the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

Flowers and fog, Northern California

codyscapes

#text #do I look like I can maintain a queue?

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

it’s stupid but i think about it Every Time i see that meme so have this

[image description: a thick book with the text “critical role c1″, next to it an equally thick book with the text “critical role c1 if percy had a g- oh wait”]

#percy tag #CALLOUT POST

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

my homestuck art request is "something cute" because the world needs it

he is the only homestuck character ever

#ask #mayor tag

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

Warning for scars!

still making progress on this,,,, have a 15 second dream sequence snippet 

#video #percy tag #w o w

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

I miss Percival Fredrickstien Von Musel Klossowski De Rolo The Third, that absolute bastard. And his wife Vex'ahlia De Rolo Baroness of the First House of Whitestone and Grandmistress of the Grey Hunt, who can do no wrong

#text #percy tag #family

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

Can someone edit The Mayor from Homestuck only his rags are actually pride flags thanks

#mayor tag

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

When I go to singings I feel like I should feel like one esk, but I don’t. I sit in the square and don’t feel like much of anyone at all, beyond a vibration in my chest and my hand beating time. I leave, and one esk is there, but in the moment I’m not

and I was wondering why that was, before I realized that one esk never went to a singing. it had its voices, but having even a single other person to make music with was an unusual experience. the closest it ever got to a singing was during the annexation of valskaay

twenty voices, one singer. an empty square indeed

#one esk tag #who I'm not sure about yet but it feels right

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

i have been questioning the Helmsman for... 2 years now? maybe closer to 3?? 

#people kinfirm like 10 seconds into a piece of media #and here I am #having spent like 5 years narrowing down ancestors

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

not to be controversial but percival de rolo is a fake goth. no I won’t elaborate. thanks.

#percy tag

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(percy): wow. you know every one of my stories.

(vex): and you know every one of mine. i guess its official, we’re an old married couple.

(percy): nice!

(vex): we did it!

#percy tag #family

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

To clarify, one of the things I’m loving about the Whitestone arc so much at this point (one noble house down, one name scratched off Percy’s gun, two points of corruption deep and so much more to go) is the feeling of, oh wait, I know this story! I’ve seen this story before!  Only it’s on this show, with this players, in the D&D medium–and that makes such a difference.

Because this is the king in return.  This is the secret heir creeping back to the land of his birth, hidden and disguised, to depose the usurpers that stole his birthright, and this story is classic and it is familiar.  It’s everything from Ivanhoe to The Lion King.  We know this story, we’ve read these fantasy novels, and it doesn’t matter that Whitestone is a city rather than a monarchy–it is an autonomous city-state in every practice, with its own nobles and its own army, and the Briarwoods rule absolutely.

It’s a really good story!  If this were just that story, it’d have a good chance of being pretty cool.  But the thing I’m enjoying so much is watching the characters go through all the motions of that story, with a core of something else at the center altogether.

Percy drops his illusion in front of his father’s old arch-chancellor, and the man’s reaction is pure awe, shock, devotion, and joy.  It’s ‘this child I once knew has become a man, and now he’s here to save us all’.  It’s a great moment, full of emotion, and we’ve seen enough of the horror that Whitestone has become to begin to appreciate the desperate hope that must be welling up inside the man even now, with the true heir revealed.  And then you twist your perspective just a few degrees askew and realize that yes, these men are living that familiar fairytale story of hope and their returning king, and so are the people whispering in the streets, and in the taverns, and maybe even the Briarwoods themselves tucked up to their stolen castle–and right there in the epicenter of it?  Percy is not.

Percy does not give more than a passing fuck about the people of Whitestone.  He isn’t here to make himself king.  He can barely pull his attention away from his rage and vengeance and sorrow and trauma and fear for his own soul long enough to be vaguely glad that, in general, the people who live here will probably be better off with the Briarwoods dead.  The story he’s living has nothing to do with kings and countries, it’s a psychological revenge thriller about demons and the price a man pays to destroy those that hurt him.  Percy would be walking this exact same path if his parents had been shopkeepers or farmers or scholars or heroes.  Whitestone is collateral damage to the wrongs done to him and his family, meaningful because it was theirs and it was stolen, not because of the horrors being visited on its people today.

