#the worldbuilding section has only two things

[writingwithcolor]

Running Commentary: What is “ok to do” in Mixed-Culture Supernatural Fiction?

Dear readers: 

Today we are trying something new. To give you some insight into our process in the Japanese moderator section, we are presenting our response in the form of running commentary to show you how we dissect and answer long asks. We hope this makes clear what points are useful and not useful when sending us a query. As always, this is for learning purposes, not callouts. Be prepared: this is a long one. 

To summarize: the asker is looking to create a comic drawn in Japanese manga style, and has provided a long summary of the story and worldbuilding which involves a mix of “reimagined” Japanese yokai mythos and cultural symbols from many other sources. They have questions with respect to cultural appropriation, coding etiquette, and “what is and isn’t ok.” 

Opening Comments

I know a common advice when it comes to the thing I am about to ask is to talk to people involved in __, but I struggle with opening up to strangers for reasons I'm uncomfortable explaining. 

Marika (M): This is already a red flag. If you want to engage with another culture without talking to people from that culture, then research is going to be very challenging. You won’t have members of that culture to guide you towards sources and perspectives they feel most accurately represents public opinion. If I were in your shoes, I might start with tackling my discomfort when engaging with other people, if only to improve my work. If you aren’t ready to engage with a culture and its people directly, then I think you should wait until you are. 

I should note, reaching out to the Japanese mod team at WWC does count as engagement, but WWC should not and cannot be the only point of contact because there is no single, legitimate cultural perspective. 

Rina (R): Also, you don’t need to “open up” to strangers or talk to them in person to get perspectives. Asking specific research questions anonymously to a forum or on social media requires very little vulnerability. You managed to do it here on WWC. So give it a try! 

Anyway, my question basically amounts to the what is and isn't ok [sic] in terms of depicting fantasy creatures and concepts outside of their respective culture.

R: So, the reason why we turn away rubber stamp questions by that ask “is XYZ okay?” is because “okay” & “not okay” 1) is vague and 2) creates a dichotomy where there isn’t one. 

When we say something is “not okay,” do we mean:

It’s offensive to the general majority of XYZ group? 

It’s contentious among people who ID in the group? 

It has a potential to be interpreted in a certain negative way, but may not be a red flag to everyone?

Insetad try asking:

What are the reasons this subject is offensive? 

What makes cultural appropriation bad? 

When might it be “okay” to intentionally discuss a difficult or controversial topic?

What is your reason for including something that may be interpreted as offensive and can it be sufficiently justified? 

What stereotypes or tropes might it be consistently identified as or associated with, and why? 

When might it be justified to bring up these tropes?

With That In Mind...

Let’s get into the rest of the ask below. 

…a story I've been working on in recent times is largely inspired off the Japanese yokai, and the setting is basically Earth in the far future, as far as when the next supercontinent may form. These yokai, although portrayed differently here, do retain their main characteristics [...] Included in this world are two goddesses of my own creation, primarily representing the sun and the moon. [...] There will be thirteen nations, named and based after the Chinese Zodiac, and the life force found in the living things in this world, called qi, comes in two forms that are always opposing each other but can never fully overpower the other, this being based off yin and yang. They're even directly named this; yin qi and yang qi.

M: This reads more like using Japanese and Chinese culture for the “aesthetics”, not the cultures themselves, which I personally feel falls under cultural appropriation. From a world-building/ coding standpoint, the actual use of concepts is workable, and, dare I say, typical, given how Chinese cosmology influences Japanese culture. However, naming a concept “yin qi” or “yang qi” is the equivalent of naming something “- charge” or “+ charge”, respectively. That you don’t seem aware of this tells me you are pretty early in your research phase. In that vein, we’ve covered translating terms and names from foreign languages in fantasy before. See the following article linked here for our recommendation against using RL terms outright but instead encouraging people to create their own conlangs. 

R: Worldbuilding-wise, I think you would have to figure out the chicken-or-egg of the zodiac nations. Did the nations come first, and the zodiac later as an origin folk story (which you would have to rewrite to serve the nation-building narrative)? Did the zodiac come first, and the nations named (most likely re-named) by a political entity? What is the justification? Otherwise, again, it’s a shoehorning of aesthetics. 

There is also a third, lesser known god based off of fox spirits and trickery and I imagined he's the patron deity of a family that honors and worships him, but his influence on them has transformed them into Kitsune-tsuki, which I depict as fox-like anthros. 

M: Not related to this ask directly, but I have jokingly ranted about how often non-Japanese people prefer using imagery related to kitsune-tsuki in Japanese coded world-building (link). This makes me feel the same level of petty irritation. See my troll answer below for a similar experience.

R: Same. It’s boring tbh. 

M: Troll Answer: I get that kitsune-tsuki are very sexy furries, but Japanese folklore has other sexy furries too! These underrepresented demographics also deserve recognition and appreciation!!

The plot of the story is this; modernization has left the goddesses neglected of their worship and forgotten, something that is necessary in this world to stop them from fighting each other. The Moon Goddess awakens first, punishing the humans by unleashing the yokai. Then the Sun Goddess wakes up to fight in humanity's defense…

M: This could feel rather like Shinto-like coding (Ex. the myth of Amaterasu and the Cave, or Tsukuyomi slaying Ukemochi), but something about this scenario feels a bit too binary in terms of themes of good v. evil, light v. dark to be Shinto. The plot also feels more Gaelic/ Nordic in influence for me as a person raised in a Japanese Buddhist and Hindu household. I imagine this dissonance could have been fixed with better guided research. 

…but their fighting has caused a perma-eclipse and this world is in danger of ending. The yokai have run rampant; some are loyal to the Moon Goddess, and some aren't, and it lies to the main characters to bring balance back to Midgard. Yeah... the name of this future Earth is Midgard. I debate changing it since it and some other things I will mention sorta feel out of place.

R: Marika, looks like you were right on the Gaelic/Nordic influence /j 

Also, worldbuilding question: if the Earth is in the far geologic future, how long has it been since modernization (19th-20th century)? Centuries? Millennia? How long has this fighting gone on for? What triggered the perma-eclipse, and why now? Why is this time depth necessary? 

One of the main characters in question is a humanoid woman with wolf features named Ling, and she is a descendant of the dynasty that had first ruled the one of the nations, particularly the one based off the dragon zodiac. She accidentally summons the other main character to this world as she's praying at a shrine, a humanoid with dragon features--I call them drakon--named Angelynn.

[on the names of characters] is it appropriating by not having the world entirely based on [Chinese, Japanese, and Indian] influence? it's a little weird to me how worldwide the creatures are referred to as yokai, implying a strong Japanese influence not unlike how it is today with Western culture being so dominant, yet there are still names like Keith and Kiara.

M: I will give you credit for recognizing you have unconsciously veered towards white-washing/ race-bending: either presenting European cultural influences (drakons, Angelynn, Keith, Kiara, Midgard) as default or utilizing general E. Asian cultural influences and aesthetics for a Western-style story (Ling, qi, Chinese zodiac, yokai). I agree with you that this creates a sense of cultural dissonance. At this point, I’d say you have a clear choice: write a Western-style high fantasy using a background with which you have more familiarity, or get some better guidance on research with East Asian cultures so you can code the story more effectively. 

The focus of this story is centered around meeting all these yokai and showing that there's more nuance to them than Ling believes, all while saving the world. But I worry if I'm appropriating these concepts and creatures by 1, drawing from more than one culture--I initially imagined that there would be a mix of Chinese, Japanese and Indian influence because according to a website I am getting the info on yokai from, the yokai in question already draw inspiration from or have been based on something in Chinese mythology or Hinduism [...]

R: Sure, some yokai have Chinese or Hindu parallels as that tends to happen with folk tales. But not all–some are unique to Japan, and some are more modern. Sometimes it’s very political–some people consider the Ainu Korpokkur as being a “Yokai of Japan” despite it belonging to the indigenous culture. It’s up to you to research, untangle, and understand these influences. 

The fact that you bring up that the Asian continent has seen a lot of cultural exchange is not a sufficient reason to randomly combine influences for the sake of visual appeal or “coolness.” That is appropriation. These influences must be understood in their historical context so that you know how/why certain things combined or morphed into another, and what makes sense to combine/morph. 

M: This also indicates that the character views the yokai as evil/inherently bad, which I would argue is not a typical stance for much Japanese folklore. Again, this shows a deficit in research. 

2, reimagining these yokai in a new context even though I have done the research on them, because one thing I kept seeing in regards to cultural appropriation is that it's bad to do that […]

R: Refer above to my note on “okay” and “not okay.” The thing with folklore and fairy tales is that every–and I mean every–folk tale is reinterpreted with every new iteration of it. Reimagining in a new context is what people do every time they pass on a story or tell a story with the same plot or characters. Do not think of folklore as an “original” that is altered and rebooted, but rather a living document that gets added to. Reimagining is not the inherent issue. HOW you reimagine something matters. 

So I suppose my question is...if someone were to do research upon the creature they want to use, given they are allowed to use it, and gained an understanding of what the creature or concept stood for, are they allowed to pick it apart and reimagine it? Alternatively, is it ok if it's explicitly pointed out that it is derivative of the original?

It has actually become my biggest fear that I may have internalized something that could both continue to do harm long after the fact and attract the wrong people to me work. I don't wanna let people down!

M: As Rina has noted several times, I think the problem is in trying to ID a set of specific variables and circumstances that make a thing “okay” or “not okay.” I want to recommend that you read my joking response about writing in secret rooms while wearing a disguise (Linked here). Who can you hurt if no one knows what you are doing? There’s a difference between creating for oneself and creating to share. 

You have internalized a message incorrectly, but not the one you cite. The goal of many recommendations against cultural appropriation is to avoid causing direct harm to people who have seen their cultures demeaned, discredited and devalued, especially in shared spaces. Assessing cultural engagement, whether we are talking about appropriation, appreciation or exchange is not a measure of personal virtue or a collection of commandment style do’s and don’t’s. Rather, I believe engaging with other cultures is the state of mind of acknowledging that when using these cultures’ in one’s own work, there is value in consulting members of that culture and giving credit where credit is due. This will be challenging if you are only comfortable engaging with all of these cultures in a distanced, minimal capacity. 

FWIW, I’ve written stories that probably will offend people from other cultures and backgrounds, but I don’t show them off. I don’t think writing these makes me a bad person, but I also don’t see the need to give unnecessary offense, so those stories are just for me, to be written and read in my own secret room. However, I’m not ashamed of having written them, and I’m also comfortable to “let people down” provided that my own shared work reflects my personal principles of what I consider to be sufficient research and engagement with other cultures,  As a creator, my work wouldn’t be mine if I didn’t first please myself. I think the trick to the creator role is deciding what to keep private, what to share and what constitutes sufficient engagement. 

P.S. 

We’ve referenced the need for research multiple times in this ask, and in some of the other asks that have gone up this week, so we thought this would be a good place to plug a beginner’s guide to academic research created by the mod team.. Look for it soon under WWC’s pinned posts!

#japanese #chinese #fantasy #cultural appropriation #coding #worldbuilding #names #mythology #folklore #fairy tales #asks #running commentary #writeblr

[ryin-silverfish]

Headcanon: Dragons of the Four Seas

(inspired by a recent discussion with @the-monkey-ruler)

-Although Chinese dragons are water deities, there are dragons who control stuff other than water: Cold Dragons under the Dragon King of the North can freeze stuff, and Bailong Ma used to be a Fire Dragon in pre-novel variants of JTTW.

"Wouldn't it be interesting if the four major lineage of dragons all have their unique side-power, apart from water and weather manipulation?"

-It starts off as this, then spins out of control and becomes one giant worldbuilding exercise.

East Sea:

-The eastern direction is traditionally associated with the Wood element. However, I feel like plant manipulation will be too obvious.

-So instead, they are the master of Thunder and Wind——the trigrams that represent these two things, Zhen and Xun, are both Wood-aligned.

-Their lightning has a notable azure hue, and have adapted the force of Thunder specifically for underwater usage, creating highly potent sonic blasts as well as what basically amount to a sonar spell.

-They kinda consider themselves the archetypal dragon, representative of their kind, and certainly have the attitude to match.

-Like, they claim to be descended from the Azure Dragon of the East, even though the idea that a Divine Beast of the Four Directions, stellar guardian of the entire eastern section of the sky, can reproduce is...dubious at best.

-Don't you mention the time Ao Guang got bullied by Wukong. Or Nezha. Or Huaguang. Or the Eight Immortals. They are very touchy about that. Violently touchy.

-They also have close relations with water-dwelling Yakshas, who act as a sort of elite mercenaries in their military campaigns against other seaborn demons and rogue flood dragons.

-Basically, the proud generals of dragonkind, with a vast weapon collection to match. The dragon king's family also name their kids after Celestial Stems and Earthly Branches, much like the ancient Shang dynasty rulers.

-The East Sea dragons are the only lineage who has an official representative of the Celestial Host stationed in their territory, who's only known by his title, the "Water-dividing General of the East Sea".

-He seems to be an older sort of god, the half-man, half-beast ones who look like they walk out of an illustration of the Book of Mountains and Seas.

-Most of the time, he takes the form of a seal, lounging around on rocks and watching sunrises, and has the personality of a sarcastic old man.

-Whether he's here to keep an eye on them, or they are supposed to keep an eye on him, no one can say. Ao Guang certainly treats him like an old acquaintance, though.

West Sea:

-They are a bit tricky. West is associated with Metal, and the two Metal-aligned trigrams, Qian and Dui, represent Heaven and Marsh...which don't neatly map onto weather and natural phenomena.

-Then I had an idea. What if they have a natural affinity for heavenly bodies? In ancient times, the movements of stars are believed to affect weather, after all, not to mention the sun and the moon.

-This affinity can be figurative——their lineage has a strong relationship with the stellar deities of the 28 Lunar Mansion and Dipper Mansion——or literal.

-Like a natural talent for divination and astrology, predicting the future from the patterns of stars. They are no governors of fate, unlike the actual Star Lords, they are just fate's weather forecast guy.

-This puts them in an awkward position, though: the stellar gods act according to the Jade Emperor's orders, some of which are very much secret and beyond their clearance levels, but the best scions of the West Sea can just infer it from the movement of stars alone.

-Which makes them obsessed with proving their loyalty, as well as enforcing a draconian standard of secrecy, just so they wouldn't get into trouble for knowing something they weren't supposed to know.

-Even more rarely, they can harness the power of astral light. Most of the time, such light is of lunar nature——Star Lord Taiyin also holds sway over the ocean's tides, though it is an easily forgotten power.

-But sometimes, that light comes from a fiery, lively, or ominous star, and the power that results is just as temperamental as their stellar origins.

-Enters Ao Lie, Third Prince of the West Sea, who has highly potent fire powers despite not being a South Sea dragon, and became the subject of some rather tasteless gossips about his parentage the moment it awakened.

-All dragons love their pearls: it's kinda like an ordinary yaoguai's "inner core", an orb of solidified Qi that can be spit out and store separately from the body, but much more powerful and culturally significant.

-Well, the West Sea dragons use their pearls in the same way a Feng Shui master uses their geomantic compass, or a Zhou Yi diviner, their turtle shell and copper coins. The ones left behind by venerable ancestors are especially treasured, believed to lead to clearer insights and more reliable readings.

