#deep understanding of magic's lore and 3) NO FUCKING FOLLOW-UP TO THE END OF AN ARC

[daringdoombringer]

HI HELLO YES HERES A RESURFACING CHILDHOOD MEMORY THAT IM OBSESSING OVER AGAIN!

During my last Power Rangers hyperfix (when i was 11-13 maybe?) I made a team called Power Rangers Jungle Thunder. As far as I know, it never went past the initial concept besides doodles on my school notes, as I didn’t know how to draw humans at the time.

Brace yourselves because this is a very rare loooong text post from me.

So here’s everything I remember about it along with some new stuff me and some buddies came up with!

Jungle Thunder was basically a cross between some of Megaforce’s mechanics and the ranger colors along with Jungle Fury’s theming. The Ranger’s attacks were likely magic based.

Their headquarters was this massive temple shrine ish place deep inside a distant jungle.

The colors and Zords were as followed: Red Jaguar, Blue Cobra, Yellow Macaw, Pink Cheetah, Black Lemur. They were kept in what was basically the temple’s backyard/back garden?

The bad guys were this reptilian ailen race called the Sintonians who understandably trying to take over Earth like every other Power Rangers villain. They interestingly used the traits and morphing energy of past Ranger teams to make each episode’s bad guy. The main antagonist was this dude called Lord Fury who I don’t remember a whole lot about. Other than he was blue.

The sixth ranger was this nonhuman White Ranger, who the team affectionately nicknamed “Buddy.” I forgot what animal he was, but he was created by the Sintonians to attack our heroes with. Of course, they end up befriending him. He had feral form that I’m struggling to remember how it worked, if any?

And the Pink Ranger’s name was Emmie. That’s the only one of the human Rangers whose name I can remember.

Ok. That’s all the original stuff 12yo Daring came up with. She got the concept down, now it’s time for all all the new juicy lore and tweaks. :3

The mentor/sensei character is this tree/dryad deity called Mother Gaia. (Kinda basic but it’s what me and the squad on discord decided on) She’s rooted to the center of the temple (name of said temple still pending) and is very curious about modern humanity, as she hasn’t seen humans in over a thousand years. Also she’s like a mom to them because I love found family dynamics ok

Another supporting character will be Esteban, a jungle spirt who is essentially Mother Gaia’s assistant. Basically Alpha-5’s role compared to Zordon. Don’t know what he’s gonna look like yet, but he’ll be a big help to the Rangers by teaching them their new abilities.

The Zords are pretty interesting.They all look like normal animals apart from the fact their eyes are their respective Ranger’s color. They’re actually the Spirt Guardians, who were sent by Gaia to find the Rangers. Each animal can transform into a giant Zord upon their Ranger’s command. Makes the back garden thing much more manageable if they’re not always giant robots.

If Jungle Thunder were an actual show, there’d sometimes be bumpers before and after commercial breaks with cool jungle and animal facts. :)

Buddy will likely have a basilisk or some type of reptile as his animal, being able to run really fast and stick to walls. Basically he’s the fucked up cryptid the team ends up adopting and I love him.

Ok. so here’s what I have of the lore and basic gist of the first episode. It’s still a wip so bear with me here✨

Long long ago, an ancient civilization in the jungle worshiped Mother Gaia and the Spirt Guardians. All was peaceful until Lord Fury (another deity) attacks, as he was very jealous that he wasn’t getting any attention. Gaia, Estaban and the Spirt Guardians managed to seal Lord Fury away deep underground, but not after he and his army had driven away and destroyed most of said civilization in an intense battle. The jungle itself had to be sealed off from the rest of world so Gaia could maintain the sealing spell that kept Fury at bay.

Fast forward to modern day. (dunno if it’s gonna be in 2024 or mid 2000s)

The Sintonian aliens land on Earth looking for a place to stay, and find the chasm in which Fury had been sealed. They make a deal with Fury, agreeing to follow him in exchange for their services, as they knew how to harness Morphing Energy. This pleases Fury greatly, as he may have a chance at getting vengeance on Gaia and humanity.

Gaia gets news of this and sends the Spirt Guardians to find five descendants of the past civilization with pure hearts to be the next heroes. Unbeknownst to five midwestern college students on a hiking trip, their lives are about to change. Their names are Reno, Isiah, June, Emmie, and Braxton.

The Jaguar Guardian steals the soon-to-be Red Ranger’s backpack. They are led by the animal guardians into a cave that is later how they get to and from the jungle. They meet Mother Gaia and Esteban, who explain the whole situation. After learning they were indeed not getting sacrificed, they agree to serve Gaia and protect humanity. Anything to get away from student loans tbh.

Spirt Guardians proceed to beam spiritual power into them via a ritual. Totally not trauma inducing at all. This power is how the Rangers morph, or are alerted to any of Fury’s shenanigans via Gaia’s telepathic power.

After some more debriefing from Tree Mother and her son, the newly formed Rangers get an alert. The Sintonians are terrorizing the local park in their generic midwestern town. The Rangers suit up and use their super cool new magic powers to kick some butt! :D Hooray!

