#I would like to clarify that I know nothing about DnD

[2btheanswertothequestion]

Okay hear me out.. this: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYmB1Vj4/ as Steve actually agrees to sit down for once at Hellfire

"... he picks you up by your breastplate straps and pushes you against the wall. He screams in your face; bits of spittle hit your chin."

Eddie grins, all his teeth on display, as he describes the scene, but he's the only one. Everyone else is fidgeting in their seats or grimly contemplating their next actions.

Tension hangs thick in the room. They're nearing the end of the session and were so close to exiting the catacombs when they ran into another enemy encounter: ghouls, four of them. Their party of nine will probably make it out mostly unscathed, but it's still an obstacle between them and aboveground.

And worst of all? One of the ghouls just grabbed their least experienced member.

Steve stares at the miniatures representing him and the ghoul, listening to Eddie with a furrow between his eyes. For someone who needed months of aggravating pleading to even sit down at the table, he's been really serious about playing. No one would fault him for showing up merely to be a nuisance in the quest of teaching them to accept 'no' as an answer (well, actually, they would fault him, but they'd also, like, understand why he'd do it). But he hasn't done that! He's put in the effort to be a model player and has barely partaken in any shitheaded shenanigans.

Which is why it's a bit of a surprise when, once Eddie finishes, Steve looks him straight in the eye and asks:

"Can I flirt with him?"

Splutters and groans erupt from around the table. Eddie himself barks out a shocked laugh. Steve simply raises an eyebrow in question, coolness personified.

Still snickering, Eddie shakes his head. "No, man. You can't do that."

"Why not? I'll use my charms and convince him to let us pass."

"Ghouls are immune to charm spells-"

"Hey, it's not a spell! S'all natural!"

"-and why would you want to flirt with it?"

Propping his elbow on the tabletop, Steve rests his chin on the palm of his hand and smiles, almost coquettishly.

"Maybe being pushed into a wall by a strong man turns me on?"

More groans, louder and more dramatic. Heads tossing and eyes rolling. Which might be why none of them notice that their fearless dungeon master has turned the deepest shade of crimson.

No one except Steve, who's yet to break eye contact with him.

Eddie sighs, burying his face in his hands out of frustration (and only out of frustration). He says, voice muffled, "You still can't do that. There's no reason for him to be affected – his goal is to eat you. Persuading him to do anything is a waste of time."

Steve hums. "So, he won't be affected?"

"Exactly," Eddie says after a moment, peeking through his fingers. "He won't."

"Hm. Guess I'll try to push him off me, then."

Nodding, Eddie removes his hands. He's still slightly pink, but that could just as well be due to the basement's stuffy atmosphere.

"Do an athletics check."

And if he's casting semi-distracted glances toward Steve for the remainder of the session, his players are too absorbed by the game to notice.

(It's not until the next morning that Dustin jerks away from his Lucky Charms to exclaim "That's what that sonuvabitch meant!")

(Claudia immediately scolds him for swearing at the breakfast table.)

#Steve: In WHAT way does he want to eat me? #Eddie: *can't decide whether to smack him or kiss him* #Idk if they're dating or not here #it's up to you #I would like to clarify that I know nothing about DnD #steddie #steddie fic #steddie ficlet #steve harrington #eddie munson #stranger things #my writing

[hargrove-mayfields]

Disabled Billy and Steve Week

Day 3- special interests

My prompt: Harringrove- Shared Special Interest

-•-•-•-

One month. Billy and Steve have been living together for one month.

In that time they’ve discovered a lot about each other, things they never expected. Things like Steve hanging his jackets and sweaters in rainbow order in the closet, or Billy placing the cups in diagonal lines in the cabinet.

Only one thing had caused a disagreement, and that was about furniture covers. Billy’s ocd wanted them to avoid touching “sofa stank ass,” but Steve’s autism hated the texture of sitting on fabric on top of fabric.

Their solution was two separate chairs instead of one couch. Close enough to hold hands constantly, but separate enough to enforce their individual boundaries. Sure, it means cuddles are limited to their bed, but Billy’s on bedrest with full body aches and bouts of fibro fog usually once a week, so it works.

However, by far the most exciting tidbit they’d discovered was that they share a special interest. Games.

Video games, board games, sports- they’ve both explored the history, researched the best strategies, and played thousands upon thousands of games. DND had brought them together through mutual friendship with Eddie, while Super Mario kept their relationship on its toes.

Tonight, their choice was a little unconventional for them, a big dusty box fished from the very back of the closet. An inherited, smoke stained edition of Scrabble. If either of them and their dyslexia had realized that making a goal to play every game in the house would mean playing a spelling game, they might not have made that promise.

But, Steve already was dead set on doing it, and his dedication was not to be messed with. They were going to play that game, no matter how long it took.

Currently almost two hours and half a bag of letter chips in, it’s Steve’s turn again.

“Uhhh, I’ll spell… sunset! S-U-N.. S-E-T.”

Every chip is placed carefully, and they both double check it with the help of their Scrabble approved dictionary. At first, he’d placed them in the wrong spot, connected to a D instead of the S on the end that he meant to use, but they fixed it quickly instead of dwelling on the mistake. Billy knows Steve might cry of embarrassment if they keep the focus on his mistake for too long.

But now it’s time for Billy to have yet another go, as Steve reminds him in case he forgot again, “Your turn, Bubs! Got anything good?”

“Honestly? I have no ideas. These letters suck.” Billy grumbles, pushing the small tray that holds the letter chips away.

“You can look it up.” Steve suggests, the only way they ever agreed to go along with this game being shortcuts and technical cheats.

But Billy shakes his head, in deep concentration, “No. No, I wanna do it on my own.”

Steve gives an encouraging smile, “Take your time. I’m watching the TV over your shoulder.”

Something about the way Billy snorts says he doesn’t see that as encouragement, but instead sounds hurt, “I’m that boring, huh?”

Regretting the way he’d put it so bluntly, Steve makes sure to promise kindly, “Nope! I just like the game shows!”

It’s true too. He likes learning new words in a way that doesn’t make his brain feel like it’s on fire. And watching other people fail and struggle, even the best of the best, makes him feel a lot better about playing mostly two or three lettered words in this here game of Scrabble.

Billy’s shoulders relax with ease, satisfied that Steve isn’t annoyed with him. He does, however, quip sarcastically, “We’re so old.”

“Thirty isn’t old.” Steve hums, actually happy to be growing older instead of being trapped in the misery of his teens forever.

Growing up meant growing out of his intense self-deprecation, after leaving behind all the pain and the tragedy he’d gone through. Now in California, playing board games with the love of his life, nothing else matters.

Billy clarifies his meaning, showing to Steve that he feels the same way, and was just using an expression, “I’m not talking about literally, baby. And stop rounding up, I’m only 26.”

It’s lighthearted and they both smile, but something keeps nagging in Steve’s head. One of those old fears of his rising up despite his insistence that they don’t bother him anymore.

“We can do young people stuff.” He offers, sounding kind of upset though he doesn’t mean to let it show, “I mean, I just thought this was fun...”

Even though they’ve got a game set up, Billy leans over the small table on his elbows, and holds Steve’s hands, “Stevie. It’s great. I love these slow days with you. They make me happier than anything. I was just kidding.”

Instant relief floods Steve’s nervously twisted stomach, but just in case he asks, “You’re sure? ‘Cause we can do something else.”

It’s his fault they’re doing this. He said it would be okay. Fun even. He said they can do anything they want.

“I want to keep playing.” Billy promises, and then a real pleased look crosses his face, “I just thought of a word even.”

“What is it?” Steve brightens up immediately, leaning forward in interest.

Billy uses an ‘O’ chip already on the board to spell- “Love.”

Picking up from the look on Billy’s face, it’s not a coincidence that he’s taken to flirting through a board game. Steve blushes like they haven’t already been together for eight years. These slow times between them can be relaxing, but they’re usually days where they check in on their romance too. Rekindling the passion over a goddamn spelling game, that should, by all means, have caused Steve to panic ages ago.

It’s sweet, and it only gets better.

An adjacent ‘S’ in line with Billy’s ‘O’ and an ‘M’ further down the board makes it so Steve can spell the biggest word he’s ever played in this game, “Oh! I can use that to spell Soulmate!!”

“You got that right. I’m yours, and you’re mine.” Billy says all suavely. Steve’s literally giggling and kicking his feet, only to be shown once again through the next move just how much of a romantic Billy is.

“Matter of fact, I can use that new M to spell- Marry.”

For a moment, Steve just stares.

He’s not sure if it’s genuine or just a strategy, until Billy produces a tiny box from his pocket. It’s wooden, looks hand carved. Inside is a ring with a small ruby in a heart shape attached to a band, one he recognizes as being Billy’s mothers.

“Billy-“ He chokes. The words he’d been doing so good at freeze up. He’s used his brain so much today and now it’s failing him?

Billy is patient though, leaving the box propped open on the table so he doesn’t have to hold it and lock his wrist up, “Stevie.”

Steve swallows down his nerves as best he can, and starts to ask, “Are you..?”

“I am.” Billy finishes for him, so Steve doesn’t get too frustrated. It’s then that he starts to look nervous too. He chews his lip, a stim Steve recognizes as being an anxious one. Like he’s done something wrong by asking for something so big, “Do you want to?”

But this, this couldn’t be more perfect. A proposal through their shared special interest, a lifelong passion channeled into their love. Of course Steve wants that too. Really, he’s wanted it ever since they were teenagers, but now that they’re in their twenties, they’re finally ready for that dream to become a reality.