-Through that lens, Ao Lie's burning of one such pearl is the equivalent of descrating the dead + destroying a priceless, irreplacable supercomputer.

-Intentional or not, to a lineage that is so serious about their discipline, taboos, and absolute loyalty to the Celestial Host, it is enough to warrant death.

-To no one's surprise, they are the diplomats, the inter-department coordinators when it comes to weatherly business. Not just between relevant celestial bureaus like the Thunder and Water Bureaus, but also between local dragon kings of rivers and lakes.

-As a result, the West Sea lineage is the most open to marrying non-oceanic dragons, even though these are often out of practical and political needs.

-That's my explanation for why, in JTTW, Ao Run's nine nephews either guard rivers or work for JE/the Buddha. The West Sea lineage has really turned nepotism into an art form.

North Sea:

-In JTTW, we know that they have Cold Dragons that can chill stuff. It is certainly not too much of a stretch to imagine them as the ice-and-snow specialists, the ones you summon when you are sick of the heat or need to insta-freeze something.

-Historically, the "North Sea" in Chinese texts refer to Lake Baikal. However, I think it is cooler if their palace is literally in the arctic zone, under the ice caps.

-Instead of garden-variety shrimp and crab soldiers, they have lots of cultivated marine mammals. And elite legions of belugas and narwhals and bowhead whales.

-The smallest and most isolationist lineage also carries the grimest duty, as border patrols and prison wardens. Not only is the North Sea a hotspot of rifts that lead to the Underworld, it also conceals the portal to the Evil-Vanquishing Mansion of the North Pole——realm of Emperor Zhenwu, Lord of the North.

-Kind of like the Lord Father of the East and Queen Mother of the West, he is the sovereign of the northern direction and the Water element, as well as the direct superior of Xuanwu, one of the Four Divine Beasts.

-And his job? Subduing demons. The Evil-Vanquishing Mansion is basically a fleet of giant, hollowed-out icebergs, packed to the brim with powerful demons, ghosts, and rogue immortals.

-Any prisoners that make an unlikely escape will emerge into the North Sea, where the vigilant army of the dragon king awaits. However, that is not their main duty; it is the Eye of the North Sea that they swear to eternally guard.

-And the prisoner of the Eye is none other than Shen Gongbao, the infamous traitor of the Chan Sect who was behind most major conflicts in the War of Investiture.

-It was said that, though his body was stuffed into the Eye of the North Sea as punishment, in the end, his soul still gets deified as a minor water god.

-However, if there is only a mindless body left in there, why the need for such heavy security? Only the most experienced elders and veterans are allowed to go into the Eye's vicinity to check on Yuanshi Tianzun's seals, and repeated visit by the same people is strictly prohibited.

-Perhaps, instead of a split of soul and body, deification has split the soul itself: one half is exorcised of all the undesirable qualities, the other left to stew and simmer in them until it mutates into something unrecognizable.

-Such is the rumor among the North Sea's younger scions. But folks will make up anything to pass the time in those long, cold arctic nights, and whatever the truth is, it doesn't matter, as long as the seal still holds.

South Sea:

-Their element, Fire, is directly opposite to the North Sea's; much like the Cold Dragons, the Fire Dragons of the South Sea are heat specialists, creators of droughts and wildfires as well as bringers of warm winds.

-And their fire is a peculiar variant of Earthly Fire. Unlike Heavenly Fires, which draw from the blaze of the Three-legged Sun Crow, or the True Fires immortals used in internal alchemy, Fire Dragons channel the power of earth's flaming veins: that is, undersea volcanos and thermal vents.

-Though they usually display their power in less flashy ways——steam clouds, a playful whiff of sulfur, a blast of warm wind on a winter night, a Fire Dragon fully on the offensive is just like a mini live volcano, unleashing streams of magma and scalding smoke clouds.

-When dragons are mentioned as one of the Eight Classes of Demigods in Buddhism, more often than not, they are from the South Sea lineage.

-Like, the most popular Bodhisattva in Asia, Guanyin, resides in the South Sea. It's all but granted that the local dragons would also be heavily influenced by Buddhist teachings, in the same way their northern kins are drawn to the entourage of Zhenwu.

-Fun fact: the imagery of dragons has appeared in Chinese art since the Neolithic period, but the specific worship of dragons as gods of the Four Seas is a result of Buddhist influence.

-Prior to that, the gods of the Four Seas in the Book of Mountains and Seas are all beasts with human faces, wearing snakes as earrings or standing on a snake.

-And in Sui-Tang era works, some variants merged the Four Seas gods with the Four Directions gods of ancient times, and said that the god of the South Sea was Zhurong.

-A.k.a. the fire god that defeated Gonggong (in the most well-known version of the tale), who, being the sore loser he is, went and knocked over the sky support pillar with his head. Thus, Nvwa's patching of the sky.

-Legends of the South Sea lineage claim that the Fire Dragons draw their power from Zhurong's embers, and their king is descended from the two dragon mounts of the primodial fire god.

-To the outrage of more traditionalist dragons, they often intermarry with Nagas, the serpentine water gods of the Western Lands. Guanyin's dragon girl attendant is born of one such union, between the Naga lord Sagara and a princess of the South Sea.

-Their palace is located inside an underwater volcano, said to be the remnant of Zhurong's great forge. Giant tube worm gardening is a popular hobby among the South Sea nobility; however peculiar it may appear to outsiders, these colorful creatures thrive in the union of Fire and Water, much like the lineage itself.

(Pictures of the Four Dragon Kings come from Nezha 1979.)

(The animated film makes the dragon king of the West a black dragon, and the North, a white one, a reversal of the colors traditionally associated with the two directions——West = White, North = Black.）

#journey to the west #investiture of the gods #chinese dragons #worldbuilding #chinese mythology #headcanon

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

Look the real reason so many book fans are mad about the wheel of time adaptation instead of having a great time with it regardless of changes, is that the production is putting a very strong focus on updating the worldbuilding and characters in specific ways, as well as changing individual events in favor of a more streamlined way to make The Same character beats happen.

Because this is an adaptation to film, and of course they have to change stuff. Come on people. Be realistic. You know how long the series is.

And there are parts of the book series that Do need updating. RJ was trying to be as progressive as he could in a lot of his approach to the series, but what was progressive in the 90s is not as progressive now so of course they are updating it. If you didn’t think this show was gonna have queer people and polyamory then sorry about it. Dear Mr. Jordan was Really Good at writing romantic relationships between women when he thought he was just writing friendships, he did it A Couple times. I would Bet Money on Avilayne becoming canon. This series is being created by a queer showrunner he is absolutely doing a queer reading of these books. Which I am Very Here For.

And he is doing a reading, and changing things. Which again, is Necessary. The book series is Super long and they have 8 seasons to do it in. They’re gonna change individual events to make sure that the main characters go through all the necessary character beats. And you’re just being recalcitrant if you can’t admit that season two Rules in a lot of ways. They are still making sure every important character has all their moments. And each individual episode has focused on some of the most powerful themes of the Entire book series. Including the inherent tragedies inherent to channelers such as: being cut off from the one power in various ways through shielding and stilling, having their own control of the one power taken over by others through weaves and ter’angreal, and living extended lifespans and thus leaving behind their loved ones. They’re doing a Very good job of keeping to the core themes and character beats and also changing stuff around to make the story work on a shorter time frame.

Also they’re working really hard to make sure Every character is as well fleshed out as possible. Meaning that yes, a lot of focus is being spent so far on the other main pov characters and all of the important aes sedai who will matter in the conflicts to come. That’s a good thing. Sorry to the people who only cared about the ta’veren boys or whatever but RJ wrote a ton of interesting and powerful women and they’re all getting their Due in this adaptation that is a feature not a bug.

It’s not like there isn’t stuff to be improved in the original! There is a huge chunk of the wheel of time that a lot of fans refer to as the slog! Where most of the main characters are separated and the plot is barely moving so some characters only show up in like two chapters of a single book, because there are so many individual things happening, before the plot starts moving faster again towards the end of the series. (And then there’s the crimes committed by Mr. Sanderson on the last three books but we’re not going to talk about that right now.

Which personally I would disagree that the slog is where the series is least enjoyable. The section I usually skip when rereading is the first two books, #having a great time right now actually with the show skipping through as much of the minutiae of books I and II as they can. The wheel of time is not a perfect series and Robert Jordan kept trying to finish it in one to three books at first and the first two books suffer as a result.

If you stopped reading in books one or two PLEASE just try to make it to three Trust Me. Or just watch the show and then read the battle of falme in book II and then read book III. You will appreciate books one and two more on a reread after all the stuff he does bring up there has really paid off. And also just have fun watching your faves be more happy than they are in later books ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The show is not Trying to be the books and frankly I’m glad it’s not! This is another turning of the wheel, another version of events, a parallel universe to the randland of the books. And I think they’re doing a pretty brilliant job of telling a version of that story so far this season.

Adaptations will change things. That’s a good thing. Judge it on executing the ideas it is bringing up and staying true to the core of the character arcs and themes of the original. And frankly it’s enhancing a lot of character arcs right now. There are many things that I think the show is already doing better than the books did tbh (Min, Liandrin, Selene, making Perrin spend less time dithering about the Wolf Stuff, speeding up Mat’s healing from the dagger so my best boy gets more time to shine)

Adaptations are transformative works. To lesser and greater degrees they reinterpret a work through a different artistic lens and medium. The changes are not bad because they are changes. Judge it on the execution of the story it’s actually telling instead of a close comparison to the books. And they are keeping as true to the books as they can whether you acknowledge that or not.

If you’re a person who reads fanfiction but you can’t judge a film adaptation for what it is instead of what it’s not then please try Slightly harder.

And if you’re just mad that it’s all queer and polyamorous now and the boys aren’t the only main characters then die mad I guess. I will continue having a pretty great time watching this show chock full of extremely powerful (and sometimes evil) women. I think RJ would have liked it tbh.

#my only criticism is they got rid of the weaving opening #bring it back #the wheel of time #wot on prime #wot show #wot #unreasonably attractive fandom #Caitie speaks #this is a mat cauthon stan account #I know I know I’m still talking about this #well people are still acting affronted that they’re not telling the exact same story as the books in the tags so

[dokidokitsuna]

God is a squishy friend

This was some of the first dialogue I ever wrote for Nell and Venn, possibly for LADYBIRD as a whole. ^^ Just a goofy little interaction that got stuck in my head~

Update on the project: Still slowly working on Episode 1, now known as Episode A1-- I've decided how I'm going to structure the story, and I'm considering making a video to explain it, while going into further depth on the character arcs and worldbuilding (the 'World Notes' section of my planning doc has gotten absurdly huge over the past few months...). The only thing that makes me hesitant is that I would have to write a script for it, and I already have too many scripts in-progress that need my attention right now (like A1's second draft...). But perhaps in a month or two I will find the time. ^^;

#ladybird #nell #the veneration #comic

[venndaai]

REPUBLIC OF TWO SYSTEMS INDEPENDENCE DAY FANWORK EXCHANGE, 2023 EDITION

This year is a pretty special one in the Imperial Radch/Leckieverses fandom! This October will mark the 10th anniversary of Ancillary Justice's publishing date, and this June we're getting a new Radch universe book, Translation State! So it feels important to run this exchange once again. I'm excited to get hype.

(The Republic of Two Systems Independence Day is a holiday mentioned in the Preface to the Traveler's Guide to the Two Systems. Ms. Leckie has told us it can probably be celebrated the Monday after Easter Sunday, when Peeps are cheapest. This year, that's April 10.)

TAG SET  —   COLLECTION

NOMINATION PERIOD: until February 26, 11:59 PST. NOW CLOSED.

SIGNUPS: Closed. February 27 - March 6, 11:59 PST.

ASSIGNMENTS OUT: March 7.

WORKS DUE: April 7, 11:59 PST.

WORK REVEALS: April 10, 12:00 AM PST.

AUTHOR REVEALS: April 17, 12:00 AM PST.

MATCHING: OR matching, on both characters and ships. (The signups should be simpler this year, now that I understand AO3 exchange tags better.)

MINIMUM: 500 words or a sketch on unlined paper.

DETAILS UNDER CUT

NOMINATIONS:

Go here to nominate tags!

There are three fandoms for this exchange: Imperial Radch, The Raven Tower, and Crossover. Characters/ships from Provenance, Night's Slow Poison, and She Commands me and I Obey go in the Imperial Radch fandom. Characters from the godsverse short stories go in the Raven Tower fandom. For Crossover, you can nominate crossover relationships between Radchverse and godsverse characters, relationships between Leckie and non-Leckie characters, or solo non-Leckie characters you want to see in a Leckie universe. Please put the second fandom in parenthesis after the character. For example: “Breq & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)”. 

For easy matching, all nominations will be Relationships. To nominate a solo character, write "Solo: (Character)". For example, "Solo: Medic". Relationships can be romantic, indicated by a “/”, or platonic, indicated by an “&”. For example, “Breq/Murderbot” would indicate a romantic or sexual relationship, while “Breq & Murderbot” would be platonic.

I've added general Worldbuilding tags for Radch and Raven Tower, but feel free to nominate more specific ones, like "Worldbuilding: genitalia festival".

We are a small and crazy fandom. There may be some injokes and OCs in the tagset. If you want to nominate something weird & obscure, go for it.

If you miss the nomination deadline by a couple hours, just message me and I’ll reopen the tagset for you. 

SIGNUPS:

You will need to make at least 3 requests, and 4 offers. For each request or offer, pick at least 1 fandom, 1 relationship tag, and one medium from the dropdown tagset. You can group your requests however you like; you could make 3 individual requests, each with one character, or three requests each with 20 characters- up to you.

If you only want to receive or create works based around worldbuilding, rather than characters, request/offer the “Worldbuilding” tag.

The way the matching works, you will be matched with someone who used at least 1 of the Fandom tags, 1 of the same Relationship tags, and 1 of the Medium tags as you. The work you create only has to use one of the requested relationship tags. 

You can pick “Any” for both offers and requests! Just remember that really does mean “Any”, and be prepared.

If you’re fine with both Art and Fic, you can check off both boxes, or just pick “Any” for that section. 

If there are things you very much Do Not Want in your gift, please list these in the Optional Details box for each of your prompts. For example: “DNW any appearances by spider mechs.” You are required to make a good faith effort to not include DNWs in your recipient’s gift. 

You’re encouraged to give your gifter some prompts! You can put these in the Optional Details box, or paste a link to a letter into the URL box. Optional Details are Optional, and your creator isn’t bound to follow them, outside of the DNWs. Only DNWs in your signup are enforceable, so put them there, not just in a linked letter.

You are allowed to mention characters and ships that weren’t nominated in your optional details, but remember, your creator matched on the tags you chose and isn’t obligated to include anything else.

If you are 18+, you can ask for or create NSFW, but your creator isn’t required to give it to you, so it would be polite to provide some SFW prompts as well. Only give someone NSFW if they ask for it in their prompts. 

ASSIGNMENTS: everyone will get an email through their AO3 account once I’ve run matching. The email will have your assignment in it. 

It’s possible there will be some people who won’t have anyone they could create for. I’ll email them through their AO3 email asking them to add more offers, and if they don’t respond in 24 hours, their signups will be deleted. If this happens to you and you don’t see my email in time, don’t panic! Just contact me and we’ll work something out.

