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thankskenpenders · 7 months

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Amy's fortune cards

The Sonic fandom has long been the kind of fandom that takes minor details very seriously, for better or worse. On the one hand, this means fans will really dig for the diamonds in the rough, latching onto fun character interactions, animations, bits of background worldbuilding, and more in pieces of Sonic media that many would write off as "the bad ones." But it also feels like every week another needlessly hostile debate over Sonic minutia erupts on Twitter, whether it's over individual lines of dialogue, fanart that makes Tails' shoes blue, or the ideal length and volume for Sonic's quills.

So it was probably inevitable that a fandom-wide debate would erupt upon seeing Amy's new gameplay style in the DLC for Sonic Frontiers, which takes the once-obscure fact that she enjoys reading tarot and shines a spotlight on it like never before.

I mean:

The thing is, while I basically always try to tune out Sonic fandom bickering... for once, I kind of sympathize with the detractors? Don't get me wrong, I like Amy's tarot stuff, and people on all sides of the discussion are being overly nasty about their opinions, as usual. (Sonic Twitter remains my personal hell.) But when I set aside the hyperbole and zoom out, I do think I understand why some fans are put off by the sudden shift in focus for the character, even if I think it's cool.

It's complicated. Let me attempt to present the cases for and against Amy's fortune cards

For years, I was always one of those fans who thought it could be fun if they played with Amy's tarot reading, or even leaned into some kind of magic with her. Part of that is my own biases showing, but there's just something that makes sense there, especially when you look at Sonic, Tails, and Amy as a trio. (I would argue that's the real "Team Sonic" these days, especially in the comics where Knuckles is more likely to be stuck on Angel Island or otherwise doing his own thing.)

You could argue that Tails is all about logic, relying on science and technology and deductive reasoning to solve problems. But Amy is all about emotion. She wears her heart on her sleeve, is extremely empathetic, and is very prone to magical thinking - both figuratively and sometimes literally. Her origin story has always been that her tarot cards told her it was her destiny to meet Sonic on Little Planet. She's claimed to be able to "sense" peoples' presences - particularly Sonic's. She's the type to believe that The Power of Love is a literal magical force. So, on some level, it makes sense to mirror Tails's science by having Sonic's other best friend believe in magic. And then Sonic is somewhere in the middle, primarily following his own gut instincts but taking advice from both of them as needed. This isn't totally accurate to how their dynamics actually function in canon stories, but I think it's a mode that could work for them.

Going off of that, it's fun to lean all the way into Amy being a magical girl, or even a witch, using her fortune telling as a foundation. Take, for example, this version of Amy from Diana Skelly's old Sonic cast redesigns from before she freelanced for Archie and IDW. This is one of MANY such redesigns for Amy.

Fast forward to the 2020s, and Amy's tarot cards are, in fact, finally getting brought up again in canon. Which is fun! I like seeing that. I like all of the individual stories involving Amy's fortune cards. This is a fun character trait for Amy, a fun nod to old lore, AND a fun storytelling device, all in one. It's really cool that the Sonic universe has its own thematically appropriate arcana, and that the cards are getting made as physical merch. And sure enough, the official card backs and borders were designed by none other than Diana Skelly, in yet another cool example of an ascendant fan leaving their mark on the series.

BUT... when you step back and look at the big picture, I get why some fans find this shift in focus jarring. At the moment, it's starting to feel like every new story about Amy involves her fortune cards to some degree.

The most recent mainline comic arc to feature Amy as the lead character, 2021's Trial by Fire arc, prominently features a sequence where she reads fortunes while camping with the girls. The Origins version of Sonic CD now bookends the game with scenes of Amy and her tarot cards. Sonic randomly mentioned it in a scene in Frontiers. And now, just this week, we got the (very cute, gorgeously illustrated) Amy's 30th Anniversary comic with a story revolving around Amy's tarot cards, followed the very next day by the Frontiers DLC in which she gets a brand new tarot-based moveset. Even her base melee attack now has her throwing tarot cards instead of swinging her hammer. Again, I like all of these individual things, but after years of it almost never coming up at all, it's VERY noticeable that Amy's tarot cards are suddenly everywhere.

To be fair, I'm looking at this from the perspective of a superfan who's actively following ALL Sonic media. Casual fans - especially kids - aren't necessarily going to be reading the comics every month, buying the thousandth rerelease of the Genesis games, or playing the ultra-hard new alternate ending DLC for a game that came out last year. Each of these stories is going to be someone's introduction to the idea that Amy can read tarot, and that's probably part of the idea behind this unified push.

But to play devil's advocate, for my fellow superfans, I understand why it feels like a very minor footnote of Amy's character is suddenly becoming the entire focus of her personality. While Amy has always been said to enjoy fortune telling, that wasn't really a character trait in and of itself, but rather an example of her being a typical girl who hopes she'll be able to find true love one day. It's less that Amy can literally predict the future and more like her using a cootie catcher or going "he loves me, he loves me not" while picking the petals off of a flower. So I get not vibing with this stuff, or feeling like it's being pushed very hard out of nowhere.

What I don't agree with are comparisons like "it's like if they made Knuckles' moveset revolve around him liking grapes." Like, I get it. Ian Flynn loves shoehorning in his little winking references for us nerds, and mentions of Amy's tarot cards were previously on the same level as other random bullet points from old Japanese manuals. But a multifaceted hobby like fortune telling that opens up so many narrative and aesthetic possibilities is obviously very different from having a favorite food. It's ALWAYS been a part of her story, not just a random fact, and there's no reason why the fortune telling can't be elevated to something more.

And, hell, even if it wasn't an established character trait, there's nothing inherently wrong with injecting new ideas into a character. One of the best Amy stories in recent years, the Free Comic Book Day special "Amy's New Hobby" written by Gale Galligan, came up with the idea that Amy's secretly been drawing little comics about her and her friends. Is this based on Lore? No. But it's cute, and helps tell the story of a younger Amy who's still coming out of her shell as both a hero and a friend.

Certain fans are also looking at Amy's Frontiers moveset and using it as evidence that once again the Vile American Contributors like Ian are CORRUPTING Sonic Team's perfect vision of Sonic with their misinterpretations. And like. Come on. Ian does not control the gameplay. He's a freelance writer. The tarot stuff is clearly something that Sonic Team likes if they made it the basis of Amy's new moveset - and, you know, if they keep approving comics and animations about Amy's fortune telling. None of this gets made without their blessing, and lord knows how much they can micromanage shit and shoot down ideas over the most minor of details.

Like, yeah, Amy's fortune telling was probably conceived less as a sign that she Knows Magic and more as a pretty mundane hobby for a lovesick young Japanese girl to have. But you're gonna sit there and tell me that using Amy's tarot cards for more than that could only be the result of a cultural misunderstanding? That nobody in Japan uses tarot card theming and aesthetics (or the general idea of magical cards) for the cool factor? Stardust Crusaders? Persona? The Astrologian class in FFXIV? Cardcaptor Sakura?? Hello??? Do you think Capcom put Gambit in Marvel vs. Capcom ironically because they thought using magic to throw cards at people was stupid? There's tons of precedent for this! It's nothing like Knuckles throwing grapes at people, be for real.

Giving Amy a very magical girl-esque moveset also just makes a lot of sense. For decades her hammer attacks have literally made sparkly heart shapes appear around her. Leaning into both that and her tarot cards in her new moveset makes a lot of sense to me.

But, admittedly... I do think it's very odd that her hammer is treated as a secondary element here, rather than having her primarily use her hammer and adding the cards for extra flair. If hitting the attack button made her swing her hammer instead of throwing cards, I'm not sure we'd even be having this discussion right now.

But the tarot-cycle and Amy riding her hammer like a witch's broom are fucking SICK and I will not concede on this point

The thing is, this whole fortune card discourse is but a small piece of a bigger problem. Amy's been a character who needed some work for ages, but there's basically nothing you can do with her without pissing SOMEONE off.

Years of stories where Amy's crush was her primary motivator and Sonic went "Ew, cooties!" have lead many casual fans to believe that being Sonic's obsessive fangirl is Amy's entire personality. At best people might call her Sonic's Minnie Mouse. This isn't just a matter of Amy having haters within the fandom - venture outside of that bubble and you'll realize that this is how MOST video game playing people seem to see her to this day. I don't feel like this is a fair assessment of the character, but this idea didn't come from nowhere. No matter how much good deeply entrenched Sonic fans may see in their old dynamic where Amy perpetually chases Sonic, this is a very real problem that Sonic Team has to contend with for their leading girl. Of course all those games where the way-past-cool protagonist thought Amy was annoyingly clingy and tried to get away from her made people think less of her.

If new stories were to go back to emphasizing Amy's crush on Sonic a little more, they'd probably be taken as confirmation that Amy's just the girl with a crush on Sonic and that this is her entire personality. Conversely, when the crush is played down, you piss off the hardcore SonAmy fans who don't seem to understand that they're Charlie Brown and Sega is Lucy holding the football. You can't win.