“Yes! Of course I’ll marry you!”

~~~~~~

For todays disability organization spotlight, let’s talk about the National Fibromyalgia Association.

The NFA is a site which provides health information and resources about Fibromyalgia, a condition that is under researched and often disregarded by medical professionals as not even existing.

The information on their site ranges from self care guides, science explaining chronic pain, COVID precautions for our disorder, medication and treatment suggestions, and emotional assistance for fibromyalgia patients, among other things.

Run by doctors and fibromyalgia patients alike, the websites main goal is to spread awareness and make research accessible for everyone. When I finally received my diagnosis, I spent a lot of time here learning about little things I could do for myself to manage my symptoms. Now I use mobility aids and am in physical therapy, and my symptoms are much more managed than before.

Because fibromyalgia is such a disregarded disability, so are our foundations. The NFA is currently asking for donations, either direct monetary donations or through buying their merchandise in the online shop.

If you would like to learn more about this organization or access their information guides, you can click here to visit the site.

#disabledbillyandsteveweek #harringrove #billy hargrove #billy x steve #autistic billy hargrove #autistic steve harrington #dyslexic billy hargrove #dyslexic steve harrington #billy Hargrove has fibromyalgia #my writing #ej writer

[thrumugnyr]

WAIT ITS BEEN THAT LONG IN THE CAMPAIGN??

Patataj and Rahadin have been dating for 1.5 years??? O.O

Idk why am I surprised knowing how time can be in DnD lol but the fact its been a while gives me hope things won't end too bad for them babsba

Altho it's cute Rahadin showed up to support his boyfriend I'm kinda suspicious of his answer GAH

OMG, I should have clarified this better: we have been playing this campaign for 1.5 years - the time passed for Patataj is only about 2 months and that's about the time that they're dating, or, well, know each other at least.

Let me tell you chronologically how he ended up in a relationship with Rahadin (this is LONG and has spoilers for CoS so beware):

Rahadin was the first person Patataj met after he woke up in Barovia (he got dragged in through a dream by, as we would later learn, the Abbot, who was looking for sun god support in his endeavor to fix the curse (of Strahd) and accidentally grabbed Patataj over Senna).

Rahadin was there to check out the newcomers mostly (and because my GM was scared of combat balance haha) and they went through the death house experience together. For Rahadin this meant nothing much, but for Patataj that's an intense bonding experience (also they were holding hands for most of it, as Patataj was the only one without darkvision).

After they made it out of the death house, Rahadin disappeared, but Patataj took up the sending spell on his level up a few days later and thus was able to send Rahadin little messages. That's how he was able to secure a meeting with him as well. That meeting went rather poorly, but he managed to not get killed. You must also know that by this time, Rahadin just seemed like a sulky, shy dusk elf to Patataj. Someone who would be funny to make flustered and drag out of their shell a little. Not much else. He hasn't really seen him do damage or anything.

He does start to ask random people he meets about Rahadin though and then slowly realized that, well, he does not seem to be a terribly well liked guy. Kasimir (the leader of the few surviving dusk elves) tells him to stay away from him, but Patataj doesn't quite know why, because he gets along quite well with him.

So after a few days (and after the party killed the Aboleth in the lake) he asks Rahadin for a second date to make up for the first one and to his surprise, Rahadin agreed.

They have like a romantic little boat ride and Rahadin even brings a scroll for Pataj so he can walk on water (because he mentioned missing being able to run in the open desert and the lake is...pretty big and the next best option). Of course Patataj goes for a run but in the end he can't just let Rahadin sit all alone in the boat so he offers him a ride.

And that's how this picture happened ahaha. YES, IT WAS ACTUALLY A THING not a dream or anything - I know!! Wild!

Centaurs don't just offer someone to sit on them willy-nilly (if at all), so in the end Patataj confesses to Rahadin that he caught feelings. He's a bard after all and centaur hearts beat fast.

Of course for Rahadin it's way too soon to reciprocate such feelings the same way (I mean, they knew each other for....two weeks at this point, maybe one? And he's like 500 years old. Them centaur hearts be moving in hyperspeed to him). But he still admits a certain fondness and they actually do kiss when Patataj asks for one.

Some time passes, Patataj keeps sending those sending messages and they interact like that every day. Just small things, as sendings have a limit of 25 words ahaha.

Eventually, Strahd invites the party for dinner, as he does. Everyone is low key terrified, but Patataj is excited to meet Rahadin again....and it goes well. Our warlock pisses Strahd off majorly because he continuously keeps the appearance of the girl Strahd is into, but Patataj is having a great time, even winning a bard-off against Escher.

Patataj ends up spending some of the night with Strahd, ending in him offering Strahd his blood (and I do not think he was even charmed. We're all still confused as well. Strahd just was very good with words and made Patataj feel sad for him okay?). Rahadin ends up taking care of Patataj for the rest of the night and it all gets very emotional, they exchange gifts, they kiss more, Rahadin starts to open up a little about his past and other personal things.

No, nothing besides kissing happening - but hey, progress.

They are mostly back to sending messages and short meetings for most of the campaign then. This goes on for months in real time you know haha. It does sometimes skew with my perception how much time actually passes.

At some point Patataj manages to convince Rahadin to join a little party at the tavern in Vallaki and it's all very cute. They play like, throwing knives and never have I ever and it's really stupid but fun....thanks to probably the alcohol Rahadin does actually end up comfortable enough to do ....more than kissing that night, too. And that is actually also the last night they managed to spend together until now.

Meanwhile the campaign goes on, we go to Krezk like, twice, kill the Abbot, we do the Yester hill battle, defend Vallaki (where Rahadin was extremely worried). In Vallaki there was also one instance where Patataj almost died and sent some final words type of message to Rahadin and boy, Rahadin was UPSET about it. Mostly mad because the message did not include Patatajs whereabouts and such and it took him longer to find him. He was probably also upset that the whole thing made him so scared in the first place haha. Rahadin is not used to care about anything other than Strahd and maybe Anastrasia (and since they're both vampires, they die far less easy, so not much to worry there).

But yeah, this is how you manage to date Rahadin in Curse of Strahd: You need a GM who puts him in the campaign early enough and PERSISTENCE. It's not easy to make Rahadin care, but once he does, he's very loyal and your chances of survival become very good actually ('You wouldn't want to hurt Rahadins mate' worked very well with the werewolves for example lol) - but also it can be a little terrifying at times. Patataj is trying to come to terms with the fact that all the protection benefit he gets out of this also means that it is very likely that he will end up as a vampire in the end. Also there is no turning back. Rahadin is very unforgiving and I'm sure if Patataj would break his heart, Rahadin would slit his throat, because that's just how he deals with his problems. There is also still a chance Rahadin might follow Strahd's orders to kill Patataj despite his own feelings. It's 500 years vs a few weeks/months after all.

But I do think Rahadins feelings are genuine. He says the most romantic shit sometimes and he really was very supportive in the last session (at least as much as you could expect Rahadin to be). It was actually the first time he said 'I love you' in return! MORE PROGRESS!

And I also do think he doesn't just want to use Patataj for personal gain. He's not a very....scheming guy. Not that Patataj would care either way. He'd do almost anything for Rahadin at this point, aside of things that go against his morals of course. It's quite funny, really. Patataj knows of all the terrible things Rahadin has done by now, but he kind of shoves it aside under 'well he did it under Strahd's orders, he wouldn't have done it otherwise' because he just can't fathom Rahadin is THAT bad/uncaring, since to HIM he is extremely gentle and sweet, even if sometimes a little struggling with showing emotions. Love makes blind, I swear.

But I'm rambling. I hope they get a happy ending. At least Patataj would deserve one after everything (all the suffering and pain of people around him and his powerlessness to help are getting to him), but it IS Curse of Strahd and who knows what will happen. Even at the best outcome, he will have to kill some if not most of Rahadins 'family', in the worst outcome, Rahadin kills him. In the most likely, he ends up a vampire in Strahd's castle, never to see sunlight again.

So yeah, on that depressing note and for anyone who read this whole thing, I'll leave you with two songs from my Patadin playlist because who doesn't have songs for their OC?

Nessa Barrett - Die first

Amber Run - I found

#forgive me for this overly long post #but I have lot of feelings about this #I put a lot of my free time into it after all (if you calculate all the sessions and art) haha #so if people seem curious I will be like WELL YOU ASKED SO HERE WE GOOOO #hahaha #thrum rambles #DnD #Rahadin #Patataj #Curse of Strahd #centaur #would I recommend going for Rahadin? Hard to say #(depending of course whether or not your DM is willing to let you treat Curse of Strahd as a dating sim) #sometimes it feels like I accidentally cheated the game #sometimes I feel I'll pay a terrible price for it lol #WE WILL SEE

[t-h-i-n-g]

Can you do some platonic Dustin Henderson sibling fluff where they're spending the day together and they've always been best friends, but he's worried she thinks he doesn't look up to her since he now spends so much time with Eddie and Steve?

You're My Number One

a/n: ello ! ty for the request. i hope you like what i came up with

word count: 700+

summary: dustin barges into your room, getting some important stuff off his chest.

warning: nothing really but if there's something i missed, let me know!!

st - masterlist m.masterlist

--------------

Your door busted open and strolled in that curly haired brother of yours. You tensed in your spot from the loud sound. Peeking out from behind your book in time to see Dustin plopping himself face first into your bed. 

Quirking a brow, you waited for some kind of explanation. However silence was your only answer. You sat up, setting your book to the side. 

“You okay there, bud?” you asked, patting his back gently. Dustin untucked his face from your blanket to look at you helplessly.

“You know you’re my favorite right?” Your face scrunched up in confusion. 

“Thanks? Favorite for what may I ask?” you questioned. Dustin sighed and turned onto his back.

“I know I haven’t really been around a lot and I keep on canceling the plans we make. It’s just the Hellfire Club meetings happen so frequently and Steve always wants to see these movies all the time or and he always wants to bring me because Robin’s got Vicky now so he can’t invite her. The girls he invites are just ‘too much right now’ according to him and I don’t want him to be all alone cause it’s really sad to see Steve go to the movies by himself. But then there's also Eddie who has these really cool DnD figurines he’s finding weekly and they're just so cool and awesome. I can’t pass up not seeing them. I mean they’re limited addition shit y’know. I just am so busy all the time now, but then you’re trying to do stuff and I keep passing them up-”

��Dusty you’re rambling again-” “Right yeah. Okay, so what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry if I’ve been drifting away or not like putting you first. I don’t mean to get distracted but Steve’s just sad and Eddie’s so cool, they’re just great guys but you’re so amazing too. I mean you’re the only one who lets me talk about Suzie without making fun of me. And you’re the only one that I feel fully comfortable talking about all our trauma shit. Anyways- what I’m trying to get at here is that you’re my sibling, dude. You’re my number one and I’m gonna start trying to make more time for us to hang out cause I miss our weekly ice cream runs and our midnight bike rides and I just miss hanging out with you.”

You stared wide eyed. Hands patting your legs awkwardly trying to find some sort of response for when his rambling came to an end.

“I-I um, thanks for clarifying,” you started. “And I think you’re thinking about this a little too much.” Dustin sat up, looking at you questionably.

“What do you mean? I just poured my heart and soul out to you and you think I’m overreacting? What? You didn’t miss me, is that it?” You let out a chuckle.

“Of course, I miss you, Dustin. It’s just the fact you’re being too hard on yourself that’s all. You're growing up, you are bound to find older figures in your life you would like to spend time with too. I’m not mad or upset that you’ve been ‘ditching’ our plans. It just means that you’re branching out and meeting new people. I’m happy for you, man. You’re a teenager. It’s your time to discover yourself and what you like to do. Whether that be watching random movies with Steve or looking at collectables with Eddie. I know you’re in good hands with them. Well for the most part, if Eddie offers you something from his special box, say no immediately.”

“You literally smoke-”

“That’s not the kinda special box I’m talking about.” Dustin’s expression was rather horrified. You let out a snort, ruffling his hair.

“Anyways, what I’m saying is that it’s okay if you have other people and other plans. You’ll always be my number one and I know I’ll be yours too, so you have nothing to worry about. If you want to start up those ice cream trips again, great. Or anything else that you wanna do I'll be here to do it. I’m not going anywhere, man. You still got me,” you stated, holding eye contact with him to make sure he knew every word was true. A light smile grew on his features. You pulled him into your embrace, tucking his head under your chin.

“Thanks, Y/n.” His voice was muffled by your shirt.

“Anytime, Dusty,” you mumbled, rubbing his back comfortingly. “Now if you’re up for it, I could go for that ice cream.”

“Oh hell yeah, for sure.”

-------------

likes and reblogs are appreciated :)

#stranger things x reader #dustin henderson x yn #dustin henderson x y/n #dustin henderson x you #dustin henderson fanfiction #dustin henderson x reader #dustin henderson x silbling!reader #dustin henderson x platonic!reader

[strawb3rrybumbl3b33]

Hellfire Clubs Honorary Member / Falling Asleep on Eddie’s Lap

Summary: (y/n) was in desperate need of affection. So, (y/p) crashed Eddie’s dnd game.

Warnings: I suck at writing. I don’t care if this is any good or not I think it’s cute. Also, instead of using any pronouns for (y/n) I used (y/p) which stands for your pronouns. I guess let me know if you guys like that or would rather me just use they/them for default (unless clarified otherwise-).

word count: 267

Eddie’s partner wasn’t technically in the Hellfire club. In fact, (y/p) knew next to nothing about DnD. But, that didn’t stop (y/p) from sitting in on some of the campaigns. This particularly day, (y/n) was in desperate need of affection. (y/p) sighed as they entered the club room. 

“Who dares interrup- oh! Hey!” At first, Eddie was still in character, but as soon as he realized who it was he broke. His smile widened just the slightest bit.

(y/p) didn’t say anything. (y/p) just walked over to Eddie’s side of the table, plopped down on the floor next to him and rested (y/p) head on his leg.

The entire room was silent for a moment, not entirely sure what to do.

“Are you okay baby?” Eddie leaned down a little to look at (y/p), his voice lowered in a comforting way.

“Yeah. Just need a lil affection. Just continue.” (y/n) mumbled.

Eddie nodded a little. “Okay, let me know if we’re too loud, okay?”

(y/n) nodded.

So, the Hellfire club continued to play; but a little less loud and energetic than usual. Eddie kept running his fingers over (y/n). Rubbing (y/p) back and patting (y/p) head and occasionally holding (y/p) hand. And any time someone was too loud he’d whisper shout, “Shh!” It really didn’t take long for (y/n) to fall asleep.

After the club time was over, Eddie softly woke up (y/n) and helped (y/p) to his van; driving to his trailer so they could cuddle in his bed.

#eddie munson #hellfire club #dnd #i dont know what im doing #like seriously #i suck at this #anyways #enjoy ig #stranger things #reader #reader insert #eddie munson x reader #stranger things x reader