Ok. Wow. That was a lot of words.

There are still some holes and other things I missed but that’s pretty much everything! It’s always so fun to find something I made as a kid and breathe new life into it! As if I didn’t have enough Ocs already :’) will soon be thinking of everyone’s designs.

That was a certified DaringDoombringer infodump about a nostalgic childhood interest. Thank you for reading and have a good day!

#daring rambles #childhood ocs #power rangers #power rangers ocs #Power Rangers Jungle Thunder #fanmade #childhood interest #I LOVE REVITALIZING CHILDHOOD THINGS #RAHHHHHH #this will be a nice thing to obsess over besides IDNB #infodump

[celticgaels]

Can you tell us anything about the Aldmerrow Chronicles? It sounds so interesting!

Hi anon! This blog has been a little dead before it's even come alive because of personal goings on but I'm happy to see that some people seem interested! I'd love to tell you about the AC.

Back in 2011 when Ninjago first came out, I decided to create my two OCs, Taliah and Erebos. In the beginning they were just Ninjago OCs that my 11 year old mind thought were cool and interesting and not seen before. As I aged along with the show and began to learn more about the show's lore, I began to edit Taliah and Erebos more and more until eventually they got their own realm with its own lore and culture much different than we know Ninjago to have.

For one, Aldmerrow is not child friendly, let's just put it that way (another reason why I do not want to interact with minors!), as it is rife with things we as a modern culture do not find acceptable. Aldmerrow and the Aldmerrow Chronicles are a creation based off dark fantasy with sprinkles of real history from medieval Europe and it's allocated myths and folklores. Aldmerrow has monsters and beasties and even humanoid races that are not known to Ninjago, hence why Taliah and Erebos find the realm so alien, and they are alien to the realm and those who live there.

To answer your question, the Aldmerrow Chronicles first started out as a Ninjago fanfiction I made when I was 11 and then abandoned when I began my oh-so lovely journey battling mental illness that will probably now be with me for life. As the show evolved and my OC's with it, I began to think that they did not make sense if they were inhabitants of Ninjago, so I said "fuck canon" and essentially created my own realm over the next few years, that as of 2020, is the sister realm to the Never-Realm in Ninjago lore.

Now we come to 2017, I've left high school and don't know what to do with myself, so I did more brainstorming and worldbuilding. I created Aldmerrow's towns, cities, religions, characters, magic system, biomes, creatures and where they would be found, guilds, culture, delved deep into fantasy racism and oppression and even created centuries worth of history for this place.

And then I began to write about it.

Someone very special to me has seen this land grow alongside me and has given some lovely insight and feedback when needed, and they have also seen some chapters from some parts of the Aldmerrow Chronicles. The Chronicles mostly follow Taliah and Erebos's story, with them arriving in Ninjago close to the end of the second book. The first book and first 2/3's of the second book basically detail who they are, how they live, their past, their family, their friends, and what they get up too in their own realm. This allows the reader to begin to like them and root for them as the story goes on, as well as understand why they are the way they are and how stark a difference Ninjago and its inhabitants are to Aldmerrow and its inhabitants.

To be quite honest I've not done much with it in a while, motivation comes and goes and I've rewritten the damn thing so much I can't remember how I wrote it back in 2011. Currently, my very special person as well as myself are the only ones who knows what happens in the Aldmerrow Chronicles, and unfortunately my lovely anon, it's going to stay that way. I'm happy to answer any questions about the creation process though!

#anon #aldmerrow lore #oc: taliah #oc: erebos #ninjago #ninjago oc #my writing

[venser]

aaaa don't get me wrong i'm still very glad to have free magic story articles back but. it feels kinda :/// to have another set's story just. rush right past us

#im very tired and maybe i'll elaborate more when ive had some sleep #but the combination of 1) strict five chapter limit 2) outsourcing to writers who might not have a #deep understanding of magic's lore and 3) NO FUCKING FOLLOW-UP TO THE END OF AN ARC #THEY HAVE BEEN BUILDING UP FOR LIKE??? A DECADE??? CLOSE TO A DECADE??? #and these stories aren't bad!!! they're fine. but aside from the first chapter or so of kaldheim they really didn't #sink their claws into me like the old articles did #and i get from a gameplay standpoint it can get boring to spend six months on a plane but??? #why cram the entirety of the story into the weeks before the set launches??? #why not continue it throughout the duration of the set?? #like the thing that would help IMMENSELY is to reinstate the in-house story team #kaldheim (though rushed) felt more cohesive than zendikar rising because the writer is on the worldbuilding team #i can deal with RUSHED for a little longer if we just. go back to the better overall quality #and i like that wizards is reaching out to BIPOC and LGBT writers for their stories #but do you know what'd be better? hiring on people from those groups FOR YOUR WORLDBUILDING TEAM #i promise you there are PLENTY of BIPOC and LGBT people who are passionate about magic story #(and you cannot tell me money is an issue not after their ludicrously profitable 2020) #ok jeez i didnt mean to go on like this dfjdskjfdjdfk i just. im bummed yknow? #i want to feel STRONGLY about the latest stories like i did back in high school not just 'ok cool!' and be done with it #like? am i making any sense?