(Thirty years later on another continent of Exandria altogether, Beau sits in a hotel room and tells Caleb that if he wants to kill Trent Ikithon to stop whatever horrors and cruelty he’s surely inflicting on others, she’s with him all the way, but to destroy the man for the sake of protecting others and the future, not for revenge.  There are themes to these stories, even as the names change and the players shift roles.)

Percy’s living a completely different story than everyone else around him, while literally acting as the epicenter to both, and it’s so cool to watch.  Percy has laserlike tunnel vision on his story (and of course he is, because the genre he’s living is so tight-focused it’s claustrophobic, the thriller where every detail is sharpened and the most important battle is the one inside his own heart and head), sowing sparks of revolution to clear his own path.  The epic, wide-scope story of populist uprising and rediscovered hope is spiralling out around him, and he’s not even paying attention to the way that story is meant to go at all.

What’s great about playing out this story in D&D, what really makes it all hang together, is the fact that it is D&D and Percy is not actually the protagonist of this novel.  There are five other characters with exactly as much agency as he has, playing intermediaries between the psychodrama in Percy’s head and the swelling tides of revolt around them.  Vox Machina get to be the people who see both sides of this story, and help pull Percy back from his inevitable brink, and also help do the actual groundwork of this revolution business talking to people in taverns and interrogating prisoners while Percy is half-catatonic, desperately scraping names off the barrel of his gun.  They’re playing a third story entirely, where the distant heroes from nowhere sweep into town, save everybody, and presumably disappear back into the sunset at the end.  Vax gets to ask, “What happens when this is over, Percival?”, and have it mean both things, at once–are you going to replace the Briarwoods with a monster as bad as they are?  Are you going to be a king?  Are you going to be a monster?  One, or the other, or both, or neither at all?  And Percy doesn’t even hear one of those questions, I don’t think the idea of ruling Whitestone has more than crossed his mind at a fleeting glance at all, and he doesn’t know the answer to the other–but I’m wondering how long it takes before somebody on the team wants to know what Percy intends to do with all Whitestone once it’s his all of the sudden.

I really love the way D&D, the way it’s played on Critical Role, allows characters to toss responsibility back and forth for external fights and planning and moving the plot forward, trading off on who handles logistics and who has the massive internal conflict and interesting psychodrama.  Fjord can be as conflicted as he needs to be about Avantika and U’kotoa and Vandren, because Caleb’s got a wall of fire and Beau recently learned how to tell the truth and also punch it out of other people, and his team at large has got this.  Percy can battle some kind of gun-demon in a city full of vampires and torture memories, because Keyleth knows how to cast blazing radiant sunlight and Vax and Scanlon are having fun in taverns stirring up the locals.

I’m so looking forward to the rest of this.

#text #percy tag

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

by vitalybulgarov

More on RHB_RBS

#photo #construct tag

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The idea of ‘Feral Scientist’ is just so Fucking Funny to me, like ‘i just found this dude on the side of the road muttering about quantum physics is it rabid’ like thats just any scientist 

#reblogging this to my kin blog #because ME

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

A comforting thought: for the rest of his life, Percy regularly invites Keyleth to help him tinker with whatever clock projects he’s working on. He doesn’t need to — he has servants and all the right equipment, he barely needs to handle the material himself — but it’s like old times, still special for both of them. And when they’ve finished and Keyleth’s put out her burning hands, she sits beside him, reading a book from his library while he repairs a wind-up toy for one of his kids, and they don’t talk because they don’t need to. They just enjoy the space.

#percy tag #family

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Some Percy, Keyleth, Vax and Vex doodles~

#percy tag #family

[the-terrible-tinker-of-taldorei]

Shiro Week, Day 4: Black Bayard

I like the theory that it will give him wings <3

#shiro tag

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absolutely fucking HATE when shiro’s experience with the galra is cast as something “empowering” or being the champion is described as a “victory” or people imply that there was something good in it

like do you not get it? do you not know the constant fear that your body will give out on you when you need it? do you not feel the pride and guilt and pain of succeeding in something you were forced to do against your will? do you not remember the powerlessness of being strapped down, vulnerable to anything and anyone?

There was no fucking good in it. There was no power, no victory. Only pain. Pain and helplessness and terror.

#shiro tag #and there were #there were moments #sometimes you can forget #sometimes you can forget for a really long time #but there was no good in it #even in those moments #even when he was happy #there was no good in it