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#COCOON protagonist
w0rlds-within-w0rlds · 7 months
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Replying to @orxnge-rxt, 💀
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[Like what? It seems pretty safe in the bushes.] It thought with a head tilt, [I'm pretty hard to see in here, aren't I?]
With a somewhat grumpy chirp, they stood up, looking down at the (somewhat shorter) thylacine
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[Who are you, and what are you?] It chirped, slightly shuffling, [I've never seen a being like you.] They proceeded to write "Geometer" in the dirt, before pointing to themselves.
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octahedral-chaos · 8 months
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I have seen people having differing ideas on what the COCOON Protagonist is, so let's settle this:
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octafans-rp-hub · 7 months
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◇Finally decided to start RPing again! Since the only thing that's really holding me back was... not being able to trim my posts using Xkit due to lack of time, so I decided to just use Tumblr's reblog trimmer in the meantime.◇
◇Also I'll might make the COCOON Protagonist RP blog soon, so be on the lookout, because there might actually be two COCOON muses...
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gothamcityneedsme · 3 months
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>why is all my longfic rated t
>tones down violence on purpose while writing
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cthene · 1 year
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Is Fox Mulder the most comically-brutalized protagonist in television history? Not only is he shot and beaten up on a regular basis, but the list of extreme and exotic injuries he accrues over the course of the series has got to be some kind of TV cop record. The man is mind-wiped by the military in only the second episode. For any other TV cop, that would be a career-defining event, but it’s just a day in the life of Agent Spooky.
Bro was cocooned by carnivorous insects, thrown out of a nuclear submarine into the Alaskan tundra by an alien bounty hunter, beaten up by an invisible gorilla. He was experimented on in a Siberian gulag, drowned in the Bermuda Triangle, tortured by Neo-Nazis. I wonder what getting Freaky Friday-ed by a malfunctioning UFO cloaking device does to your gonads. How much radiation has he been exposed to? Someone test this man’s hair follicles. How many mysterious bodily fluids has he dipped his finger in and tasted at crime scenes? Dear God, someone test him for HIV. Imagine being the FBI doctor who administers his physicals.
Remember when the Shadow Government was putting LSD in Mulder’s water tank? Our boy got blown up in an underground train car and resurrected in a Navajo healing ceremony, and that’s not even the last train car he would get blown up in. One time, his lungs were filled with mutated tobacco beetles. Hoss let a quack doctor give him ketamine and drill a hole in his goddamn skull. In an unrelated incident, he had a chunk of his brain stolen. He was locked in a padded cell, trapped inside of a video game, and— of course —abducted by aliens. Fox Mulder was fully dead, and then came back to life after being exhumed, and nobody even seemed that surprised when he rolled up at the J. Edgar Hoover building like nothing had happened.
Am I missing anything? How is this man still alive? His body must be like a pillowcase full of broken lightbulbs. Every time he moves, you just hear crunching.
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shimaen · 4 months
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Sy shizun au
Sy transmitting as a random rogue cultivator many years before the protagonist is even born.
He starts looking for the protagonist but in the way he finds a homeless child that just looks like him, they are not the exact same, but they could easily pass as family. He ends up helping out this child, he felt strangely attached to him, bringing him to his lil cabin near a forest, one of his many hidden safe zones.
The child, Sj, comes in a package with his older brother? Yqy. The 3 of them don't start as teacher and students, much less a parental figure, Sy is not a child, but he must be just 5 or 6 years older than them, but Sy becomes a safe space, he provides them with basic necessities and more.
They grow up respecting him, and he teaches them what he knows, and could be useful. Thing is, the system determines that his work in that era is done, and needs to send Sy to fix the next problem, so one day, 4 years later after meeting his 2 lil gremlins, he goes into the forest, just a normal fauna and flora exploration for Sy, he goes alone with almost nothing, after all he is not going far, they all know this.
But Sy doesn't come back.
They wait until midnight
They are still searching by sunrise
They are losing hope after a week
They think that he must have abandoned them, it was too good to be true, but it still doesn't makes sense, Sy left most of his stuff in their little cabin, all his money, his sword, his trinkets, his fan. If he abandoned them, why did he leave all his stuff too?