[mashkaroom]

This isn’t related to anything, but frozen 2 was actually...pretty good of a movie, and you can literally see the disney profit model holding it back. firstly, the music was really good -- i was really impressed with the writing team and with the vocal performances, especially by idina menzel. the songs that didn’t make it in because the plot was rearranged were also excellent. wrt to the visuals, i’m not the biggest fan of this specific animation style, but it’s clear it’s very well done -- i’ve no choice but to be impressed. the plot was whatever (also they fully put a couple of trolls in charge of the kindom for a bit -- is there no fucking line of succession in this goddamn kingdom?? maybe the plot of the movie should have been establishing a functional bureaucracy) and they really yada-yada-ed the magic system, which was basically of the central conceit of the movie so...why did they not put more effort into it? the explanation, such as it was, of the magic system was both confusing and ultimately pretty meaningless -- it added next to nothing of value to the lore or theme or worldbuilding. the themes were clearly meant for a more mature audience (which is i guess what you get for waiting 7 years to make a sequel [which btw just wrenched out a memory out of me that frozen 1 came up literally constantly in my 7th grade latin class -- i cannot emphasize enough how bizarre of an experience learning a dead language throughout the entirety of your teenage years along with 400 more of your cohort is]) -- but anyway, they establish all these themes and then don’t commit to them. Like, the central plot conflict of the movie is literally colonialism lmao. it’s such a strange place to discuss it. My suspicion is that they decided right away to go with a “connecting with mother” storyline, since the “women in the same family connecting with each other” bit worked so well in the first movie; then they were like “is this too basic?” and decided that they should wrap that into a “reckoning with ancestry” thread to cash into that “young leftist with white guilt” market. Then they had somebody on the writing staff who was like “what if we made this about colonialism?” So re: those elements, first of all the mother plotline is boring as shit. Like it doesn’t ring true even to losing a loved one early, but it especially rings soooo hollow wrt the actual relationship that is portrayed in the first movie between elsa and her parents. like we see the parents be so misguided it borders on abusive. and that’s a really interesting dynamic, story-wise, bc the parents are dead and can’t redeem themselves but the baggage they left behind is still there, so the burden of processing that falls exclusively on the daughters. i dare say this is something probably relatable to many of us, bc it’s my sense that most people grow up with pretty misguided parents! (lowkey i feel like the best parenting i’ve seen in my circle are parents who basically went off of vibes rather than idk a philosophy or whatever) i actually would have loved to see a children’s movie address dealing with parents in a nuanced way that isn’t just “one of us is right and the other is wrong” but rather addresses what responsibilities parents and children have to each other, how to navigate intent versus effect, what the value (or lack thereof) of forgiveness is, how to uncover your identity when your entire life was shaped by societal and parental expectations, etc. And the Frozen premise is ideally suited for this! Moreover, a lot of these beats actually DO happen in the movie! Into the unknown is basically elsa trying and failing to convince herself that she wants the life she has and any thoughts to the contrary should be dismissed (and it’s gay as hell, but we’ll get to that later). The climax of show yourself literally says that it was the truth about herself rather than her mother that will bring her peace. But all of these beats are facilitated supernaturally rather than by the very fitting preexisting character background, which makes it lack the satisfaction you’d expect in such a resolution. it never features any reckoning with what made her feel the way she did in the first place -- a projection of the mother’s face singing the climactic realization literally undercuts the entire plotline. like here you can see how basically being propaganda for the american lifestyle (in this case the nuclear family e.g.) undercuts their message. this predictably only gets more egregious when they attempt to tackle colonialism. so quick summary of this plotline: anna and elsa’s grandfather basically genocided an indigenous people -- the northuldra -- after tricking them into building a dam that stifles the power of the forest or something. also their mother was actually northuldra. also magic comes from the northuldra forest? it would probably be pretty problematic re: the magical native stereotype if it was clearer what was going on lmao. at the end, anna breaks the dam even though it’ll flood Arendelle; however, elsa (who was literally frozen because of the sins of the past) swoops in at the last moment and freezes the wave so it causes no damage. However, in an earlier version of the story, the wave actually DOES destroy Arendelle and then they rebuild it with a mix of Arendellian and Northuldran architectural styles. this version actually proposed a genuine vision for how to deal with the impacts of colonialism instead of the final movie where sisterly love absolves everyone of consequences. 

ok, so about the gay: i know people read a coming out into let it go, and maybe this is just cause i watched frozen 1 when i was still straight, but i didn’t really see it. but the lyrics in frozen 2 elsa’s songs match up so well with the coming out experience, i have difficulty imagining the song-writers weren’t aware of it, especially since people were already calling for elsa to be gay. Like let’s take a look at these songs -- into the unknown first. She sings