[autisticempathydaemon]

Hello! Just trying out the Redacted Audio Matchup!

What song are you fixated on at the moment? What lyric or verse, and why?

I am currently obsessed with the song Bitterwater by The Oh Hellos, I love folk-rock and songs I feel like would be played in a DND tavern.

"Bury me beneath the tree I climbed when I was a child"

I don't know why I liked this verse but it gave me a message that home is a place where you are the happiest (If that makes sense)

What is your Enneagram type?

I am a type 4 (the individualist) which makes sense kind of

Do you love gargantuan Youtube video essays, and if so, which is your favorite and why?

I have actually never heard of this channel so I don't have an answer.

Tell me about your childhood imaginary friend.

Their name is Jasmine, they've been my imaginary friend since I was a kid, and they change their look on the regular, they're usually there to comfort me when I'm down and alone.

What is your go-to way to fall asleep?

Usually just put on some asmr video and wait till I fall asleep.

If you had to change your name, what would it be, and why? (In tandem, if you have changed your name, why did you pick that one?)

I keeping my name at the moment, though I have tried to think of a name that suits me, that makes comfortable and confident in it. I don't have a name yet, but I hope to find one in the future

What is your favorite of Redacted’s audios, and why?

"Talking Commitment with your Werewolf Boyfriend"

This video just really shows how strong and healthy Milo and Sweetheart's relationship is, that they clarify that they don't feel like they need to get married to be devoted to each other. I love Milo and Sweetheart's relationship, it's full of fluff and understanding for each other.

What Redacted boy holds no appeal to you, and why? Like, not the one you hate but the one who you don’t get the hype for. (I won’t judge, I promise.)

Vega, he just doesn't interest me, he seems so bland and just has really nothing really worth for my to hear.

Tell me about that one book/movie/tv show you know all the words to.

How to Train Your Dragon (all the movies)

Which Redacted boy are you platonically attracted to? Like- forget dating, which dude do you want to be your best friend?

I know this kinda seems basic but Huxley, I see him more as a brother/best friend then anything romantic.

Do you have a go-to thing you ramble about when you’re tired, and if so, what is it? (For example, my boyfriend knows I’m ready to sleep when I start talking about space.)

I just start rambling about the most random things, like they aren't even related to what I was saying before, they just start Poppin outta nowhere.

Tell me your go-to gas station and drink combo.

Sausage rolls and Hot Chocolate, it always makes me feel like a child again.

Tell me about your favorite playlist at the moment.

Funny thing...I don't have a playlist, the playlist I think would count would just be The Oh Hellos! Dear Wormwood album. I just love their songs ❤️

What’s your guilty pleasure media, and why?

Tough one but it would have to be reading bl comics and manga.

And whatever else you think tells me about who you are!

I am an artist who is striving to be a character designer one day! I love DND and rpg games, I dance and sing in my room by myself, and I use my imagination more than I think is healthy. I am queer, and I want to make friends, but I tend to be quite odd to talk with, so that is mostly a problem. I very much hate math too and I am not a morning person (very much a night owl)

Lemme tell you, this one took me on a RIDE- a flimflamming, tossing and turning, back and forth ride with loop de loops. I had to think incredibly hard about this, so it is with hard won assurance when I say you and Ollie must be together.

Being a Type Four, the Individualist, your imaginary friend, and wanting to make friends gives me the image of someone who’s kind of lonely, if I may say so? Ollie wouldn’t let that continue, because he personifies loyal, sweet, simple companionship like no other Redacted boi. Making friends would be so easy and natural with him by your side, integrating your lives together, introducing you to his cat, inviting you to board game nights with his friends. A life with him would be very full.

It would also be so fun! I think another reason y’all would get along so well is that y’all like a lot of the same things! I can just imagine y’all sharing character playlists for your campaigns, exchanging little TTRPG memes, getting little Cattywumpus footsteps all over your character sheets because y’all left them on the coffee table. When you’re not out with your TTRPG friends, you’re having lots of cozy nights in, chilling on the couch, Ollie kissing your cheek as he watches you draw over your shoulder.

Song:

They'll speak of me in whispered tones/ And say my name like it shakes their bones/ 'Cause we'll dance together so close we're sharing breath/ But now I'm leading, doesn't that just scare you to death

Is this a traditionally romantic or cute song? No. Is it hella fantasy, storytelling, narrative vibes? Abso-fucking-lately. It’s giving enemies to lovers with indescribable, undeniable chemistry and tension, and I think you and Ollie would have a blast carpool karaoke-ing it and acting it out.

Runner-Ups:

So here’s where the issue was- Milo and Ollie were fucking duking it out for your hand with Asher just ekeing out behind in third. They’re both sweet and supportive, fun, eager to engage with your interests and hobbies; Milo even has a cat too. Ollie just fucking won because it’s canon he’s a game nerd and I liked an Unempowered boy with you.

note: we should be friends I myself am odd and unusual 💕

Read this post and send me an ask if you’d like a match-up of your own! 💌

#redactedasmr #redactedverse #redacted asmr #redactedaudio #redacted audio #redacted #busybee matches

[warlordfelwinter]

a moment alone

you know. i just think novelising dnd games is fun so here's some celeste and patience from the other night

--

--

"Celeste, do you want to go keep an eye on Patience, and Nyalori and I can go inside and start looking around?"

Celeste barely heard Corivier, already heading to catch up with Patience. "Hm? Yeah, good idea!" he said absently, trotting over to the tiefling who was starting to make a circuit of the manor, taking notes. His assistant had already gone in, which meant the two of them were alone once Corivier and Nyalori went inside.

"Hey, I need to talk to you," Celeste said as he caught up.

Patience smiled. “I assumed so, you’ve been giving me that look since I came to the office. What is it?” He was writing without looking at his notepad, eyes flicking around the exterior of the old tavern, but he spared Celeste a quick glance.

"I wanted to ask you about something kind of serious.”

Patience stopped. He lowered his notepad and gave Celeste his full attention. "What's on your mind?"

"It's..." Celeste hesitated, glancing around, trying to make sure no one was around before he started asking Patience about things there were no good reason for a solicitor to know.

"Celeste," Patience said, and Celeste looked at him again. Patience held his gaze. "No one can hear us," he said.

"I need to ask you about Tiamat."

Patience stared at him for a moment and then chuckled.

"Don't laugh at me," Celeste said.

"I'm not laughing at you, my dear, I'm just… Every time I talk to you about work it puts you straight to sleep and the first time you ask me about it, it's about Tiamat. Of all the tedious, uninteresting…"

Celeste frowned, slightly. "Just hear me out, please," he said, quietly. "A little over a tenday ago I had a dream, from my guardian—don't give me that look, I know you don't like her—she showed me Waterdeep in flames, the Sword Coast reduced to ash and ember, everyone around me burning and screaming." His voice shook as he remembered the visions. "She told me something would escape the Nine Hells, that it was coming to bring a shadow of death and silence, and everything I've found or others have found tells me it must be Tiamat, so I just… I just need you to tell me she's still imprisoned."

Patience listened to all of that without his expression changing much, apart from a slight distaste at the mention of Hanala. It was measured and thoughtful. He glanced away, gaze unfocusing slightly as he redirected his attention to Avernus.

"At this moment she's still in her miserable little pit, yes," he said, refocusing on Celeste.

"And can you… is there anything you can do to make sure she stays there? To make sure she can't get out?"

"I am already doing what I can, my dear, I'm the one who put her there." Patience frowned slightly, searching Celeste's gaze for something. "Celeste, don't get invested in whatever this is. Tiamat… she doesn't matter. She's nothing for you to worry yourself over. Trust me."

"I do, but my guardian has never lied to me. Whatever she showed me must be real, somehow." Celeste paused, thinking about what else he'd learned. "There's an artifact, apparently, in the city somewhere that would allow a dragon through the wards. Do you know what it is? It seems like no one knows what it is or where, but if anyone would know it would be you. You know everything."

Patience's lips twitched slightly at the assertion. He looked thoughtful. "Ahghairon's dragonward?" he clarified, and Celeste nodded. "Mmm… Last I can recall, what you're thinking of was in the possession of a gold dragon. Part of quite the massive hoard."

"In the city? There's a gold dragon in the city?" Celeste asked, startled, wondering where it could be hidden. Waterdeep was big, but surely it wasn't that big that there could be a dragon here without anyone knowing.

"Mmhm."

"That must be what they're here for, then, the people Hanala warned me about!" Celeste said, convinced now that his theory was right, and also terrified that it was. "She said they needed something from the city for her, for Tiamat, they must be after whatever that thing is the gold dragon has so they can let her through."

"Tiamat is in Avernus, even if she were able to breach the dragonward, she would need to get to this plane first," Patience said, patiently. "If she were planning to break her contract again, she would need quite a large sum of gold, which may be found here, but, again, I doubt this is something you need to get involved in. Trust me, she won't escape. She may have done before, but—"

"Okay, see, I do trust you but then you say things like that!" Celeste interrupted.

"Celeste, please," Patience said sharply. "Let this go. Don't get invested, don't get involved. If Tiamat is planning on breaking her contract, there's not much you could do to stop her anyway, I don't want you doing something stupid and getting hurt."

"But if something is threatening my home and the people I care about then I am going to try and stop it, if I can."

Patience rolled his eyes.

"You could… help me," Celeste said, quietly, before he could really think about it.

The mild irritation vanished from Patience's gaze, replaced by something else as he looked at Celeste almost warily. Almost disappointed. 

"Are you asking me what I think you're asking me?"

"No… I don't know," Celeste said, confused and upset, "I don't even know what I'm asking you."

Patience sighed. "I like you, Celeste. And one of the things I like best about you is the… power dynamic we have. If you start asking for my help, like this, that balance is going to shift."

Celeste shook his head. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean…" he faltered, looking away. "I'm just… scared." His voice wavered again. He had been trying not to think about that dream, but it had occupied his thoughts nearly every day and every night since. Though Patience seemed content to dismiss Tiamat out of hand, the thought of her was terrifying to Celeste. He wanted to trust that she would be kept in Avernus, but it was hard to ignore Hanala's warning.

Patience lifted a hand, brushing loose hair out of Celeste's eyes and then cupping his cheek, making Celeste look at him again. "Hm..." he sighed. "It seems I should ask your guardian for tips… she’s obviously quite effective at frightening people."

Celeste could tell Patience was trying to cheer him up, but he couldn't bring himself to smile.

He sighed. "Tiamat is no different than any of the rest of her kin, she just has more heads. All of them chromatic. All of them boring and uninventive, all doing hardly more than chasing the base impulses of their kind. Creatures of greed and little else."

"From what I saw, she doesn't want gold. She wants to destroy everything," Celeste said. He crossed his arms over his stomach and shifted back from Patience's hand, looking away. He understood that the devil in front of him had no reason to be afraid of Tiamat, or anything for that matter, but he wished his own fears were being taken seriously.

Patience looked at him for a moment, tail swishing idly behind him as he thought, and then made a quiet noise. "What's your guardian's name?" he asked.

Celeste looked at him warily. "Why are you asking?"

"For work. If Tiamat is planning on breaking her contract, I'll need what information I can get. If your guardian has seen this, I want to have a word with her."

"… Hanala. She's a deva. Good luck getting her to talk to you, though, she doesn't like you."

"Hm, well the feeling is mutual." Patience smiled after a moment. "I still can't believe you," he said, his tone lightly teasing, again trying to lift Celeste’s mood. "You finally ask about my work and it's Tiamat. I should really be offended."

Celeste smiled slightly, despite himself. "I'm sorry, you can talk to me about work anytime, if you want to," he said, earnestly. "You can talk to me about anything."

"Well, we don't need you falling asleep right here," he replied. He paused, thoughtful, looking toward a broken window of the tavern, from which they could hear Corivier and Nyalori exclaiming in surprise about something.

"Where did you find those two?" Patience asked, after a moment.

"At The Yawning Portal, I told you," Celeste said. "We all just happened to be there and started talking and then the troll showed up and we fought it together, so Volo thought we must be friends and hired all of us to find his friend."

"Hm… Do you know what that ranger keeps in his bag?"

"The dragon? Yes. She's really cute."

Patience's eyes narrowed slightly and he sighed. "That is not simply a dragon."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not entirely sure, which I don't like. And the other one… Do you have any idea what follows her?"

Celeste shook his head, uncertain.

"Your friends have friends in high places, is all I'm saying," Patience said, carefully. 

"Well… they're in good company, then," Celeste said, smiling. "I have friends in low places."

Patience laughed. "Do you trust them?"

Celeste thought about that for a moment. He was surprised at how quickly he had grown attached to Corivier and Nyalori, but truly he knew very little about them. "I don't know,” he said, eventually. “I like them, but…"

"Good. Don't trust them, not yet. Don't trust anyone, for that matter."

"I trust you."

He snorted. "That's a mistake."

"I know," Celeste murmured.

Patience looked at him for a moment. "Just keep your wits about you, my dear," he said softly. "I doubt it's a coincidence you all met that night and they have their own motives for being here. Don't let them use you." With a gentle hand on Celeste's jaw, he pulled him down so that he could stand up on his toes and lightly kiss him on the forehead.

"Come on, let's head inside, I've seen all I need to out here."

#i love how dismissive patience was about tiamat #he literally just thinks she's boring and it was so funny #celeste is like hey this dragon is coming to kill everyone i care about i think #and asmodeus is like i wish you had more interesting problems #which is so. on brand. honestly #fel's ttrpgs #dnd: tales from the dancing sea dragon #fic #oc: celeste #celeste/asmodeus

[therandomavenger]

To AI or not to AI

There’s been a lot of hubbub lately both online and in the media about the new AI tools that have been created. It started out with art, and then moved into the realm of writing, with the coming of various tools that are supposed to be able to generate original content. Reactions have been varied. Some people have embraced these tools as the wave of the future. Others have drawn a hard line in the sand and declared that no legitimate writer or artist would ever use them. As for me, I haven’t known what to think. I do not like the idea that I could be replaced by a collection of algorithms. But there are some writers I know and trust who’ve found useful applications for them that did not strike me as unethical uses of the technology.

I didn’t see myself using any of these tools in any capacity. But last week, someone in my writer’s group suggested that they could be used to generate comp titles for your books to assist in marketing. This seemed like something that could be useful, and also ethical, and since I have a new book coming out later this month, I tried it, using, specifically chatGPT.