They don't want to think that he may have died. It isn't fair. They would prefer that Sy just abandoned them, but they know (they hope) that Sy isn't like that. Years pass, and the plot somehow reconnects, Sj becomes a peak lord, and Yqy the sect leader, they gave up searching a long time ago and just accepted the most probable "truth" Lbh enters the story, and in one of his night hunts, he separates from the group.
He ends up in a section of the forest that looks a bit wilder, somehow more mystical. He reaches a big tree, ancient looking, it almost looks alive, and in the middle of it, there is this crystal, ancient amber filled and pumping with energy, maybe the beating heart of the forest? And there is something in the middle, a figure seemingly sleeping, it looks like his shizun, but not quite, maybe a bit younger, even Lbh doesn't realize until he has his hand pressed against the crystal, blood from his earlier wounds accidentally smeared against the amber, and the figure opens its eyes.
Haha funny au Lbh helps a really confused and out of it Sy out of his amber cocoon and brings Sy to the were they were staying just to discover that his teammates went back to the sect without him So imagine the shock of an Sj that was going to look for his student when he Sees this child carrying a full adult that seems to be unconscious, he was going to scold lbh when he actually sees the face of the man, and it feels like time stopped
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Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final
The first three posts in this series are here.
Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.
George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.
Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.
Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.
The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.
Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.
The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.
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Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.
Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.
Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.
Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.
Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.
Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.
Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.
Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.
The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.
The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.
Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.
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St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.
After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.
Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.
For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.
"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."
Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.
Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).
Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".
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Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.
Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.
Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.
In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.
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kranagok0 · 2 months
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Oh boy, this Is a complete love square....
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Guys, I don't know what I have about polyamorous romances but it's like a strange feeling of 'look at that, no one is sad and everyone loves each other.'
That just crossed my mind when I saw the new member of the trio of strange friends (now it's a quartet).
Louise is a breath of fresh air among the extroverts that make up the group.
Louise is practically an introvert. Someone closed who was even the last to be chosen on the boat trip (if we leave aside the trio of protagonists). Louise mentions that she has been in the Sparrow Scouts for some time now but has made almost no friends (or so I think).
I understand what it's like to be an introvert, more or less. I am the type of person who acts with a lot of concern, nervousness and gets serious so as not to say something stupid the first time they meet him... However, when I gain the necessary confidence I transform into someone different. I go from being 'a mouse thinking carefully about its next move' to becoming 'a monkey with a shotgun'. I hope I'm not the only one to have that strange way of being....
My life aside, I'd say Louise is kind of like that too. At first she tries to fit in by being normal with the team, but then she begins to get to know them and identify what things the trio of friends think are right or wrong and that is when Louise begins to show more of her personality. It emerges from the cocoon like a butterfly to show its true colors.
And in short: it is perfect for the trio of friends. It's so weird and different that I feel like it's necessary for the group, and I'm speaking in a positive way when I say weird. A good time.Now the main topic..... Romance.
I've seen a lot of Frida X David, Hilda X Frida, David X Frida fanfics and blogs, there's literally everything. But with the arrival of Louise the combinations are doubled. Now it could be Louise X David, Louise X Hilda, Louise
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*Music from a 80's TV game show plays*
Hello ladies, gentlemen and other magical creatures who visualize us! I want to welcome you to this little head-canon idea I had of what each character in the trio of friends would be like if they were Louise's partner!
To do this, we will see the qualities of each suitor and what their dynamic with the character would be like:
Let's start with the one who represents better than anyone the shyness and courage that exists within us, he died twice to try to demonstrate it. Here we have David.
David may be a scary guy, but he will definitely come to save you if you are in danger. This kid would literally show what he's made of on a battlefield if he feels like he needs to prove something.... Don't tell me no, we've all seen the Vikings episode.
Our next contestant is not only smart in school but also in witchcraft. If you ask him about a certain topic, rest assured that when he finishes his talk you will at least have knowledge of the entire topic and its related subtopics. She is willing to do anything for her friends, she would even open a portal to the unknown and create non-existent spells just for you. Let's give a big, fervent wave of applause to the young city witch: FRIDA!
Frida may have been a bit of a perfectionist in the past, but after meeting Hilda and experiencing several events she went from being miss perfect to becoming the smartest friend you can count on. To be honest, sometimes Frida can be a bit boring, but that doesn't stop her from reaching your heart by showing great gifts of her intellect and the magic she possesses means that any topic can arise from a conversation. So, if by 'boring' we mean a lot of context and extremely long topics that she explains to you with excitement and great happiness, then boring is pretty good.