“Everyone I've ever loved is here within these walls I'm sorry, secret siren, but I'm blocking out your calls I've had my adventure, I don't need something new I'm afraid of what I'm risking if I follow you”

This idea of having being afraid of ruining relationships even (and especially) with the people you love most by coming out is something that a lot of queer people can relate to. Then she sings:

“Are you here to distract me so I make a big mistake? Or are you someone out there who's a little bit like me? Who knows deep down I'm not where I'm meant to be? Every day's a little harder as I feel your power grow Don't you know there's part of me that longs to go”

How much do i need to explain this? (like all my 7 followers are some form of queer anyway lol) But again this battle of trying to hide but knowing deep down that you can’t, longing for “someone a little bit like me” --  it’s classic queer. Then she sings a bridge-type thing:

“Are you out there? Do you know me? Can you feel me? Can you show me?”

I mean, again, what is this but longing for community. Then in the climactic song “show yourself”, she sings this:

“Something is familiar Like a dream, I can reach but not quite hold I can sense you there Like a friend I've always known”

this is literally just about reading stone butch blues.

The climactic lyric is  “You are the one you've been waiting for all your life” (sung to her rather than by her) and i mean again, this is about finally giving yourself permission to live as your true self. And not gonna lie, i dug that shit. it felt quite authentic. obviously they didn’t actually make her gay, bc of course, but she is gay in my heart!

Ok, so what would have made the movie live up to its full potential?

1) fixing that stuff i already said about the parents; it felt like such bs that anna and elsa were dealing with ancestral sins but also their parents were saints whose love fixed everything? how much more interesting would it have been if reckoning with their parents’ impacts on them led them to reckoning with the impacts of their entire ancestry and in turn their society? if reckoning with their personal responsibilities to each other led them to consider their society’s responsibility to fix the past wrongs that allowed it to flourish? this wouldn’t even be counter to disney’s individualism, but it allows for a slight reconceptualization of it that i think would feel fresh.

2) having actual consequences for the colonialism and genocide

3) either cutting all the new magic system stuff or developing it in a way that in turn helps develop the themes. frankly, the “sometimes people are born with magic” that was implied in movie one was enough.

4) making elsa gay, and i say this not just because i want gay characters but because that genuinely makes sense within the story

5) basically, the central theme should have been “i have all this baggage and i can’t resolve it by looking for answers only within my society; in order to be fully at peace with myself, i must work to right the wrongs of my society that obscured the different ways of knowledge that could help people like me; sometimes you must go into the unknown in order to understand the known” which is a message i think very well suited for the united states!

#In general Disney has created this really cowardly mold for children’s media #where the messages rarely go beyond the individual and are universally basic as shit #and that comes from a fundamental lack of respect for the audience #people keep telling me that pixar has deep multidimensional messages #and i’m sorry to say that your standards are just low #like people keep citing inside out to me and the message of that was literally “it’s okay to be sad sometimes” #cheburashka had a more complex message than that. #i know nobody asked for this long-ass analysis #and i myself watched frozen 2 in like may so idek why i started thinking about it again now #but it's just such a weird yet revealing movie #frozen 2 should have been abolishing prisons #but like seriously idk where they pulled colonialism from #but if they wanted to address a serious issue #prisons would have been perfect #because elsa basically spent half her life in a form of incarceration for being a perceived societal menace #i guess that's more difficult to weave into a story arc #oh holy fuck this reminds me that when i was 16 i was paid (very little might i say but nevertheless) #to 'ghostwrite' a witch cozy #whatever the fuck that is #but literally 'witch cozy' was the entirety of the prompt #no plot or characters or anything #there were 3 novellas #in the first one they made me changed the gay love story to a het one lmaoooo #in book 2 she busts a crime ring or sth and then realizes that social determinants made them commit crimes #and then in book 3 she becomes a prison abolitionist lmaooo #she starts running a rehabilitation program in the local prison using theater #this character was so self-insert it was ridiculous #no offense at whoever's writing the flash but 16-yo disaster child me had 15x more social consciousness than yall #sorry to analyze a different piece of media in the tags for another long-ass media analysis #but in s1 of the flash the local prison can't handle the new metahumans

[the-prince-and-the-thief]

Come at me with the lore, fam, after making my own overly complicated fanfic for almost more than a decade with its own magic system nothing surprises me

//OH BOY YOU’RE IN FOR A TREAT

I’m putting it under a cut to save your dash. 

TW: A lot of stuff. Rape, sexual abuse, abortion, murder... just... just prepare for the worst. 

//Okay, so, Blazblue AU. 

Key characters here are: Kagura Mutsuki, Ragna the Bloodedge, Celica A. Mercury, my OC Riku Akasaka, and of course Ren and Goro. 

First off, in the BB world, there is a one-world government police state that’s currently been having a bunch of in-fighting and schisms since... forever. They had a civil war (the good guys in this fight lost 8( ), and Kagura has been trying to fix shit for uh... a long time. He’s got the true heir to the throne (Homura Amanohosaka, I think? Their name is long.) 