Please don’t tell your giftee who you are. If you have a question, let me know and I’ll convey it to them. 

When you are creating your work, make sure you include at least one tag from at least one of your giftee’s requests, and don’t include DNWs. You only need to create one work, and it only needs to include one of the tags in your giftee’s signup. 

DEFAULTING:

If you can’t finish your gift, no worries. Just click the “default” button on your assignment page. If the person assigned to you also defaults, you may not get a gift. 

If you need an extension, just message me and let me know! If the posting deadline passes and you haven’t posted anything or contacted me, I’ll assume you’re defaulting. 

If you’ve posted your gift, and your creator defaults their assignment, a pinch-hitter will create a gift for you. Everyone who posts a gift will get a gift. 

POSTING:

Please post a finished work of 500 words or sketch on unlined paper by the posting deadline! You can continue to edit and add to your gift until the 10th, but you need to have something that could work as a gift by the 7th.

To post your gift, go to your Assignments page on AO3, and click the “Fulfill” button. Your gift will be automatically given to your giftee, but it will be hidden until the reveal date on the 10th. 

REVEALS: Works will be anonymous for a week after they are revealed. 

#imperial radch #the raven tower #translation state #ancillary justice #ro2sid exchange #ro2s9d 2023

[bedlamsbard]

I got into your fics because of Thor and Loki.. and while I love the world (and you basically sold me on Steve/Nat) I am still very curious about the twins. What made you go the prophecy route?

Oh, man, this was almost three years ago -- with rare exception I use the same background and worldbuilding across stories, so while the prophecy is introduced back in Morning, it's also mentioned in the Yonderverse. It's just that Yonder isn't really a story where that kind of thing features, and Morning's all about destiny/fate/timelines, which is part of the reason it's in there. IIRC, the other reason was pushback against some of the meta/fic I'd seen in the Thor fandom back then, since that was still when I was still reading in the fandom. I wanted to take Loki (and Thor) out of operating in a very human realm, where there were very direct parallels to things that could happen to, like...normal people, and put them back into a mythical realm where stuff like the prophecy was taken very seriously. But it's important that it's also an ambiguous prophecy that could as easily have gone the other way, which I don't think has actually been revealed anywhere, because the prophecy has been most directly dealt with in a chapter of Morning that hasn't been posted yet, but has been written since 2021. So I've had this all figured out since then, I just haven't been able to use that chapter yet. (It is a full-chapter altverse flashback, and it has to follow a present-day chapter.)

Hela is actually the first person to mention it in Morning:

She had known for five centuries before her exile that they were coming, her little brothers. Odin’s sons, battle-born, battle-worn. Prophecy could leave many things to chance – the finer details, mostly – but the broad strokes were always certain. Hela had sat in the hall of the vǫlur and known by the end of the chief seeress’s first stanza that it was the end of her. As soon as Odin knew of the new prophecy, he would have no more use for her, not when Asgard’s wyrd said he would have his matched pair of perfect princes. She had slaughtered all of the vǫlur for that, hoping that Odin would never hear of the prophecy, but the vǫlur were like the wyrd they spun out – no one, not even the goddess of death, could truly destroy them. Sooner or later a vǫlva would come to Asgard bearing the Norns’ words, though it had been, Hela assumed, after her exile, since she had no memory of the vǫlur’s return. Even one of the Aesir could not stop fate, merely delay it. Fate, like death, was inevitable.

This introduces my take on the volur and the first hint of the prophecy, that it pretty significantly predates Thor's and Loki's births (by fourteen centuries), and that Hela is the only one that knows the entire thing because she killed the volur who spoke about it. It's also mentioned very briefly in Yonder and at one point Yonder went into more detail and I cut that because it's not thematically important in Yonder the way it is in Morning.

“You didn’t know?” Sif said to the Valkyrie. “It’s a very famous story.” “Yes,” Loki said, “as in ‘story,’ as in ‘fictional,’ as in ‘Odin made it all up.’” He ground his teeth and looked irritated. “What story?” the Valkyrie said pointedly. Sif shot a glance at Thor and Loki, then explained, “About Odin’s sons being born at the beginning and end of the Battle of Jotunheim. There’s supposed to be a prophecy – Odin’s sons, battle-born –”

So it features pretty significantly in an unposted chapter of Morning, here are the two most relevant sections. (Farbauti's a volva but was not at Urdarbrunnr when Hela did her slaughter, and isn't aware that it was Hela who did it.)

The giantess didn’t look at him. “Twenty-four centuries ago the vǫlur were slaughtered at Urðarbrunnr.  I wasn’t there with my sisters that day, but I know what prophecy it was they sang into being.  It did not come to Asgard, I think, for many centuries afterward, nor was the whole of it brought to Valaskjalf for the ears of Odin One-eye.” Frigga hesitated before she shook her head slightly. “What prophecy?” Loki said. “What – the prophecy?” “Odin’s sons, battle-born,” Farbauti quoted softly. “There’s more, but that’s the part you and Odin cared about, isn’t it?  That he might have his matched pair of perfect princes.  Never mind that you might never hear the rest of it, because the vǫlur that still trusted Asgard brought those stanzas to you in time, but those who would never trust Asgard again brought the rest to me.” No single vǫlva ever got the whole of a prophecy, Loki knew.  Individuals got bits and pieces, but it took many vǫlur to piece together the entirety of one.  Since the massacre at Urðarbrunnr he didn’t know if more than a handful had been completed; most of the known prophecies dated from before the slaughter. “They are my sons,” Frigga said, her voice hard. “Yes,” Farbauti said, “but they could have been mine.  Both of them could have been mine, your blood-son and his twin.”

and then a little later, after they argue for a while and some other stuff is discussed.

Farbauti nodded, then crossed back to the brazier with the kettle and poured herself another cup of spiced wine.  As she spooned honey into it, she said, “When the vǫlur see the future, it isn’t set.  We see possible futures – certain things that will happen, because they’re part of the pattern laid out in the great tapestry the Norns make of our wyrd, but there are many ways that those threads can be woven.  And those threads themselves are always being spun.  Yes, our own choices make up our ørlǫg along with our natures, but so do the choices of all those who come before us.  What was possible when the vǫlur speak the great patterns of the Norns into being is not always possible a century later, let alone ten.  The possibilities narrow as the cloth is worked and the thread of our ørlǫg is spun.” She set her hip against the table and drank deep from her cup, then quoted softly, “Odin’s sons, battle-born, battle-worn – that’s the version you know, isn’t it?” Loki nodded shortly.  “Everyone says Thor and I were born at the beginning and end of the Battle of Jotunheim.” “I can’t speak for your brother,” Farbauti said, “though I don’t know that there’s any reason to lie about that –” “There isn’t,” Frigga said. “Thor was born when the Bifrost brought the last of the einherjar to Jotunheim.” Farbauti smiled, thin. “Your other son took his first breath as the first of my people died.” Loki felt the muscle in his jaw jump again, but glanced upwards at his mother anyway.  He tried to make his voice light as he said, “So Thor’s still older than me.” Frigga hesitated for a brief instant, then said, “Sixteen minutes.  I scried it to be certain.”  She leaned down and pressed her lips briefly to the crown of his head, making Farbauti’s brows knit a little – a somewhat disconcerting effect on her Jotun features. Loki let his breath out slowly, suddenly dizzy with relief.  “So we did come into this world together,” he said.  He had been afraid to ask before, to find one more part of his reality crumbling around him; having it back… “Yes,” Farbauti said.  When they both looked up at her, she shrugged. “It’s their wyrd.  Odin’s sons, battle-born, battle-worn,” she quoted, the rhythm of the familiar words a little different than an Asgardian would have used.  What she said next was entirely unfamiliar.  “Or Laufey’s sons, battle-won, bone-born.” Loki heard the sound he had made only after it passed his lips, a soft grunt like he had punched in the gut.  You didn’t have to be a vǫlva to interpret that. His mother’s grip was so tight on his shoulders that he suspected he would find bruises there later. Farbauti made a gesture to toss the matter aside. “It’s done.  What might be is now only what could have been, and ultimately what never was.  That path was closed to all of us at least a century before your birth.  Laufey never worked up the courage to challenge Asgard on its own ground, just proxy wars.”  She smiled a little, idle.  “Or I suppose he might have taken more than Odin’s eye that day, though I doubt it.  Regardless –”  She shrugged.  “It’s done.” “Yes,” Frigga said softly. “It’s done.”

The Asgardians never knew the other version of the prophecy. That is actually a reference to a What If comic called What If Thor Was Raised by Frost Giants, where Laufey does kill Odin and take Thor to raise him himself.

Part of the reason the prophecy is in Morning is to set up the idea that there are things that are going to happen, though they're conceptualized in different ways depending who says it -- obviously the Asgardians and the Jotuns think of fate very differently than (my version of) the TVA, since Mobius gives a long explanation earlier in Morning. But those things are going to happen aren't always going to happen in the same way or in predictable ways, so the prophecy sets up that Loki and Thor were always going to be raised together as twins, but not necessarily in the context that they were. And again, part of that is just to put the Asgardians and company into a non-human and very mythical context, that they accept is governed by other powers.

All of this is also true for the Yonderverse, it just doesn't come up because it's not really relevant there. There are brief mentions of the prophecy, and then Urdarbrunnr and the volur are mentioned a few times (they'd both feature in the Horizon sequel), but it's just not thematically relevant in the same way it is for Morning. But it's still part of my worldbuilding.

#starkaddict #bedlam replies #morning behind the scenes

[ehksidian]

Ooh! Worldbuilding, you say? Whatcha workin’ on right now? What’s the current Fixation?

I HAVE LIKE FOUR DIFFERENT PROJECTS. arguably five.

all of them are sci-fantasy flavored in some way because i have a Specific Taste.

the Qvarniverse (needs a better name - it's named after One specific planet that isn't even the whole setting) is an intergalactic setting where gods (and the worlds they come from) are used as fuel in some regions of space, other regions have massive wizard groups maintaining an arcanoharmonic generator that puts out more usable energy than a star, and somje places use good 'ol strictly sci-fi bullshit. two projects in this, one is a murder mystery set on Qvar itself (Qvar being one of those god-focused worlds, and in that section of space) and the other is in a research station manned by people from all three different "power factions" and deals with that aspect.

Noquana is a singular world devastated by a massive flood - it turned every mostly magical being into water, and most land into water as well. Five factions remain in this post-post apocalypse, and all of them vie for the exact same resource: the bountiful, highly advanced magitech that rests below the waves. Luckily the runic magic that permeates magitech makes it resistant to saltwater corrosion. No spell-slinging here - the most you'll see is someone whipping out a spell scroll or a magitech device. This one is a big interconnected story featuring a member of each faction, though the two most notable ones are the technolich pirate and the zombie-worshipping rotdruid who's scared of dying.

KAU-SHALAN is a city built into the corpse of the god that ate the stars. exactly 100 people live here - never more, rarely less. Whenever one of the remaining 100 living sapient species dies, another member of that species is produced by the crystals in the core of the city. The story here follows the last human and her quest to find out who killed her previous incarnation...who, mysteriously, is an exact copy of her - something that has never happened. Very specifically themed after whalefalls, and the line between whether this is strictly fantasy or strictly sci-fi is very intentionally blurry here. No one uses magic, and yet they are surrounded by things that could only be described as such by the inhabitants.

Akamia is a world of seven floating islands, each one stacked atop each other in a perfectly vertical column. Each island is surrounded by a (literally floorless) ocean, which is the easiest way to travel between layers...and only doable by the strnge aquatic dragons that call those oceans home. At the very topmost island is Lazarus City, a city with no need for food or drink as the inhabitants are fueled by the mysterious magical vials they are born with. Filled with electric blue light (and making their eyes the same color), these eight vials that each person in Lazarus City carries allows them to live without any external food or water - at the mere cost of passing out for eight hours a day to recharge them. This follows the story of a mouse girl who lived at the bottom of the world, who somehow had her own bound vials - despite residents of Lazarus City being unable to leave...

#ehks text posts #xena worldbuilding

[ninthprime]

mildly arbitrary rating of every gundam i have watched so far

in order of me starting them

witch from mercury: 7.5/10. we’re never gonna get confirmation of people’s various theories that this show was originally planned for 50 episodes and i’ve also heard that the showrunner’s series tend to be kind of just Like This, but gwitch has a lot of missed potential mostly focused on 1. its seemingly incomplete worldbuilding and 2. the fact that the arcs of much of its secondary cast (guel, nika, shaddiq) appear to jump over a few steps or just are missing something. on the other hand, the arcs of its primary cast (particularly suletta) are great, suletta herself is a top-tier protagonist, the tertiary cast is one of the best i’ve seen in gundam (i love earth house), and sulemio is probably objectively the best gundam romance even if i’m pretty sure it’s not my personal favorite.

gundam 0079: 9.5/10. the GOAT. you know how it is. every single person who got into gundam via gwitch like i did but still hasn’t gone back to watch 0079 is doing themself a total disservice. you watch this show and both everything about mecha and everything about modern anime in general suddenly clicks completely in your brain. everyone who has been obsessed with char aznable and amuro ray for the last 40+ years has been completely right. i think its only big flaws are some of its treatment of women (though later shows like ZZ have way more glaring issues there) and its shortened length, but frankly if you hadn’t told me it got cut short seven episodes early i would not have noticed, because its finale may be one of my all time favorite television finales ever. just go watch it. i’m sitting you down right now

zeta gundam: 8.5/10. a really ideal sequel in a lot of ways that are remarkable considering the gap of time between it and 0079. focuses on new characters who reflect on the last show while still being their own things, and brings back the cast of the last show in ways that feel like they make sense while still being unexpected and making you look at things in a new light. deeply iconic and atmospheric in ways that are a little overwhelming at times; it is a dour show. has way more glaring flaws for me than a lot of the fandom brings up though, mostly in its pacing and its villains. this show has an entire middle section i barely remember and do we need both the four and rosamia storylines? and frankly i do not care about the titans that much (other than sarah).

zz gundam: 8.5/10. zz defender crop is here. please ignore everyone who tells you that you can skip zz. zeta’s other half in ways that aren’t just “it started two weeks after zeta in real life”- it also fixes zeta’s pacing, provides a welcome counterpoint to its dire tone, and its villains are literally just improved versions of zeta’s (glemy is better scirocco! haman is a top tier gundam villain in general!). i think the middle section of this show- the entire time they are on earth- is my favorite section of UC gundam, or at least tied with 0079’s ramba ral and finale arcs. i do think the dip in quality people say it has in the last arc is true. also probably has the largest Woman Problem in any gundam i’ve seen so far (i have a threshold for bad women writing so high it is practically antifeminist but unfortunately emary breaks that threshold, what the hell is up with everything about emary) even though i love some of those women very much. secretly has the boldest and most thematically interesting gundam finale so far. ple forever

char’s counterattack: 8/10. as i’ve said before: a gorgeous film about two men being so divorced that thousands of people die. genuinely iconic and also very bold but i often find myself torn as to whether i want tomino to be more explicit about what he’s saying here. we could have saved ourselves years of “was char right??” debates but then again, it’s the spirit of cca to claim that only you have the right take about cca. beyond the time is a good song

gundam unicorn: 7.5/10. politics here are often confusing and messy, and i think it suffers from its core characters (banagher and mineva) and their relationship not getting the time they need. on the other hand, i’m interested in what it says about the worldbuilding of UC (even if i think it didn’t execute it that well) and its secondary cast is great; i did nearly cry about marida and zinnerman so that sure works. full frontal does not bug me nearly as much as he bothers most people although i think he has the same “needs more time to cook” issue banagher and mineva have. i even kind of like what they do with riddhe and i usually dislike that archetype. in other words: i would have been nuts for the forty episode (and properly paced) version of this show. marida forever

gundam hathaway: 7/10?? hard to tell here without having the next two movies. was a bit hard to get invested in the conflict near the end as we met many characters who are not developed yet. but the relationship between the core trio here is intriguing and i like hathaway as a protagonist a lot.

the rest of my “gundams i am most interested in list” is victory -> turn a -> 00 -> iron blooded orphans so that’s the next four shows. after…who can say

#gundam personal tag #hot takes post. watch out. weeoo weeoo

[butterflydm]

origins of the wheel of time

I was originally planning on reading Origins of The Wheel of Time after my reread of the last three books, but it has arrived and also is so much shorter, so I’m going to read it first instead, lol. It’s not a narrative, but I’m intrigued to find out what it has to say about the series. I’m not entirely sure if it’s written more like a sourcebook or whatnot. 