Finally we have the icing on the cake, or in this case the blueberry. Coming from the wild and with more extroverted energy than any of the other candidates mentioned above, we have a young woman with blue hair as long as she could grow it (I don't doubt that she would have let it grow longer if it didn't bother her in her adventures). This girl can literally make friends with almost anything and her circle of friends is huge, ranging from elf scribes to giants who are no longer on this planet. She would be the one to always take the first step in battle with her sword if I see it necessary and— Wait, where did he get that sword?
With you, Hilda!
Seriously, where do I get it from?
Hilda is by far the most outgoing and curious person I have ever seen. Don't you remember what Tofoten was triggered by his curiosity? Dude, it was literally the end of the series. And if you hadn't already noticed, this girl would fight barehanded against a king to save her loved ones. She would be the first to take up weapons to save her friends, she is capable of moving every rock in the entire city to find her pet, she is even capable of doing an act of terrorism just because the bells were bothering her friends.
Oh my god, I'd be afraid of this girl if I were someone who played some practical joke on David in the past or something. I would be locked up at home for what might happen to me. Better confinement than meeting Hilda on the street and having her recognize me.
So.... In a little while we will see Louise's possible choices about who she would like to be with, why I think they would be a good couple and also about what their relationship would be like. And it wouldn't just be from my point of view. Indeed, dear reader, you can also have your opinion. Comment what you think a relationship between Louise and any of our favorite trio of friends would be like.I retire to write incorrect quotes and more about this romance because I am burning with emotion. See you later
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plethora-of-imagines · 9 months
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Hello, I have a request idea for you. If you think it's silly or aren't comfortable then please feel free to ignore it. May I please request a dhawan!master x reader request. (Do you remember that scene in the movie labyrinth where the protagonist ate the enchanted fruit and went into that dream state and the song played and she danced with the villian but something caused them to wake and break the dream state?) May I please request the scenario where the reader is trapped on a planet after being thrown out of the TARDIS but the population is under the control of the master. The reader ends up meeting someone from the planet who offers to "help" the reader find the doctor and friends.
How ever the reader doesn't know that this being is actually communicating with the master with a plan to bring the reader to him. After the being has gained the reader's trust the master orders the being to give the reader a piece of food for the reader to eat. The being does this but feels guilt once the reader eats it, they feel odd and walk in a daze before going into the dream like state. Everything then happens like in the above scenario from Labyrinth and once the dreamstate is broken they wake up in a different location.
Sorry for being so detailed. Feel free to alter it if you want.
I hope you have a great week
Sorry just wanted to add to my Labyrinth inspired request, maybe the food item along with the dreamscape causes the reader to forget about the Doctor and their friends and just wanting to be there with the master but they hear/or see something that makes them remember and break the dreamscape. (I just remembered the song that plays in the dreamscape. It's As the World Falls Down by David Bowie)
Sorry for being so details and I hope I'm not coming across as bossy. Have a great week.
Everything shined and glittered in the crystal candlelight of the ballroom. Your feet ached in your silk shoes, but almost as if compelled- you couldn’t stop. Others spun around you in flowing gowns painted in watercolor and paper masks. The spinning colors made your head spin along with them. 
Resting your head against the shoulder of your dance partner allowed for some minor relief. 
“Tired already?” His soothing voice inquired.
“Mhmmm, I haven't been sleeping much recently. Have to keep moving, for some reason...”
Rude, you were being so rude to the host of this wonderful party! And you couldn't even remember why you were exhausted in this way. Flashes of needing to keep running towards something, not even stopping to eat flickered in your mind. Dismissing them from your head as soon as they formed. How silly. Why would you ever need to run when you were so safe and comfortable here in his arms?
The gentle swaying and soft music was lulling you closer to sleep. Not quite true dreams, but small daydreams of pomegranates drifting before your closed eyes.
Whispers floating into your ears. 
“I’ll help you find the Doctor.” 
Soft hands guided you from the dance floor. Eyes slightly opened, looking down at your feet to avoid tripping over your gown. It was breathtakingly gorgeous. You must have borrowed it as you didn’t remember owning a gown like this.
“You must be hungry. Eat, eat this, my dear.”
You found yourself sitting on a regal couch. Gilded in gold, plush pillows providing comfort. Head finding its way to his lap, cocooned in blankets by the other guests. A hand finding its way to your hair.