This is an alternate canon where Kokonoe decided to bring her dead aunt back to life like, 3 games early. So it diverges during Calamity Trigger, or The Only Game I Understood (tm). Celica has this power to absorb seithr, or magic energy that can also kill you. The main villain’s body is kind of MADE of seithr. The main villain, Terumi, had a plan to merge with his host and make himself unkillable by linking his life to Noel Vermillion’s. But because Celica decided to show up and cling to Ragna, plans did not go through, but the time loop didn’t restart. Ragna’s plans are at a standstill as well, and he gets attached to Celica, and... it’s complicated. 

To sum up Ragna’s story super quick because it’s side information-- He falls for Celica, they have twins, Ragna realizes that his soul-eating grimoire could kill said kids, gets Jubei to cut it off of him, and they live mostly happily for a while until Celica starts dying of seithr poisoning. Then Terumi decides to finally pay back for having his plans ruined, kills Celica, burns Ragna’s house down AGAIN (you know, for extra trauma), and kidnaps one of his kids. The other had a power like her mother so she didn’t get taken because being near her made Terumi sick. Ragna nearly died in all of this, spent years trying to make a decent life for his daughter, got arrested, and then after basically making prison hell for everyone else with his anger and violence, was basically given a plea deal by Kagura of “Look my dude, get on my side in this government coup I’m doing and we’ll basically give you your daughter back, a job, and a steady income. We cool bro?” Aaaand by the time Akechi is around he’s a parent with 7 kids, 2 who are the same age as Akechi and grew up being his friends. 

Kagura is the part where it gets relevant to Akechi. Kagura hears about this scandal with the Fumizuki family (long story short Shido is a Fumizuki in this case because it’s a Duodecim family they haven’t used yet, and it means “month of erudition” so I figured a focus on intelligence above all else would be fitting...) involving a bastard kid whos mom just died. Now the whole family is looking to basically throw this kid as far away from them as possible. 

Kagura, at this point, is a walking scandal magnet and has stopped giving a fuck. He married a woman literally nobody in his family liked, started a government coup, gave Ragna the Bloodedge the sweetheart deal of a lifetime and more. His wife is my character Riku, who uh... 

Goddamnit, another character break. You see why I said this would take a year and a half? XD Anyway, Riku. Riku is one of the last Japanese people in this setting. Japan got magic nuked in Blazblue, to put it bluntly. A giant world-ending monster decided to appear there first. Japan is *still* not inhabitable centuries later. The Japanese people are very few and far between, and Riku’s family is one of the last families that can boast a 100% Japanese heritage. Y’know. Except for Riku. Because her mom went and married an outsider without her family’s permission. Her mom doesn’t give a single solitary fuck what others think and does what she wants. So she’s actually only half Japanese, and her family treats her and her older brother like shit for it. They’re basically only cared about if they’re “useful”. Her brother went into the military academy to basically gain info for the family (they like to hoarde grimoires as well so the NOL and the Akasaka family kind of hate each other), but he “mysteriously went MIA”. I.e. was violently murdered and had his grimoire stolen. Riku went to the academy after to figure out what happened to her beloved onii-chan. It... did not go well for her. TW sexual abuse- she was raped in her freshman year, ended up pregnant, and when she went home in her third trimester, the head of her family forced her into an abortion that caused serious damage. They cut her hair off and basically sent her back to school traumatized and miserable. And now everyone in school treats her like a whore. She decides fuck it, if they’re gonna treat her like that, she’s going to use being a “whore” to her advantage. She slept her way to status, and, using her own special abilities, gathered a bunch of blackmail on literally everyone in the NOL. Nobody can mess with her, but she also has no one she can rely on. 

She was initially trying to use Kagura as well (trying to get put in intelligence so she could ruin the people who made her life hell), but Kagura noticed she didn’t actually seem to enjoy sex. He helped her get surgery to correct the damage done to her (he only convinced her to go along with this by saying it was for his own benefit. She did not trust him. He said basically he wanted to be the first person to make her enjoy sex.) She eventually began to open up to him and trust him when she realized they were very much alike. They both were isolated from their families for not following tradition, both had many enemies, and both genuinely wanted to destroy the government around them and create a better world. She joined him in the whole government coup thing, using her intelligence-gathering skills. They’re newlyweds when Akechi is a kiddo. 

Understandably, considering all of this, Riku doesn’t really want kids... the trauma of it all is a bit too raw. So Kagura wasn’t really planning to adopt him? He figured he’d give him temporary housing, then send him off to Ragna. Ragna would gladly adopt the kid after all. But he and Riku found out they were very attached to this sad little kid who didn’t understand why everyone looked down on him. Riku, in particular, could relate to his problems. 

So Akechi gets a nice, (mostly) stable family! He meets Ren in middle school. Ren outed a pedo teacher that was very well-liked by most of the students and staff, getting him fired and arrested. So, he was something of an outcast. Akechi, upon hearing this, decides that Ren is a hero. (And Ren p much instantly had a crush on him after that). The two grow up as childhood friends. They’re pretty inseparable. Ren doesn’t really like being at home with his family (they’re very much the type that says nothing to avoid being a target for potential assassination. The NOL has been legit very dangerous their entire lives, after all. So their outspoken, determined child causes them no shortage of headaches), so he’s always hanging out at Akechi’s place. 