My thoughts contain spoilers through a memory of light

1. Okay, looks like it’s broken into four sections -- first will be a bit of a biography of Jordan, then there’s specifically a whole section about how Tolkien inspired him, then his writing process perhaps (the summary on the inside of the book cover notes that there’s a previously unseen early draft of a cut scene from Eye of the World, so maybe that’s there; and then one about “the real world” comparisons (mythology-related maybe; I know that there’s a lot of mythological connections tied into the imagery, especially with Rand, Mat, & Perrin).

2. The full world map that we get (it says it was adjusted based on things that Jordan had said about the maps that had previously been made) shows how the Westlands/Randland is actually the smallest section of the map -- Shara is bigger, the Mad Lands are bigger, and Seanchan is enormous. lol, yeah, Tuon ain’t gonna be ruling all of that. I don’t care how great a general Mat is. Both of them are gonna die long before that area gets back under her iron grip (especially if she really does manage to keep herself from channeling - man, it would be so funny if she actually does get around to channeling one day but is only as strong as Morgase, literally the weakest channeler possible. I feel like Jordan wouldn’t have been able to resist making her Nynaeve-level strong, because of how much he was contorting and manipulating the story to appease her in the narrative, but her being super-weak would be so much funnier). Nation building is not easy and it’s gonna take time for her to even get over there since she will need to finish ‘settling’ the Seanchan-ruled Westlands first (and she’ll have to worry about Westlands-based rebellions as soon as she leaves for Seanchan proper too - the original plan that the Empress had seemed to be that her daughter would rule over the ~new land~ in her name while she kept a tight grip on the homeland, but now the rest of Tuon’s family is dead, so it’s more likely that she’s gonna have to pick if she wants the Westlands or if she wants Seanchan, because she has no one she can trust to rule either of them in her absence). I wonder if Jordan was planning to handwave her to be the ruler of the disputed lands quickly so that he could tell another story about... Mat being miserable and Perrin needing to kill someone? Or if he was going to take into account how likely it would be that Tuon would NOT be able to actually regain control of the majority of the continent. I mean, since he only left two sentences behind about the outriggers, he probably hadn’t even decided yet.

3. Oh, gosh, the author of this book teaches at The Citadel, where Jordan went to school after he left the military. The Citadel had a pretty heavy hazing/bullying culture, at least back when Jordan attended (from what I’ve read) and some Weird Ideas about men and women, and definitely some “beating students is good for the learning process” vibes. A lot of the odd quirks in Jordan’s worldbuilding seemed to be based in him assuming that his culture’s particular practices and his own personal kinks were just ~human nature~, including some of the stuff that seemed to be essentially ‘taught’ behind-the-scenes at the Citadel. Oh, and this author (who teaches Military History specifically, it sounds like?) was consulted about the writing of The Last Battle in the final book. This book was also written at the same desk where Jordan wrote Wheel of Time. That’s actually quite interesting to me, and I wonder if that contributes to... when Jordan wrote about war, it was very personal, because he’d been in war. But if your main consultant is someone approaching it from an academic PoV rather than a ‘in the trenches’ PoV, that definitely lends a different angle onto the way the battles are written about.

4. Ah, WoT was a formative book series for the author -- he read EotW when he was fifteen. So he is quite a bit younger than Jordan. He even interviewed at the Citadel for his teaching job knowing that it was where Jordan had gone to school. He did know Jordan personally as well (I’m going to be using his pen name for WoT as opposed to his personal name because, well, I never knew him. Though I did meet him at a book signing once.) - it looks like they met when Jordan was already quite ill. And that’s the Foreword.

5. Every time it’s noted that Harriet (Jordan’s widow) was his editor, I feel the urge to wonder why on earth she was asleep at the wheel for Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams (though, honestly, the books started to lose focus and needed much tighter editing starting in Lord of Chaos). I mean, it’s common in a LOT of series, once they become popular. But wow there’s a lot of needless fluff in the later WoT books.

6. Okay, the biographical section of the book. First thing relevant to the books is that even as a kid, Jordan was exposed to war-related PTSD - his father was in the Pacific during WWII and “For years afterward he would sometimes wake up in the night, sweating, afraid that in his sleep, in his remembered dreams, he might have hurt the wife he loved.” I’m seeing a lot of Rand in what’s written here about Jordan’s father. A gentle man who did his best to be honest and good but was terrified that he might hurt the people he loves.

7. Ah, Jordan ran into a very common trouble of gifted kids once they get into college -- he had always been smart enough to glide through classes, so he had no clue how to study, and floundered once the classes were hard enough to require it. I mean, mood. Been there. 

8. That’s when he enlisted, and he spent two tours in Vietnam. Even before I actually read the section on it, I can say that (much like Jordan was second-hand aware of how rough WWII was on his father), I have seen the effects that going to Vietnam had on my own uncle. Incredibly traumatizing experience for him that he still has after-effects about, even today. It’s affected him his whole life. 

9. Jordan was aware that his own personal experiences had an impact on his writing -- he even pointed out himself that his own personal trauma from instinctively shooting a woman who aimed a gun at him during his Vietnam tour was basically why Rand (& Mat) have issues killing women. So, he was dealing with his own trauma while writing. I think it’s possible, as a reader, to be aware of that personal history but also go “but Rand’s attitude really doesn’t fully make sense with the worldbuilding and can get pretty frustrating, especially to female readers”. Both of those things can exist at the same time, I think. Bringing personal experience to the writing process is a double-edged sword that way. 

To go back to that worldbuilding thought, there are definitely times where it feels like Jordan failed to fully do the mental math on what a world that has the backstory that he has given WoT would look like (and the show actually reflects the book’s reality more in what Liandrin says about how despite the power of the Aes Sedai, there are still many places where powerful men are in a position to hurt little girls). A non-Jordan example of this sort of thing would be Dragon Age: Origins. In the character creation screen, the player is straight-up told that women and men are treated equally in the world setting they’re about to play. In some of the character origin choices, this is disproven within minutes of actual gameplay, with oversexualized female characters and sexual assault threats that are pretty much only directed at women. Because that stuff is subconsciously lurking in the background of the writer’s mind and it just seeps out. While Rand’s sexism is more ‘benign’ in that it stems from him holding women above himself as a category, this still harms the women around him (and harms himself). I do think Jordan was aware of that, because we do see negative results from Rand’s No Woman Must Be Killed stance, but, again... given Rand’s cultural background, him having this stance at all makes very little sense, because he didn’t grow up in a culture where women were treated as fragile flowers that must be sheltered and kept from the dangers of the world (and it makes no sense for that to be LTT’s background either).

10. We also get the note in the middle of all this that Jordan’s mom was “a housewife”... but she worked “in defense” during the war “when everyone worked” and then later in her life, after she had kids, she suffered frequent nervous breakdowns. Which sounds like a very familiar story in terms of some of the history I’ve read on women during/after WWII, where they got a taste of freedom and independence during the war and then were expected to completely give up that part of themselves when the men came back to reclaim their jobs. Just stuff all their feelings inside to be the ~perfect housewives~. And this also makes me think of how Jordan always has a “but you gotta quit your job if you decide to have a husband/family” clause for the ‘working’ women in the series who aren’t nobility/elites (Aiel Maidens & Seanchan to’raken riders).

11. His experience in Vietnam sounds like it definitely also contributed a lot to Mat’s characterization in TSR/TFoH. This whole entire section here on page 14 vibes very Mat (before he got sucked into the Seanchan ‘storyline’, such as it was). “In the end, for most of us, the medals boiled down to managing not to die.” ... “That is why I am not I repeat, not! a hero. I just managed to stay alive.” From reading this, it sounds like Rand was based more on his father’s experiences/PTSD from WWII, and Mat was based more on his own experiences/feelings in Vietnam (or, to put it another way, Rand was based more on an outside view of how PTSD affected someone that he loved, while Mat was based more on his own internal experience of war). Though his descriptions of being ‘in the zone’ (which I’ve definitely heard other people talk about too but have never experienced myself) sound similar to how being a channeler affects people, in terms of time slowing, your senses feeling sharper, etc.

12. Okay, skipping past his early writing career (he first met his future wife Harriet while he was out shopping his first book, in her capacity as an editor), the first books he wrote under the “Robert Jordan” pen-name were some novels in the Conan universe (I’ve never read them; I saw the movie(s)? but never read any of the books) and I am reminded that the first plan for the WoT books was a six-book series. So that was after Eye of the World had already been completed and he was almost finished with The Great Hunt. Plan at the time was six books total but morphed as the books progressed.

13. His illness really was the kind that progressed very rapidly. I never read about all the details back when it happened, but it all happened over the course of about a year and a half before he died, it sounds like here. Maybe two?

14. Harriet, as both his widow and editor, was entrusted with the task of finding someone to complete the books. She first found out about Sanderson based on reading the eulogy written by him on his personal blog post when Jordan died (that a friend had sent to her), and decided on him as the one after reading Mistborn. He was the only name on her list of potential authors who she thought could finish the series, though it sounds like it didn’t hurt that he was already under the Tor umbrella.

15. So, the epilogue that we have in the current series is, basically, the one that was dictated by Jordan once he’d realized that he was most likely not going to recover in order to finish writing the series himself (and recorded by Team Jordan).

16. “All told, there were roughly two hundred manuscript pages of book-specific notes left behind. Some of the pages were outlines for complete scenes - bit and pieces of what became the published prologues for the final three books, for instance, as well as the all-important epilogue of A Memory of Light - but others were only hints of plots and solutions. And then there were the thousands upon thousands of pages of series-related notes, glossaries, lists, and other working materials Jordan had left behind in his personal files. It was all they had, and it left so very much undone. There wasn’t a full outline. There wasn’t a sequenced plot. Most of the puzzles only had pieces of the solution. One of the questions that Maria never got to ask Jordan - the next one on her list that Friday before he passed - was about the final moment in the series: “How did Rand light his pipe?” The answer to this, and everything else, now fell to Brandon and Team Jordan.”

17. What a massive, unbelievably massive undertaking. “Along the way, there was also a keen awareness that Jordan had made and then cast aside many plans throughout the writing of the series. Did they need to use all the hints in the years and years of notes? Surely not, since at times the notes didn’t even agree with each other. Jordan had a habit of stockpiling old files, after all: a boon for the later researcher, but a nightmare for the present writer.” And, for me, whatever you might say about Sanderson as a writer himself, whether you like his writing style or not, or like him as a person or not, you can’t say that he wasn’t sincerely doing his best to live up to the legacy that Harriet handed to him, or that he’s not a genuine fan of the series. Same thing with Rafe Judkins now -- agree or disagree with the changes that have been made, but Rafe is a very sincere fan of the series and is adapting the books with a sincere heart.

18. “Had Jordan lived to complete the work himself, it’s unlikely he would’ve managed to fit all that needed to be done within the single book he’d promised. Light knows, it might well have grown even beyond the fourteen volumes that Brandon and Team Jordan ultimately delivered.” I’ve literally said exactly this same thing, lol. And, with that, we are done with that section of the book.

19. The next section is about Tolkien’s inspiration on Jordan and the series. On why Jordan wanted to write his own fantasy series: “One of my themes is (and it’s one reason I wrote the books as fantasies) there is good, there is evil, there is right, there is wrong - it does exist. If you do that in a mainstream novel you are accused of being judgmental unless you’ve chosen the right political viewpoint.”

20. This section talks about fantasy in general as a genre before noting the specific elements (especially in EotW) that are inspired by Tolkien - the Shire/the Two Rivers; the Fades/the Black Riders -- and all this was very deliberate on Jordan’s part, to evoke a sense of nostalgia before he went beyond those general outlines of what had been inspired by Tolkien. And he also took inspiration from the same places that Tolkien took inspiration -- the myths and legends of our own world.

21. Then he goes on for... a while about language evolution through time, but I’ve read about that before, so I’m kinda skimming this part, ngl. But essentially, he kinda links what Tolkien was doing with language in LotR with what Jordan does with the concept of the Wheel of Time itself.

22. But then he does also go on to point out that having been in the military and going through war is another thing that Tolkien and Jordan had in common, and something that can be seen in their protagonists, that Frodo at the end of LotR also appears to be suffering PTSD/‘shell-shock' and is never the same again.

23. Okay, now in the next section, we dive into the actual creation of the series itself, starting with the first idea of it in the mid-70s, which was the basic notion of ‘what is it REALLY like to be the savior of mankind and what kind of toll might that have on someone’ with the addition of ‘and you’ll go mad and die to save everyone’. So that’s the core of the narrative that Rand believes he’s walking for the majority of the series. But he didn’t actually write anything on the idea until 1983 when the success of his Conan tie-books led them to asking him if he could write a fantasy book or series of his own.

24. lol, first it was gonna be a single book. Then maybe a trilogy. The publisher though “knew how Jim liked to tell a story” so offered him a six-book deal.

25. Yeah. I knew that “Tam” essentially (whatever his original name was) was the original character idea, before Tam became the foster father and Rand became the main character and that makes so much sense after seeing how much Jordan based Rand’s fears and personality on his own father. Of course he thought of the character as an older man, who’d lived a life. That was who he was basing it on. 

26. So some parts of Jordan’s collection are staying sealed until 2037. It doesn’t really say why most of it is already opened to the public but some of it is being unsealed in the future. I wonder if some of his notes have maybe some more personal comparisons not comfortable being made public at the time? But in his earliest notes, three books “dominated his early decisions regarding the scope and course of The Wheel of Time”. Lord of the Rings, Le Morte d’Arthur, and The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. I have not read the last two, so I’ve gotta trust what the author tells me about them, lol. I do roughly know that Le Morte d’Arthur formed the basis for a lot of the current stories about King Arthur, but I’ve never heard of The White Goddess before.

