zokerfel-fr - Tumblr blog

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HE CAME DOWN IN A BUBBLE, DOUG

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Prismatic Baldwin Mats be upon ye

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Before they fix it, I'm gonna commemorate how Aberrations had a hole in their head when the Button eye type was first released.

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i somehow managed to get onto the first page of the dragon share thread this week

The People Like Pants Boy

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Being a trans dragon on flight rising is like

“Mom… dad…” (moves from standing pose to sitting pose)

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pondering my Primary Gene: Orb

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sometimes dressing dragons has you in the AH searching up things like Amber Flourish Anklets

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WHO GOT CAUGHT!?

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None of the user-made color guides on site were exactly what I wanted, so now I'm going mad with power

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I always find it kinda interesting how Flight Rising decided to handle the problem of 'I don't want to just pick one but how do I design a winter holiday event for my game that includes everyone' by instead going 'Fuck it. Spooky mimic creatures event that covers half of December and includes absolutely zero winter holiday themes. You're welcome.' and imo it Works.

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Oh my god, staff.....

This auraboa issue with the lore being (most likely) unintentionally racist is especially maddening to me, because the concept they seem to want to portray (based purely on the encyclopedia entry) is very similar to an OC I have, and so I can say with experience, it's incredibly difficult to convey! ESPECIALLY when you try to portray it inside a short story where you're cutting lines for word count (their forum reply mentioned they left out some lines to keep it short)

Instead of getting across the concept the encyclopedia entry seems to allude to, the short story just accidentally walks into like 10 racism rakes in a row and its truly agonizing for me to watch, knowing what i assume the actual lore's intent is.

encyclopedia quote: "Older generations of Auraboa existed in a constant state of communion with their fellows. They refer to this connection as The Loop. In this persistent state they perceive time and memory in a non-linear manner; their intertwined considerations for past and present events are such that it became difficult for a dragon outside The Loop to grasp the intentions of these ancient wyrms."

what seems to be the intention is that the auraboa are a hivemind that doesn't experience time the same way other dragons do- they experience past, present, and future all at once and thus cannot communicate well NOT because they have a different language, but because they aren't experiencing TIME ITSELF in the same fashion as the dragons! However, in practice, in the story, the auraboa seem to speak with words in the proper order, just haltingly, since otherwise the story itself couldn't work at all.

another encyclopedia bit: "The newest generation of Auraboa is not linked to The Loop in their waking hours. While they move through the world, they are less directly accessible and read as "silent" to Auraboa who are within the communal state. This disconnection has allowed the young Auraboa to experience time in a linear fashion, and with this new understanding they have begun to form connections with other species of dragon that have never before been possible."

The encyclopedia seems more clear about the Linear Time thing, and that being why they can actually communicate sensibly, but in the act of having a story where the older ones DO communicate with the outside dragons and get a point across, they've kind of not shown the reason why dragons and auraboa COULDNT communicate before! which is! a big thing!

If they'd implemented the auraboa speaking with everything in the wrong order instead of halting single words at a time, i feel like the intention would get across better. As it is, it just smacks them directly into the 'simple native' stereotype with a truly awful tripping into the 'having our kids be taught by outsiders' which is. a really wretched parallel, as many native people have spoken of the unimaginable violence of residential schools.

I feel like the encyclopedia entry Alone isn't nearly as awful (still not great, but not as bad) as the extremely poorly implemented story that managed to ddr dance onto a bunch of horrible tropes.

they were literally so bad at conveying the fact that the auraboa are a hivemind that is unmoored from time, that i see people misinterpreting the lore as auraboa having their own weird language that other dragons can't understand! there was not enough effort put into conveying the ideas they tried to convey, and what WAS put forward was literally chock full of the most unfortunate parallels physically possible.

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can the Ancients get better lore aside from the theme of "oh we (the modern breeds) forgot they were there" which is kinda stale. 4 of them is practically this

the elements should shake them up in a massive way and be like, angry beasts revived by the sheer energy. like no offense to sandsurge lore that has such great design, and then make them undertunnel workers...wtf? i'm like of the belief that ancient stuff should wake up from the earth angry and pissed because they got revived after so long AND forgotten by the gods

Imagine a physical map expansion where the elements get more area that is unearthed and there's a war between angry ancients and moderns. now that's a bounty alright

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VERY long Ramble incoming

honestly now that I'm looking at the auraboa lore situation, I'm just disappointed. There was such POTENTIAL in the idea of the Loop and the horror of a new generation inexplicably being disconnected from it, forcing the newly hatched children into a world totally separate from that perceived by their parents (I mean, hell, they perceive TIME differently!).... but then the writer(s?) just fell ass backwards into Icky Tropes.

I feel like I can see what the idea was, especially with the recent alterations to the Encyclopedia entry... It seems like staff fundamentally understands the true Horror potential here, but... Instead, through the short story, they proposed it through the lens of a condescending outsider character, turning the fears of the older generation into something trivial. And also weirdly demeaning the Auroboa's situation by portraying them as overreacting.

Why... why would you do that? Like, from a storytelling perspective? What's gained from that? Why not embrace the true horror and even Emotional significance of that disruption? Why instead go for "ohh we NEED outsider help we NEED to be saved because we are so helpless and it is so Silly that we, creatures who have never experienced such things, do not know what sleep is"????

And if they WANTED to have a condescending outsider, I feel like they COULD have done that, but it would have to have that character realize the horror at some point. And make it obvious that their attitude towards distressed parents and children facing Eldritch Shit and the Sudden Deconstruction of it was not cool!