You can probably guess that, actually knowing Akechi’s life story, Ren *actually* assaulted Shido when he saw the dude trying to assault another woman. He was genuinely enraged and just kinda lost it. >>; Thankfully connections save Ren. Kagura basically goes “Ok so enjoy going to the military academy as a reform school. Also you need someone to keep an eye on you. ....My son can do that.” Really... he just wanted Ren to look out for his son. 

See, Akechi in this verse is still very concerned with status? He feels that he owes it to his mother and father to live up to his family name, because they’ve done so much for him. He wants to be accepted by the Duodecim as a whole. Riku and Kagura tried their very best to keep him the hell away from all of that political bullshit, but the kid decided to go into the military anyway. He’s not physically the strongest, and he’s pretty naive and childish, deep down. His parents are pretty damned sure that Goro will be eaten alive if left on his own there. (The military academy is, for the record, it’s own massive city. So they wouldn’t exactly be able to keep an eye on him.) So, Renren gets asked to protect his friend. 

They also get chosen by two grimoires while there. These are the Rebel’s Grimoire and the Hero’s Grimoire. Grimoires are basically... to put it bluntly, training wheels for magic. Most people suck at magic by nature. Hell, most people don’t even USE grimoires. They use the even bigger training wheels that are Ars Magus. Grimoires usually specialize in a particular ability. They have their own rules, conditions for use, and often choose their hosts. People fuse with their grimoires over time. If the two become completely synchronized it’s called a Remix Heart. (This is the only important lore information from Remix Heart btw, I saved you from reading a crappy fanservice manga, you’re welcome.) 

The Hero’s Grimoire picks a host with a strong sense of justice. The Rebel’s Grimoire picks a host with a very rebellious spirit. The catch is, they always pick their hosts at the same time, and the hosts are always very connected souls, two sides of the same coin. The Rebel’s grimoire also likes to do this *wonderful* thing where it latches on your face and only accepts you if you rip it off. If you don’t, it kills you! Fun times. Goro turned around to look at Ren when this happened, and the Hero’s Grimoire embedded itself into his spine. (Ren’s looks like a pair of glasses when not in use, Akechi’s looks like a crow tattoo with a weird growth between his shoulder blades.) 

The two grimoires are sentient and talk to their owners while giving them similar but contrasting powers. Ren can use his Third Eye ability from the games, destroy barriers, teleport through shadows, and has very little presence-- almost nobody notices him around unless he’s pointed out or makes himself known. Goro has the same third eye ability, can create barriers/obstructions, can obscure his movements in bright light (either dazzling people or simply teleporting in light), and has a glamour that attracts others to him. (Ren uses this to basically cling to Akechi at all times while nobody notices him. He loves it. Akechi hates it, because PLEASE STOP HITTING ON ME I HAVE A BOYFRIEND HE’S RIGHT. HERE. ) 

The phantom thieves also still exist in this AU! They have a different MO but similar intents and goals. Basically, they steal back what the NOL has taken from others. Or, if said thing can’t be replaced (like, say, innocence, trust, etc) then they’ll take what they consider a karmic equivalent (status, power, etc). It actually all started because Ren wanted to get Riku’s grimoire back (Akechi was still vERY upset that the government had it, how dare they do that to his family). So Akechi is on the team from the beginning. Whether he wants to be or not. 

There’s a lot more but this is just the basics... @_@ I told ya it was a lot. 

#ooc #honestly i'm scratching the surface here #Masked Shadow

[sleepymarmot]

COUNTER/Weight liveblog, part 2

Episodes 23-40

Keith hasn't listened to the previous episode and Austin & Ali are cackling like “You got a big storm coming” lmao

…Look I understand the idea of making Tea an ally after the players and audience got to know her in the Kingdom game but the excuse is really thin

“A gift for his little brother” You guys are really bad at this gender neutrality thing huh

AuDy talking to Orth makes my head spin a bit now

Oh so Addax is the leader of the Angels? The person who has been watching the Chime from the shadows = the group that has been spying on them? Okay, I now feel dumb for not putting this together myself.

Wait I lost track again. Who were Jacq & Jill working for initially that gave them access to those immortality tanks? Iirc it was Odamas who had that technology and then gave Horizon access to it while imposing strict rules on them during the merge? So why does Jacqui get less fun assignments now if she was a part of the winning faction, not the losing one?

Oh cool, so Jamil wanted to hand over the virus to the Angels because they're both just from the Rapid Evening?

“A bard notices their enemy's heart isn't in the fight, so they stop fighting, fall in love” is such a specific thing. How the hell did it happen twice on the same show. Is this the new big gay trope now

Heeeey could you stop punching me in the stomach with intros

So, Jacqui was working for Horizon, which in turn was given this job by Petrichor? Still doesn't answer my question…

Do I have to mentally rewrite the entire holiday special so that in every scene on the Kingdom Come everyone is floating in zero gravity all the time?! I'm sorry but this makes no fucking sense!