And so here we are. In the absence of what was once her defining trait, now reduced to an occasional blush or wink in Sonic's direction, new stories are trying to mine Amy's past for additional material to work with. Having been a thing fans wanted to see for years, right now we're getting a lot of tarot, but we're also getting reminders of her compassionate nature and her desire to go out of her way to help the little guy. This is an ongoing process. I continue to hope that her bubbly, exuberant demeanor can shine more in future stories. Now, I also hope that the tarot stuff gets balanced out a little better with other traits of hers. But I don't want it to go away. I think it's fun.

This course correcting is far from exclusive to Amy. Knuckles is getting stories that remind us that he's a competent fighter, an experienced treasure hunter, and even a self-taught archaeologist after years of him being perceived as either the dumb one or just the guy who stands in front of the Master Emerald all day. And Tails has been getting some stories reminding folks that he's a capable hero in his own right and not just Sonic's timid kid sidekick.

But no supporting character will ever compete with the sheer number of new ideas Sega has tried with Sonic himself. Like Amy, his Frontiers moveset has also given him half a dozen new superpowers that he never had before, from the Cyloop to air-slicing projectile attacks to his own take on Shadow Clone Jutsu and beyond. He's also been a hoverboarder, a swordsman, a time traveler, an Olympic athlete, a racecar driver, cursed with a Flame of Judgment, imbued with alien power, a fucking Werehog with stretchy powers, and on and on and on.

If Sonic can do all that, Amy can try out using a tarot-cycle.

Anyway TL;DR the REAL problem with Amy's current characterization... is where the FUCK is Amy's bestie, Honey the Cat???????

#tkp post

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gffa · 6 months

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TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT THE JEDI ORDER IN STAR WARS CANON, PART IV [A Meta/Reference Guide on AO3] Aka, SO WHAT DO THE JEDI SAY AND DO IN THE ACTUAL CANON? This is the third part in my series of Jedi Culture and Teachings in Canon, where I have officially crossed the 100k after four years of working on this project, everyone congratulate me! And also send me prayers and strength because I still have something like two dozen novels to comb through and probably half a hundred more comics. So what's the point of all this? Well, first of all, I enjoy doing it, it's surprisingly fun to collate all of these citations! But it's also meant as a reference guide for if you want write meta about the themes and actions of the Jedi in the narrative or if you want some ideas for what's in the canon for wordbuilding so you can write fic or build further on what's already there! Do what you want with it, babes, I put all this together so you don't have to dig through 500 different pieces of Star Wars to find out if they tell you whether or not Jedi younglings have ever tried to toast a block of cheese with a lightsaber. (Spoiler alert: They absolutely did try it and it was a disaster and I love every one of those hellion younglings.) This is a guide to pretty much anything I could think of as relevant to the Jedi--worldbuilding on how the Force feels to use, descriptions of the Jedi Temple, any school classes the Jedi had, attitudes towards the Jedi from the public, why the Jedi decide to join any given conflict, all the swear words they use, anything I could get my hands on regarding Jedi healing--all of it is put into these guides and this is another 25k+ of reference for you to nerd out about if you want. The guide is broken down into seven sections as before:

How the Force Works

Jedi Culture & Philosophy & Teachings

Jedi As a People

Psychic Space Wizards Doing Psychic Space Wizard Things

Jedi Temple (Living Quarters and Dining Halls!)

Jedi Outreach, Politics, and the Bigger Galaxy

Jedi, Buddhism, and Everything Else

#star wars #jedi order #reference #resource #meta

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writingwithfolklore · 5 months

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When i start writing a story in passive voice, using a lot of descriptions, as the story progresses, i have this tendency to write it in active voice. Somewhere the natural flow is disrupted. Please help!!

Hi!

I think first we need to clear something up about active vs. passive voice. Descriptions and lots of it can all be told in active voice, just like action could be told in passive voice. The difference depends on the structure of your sentence.

For example:

"The flowers were speckled with glimmering drops of rain." (passive) "Glimmering drops of rain speckled the petals of each flower" (active) and "The villain was struck by the passing crane." (passive) "The passing crane struck the villain." (active)

Which you choose depends on the effect you want on your readers! For example, you may not want to reveal what's happening to the character until the end of the sentence to maintain a sort of suspense.

"He was tugged suddenly under the door; a large, skeletal hand digging into his thigh." (passive) versus "a large, skeletal hand tugged him under the door." (active)

Good stories use a combination of both! Unless you're really intentionally writing only in passive or active as a style choice to convey something specific, make sure you're incorporating both where appropriate.

What I assume you mean is that the beginning of your work tends to be full of description and focus on detail, whereas by the end you're just moving bodies through space--focusing on the actions of the characters.

I also have this struggle!

A lot of that work at the beginning is about tone, which I wrote about here:

Otherwise, it's about editing afterwards--adding in the missing details and being intentional about your pacing. This may also help:

Hopefully that answers your question!

#writing #creative writing #writers #screenwriting #writing community #writing inspiration #film #books #filmmaking #writing advice #maintaining style #ask and answer #ask box #anon

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littlemisspascal · 1 year

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Rockford & Roan

Pairing: Tim Rockford x Female Reader/OFC 'Roan'

Word Count: 2.8k

Summary: You meet Tim Rockford in the true crime section of the library of all places.

Rating: T

Warnings: Language, reference of self-harming + assault, meet cute, Reader has a dog, Reader has military background, Superpower AU, They Were Roommates AU, self-esteem issues, soulmates-ish, original characters, worldbuilding

- Reader has no first name and no physical traits described in detail except for being shorter than Rockford

Author Note: Elements of X-Men and Sherlock/Elementary mashed together because my brain said so. I've got more of these two (plus another Pedro Boy *cough* Thief *cough*) outlined if y'all are interested in seeing more of this world. It was a lot of fun attempting this new guy 😊

Special thanks to @beecastle for beta reading and encouraging me 💜💜💜

Part 2

The Session

You cross your legs, trying to get comfortable, immediately grimacing when the plush leather couch squeaks as a result. Your psychologist’s office smells overwhelmingly of lavender from the burning candle on her desk. Dr. Odair insists the smell has a calming effect to combat anxiety, but you remain unconvinced. You’re unconvinced about a lot of the advice these mandatory sessions offer, actually.

“How’s your search going?” Dr. Odair asks, pen poised above a fresh sheet of paper. “Have you connected with anyone?”

According to the internet, Dr. Charlotte Odair is one of the leading experts on empaths, telepaths, and other similar mind-gifts in the world. She’s also renowned for helping discharged military personnel integrate back into civilian society which meant you didn’t have much of a choice seeing anybody else.

Most people’s emotions are a finicky and erratic mess, shifting and fluctuating depending on the countless number of influences stemming from one’s surroundings. Some feelings are easy to identify at once, others are too obscure or complex to be named. The latter are the ones which overwhelm you. The ones which bury beneath your skin, an itch you can’t scratch no matter how harshly your nails dig into your arms, deeper and deeper until they’re stained red.

Dr. Odair’s emotions resemble crystalline waters, transparent and blatant. There’s no second-guessing with her, no hidden tricks. She’s been trained, masterfully so, to carefully bind her feelings to her will.

“Yeah, it’s been going great,” you answer, then nod down at your feet where a small, golden brown dog lies with his chin on his paws. “Connected with Banjo here over the weekend. We’re a total match for each other.”

She fixes you with a look over the thick rims of her glasses. “Is that so?”

Compared to humans, animals have a much smaller range of emotions. They broadcast exactly what they want like a neon sign, whether that be food, shelter, or a good petting. And if their desires are met, the hum of their contentment is a far more pleasant tune than most songs on the radio nowadays.

You’d actually been looking to get a cat when you went to the pet shelter, dismissing dogs as too needy and energetic for your liking, but fate had other plans. One look at the little mutt, with his tangled fur and deep, froggy bark, and you were signing the adoption paperwork within minutes. And still, even after that unexpected love at first sight moment, Banjo continues to surprise you with how easily he adapts to your routine, standing by your side like he always belonged there.

You tell Dr. Odair as much, but there’s no response even though you know she’s absorbing every word out of your mouth, turning them over in her head, analyzing each syllable. Her mood remains almost frustratingly steady, giving no indication as to what she’s thinking. That look remains though, blue eyes narrowing even further.

“You never said my match had to be another human.” Your hands tighten around Banjo’s leash, hoping she doesn’t catch the defensive edge your voice has taken.

Her pen starts to scribble a note across the paper, too similar to a doctor’s chicken scratch for you to read upside down.

You bite the inside of your cheek, glancing towards the flickering candle. Damn it.

“Miss Roan,” Dr. Odair begins, and you taste blood on your tongue, “I know it’s annoying, being forced to attend these sessions every week, but the fact of the matter is, empaths aren’t meant to live alone. Especially not after what you’ve endured. Finding someone to match with is what your empathy needs to finally settle down.”

