, and then stealthed up to the malleus key, where they proceeded to defeat ozo cruth, break the bloody bridge, and get vax out of imprisonment. the mighty nein stealthed around kreviris, met with the volition, zip lined to and blew up the arx creonum, and then snuck through to meet the weave mind in combat. i can recall fun details and clutch moves, big risks including characters dying, and overall, battles that had character interaction.

as i’ve talked about before, bell’s hells gets whomped. they swing for the fences on some things, but when it doesn’t pay off it’s not just a missed opportunity, it’s often an active barrier or a loss of valuable resources that drive them closer to crisis.

imogen’s whirlwind, laudna’s disintegrate, and dorian’s forcecage were all great moves this episode. it also means they’re down some of their highest level spells before they actually face ludinus and/or predathos. granted they have the orb. but whether they can use it will be variable.