The doppelganger thing started really creepy but now it just makes my head spin! Please stop it with the names, I'm too easily confused, especially with a show that has a record of passing characters back and forth between the GM and the players!

Re: that whole thing: aaaaAAAAA???

I don't understand what Austin and Jack are doing but it's pretty magical

God, the Aria/Jacqui scene is so… tender? Idk. Austin's gentle “PC's love interest” voice has murdered me again. I'm not sold on Jacqui by herself as a character but on the feelings between the two? Definitely. (Though I still wonder about Aria’s heroism vs Jacqui’s disregard for life. That’s a biiig value clash)

Okay, this was all very unsettling and I still understand so little

I really love that Sokrates' refusal to make that one nameless person take the fall, which seemed (at least to me) kinda stubborn and shortsighted, turned into a key moment, both because it demonstrates integrity, and now because that person becomes an actual NPC as an important asset in their faction

I love how the idea of moving Rigour to September comes up and everyone starts screaming and I do too! They sure love leaving horrifying surprises for the ground team to stumble upon lol

Is it too callous and unwise of me to react to Ibex overthrowing the Hands of Grace as “good riddance”?

Maryland's letter has strong Alyosha/Arrell vibes

I love the “reluctant alliance with an antagonist” trope and was hoping it'd happen with Ibex so I'm happy! Also in one of the early episodes Austin mentioned the Anders-Justice storyline and I'm glad to hear him finally deliver. (There was stuff about the pilot/Candidate->Divine influence with Order, but not about the other way around or fusion, like with Vengeance)

Okay thankfully things are clearer now (I'm reeeally glad I wasn't spoiled on this) but I still have so many questions. How were LD made in the first place? Why and how did they hide in/turn themselves into a simple robot? What are they – just software, like Righteousness, or is there some Divine hardware core inside the normal Automated Dynamics unit that nobody has noticed somehow, or is the hardware in a remote location they access through the mesh? Did Ibex know AuDy was LD the whole time – he didn't act very surprised? Why didn't Ibex rescue his brother, did he die really quickly? How will Mako be able to fog without Righteousness? Shouldn't AuDy be gamebreakingly powerful now? How and why do LD count as two Divines but have a single consciousness, are they like Garnet?

Lazer Ted feels like a fucking TAZ character lmao

The comic relief was welcome but at the same time I'm continuously like “What is AuDy thinking and feeling. Why are they acting like nothing happened. Where's the existential crisis. How do you realize you're a pair of ancient gods and just proceed with your life? Are they so impenetrable on purpose because they're a robot”. Like, it was chilling when they were suddenly chatting with Ibex like old friends, and now it's chilling that they're acting just in the early episodes.

I'm glad the robot incident made everyone realize it might be unwise to put the two charming extraverts in the same half of the party lol

Looks like they decided to permanently switch back to “he” for Cass… Probably for the best.

Jack keeps excitedly jumping at every opportunity for creepiness™. God, AuDy makes so much more sense as his character now after the Reveal

Is September just fucking Solaris now?

I think this is the first time I'm not excited to hear a faction game episode because I really didn't expect it at this point in the story. My reaction was “Wait what? Are you telling me everyone gets stuck on September waiting out that storm for a whole month?! I wanted to hear what that cliffhanger led to!” Idk, the September arc was generally kind of a let down after the intensity of the episodes leading up to it, and this further deflates the tension.

Speaking of tension and letdowns, I just have to complain… It's really disappointing when the show sets up really big dramatic hooks and then does practically nothing with them! I complained about Addax and Cass in the previous post and that point still stands. Case two: Mako and Righteousness/Voice. It's set up in a faction episode, and in the immediately following arc Mako indeed is in danger from something inside his own head, but it's a completely unrelated thing! At the end of the arc he finally finds out, but the threat immediately gets nullified with no consequences – no self-doubt or identity crisis, no diminished abilities in terms of game mechanics. Case three: Ibex himself. Out of the reasons the Kingdom game is what it is, the excuse for it happening in-universe was to give more details on Ibex, and at least half of it featured a collective effort to make him as central to the story and as threatening as possible. But as soon as that flashback ends, so, counterintuitively, does the role of Ibex as an active antagonist to the Chime -- the role which was literally just supposed to begin in earnest. So by this point I can barely recall why we were all so intimidated by this guy in the first place. I'm more like “This is a useful ally to have”. This is what I don't like about the world-ending threats like Rigor: all other interesting conflicts fade in their face.

Dang, I thought Isurus was a cooler name than Enhydra!

Sokrates, forced to shake Ibex's hand: *clenched fist meme*

Wait, I missed something, why is Rigor deep underground and has to dig itself out?