(or at the very least be a bit more...idk. Consistent with said outsider character? Juniper just goes from "omg I am so honored that the fascinating creatures of the behemoth have chosen me to speak to" to "oh their wasting my time because they don't know what sleep is. I'd rather be sleeping!! 🙄" like girl... c'mon now. Why are we trivializing it like this. Do you want me as the reader to be invested in their plight or not.)

I mean come on. They're beings connected through one networked hivemind-like system, yet each still maintains a silver of individuality that allows them to move freely throughout the Behemoth that they care for. And they've got an eldritch understanding of time that no other dragon could understand. They're seeing the future, past, and present unfold simultaneously. They're witnessing the birth and death of the world at the same time, and have no way to communicate it to other dragons. The best they can do is maintain their home, and even then, they see its roots spread and decay all at once.

And then the newest generation is suddenly disconnected. An inherent link between parent and child and all dragons in-between, that has existed since the creation of their species, is just suddenly GONE for the newest births. With NO explanation for it. The children have no easy way of communicating with their parents. The children are experiencing time in a way that was not meant for their species. They've forcefully been shoved into a circadian rhythm that they are Not! Built for!

The only way a parent could communicate properly with their child would be when the latter is sleeping, something that is also completely foreign to this species. It would be terrifying for all involved!!!

They are literally experiencing eldritch horror from the perspective of the eldritch being forced into the mortal.

Like why WOULDN'T there be panic!!! And why would that panic be trivialized! Why are we only shown the perspective of an outsider who looks at this situation and goes "Oh the silly tree beasts are being so silly over nothing, it's no big deal!"

That and the way the auraboas talk to outsiders. Like. There was such potential there. Real opportunity to explore how ancient, time-bending beings would communicate to someone who couldn't even BEGIN to understand the intricacies of it.

Instead we got what feels more like baby talk (even described as though they were hatchlings enunciating their first words, which... I dunno man, maybe we don't want to compare them to children like That) and less like... Beings that experience all of time at once. I mean, the hatchlings and the adults speak the exact same way, and that doesn't make any sense given the literal time barrier going on.

I totally get why people thought there was just a language barrier and that auraboas had their own language, thus causing the disjointed speak, and not that it was because They Do Not Experience Time Like We Do. And I feel it would've been far easier to get it across by just... I dunno. Do anything else?? I saw someone on here suggest they speak in the "wrong" tenses, or using multiple tenses in the same sentence, which I think would've been far more clear.

Like, as opposed to "saplings wilt! saplings silent!" just "the saplings will wilt in silence, they've wilted in silence, they are wilting silently." Said all at once like all things are true simultaneously. And if we're going for hivemind, have each auraboa speak in a different tense, all at the same time, and have them switch it up every time. Have our outsider get confused and be like "which is it? are they wilting now, or have they already wilted?" and the cluster of auraboas respond in a cacophony of yes's, no's, and maybe's all at once.

Would've probably gotten across the "alien" vibe they were supposedly going for far better than wide-eyed desperation for an outsider's guidance conveyed through disjointed, in-world described as baby speech.

And also maybe would've had less accidental connotations. Because as it stands, I completely see why people have made the connections to the real world where they have. This doesn't read like eldritch timey-wimey intrigue, or even a respectful look at how younger generations can become detached from their families' cultures over time and the struggles that come with it. It reads like a culture being perceived by an ignorant outsider who (despite supposedly respecting these dragons) scoffs and rolls their eyes because the tree beasts with their funny words are being silly again, and that Hey, isn't it actually a great thing that the children are fundamentally different in all manners now? Because now they can join the rest of us in the "real world."

Yknow. Ick.

(I Personally think it would've been better to have the perspective be one of the Auraboas themselves, especially one of the children, to really understand what was going on here. Give us the full brunt of the mind of a creature experiencing all of time interwoven as one shape. The waters fall and the oceans crash with waves. They've now fallen to drought. The ocean has yet to be born. Caves have been carved out through the waters' currents. And when I break from this timeline, I open my eyes to see a child, the child not yet born, the child born now, the child born yesterday. Why can't I hear it? Why couldn't I hear it? Why won't I ever hear it?)

I dunno. People more qualified than me to speak on this matter have already torn the lore apart, I'm just... dropping my own two cents. Potential got weirdly squandered and we ended up instead with unfortunate implications and tropes that could be connected a liiiittle too awkwardly to irl situations.

*Also, before anyone points out: Yes, I know the hatchlings aren't COMPLETELY detached from the Loop and can join it when they sleep. But the fact is, these thangs never had to sleep before. That wasn't in their species' nature. So that's still weird and foreign for them on both sides. And since the hatchlings now have a circadian rhythm, they can't stay connected to the loop permanently. And also Also, seeing as the previous generations aren't experiencing time linearly, who's to say they even recognize when their child joins the loop? They'll speak with an echo of their child when that child was last asleep ages ago, not knowing that it's not them presently, because there is no 'present' for the older generations.

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KERMIT FANDRAGON FINALLY REAL

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Wait what's up with them??

they made a ancient dragon with a headdress that lives in a remote part of the world and have such exotic existences they can barely communicate with other dragons beyond baby speak until the elements get fucked up and now their babies can talk like normal. and their entire story is just some random dragon being vaguely condescending to their real fear of losing the connection of language that they have with their children

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EVERYONE PAUSE. BABY MEDUSA GETS EGGS