I gave it a short summary of the book and asked for comp titles. I did this three different times, providing more details each time, and clarifying what I was asking for. Each time, it generated a list of ten titles, complete with one paragraph plot summaries. I was pleased. Here were some comp titles I could use in my marketing. Then I looked more closely at the plot summaries. They were eerily close to my book, so much so that I was a little afraid I was going to be accused of plagiarism. They also all kind of sounded the same, with minor rephrasing. I chalked that up to the format the algorithm was using.

So, I decided to check some of these books out and see how they were being marketed, what their covers looked like, that kind of thing.

None of the books actually existed. ChatGPT completely made them up. The plot summaries were all rephrasings of the prompt. Of the authors listed, only one was real, and she had no book even sort of like the book that was credited to her.

I tried again, this time stressing that the books should be real. Same result. Different details, but every book was fake. Obviously, this tool is of very limited utility for me. Other writers have done this and found actual comp titles. Maybe I am just uncomp-able?

Other people are finding utility in this tool, mostly for brainstorming ideas. I tried this too, and what it gave me was the most cliched and hackneyed of plot ideas. Seriously, nothing usable. One of my friends in my dnd group uses it to generate backstories for our characters, and God bless, you Jeff, but the text generated is, let’s say, ‘devoid of inspiration,’ and the plots are just rehashes of other things. Several short story markets have closed to submissions because they are being inundated with ai-generated submissions, all of which are badly written.  

Also, people who’ve used it to do research for them have reported that you can’t trust anything it tells you. It comes up with stuff that sounds right but could be completely inaccurate. So, its usefulness as a research assistant is nil, at this point.

I fully grant that the problem could be me, but I am not finding this an even marginally useful tool. I know the technology is in its infancy, and will get better, but for now, I am not worried about being replaced.

And even if it does get better, I must wonder why it’s being used this way at all. I can see applications for AI. As a virtual personal assistant? Sure! As a way of completing complicated legal documents? You bet! Why is it being turned toward creative endeavors. Free us from drudgery, please, not the work that people actually want to do.

Now, if a writer wanted to use it to give them a rough first draft to get their ideas organized, and then rewrite it into something worthwhile, I can see the utility in that. I don’t think that’s unethical. But if you’re using it to just regurgitate a blog post or something, what is the point of that? There are enough blog posts in the world. We won’t miss yours. Also, as far as storytelling goes, for the most part, the stories generated are simple summaries of events. I haven’t seen anything ai-generated that was even close to an immersive scene, or a compelling character, or a shocking plot twist. AI can only, for now, spit back versions of what it has been fed.

This may change in the future, but even if it does, and an AI becomes capable of generating original fiction, I am not interested in reading it. Part of why I read fiction (and non-fiction too) is to gain the benefit of another human being’s perspective and experience. That is completely lacking if it’s written by an AI. Right now, AI has real ‘Yorkshire Terrier that has been taught to stand on its hind legs and pretend to talk’ vibes. Maybe it will get better, but even if it does, I probably won’t use it.

I’m going to keep an eye on how the technology develops. If I could download an AI assistant to help me organize myself, and do accurate research, that would be a godsend. I routinely use Microsoft Word’s editor feature, which is not exactly an AI but something close to it, and sometimes it has good suggestions. I am not anti-AI. But I think the creative work needs to be left to humans.

originally published on chadgrayson.com

#blog post #AI #chatgpt

[worldviewcast]

The Origin of Worldview

So this is going to be a semi-personal, but also a semi-explanation post about alot of the background info regarding Worldview.  Yes it’ll be a long somewhat boring wall of text for many of you, but to ME it’s words I feel need to be said and it would mean the absolute world to me if people would take the time to hear me out.  Even if its only gonna be the five of you that continue on after this. Anyway...

Worldview technically started forming in my mind when I was probably about fifteen. (For reference, at the time of writing this, I’m about half a year to thirty-one) I was really into doing comics, I had done probably a hundred pages of a really dumb fantasy comic I came up with when I was TWELVE, a Sonic fancomic, and every morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would upload my micron inked and colored pencil story about some DnD characters into the school scanner to post on Drunkduck which is probably all still there today. Adventure’s Guild is missed in my heart, for sure.  But in between looking for my first job, the constant writing and doodling I was doing, and my schoolwork I was tossing another idea around in my head. A really DUMB idea, cuz ya know I was FIFTEEN. And I wanted to call it ‘My Big Brother the Ninja’. At the time I was influence by all the dumb anime I was watching and my best friend at the time who always wore black and stood about two feet over me. I don’t know if he’ll ever read this, but trust me if he knew I was talking about this he would recognize this story right away.  Well. My first job came around, along with my post secondary college work, and then a tech school I paid for, and.....life really started to get in the way of development. I was more focused on drawing Adventures Guild and other doodles for a long time, and soon enough taking care of my daughter took precedence over everything, and then I started sewing, and doing conventions....and the idea of ‘My Big Brother the Ninja’ was just stuck in the back of my head. Sitting. Waiting. Forming slowly as it waited for its existence - its time in the sun.  And at some point I decided I wanted Android/Robotic like characters too...some of my FAVORITE series are Kikaider : The Animation and Chobits (the books, not the infants show they try to pass a a fully written anime) - things like that. So I KNEW long before Worldview had a proper name I would be writing robot characters with a twist. But I couldn’t figure out what that twist was, what would make it work. The whole idea was still....building. It needed a push.  Right around the time My Hero Academia came around everyone with a creative mind seemed to be suddenly struck with a similar idea - what if unique powers WEREN’T so unique in a world?  This is fairly common now, but at the start of MHA I remember finding it weird that suddenly every half the new shows out had a whole population of super powered badasses in a world where living daily life with it was more the norm than the exception.  And I remember finding it REALLY weird this all came out the same time I evolving a similar idea for my own thing.... I wish I could prove I was evolving this ideas before I saw em but I can’t. I have a much deeper theory about the evolution of cultural art and how influences drive creative minds to similar conclusions but that’s a LONG mental dive for another day.  ANYHOW.

So my original idea in ‘My Big Brother the Ninja’ was the Ninja would be the weird super power in the normal world.  NOW I wanted the NINJA to be the ‘normal’ one...and the younger sister would be the WEIRD one because she DIDN’T have some sort of power or ability.  I fell in love with this new dynamic and now things were REALLY starting to come together in my mind, what kind of powers were people gonna have, just HOW mundane was it gonna be, how many fantasy elements did I want to have?  Because I already KNEW another element I really wanted to include was modern day Paladins - and YES I WILL be covering modern-day style Paladins in Worldview proper, but this meant the universe needed a Deity system, a hierarchy or pantheon.  And the world just started to grow....but something was still MISSING, the binding, the elements of what all I wanted to do -  Aaaaaaaaaand then came UNDERTALE.  And yes this ENTIRE long post is just me mini ranting about how WV came to be so people can TRULY understand just HOW much is inside MY universe so we can stop tagging it as part of the UT Multiverse please and thank you - it’s not that I don’t UNDERSTAND the confusion, but here is your ultimate ‘for the record’ post regarding mine and @little-noko ‘s personal frustrations. Undertale was obviously a HUGE part of pop culture, personal experiences, my life, MANY of my readers lives, I GET why the emotional connection is there and why its the first thing that comes to mind - but the ONLY part I truly was fascinated by with Undertale was the way the Souls were.  PHYSICAL Souls - an actual magical entity that represented a person - THIS idea.  This was my missing piece.  To say artists get inspiration from other artists is beyond an understatement - even Sans and Papyrus are references to Helvetica, right? If not references, inspired by, or ‘great minds think alike’, whatever your argument there....its not uncommon.  And Souls being PHYSICAL was the element I wanted to play with - the idea I wanted to expand on, and so much more I want to go into detail about but don’t want to go into spoilers yet so I’m not going to - and the absolute CRUX of my frustrations when dealing with ‘WV is just UT with different characters’.  Worldview has.....humans. Only humans, divided into four race. Mechanoid. Masic. Skeleton. Metazoan. (The last one exclusively because I wanted an excuse to draw cute cat girls, so sue me)  A pantheon of Gods. It’s own world map. Special BIOLOGY that I have developed to work specifically with the races I have built. Ability trees (diagram to come, don’t worry, we’re just still working out the kinks).  It’s own countries, nationalities, and even it’s own tangible form of afterlife which I blame watching WAY too much Supernatural on but HEY Reapers are freaking COOL man.  It’s absolutely gut wrenching painful to have people argue with me over a world that I have nurtured and slowly tended to for a good fifteen years...now that it finally, FINALLY gets a chance to exist and be worked on....I feel like the one binding element I finally found and played with and tried to expand on is the ONLY element that people care about. As if absolutely EVERY other element that I want to show just - doesn’t EXIST. We started with Finch because its a good transition from the old projects to the new and it’s the earliest event in the timeline - nothing more than that. But I’m almost starting to feel like that was a mistake because it’s TOO familiar.  There’s no going back now, and thats fine. But it does make me anxious to move on to the next ‘chapter’ we’ll be delving into.  MAN.  I hope that helps clarify a few things.  I love answering questions (those that I can) about  WV...so my ask box is always open.  For those that made it, thanks for listening. :) 

#alainatalks #worldview #worldview origins #long post #semi-rant #mostly annoyances I just wanted to get off my chest but I didn't want to be mean about it #its just REALLY frustrating on my end #XD #thank you #!!

[itsomgitsgreenblogging]

Xhorhassian Castle Strategy: A Shadowgast fanfic

Shout out to the ETFC. I swore I wasn't going to write this...and then we had such an amazing conversation that I just had to write this because of the vibes. The Queen's Gambit is a great show on netflix about chess...which I know nothing about and I just figured since that there are no rules for the dnd equivalent dragonchess so I could do whatever I wanted lol. This is really here for the vibes.

Enjoy! Read on AO3 The hotel was a swanky joint, one of the most expensive hotels in all of the Dwendalian Empire. Essek didn’t have much use for the light and the noise...it wasn’t like they were trying to make anything easier for him and he wouldn’t have asked regardless. However, once they all got past the formal stilted manner of most Empire competitions during the actual playing, the after-affairs tended to be rather convivial and light-hearted. Most players knew each other from circuits and practice and other competitions, so it wasn’t too surprising to see players who had just been engaged in tough matches to reach each other and ask to meet up for dinner or a drink.   Essek, as a rule of thumb, couldn’t be bothered with those kinds of things and didn’t really know anyone besides. After all, he was the only Dynasty dragonchess player who had been invited to the tournament...and it had been done out of obligation rather than a sense of sportsmanship. You couldn’t claim to be running the “Dragonchess World Championship” without the top players from across the world...even if they were your political enemies. Essek was sure they would have rather had Adeen (who had come in last or second to last in the past five World Championships) just to save their glorious Empire sense of superiority. But Essek had trounced him months ago so decisively that Adeen had gone to “find himself and his play style” out in whatever backwater Greying Wildlands hovel that artists went to go and starve for their creative vision in. And so, Essek had been invited and now was on track to win. There was only one final obstacle in his path.  The Zemnian was there with the others, milling about after the day adjourned. He had finished his game quickly. Though Bryce was known for their elegant and thoughtful play on the board they got discouraged quickly. The Zemnian had made quick work of them as soon as he smelled discomfort. Brash and bold on the board, cocky almost to a fault in contrast with his placid demeanor-he played to win and was out for blood every time. He had smashed through Bryce’s defence almost instantaneously the minute the other had faltered. Essek, though he wouldn’t like to admit it, had a much harder time with Beauregard Lionett. She was the opposite of the Zemnian. Though her personality was all bluster and edges, she played a precise and precocious game-was flexible and agile upon the board. It was like trying to capture a swallow-though in the end, she had been cornered and forced to submit through gritted teeth. 

Essek made his quick escape up to his room, not wanting to be pulled into an obligatory conversation or useless pleasantries. For a while, he lay on the couch and let the tension seep out from his back. When he played he often felt numb to everything but his thoughts. It was wonderful and freeing and exhilarating. However the minute he stopped playing he would feel his stress pounding in his ears...locking up his jaw and neck and joints. It was like a residual pain that haunted his body and he did his best to just block it out. In his mind, the moves echoed there like footsteps. He could almost ignore the pain when he focused on them. Clicking into place in a rhythm of the clock and-

“Essek? We’re back,” Verin said as the door opened and revealed him and his mother. It startled Essek, but it shouldn’t have. His brother had never had a good sense of privacy. Verin set a bottle of water by the table for him, and Essek took it and swung himself into a seated position despite the complaints in his muscles. “Well? Congratulations on making it to the finals.”   “He was watching me again,” Essek sighed as he took a sip of his water and not having any time for his empty congratulations considering his only real challenge was ahead. Essek would only accept congratulations when he won. Which he would, of course, but still. He eyed his notebook where he had written down his notes the dragonchess matches from that day. He should have been studying his only real competition’s moves, he should have been mentally preparing, but the only thing he could think of was his eyes. Blue and piercing and digging into his thoughts. It was infuriating if he was being honest.  “Who?” Verin asked curiously, tipping his head to the side.  “The Zemnian,” Essek said, annoyed that he even needed to clarify.  “Why?” Verin asked, still clueless as ever. Essek tried to breathe his irritation out and settle his mind. Victory only came when your mind was as still as a pool, it was an old proverb that Leylas Kryn liked to say to him.  “He unnerves me,” Essek admitted. 

“Oh please,” his mother, Deirta sighed from where she was lounging, dramatically draping herself as if she had no time for his concern. “You don’t really believe he will beat you, do you?” 

“The reason I dislike you mother is because you are so incapable of surprise. You lack imagination. I know I don't,” Essek said as he got up with a huff, unable to be in the room with them any longer or else he was going to kill them. And he couldn’t do that...he needed them to get home.  “I’m going to get a drink.” 

His mother threw her hands in the air but let him leave from the hotel room they were occupying. He got a few looks from people as he walked down the hallway but didn’t pay them any mind. Drow weren’t a usual sight in the Empire, and he knew he had a reputation. Essek Thelyss, the young upstart dragonchess prodigy-representative of the hope of thousands of others to break through and make the Empire bend the knee in any way they could. Personally, Essek could do without it all. He wanted-no, he needed to win to satisfy his vanity and ego. But he didn’t care about the hopes of his country. Honestly, it was exhausting to pretend he did. But he didn’t want to lose, and if he didn’t want to lose then he had to put up appearances so the Dynasty would bankroll his way to competitions. 