27. Apparently, The White Goddess is not considered... um, particularly accurate as far as the connections that it makes between various myths and legends of different cultures. “It was, at its core, a kind of conspiracy theory. Those sell.” Ah, it’s about the idea that there was an overarching goddess that cultures all worshipped before the current forms of religion existed. Okay, yeah, I’m definitely seeing how this would inform some of his writing ideas as he was pulling the story together.

28. I do like that the author here -- Michael Livingston -- sets out what he believes are Jordan’s INTENTIONS in the text (based on what his various notes said about the story) but says that it’s up to the reader as to whether or not Jordan was successful in translating that to the narrative. Example: he points out that while Jordan’s intention in creating the saidin/saidar binary was to point out the damage that one side unchecked can do and to show a need for balance rather than one half overpowering the other half, this is something that can certainly feel exclusionary to people who don’t fit into that binary. I do appreciate that acknowledgement; that Jordan’s intent in the story isn’t the only thing that matters.

29. But that does get me to thinking about... benefit of the doubt and what we extend to authors. For me personally, CoT/KoD were an overall bad experience and wore away so much of my own pool of belief and so I don’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to Jordan’s writing and intentions that I might have in earlier books. I look at the current ending (confirmed in this book to be dictated by Jordan, with only “a couple” of scenes by Sanderson) and I look at where we left off in KoD and I go, “yeah, I kinda think Jordan would have screwed up in a lot of similar ways to what people who dislike the Sanderson books are unhappy about, because the vast majority of the ‘harvest’ in the Sanderson books comes from narrative seeds that Jordan sowed, and there’s no way to know if he would have solved the narrative problems better than Sanderson did”.

Non-Seanchan example: Jordan clearly didn’t know how he was going to get Rand from “deeply traumatized” to “ready to wander the world carefree” or he would have left notes about it. And it’s easy to say that he would have figured it out as he went along, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that he would have done it in a way any better than what Sanderson ended up doing. There are some specific things that I’m sure that I’ll probably point to and say “eh, I feel like Jordan might have stuck the landing better on that one” but I’m no more guaranteed to be right than anyone else. There’s absolutely no way for any of us to know, you know? I can look at the Seanchan plotline as it stood in KoD, look at Mat’s ending, and say, “yeah, there’s nothing that Jordan could have done to make any of that feel anything less like a shit sandwich” but someone else might look at those two plot points and go, “well, if he did a. b. and c., then it would actually be a great story.” And they might even be absolutely correct that it would be a great story... but there’s still no guarantee it’s the story that Jordan would have written. And that’s not me saying that I think Jordan was... a terrible author at the end... because there still are some great scenes even in CoT & KoD (and New Spring is one of the best books in the series imo), but I do think he lost the thread of his story and wandered off into the weeds. And I don’t think that there was any guarantee that he would ever have picked it up again successfully. We might have had six more meandering books in the vein of CoT/KoD before sputtering to an end. Or he might have looked at how much easier and more crisp New Spring was as a read and reworked his future plans to put out a great banger of an ending. No way to know which direction he might have gone.

30. Tam had already turned into (unnamed as yet) Rand by the time Jordan got to the outlining stage - “Young man (age unspecified, but 18-25) in small village”. Interesting note that at this point in the outline men and women also had some different “abilities” from each other, not just different strengths. Oh. and the Dark One was also an alien at this point in the outline, “Sa’khan” and the Forsaken & Shadowspawn were fellow aliens that he brought with him from his dying world. But he had figured out already that he wanted the person who opposed “Sa’Khan” to be named the Dragon, and the origin of the savior/destroyer viewing of the Dragon was based on Jordan comparing the Western stories of dragons (fairly destructive) to the stories he heard in Vietnam (life-giving, standing for power and prosperity). Plus the various dragons and serpents in other cultural stories as well - the Norse world-serpent and the dragon in the Christian book of Revelation (sounds like Revelation is where he got the “seals on the Dark One’s prison” idea).

31. Looks like Rand’s original name was “Rhys al’Thor”, though Jordan played with the last name for a while. He liked the way “Arthur” and “Thor” had similar sounds and was looking to invoke both at the same time - so combining those two mythical figures is how he started with Rand -- a King Arthur who was also the god Thor. There’s a lot more King Arthur in the early books than the late books -- once we hit around The Fires of Heaven, we really move away from Rand being much involved in Arthurian myth (and that’s left more to Elayne & her family). Interestingly, al’Thor at this time was known as “The Hammer” - that part of what he envisioned for Rand kinda spun off into Perrin’s character, it sounds like.

32. Hmm, the original concept for Warders was a lot more of an equal partnership than it ended up being -- they were originally men “who watch the borders of human lands” and have “some abilities gifted from the Power, but they themselves have no use of the Power”. They’re bonded to a female wielder of the Power but notably “she cannot compel him to obey her” but if he disobeys, it breaks the bond between them. The gifts they were given were a “sense” for the presence of evil, some good self-healing, and slowed aging.

33. Ah, the name Aes Sedai is based on the Irish myths of aos si (faerie from the Otherworld). And he based the White Tower structure on “the pre-modern convents of the Catholic Church”. He was also amassing a list of names yet to be attached to any characters: Lewin, Thom, Emon, Jaim, Elaida, Mina.

34. This is Jordan’s own (very early) list of how the characters he was creating matched up to Arthurian myth:

Merlin: Amyrlen

Igraine: Tigraine

Arthur: Rhys al’Thor

Gwynevere: Gwyn al’Veer

Morgan le Fay: Emorgaine

King Lot: (?) Lor

Margawse: Morgase

Gawain: Gwayne

Gareth: Garth

Interesting to see which names roughly survived and which didn’t. He’d already decided at this point that his “Merlin” figure would be a woman, the “Amrylen” (Amyrlin Seat). He’d already decided that “Gwynevere” would be a ‘village girl’ as well. I wonder if at this point “Gwyn al’Veer” was “Rhys al’Thor’s” only love interest or if he’d thought that far yet. “Sir Gareth” would be ‘one of the village lads’. Lancelot was turned into “Lan, the Warder”. “Sir Galahand” was originally Lan’s son.

35. In 1987, he wrote a new outline for the first book, with Rhys still his hero. At this point, several of the pieces of Winternight are already in place - the yearly festival, “Rhys” lives with his “widowed farmer” father outside the village, an attack by “half-beast” mean and the dad getting injured badly by one of them. The story that Tam tells about finding Rand is somewhat similar, though the Aiel were “savage tribesmen, horse-mounted clans” at this point. Oh! Oh! The change that the show made with Tam and Tigraine came from Jordan’s notes!!!! (either a consultant read the public notes or they were just very in tune with Jordan’s original thoughts): “he found a woman, a warrior of the enemy, on the slopes of Dragonmount, dying of her wounds. She was pregnant, and though it was obviously not time for the baby to be born, her wounds had brought on labor. He helped the woman birth her child, and buried her when she died”. And at this point, he had vaguely thought of a “Green-God” at the end of the book who would help Rhys defeat the forces of “Sa’khan”, a god that would be revealed as a construct of the Power who watched over a magical pool (which is basically the end of the Eye of the World).

36. In June of 1987, Jordan did a second version of his ‘namelist’ for the book. This one was 33 pages long. 33 pages of names for people, places, and things, with handwritten notes to adjust them further. Changes:

Dark One renamed to Sha’tan

The Ogyr are now tall instead of short and are excellent stoneworkers and foresters.

Rhys is now officially Rand

Has already decided that Rand would fake his own death after defeating the Dark One though “Moiraine, Arinel (an early name for Elayne), Equene (the current name for Egwene) are among those who are not fooled and will not let him go alone

Tam gets a name, though it’s short for “Tamtrim” at this time; he based it on Mesopotamian mythology: Tammuz (Dumuzid) who was the god of shepherds & ‘the life-giving growth of plants’

He shorted Tamtrim to “Tam” and gave the second syllable to “Matrim” also known as “Mat”, though it was currently a name without a character

originally there was a complex set of religions in the Westlands, but he dropped that in favor of “cultural mentalities” of groups like the Children of the Light, the Red Ajah, and the Tuatha’an.

sa’angreal were based on the idea of the Sangreal aka the Holy Grail from Arthurian literature; objects imbued with the One Power

Padan Fain was originally named “Eward White” - he died in the attack on the village in the first draft but was mysteriously surviving in future drafts and spotted in the city

“Nyneve Bayal”, based a bit on Nimue from Arthurian legend, was one of his first characters, and was originally meant to have a darker role where she died, was brought back from the dead, and is serving the Dark One, getting Lan to oppose Rand at one point, and also was going to ‘kill’ Moiraine (who had ascended to the Amrylin Seat) but actually trap her “half-way between life and death” to be brought back later. So parts of this role were given over to Lanfear.

Gentling was a much more violent process originally, and there was also originally a testing in place for men once they came of age. Originally, being gentled didn’t cause an intense depression but was “a form of lobotomy performed with the power that makes the victim very passive, incapable of violence, and receptive to being commanded” and he called it being “gelded”. It sounds like it didn’t actually remove the Power from them but instead turned them into tools to be used (which sort of got adjusted and moved to how the Seanchan find and treat the women they turn into damane, it sounds like).

37. The next step was the “Test Manuscript”. Further changes in this:

Peddler now named Mikal Fain.

Rand has friends! Matrim Piket, Dannil Aybara, and Perrin Dael. Dannil actually survived long enough in the drafts that he’s in the original cover art for EotW, I learn. Sadly, I think I no longer have my original battered copy of EotW - I replaced it last year when I decided to do my reread.

Dannil got cut from the book because Harriet pointed out that he was doing absolutely nothing (again, Harriet, where was this energy for CoT & KoD?). The general plot was roughly the same as the finishing product at this point, so I assume Perrin was with Egwene, and Mat had stolen the dagger and was with Rand, so... where was Dannil in all this? lol, Jordan tried to keep him in by arguing “he’ll be important in book 5!” I wonder if he was originally the boy who would go over to the Seanchan and Mat took over that role?

Yeah, the version of the Test Manuscript that has Dannil in it is a lot less focused than the finished version.

38. The next surviving revision is “Revision 23″. Changes of note:

The Ogier “Jak Vladad” become Loial.

Jaren Telamon becomes Lews Therin Telamon.

39. Honestly, given the things that I hated so much about what CoT & KoD gave us, it’s almost sad to read Jordan writing:

The main thrust of the story will not be how fact becomes legend, however. Rather it will explore the nature of good and evil, of free will and the duty owed by the individual to humanity as a whole, of why and how mankind makes the choice to oppose evil, and the harm that can be done in the name of good.

People who do not champion and support good are acquiescing in the press of evil.

Some people who believe they are championing good actually fight [for] the cause of evil, for they would bind the free will given by the Creator.

That is EXACTLY what it feels like the story lost for me in Rand, Perrin, & Mat’s storylines in CoT & KoD. It felt like Jordan got so caught up in the shiny newness of allying with the Seanchan that he overlooked his own themes in the series and how he was undermining them.

40. At this point, Jordan is drafting The Great Hunt and has a somewhat comprehensive summary of the long game of the series as a whole:

Rand tries to flee his destiny but this only brings him into further conflict with the Forsaken

Determined to unite the people to face “Sha’tan’s” minions, by force if necessary

This middle section here I’m not certain about though -- he tries to defeat the Dark One, fails horribly, and must flee to regroup. That doesn’t sound like something that happened during his fights against TDO. That sounds more like when he tried to take back Ebou Dar from the Seanchan. Interesting change.

Rand was supposed to be completely without allies at some point in the story, originally, but that never quite happens in the books. The closest we really get is his flight from the Darkfriend Asha’man who attack him at the end of The Path of Daggers, but even then he flees... to his allies in Caemlyn (picking up Nynaeve, etc) and, of course, Min is surgically attached to him nearly all the time after that point He was supposed to realize that “by attempting to force humankind to oppose evil he was attempting to circumvent the free will that the Creator had made a central part of all humans”.

The ending is essentially what we got -- Rand binds away evil rather than destroying it because it “cannot be destroyed any more than can Good. Evil must be opposed by people who choose to champion Good”.

“Humanity, to be human, must have something to oppose and something to support, and the free choice of which will be which.” I feel like that is essentially exactly what happens in Rand’s confrontation with TDO in Shayol Ghul, yes?

also, no mention of allying with slavers, just pointing that out.

41. lol, damn, in the Test Manuscript, Min bangs Rand in the first book, right after “Eguene” breaks up with him. lol, and, wow this is... not super-great. So Lord of Chaos/A Crown of Swords Min was always in the plans, it seemed. It does seem like Jordan lifted some of the ideas in this scene for the post-Rand/Aviendha sex scene -- Rand talking about how they have to get married now that they’ve had sex and her being like “lol no”. Min also talks here in a way that makes it clear that she already had a viewing about having had sex with Rand, though she’s... happy enough about fulfilling the prophecy in this version.

42. Oh, here we go! First mention of what would become Seanchan in Jordan’s notes. I really am intrigued to see how this idea grew (and eventually took over and swamped) the rest of the series, even if I’m unhappy at the results in the books themselves. So, the first idea for the ~other continent~ was that Rand would be “shipwrecked on the coast of a Blight” and find himself in a land broken into city-states, each ruled by an Aes Sedai. Pretty different from the Seanchan we ended up with. Rand was going to fall in love with the daughter of a general that he was “given” to but then have to leave to avoid being gentled by the Aes Sedai in charge of the city-state, with not!Tuon bringing an army with her to help him take the “Stone of Stair”. Okay, Michael calling Tuon a ~young general who is also a ruler~ is hilarious. Tuon never showed an ounce of tactical knowledge in the entire series. Anyway, changing from Rand shipwrecking in Seanchan to instead having the Seanchan invade was supposed to... tighten the plot. Best laid plans o’ mice and men. Best laid plans. Boy, wow, it did the opposite.

43. Unfortunately, we don’t get a timeline here of when and how Jordan swapped things over from one version to the other. It was mentioned in the start that a lot of Jordan’s notes were not dated, so it can’t be certain exactly when certain things happened. The author notes that Jordan had also wanted to “dive into the complicated politics of a land invaded”. Again, shame that Jordan only really did that in WH and then decided Mat navel-gazing for two books was more interesting (in fairness, he does continue to explore it a bit in the prologues but, yeah, it really feels like he dropped the ball in the main storylines featuring the Seanchan).

44. Oooh, getting into Taimandred. “To imagine that an author never changes their mind about their plots or characters -- especially in a work as massively complex as The Wheel of Time -- would be foolish” .. “Another example of this -- interesting both for the ramifications within the narrative and its importance to fans -- is the shifting identity of the character Demandred. It’s a perfect microcosm of not just Jordan’s ceaseless creative process, but also the kinds of problems it left Brandon and Team Jordan in the wake of his passing.”