She makes it sound so easy, like the rest of the world doesn’t have any issues with mind-gifts and the lack of privacy that comes with them. Like there isn’t a set of laws specifically written for people who can read thoughts with a single touch or predict the future through dreams because their gifts aren’t as flashy, as visible, and thus in the eyes of the government that makes them the scariest threat of all.

On the battlefield things were different. The laws of polite society didn’t apply, not out there amongst the pools of blood and ceaseless gunfire. Your mind-gift was a tool to take advantage of, capable of numbing pain away faster than drugs and boosting the troop’s morale to a near fever-pitch. There was no time to stop and assess the damage you were self-inflicting unintentionally by overworking your empathy. Nobody who cared enough about you as a person to recognize the warning signs—not even your own self.

It was a miracle, as your commanding captain would later put it, when enemy forces staged a midnight raid on the camp and a man pinned you to the floor, radiating nothing but vulgar lust, that your lapse of control only resulted in putting every hostile within a mile radius to sleep instead of killing them instantly.

A miracle for the unit maybe, but for you it marked the abrupt conclusion of your military career. Loss of control of one’s gifts stipulated their immediate release from serving, even if in your case it saved lives. Your discharge papers were officially signed and filed by the higher-ups before you regained consciousness three days later with a pounding headache from hell. Your mind-gift, once seen as a helpful aid to win battles, was now a time bomb dumped into the hands of Dr. Odair to deactivate.

And what is her brilliant solution? Matching. Or, as it used to be called back in the olden days when gifts were thought to be divinely bestowed instead of being entirely unpredictable mutations in one’s genetic code, soulbonding. A powerful connection forged between two individuals, locking their gifts together and intertwining their lives until death splits them apart.

Movies and fairytales will describe matching as the ultimate manifestation of true love, but love’s got nothing to do with it. Matching is a direct result of a human’s innate instinct to survive. It most commonly occurs when one or both members of the potential pairing possess dangerous gifts likely to cause harm to themselves. Supposedly, the bond is instantaneous once the two meet, causing their gifts to settle down, easier to control. Balancing each other out as if they were two halves of the same whole.

Sounds wonderful. In theory, at least. The biggest problem with matching is it can’t be done with just any random person. It can’t be forced either, not even between established couples. The bond happens solely on the choice of the gifts, not the will of the people involved. The hows and whys and other intricate details of the fateful decision-making process remain a mystery, one perhaps beyond mankind’s ability to ever solve, but regardless, it’s hard to argue against the overwhelmingly positive end results. To date, every recorded pair has admitted their match stabilized their gifts and saved their lives from an early death.

So until your mind-gift figures out who it wants, all you can do is walk the streets of Fox Leap, searching for just the right stranger in a sea of wrong strangers, empathy buzzing like a live wire pressed against your brain with each disappointing encounter.

“I am looking.” You’re being honest, despite what the dropping of your eyes to the floor might suggest. It’s too difficult to meet her gaze, afraid of the pity you might find shining through her carefully maintained facade. “I’m just not sure they want to be found.”

The Meeting

You meet Tim Rockford in the true crime section of the library of all places.

Fox Leap Central Library has essentially become your second home ever since you sought shelter from the rain one miserably gray afternoon two weeks after moving there. It’s one of the few places in the city that doesn’t make you feel like ants are crawling along your spinal cord, designed with dozens of cozy spaces to curl up with a good book and cup of coffee and zone out for a couple of blissful hours.

Your eyes are drifting over the colorful covers of fantasy books offering to transport you to alternate universes full of mythical beasts when you feel it. A flash of anger, stronger and more intense than anything you’ve ever felt, illuminating your mind-gift identical to a streak of lightning tearing through the darkness of night.

The emotion fades just as fast as it made itself known, but your empathy bays like a bloodhound picking up a scent trail, urging you to follow it to the source. Your fingers twitch at your side. Not with the desire to scratch, you realize with surprise, but to soothe. You haven’t felt this kind of compulsion since you’d been on the frontlines, taking away the pain from bullet-stricken soldiers, but that had been your purpose back then, a duty expected to fulfill.

This…This is a purely selfish want.

You bite your lip, glance down at Banjo, tail wagging as if to say what are we waiting for?, and then surrender to the temptation.

Three aisles down stands the library’s only other occupant in sight: a tall, broad-shouldered man in a white shirt and tan trench coat with dark, unkempt hair like he’s been running his fingers through it lately. He’s rubbing at his stubbled jawline, brown eyes glaring beneath furrowed brows at a book on serial killers.

He’s the perfect example of tall, dark and handsome but it’s not his looks that has your pulse quickening, a flutter of something dangerously akin to hope beginning to stir. If Dr. Odair’s emotions are a crystalline pool, then this man’s are an ocean in the midst of a storm. Turbulent on the surface, rough and irritable, concealing unexpectedly mesmerizing depths luring your mind-gift to dive deeper and deeper–

“Psychic or empath?” the man asks without looking away from the shelf, a slight raspiness to his voice that has your stomach flip-flopping before full awareness of his question even registers.

Startled back into your own head, you can only manage an eloquent, “Huh?”

He finally turns, piercing you with his gaze, intense yet not unkind. The storm afflicting his temperament lessens some, followed by a series of feather-light curious touches along the edges of your mind-gift.

You suck in a breath, expecting the stinging bolt of displeasure that usually follows when someone interacts with your empathy. Whether they’re being delicate or not, it’s never fun to have the most sensitive part of yourself poked and prodded and toyed with. But there are no symptoms of a headache in the seconds that follow. Only a strange sort of thrill at the connection. A sense of rightness.

And there’s that damn fluttering again…

Once again, you find yourself caught off-guard, unsure how the roles have swapped so quickly from you seeking to comfort a stranger to now you being comforted by him.

“Empath,” he says after another beat, answering his own question with a confidence that’s neither tentative nor arrogant. It sounds like a regular fact of life. The sky is blue, the sun is hot, and you’re an empath.

“Y-yeah, that’s right.” You nod your head, hands trembling where they are clutching Banjo’s leash. God, you don’t understand what’s wrong with you, why his stare has such a strong effect on your galloping heartbeat. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to–”

The man looks down at Banjo then, taking in his snaggletoothed grin and perked ears with a soft smile of his own. “Cocker, poodle, schnauzer—interesting ancestry. I bet you have quite the story to tell.”

How did he–? You shake your head, getting your thoughts in some semblance of an order now that you’re no longer the sole focus of his attention. “This is Banjo. I adopted him from the shelter last weekend. We’re still getting to know each other.”

“Oh, good,” his soft grin widens, revealing a dimple in the side of his cheek. “It won’t take long to catch up then. How do you feel about takeout?”

You blink, frowning because huh? Is he just asking your opinion or is he asking something…more? It’s been so long since you’ve been asked on a date, you’re not even sure what the common etiquette is anymore. Isn’t everything arranged online nowadays? Swiping left or right and all that app rubbish?

“My schedule is unpredictable which leaves little time for cooking or grocery shopping, so at least three days a week I order takeout,” he continues, seemingly oblivious to your increasing confusion. “I also have frequent bouts of chronic insomnia, sometimes I’m up for days without any sleep.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

The question comes out sounding ruder than it had in your head, but if he’s offended by it the man shows no outward sign. “I figured if I were in your shoes, I’d want to know upfront the annoying traits of who I’ve matched with.”

“Who I’ve–?” you choke on the words, eyes widening.

Oh, you think faintly, a strange clarity sweeping over you, at last connecting the dots that seem so incredibly obvious now. What better reprieve for an overwhelmed mind-gift than an underwater safe haven muffling the chaos of the city. It’s you.

The Offer

“Rockford,” the man—your match—says, extending a hand to shake, warm and calloused. “Tim Rockford.”

You introduce yourself, probably looking a bit unhinged with how wide you’re grinning but you can’t help it. You finally found your match. The urge to run to Dr. Odair’s office and jump on her sofa, screaming he’s actually fucking real! at the top of your lungs is near irresistible.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Rockford says. “I had a feeling our paths would cross soon once I settled into my new place. An apartment a couple blocks from here. Three bedrooms. One for me, one for my office, and the other is yours if you’re interested.”

Your eyebrows lift incredulously. “Seriously?”

“A good roommate is hard to find these days,” Rockford responds easily, shrugging. “Who better to live with than my match?”

You think about sharing a space with someone else. Someone who's human that you can have a two-way conversation with over meals, who doesn’t react to your mind-gift with repulsion or contempt. He makes a good point; good roommates are hard to find. A yes sits on the tip of your tongue, held back by a little voice in the back of your head insisting it’s too good to be true. He’ll grow tired of you eventually. Get sick of you dipping in and out of his head like a parasite. You should say no. There’s too much of a high potential you’ll wind up hurt and alone again. It’s too risky.