He stood in the elevator, the other tenants hoping off on the way down. In his mind he replayed the game in his mind and visualized the moves of the game. Barbarian to C5, Monk to 4D-then the Archmage Reversal formation. If he had just put the Rogue in an offensive decision the game probably would have been decided three moves sooner- The elevator opened, and the Zemnian stood for a minute. His face was a study of surprise, as he blinked rapidly at him. Essek felt his back straighten as he held his head high and refused to give the Zemnian more than a cursory nod of greeting. The Zemnian walked in, looked at the button for the lounge that Essek had already pressed, and then stood a few steps away from him. Essek for a minute closed his eyes and tried to breathe, refusing to look at the Zemnian. The pressure in the air could have made Essek’s ears pop-the weight of his attention chafed against his flesh like cheap fabric and almost made him squirm. 

“The opening was surprising for you,” the Zemnian finally said. His voice was much quieter than Essek had expected. Essek was sure he had heard him speak in interviews before, but it was still a surprise. “You prefer the Xhorhassian Castle Strategy.”

 “Beauregard Lionett is a student of Grandmaster Dairon,” Essek said, insulted by the insinuation and folding his arms over his chest. “Expositer’s Gambit. Only an idiot would play Xhorhassian Castle against a Monk lead. I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes as Obann.” 

“You studied her game against Obann?” the Zemnian asked, a quiet reflective surprise in his voice. Essek refused to turn his head and look at him. He didn’t want to see him-see his blue eyes or his rugged jaw or the lines in his face. 

“A decisive and well played match,” Essek said curtly. “I make it a habit to work through all of my competitors’ matches, no matter how unknown or new they are.”  “I see.”  “I know you see, you’ve been watching me,” Essek said as he watched the elevator buttons continue to light up as it moved down. Surely this was the longest conversation of his entire life and he was going to personally murder whoever had built this elevator for forcing him into it. “I imagine you were doing the same.”  “Of course,” The Zemnian said, and Essek was glad he didn’t bother to deny it. Essek could feel his gaze digging into his neck and it made him want to swat at his own skin.  “If you want to enjoy staring at me longer, it may be worth your time to invest in a photo,” Essek said, tapping his foot at the elevator that hit the floor before their destination. He couldn’t hide his irritation.“I have quite a few good ones in the Dynasty Times.”  “I know...I’ve seen them,” the Zemnian said. Essek refused to flush or flinch, and clenched his jaw so tight he was sure he was about to crack a tooth.  “Of course you have,” Essek said with a controlled sigh as the elevator finally hit the floor and opened. Essek took a few steps out only to turn and see the Zemnian reaching out his hand. Essek stared at him. He couldn’t have been more surprised if the Zemnian had grown a second head and started singing Marquesian folk songs. 

“I was going to meet with my friends,” he said, his expression was soft-like Essek was a slightly feral creature he was trying to soothe. “We were going to go over the matches so far. Would you like to accompany me?” 

“You mean my matches,” Essek said, unable to help narrowing his eyes. His hand returned to his side in response. “With who? Beauregard Lionett? Veth Brenatto? Jester Lavorre?”

 “As well as Fjord and Caduceus,” he said with an almost-smile. “Is it not practice in the Dynasty to do the same?” 

Essek almost grimaced. It was standard practice for groups of skilled dragonchess players to go over games and sequences and practice together. Essek never did. Standard practice to be bogged down by old players stuck in their old ways, to be told you were too young or too ambitious or too reckless or too careful. There was nothing to be learned from such sessions that you couldn’t learn on your own or from just watching. 

“Dragonchess is an individual affair,” Essek reminded him. “At the end of the day, you and I are going to face each other alone. I’ll win on my own terms.” 

“I played like that before, but I find this way more enjoyable,” he said with a tinge of humor to his tone. 

“I know you did, back when you had a different name and a different circle you ran with,” Essek said simply. “Your play style hasn’t changed too drastically-you always were a stickler for the scorched earth tactic no matter how you like to present yourself.” 

“My name is Caleb Widogast,” the Zemnian told him, an unreadable expression on his face. 

“It doesn’t matter to me what you call yourself-Nine Hells, you could call yourself King Dwendal and it would make no difference to me,” Essek told him. “My only request is you meet me on the board at your best tomorrow. Show me the best you can do. If I wanted to beat a player like any of your friends, I would just play them again.” 

“That’s a big request coming from the youngest Xhorhassian Grandmaster in history,” Caleb said with a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth where Essek was definitely not looking. 

“Said the youngest Zemnian Grandmaster in history,” Essek pointed out with a roll of his eyes. 

“Have a good evening, Herr Thelyss,” he said with a look that Essek refused to register as something deeper. Their eyes met, and for just a single moment Essek wondered how it would feel to be seen like that all the time. But the thought was fleeting. After all, victory came from clarity...and his greatest clarity was only found in solitude. 

“Have a good evening, Mr. Widogast,” Essek said quietly, not for an instant feeling regretful. 

And so they parted ways without a single look back. After all, Essek had his eye on the prize.

#critical role #critical role fanfic #shadowgast #shadowgast fanfic #essek thelyss #caleb widogast #queen's gambit au #dragonchess

[vwildmonk]

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 13 and 14?

B for you also!!

Also: If she were in smash/mario kart, what powers do you think she'd have and what would her vehicle look like???

What's your favorite thing about playing her?

Random thought you have about her that just won't leave your brain?

Putting under a read more as these got long again, but thanks for sending in the ask! Happy to take many more as these are always fun! Also looking forward after a game soon seeing how Lin centric answers change, she’s going to be going through some fun (and happy) things in her near future!

Also excellent extra Qs Frosty, love to see ‘em!

2.  How easy is it for your character to laugh? Laughter… oh tough one cos Lin, she does laugh quite frequently. But some of that is a forced laugh at the end of one of her own ‘look at the peckin’ idiot jokes’ or to misdirect things (both so others dont see and so she doesn’t always have to think too deeply about her words). But she also does laugh genuinely quite a bit as well; family shenanigans, silly stories over warm meals or steaming drinks, watching toon chaos go down that is safe and silly. It’s easy when you know her to get honest laughs- she’s open with those she loves and as they bring her joy the actual warm laughter comes easy. Something that is going to get even easier given time. It’s loud and bright and full of warmth and it’s going to be softer.

3. How do they put themselves to bed at night (reading, singing, thinking?) At the moment? A sharp drink of a sleeping potion and trying very hard to think happy thoughts as she blacks out- nightmares still come but she does try. Waking half-shifted too few hours later and fighting a shift isn't great... but she slept enough right? 

But In the future? It’s going to be better. Reading sometimes, but also a good cup of Stagehand’s special hot chocolate and a final chat with her boy are going to be important and soft. Making sure he’s asleep, sometimes staying with him to make sure he gets good dreams and nodding off herself. Other nights it’s getting herself in the comfiest pyjamas she can find, snagging a lullapop to put on the bedside table and doing some breathing exercises with Network humming songs to her. Nightmares might still happen, but with a major dangerous card off the table, she’s going to feel easier about getting support. Her dreams are going to get sweeter… and maybe one or two cuddle piles will be helpful. She always sleeps best when she knows family are near and safe, in either of the two places she calls home. The last thought she has when drifting off is the phantom of comforting hands she’s felt in the past full of love and reassurance, slipping into sweet dreams and true sleep knowing everything is alright.

4. How easy is it to earn their trust? It can be quite easy and also quite hard! She’s guarded and needs a reason to trust people. But there are ways, if you seem kind and caring and open- if she sees good and soft present? You show her through your acts that you are someone potentially safe to trust? She’s got a bleeding heart and a wish to help. Having people care for her back and trust in her confirms that bond, She will do her best to prove that the care is well placed. Other ways are steps: You help out children and she sees that? Congratulations you have a little bit of her trust. If she gives you her business card, you’re definitely working your way up as network, and if she invites you around or turns up to a place that you’ve invited her to more than once? Yeah you’ve definitely got her trust then- you might even be family.

5. How easy is it to earn their mistrust? Lin likes to think herself as a wary person, and she is- once bitten twice shy sort of thing- she can get quite railroading on her views. In this world if someone can harm you and gain something from it, they likely will- she’s seen that quite a bit from her cases. So if something sits wrong with her, or she finds things out that taint views, or someone just keeps pushing the wrong buttons it can break that trust or prevent it from ever forming. However, given time and proof Lin can learn to trust people even if she didn’t originally.

Breaking her trust? Withholding dangerous info from her or doing something that takes what little control she has out of her hand. Once you’ve broken or splintered the bond it is going to be incredibly hard to earn it back. 

She’ll beat herself up for months that she didn’t see it coming, or worse question where she went wrong that led to the moment happening. It’s a surefire way to get her walls up and once you’re on a mistrust list it’s tricky to find ways to get off them.

6. Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable? Oh another tough one! Lin sees laws as both. They can be flexible, you can find the loopholes and the strings and manipulate them so the system is the best it can be- work within it to keep people safe and as shielded as possible- with the Law backing you it makes it harder for things to go wrong. At the same time she sees the corruption in places and knows that if things go wrong that immovable authority and strong laws will be worse than hitting a brick wall. Just because laws can do good, doesn’t mean the people behind them always are. It’s one of the reasons she is so worried for Lil Boomer. If that kid gets into trouble enough to actually get caught by the authorities, she’s genuinely unsure how she could get the flexibility to make sure that little reelkind didn’t get hurt.

8. What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child Oh Lin had a lot of people giving her advice as a kid, many different stagehands helping her learn things and also beyond that. She’s got a few snippets she recalls best: “Start/keep exploring, there’s a world full of people Pompom, never stop seeing that.”, “”lil Lin, pompom, kiddo, please for the love of peckin’ gods stop leaping from the rafters to scare folks, do it like this!”, “Never be afraid to come in for a hug pompom dear, always ask permission first mind for most folks, but remember to keep being open- you’re a good kid, keep being soft eh?” … “Pompom… Lin please, whatever the peck is going on stop and talk to us Stop shoving us away! What’s happening to You?! What is wrong with your design? What is wrong with your face, this isn’t normal would you just- Lin Lil Lin Stagehand talk to us! -Kiddo!” 

11. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)? If it’s for a case or for something related to someone she cares about, she seeks info out. Either clarifying with folks or doing some sleuthing and finding as many reports or related information snippets as she can. She might even straight up bluntly ask someone if something makes no peckin sense about them. Although she tries to have habit of tact for her inner circle when she asks questions, or with children. She tries to be soft as needed. Her track record of near perfect cases definitely proves that she has done her best over the years to limit confusion at all costs.

 If it’s something related to herself though, perhaps about the cure? She will dig up as much as she can but also likely spiral if she can’t find the source or the answer to the thing confusing her most. She’ll pretend everything is fine while internally going into panic spiral at ‘peckin detective can’t even help themself’. Nothing is ever simple or calm and so she can’t believe it if something is too easy, and she’ll drive herself into confusion if she listens to much to her paranoia.

13. What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color? Lin… doesn’t really know what colour she looks best in? She’s had the same outfit for as long as she can remember with the odd costume for a case or seasonal event. Navy and Red are her go to colours and she does suit them quite well when she is her natural true colour. In fact she does think she looks good in them, especially with her niece-jumper in gold-red-navy. So that’s her ‘best look’! 

When her fur has become the distressed russet the red kind of clashes a bit but that won’t be an issue forever. She’ll have to try out other colours someday, when she gets the time and energy to go clothes shopping, maybe try out autumnal or halloween themed colours, she’ll see how things go.

What animal do they fear most? Herself Wolves. She knows other wolves aren’t like the Thing that bit her, and the Thing in and of itself wasn’t fully wolf… whatever the peck it was is something else… but yeah, from her own shifting and knowledge of what she can do, and that memory of something lupine and huge hurtling at her from the dark… its definitely an animal that sparks her fear response and has her reaching for her broach and crossbow at the sound of a howl or a too big shadow. 

She will meet lycans in the future that help ease that, and seeing druids like her son be able to change to wolf form is cool… but if she doesn’t see it coming or one come at her from behind she will flinch and shield whoever’s closest to her and mentally be somewhere else for a second. 

An old fear that’s going to take a long while for her to be able to ease away. Wolves are wonderful creatures, she just has to break the association.

B) What inspired you to create them? Honestly? Toonkind in general. I saw my first session of it on YouTube when I was alone and wandering what to do with myself as my DnD adventure died with lockdown. But this whole new world of insane and amazing characters and stupendous people- it sparked such joy and life in me. Lin was formed from that joy, and then from there she has grown. I am so delighted by the stories I can tell with her and the people I have met through her. That creation inspiration has bloomed since then... in fact: Lin thinks in network connections, and in this instance, the Drafthouse server to me? Is a RAINBOW of inspiration.

Mario karts: 

Vehicle wise: She’d have something small, a very speedy little car in her signature colours and a very happy tooting little horn, does it have racing flames on the side? Absolutely bc she delights in the silly things even as she projects sensible detective as well. 

Special power move? You ever heard this little monkey swear? An explosion of tangible grawlix symbols in a rainbow of colours bursting from the car to knock people out of the way (followed by a very quiet version of her signature laugh).

Favourite thing about playing her? Interactions with others. Lin has built an amazing web of family that is full of love and warmth and softness. Getting to see her grow into that and reach back is something so soft that I am delighted to enable. Her CornMaze family, spooky grandparents, her son? her many adopted children and newfound friendly pecknecks? It’s the people that make it fun to play her and give her such life. She changes and grows and shifts even beyond what I think of her and so that makes it so exciting to play as I have no idea what the future will have in store.

…also not going to lie hearing people scream “Lin for peck sake NO” adds years to my lifespan as I cackle, she’s a beloved but so very dumb little monkey who makes poor life choices and audience reactions give me life.