45. Interesting! Even after he’d finished The Great Hunt and was working on The Dragon Reborn, Jordan hadn’t finalized all the names of the Forsaken yet. In his notes he had:

Ishamael (check and already in the books)

Lanfear (ditto)

Aginor - already dead

Balthamel - already dead

Sammael

Rahvin

De’ath (...literally just the word death with an apostrophe)

Moloc

Be’aldrid

Maladour

Malifecin

Sha’rein

Savintar

46. “If we rewind back to Jordan’s own notes, however, we can see that at least at the time Jordan was writing Lord of Chaos, Taimandred was absolutely true.” Twice in his private notes for the books, Jordan wrote “Taim/Demandred showed up” at Dumai’s Wells. In his notes where he was summing up the accomplishments of the Forsaken, for Demandred, he wrote: “He will show up claiming to be Mazrim Taim, taking advantage of Rand’s amnesty.” And he was also supposed to originally be the person who’d killed Asmodean (makes sense, since it happens very soon before “Taim” shows up in the story). We know this because he wrote in a note about Nynaeve - “She does not know that Asmodean was a prisoner of Rand, nor, of course, that he was killed by Demandred.” The author says that it’s difficult to tell from Jordan’s notes when and why Taimandred changed into two separate people. “Sadly, we’ll never know. Jordan shared a great deal with Harriet and the other members of Team Jordan, but he hardly told them everything.”

In my own reread, it felt very much like Taim was Taimandred in LoC and very clearly that he was only Taim in WH, but the parts in between are wobbly and uncertain.

47. Honestly, I feel like pivoting away from Taimandred was a mistake on Jordan’s part. Him being the author of the slaughter at Dumai’s Wells and him killing Asmodean just... makes so much more sense than what we ended up with. I’m gonna hope that the tv rule of conservation of characters leads the show back to Taimandred as a reality, lol.

48. It was Brandon who came up with Random Sharan Army to try to explain why the fuck the Dark One was so pleased with Demandred in LoC if he wasn’t Taim and therefore had accomplished absolutely nothing of note on the page. Interesting. I was sure that the Random Sharan Army was connected to Jordan’s pivot to allying with the slavers, because the numbers just didn’t seem justified otherwise, but I guess Jordan was allying with them... for who knows why tbh. The mystery of why Jordan was obsessed with allying with the slavers remains a mystery thus far into this book. It kinda seems like it will be one of those forever questions that is never answered.

Jordan just... he really didn’t successfully sell me on it actually being NECESSARY to ally with the slavers, and I think a lot of that is rooted in his arbitrary withholding of information from Rand? Like, Rand is trying to ally with the slavers because he believes he has no choice, but HIS OWN ALLIES (including his LOVER!!!) are straight-up withholding vital intel from him re: the slaver army’s weaknesses for... absolutely no good reason at all. The deck feels so artificially stacked in the Seanchan’s favor due to Min and Nynaeve undergoing voluntary amnesia rather than any actual narrative reasons for the Seanchan to have the advantage. Again, it’s a place where I feel like I can literally see Jordan’s puppet strings on everyone’s shoulders rather than it making sense that the characters would behave this way.

49. Okay, the summary of what we know about the “outriggers”:

Set 5-10 years after the Last Battle

“focused on Mat, Tuon, and the changes faced by the Seanchan as a result of the events of the Last Battle” lol what changes. that was the whole issue through KOD. That Jordan refused to let Tuon change or grow even the slightest bit. I guess this would have been changes that happen despite Tuon throwing tantrums and kicking and screaming the whole way (and probably murdering and enslaving a LOT more people).

“All that survives, in fact, are two tantalizing sentences. One depicts Mat lying in a cold gutter, the dice having failed him. The other sees Perrin on a boat, sailing to Seanchan to kill an old friend.”

honestly, if it had the same energy as the Mat and Perrin chapters in CoT/KoD, then it’s hard to imagine the outriggers being anything but a boring slog where our main characters constantly think about how they should oppose slavery but then don’t actually do anything useful because slavery is just so gosh-darn helpful and some of the slavers are just so pretty. I’m just... I do wish more notes had survived on this, because Jordan’s pivot towards having all his main male characters working towards allying with and appeasing the slavers has been THE thing about CoT & KoD that really ruined those two books for me, and I just wish I understood WHY he went from his interesting and nuanced storyline that he had all the way through Winter’s Heart and instead changed it to Mat acting like “wanting to brutally torture and enslave people” and “not wanting to be brutally tortured and enslaved” are two equally valid points of view, with the edge being given to whoever has the most mysterious eyes.

50. More interesting to me are that Jordan had been considering writing a prequel about Tam. Basically the story that Jordan had first considered, all those years ago, about a soldier who has finished with his war. The other prequel he’d wanted to write would have been Moiraine and Lan’s lead-up to Winternight -- what led them to Two Rivers just in time. “As with the outrigger novels, however, Jordan’s archived papers contain no complete sequences or outlines”.

51. And the rest of the book is a glossary of the various characters, places, and ideas, with how they connect to mythology or the real world. I might potentially use it in the future during fics maybe but I’m not going to go over it here.

Overall, this was very interesting, even if the questions that I most wish could have been answered still remain mysteries.

#wot reread #technically not a reread #but it fits in that tag for organizational reasons #wheel of time #wot #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #a memory of light #amol spoilers #a memory of light spoilers #the wheel of time

[stephsycamore]

Hello friends. Yet another post on a topic literally no one here signed up for but the blog is about my hyperfixation of the month so here we are

I have been reading dramione. I know in my last post i said i was ki da over dramione after a couple of fics because i find the pairing too toxic but i only kinda lied because i have just reread the like 4 dramione fics i found and liked and now i will review them. Technically i have read/started more than 4 but i won't be commenting on fics i didn't like because that isn't fair to the writers.

The first one was manacled. Which i know what a fucking reintroduction to the fandom. But i am no young newbie. I used to read and rewrite A LOT of harry potter fic and while its still fuck jk rowling, she doesn't financially benefit from fic and i heard years ago that she doesn't like fic so. I hope its all a big fuck u to her.

Anyway, manacled. Wow!!! What the fuck???? It has lived rent free in my head ever since. I literally cannot stop thinking about it. If ever i reentered the harry potter fic world let it be known that it would be so i can write fanfic of this fanfic. A couple points - manacled is kinda overly long and would benefit from an editor/beta reader, but I heard senlinyu wrote it on her phone while nursing a baby and just???? Idk what her day job is, but that woman needs to be doing creative writing mfas, writers workshops, residencies, whatever. That is extraordinary creative talent.

I think the first part with hermione in the manor was a bit overly long and too torture porn ish. A lot of the scenes bordered into the unnecessarily gratituous. But overall, it was well plotted, well written, and gut wrenching. The last section takes my breath away

The second fic i read was Remain Nameless. And while i kinda don't love smut (it makes me a little uncomfy) i think remain nameless is a perfrct example of fanfic as a genre. Within fic, there are obviously genres, but there are stylistic elements and things that I think makes fanfiction a genre in itself. Remain Nameless is an exploration of character that goes beyond the confines of conventional or traditionally publish-able story structure. It is too long, too drawn out, too indulgent to be a traditionally published story. If i swap out the names and details in Manacled or Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in love (up next) out, its a probably close to a stand alone novel, but Remain Nameless relies on you knowing and already caring about Draco and Hermione. I don't mean that disparagingly at all, I just think sometimes people don't realize that fanfic should be different from traditionally published novels and that is a benefit of the genre. I think Remain Nameless is great. Its an indulgent, fluffy read that takes two broken people and slowly puts them back together again. Its like a hug in book format.

My next one is DMATMOOBIL!! I loved this one. And the author??? You cannot convince me that this fic was not written by someone with literal years of publishing experience in contemporary romance. No way. Its too good. Not just in a good writing way. Manacled is good in an unfiltered, raw talent way, but DMATMOOBIL is polished. The plot is perfectly structured and then each chapter within that is perfectly structured. I loved it. It wad witty, funny, heartfelt, and exciting. Not sure what more I can say about it. It reads like published fiction both in its polish and readability, and I think of all the fics I read has the best worldbuilding. It is truly exciting to read about the possibilities of magical and muggle science colliding in this book and bringing their world to the 21st century.

The last fic i read was Green Light by SereneMusafir. I thought it was so good but would benefit from being split into two maybe even three books. Green Light features a journalist coming to interview Draco many years after the events of the book, so that kinda complicates splitting it up, but as it stands, the story parts are too vast and thematically disparate to be one book. The first part has Draco and Hermione on an expedition in the desert to find a archeological myth and the writing is extraoridinary. Its poetic and cinematic. But I think at times it all tries to do too much. Like I said, the whole thing needs to be split up but each chapter also needs to be a bit shorter. Again, I don't mean cutting content, but rather restructuring. As it is, I read an incredible scene, but then there's like 5 more scenes of something else, and by the time I'm at the end of the chapter, I've kinda forgotten what amazing prose I read earlier on. Things get lost in this way. Beautiful passages buried.

I think two or three books would also allow each thematic section to be explored better. Idk i thought about this one a lot. I likely will not reread Green Light the way I have reread the others on this list, but other than Manacled, it is the one I think about most. Its the most ambitious plot wise and it kinda got lost in that ambition but I think it has so much potential and was over all very good.

Anyway. That is the end to this book review no one asked for. I will likely not be reading more dramione. So here ends that brief of excellent phase.

#dramione #harry potter #harry potter fanfiction #harry pottet fanfic #dramione fic #draco malfoy #hermione granger #manacled #senlinyu #remain nameless #heyjude19 #draco malfoy and the mortifying ordeal of being in love #isthisselfcare #dmatmoobil #green light #serenemusafir

[nocturnalfandomartist]

What if there was a Minish Cap sequel?

Journey to the Minish Realm

I was a little unsure whether to post this to Untold Myths or not, but decided to post it here. Basically what happened:

And now I'm a little obsessed with the idea.

Story

Exactly one year after The Minish Cap arrives the next Picori Festival. Link anticipated Zelda would ask him to go with her,

The tutorial section would be Link preparing for the tournament, which he actually gets to compete in this year... After the Minister practically begged him to keep an eye on Zelda while she watches over the whole thing, anyway. For the tournament, Link uses a replica of the Picori Blade rather than the Four Sword.

At the peak of the festival, when Link finds he is at the final two, the opponent set for Link is suddenly injured– too much to compete. As they try to find a replacement opponent, a lone silhouette volunteers after a rather dramatic entrance using a wind spell. They are none other than Vaati, who has mysteriously returned from his defeat... But his form is corrupt and indefinite, constantly leaning between his humanoid form and the monstrous one he was slain in. The husk of who was once a great sorcerer seems overly confident despite the fact he can barely hold himself together, proclaiming a rematch is in order. Although the Light Force was removed from him, somehow a portion of the monster form's power has lingered with him.

Link, although alarmed, prepares for a fight... But Zelda quickly intervenes to protect Link. Vaati is only more provoked by seeing her after he failed to contain the Light Force after draining it from her, about to attack her as well. However, he stops himself as a different idea comes to mind. Using a power unknown to the pair at the time, he manifests his own version of the Minish Door, knocking Zelda right through it and following after daring Link to join them.

Without a moment's hesitation, Link races through the door after Zelda. He awakens in the Minish Realm, managing to find Zelda after she evaded Vaati. The two now find themselves in a world they have never seen, and seek out an old friend to help them return home... And stop the revived Vaati.

Worldbuilding

The Minish Realm is structured like a mix of Hyrule in MC and FS. While vast, it features a lot of areas tied to a specific element.

Other Ideas

Guide character Zelda, Spirit Tracks style...

I call MC Link "Pico", so someone might give him that as a nickname.

There are four types of Minish in the Minish Realm, the ancient sages that proceeded Ezlo being responsible for the Picori Blade. There are Forest Minish, like in Hyrule, Snow Minish, Fire Minish, and Wind Minish. Vaati was a Wind Minish before his descent.

Ezlo has refused to take an apprentice after Vaati. Although he does miss teaching, especially after departing from Link, he unadmittedly worries about pushing another one down the wrong path. Unfortunately for Ezlo, a ton of younger Minish have heard how he helped a hero in Hyrule like the old Sages... And now they all want him to be their teacher.

Other Minish Sages will be present. Three, to be exact. Ezlo is the Minish Sage of Forest/Earth, but there is also one of Ice, Fire, and Wind.

Ezlo can turn into a bird similar to his cursed cap form. He claims Vaati gave him the idea...

#journey to the minish realm #the legend of zelda #loz fanart #zelda fanart #loz zelda #loz #link zelda #zelink #zelda #fanart #legend of zelda #tloz #tloz minish cap #tloz the minish cap #legend of zelda fanart #loz au #zelda au #tloz au #minish cap #vaati #loz mc #mc vaati #four swords #zelda minish cap #minish #picori #pico link #minish link #loz minish cap #loz the minish cap

[sam-glade]

hey sam, happy STS!

you have a lot of really good worldbuilding resources and do a lot for your stories - do you have a go-to strategy when it comes to research (especially for something you haven't looked into before), or is it a bit different every time?

my own strategies atm are very uhhh scattershot tbh TT_TT

(--@space-writes)

Hi Space! Happy STS💜

Now that I've created two (and a half) settings - two worlds, one of which has two stories set in different eras - I'd say I have a consistent strategy, and sure, I'm happy to share it, but I make no promises it'll work for anyone else😅 'Scattershot' is a pretty good description.

I usually start with some elements of the setting that make me want to put a story in it. In Days of Dusk it's the metaphysics, with the superpowered weapons and long lifespan. In The Fulcrum, it's the larger than life structures inhabited by a sentient species that couldn't have possibly built it. I treat these ideas as axioms, and take them as given. I only need a handful of those, and the rest is exploring the consequences.

There are three parts to it:

Trust your intuition

Tl;dr: put down whatever comes to mind, explain it later, if needed.

It starts with how I draft stories. I'll come up with a location or two and describe it in detail in the first few chapters. As I draft them, I try to avoid the notes in square brackets to fill in the details later. Instead, I trust my intuition and put down the first thing that comes to mind that would make this particular place and scene unique. If I'm really unsure about it, I might make an editing note for later to check it, but 9 out of 10 times, it sticks.

I'm talking about the little, localised things that make the place/character/ritual distinct and memorable. Accents, talismans, decorative vessels on the shelves in the house, etc. Basically, whenever a description starts sounding too bland and generic, I'll come up with something - anything - on the spot. It's a first draft, it doesn't have to be perfect.

I'll use Gifts of Fate as an example. The first scene-setting description is this:

The downpour started when they were half way to Beetletun. The ground turned to mud, and the leaves of the bushes that crawled up the sides of the causeway drooped heavy with water. No wonder that there was nobody else in sight, on the road or in the orchards and fields stretching to either side of it.

For the plot, I needed it to be on an empty road and with rain, but otherwise, it could have been just fields - that's boring. Ok, fields and copses of trees to break the monotony? Still not distinctive enough to stick in the reader's memory. So, on a whim I arrived at orchards.

So now Aritia, the region where Lissan's from, is known for its orchards; they're an ubiquitous element of the landscape.

Causes and Consequences

I've come up with a detail, now I'd like to explain it, so that it's consistent with adjacent elements. I usually do that when I'm passing time irl, e.g. in a queue or on public transport, not looking at the document. I'll pick at a detail and keep asking why it is this way and what else it affects.

This is loosely based on the Five Whys method though quite often I won't go as deep with the questioning, and expand in the direction of consequences.

To take the orchards from the previous section, what does it entail? Quite a few of Lissan's neighbours work in the orchards. Let's weave this in then - a person Lissan runs into in the pub is a son of one of the local apple growers. Also, there's plenty of apples to go around, so in the beginning of the second book, Lissan and Marta (his sister) talk at home as they do chores - turning what's left of the late apple harvest after winter into jam.