“Is there anything else your human will require, Lord Master,” a voice only slightly louder than a whisper broke through your haze.
“If it would not ruin everything I would get up and choke the life out of you for waking them up,” the now familiar voice of the Master growled. “That slightly drugged haze could have lasted another hour if you hadn’t mucked it up.”
Attempting to fight against the blankets holding you down was a failed task. As reluctant as you could be to leave the comfort and warmth of blankets on a normal morning, these were refusing to let you move. Squirming only made your predicament, your knowledge of how much of a hostage you were, grow.
“Shhhh, sh, sh, shhh. No need to fret dear, your Master has you all safe and comfy,” his voice teased.
“What have you done to me,” you growled.
His wicked smile only served to enrage you.
“You’re about as ferocious as a declawed kitten, pet. Now I suggest you stay nice and docile in my lap until the Doctor has been taken care of.”
(463 words)
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w0rlds-within-w0rlds · 7 months
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WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS
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An independent RP and Ask blog for the Protagonist of the game COCOON (2023). May contain spoilers for the game, body horror and potential flashing lights/ eyestrain.
Crossover and OC friendly
Iconless friendly, even thought I may use icons
Slight Canon divergence
Follows/ Interacts from @octahedral-chaos
[Muse] [Mun] [Rules/ Dni] [Other RP blogs] [Tags]
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octahedral-chaos · 11 months
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Okay so the COCOON release date trailer came out and
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Turns out the Protagonist can fly
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octafans-rp-hub · 9 months
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◇Here's some potential muses that I might rp as:◇
Melodrama, my Mad Rat Dead- inspired thunder manifestation oc
My Pari oc, Thrill
Unnamed Mesuline oc and their shadow being friend (Might make a multimuse blog for them, along with Melodrama and Thrill)
COCOON protagonist
Hunter and maybe Eagle Mother from The Pathless
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artbyblastweave · 2 years
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Gideon the Ninth Liveread, Chapter 13
Gonna try and catch up on these.
Gideon is using increasingly possessive language used for Harrow- HER necromancer.
“I am just saying, you’d be dead.” More and more I understand the gestalt image of Harrow as the Kitten Who Thinks Of Nothing But Murder All Day. She’s a heap of bones and wet cloth held together with spite.
Big fan of the repeated use of "In a Bone”- “hiding in a bone”, “stuck in a bone”, “dying in a bone-” to describe the bone cocoon. This syntax smacks of Homestuck.
Okay. So Harrow was “just recuperating.” Here we see a reproduction of what Harrow did with her parents; sealing herself off from the world to try and recover, which is of course fruitless because you do it in a situation where you're starved for resources and there's nobody who even knows or cares something is wrong. Harrow rejects all solutions she doesn't execute singlehandedly; Gideon, meanwhile, snaps at opportunities as they emerge, even when offered by someone she hates; her brand of stubbornness only superficially resembles that of Harrow's because she was never given any real offer of assistance.
Finally Gideon starts flexing her leverage. This is good to see. Yell at your wet rat
Harrow is equally suspicious as I am of Dulcinea; she picked an interesting place to die! This, in turn, highlights something interesting about Gideon’s point of view; Gideon is cutting, but not consistently insightful. She’s very good at coming up with downright poetically mean and snarky things to say about the people and things around her; she can intuit the broad shape of the social dynamics, as shown in the chapter 12 intro- but she isn’t thinking critically about a lot of it. She’s routinely spending time with Dulcinea, and she hasn’t moved mentally beyond “she’s dying” to “why is she dying:” She hasn’t considered in the slightest the fundamental weirdness of sending a terminally ill person to complete a giant scavenger hunt. Gideon noticed and was put off by Canaan House’s dumpishness, but she didn’t parse it as a power play; instead, we overheard Naberius say that. Gideon noticed how incongruously constructed Canaan House is, but didn’t read much into it; Palamedes is the one whose bullshit detector actually went off.
The awful orange tone of human leather. Jesus fuck.
Alright, so they aren’t supposed to go through locked doors without permission. I didn’t remember the specifics of the wording on that one.