#Detective Lil Lin Stagehand #Toonkind #toonkind dnd #dozydin-keyfree #Love doing these- feel free to send Qs anytime about Lin my dudes!

[consilium-games]

Setting, Genre, and Principles

I talked recently with a friend about Apocalypse World, genre, and Principles. For those unfamiliar, Principles are a design and game-running technique that Apocalypse World did not invent, but did refine and explicate, a bit like how the Greeks knew of static electricity, but it was Galvani who made a battery on purpose, that others could study. Since I haven't died yet, I have a project in mind, in this case one that really explicitly relies on Principles in its basic design, so in this essay I want to work out a basic edge of 'what Principles can cover'. Namely, the edge of 'genre'.

I'll define a couple technical terms here because I intend to use them pretty narrowly:

Diagetic means the usual, "bound within the world of a given story".

Commentative means "outside of any story, things we say about stories-generally".

So a setting counts as diagetic, bound within its own logic and the logic of the single work it appears in. Diagetically we'd ask "why does the author choose to write dragons in this way?"

A genre counts as commentative, not bound within any story. It may or may not codify some stories, an author might consciously bend to or defy a genre as they understand it, but most importantly on the genre level, we don't ask "why did the author write dragons like this?" Instead we ask "why do people-generally like to see dragons?"

In talking with that friend, she said she had difficulty reading AW, which I can't really fault anyone for: I'd consider AW almost as much a polemic manifesto as a procedural manual. And the former undermines the latter. Part of her issue came from her looking for a setting, not realizing that properly speaking, AW doesn't have one. I said as much, and as we talked, I then said a lot more than I should:

After confirming that "Baker does not give AW a setting", in a bit of enthusiasm on the idea of 'genre emulation', I went on to say that "Baker gives his apocalypse". This prompted confusion, for the reasonable question arises, "how can Baker provide his own, particular, post-apocalypse story without giving a setting?" So I should have spoken more carefully, and I wrote most of this essay to over-answer that question for my friend. I've massaged it into its current form, for you non-her readers, in hopes that it helps someone, or if nothing else I can refer back to it as I clarify my own cranky lit-game-dev ideas.

To me, 'a setting' goes like this:

DnD has a kind of proto-setting, it has dragons like-so, it has elves who look pretty and live in the woods, it has dwarves who look TV-ugly and live in the mountains, it has orcs who look ugly-ugly and live in the wastes, it has humans it treats as default and live wherever. It has vague gestures of settler-colonial race-relations but not enough anything to explore, unless you the reader put it there. DnD doesn't really have much of a genre more specific than "uh, generally sword-and-sorcery fantasy".

Shadowrun has basically the same things, and a specific setting: neoliberal dystopia and collapse of the state, but otherwise 'basically our world'.

But more than that, Shadowrun also--for its many faults--has a commentative-sense genre: in Shadowrun, might makes right (or at least right-now); money rules everything, except maybe loyalty; it treats magic as innately cool and natural but technology as evil and you maybe would better die than get an artificial heart. These story-contours don't care at all about where things happen or what institutions exist.

To take another example, Cowboy Bebop tells a solid noir western story set in space. The fact that it takes place in space ultimately matters very little to the 'western' or 'noir', though. Spike knows he lives in space, and he'd agree that--to someone alive in our world today--he lives in a sci-fi story. He doesn't know that he got cast as a western-revenge-fable protagonist (though he might agree if someone asked). He definitely doesn't know that he has a corner of the story that goes more-western, while Jet lives in a corner of the story that goes more-noir.

If you wanted, you could tell Cowboy Bebop beat for beat, almost unedited, as a straight-faced noir western. Instead of Jet's main ship they have a wagon, the individual bounty-hunters have their own horses, Ed does something weird with telegraphs and adding-machines. Instead of vacuum between planets of our solar system, they weather the desert waste between far-flung towns. It would remain a story about revenge, losing oneself, finding oneself, remaking oneself, and the things we have to do for the people we love, and what happens when we don't.

You could not do this and also remove the noir, or the western, those define the kind-of-story. If you left it in space but took out the noir, entire episodes of moral ambiguity would disappear (like Ganymede Elegy). Likewise taking out the western, the premise of bounty-hunters wouldn't fit and couldn't stay. I would even go further, and say that while I don't mind Cowboy Bebop sitting on the 'sci-fi' shelf so that consumers can find it, I wouldn't class Cowboy Bebop as sci-fi. A masterpiece, but not sci-fi. Because I think that as a genre, the core of sci-fi asks "where are we going, and what will we do when we get there?" Cowboy Bebop does not care to ask this question, it cares about the human condition right now, and what people right now will do. It takes place in space because space is cool.

Second hot take: Kafka's The Castle counts as sci-fi, by the above conception. Extremely, disturbingly prescient sci-fi, precisely predicting things from call-centers to Big Data and the professional managerial class, and warning of the ease with which a competent, level-headed, and well-meaning person can confront The Machine, and The Machine will completely hollow out and dehumanize them, rob them of every competence and agency, until The Machine no longer notices them as a foreign object.

No one would put The Castle on the sci-fi shelf, because it has no shiny labcoat SCIENCE![tm], telephones and typewriters show up as cutting-edge in the setting. But just look at the concept of tracking, monitoring, filing, and refiling, and bureaucratic shuffle and managerial maladaption and "not my department" and "oh you have to fill out a form 204B -> well file a form AV-8 to requisition a 204B -> look do I have to do everything for you, I'm a busy cog you know". Look at that concept as a technology, like Kafka did.

The story explicitly refers to this as innovation, as a deliberate thing that the Count and his bureaucrats did, on purpose, with intent and expected effect. The Castle explores social science, political technology. And Kafka rigorously explores its psychic effects on the subjects, more thoroughly than Gibson waxing poetic about VR headsets and the Matrix. The Castle qualifies as fiction about science, where we're going and what we'll (have to) do when we get there. It takes place in a quaint provincial village that might lie somewhere in Bohemia in the very early 20th century.

So I allege that while setting matters for writing a given story, it doesn't matter a lot for kind-of story. And in my conversation with my friend, I should have sensed the kernel I could have dug out, but instead, I wrote the rest of this essay, particular to post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and germane to Apocalypse World.

Bringing this back to apocalypsii:

In the Australian outback in the late-70s, the gas supply all but disappears, causing societal collapse and civil breakdown.

In the American midwest, an unspecified disaster wipes out communications and supply-lines, causing survivors to turn feral and cannibalistic.

In New York in the late 60s, food shortages and overpopulation cause the government to criminalize almost everything so that they can grind people up into food.

These are settings in the sense that I mean: a place, a time, implicit societal structures and institutions, "where is this, what world is this, what is here?" DnD's setting doesn't have much of a 'where' but it more or less assumes "uh, Earth kinda, sorta"; Shadowrun says "literally Earth but N years after magic becomes real and also DnD races". But the above three post-apoc settings have very different everything-else: if you were making a post-apoc section of a library and wanted to break down into sub-genre, you'd want to put the three works above on different aisles.

Mad Max tells a story where holding on to old power structures is complicated, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and it emphatically matters how we go about doing it: when marauding punks kill your family, you may justifiably go and kill them back; but when a power-mad warlord inflicts his brutal regime, you owe him no allegiance.

The Road tells a story where everything we care about can just blow away in the wind, and at best we can only cling to what we cherish, while we can. Power comes and goes, structures don't last, but cruelty and misery endure eternal and will always win--but we try anyway.

Soylent Green tells a story where societal structures can technically endure, but themselves have no moral compass and can inflict as much cruelty as uncaring nature. You may live in an illusion in which civilization appears to function, but in fact you have no more safety than the wilderness, and indeed you didn't realize it, but you're the cannibals, and perhaps soon the meal.

Those considerations all sit at the genre-type, commentative level, and I class them as wholly unconcerned with setting. Each of these stories would tell just as well in space, or an underground complex, or even Bronze-Age Fertile Crescent if you twist a few narrative arms. The where and when and what doesn't define or determine the kind of story, the genre, even if setting can help or hinder genre goals.

Bringing this back to Baker: he doesn't give a place where things happen; he doesn't give an inciting event that brought the apocalypse; he doesn't even describe what happened during the apocalypse, or how long ago it happened, or give a date for "today". I'll list three AW settings I've run or played in or heard about:

Sunlight vanished altogether, though somehow it hasn't gotten any colder. Darkness and shadow can become animate and even sapient, and can claim people, though it doesn't seem exactly malevolent or 'evil'. Rule of law has mostly fallen apart, but out of fear and prudence people mostly avoid wanton violence, because if you see someone you don't like, you could roll up on them and take their stuff--but just as easily they could kill you, and just as easily as either, the Dark might just take both of you; you're safer keeping the Dark at bay and not hassling someone else, unless you've got good reason.

A few years(?) ago, survivors woke up from total amnesia and some kind of fugue: it seems like this fugue lasted at least some years, there's some decay of modern-to-us structures, but the ruins look fully recognizable and often quite well-preserved. But signs abound, literally painted twenty-feet-high on buildings and structures, that something unfathomable happened. The giant wordless pictograms seem to warn to protect tools and structures, to stay together and not go off alone, indicate places that once had lots of food or other important resources, and most alarmingly they show gigantic hands reaching down from above onto some of the pictogram figures. No one can remember anything from before the wakeup though, so the meaning is lost.

Something like twenty years ago, the world broke in some fundamental way: it always rains or at least fog abounds, long-distance communication inexplicably but insurmountably fails to work, and cityscape has sprawled on its own to incorporate seemingly the entire world. As far as anyone knows, the city spans infinitely in every direction, it has no edge, only more city. The city-cancer seems waterlogged and rotting everywhere, some few places fit for use and occupancy, but if you go down any given street and step inside an empty house or shop, it probably won't suit human habitation. People still habitually carry on the forms and outlines of societal norms, mostly, because what else can they do? You can't burn it all down as long as it keeps raining.

I brought these up because Baker's conception of 'post-apoc' does not cover the whole of "all post-apocalyptic literature"--it couldn't, shouldn't, and if it did it would have little or no use to anyone. Baker's narrower conception, the Principles that AW's rules expect a setting to follow, narrow things down and keep the rules crisp, tight, and tractable.

Each of the AW campaigns above has a totally different setting, aiming in totally different directions for different things--but, they all live inside Baker's Principles for a post-apoc that fits within AW: scarcity, weak but present society and norms, a Before, an After, and no going back, and each has a 'Psychic Maelstrom' that excuses a lot of narrative fiat and deus ex machina and having characters just do weirdness not otherwise specified.

That 'Psychic Maelstrom' comes closest to giving what I'd call "a setting" as in "place, time, institutions", because it sits at the diagetic level. A distinct thing bound within a given story--except it only barely counts as 'diagetic'. Because Baker only gives loose guidelines for what a Psychic Maelstrom should be or do. Baker's own at-his-table Psychic Maelstrom will look nothing like mine, or my girlfriend's, or her erstwhile friend's, because in those three AW settings up there, each of us had totally different ideas for what to do with a Psychic Maelstrom in a post-apocalyptic setting.

But: all three of us used our Psychic Maelstroms for the things Baker says to use them for: unleash weirdness, justify unrealistic but narratively satisfying twists, allow and excuse extra awesomeness, maybe use as a metaphor or allegory for "how it got this way", as well as "where it could go", in literary terms. And . . . Baker doesn't really get closer than this, to giving "place, time, institutions, history and people and events". So in the sense I understand 'setting', a diagetic construct within a given story, AW doesn't have one.

But in the commentative genre sense, AW very definitely gives Baker's apocalypse, in that it gives a recipe for the things that Baker considers essential to the post-apoc genre (or at least, the aisle of the post-apoc library he wants to confine his game to). He doesn't try to tell a Soylent Green apocalypse so much--you'd need to twist some arms and ignore some Principles to tell Soylent Green. Nor does he try to tell Children of Men so much--you'd have to leave a lot out to rein AW in to just Children of Men. He instead aims* for something closer to Mad Max, but heavy on Weird West, and a lot less somber and desolate, so more like Fury Road. And he says, "here's how:".

(*) But, of course, he doesn't actually tell these stories. Instead he has the project of telling the reader how to tell this kind-of story. So, while he gives some sample poetic images of skylines on fire and the world torn asunder, he doesn't care to talk about the virus, or the metorite, or the gas-shortage or the food-shortage. He doesn't care about the where or when or what, and even with the Psychic Maelstrom, the one concrete diagetic thing he gives--it sits there as a meta-thing, explicitly unstated whether it resulted from The Apocalypse or its inciting event, or caused it as the inciting event, or something else.

All of which boils down to: commentative, about-stories, genre-level stuff owns bones, and I weigh it heavier than diagetic, in-stories, setting-level stuff. Baker gives excellent tools, within his purple polemic prose, for that first stuff and gives little or nothing for the second.

#literary theory #game design #genre

[the-gay-cryptid]

DND Last Night!

Quick background: we’re in a town called Neiro, and last session was spent battling our way through a dungeon. We started this session in the tavern celebrating our success with the companions we went through the dungeon with.

Saffron drank something called Dragons Fire Ale from one of our companions, and she got fucked up

Our other companion was drinking something called halfling stout, which had the slogan: “makes a halfling feel like a wholeling”, which had us cackling for a while.

Saffron got into a drinking contest with a gnome, and had a grand total of 3 double shots of this ale. Every single one was a mistake.

Saffron: Another!

Jade and Soli in unison: NO!

“I can’t wait to see Josh’s face when he finds out about this” “oh god, he’s going to kill us!”

Saffron, so drunk she cant lift her glass: Vers...feed me the next one!

Soli threatened to never heal Vers again if he actually gave saffron more ale

Saffron got put into the special bag we made for her to ride in on Vers’ back.

Soli and Jade swore they weren’t helping him clean it when Saffron threw up in his bag. 

Jade, with fear: No one tell Joshua about this

Saffron, drunk and with damaged pride: you tell him I won!

she definitely did not win

Saffron stayed in the bag, just her little head poking out, and Jade fed her crackers to help soak up the alcohol