At no point I'spell out that apples are the primary goods produced in this region.

This is also where going down research rabbit holes and chains of Wikipedia articles comes in handy. I'll look up especially the technologies that I put in on a whim, to make sure what are the prerequisites for them and that they're reasonable with the level of development of the society. I'm not talking about modelling how science and technology developed in your setting on history, but rather understanding why it happened IRL and translating it to the priorities and values of your setting.

For example, in the setting of Days of Dusk, people turn to ash in the moment of their death. That's one of the rules of the setting which I don't want to change. As a consequence, you can't perform autopsies, and that stunts the development of medical sciences. Ouch.

Another example: I wanted lamps lighting the streets in the main city featured in the story. Ok, so what sort of fuel was used in early gas lamps? Where did it come from? Coal is one of the options. Ok, so let's say this region is coal-rich, and there are mines. Why are they mining it extensively in the first place? What are they using it up for? Factories - so let's say we're at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Let's add a factory to the cityscape.

Of course this could have gone in a different direction - gas can be obtained from other sources, like wood or peat, and each option would have different consequences. E.g. on the landscape - wood comes from forests, peat from moors.

Either way, if the overall appearance of the setting was pre-modern, I'd have much more trouble explaining it, but it's still doable! Are they fuelled by magic? Where does the magical energy come from? And so on.

You can keep asking these questions forever, but the last part is:

Be lazy

It's very easy to go too far with following the threads of cause and effect, and I'm afraid it's one of the cases where your mileage may vary. Most people won't notice or at least won't be pulled out of the story by anachronisms, some will. How egregious they need to be to break immersion, will vary.

My rule of thumb is to pick one main thing about the location and add no more than 2-3 relevant details per scene in which it features. Hence, Aritia is Lissan's home and we return there quite often, so it's a lot more fleshed out than a village where Lissan stays for two chapters, recuperating, and doesn't really leave his host's house. In the latter, I've no idea who the local lord is or what's the main export of this area. It doesn't matter.

I only come up with the details when they're needed. A very obvious example would be hypothetical methods of space travel which the society will reach in a millennium, when right now it's an early-modern setting.

I didn't name the lord to whom Lissan's home village belongs until 2/3 of the way through the book, when Marta was talking about the lord at length, filling Lissan in on what he'd missed. I vaguely knew that there are the five princedoms, but only two of the princes feature in Gifts of Fate, so I didn't even come up with the names of the others until I reached a scene in the later books, when they all make an appearance.

I also don't put the names of the cities, rivers, or regions on the map until they come up in the story. Then and only then I note them down so that they'll be consistent.

Finally, you'll see extensive worldbuilding questions lists, which are overwhelming and frankly, I find them incredibly unhelpful. They're usually divided into sections like climate, government, religion, culture, etc., and sure, it's good to be aware that these aspects of the setting are a thing, but I don't believe that they're all important in every story. Most of the categories can be described in vague terms, and adjusted as needed.

So, e.g. in Gifts of Fate, there's a conspiracy within the army and the plot relies on military technology being misused, so I'm exploring the magic system in detail, as well as the military. There's a single chapter of courtly intrigue (I couldn't resist a ball), so I completely skipped etiquette and customs among the upper class, only describing fancy outfits. Also, there's nothing about political factions and tensions between the different princedoms. It's not relevant. The religion also is a very background thing, so a couple of rites are mentioned in vague terms, but at no point I mention a pantheon of gods (there isn't one) or a creation myth.

I hope that helps😊

#writeblr #writing advice #worldbuilding #sts #ask and i shall answer #days of dusk

[phneltwrites]

fic writer meme

I was tagged by @ziusik <3

1. how many works do you have on ao3?

between my two pseuds, 132. I started posting end of 2018 and i orphaned 1 fic so that's everything

2. what's your total ao3 wordcount?

996,548 words

3. what fandoms do you write for?

Right now various Thai BL, mostly offgun, and I'm on the docket for a DCU fic for a pal who won me in a raffle

4. what are your top 5 fics by kudos?

the top 17 of my most kudosed are all MDZS wangxian, what a powerful fandom (then a witcher then a leverage)

Love Is More Than Telling Me You Want It - the omegaverse big gender feels one

Yeah I Know How You Like It - wwx gets telepathy and lwj is horny then touching about it. love every time i get a comment on this that's like this is a pwp why am i crying. hehe

your persuasions - lwj has a big dick and wwx is a san francisco based high tech software programmer. they fuck about it

the earthquake in the room - alternate universe Canada modern university fic. In which lwj does not make wwx toast

wild for your skin - canonverse pwp

from this i suppose that most people are pretty disappointed when i update and it isn't smut

5. do you respond to comments?

always! I feel like fandom is this thing we're making together and when people reach out to me I reach back and in that way we both add stitches to the tapestry that is the community

6. what is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

I think most of my fics have a hopeful ending. So it might be Verbs are a Tragedy the Captain Marvel Carol/Maria fic about Maria grieving. Or wait! maybe the Never Let Me Go fic because it ends right before you know that Chopper is about to get his heart broken. Or the John Wick fic about Helen cause you know she dies later and isn't able to keep her promise of helping John leave the business? Ok maybe I do have some angsty endings.

7. what's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

ha what is happy. Maybe the Leverage fic where Eliot has to pretend to be married to Hardison even though they are exes and that one ends with him proposing to Parker and Hardison and them being happy together

8. do you get hate on fics?

Rarely. Not usually hate at me but sometimes my fics make people pretty angry. I don't love it when people yell at the fic. the funniest though is getting an angry bookmark on a fic that i turned comments off of cause people were angry. like you do you in the bookmarks but lmao

9. do you write smut?

do i ever

10. do you write crossovers? what's the craziest one you have written?

I write fusions and crossovers! My wildest crossover is a 5x fic about Fezzik and Inigo from the princess bride meeting different other characters which actually might be the angstiest one now that I think about it because their last section is them going to the grey havens from lotr so they can sail into the west together. they also party with phryne fisher

11. have you ever had a fic stolen?

i think only onto wattpad

12. have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes, and it's so cool!

13. have you ever co-written a fic before?

Twice! One time on a leverage fic and it taught me how to use semi colons and also write introspection, a lesson i have forgotten and one time lesbian beach volleyball porn with a friend.

14. what's your all time favorite ship?

uhhhh oh no. they're all my favourites. of the ships i've written... no can't do it.

15. what is a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I dream of finishing my pacific rim x avatar fusion with mdzs. the worldbuilding was so much fun.

Everything else I think I've comprehensively abandoned in drafts. rip carol and maria having fun in space, jon and tormund going to winterfell, and the shl ocean's 11 au oh shit also the fic where wwx was adopted into the nie sect and it changes very little in some ways. Otherwise I tend to finish things I'm kind of a robot

16. what are your writing strengths?

smut and extended metaphors

17. what are your writing weaknesses?

description, romance, tenses, character introspection. i also think my sentence level writing is not that strong

18. thoughts of writing dialogue in another language in fics?

do whatever you want forever

19. first fandom you wrote for?

leverage! my first fanfic is on ao3 for that show. though technically i did a creative writing exercise where nietzsche and the librarian from a Borges short story hooked up as a class assignment in university so idk i guess maybe literary rpf

20. favorite fic you have written?

uhhhhh. i genuinely don't know. they're all their own little thing. im more interested in hearing which of my fics are other people's faves

tagging @idrilka @defractum @daltoneering @giraffeter @ginnymoonbeam

#tag meme

[jaeheewillalwaysbemyfav]

How Obey Me Shot Itself In the Foot: The Better Version of Obey Me That Lives In My Head

MASSIVE WARNING FOR DISCUSSION OF RELIGION. Specifically of Abrahamic religions (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) and their shared God. I am doing this in a media analysis context, not to shame any particular religion or anyone’s particular beliefs. If that makes you uncomfortable, feel free to not read this post, stop reading at any point, and/or unfollow/block me. DO NOT try to start religious discourse on this post or in my askbox/DMs, I will clown on and block you.

Also spoiler warnings for a ton of different Obey Me lessons.

Intro (X), Michael (X)(X)(X)(X), Conclusion (X)(you're here)

aka The Part Where I Actually Talk About Why Raphael Should Kill MC

Why Raphael Should Kill MC

I've thought for a long time about how I'd handle writing Bible fanfic, so I have many ideas about how I'd portray Heaven and Hell. This section was originally going to be an in-depth deep dive into my Celestial Realm and Devildom worldbuilding, but that would take too long and potentially reveal some stuff I might use for my longfic that's in progress.

But the essence of it is:

The Celestial Realm is a militaristic and very protective/insular realm as a result of Father/God's paranoia over his loss of control over his creations. The Devildom and many parts of the human world are formed by rejected "imperfect" creations that were banished from the Celestial Realm. Only humans with "pure" souls are let into the CR, while the others are reincarnated or sent to the Devildom to face punishment.

There are three basic types of angels: the original extensions of God responsible for helping to create things, the warriors who fight off demons and protect the CR, and those who look after different aspects of creation, especially humans.

The Devildom is the product of a fucked up version of the island of misfit toys, as previously described. They are the rejected creations of the CR, sent to die in the void at the edge of existence. But they didn't die. However, adapting to this harsh environment created harsh and vicious creatures that came to be known as demons. The original Demon King earned his title by figuring out how to siphon power from CR and human-world beings, a practice that lead to most of the Devildom being divided into 7 courts of the 7 deadly sins.

Human souls that get sent to the Devildom don't face any organized punishment: they're fair game for any demons that find them though. If the human has a pact with one or more demons, that/those demon/s have dibs and can do with them what they wish.

There are many types of demons in terms of form, but nearly all are aligned to a sin. Only the very oldest ones are not, or aligned to multiple. They have a wide range of jobs much like any earthly civilization.

The Human World is largely unaware of the supernatural forces that shape it, but two primary groups who are aware are witches and sorcerers. Sorcerers are more organized: they have a strict code to follow vis a vis how they use their magic, are registered with the Sorcerer's Society, experience formal training, etc. Witches are more freelance and unstructured, though they may form covens who may occasionally meet up. Sorcerers tend to be more aligned with the CR, while witches tend to be more aligned with the Devildom. That being said, it's not unheard of for a sorcerer to deal with demons in the form of pacts.

Solomon is famously an exception to how sorcerers are expected to behave, having 72 pacts and a more experimental magic practice. But he's old as fuck and the best at what he does, so no one can really tell him not to.

Diavolo's exchange program is a genuine effort to unite the three realms, to bridge the gap that was created so long ago. The CR reads it as a front to gain better access to their magic, or even to attempt a takeover. But they refuse to truly strike first and restart the war, so they're at an uneasy stalemate.

Until the stuff with MC happens.

In the version of Obey Me that lives in my head, seasons 1 and 2 are largely unchanged. I'd probably remove/alter how our connection to Lilith works (and in fact Lilith's role would be very different overall), but the basic plot beats stand.

As I mentioned 800 posts ago, I lost my account at lesson 41, so I don't know much about how the human world arc goes, and honestly I don't really care. Because for me, if we're gonna put s3 in the human world, we're gonna learn about the human world's magic scene. Which means if MC's initiation into the sorcerer's society doesn't happen there in canon, that's where I want it to happen.

But I also want the Sorcerer's Society to be extremely suspicious of MC. Yes, they're Solomon's apprentice, but... they're Solomon's apprentice. They're a rogue element, and the beginnings of a legacy of rogue elements. A very powerful one too.

Something should be done about that.

S4 starts with the expanded roster of exchange students, Thirteen and Raphael. We were already introduced to Thirteen in s2 as a somewhat antagonistic force, but now we get to meet her in full. Yay! Unfortunately this isn't about her, so let's move onto Raphael.

Raphael was sent to the Devildom to kill MC. The CR was tipped off by someone in the Sorcerer's Society that they're too dangerous, too powerful, the cause of all the mess from s2, and they need to be iced. But the thing is, they're closely bonded with the demon prince, as well as the seven traitors lords, so he needs to make it look like an accident.

Throughout season 4, MC experiences a variety of strange and increasingly dangerous mishaps, culminating in an encounter where a group of hardline traditionalist demons accost them. MC has plot armour though, so they kick their assailants' asses, only to find out they were encouraged to action by none other than Raphael. MC is shocked to learn this, because other than being a weirdo, Raphael hasn't seemed all that threatening.

They're so shocked, they don't notice him behind them, spear in hand.

They're captured and taken to the Celestial Realm, alive but bound in manacles that restrict their access to their pacts and powers. They meet Michael, who exposits the trouble they've been causing him. He then lays out their choices for them:

Break their pacts, have their memory wiped, and return to the human world to live an ordinary life.

Break their pacts and be accepted as an honorary member of the Celestial Realm's ranks (read: get a pair of mind control bangles slapped on them forever)

Use their pacts to bring the brothers back to the CR so they can be "purified"

Die lol

So if I was straight up writing a game plot, this would be the point that the brothers and co. show up, there's a big showdown, maybe they resolve things peacefully in the end, maybe the war starts up, idk, but for the purposes of plot bunnies, I like leaving it here because there's a lot of things that could happen from this point.

(Bonus: after this is resolved the Demon King wakes up and then we have a whole 'nother problem to deal with)

#obey me #obey me celestial realm #obey me raphael #obey me michael #obey me devildom #mine #How Obey Me Shot Itself in the Foot

[monkiebois]

Headcannons masterpost

Tw's-Sun wukongs headcannons include alot of violence and torture from his past. Nezha's headcannons include him unaliving himself.

General Worldbuilding-

to release excess magic, some characters can exhale a smokey substance. The thickness of the smoke depends on how much magic they exhale. Each character's "smoke" looks different.

characters that can do ^^^ that are. Sun Wukong, Macaque, Mei, Mk, Pigsy, Azure, Redson, DBK

Sun Wukong-Aroace-Genderfluid-He/She/They

Aroace, She only likes Macaque, everyone else? meh couldnt care for them. Macaque though. Yes perfect, small, perfect tempurature, huggable size, kinda sassy sometimes but its cute. He is Aroace and only wants Macaque around-relationshipwise.

gonna draw his Hc desing sooooon

Because of his time in the furnace not only was his magic sharpened but his apparanced changed as well

Of course his eyes turned red, the sclera a dark and deep crimson and his pupils gold.

The his fur was permanently changed as well, parts permanently burnt to an dark orange/crimson color.

Since his magic was sharpened as ell he was of course stronger as he left the furnace, because he became stronger his magic leaks out of him in multiple ways when worked up.

When calm he has strands of gold at the front of his scalp.

the more he gets worked up/the more magic he uses without glamour, the more the gold spreads throughout his fur, tracing his scars.

His scars are normally a lighter shade of the crimson color of his burnt fur.

Macaque-Trans-He/Him

Nezha-Aroace-He/him

Nezha is eternally twelve. he has an adult form simply because he doesnt want to be condescended by his peers in heaven or anyone else. its also easier to do adult things in this form so he uses it very often.

Nezha was born with white hair in Investiture fo the gods but he is often interpreted with black hair. So I HC he was born ith white hair and after he came back from the dead his hair turned black and he only has a small section of hair left thats white. its a small section and easily hidden

you can interpret Aroace Nezha as either a twelve year old wanting to stay away from cooties or Nezha being sex/romance repulsed. either one works.