Harrow got ahead of the other houses because she has the force multiplier of skeletons; Palamedes has psychometry. The eighth house has... raw zealotry? There’s gotta be some necromantic element giving them a leg up. Here we get insight from Harrow about the other houses, insight absent from the narrative up till now because Harrow is, again, the protagonist of a very different story from that of Gideon's, with a very different set of known unknowns. All that buildup surrounding the sixth pair, and Harrow just kind of casually knows Palamedes by reputation. Also here we get a sense of who Harrow considers the functional competition- the Sixth, the Eighth, and possibly the Third. This makes sense; the Fourths are teenagers, the Second don’t actually seem interested in this, the Fifth were painted as pretty non-competitive in the dueling sequence, and the Seventh is.... actually, now that I think about it, Dulcinea is pretty heavily implied to be doing what Harrow is doing but with her Cavalier as her proxy instead of a skeleton army. Hmm. Harrow might not know this, having been AWOL the last week or so. And Gideon herself is not making that connection at the moment.
Harrow’s description of how she methodically swept the entire House for locked doors and then threw 163 skeletons into the bone grinder is yet another example of her being the protagonist completely different kind of book than Gideon. Harrow is the kind of prodigious protagonist who has incredibly in-depth understanding of the magic-system and to a lesser extent the setting politics; a strong insider of the sort whose "arc" often consists not of getting good, but of turning their incredible force of personality against the correct adversary, and whose minute-to-minute page-filling challenges consist of outsmarting hard-magic-system puzzles through cleverness and brute force. That whole "163 skeletons" thing, in a different kind of book, would be a triumphant sequence for Harrow where she tries everything she can think of until something finally works; but this is a story about how trying to do everything yourself fundamentally destroys you.
Brief aside- we get another mention of blood “skeletonizing,” which appears to involve rapidly drying it/ draining it of energy in the process; presumably this might allow for the rapid creation of occult diagrams, or that might be a mundane use compared to the mystical function of a quick powerup.
And Gideon puts the nail in the coffin; she found the door, she’s the only one of the two capable of standing upright, she’s successfully framed Harrow as being the weak link in their power projection to the other houses. Gideon is good at this kind of freight-train Laying Out Of Points when she’s given the opportunity; she hasn’t had cause or opportunity thus far in the book, but like any good swordswoman, when she sees an opening, she presses her advantage.
The sum of all necromantic transgression. That’s a fundamentally interesting concept to hear come out the mouth of a girl reading a book bound in human leather. Given what we've already seen of business-as-usual necromancy, what does the head of first house consider "transgression?"
Ten Thousand Million unfed ghosts. What do you feed ghosts? And why are there a billion ghosts? Someone was busy.
So Teacher is capable of specificity, if you hit upon the right questions. Florid specificity. Does he write his own lines? Is this his description of the situation down there, or did someone give him a script?
“Ghosts and you might die” is my middle name. Not far off- I haven’t really touched upon the bizarre circumstances of Gideon’s coming into the Ninth, but she was named by a manic ghost. (Does she, herself, know that? Did anyone tell her the profoundly bizarre circumstances by which she came to Drearbaugh, or is this something only the narrator knows?) 
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CELEBRITY | chapter 03
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rúben dias x original female character [+18]
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SYNOPSIS: The protagonist knows for a fact she'll be famous someday. The way it happens is not as she planned, though. WARNINGS: mentions of e.d.; cyber bullying; minors dni.
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|[previous chapter]| — |[masterlist]|
CHAPTER III — THE MOVIE
In the dead of night, the room's only witness is a whispering clock on the wall. Rúben's apartment bathes in a dim glow, a haven for the protagonist seeking refuge. Seated on the edge of the couch, she nervously bites her nails, eyes glued to the floor. Rúben, concerned, offers her a glass of water.
"Thanks." She says, accepting the glass but hesitating to drink.
Rúben takes a seat across from her. "Are you okay?" He finally asks.
The protagonist glances up, the dim light accentuating the lines on her face. “Honestly? No. This is a nightmare. This entire day has been a nightmare.”
Rúben sighs, leaning back in his chair. “This never happened to me before.”
She traces the rim of the water glass with her fingertips, creating a haunting melody against the silence and contemplating her next words. “What do we do now? I mean, I appreciate you standing up for me today, but this…” She gestures to her phone, where the image of them together has taken on a life of its own.
“Addressing it head-on might be our best bet.” Rúben runs a hand through his hair, his expression thoughtful. “But we need to be careful with our words. REDACTED is not happy about it either…”
“Fuck me.” The protagonist winces at the mention of his name. “I just can’t believe the first time I showed up on the Daily Mail was as someone’s affair… No offense.”