But, another voice chimes in, deep down beside the fragile hope, if it worked out for all the other matched pairs, then aren’t the odds in your favor?

“You barely know me,” is what ends up coming out of your mouth, a weak extending of a shovel for him to dig himself out of his offer.

He hums a thoughtful note, head tilting to one side, and your shoulders start to instinctively tense up in preparation of rapid backpedaling. A sudden wave washes over your mind-gift, though, steady reassurance drowning your budding fears.

“I know you’ve recently been discharged from the military,” he begins calmly, that same matter-of-fact tone from before. “I know you’re new to the city, not by personal choice but because you must attend mandatory sessions with a psychologist who resides here and has an excellent reputation with patients sharing your similar background. You’ve begun dreading the appointments—possibly because of trust issues, more likely because until you meet your match there’s very little she can do for your empathy and that frustrates you. And I know you adopted Banjo hoping he would pass as a substitute for me, but while he’s been helpful providing companionship, your mind-gift has continued causing you pain up until our meeting.” A pause for a quiet breath. “I think we have quite a solid foundation already, wouldn’t you agree, Miss Roan?”

“I–you–what?” You blink dumbly at him, brain function short-circuiting. Seriously, what? “How on earth…?”

“We all have our gifts."

And maybe it’s because he doesn’t elaborate further, meeting your quizzical stare evenly, still emanating steady reassurance, that makes it surprisingly easy for you to make a decision. You want to know this man. Not just his likes and dislikes, no, you want to know his happiness, his hurt, all the miserable shades of his sadness and every sharp pang of his rage. You want to look at him the way he looks at you: confident and steadfast. Unique to him in all the world.

If the stories are true and he’s going to be a part of your life for a long, long time, then you have the distinct feeling you’re going to need every one of those precious seconds to understand the infinite depths of Tim Rockford.

So, you nod your head. “Okay,” you tell him, lips curling at the corners into another wide grin when you detect how pleased he is with your agreement. “Let’s give it a try.”

“Meet me there tomorrow afternoon,” he says, grabbing the book he’d been burning holes into earlier with his glare. “445D Albatross Lane. Bright yellow door, can’t miss it.”

Then, turning on his heel in one fluid movement, he heads for the front desk, leaving you to process how a single meeting has just shifted your entire world on its axis.

#tim rockford #tim rockford fanfic #tim rockford x reader #tim rockford x you #tim rockford x ofc #pedro pascal character fanfiction

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ktsumu · 4 months

Text

three ticks and i’m home.

pairing: dainsleif x fem!reader, 4.2k words

summary: gods are never innocent; neither are godless men.

(or: a timeline of dainsleif's grief through the life of his broken watch, one that ticks backwards and the one you fixed, first.)

note: someone tell me to stop reading his lore and i will. beware for plot holes because genshin is nuts. crossposted to ao3 also!

content: major character death, destruction, angst, talk of children, you're a clocksmith, angst with like a sprinkle of fluff in one scene, a lot of worldbuilding regarding khaenri'ah + the cataclysm

Five years before.

Dainsleif is a serious guy.

He needs to be — it’s a must-have quality for a Commander. He smiles at children that look up to him, doesn’t leave bars with women who want to. His schedule is so tight that some say it wears a corset, or at least his friends do. He takes his job with the pride of a boy who grew up watching the soldiers march, a boy who now leads them.

Dainsleif runs a tight schedule.

That is, until his watch breaks, and disorder comes soon after.

He complains in the bunks for twenty minutes that night about the chaos his time regulates until one of his friends recommends an old friend, a clocksmith in the heart of the city.

( “Get a digital one while you’re there. That thing’s ancient.”

“People are allowed to like old things, Halfdan.”

“Not things that break like that.” )

Dainsleif visits you the next day, setting the metal watch on your counter with his arms crossed. His brows tug together and his expression is more wary than it is expectant.

“Can you fix it?” he asks.

You look it over, rubbing your thumb over rust. “Who’s it from?”

“Can you fix it?”

You set the watch back down, looking back up at him with a little grin.

“For a price, Commander.”

Dainsleif swallows, rolling his shoulders back and digging out his wallet.

It takes you four hours to fix his ancient watch, and you even get the rust off of the band for him. You clasp it back around his wrist and tell him to get back to work when he tries to thank you, standing around for way too long. When he leaves, you set aside and refund his money.

15 years since the Cataclysm

“What do you mean you can’t fix it?”

“They call us horologists, sir. Not magicians.”

Dainsleif huffs, leaning on the counter and shaking his head. “My friend recommended you,” he says, pleads. “He said you can fix anything. Even this. Did you try?”

“I—”

“Try.”

The watchmaker tilts his head, an unsure look on his face. Dainslef’s shoulders fall. “Please,” he whispers. “Try.”

The man purses his lips, sighing, and extends a hand. His fingers wriggle.

“For a price.”

Dainsleif takes out his wallet and pays him double what he paid you — the watch takes four days to fix, and he doesn’t remove the rust. Dainsleif collects it with haste.

“Sorry, couldn’t change the time,” he tells his client. “That thing will always run backwards.”

Dainsleif nods. “Oh.”

Four.

Your favourite day is Sunday.

Dainsleif allows himself one day to relax, one day that he’s mandated, and what day other than a day reserved for a god you never had would be a better fit? On Sundays, you stay in bed, under your linen sheets and against his chest. Neither of you move until absolutely necessary; sometimes hours, sometimes less.

“Breakfast soon?” he asks.

“I thought maybe a little while longer.”

“That’s fine.”

“Ugh, I love it when you agree with me,” you tease, giggling when he scoffs. He agrees with you most of the time; you’re reasonable people.

Dainsleif sighs, humming when you curl further into his side. He's a serious guy, but that doesn’t count on Sundays. Not during your beautiful, godless mornings. He raises an eyebrow at the vase on your dresser, “Those are new.”

“Hm?”

“Inteyvats,” he comments, “the flowers.”

“Is it so wrong of me to show some nationalism, Dain?”

He grins, shaking his head as you laugh. You laugh and it shakes your shoulders. You laugh and it shakes his chest.

“I just didn’t know you liked them,” he says, “that’s all.”

You settle, humming against the cotton of his shirt. “I love them.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” you nod. “Maybe someday, we’ll have someone to use their name.”

He thinks for a moment, “A daughter?”

You tilt your head back so you can see him, to the point where it aches to hold yourself up like that. “Would that be so bad?”

Dainsleif thinks for a moment — you and a daughter. “No,” he says, “not at all.”

“That’s down the road, anyway,” you laugh. “You know what isn’t?”

“What?”

“Our anniversary,” you say, pressing a kiss to his jaw. “How do you want to celebrate it?”

Dainsleif thinks about your one year anniversary, lying in bed with you on a Sunday, talking about a family and the flower you’ll start it with. He thinks about how content he would be if you did nothing at all but this; lie against his side and kiss his jaw, talk about the daughter he hopes will look just like you. He doesn’t think he could ask for anything more.

“This is okay.”

“Mm, alright,” you say, your smile against his collarbone. “I love you.”

Dainsleif tilts his head so you can stay where you are. “I love you," he echoes, "I love how you speak our language.”

“Oh? What’s so special about it?”

He smiles to himself.

“Tell me you love me again.”

Fifty years since

The watch breaks again on what would’ve been your seventy-fifth birthday.

The smith Dainsleif found this time looks over the stuttering clock hands, the numbers written in something unintelligible to him. He tosses it in his hand, a curious look on his face. “Old watch, no?”

“Very. Could you restore it?”

“By ‘restore’ you mean…”

“Fix it to tell time,” he clarifies. “And to still tick backwards.”

The clocksmith looks up with curious eyes, one of his eyebrows quirking up. “You want me to fix it ... to be broken?”

“If you can.”

He hesitates. “I’ll do my best.”

Dainsleif lets him swivel around in his chair, flicking a light on over his desk as he hunches over. The shop he operates out of is personal, messy — never Dainsleif’s style, but he can admit it is quaint. Quilts and sewn tapestries line the walls, textbooks from the Akademiya line a bookcase filled with papers; a frame hangs on the wall.

A painting of a flower; inteyvat.

“Excuse me,” Dainsleif coughs, “I can’t help but notice your painting.”

“Hm? Oh, the flower.”

“Yes — you know where it’s from?”

The smith hums a laugh, nodding. “Khaenri’ah hasn’t been gone long enough to forget it.”

Dainsleif swallows. “I was just surprised to see it, is all.”

“Most are,” he replies, his eyes not leaving the watch he works on. He rummages through his drawer for tweezers. “It was a gift for my daughter.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes,” he replies, happily. “We named her after them.”

Dainsleif takes a deep breath.

Three.

When Dainsleif comes home from his shift, you’re sitting at the table with your chin resting in your hands.