Okay, after the lore episode I'm also confused how Rigor ended up underground on Ionias after it was blown up 20000 years ago in a completely different place

I'm very distressed by the idea of Hieron as a future popular franchise!! No, it's supposed to be real when these people are talking about it!! Oh wait a fucking second, does this mean Jace's Panther was a deliberate reference in-universe?? Like you're fighting in a real serious terrible war and you model a giant war machine after, like, a thestral from the fucking Harry Potter and just call it “Thestral”??!

No, no, wait, do tell me who Cass and AuDy would cosplay!

Oh no, Rigour wants to talk to Voice(?), great

Hey Cass, your Hadrian is showing??

Speaking of Hadrian, I was caught off guard by description of Tower as a “hot young Hadrian”, for some reason Hadrian never struck me as a character who's supposed to be exceptionally attractive. But then again, I imagined him as very young until that letter to Hella, and then I imagined Cass as a young adult until I did the math, so I might just be bad at visualising Art's characters lol.

Austin is so generous and unsubtle about throwing hot gay NPCs right at the players. Too bad Mako doesn't sound as interested as Aria did.

I expected they'd find a room with one copy of everyone plugged into the mesh, that'd be even creepier. What's with the false memories though? This doesn't explain them.

So, how does this whole clone system work? How does time work? Why don't the real students like Tower or Maxine notice that there's a new guy who looks just like their friend, but doesn't know them – or, for that matter, why don't the other clones notice? Oh, maybe that's the purpose of the fake memory aura? So that Maritime-4 could continue right from where Maritime-3 left off?

When Cass saw Apokine's face I thought it meant that the humans had genetically engineered the Apostolosians and that's what “we made them look like us” meant, which would be two of my long-standing questions answering each other. And then it was just another giant mech.. :/

Wait, does Orth calling Cass “Apokine” mean that he pilots the mech now or that Sokrates died and Cass inherited his position?! I'm worried now…

I'm even more worried about Mako, because at first I of course reacted to the question about being in two places at once as “hah, Larry”, but it's probably the other thing, and on one hand that must mean that the rescue of clones was successful, but also that means that our Mako might be dead and the one in the intro is one of the clones… Considering that in the Winter post-mortem I caught Keith saying how emotional the C/w finale was for him before I started fast-forwarding in fear of spoilers, do I need to start mentally preparing to bury Mako already or what?

Speaking of spoilers… The farther I go, the less I understand the advice to skip Autumn. I thought that at least for C/w it wouldn't matter, given it's a whole different universe, but they keep referencing it, and then casually dropping major spoilers, and then referencing it again in a story-relevant way. (The Ordennan ships arrive on the screen as Rigor does, and the next episode is named “The Storm over September” and quotes Lem's poem in the description. That's really cool but I somehow feel vaguely irritated on behalf of my potential alternate self who skipped season 1.) I really hope they've grown more careful about this by now, because I'll probably not even begin Twilight Mirage by the time the next season starts, and I would really like to stay in the dark about the intense events they're all vague-tweeting about at the moment!

Why was AuDy alarmed by Voice's presence as “a” Divine accompanying Maxine? Shouldn't they be familiar with it already because of Mako? (And I don't want to even ask about the ontological difference/border between Righteousness and Voice. I'm tired and feel like a nitpicker. But just for the record, this still isn't clear.)

Well that's a sadder family reunion than I hoped for!

So AuDy does have a split personality to some degree?

Oh well. AuDy's got a fate worse than death: Liberty and Discovery, imprisoned indefinitely. Or devoured I guess, I didn't really get it. Great. Thanks. Fucking RIP I guess. Out of all ways I expected them to go, this wasn't one.

(By the way I still don't understand how the portal works. Where is this portal to? Why can't L&D fly out and take the slow way home, and why can't Rigor?)

There's still about ten minutes left in the episode and I don't understand how it isn't the finale. What's there to do for three more episodes now.

“With Rigor defeated so easily, so permanently, she thought” *Rigor screech*

Yeah, fuck Grace btw

Sounds like cultivating saplings is not a priority anymore for a certain someone… (Wait, btw, what happened to that patch/seed they left? Will it ever come back into play?)

“...Why they would put themselves into a body like yours? And I think, maybe, it's that they were curious about what it would be like for four years to feel like a long time” AAAAAA

Okay, things are better on September than it sounded initially, but still… Wtf's going to happen? Rigor repairs itself, takes over the survivors, takes off again? But what's the timeline on that? I genuinely have no idea wtf the finale is going to be about after this.

Oh, what happened to the clones btw? Did Larry manage to get them off the planet in time, despite the Minerva ships in orbit and, more importantly, Rigor? Or are they stuck on September, unable to continue reenacting the plot of Orphan Black?

From how it's been described in this episode, feels as if Liberty and Discovery are a candidate of AuDy… They didn't want a candidate but were curious to learn how it feels for the other side?

Paisley's dead-eyed, Tower's gone, and even Ibex, who is barely holding on himself, loses his ex… Everyone's love life takes a nosedive: the episode. At least Jacqui's okay… (And because of Jacqui, it was doubly sad and surprising to hear Aria still has feelings for Paisley…)

#friends at the table #blah blah blah