“None taken, I guess…”
“My thing with you-know-who, I don’t even want to talk about it, but it wasn’t meant to end up on the fucking news.”
“I get that.” Rúben agrees with a nod. “We can handle this, don’t worry.”
Her eyes drift back to the phone screen, her thoughts drifting off. “They’re calling me ugly, saying I’m not hot enough to be with you.”
“That’s crazy.” Rúben chuckles, a raw sound that echoes in the room. “You’re beautiful, you’re perfect.”
A blush stains the protagonist's cheeks at the compliment. With little else to discuss, she lets the silence stretch and wonder if he knew about her before they met. If REDACTED had mentioned her. Given their friendship, he probably did. He strikes her as the type who likes to brag.
Breaking the silence, Rúben leans forward. "So it's settled!" He taps his thigh. "We'll drop a joint statement tomorrow. You can toss something casual on your socials, and I'll deny it to the press. We are just good friends hanging out."
He extends his hand to seal the deal, and she takes it, shaking it firmly. "Good friends, okay, deal." She says, trying not to linger on the thought of how good his hand feels holding hers. The handshake lasts for a moment longer than necessary, the warmth of their hands intertwining. 
"So, good friends it is." Rúben repeats.
She nods, a shy smile escaping her. "Yeah, good friends."
The weight of the day seems to ease for a brief moment and Rúben studies her face for a moment. "You know, for good friends, we haven't really talked much about non-scandalous things. Wanna stick around a little longer?"
The protagonist's eyes wander around Rúben's upscale apartment, taking in the polished surfaces, the sleek furniture, and the air of affluence that permeates the space. "Why the hell not." She mutters, the words escaping her lips like a reluctant confession. The contrast between her world and the opulence surrounding her is stark.
Rúben's place is a bachelor's wet dream. The allure of the high-end decor creates an atmosphere that feels alien yet strangely enticing. They settle in for a movie, the room taking on a different vibe as the screen lights up. Our girl finds a momentary escape in the luxurious cocoon of Rúben's apartment. The movie becomes the backdrop for questions nobody's putting into words, glances that hang in the air, and a dance of doubt that's as clear as mud.
The film rolls on, and the dame starts to wonder if Rúben's moves had a little hint of flirtation. The dim light casts shadows that flicker across his features, leaving the intentions behind his actions shrouded in ambiguity. 
As she heads home, the question of whether Rúben's actions were fueled by flirtation or mere camaraderie remains suspended in the silent spaces between reality and perception. The protagonist is now entangled in the enigma of the football player's intentions.
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The morning seeps into the protagonist's apartment, casting a muted light on her disheveled bed where she lies, eyes wide open, fixated on the ceiling. Sleep had eluded her, slipping through her grasp like sand. 
She pushes herself out of bed, the weight of the day already bearing down on her shoulders. Her appetite has also abandoned her. The comments on her Instagram, calling her "miss piggy" and worse, echo in her mind, suffocating any desire for sustenance. 
The protagonist moves mechanically, a ghost in her own home. She glides past the mirror in the hallway, avoiding her own reflection, unwilling to confront the distorted image the world is trying to impose on her.
“I know this isn't the best time, but we need to talk about Sarah.”
Her roommate's voice reaches her, a gentle touch on her arm accompanying the soft words. “She’s moving out soon, and we need another girl. We can’t pay the rent just the two of us.”
“Lily, I can’t even think about this right now. I trust you, just bring in whoever you want.”
A colossal headache clouds the protagonist's thoughts.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah…”
Sinking into her old, worn-out couch, she mechanically types and retypes, attempting to craft the most generic and impersonal Instagram post to dispel the romance rumors. The constant calls from REDACTED interrupt her concentration. Blocking his number seems impossible for now. Since the breakup a week ago, he's found new ways to torment her and be violent towards her. Strangely, she understands and sympathizes with his pain. If she were in his place, she might do the same. The sight of her photo with his teammate plastered everywhere is probably not easy for him.
Suddenly, a notification disrupts her thoughts – a private message from an anonymous account. The message is brief, containing only a cryptic link and the words: "You're not alone in this."
Intrigued and cautious, the protagonist clicks on the link. The screen fills with a blurred video, and her heart sinks as the image becomes clearer. It's a snippet from her confrontation with REDACTED at his house. As she watches, the message from the anonymous sender appears: "More to come. Brace yourself."