“Good evening,” he greets, shrugging off his jacket and kicking off his boots. He doesn’t seem to notice that you don’t reply in the twenty or so seconds it takes to writhe out of his uniform, or that you don’t bother to even look in his direction at all. The only time he realizes that something in the room has shifted is when you move away from his kiss. “Hello?”

You grit your teeth.

Dainsleif crosses his arms, slowly rounding the table to face you from across it. “What is it?”

You look up at him, finally. “Where’s my blueprint, Dain?”

He blinks. “I — your what?”

“Don’t act dumb,” you say with a pointed finger, your head shaking. Your body might as well be, too. “My analog blueprints, digital ones — they’re all gone and guess who is the only one I trusted enough to tell?”

He opens his mouth, closes it. “It wasn’t me,”

“Who else was it, then?” you shout, standing up to try and match his height. “Who? Tell me, Dainsleif, who else could it have been?”

He swallows, pulling one of your dining table chairs out. It squeals against the floor like it hates him just as much as you do. “Sit, please.”

“You know what I think, Dain?”

“Sit down, please.”

“I think you stole them for the factories you Guards don’t tell anyone about,” you whisper, “the metal soldiers you make.”

“They’re field tillers,”

“Field tillers don’t have missiles in their chest,” you spit. The air thickens as you shake your head.

He gestures to the seat you once sat in, but you don’t bite. Not that easily, not ever.

“Lie to me again and I’m gone for good.”

Dainsleif swallows again, folding his hands and looking down at them. You’re scorned and he’s holding the heat; there is no explanation he can offer that makes this look any bit okay to either of you. He’s dug his grave — now, he lies in it, shovel at his side.

“Tell me,” you plead, “tell me what you’re making an army for.”

Dainsleif shakes his head.

“Gods don’t like godless men,” he says, so low you hardly hear him. So simple, like he's being reasonable.

You shake your own. “Godless men don’t even like themselves.”

His eyes meet yours.

“I want my designs back,” you tell him, more desperate than you let on. “Every page, every scribble, everything. And I don’t want anything made with them.”

Dainsleif takes a deep breath, his eyes averting themselves back down to the table. He doesn’t need to see your face anymore — not when he knows you’ll hate him once he tells you.

“You can’t.”

“You—”

“I can’t,” he says. “It’s too late.”

150 years since

“Wow, this watch is beat.”

“It is — can you fix it?”

This one is in Fontaine, the clocksmith is — she’s eclectic, a little disorganized like you were, with a scary love for crushed velvet by the look of her shop. There’s metal dust everywhere and things that don’t belong to clocks or watches, but someone swore up and down she knows her stuff. Knows it well, too.

She looks back up at Dainsleif with a wink. “Got Mora?”

He tosses a pouch on the counter. “Anything you need.”

He doesn’t bother watching what she takes from it, instead opting to turn and watch the bustling streets outside. He’s fond of Fontaine, it’s full of life and running water — every shop is full from wall to wall.

The girl he’s trusting to fix his watch is trying to speak to him, but he’s not listening; all he can see is the eye of a Ruin Guard that hangs in the window of a pawn shop across the street; marked down to half value, less if you trade-in for credit. Dainsleif thinks about the lives those parts were worth almost two centuries ago.

No one in Khaenri’ah was ever worth just a couple hundred coins.

Two.

Taverns in Khaenri’ah have so many songs that they fill walls with the lyrics.

They are loud and they are lively — you know something’s wrong when you catch one quiet and half-empty. The windows all made of stained glass, rustic to contrast the world around them; taverns in Khaenri’ah are like a world of their own. In them, people dance like such.

You dance that way, yourself. Not with him, but it’s nice to watch you spin again.

Dainsleif watches you clutch someone’s shoulder; he doesn’t know who he is but he’s wearing his uniform, someone he leads. He thinks he remembers you saying that you made an exception for him — you don’t date ‘snobs from the Royal Guard.’

(Dainsleif has hope that, maybe, you still remember your pact and, maybe, you try to keep it now.)

The wooden floors groan beneath stomping feet and gliding boots, the room a whirlwind of exhausted workers and the select few from the Guard that deem little places like this worthy of their presence.

He catches your eye for a second, only one, but your smile fades quick enough for your dancing partner to whisk you around again. A blur of your dress, and then, you’re grinning again.

Halfdan sets a drink down on the bar in front of him, kicking out the stool beside Dainsleif and sitting down. He follows his commander’s eyes and they land on you; they typically do on Friday nights.

“It’s alright,” Halfdan says, with a heavy-handed pat on his back. “Everyone has the one that got away.”

Dainsleif shakes his head, you laugh against his knight’s chest. “It’s different.”

“How so?”

“It does not matter, now, does it?”

“Mm, and yet, you’re still watching her.”

Dainsleif sips on the drink that was brought to him, turning to face the bar instead. Halfdan purses his lips, drumming his fingers on the table.

“You know,” Halfdan says, “I worry about the … field tillers.”

Dainsleif nods. “They’ll work.”

“Godless doesn’t mean we need to create our own, Captain,”

“You don’t know the things that I do,” Dainsleif cuts, harsh but not mean. “All of this has been discussed before. Let us make the orders, Halfdan, let yourself follow them.”

Halfdan hesitates.

“Captain Dainsleif,”

“Halfdan.”

“I apologize for overstepping,” he says, “but I’m just afraid of what will happen to us.”

Dainsleif rolls his shoulders back, nodding subtly. He clinks the bottom of his glass against the table.

“I am too,” he replies, tilting his head back and his glass up.

When he sets his glass back down, swallowing with a wince, he turns around. You’re the only one still on the floor, and you’re looking right at him.

500 years since

Dainsleif has spent his life figuring out where to drink. He finds that Mondstadt is the best place to.

The taverns there are quiet enough, and he isn’t bothered by anyone — they’re less lively than the ones way back when. It's a blessing that he isn’t haunted by the laughter, and a curse that he forgets what it sounds like. The tap beer is good, too. Mondstadt only serves you in bottles or chilled glasses.

But Dainsleif knows that no good comes after two in the morning, and nothing good comes from watching the Knights of Favonius pour in.

(It’s a little too familiar; he’s watching his bloodied soldiers laugh and topple to the bar.)

Dainsleif leaves enough Mora to cover his tab and tip, and bolts for the door.

He makes a beeline through the center, cutting the body of the bar in two as these faces he recognizes comment on his attire. He knows he looks like a fish out of water, he feels like a fish out of water. Five hundred years spent in this place and he still feels hated — he’s sure the next five centuries won’t change.

He knocks shoulders with someone near the door: “Woah there, pretty small hallway this must be, huh?”

He’s about to apologize, too, maybe count it as his crooked form of atonement, until he looks the guy he hit in the eye. Yes, eye — there's only one showing. The other hides beneath an eye patch.

He’s looking at him, but somehow, he’s now looking at you.

He’s lost in them, his eyes, and this new guy seems to notice — judging by the way he’s dressed, Dain guesses he’s a captain. He clears his throat.

“I know you’re heading out, but maybe another drink wouldn’t hurt?”

Dainsleif panics, because now he’s trapped. He doesn’t see you until he sleeps — not until he’s locked in bed somewhere, until it doesn’t matter what he says because no one else is there to listen but you and him. He can’t see you here, and he can’t see him.

“Sorry, but I’m afraid that I'm in a rush. I apologize for hitting you.”

(He doesn’t get very far.)

The man takes his wrist, making him turn around.

“Please?” he asks, but it’s not really begging. More like a proposition, probably. “I’m not sure how to say that in Khaenri’ahn.”

Dainsleif lets out a breath.

One.

It is your old day, Sunday , when Dainsleif enters your shop again, the broken watch on his wrist thrumming against his pulse point with every jerk of its hands.

The bell rings above your door and he’s almost surprised the door isn’t locked — he remembers unlocking it for you after he had to go, way back when. Kissing you goodbye, apologizing for holding up your business. You aren’t far, either; you come out with a smile that fades quicker than he likes to admit.

“Hi.”

“Hello,” he says, all too formal. He winces, almost. “Uh, it's broken again.”

“Of course it did. It’s ancient.”

He just sighs a laugh, nodding, undoing it from his wrist, from beneath his sleeve. “Yes, it is. Do you think you can fix it again?”

You glance between him and the watch. Him, and the watch. “Let me see it.”

“Of course,”

“Okay.”

You examine it with delicate fingers, screwing off the back of the body with a small driver, squinting at its insides. Dainsleif watches you.

“Dain, this thing isn’t gonna last long.”

“I don’t mind. I can pay double.”

“Why do you like this watch so much?” you laugh, dropping it on the counter and crossing your arms. “I mean, they don’t pay you enough for a digital?”

Dainsleif shakes his head. “I like this one.” He coughs. “You fixed it, first.”

“Yeah, and I’m shocked it still works.”

“You craft well.”