Saffron took great pride in the fact that she got this wasted before sundown

but then!!! bells started ringing!!! and we were told “He’s here!”

so we followed the towns people to the town center, and we were told to get down in a manner that I now realize was very much like a surprise party.

a man appears! riding his horse! Its our dear friend Joshua, who hasn’t been in this quest until just now!  and he gets charged by the mayor.

the mayor..we have seen in action only once. he is a buff old ass man in a wizard hat. Joshua tries to get away, and, for pretty much the first time since we’ve met him, gets his shit wrecked. 29 points of damage in one hit. we hear Joshua’s bones crack.

and then we find out that the mayor is Josh’s grandfather, and this was all in good fun, and his grandfather heals him. Jade, being the only one who passed her arcana check, realizes this old ass man is very powerful, and she is very afraid of him.

Joshua takes us back to the tavern to watch a fight, and then we watch a lovely show.

the show is a beautiful woman singing. her name is Rachel, and Jade met her earlier that day at a music competition. Except she was judging the competition, so Jade hadn’t hear her actually play yet.

Rachel, it turns out, is an incredibly powerful glamour bard. and Jade, as a bard and lesbian, is smitten.

and then Rachel came up to our table with a bottle of wine and asked “come here often?” Saffron, our dear, drunk, little girl in a backpack, tried to flirt. Soli fumbled over herself trying to compliment Rachel. and Jade was in full blown gay panic mode and as soon as she got some alcohol in her system, she was going to charm the hell out of this gorgeous woman.

and then Rachel sat with Joshua. and we found out that they know each other. And, thankfully before Jade gets any alcohol, we learn that she is Josh’s fiance.

Saffron swears to steal her from him.

Soli, very tired: “Please excuse the small drunk child.”

We all went to Joshua’s house, which is super nice, because this island and town are in fact owned by his family. joshua is a rich boi.

But now it’s angst time

Jade went to Joshua’s study to talk to him about how she’s worried about saffron, because saffron has been sickly and violent since we got to the town, and something is very clearly wrong. and then had another gay panic because rachel was laid out on the couch while Joshua was painting (our dm, who plays Joshua, then had to clarify that no, this was not a titanic type scene and Rachel is just keeping him company)

Meanwhile! Soli sat with Saffron in her room to keep her company and make sure she doesn’t get sick. Saffron asked Soli where we got all the items we came back with from our little trip without her. (because we gave her like...five magic items from that trip)

Soli told her the short version, which was that we were hired and sent back in time to get something from Westshire before it burned down.

Saffron freaks out when Soli says the town’s name. She insists Soli is lying, and she gets so frantic, she ends up running to Josh’s study to ask him.

and so Jade sees her run by as she’s going into her room, and joins Soli in chasing after her.

Vers meanwhile has left the house and has no idea any of this is going on.

Saffron is still freaking out, and asks Joshua the same thing, and gets the same answer. when Jade and Soli get to the study, she asks Jade, and when Jade tells her they went to Westshire, she gets even more freaked out.

And saffron shows us a picture she got. she got it from a memory camera in a shop in town. it’s of Westshire. it is burning, and there is an elven woman with a symbol of House Lyrandar on her hand, and she is clearly the one who caused the fires

We all promise, very ardently, that we care about her and we trust her and we will do everything in our power to keep her safe from whoever this woman is.

We stayed in his study, Saffron sitting on Josh’s knee, Soli sitting beside them with a hand on Saffron’s back, and Jade sitting on the floor, just watching over all this.

Soli began asking Saffron more questions, trying to figure out why Saffron was there during the fires..and very slowly coming to the conclusion that, given that Saffron told us she’s an orphan, and given we were in Westshire about a decade ago, and given Saffron’s age, it’s very likely she was in the orphanage. She then mentions that she, Josh, and Jade went to the orphanage while we were there.

and Jade notices something (and I redeem my shitty ass roll from the last time I tried to do this). Saffron, she realizes, looks not quite human. she can see under Saffron’s hood a little, and notices..Saffron’s ears are a little long for a human. More like that halfling baby she held in Westshire. (Screaming from me and Soli’s player ensues)

And Jade finally makes the connection. And she and Saffron lock eyes, and they have a moment of understanding. Saffron tries to glare at her, and Jade just stares back, completely unfazed.

Saffron admits she has a lot of secrets, and she fears that if she told us, we would kill her.

Soli and Jade assure the hell out of her that, fuck no, we trust and love her so much.

Joshua attempted to lighten to mood by showing off his painting of him slaying a dragon during out last mission, and was met by some bitterness from Soli who reminded him that, without her help, he’d have been burned to a crisp.

Soli and Jade took Saffron to bed and kept her company while she tried to get to sleep, and Jade sang the same lullaby for her that she sang to baby Saffron in Westshire

And then Jade laid in her bed and did not sleep well at all, because holy fuck, Saffron isn’t a human either, and she’s from Westshire.

Joshua, meanwhile, took out the crystal ball we got in westshire. we actually accidentally stole it from a dragon born woman named Raipora.

Joshua let Rachel know he was going to try it out, and to stop him if it looked like things were going wrong.

Joshua woke up in a cloudy void space, and guess who was there to meet him

Raipora’s a little pissed that he stole her crystal ball, but he explains he fully intended to return it, and even offers to give it back to her. but Raipora tells him she was killed in the fires that destroyed Westshire.

and now, if he will let her use him to see Saffron, she will allow him to use the crystal ball to cast scrying.

Joshua lets her see Saffron, who figures out she is being watched, and informs him and Raipora, though she apparently mistakes them for someone else, that she likes hide and seek, and she’s been winning their game, and then she locks eyes with them, and tells them that this is cheating.

she tells them she doesn’t appreciate being spied on.

and the spell ends, and Joshua is in the void with Raipora for four hours. He loves Raipora though, and calls her his druid grandma, and they spend the next few hours talking about divination and trying to manipulate the clouds in the void to become furniture.

Vers returned after getting drunk on the beach and questioning his life choices, and Joshua, now very thrilled, shoves the crystal ball at him and insists Vers should look into it.

Vers is less thrilled about Raipora. He is deeply uncomfortable around her, and just tries not to stand too close to her.

Raipora just asks him about Saffron, and she apparently has some investment in making sure we keep little Saffron safe.

Vers is not a fan of Raipora.

in the morning, Jade woke up early for the first in her life, and she and Soli hung out in the library for a couple hours. they found an adorable book of drawings made by Joshua as a child.

Jade found a book on the houses and did some reading on House Vol. Unbeknownst to the rest of the party, or their players, Jade has spent the past five years picking up any patchwork information she could find on the cult that kidnapped her, and she knows they have some connection to House Vol. 

She and Soli then get some breakfast with Joshua, and we realize that his hair looks really nice this morning, and that Rachel apparently fixed it for him. which is just fucking adorable.

Joshua brought a very hungover Vers breakfast, and Vers informs him he wants nothing to do with the crystal ball ever again.

Vers, Jade, Soli, and Joshua all convene in the kitchen to talk about the crystal ball.

Josh appeals to Soli’s kind heart, and tells her how lonely Raipora has been. Jade tells him that’s noble and all, but Raipora is creepy, so fuck that, and Vers is very glad for the validation.

Soli and Jade go to Saffron’s room to check on her and see how she’s feeling after the night’s events.

And Soli reminds her again that we trust her, and we would forgive her for almost anything.

Saffron looked over to Jade, and Jade told her the same, and that her feelings have not changed. Saffron questioned her, and Jade just told her again, a little more firmly, that, even now, she hasn’t changed her mind.

Saffron made a comment that Jade saw something she wasn’t supposed to see. Jade agreed, and again told her it changed nothing.

and Saffron took off her hood, officially telling both of them that she’s a halfling.

Jade, meanwhile, is absolutely giddy because Saffron’s been lying about being a human too, and as soon as the two of them can talk alone, Jade is 100% telling Saffron that she’s a changeling.

there’s a lovely group hug, because everyone’s emotional and we need it.

Joshua comes and gets Saffron to ask her about the what she said when he and Raipora watched her the night before.

Saffron apologized for what she said to Joshua, and is apparently very relieved it was him and not whoever she thought it was

they then have a stupid cute conversation about how Joshua using the crystal ball to win hide and seek is cheating, and Saffron will just know he’s used it, and then go hide somewhere else. and Joshua answers he’ll mist step to her before she can hide again. Just really cute stuff.

Joshua finds Soli and Jade and brings us downstairs to the living room for what, in hindsight, probably looked an awful lot like a seance. 

all of us, minus Vers, sat around the crystal ball and waited for it to take us. except it didn’t. it only took Saffron.

cue mild panic from Jade who isn’t sure how safe this is. Joshua assured her it was perfectly fine, and that if they got too concerned, they could just take the crystal ball from saffron’s body and she’d come back.

Saffron comes back to consciousness after an hour

Jade and Joshua look into the crystal ball, and we immediately get taken in

The two of them have a brief argument over whether Raipora is cool or creepy.

and Jade gets jump scared by Raipora in the void, and Josh starts making couches from the clouds again while Jade and Raipora talk.

Raipora asked Jade about Saffron, and Jade was not nearly as forthcoming as the Josh, and demanded to know why Raipora is asking

Raipora admitted she has some sort of care for saffron, and Jade, rather begrudgingly, admitted she was fond of Saffron

After some more questions, Raipora revealed she wants to use us as vessels for her spell components. She is incredibly powerful (level 20 druid)

 and then Raipora asked if Jade had anyone she wanted to see. and Jade just went very pale and very still. (Out of character, i was repeatedly yelling “fuck!” because the person playing Raipora isn’t even our regular dm, and she has no idea how perfect that was, and I can’t even tell her because  s p o i l e r s)

Jade finally collects herself and tells Raipora, very shakily, that she doesn’t want to see anyone right now, and she would prefer to never need to see someone, but it’s pretty damn obvious there’s someone she wants to see, but cant ask about while Joshua is still around to hear.

So Jade just promises to keep Saffron safe, as per Raipora’s request, and they’re sent back to their bodies after Raipora makes some comment about Saffron being useful

Joshua is in a great mood.

Jade is shaken and a little bit furious, but Saffron is a sweetheart and tried to comfort her.

And then it’s Soli’s turn to visit druid grandma!

Joshua tries to go back again, but Raipora refuses, telling him that she needs to speak to Soli alone.

there’s a lot of half formed furniture, because Josh is still figuring out how to manipulate the void. Raipora admits to Soli she appreciates the effort

Raipora tells her that we each have a destiny, and that it is curious Saffron found all of us

and then Raipora asked about Soli’s feelings about Saffron, to which Soli explained she wants to help Saffron be safe and happy, because Soli didn’t get to have much of a childhood, so she wants to make sure Saffron has more happiness than she did.

Raipora reminded Soli that she has read a letter none of us have seen. a letter about saffron and the person looking for her. And Raipora made Soli promise to protect Saffron with her life.

Raipora greatly appreciated this, and told her “the Rootlock legacy must live on” and sent Soli away with no further explanation

Jade: so, what’d the crazy lady say?..She say freaky shit to you too?

Soli, absolutely full of shit and very obviously hiding a lot: uh..yeah..she just said to protect my friends and family

Jade, being the queen of minding her own damn business: eh, fair enough.

We ended session there, because we got a lot done, and it was getting late. so that was absolutely amazing, and Jade is super ready to tell Saffron some shit now, and she still has so many questions. this got kinda long, sorry! 😅😅😅

#dnd #dnd stuff #dnd shenanigans #my post #dnd character #dnd 5e #dnd oc

[yourfaveisyanderematic]

Hi! Just wanted to drop by to ask what the writing process is like for you? What kind of facet of the story do you focus on the most? What motivates you to write diamond-level-sexy writing? And how long have you been polishing your writing to the point that it's this emotionally riveting and interesting? From a nonnie who adores your blog. In all-caps.

Oooh boy!  This is a fun question, because it’s a complicated one!  (Wow, who knew I’d be at a point where someone thought I was qualified to answer this question?)

Under a cut because wow this is gonna get long.

I struggle with ADHD and executive dysfunction; of the time I spend ‘writing’ a prompt, maybe 90% of it (hours or days, in one case well over a week) is rolling the idea around in my head until I come up with an idea or angle I think would be really interesting or exciting to write about.  Once I have the outline/idea in my head, I sit down for a couple of hours and bang it out, proofread it for typos, then post it.  Second draft who?  Editing what?  Don’t know her, bitch!

The first couple of ideas that immediately come to mind are usually rejected outright.  For example: “Cioccolata falls for a mafia member who doesn’t know who he is”.  Simply having him do kidnapping and then nonconsensual surgery is scary, sure, but it’s also too easy.  (I also…basically did that for my first Ciocco request but hey.  Hey.  Shush, you.)

To clarify: there’s nothing wrong with doing ‘easy’ prompts.  Execution is always, always, always more important than the idea you write, and can elevate a simple concept or hamstring a great one.  But I personally rejected this first option because it felt too stereotypical to pick for this character; what about Cioccolata sets him apart from every Evil Doctor™ ever?  What scenes was he in that made my gut twist with fear?  For this fic, I decided it was the psychological aspect of someone experienced with driving others to suicide/self-harm.  In a previous request, I was fascinated by an online description of an experience with a drug.  Essentially, I picked a ‘centerpiece moment’ of the request and started to build around it.

This next part is going to vary for everyone, and you kind of get a feel for it if you read a lot or watch a lot of media.  Basically, you gotta know what’s important and how to pace things.  In the original outline, I was going to have the prompt take up two “therapy” scenes, where another mafia member makes an offhand remark about suggesting you see a therapist and Ciocco using that as his in, and set up him ‘collecting’ information about you for the second half.  I cut this because I realized it was unnecessary.  There was nothing about those scenes that justified their word count, so I took note of what I wanted from them and folded it into the rest.  

Once I knew what to write and how, I just sort of…did it?  The most important things to me personally are an attention-grabbing opening line, and a snappy finisher, bc it forces me to start the story at what’s important.  When I edit work for friends I get a lot of “ugh I know this is bad, but I just had to set everything up to get to the good part”….don’t do that.  Don’t do that!  Start the story where the story starts, and it’ll all go from there.  You just gotta, you just gotta trust your gut on this.  The gut that will develop a sense for what’s good or bad based on all that reading I KNOW you’re doing, because I told you to read a lot.  If you don’t like it, it’s probably for a reason.  If dialogue isn’t sounding right to you, read it out loud to yourself and see where you stumble, then restructure the sentence.  If you’re writing about something you’re unfamiliar with/too familiar with, go look at some pictures or read some accounts so you’ve got the pertinent information captured.  If you’re writing along and wonder “hmm…but WOULD DDR exist in an arcade in 1989?” then get distracted for three hours researching it and six other tangential factoids that won’t ever be important in the work, JUST IN CASE.