A chill runs down her spine, and panic sets in. Who else knows her secrets, and what do they want?
|[masterlist]| — |[next chapter]| join the taglist @kcharlyy @melanieph321 @goregoal
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nilsavatar · 1 year
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PHOENIX
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Status: PROLOGUE (0/?)
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4
Parings: Neteyam x Fem!UnknownOriginsNa’vi!Reader
Genre/Warnings: ANGST, sorrow, mentions of nearly death, romance, adventure, soulmate love, destined lovers, possible suggestive content NSFW/MDNI later on, no use of Y/N, clans never seen in films yet. All characters are AGED-UP.
Summary: During the battle with the SeaDragon, gunfire struck Neteyam’s heart. A mortal wound that heals itself under the astonished eyes of his brother, as if the Great Mother still did not want him with her. She has other plans for Toruk Makto's eldest son. 
Nevertheless, his body is weak, and he falls into a slumber from which he can no longer wake up. His vital signs are stable, yet Neteyam is slowly slipping away.
He is waiting.
Waiting for the girl who has been appearing in his dreams since he went into a coma.
Sneakpick on the fem protagonist: Mi'niri is a Na’vi of unknown origins and singular appearance: very fair skin in shades of gray with desaturated stripes, auburn hair, and pearly irises with pale magenta highlights. She is raised within the Tawkami Clan by a couple who have never been blessed with a child. Her parents are held in high regard by the entire clan as skilled scholars and chemists. It is suspected that Mi'niri is originally from the Kekunan Clan, although she doesn’t share their somatic features, as she was found as an infant in the border area between the two clans and wore a bracelet on her wrist made of the typical garish colors of the Kekunan. She also had a toy ikran in her cradle, usually used by the clan as an educational tool. Mi'niri is sharp and intelligent, very curious about the ecosystem and an animals lover, but she never fully integrated among the Tawkami despite the peaceful nature of the clan.
Author's note: The idea of writing something related to Avatar TWOW has been floating around for a while now.
Like so many of you, Neteyam's death left a bitter taste in my mouth, so I started fantasizing about an alternative ending where the Prince of the Omatikaya overcomes death.
And, again, like so many of you, the anticipations about the Ash People gave rise to so many ideas that, alas, I can no longer ignore.
The story in question, although it has a plot already outlined, is still in the early stages of writing, to the extent that it doesn’t have a definitive title yet. And for this, I ask for your kind help.
Even if this is my first post in a very long - too long - time I hope you'll like it.
If you want to be tagged in the next posts, just write it in the comments. I’ll gladly add y'all💕
Masterlist - Request a fic
PS: I'm not a native speaker. Therefore, at times, my choice of style and vocabulary may be odd. Nevertheless, chapters will always undergo proofreading before being posted.
Let's cut to the chase and enjoy your reading! 
PROLOGUE
The thunderous rumble of rain pelting the ground. The violent howl of the wind shaking the trees.  The desperate cry of a woman blended with the growl of a wounded animal.
Then nothing more.
Only the quietude of the eclipse and the reverberation of that roar fading into a wail.
Acala awoke with a start. She rarely dreamed, but never was there a dream that was so full of sorrow that it kept her from getting any rest. It was so vivid, so authentic. So vibrantly real. A choked sob betrayed her, causing an abrupt jerk by her side.
“Are you okay?" firm fingers held her wrists in the faint dimness of the night. She turned, her sight lost in keeping track of the glowing freckles that speckled that much-loved face. She couldn’t meet his eyes, but she could surmise the look on his face. His weary voice left no doubt; full of concerned, yet reassuring.
Minute shudders ran through her body, prepping her lungs to vent air in muted whimpers, before they descended into weeping.
“Hey, hey,” strong arms cocooned her, tenderly stroking her back with one hand, while smoothing her unbraided hair with the other. “Shhh, it’s alright. You are alright. It was just a nightmare.” “No!” she gasped against his chest, “We have to go. We have to go now!” “... Go where?” "With conviction, she affirmed “Into the forest!” as she fiddled with something. “Acala, you’re upset. Go back to sleep, it’s the wee hours,” he asserted, not in the least bit fazed by his mate’s irrational behaviour. She was all too familiar with such happenings after -- “Hurry up,” she insisted with more fervor. 