The two of you don’t speak for a moment; you dwell on the watch, its body pulled apart on the table. Your fingers pull at your threading jeans, and Dainsleif must see you mutilating your pants because he leans on the counter, lowers himself to you.

He lets you look at him for a moment. “What is it?”

“Nothing,”

“What is it?” he asks again, like it isn’t the second time.

You take a deep breath, tilting your head up.

“I’m sorry about your designs. Every day.” He shakes his head, looking in behind you. Your desk is still full of paper. “I will reap what I sow, and that’s the only comfort I can give you.”

“I know.” “I’m sorry. Endlessly, I am.”

You huff. “I’ve had better things since. It’s not what bugs me, Dain.”

“What is it, then, my dear?”

Your tongue pushes against your cheek, regretful hands reaching out to grip his own. It’s like you know you’re doing yourself no favours, but you’ve always been a masochist.

“Are we going to be okay?” you ask. “Not us. This place.”

He can tell you’ve been sitting with this thought alone, he’s just not sure how long. Since you brought up the field tillers? Since his last expedition? When was he last here, he’s not entirely sure.

His thumb wipes over your knuckles. He doesn’t tell you whether you’re going to be okay.

“I will protect you,” he whispers, “even in my dying breath.”

The second time he meets the Traveller is when they ask him.

“What happened to Khaenri’ah?”

ZERO.

There is little you can see in smoke and ash. What Dainsleif can see, it is blurry and most likely dead.

(He doesn’t want to think about what happens to those who live — simply surviving is not enough, they’ll seek retribution in the living, too.)

He feels guilty for saying it, but he was glad when the castle fell — relinquished of his sworn duty, free to run to where your shop lives. It came down in a blow of fire, the castle did; more than just four mighty walls, built of minerals made to last. He’s afraid to think of what happens to simpler stones.

(He runs like you stand a chance.)

He’s running in the opposite direction of other people — hell, he’s directing them out of there. Whatever is behind them is a lost cause, for him it’s a little hope. The havoc being brought down on this place is proof that they’re not allowed to have hope, but he promises it’ll be his last bit. He’s assuming they can hear him when he prays for it.

The windows of your shop are blown out. He ignores the sound of crunching glass because you’re screaming his name.

(You stop when you see him, swallowing it. He drops to his knees and says you’re allowed to yell, even when he’s there.)

“Dain,”

“Just breathe, hold on,” he breathes, chest pumping as he starts to heave the rubble off of you, the thick pillars that bar you from moving. He lifts one, another falls down. He lifts that one, and another, and another.

“Dainsleif.”

He’s still heaving, grunting now. Sweat lines his forehead and he’s coughing up soot he smelt ages ago.

“Dain,”

He’s crying.

“Dainsleif,” you spit, grabbing his wrist. You shake your head. “You’re hurting me.”

“I have to get you out,”

“To where?” you whisper, voice shaking. “Where are we going to go?”

Dainsleif doesn’t cry intentionally. His eyes are so wet that he can’t see clearly and they’re cleaning off his cheeks, but if tears were invisible you would never be able to tell.

You shake your head. “I’m not going to die in the street.”

“Don’t be so blunt, dear, please.”

“There is no other way to p-put it,” you say with a shiver, swallowing the hurt that threatens to spill out between your teeth; you smile instead. You feel weak already, even weaker in front of a commander. “Don’t cry about it,"

“I can’t stop it,” he chokes out, shaking his head. He cradles your head in his lap, brushes back your hair until his fingers get caught in knots. “There is nothing I can do.”

The weight of your life, his world, is in his lap, and he thinks about tomorrow. One, or both of you, will be dead, and yet that weight will still be there.

“There’s no one but the gods that could stop this, Dain,”

“I—”

“I love you,” you gasp, “I forgive you. I love you.”

“No.”

“Say it back, you stubborn, stubborn man,” you grit.

(Dainsleif keels over you, and he says it back. He repeats it until he feels your grip on him loosen, until your head lulls the other way. He repeats it until he feels sick and out of breath, because he knows he will never say it again. He repeats it until he's about to gag.)

He remains in your shop for the next few hours, unmoving, leaned up against the front desk that amazingly still stands. He’s holding your hand.

Dainsleif waits for something. Probably a sentence, to death or otherwise. He waits here for a chance for the roof to cave in, or to be struck down by someone that finds him. He hopes the gods get to him. He hopes this shop still stands if they pry him out of it. He hopes they call him Atlas and tell him to hold it up.

“This watch is never gonna work.”

Dainsleif blinks at the man across the counter, who looks at him with raised eyebrows — probably in shock that he even thought it was fixable — and a condescending frown. “You are sure?”

“Dude, this wasn’t supposed to work the last time you had it fixed. This looks like it’s centuries old.”

“It…”

Is. He doesn’t finish that.

“It’s an heirloom,” he says instead. “It's impossible, then?”

“Uh, yeah. I’m pretty good at what I do, but this is … miracle talk. This should have been up-cycled three hundred years ago.”

“I see.”

The two men stand in silence for a moment, and the clocksmith brings a hand down on the watch.

When he strikes it, he knocks the last bits of air out of its lungs; the watch ticks a final one, two, three times, and Dainsleif hears laughter to his left.

He turns, and there you are.

You’re sitting on a bench, alive, breathing. You’re holding a popsicle and leaning back like you don’t have a care in the world.

Dainsleif thinks of all the things you can say to him. That you blame him, that you love him, that you hate what he did. That you wish he could save everyone, that you wish he could’ve maybe saved you. That you’re thankful you died and never had to live as a curse. That you think of him, too.

(You don’t do any of that.)

Instead, you smile, close-lipped and gentle. And you wave.

The watch stops after the third tick. He loses you in a blink for one second, and you’re gone.

“Can you hit it again?”

“When I tell you that was its last life, I really mean it. I’d guess it had ten of them.”

He swallows, nodding, staring down at his broken watch. He’ll never see you again, hear it tick three times and go back to your bed on Sunday, hear it tick three times and listen to you say you love him in his native tongue. He’ll never go home, but he’s glad he saw you one more time.

He’ll never go home, but he’s glad he saw it one more time.

“So? You gonna try and bargain, or…?”

Dainsleif is staring at the bench you were just in; his fingers itch for it. If he has to spend the next lifetime looking at that bench, he’s going to do it alone, and he’s going to learn how to do it without you.

You deserve to rest — he was the one cursed to live forever, not you. You did not die in vain.

He turns back to the clocksmith, who honestly looks pretty bored of him by now.

“Can I sell the parts?”

#a product of my intense and unwavering genshin phase #dainsleif x reader #genshin impact x reader #genshin x reader #dainsleif x you #genshin impact angst #kit writes

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star-anise · 2 years

Note

Speaking of potatoes and fantasy worldbuilding and the impact that they have on a culture: You discussed how potatoes free a society from a lot of things that grain imposed. Including how potatoes are pretty much ready to cook/eat right from being grown. That had me wondering about potatoes in various worldbuilding projects which leads me to this: Is it as easy to turn a potato into a food item that will keep, potentially for months or years, as one can with wheat (see: Hardtack/etc, for an extreme example). Or is that actually an advantage of wheat over potatoes? Because your post kind of makes it sound like once a society gets potatoes, why would any peasant choose to keep growing wheat? Or is that the point, they really *wouldn't* choose to keep growing wheat?

I think modern society's uses of the two are pretty good illustrations. We like wheat, and we also like potatoes! Bread, but also french fries! Beer, but also vodka!

So it's not always an either/or choice: Homesteads that grow for their own tables tend to have their fingers in a lot of different pies, like livestock, dairy, poultry, field crops, fruit trees, and vegetable crops. This is partly an insurance policy: If one crop doesn't make it, maybe another will. Maybe it rains so hard your potatoes all rot in the ground, but your wheat finds a way to survive—or the storm is so violent your wheat is all flattened in the field, but your potatoes were perfectly fine.

But there's also the part where we humans tend to like variety in our diets, which is partly physiological (we need a lot of different vitamins and minerals, and which ones we need can shift with the circumstances) and partly psychological (because we can get really tired of having to eat the same damn thing over and over and over. Yes, samefood crew, we exist, but we're also statistically rare.)

But if you had to choose: If you intend to eat what you grow and you've got limited land and equipment, potatoes are the hands-down winner. It's really easy to plant a pound of potatoes and get five pounds back at the end of the season. Depending on storage conditions, you can keep them for several months.

However, if you want to earn your living by selling your crop for cash, it's a little more complicated. Potatoes, though lovely, are also demanding; they are prey to literally dozens of problems that range from "potato is being eaten by an insect" to "potato is being eaten by a fungus" to "potato did not get enough water" to "potato got too much water." Even when your potatoes are technically edible, they might end up harder to store, harder to turn into food, or just plain ugly, which makes people less likely to buy them.