Actually, hang on, don’t do that last bit.  Nobody notices.  

Anyway, that’s my writing process.  Touching on what you asked about “how long” I’ve been “polishing” my work…not very!  I’ve “written” since I was an awkward preteen selfshipping with Naruto characters, but I took a loooooOOOOONG break from writing proper, narrative fiction for literal years.  Depression will do that to you.  What got me back into it was running DnD and WOD games, where I developed greater flexibility with working with characters and improvisational storytelling.  The instant feedback from players also helped me zero in on what was important and what was ‘fun’.  Eventually, I got frustrated with the fact that none of my storytelling existed outside of game sessions, and started seriously working on individual, written work again.  By which I mean I tried NANOWRIMO for the first time in a decade, made it to 20k words and then stopped to regroup because my project was, surprise surprise, not up to my standards.

When I’m reading, I tend to make notes on what I like and don’t like about a piece.  If something is jarring or irritating, I make sure to avoid it in my own work.  If I like something, I try to zero in on just what it is that gripped me and then emulate it.

This last bit’s gotta stay between us, but the reason I fixate on horror, and why I put so much into these stories, is because I am someone who is afraid of other people.  My primary motivation for these stories is to express even a small fraction of the fear in my heart.  If it’s on paper and separated from me, in a form that others can experience, it becomes a source of entertainment, and I can live with myself again.  Things just happen to get horny sometimes because let’s be real here I Am A Sub, but 90% of what I write is literally me telling the world how I live (but like, allegorically, so nobody calls me out on it or worries about me too much).

The other 10% is just my hatred of the government.

#writing haze feedback #me: yeah I'll just sit down and bang out 6k words no biggie #like a fucking liar

[chongoblog]

PLEASE tell us more about ber

You asked for it! Here’s just me talking about my OC Waltz. I’ll put it under a Read More just because I don’t know how long it’ll be.

Okay, so if you’re reading this, either Tumblr mobile is an absolute mess, or you wanna know a thing or two about Waltz. Well say no more, here we go.A few things to clarify before diving into what Waltz is about is that she’s kind of transcended her original purpose as an enemy in a DnD campaign at this point, so while Spagoots Realms (which I called “old” in the last post, really just mentioning it isnt running anymore) laid the groundwork for who she is and her backstory, she’s definitely changed from her original inception. Most notably, in Realms she had red hair and she was a Halfling. The former got changed to blonde hair (obviously) and halfling being mainly because I didn’t want All Humans in a DnD campaign because that would be boring (although she’s still short).So as I mentioned, Waltz is a member of the pirate crew known as the “Red Kraken”, which is a big part of who she is, so here’s the lowdown on them. The Red Kraken are a group of pirates who do what pirates do, they seek to plunder riches and all the like, standard pirate fare. When Waltz was in her late teens, they found an abandoned island full of futuristic technology, which a rather savvy member of the crew named “Dougie” found a way to reverse engineer, giving some of them rather robotic enhancements. They all wear red in some fashion, and all higher-ranking level crew members carry a sort of iconography of an aquatic creature when they are out and about. Additionally, when any member joins, they are given a codename based on a type of dance. In-universe this was done because the founder believed that the ocean moves like an exotic dance in both its grace and in its destruction. Out of character, the reason was for the sole purpose of setting up The Greatest Joke Of All Time™

So now for Waltz. Her family lived in a port town that was attacked by the Red Kraken, and her parents were killed by the pirates. One of the officers, Tango, was a fucking softie and was totally against murdering babies, opting to adopt the young girl instead. However, she was too young to remember her name, and Tango and the crew gave her the name Waltz.

At a young age, the crew noticed that Waltz was very adept at brewing potions and creating various gases, so the captain decided to use that, having her brew sleeping gas, combustible gas, and occasionally poisonous gas to help the Red Kraken with their many raids. As she made more gas, she was given a gas mask by the crew made to look like a squid, her favorite animal. As time went on, she began to wear it all the time, rather than just when she was making potions, sort of tying it to her identity and growing attached to it to the point where she feels viscerally uneasy when not wearing it around other people. In her time concocting new potions and experimenting with some pretty crazy stuff, she grew more.....resistant to trivial things like explosions, to the point where she can brush off stuff like that almost as if it was a good time, and leading to her coat very slightly glowing in the dark. Other Neat Facts about her!

She has insomnia, and brews her own sleeping gas to help her sleep at night. Some have described this as “unhealthy” but Waltz sees nothing wrong with it

She adopted a pet squid which she named Two-Step. One day it got attacked by a barracuda, and it was thought to be deceased, however Dougie managed to save Two-Step by turning him into a cyborg squid.

Waltz was also given a robotic companion named D1, although she’s hesitant to use it because it “creeps her out”.

Tango is a father figure to Waltz and is somewhat against letting her make poison gas and being on the front lines. Waltz does both because she thinks it’s fun.

Waltz despises seafood. Not because of how it tastes, but because she loves sea creatures too much. Other meat she is perfectly fine with eating.

Nobody in-universe or ooc knows Waltz’s real name except for me, and it’s a secret I’ll take to my grave

#waltz #theres your long ass rundown #Anonymous

[sol1056]

when the lamp stays unlit

a multi-part anon that’s been waiting awhile:

...I never really fully thought of shiro as physically disabled... he had a fully functional prosthetic arm with all the motor skills of a real arm plus superhuman strength and so forth AND because it didn’t really impair him. It would be one thing if he was physically disabled and the show thus normalized disability; but to me, Shiro‘s arm (and Ezor‘s fake leg and Zethrid‘s missing eye) were more like sci-fi ‘cool battle scars’ rather than things that really impacted their social or emotional life. [...] The missing arm made [Shiro] more incapacitated during s7 (I guess?) but it was an excuse for benching him, which is something I found ableist. And while he has a mental illness as well, I thought it only ever became an issue when it was convenient to the plot. Hope that made sense, it wasn’t my intention to be insensitive since many people see him as great disability rep.

This is nearly as difficult a subject as race, but it’s also an important discussion to have. We do need the conversation about LGBT+ representation in VLD, but it’s drowning out an equally important conversation about how disability is represented (and treated) in popular media.  

As a caveat, I’m a work in progress when it comes to un-learning the ableism that permeates Western culture, even when directly harmed by its perpetuation. So I’m inviting anyone with the spoons and lived experience to join in. The more voices and perspectives, the better. 

Behind the cut: clarifying a few terms, how the SFF genre conceptualizes disability, how humans conceptualize difference, narrative treatment of Shiro as disabled, and PTSD/mental health in popular media. 

First, let’s define some terms so we’re on the same page. Assistive technology “increases or maintains the capabilities of people with disabilities.” Adaptive technology (a subset of assistive) is tech “specifically designed for persons with disabilities and would seldom be used by non-disabled persons.” Gadgets like sock cradles are assistive, since an abled person might use them; a prosthesis or screen reader would be adaptive. The majority of media representations of disability will use adaptive technologies to signal a disability, rather than assistive. (definition from wikipedia)

Now for a few lesser-known terms. There’s a philosophical concept concerning the breakage of things we’ve always taken for granted. Like flipping a light switch: the light goes on. We don’t pause to marvel over what made the lightbulb glow. Then one day, you flip the switch and the light doesn’t come on. Now suddenly you have to stop and notice something that previously you’d never given much attention.   

This sudden awareness of wrongness --- the light not going on --- takes three forms. It can be conspicuous, where it’s visibly damaged, ie the lamp is smashed. It can be obtrusive: a part is missing, ie there’s no bulb in the socket. Or it can be obstinate, ie the bulb and lamp are fine, we just don’t have power. 

The abled perspective --- when suddenly reminded of disability --- is to see the disability as conspicuous and obtrusive. That is, broken and incomplete. Which means, that’s the only story the abled perspective knows, so that’s the story it tells, over and over. 

It’s a common assumption, especially in the SFF genre: adaptive technology removes a character from the category of disabled. Cybernetic modifications or prostheses become design elements; the character is considered --- and written --- as abled. In a sense, the character is like the lamp when there’s power: the author can ignore the label of ‘disability’ and carry on without giving more thought to the issue.

But if there’s removal (or breakage), for the author, it’s like flipping a switch and the light doesn’t go on. You can almost hear the author thinking: ‘oh, forgot this character can’t do anything.’ Until the story provides repairs or replacement, the previously adaptively-abled character is now un-abled. 

Disability --- in the absence of adaptive technology --- is, at best, obstinate. The character is neither broken nor incomplete; they’re a lamp without a power source. Nothing else has changed. But if someone never gave thought to how lamps need power to operate, their first reaction won’t be to ask if the power’s out. It’ll be to check the lamp, the bulb, the wiring, and declare it mysteriously broken because no light is happening. 

Abled writers effectively shift the blame onto the lamp: it’s now useless, by some ill-defined sense. But it’s not; it hasn’t changed. It was reliant on power when power was available, and it’s reliant when power’s not available, too. 

The analogy itself is already too simple for the reality; it implies a person could be abled/disabled as on/off. So let’s adjust, and say: the lamp has a solar-power backup and still lights up --- just not as quickly or brightly. Or it’s a drill whose battery needs recharging: it’s still usable as a manual screwdriver, awkward but workable. Plus, the base is still handy as a makeshift hammer. 

The presence of any given disability does not automatically mean the person is fully dis-abled by all other measures as well. Analogies only go so far, after all. 

But this is the main point: the character never stopped being disabled, any more than the lamp stopped needing power. By that same token, the person who takes medication for ADD isn’t ‘cured’ with medication, anymore than a paraplegic stops being unable to walk just because they have a wheelchair. 

Now that I think about it, this could extend to just about any representation one doesn’t experience personally. I mean, we do it to each other: “behind the grill, she’s one of the guys.” And then we see the person after work in a dress and heels and we’re reminded she was a woman all along; we were just setting aside her gender because we could ignore it. Like the light switch we flip unthinkingly, we paid that detail no mind.

And the fact is: it doesn’t matter if an onlooker judges a trait as irrelevant. The person still has that gender, religion, ability, sexuality, ethnicity, age, etc. When we aim to be colorblind, or genderblind, or sexualityblind... it’s like having a lamp that won’t go on and not realizing electricity is required. We’re blind to half the picture, so we blame the lamp, not the absence of power. 

We’re forgetting that because we can ignore her gender doesn’t mean she can. Or even would. But so long as we can, we’ll miss all the ways her reality informs her experiences.   

You’re right that benching Shiro in S7 was an ableist move. The entire season makes evident how little thought the staff has afforded Shiro. To them, he was abled, now he is not, and this radically changes everything: no longer a paladin, not even a pilot, nor even on the front lines (and when he is, he loses). As @caramelcheese​ pointed out, Shiro’s fought with both hands tied behind his back. Lacking one arm shouldn’t slow him down in the least. 

Others have written at length about Shiro’s new prosthesis. They’ve raised practical issues with a floating arm, such as imbalance and center-of-gravity, and ethical issues such as the offensiveness of a design that echoes his tormentor’s signature detail, so I won’t belabor those here. To me, there are two aspects even more insidious. 

One is caused by narrative silence on Shiro’s changed status. Shiro’s only visible difference is the loss of his prothesis; the narrative fails to address this, let alone provide any other explanation. Narrative silence becomes tacit confirmation: an amputee cannot be a hero. 

The second is the dehumanization. Before S7, in casual dress, Shiro’s arm was evident; in armor, he was no more marked than anyone else. His expulsion from being a paladin is visually reinforced by his loss of the Black Paladin’s armor; the Garrison uniform and space suit are modified to be constant reminders that Shiro is disabled. There is empty air where his upper arm would be. 

His redesign marks him as literally incomplete. 

As for mental health, we can’t discuss Shiro’s PTSD in a vacuum, when it’s a part of so many kids’ lives. Some suffer PTSD themselves from first-hand trauma, and likely many more suffer it along with their parents as a result of the US’ anti-immigrant attitudes. The hardest hit may be military kids between 8 and 18, of whom roughly one in five has a parent who suffers from PTSD. 

Shiro had to have been a powerful figure for those kids. He had onscreen panic attacks and flashbacks, yet remained a hero in the story and to his team.  His PTSD-inflected moments may have served the plot, but those also worked to keep present the continuing damage from his trauma. More importantly for younger viewers, he laid a hero’s narrative over the sometimes terrifying reality of a family member who suffers from PTSD or related trauma.

S3 left that behind, turning Shiro’s trauma into headaches, and even that much mentioned rarely. By S7, no signs of PTSD remained. The EPs’ tone-deaf explanation --- that Shiro learned to grit his teeth and just deal with his trauma --- was a horrific betrayal of the audience who related to Shiro. Willpower has never been a viable cure for mental illnesses or trauma.

One ingredient for healing from PTSD is support and love from a strong network of family and friends, and it’s ironic the series’ only example of a healing moment was the DnD episode. It allowed Shiro/Kuron to create and role-play a new story for himself, in a safe environment, surrounded by the support of people who mattered most to him. When Shiro/Kuron tells Coran that he feels better after playing, it’s one of the rare grace notes in the story: because that would be a healing experience for someone with PTSD.

Shiro’s story undergoes an odd reversal. He begins the story treated as though he’s abled, yet mentally traumatized. By S7, the story considers him disabled yet also fully ‘over’ his PTSD. He went from conspicuous and obtrusive for his PTSD, to conspicuous and obtrusive for being an amputee.

After thinking about it, I wonder if perhaps it’s because once the lamp has been broken for long enough --- regardless of the reason --- it eventually becomes yet another thing we don’t think about. Just like once, perhaps as children, we found light switches fascinating and the lamp going on/off to be worthy of deep thought, eventually we learned to pay it no mind. 

Perhaps Shiro’s reversal is yet another indication of an abled creator who doesn’t understand the obstinate nature of disability. We have some backwards notions about illness, in the US, and one of them is that illness is a moral failure. Like, if you just tried hard enough, you’d be better. Any disability for which there’s no cure --- you can’t regrow an arm, after all --- thus renders the person both permanently broken and morally inadequate.

And, apparently, not worthy of being a paladin. 

#vld #voltron #disability #representation #characterization #sol thinks about stuff #random existentialism terms #come for the sugar stay for the salt