Now that the woman had lit a torch, he could watch her closely. Slender fingers on the shoulder strap, her expression showed a seriousness and confidence about the terrible thing to come.
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” “They will die if we wait until tomorrow.” “Who--?” “Trust me,” she stoned, staring him straight in the eye in that peculiar way only she had, “Please.”
He couldn’t win against those eyes.
As they reached Greenhouse entrance, a voice called Acala. A gaunt figure emerged from the darkness; finely woven beads veiling her abdomen tinkled with each step. “Tsahìk,” she winced, “Oel ngati kameie (I see you),” she greeted, bringing two fingers to her forehead, right in the middle of her eyes. Her torso bent in reverence as those two fingers drew an arc in front of her. The old woman flashed her a smile, her gaze was affectionate and sympathetic, but bothered by the evident wrinkles. “Go, child,” she granted simply, releasing some of the tension that stiffened Acala’s posture.
Approval. The proof that what she was doing was the right thing. That what was occurring was actual and not a fabrication of her mind. For Eywa had also whispered to the one who interpreted the Great Mother’s decree.
“Fulfill your destiny.” “I don’t know in which direction.” “Nawna Sa’nok (Great Mother) will show you the way. Listen to her voice.” Her eyes, of a bright yellow with green around the pupil, met Sílron’zem’s, “Stand by her and be prepared”. “Prepared for what?” the frustration now impossible to control, despite being before the elder. “Providence can appear in enigmatic guises and its gifts may be found in the oddest of places. Yet a blessing must welcomed with an open spirit in spite of the fear.” “Blessing? What blessing might be concealed for us in the heart of the forest, when predators are at their most active?”
In stark contrast to expectation, Sílron’zem was unafraid of the forest. He ventured into the lush greenery of Eywa’eveng (Pandora), eager to absorb her absolute magnificence. He had undertaken such a journey as his calling, to which he had dedicated himself with every fiber of his being, regardless of the risks. But something in him changed upon meeting his mate. A compassionate and talented woman with a vocation for looking after children. However, it never attained her greatest longing. 
The desire for motherhood.
A sense of incompleteness devoured her. What was once an exuberant girl, thrill-seeking and inquisitive, has dwindled into a mere shadow of her former self.  The whole village provided her with aid in confronting the unfathomable sadness that overwhelmed her. A sort of inexplicable melancholy. The nostalgic and poignant suffering of a mother whose child had been torn from her arms. How could you miss something you never had? It was something Sílron’zem couldn’t get, not entirely. He couldn’t grasp the feeling of being denied the purpose of a lifetime, the path you had mapped out for yourself. And surely, he could not estimate the magnitude of the damage caused by an anomaly no one else had undergone before. It’d never happened a couple united by tsaheylu didn’t beget offspring, their own palpable evidence for the continuity of the clan. The Tawkami were shaken to its core when this impossibility had befallen on the very person who most deeply wished for a family of her own.
Amidst the grief, rage was also present.
Why?
Why did Eywa mould Acala to be a mother if she had no intention in making her one? Why did Sílron’zem have to stand there still, witnessing the love of his life turn into an empty shell?
Finally, one last thought crept into his heart. If she ached so immensely over the loss of a baby she never had, what would happen if she also lost her mate?
Frightened, the man resorted to a drastic shift in his scientific pursuit. Explorations no longer held the same intrepidness they once did; he stopped staying away from Greenhouse for several days. He wouldn’t expose himself to danger anymore, so he would take better care of Acala.
He was willing to sacrifice everything for her, to make her beam with joy once more, to bring back the sweet smile he was so fond of. And now all his efforts were about to be in vain. Not only did his wife have a sudden urge to plunge into the forest, at night, under the threat of predators, Tsahìk was encouraging her. No matter his high regard for her, she had to give him a valid reason to go along with this madness.
“To become a father.”
Heavy raindrops pelted the leaves that sheltered them. The soft purring of a guarding animal. The distressed gasp of a terrified woman. The rustle of a bow ready to shoot.
The txumre' (slinth) snorted irritably, as if to rebuke them for their tardiness, before leaving.
@cinetrix
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octastims · 8 months
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The Protagonist (COCOON) stimboard with moon moths, deserts and orbs for me! Happy release day COCOON!
💚 🧡 💚
🧡 💚 🧡
💚 🧡 💚
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