Also, and maybe this is just my personal perception from trying to pick three acres of potatoes by hand when I was 13, harvesting potatoes is a pain in the ass. They grow down in the dirt, so to get them out again, you have to physically dig them up and shake them apart from chunks of earth. I've never harvested grain by hand so maybe I'm just ignorant, but to me that's a lot of bending, kneeling, crouching, and scrabbling through the dirt. Like, harvesting 1 potato plant? Delightful search for buried treasure. 10? Wipe sweat off your brow and feel very satisfied with yourself. But the year I was 13 we harvested at least 100 potato plants. It was the year we studied the Russian Revolution in school and I felt the peasants had a definite point.

(And then they weren't good enough to be sold as food crops. They stayed in our garage, a giant pyramid touching the roof, for half the winter. We ate potatoes every single day until my brothers campaigned for an end to it. My parents donated 10,000 lbs of potatoes to the local food bank and my dad bought a potato picker at an estate auction the following year.)

Wheat does not make a great home-consumption crop these days, since it takes a lot of work to process into flour. In the last decade I've seen some affordable home flour mills, and if you have a combine harvester that's actually doable, but when I was a kid, the nearest flour mill to us was 1000km away. Without a combine, you still need to thresh and winnow the grain. It's a whole thing.

On the other hand, if you have the tools and facilities to process it, wheat is generally simpler to grow, easier to transport and sell, and the straw it leaves behind* is a useful byproduct. And while I do love eating potatoes, and you can technically make cake and bread out of them, I, like much of the rest of the world, prefer to eat things made with wheat flour, and am also fond of other grain products like rolled oats, rye bread, and multigrain bagels.

(*Sidenote: Straw and hay are different things. Straw is the stalk of grain like wheat or barley. It has minimal nutritional value and is used for bedding and insulation. Hay is a nutritious blend of cut grasses and plants that are fed to farm animals instead of, or in addition to, access to pasture they can graze in. In case that's useful.)

In British history there IS a whole huge thing with the Agricultural Revolution where land use transferred from smaller peasant farmers growing food for themselves, to larger farmers growing cash crops to feed a mostly-urbanized population, which was part landlords kicking people off their land so it could be used differently, and part peasants seeing factory jobs in the city as a welcome escape from the backbreaking labour of farming. While I think the landlords shortchanged their former tenants, and the urban factory owners were horrible to their workers, I think we also need to remember that the peasants who said "Fuck this hoe, I'm off to town" had a very valid point.

#agriculture #medievalism #staranise original

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johndead · 10 months

Text

Talking a bit about Jon Sims Care :]

Seeing as this is now kinda what I'm known for I wanted to make a pinned post just talking about it a bit

First off, out of universe things!

To me this thing is still a bit that got out of hand, but you can totally also call it an AU since it has gotten a bit big lmao

The official tag for this thing is #jon sims care! Keep asks and tags coming! It's genuinely the highlight of my day when I get an ask about this and I get to expand the world of Joncreatures just a bit further, or when you guys share your great ideas in universe. Fanwork also! On that note, I'm not an arbiter of truth! Make shit up and have fun with it! I like this more as a community worldbuilding thing And probably the most important bit, please don't take any of this seriously lol. I've made posts before complaining about fandom discourse, and this is the last place I want it. Please keep it fun and lighthearted for everyone. I don't wanna have to be serious on this post but I did wanna mention it. Back to fun stuff, and more of a fun fact, the drawings of the Joncreature are actually inspired by my weird looking rabbit, Brownie!

In universe things!

Thinking of getting a Jon? Great! This is what you should know:

Most Jons take a long time to warm up to new environments and owners, you're not a failure if it's been a month and your Jon is still putting off the occasional threat display towards you. Just make sure you're giving him his space and keeping his space maintained! Jons need a lot of space to roam. I personally recommend jonproofing your house and yard, and if you have the option, giving him is own room to retreat to. They certainly like their alone time! Toys/play that almost all Jons enjoy are things like tape recorders, tunnels, hole digging, reading, chasing feather toys, and beholding! Make sure to incorporate playtime into your routine! Jons love chewing on anything with information! This can be cassettes, papers, books, phones, or even laptops! Make sure to keep important things out of his reach and offer Jon safe papers and chew toys Another important thing, Jons tend to have a lot of strange and worrying phases throughout their development! I have some posts explaining some in the Jon care tag if you're worried. The internet is also a reliable source though! Just make sure the websites you're reading from are reliable! Of course that's not all there is to know, but it's some useful starting info if you're considering getting your own little guy!

Happy Jon caring everybody!

#tma #the magnus archives #magpod #jonathan sims #johnalandead.txt #jon sims #jarchivist #jon sims care #tma au

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wisteria-lodge · 9 months

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A question for you: would you sort a living person with whom you are not in communication, and without her express consent, but whose words and deeds are very much on public display? Specifically: J.K. Rowling sure thinks of herself as a heroic Lion Primary; what’s your call?

I have spent a long time thinking about this lady. Possibly too long. But here's what I've got.

She's a Bird. She *likes* Lion primaries, and she likes them in that way a lot of Birds do - Lions feel magical and moral and easy and good. That's why Gryffindor is her good-guy house, and that's why Gryffindors always get a pass when they do shady things. They were always doing it for good reasons, because that's just how Lion primaries are. They know what's good, just by kind of feeling it.

(obviously this isn't at all how it feels to be a Lion primary, but it can SEEM that way, if you're outside looking in.)

And so she likes Lion primaries, and surrounds herself with Lion primaries. And over time, seems to have filtered for the most fiery, if-you're-not-with-me-you're-my-enemy Exploded Lions imaginable. This could also be why she's not interrogating emotional pings when she really should. Like it's heartbreaking to read some of her essays - like, no JKR, that's not a reason, that's a trauma response you ought to be getting help for. But she thinks there's inherent goodness with going with your heart over your head.

Which is also probably why, for the last two decades, she's been slowly surrounding herself only with people who agree with her - effectively Exploding her own Bird primary. She is notoriously stubborn and difficult to work with, and I have that from first hand accounts... but just think how much better an editor could have made books 4-7. Or the Fantastic Beasts films. Or the Cursed Child (we all sort of collectively forgot about the Cursed Child.)

But I see the Bird! I see the Idealism, I see the mind that likes puzzles, and systems, and mysteries. And then I see her just kinda... be lazy about it. Not think though the implications. Be happy with only a very surface-level understanding. Not edit, or update, or interrogate her system. (We know that her worldbuilding is sloppy. We know she grabs existing problematic tropes and then kind of uses them as-is.)

The more I dig into to her, the more I'll come across bits of her system that just seem very... young. They'll be things like 'Good people have kids, or if they can't, then they take care of kids.' Or 'People with mobility aids are good.' That's one's so weird I just have to bring it up. It's very consistent, and comes with the reverse - 'People who use mobility aids they don't need are evil.' Barty Crouch jr. is the HP example, but that situation comes up like - a weird amount in her mystery novels.

(also, I can't prove it, but I think Lucius Malfoy got a much more sympathetic edit after Jason Isaacs started playing him with a cane. Of course that could also be just because... he has a kid... so he can't be BAD.)

Harry Potter, the character, is also very much a Bird Primary. When he acts on really strong emotions it's because they're - yep, trauma responses. Mostly he's trying to figure out his world, synthesize everything Dumbledore and the Weasleys and Hagrid and Sirius tell him, in order to build his own system.

And he's a really loud Lion secondary, the way I suspect JKR is too. Her response to all of this has just been to double down, do MORE, be LOUDER. If her royalties, or the reputation of her IP take a hit, she honestly does not seem to care.

She's not stupid and she's not evil. Hermione was a complicated, fascinating female lead. JKR has an incredible knack for side characters. The books have good stuff to stay about grief, and depression, and I know it gets memed now, but it was a big deal (for me) when she said Dumbledore was gay. But this is how I think you can get someone who starts out in a reasonable place, and gets more and more out of touch, and harmful and wrong and dangerous - when locked into one way of seeing the world, and no one with the ability to contradict you.

#jk rowling #jkr #anti jkr #sortinghatchats #tangentially #shc #exploded bird primary #lion secondary #bird primary vs lion primary.

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bloodgulchblog · 2 months

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Have you seen that YouTube video where some guy reads every Halo novel back to back and then reviews them? If so what did you think

The Brian David Gilbert one? Oh yeah, all my friends showed me it when it came out. (It was honestly kind of cute seeing how many people thought of me immediately.)

Rewatching it to refresh myself because it's been a couple years and a full-novel reread for me since the last time...

youtube

High fiving BDG because the Master Chief parts of The Flood were definitely the most boring parts.

He didn't have anything to say about First Strike which I think is a shame because I think it's better than The Fall of Reach and actually has A Theme I Find Interesting.

Rightful recognition of Contact Harvest as pretty damn good.

Rightful recognition of the Forerunner Trilogy as dense oldschool-style SF with deep worldbuilding. (Also the San'Shyuum thing.)

I disagree with him about, and have significant problems with, Kilo Five. He is correct that Kilo Five actually delves into some of the dark places in Halo in a way it really needed, and I would even say that its writing is extremely engaging by Halo novel standards. However, while he does notice the obvious parallels between what ONI is doing post-war and the kind of shit the CIA has pulled again and again irl, I think he misses some of the subtext I see where it feels like it justifies some shit a liiiiittle too much if you know the author's irl politics re: the military. He also doesn't seem to notice the character assassinations (particularly of Catherine Halsey) that I and a lot of other fans see/object to in those books. I kind of gaze into the middle distance with a haunted expression at the suggestion that these are the ones to read if you don't touch any of the others just because they are, ironically, so heavy-handed and feel like they treat certain kinds of evil as inevitable in a way that actually feels way worse to me than the excuse plot offered by the earlier/lighter Halo novels. (But idk, that's me? Nobody is committing a crime if they disagree with my frenzied insane person red string diagrams about Kilo Five.)

I'd swap Pariah for Dirt in the Evolutions anthology if it were me, but I think these are solid standouts.

Broken Circle is neat but really nonessential he's not wrong.

A one-sentence review of New Blood is probably not enough space to get into how fucked up the Spartan-IV program is, but yeah. New Blood is fun if you don't find Buck's first person narration annoying. (It comes and goes for me in that one.)

BDG you're an absolute sweetheart, I think Hunters in the Dark is kind of goofy in a way I cannot in good conscience ignore if I'm gonna review it. But it really really is so much fun and I love that one a lot anyway. The "it's like Halo 3... 2" observation is solid.

High fiving him again because I also found Last Light disappointing. And it is also a me problem.

Fractures!

Hell yeah these are all good pulls from Fractures, I would say Shadow of Intent is the pick of the litter in that anthology for me. Interesting that as a Kilo Five enjoyer he didn't single out Rossbach's World, which is the last we've heard about Osman and Black Box. (Also, that one is good.) I think Oasis is worth an honorable mention because I'm an Envoy stan, and the Forerunner stories are interesting but I wouldn't go for them if you don't already have a healthy interest in the trilogy.

This tangent is so fucking funny now that we know more things:

Oh BDG, oh buddy, it's really not for the people like you and me huh. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if BDG likes the Halo tv show or not and I have no desire to dig up evidence about it.)

Also, while you're here, this is the bloodgulchblog origin story:

Smoke and Shadow is fun so it's a little sad that when he ends that sentence with "whatever," I can't actually say he's wrong to. (Sorry Rion your part of the lore just.... hasn't... touched anything that touches anything else anymore.)

ENVOY IS GOOD AND EVERYONE SHOULD CARE ABOUT IT okay okay I'm cool I'm normal, anyway. Envoy is the Halo novel that restored my faith in reading Halo novels and reminded me that authors can care and know how to do nuanced, interesting themes in this space. It's great. Everyone in this book has war refugee trauma (except the Spartans which have Spartan trauma) and that's incredible to me. Please care about Envoy if you have spare room in your heart for Halo side characters.

I am cheered to see someone indifferent to the Veta Lopis stories, but I still feel petty for feeling it.

I don't have a lot to say about Legacy of Onyx here but it's always so fun seeing someone else suffer and care.

Bad Blood, the Blood is Bad now is a fun joke but lol yeah. It does have this very vital moment where Chief and Arbiter talk, though. For the first and only time in years.

PROPS FOR NOTICING THE YA NOVELS they're actually pretty nice.

"The Master Chief is the protagonist and boy does he shoot some people" is most of how I feel about Silent Storm and Oblivion too, I know they have their fans but Troy Denning's Chief books don't do much for me personally.

Renegades hadn't had its followup Point of Light yet but yeah, Spark stuff is interesting.

I had to remember that oh yeah, there are multiple books now that didn't exist when this was made. I wonder if he read them?

OKAY I THINK THAT'S ALL I HAD TO SAY as always if y'all want specific book opinions, I might have a tag for them. Or just yell in my ask box, I'm sure I can scrounge up some thoughts.

#halo novels

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madame-ellunas-moonlit-readings · 1 year

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May 8 - Foul Bauble Of Man's Vanity

Re Dracula/Dracula Daily

So, I got distracted and now I'm behind by about a week. So be it, I'll catch up. Starting with this one.

Serious props to the voice actors here. Jonathon's stressed venting over being trapped and in danger, and Dracula's fervent rant over his people's history were excellent. I was drawn right in. They really set the tension and the tone. There were no skipped bits this round, so just a reaction to the podcast today. And a little definitions bit at the bottom for the words I had to google.

Jonathon has stopped turning his back on his ill feelings and the numerous red flags, grateful even for his older descriptive journal entries to refer upon and determined to keep clear record onwards. I guess not seeing someone in the mirror and getting choked out would be too much for anyone to hide from. That and his destructive tendencies.

I like how he takes the time to feel gratitude for the rosary and the woman who gifted it, wondering on the manner in which it works. Also the little tangent, 'now I can't shave! how annoying!'. Coping skills 101.

He's not just kept older fears to heart but has started actively looking into things as well. Thanks to that he knows that there are no servants, only himself and Dracula, that the man hasn't consumed anything and that there's no way out. All the doors are locked and his window just leads to a precipice ending in rivers, chasms and forests, all easily seen from the castle. It's no wonder the poor man ran about the place in a panic.

Jonathon is taking care with his interactions with Count Dracula too, planning ahead, how to react, how to behave, what to, what not say. He's even gone with so bold a move as to dig out personal information from the man himself. And wasn't that interesting.

Count Dracula fell for it, hook line and sinker. He fell into a fervent rant over the histories, follies and glories of his blood, his people, his land. He ranted on wars and battles, dismissed more pacifist and communal behaviours, which showed a lot into his personality, his priorities and his attitude towards others. He even clued Jonathon in on who he is was, when he came from, his role in the past, when he went on about his achievement against the Turks.

Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph! They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants without a leader?

Overall, it was a stellar success on Jonathon's part. It could even make for a historical record there. What a thing for a historian to get their hands on.

Jonathon has a point though. This, like with the other nights, didn't end til morn. He compared it the beginning of the "Arabian Nights" or the ghost of Hamlet's father, ending at cockcrow. Not very comforting comparisons.

It was an interesting chapter. Very informative. Love the building stress, the increasing urgency and the worldbuilding.

My little definitions page, in the order they came up. Almost all are directly copy pasted, with some hyperlinks for clarification sake.

Diffuse: lacking clarity or conciseness, verbose, wordy, longwinded

Prosaic: without interest, imagination, and excitement, prose lacking poetic terms and verbosity

Demoniac: possessed or influenced by a demon

Boyar: a high ranking member of Russian aristocracy, serving under the prince

Szekelys: Székely people are ancient Hungarians, living in Transylvania in Székelyföld (Szeklerland), situated in Romania

Ugric: Ugrians or Ugors were the ancestors of the Hungarians of Central Europe, and the Khanty and Mansi people of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug of Russia.

Scythia: or Scythica was the region of Eastern Europe corresponding to the Pontic steppe. The Scythians were an ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people.

Attila: Attila the Hun was the leader of the Hunnic Empire from 434 to 453. Attila the Hun is used as a figure for an extremely vicious fighter or cruel person, especially in political contexts.

Magyar: The Magyars were horsemen from the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Their people make up the majority of the Hungarians.

Lombard: a Germanic people who conquered most of the Italian Peninsula from 568 to 774. They originated from Scandinavia.

Avar: a nomadic equestrian people from central Asia who built up an empire in the area between the Adriatic and the Baltic seas from the 6th century.

Bulgar: The Bulgars were Turkic semi-nomadic warrior tribes that flourished in the Pontic–Caspian steppe and the Volga region during the 7th century.

Arpad: Árpád was the head of the confederation of the Magyar tribes at the turn of the 9th and 10th centuries. He was a ruler of what we now call Hungary.

Honfoglalas: the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin

Cassova: or Kosovo. Kosovo, officially the Republic of Kosovo is a landlocked partially recognised state in Southeast Europe, lying in the centre of the Balkans.

Wallach: the people of Wallachia, now Romania

Voivode: a local ruler, governor or military commander, especially the semi-independent rulers of Transylvania, Wallachia, or Moldova before c1700.

Mohács: is a town in Baranya County, Hungary, on the right bank of the Danube. The Battle of Mohács was fought on 29 August 1526 near Mohács.

Hapsburgs: aka the House of Austria. One of the most prominent and important dynasties in European history.

Romanoffs: or the Romanovs. The Russian imperial family in control from 1613 to 1917. Famous for the murder of the Romanov family wherein Princess Anastasia went missing, presumed dead.

#madame ellunas moonlit readings #dracula daily #re dracula #may 8 #foul bauble of man's vanity #read along #reactions #spotify #podcast #definitions #Spotify

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