Theres one person they let close and thats thier fellow young immortal Longnu (i dont know much about her so ill add stuff about her later)

Nezha is Autistic.

they are Magically disabled.

In Investiture of the gods Nezha kills himself to stop the dragon king from throwing a tsunami and a storm into his home. Also as an act to keep any blame from thier parents for killing Ao Bing.

its alot of graphic stuff that i wont mention here but because of this after Nezha was reborn into a lotus body scars remained of that on his body.

primarily on thier neck and around thier torso.

another fact about the lotus body is that its not strong enough to contain his powers.

He was born with powers and strength of a god but the lotus body is not enough to contain it.

Nezha can use thier powers like a normal god but also uses alot of weapons to assist them because if they use too much it will strain the lotus body.

remember when Bai He's body started cracking because lbd's power was too much for her. the same thing but pink happens to Nezha.

they have a war form that is bassically engulfed in pink flames, two extra arms and sometimes two extra heads. along with more accessories, thier eyes turn pink as well. i need to draw this.

well they cant use this form for too long, if he does his body will start to crack and crack until it shatters and they turn into a lotus to rest and heal. kinda like the crystal gems

you can really tell when Nezha is upset when his hair starts turning pink and flaots like fire (god form leaking through). like he has to be REALLY exited (good or bad exited) for that to happen.

He has taken Mk as his little brother, he will kill for Mk

Same for Mei but she seems more feral unlike sweet Mk. So he's not very worried about her.

little form Nezha likes to jump onto Mk's back and be carried. they also like to do this with Wukong

Wukong adopted Nezha, she has a room in her house for Nezha to come and visit and stay whenever he wants for however long they want.

Wukong is Nezha's emotional support monkey and before Mk came around he was the only emotonal support monkey. Now Nezha has two. Mk and Wukong.

Mk-Trans-Pan-He/him

Mei-Lesbian-She/her

Redson-Gay-Genderfluid-He/she/they

Pigsy-Gay-He/him

Tang-Trabs-Gay-He/him

Lady Bone Demon-Aroace-She/her

Mayor-He/him

Spider Queen-Lesbian-She/her

Bai He-?????-She/her

#Its canon to me #li nezha #lmk nezha #nezha

[alovelyburn]

Rambles about the Millennium Falcon Arc Part 1

I said I wasn’t going to do this one next, but I changed my mind because it’s Valentine’s Day.

So, it’s probably not surprising that this is one of the bits I’ve been looking forward to tackling the most. I am a predictable goldfish. Despite that, I did kind of wonder what I’d actually have to say since I always felt like it’s a fairly straightforward section, so let’s see how it goes.

Later addition: I couldn’t shut up.

Rambles about the Millennium Falcon Arc Part 1

1. This opening reminds me of the beginning of the Last Unicorn. It’s not actually the same at all but it still reminds me of it - this dreamlike enchanted forest with creatures just outside the edge of your vision. People discussing whether those things are really there...I think about this a lot -the way the shadows and silences in the world post-Conviction aren’t really empty anymore. THAT reminds me of the unforgiven demon spirits that came to Griffith in the dungeon.

But it’s kind of interesting how Zodd went centuries without people seeing his apostle form (well I assume he killed most of the people who did) and suddenly he’s being quite brazen which I think speaks to the way the world is changing and the new set of rules that Griffith is bringing with him.  He’s about to bring all the things in the shadows into the light, so the drive to discretion has faded out a bit.

The hollows of trees, the ground beneath graves, the whispers of winds, the lull between waves, the depths of wells, the darkness of attics... secretly, at some point their silence ceased to be mere silence. Like a folk tale told by elders to children, as if it might have been there all along, something surely breathed within the silence.

One of the things that doesn’t get talked about a lot when discussing how Griffith is a dick for bringing the monsters and such back into the world is that per the discussion in Elfhelm, the world he created was really recreated – it’s the world that existed before humans lost faith in the supernatural and started to drive those things into the astral plane. And also, because of the way Berserk’s worldbuilding works, where the physical world and the astral world kind of overlap with some things (e.g. the tree in Flora’s forest) existing in one but not the other, the above passage is very relevant.

“As if it might have been there all along, something surely breathed within the silence.”

I mean they were there all along. They were just a step removed from where humans were, and so they couldn’t be perceived by those who exist wholly on the physical plane.

2. I think I paid less attention to Casca in the past than I have been this time... because she’s just kind of off in the corner doing kooky things most of the time. She does have a bit more characterization than I remembered – I guess it’s basically age regression since she acts kind of like a toddler or something. I... am not gonna get too much into Casca’s situation right now since obviously the main event is Griffith showing up like a ex with a glow up but her situation is on my mind a lot. Maybe I’ll get into it when she and Guts go off alone.

And I still miss Godo. Gruff old bastard.

This next little sequence I’m just going to rearrange slightly to make it easier to comment – you’ve all seen it anyway. I just moved the two panels of Guts thinking about Griffith out of the way of bit with Erica trying to get him to stay.

This is a kind of weird moment to me because Guts didn’t actually promise to stay he just half-heartedly acknowledged that if he did stay Casca would probably calm down a lot. I have a lot of conflicted thoughts about Erica and her constant push to have Guts stay with her/them, because Guts literally only knew them for a year so I’m not sure why she feels like he’s supposed to live the rest of his life with her.

I guess the real answer is “because she’s a kid. “

But even so, that moment kind of has the feel to me of like... Guts saying something kind of vague to avoid having to decide in that moment, but since he’s talking to a literal child it ends up being taken to heart in a way that’s difficult to walk back.

3. One of the problems I have with the “Guts just hates Griffith and wants him dead” crowd is... when he thinks about Griffith it’s never about killing him. He thinks about maybe becoming a monster to be more like Griffith. He thinks about Griffith’s flowing silvery hair. He thinks about how much he should want to kill him even though his instinct was to drop it.  He thinks about abusing or abandoning Casca to get closer to him, or become more entwined with him or chase him, but he never... imagines inflicting violence on Griffith. He doesn’t fantasize about Griffith’s death, that’s just his fans. Guts himself can’t even bring himself to think the words, most of the time.

What I really think is happening, and I will defend this to my death, is...

... what he really wants is for Griffith to be Griffith again. He wants to be able to get back the things he lost without realizing he had them. But it doesn’t matter because Griffith’s still a demon and Guts can’t turn back time, so he just gets mad instead, because that’s what he knows how to handle. As Godo said, he runs into his rage because it’s easier to handle than his grief – over the death of the Hawks and the loss of Casca’s sanity, but most of all over the loss of Griffith, the person he upended his life to get closer to – the person who no longer exists.

Which is why seeing Griffith in a human-esque body throws him off. It’s easier to hate Femto, who is visibly demonic and has obvious physical markers to separate him from the person who was, and is, Guts’ primary fixation in life. But when he looks like himself, that line gets blurry and Guts responds with epic ambivalence... as is about to play out during their meeting.

All that aside, the fact that his first instinct is to drop it is very telling, in my opinion. Because a person doesn’t need to talk themselves into doing something they unambiguously want to do, they need to talk themselves into doing things they feel ambivalent about, or conflicted about. On one hand they may want to do the thing, but on the other hand, definitely don’t want to do the thing.  It’s like when you don’t want to go somewhere but you know you should, and you assume you’ll be glad you did it after it’s done, but in the moment you’d rather just watch tv and doomscroll, so you have to get yourself revved up to put on pants and leave the house.

I guess my point is...

After he sees Griffith in his human form, the desire to go after him changes. He feels like he should do it for a number of reasons. Because of everything Griffith did, and how outraged and hurt he is. Because of his grief and frustration... and because he’s been hunting Griffith for years and there’s no way he can just stop now right when he finally has a chance to accomplish his goal. There is a bit of sunk costs in there - something Griffith knows well - mixed in with that genuine drive and anger, and hate.

But... as much as he knows that, as angry and hurt as he genuinely is, he struggles to hold onto that in the face of the one person who has always meant the most to him – for good or ill.

I do think that changes a bit, mostly as a result of this very meeting, but it never does go back to the way it was – the certainty he gained from all that black fire and white hot rage is dimmed by his ambivalence.

That said, even when he was faced with Femto his feelings were more complicated than that. Puck lampshaded it obviously, but even more than that you can see a slightly smaller scale version of the following scene all the way back in Black Swordsman –

Guts being crushed by Griffith’s initial dismissal of him. (He even does that thing where Griffith dismisses him and he’s like, ...WHAT WAIT... and tries to follow him), Guts being like, “Griffith you fucker, look what you did,” and Femto being all, “Hey Guts, I’ve got some good news: I don’t care,” and Guts being driven by Griffith’s lack of fucks to give... more than anything else, really.

So, you know, the change in appearance puts a foot on the scale but it didn’t create the issue to begin with.

Oh yeah. The other thing I wanted to say, because I’ve been thinking about it since the last writeup, is...

The fact that Guts perceives Griffith’s facetuned 2.0  – the version people recognize as being a tier above even the high tier of beauty that he already had as a human being – as “just like he used to be” is pretty telling as far as the way Griffith is in Guts’ mind: filtered through the eyes of love and idealization and hero worship, seen from the ground as Guts looks up at the pedestal he always had Griffith on.

The sheer sensuality of the imagery is also... quite notable to me, especially in light of some of the phrasing that has been discussed re: later scenes.

4. This whole part of the scene is so weird to me, honestly. Like the way Rickert is talking and Griffith’s just silent. It... gives me the weird impression of Rickert talking to a statue or something. Or a mirror. In some ways it’s actually pretty appropriate – Griffith was always the slate the Hawks projected their dreams and hopes and fantasies onto. The only one he really allowed to “know” him was Guts - even Casca picked it up by chance, really - so it is perhaps appropriate that Guts is the first person he speaks to on panel. I also think this serves a narrative purpose, but more on that in a moment.

I bet the readers lost their fucking minds.

As a sidenote, I’m a little devastated that we lost the “reunion at/on/in” titling scheme for the Elfhelm visit. They did drop the phrasing on the color pages, but still.

One time I read someone asking how Rickert was able to stop Guts given that Guts is definitely stronger than him and like... I just figured Guts didn’t want to trample him. Because it’s Rickert, I mean if it were anyone who wasn’t Rickert, Casca or Erica I’m sure he would have... well cut them in half if we’re being  honest. But there’s no way he’d manhandle a Hawk that easily.

I can’t imagine how confusing that must be to Rickert. But again we see here this separation Guts has between Griffith as he is now and the Griffith he knew. Like he struggles to maintain it now because Griffith looks like Griffith, but he’s actively trying to maintain that separation... I imagine because it makes it easier to maintain his focus on vengeance instead of pining for what was lost.

In the deluxe version, that last panel is corrected to “Don’t talk about me in that same voice.”

Which is interesting – it kinda brings me back to exactly what Griffith’s talking about – the day they first met, when Griffith speed analyzed Guts’ personality and Guts was super pissed off about it (because he was right). And I do think that’s a lot of what’s going on here – “don’t talk to me in that same voice” and “don’t talk about me in that same voice” aren’t really the same thing. Well I’m sure you know that.

But basically, for me, when it was translated as “to” the feeling was something like, “don’t come here acting like you’re Griffith and using his face and smiling his smile and talking with his voice.” Almost like rage over the demon who replaced his friend.

With “about me” I feel more like he’s angry because this moment echoes the moment Griffith is talking about - when they first met, and Guts was a wild dog, and Griffith just stood there and analyzed him - and hes doing it again like nothing changed, but it has. It fucks with his head. I’m having a bit of a hard time articulating this for some reason, but look at Guts’ face when his internal monologue starts (“that same face”). He’s essentially frozen in place. He’s struggling. And just like back there on the tower, his first instinct is to stare and then he has to work himself up... in this case by the sheer hubris of Griffith showing up here all chill and acting like Griffith and pushing all of Guts’ emotional buttons.

It feels a bit like... “You’re acting like nothing’s changed, but everything’s changed.”

But it’s debatable how successful he is at revving himself up here. I mean he’s pissed, sure, but hes also just standing there. Rickert may be “holding him back” but in a page or two we see how effective that is if Guts really wants to get through, because Guts just shrugs him off basically.

As much as Guts is struggling with this situation, though, Griffith’s tone is interesting isn’t it? He’s so distanced and calm – even more than when they first met. Back then, he had a lot of intensity and playfulness whereas here he’s just kind of distant.

Once, years ago, someone told me that she had met up with an ex that she used to be crazy in love with... and she said she could still see everything about him that she had loved so much, but it had lost its hold on her. She didn’t ... react the same way to those things, even though the things hadn’t changed and she still thought they were charming.

That’s kind of the feeling I get from Griffith here. It’s not necessarily something specific to Guts though – it’s kind of how he is with everything, even his ambitions.

So like. About this scene.

Is he here just to see Guts and see whether Guts can shake his heart, or is he here to see whether he feels any guilt over the Eclipse?

Rhetorical question, it’s the first one. But I’ve seen a lot of people argue that rather than come here to see Guts specifically and test whether Guts specifically still affects him, he is instead here to see “The Hawks and their graves” and see whether he still “has some scrap of emotion left” or regrets his choices. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad faith argument - it’s almost the same thing, just phrased in a more... uh anti-Griffith way I guess and focused on the Hawks as a whole instead of Guts specifically.  Usually this I think comes from people who place less weight on Griffith’s feelings for Guts than, say, I do.

 But I’m going to argue against that perspective.

First of all, Griffith does literally say he came to meet with Guts. Maybe people think he’s talking to Guts and Rickert, but I don’t think that bears out from the scene itself. Remember when I noted that Guts is the first person Griffith speaks to on panel after his reincarnation? That’s a bit of a narrative trick – it drives home how focused he really is on Guts, because he’s sort of an ephemeral half-presence until Guts shows up and he starts solidifying so to speak. But that’s not all - Griffith really only talks to Guts at all for most of this scene – he only really acknowledges Rickert’s presence once he’s finished his business with Guts, and even then it’s half-afterthought as he’s taking off.

Second, Guts is the thing that always undermined Griffith’s control of himself and his ability or desire to focus on his vision/dream. This is obviously hammered home like 90,000 times during the Golden Age -  that’s really what Griffith’s side of the narrative is about – this tug of war between Guts and Griffith’s lifelong ambition. Even when he actually made the Sacrifice, the only one he thought about before making the choice was Guts.

That being the case, the scene just makes the most sense as Griffith checking his Guts issues not his Hawks issues, because he doesn’t really have Hawks issues. If he wants to test his own heart, the best possible trial is coming face to face with this person that he desperately loved and couldn’t think clearly about. Because if Guts can’t hurt him anymore, can’t control his heart anymore, what could? Literally nothing.

There are also visual markers later but everything in its time.

And Guts’ face when he says that is priceless. He doesn’t know how to process that – he doesn’t know what to do with himself if that’s true. And honestly, imagine if Griffith had followed that up with, “as it turns out, this was a terrible idea and I miss them and I miss you.” Guts would have dropped the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong, It’s not that I think Guts would be fine with it or suddenly not care that Griffith fed the Hawks to monsters and raped Casca. That’s not what I mean. I think he would have struggled with himself over it, and felt guilty about it, but ultimately I do think he would have dropped it.

Because the thing with Guts is that, since he operates on a  system where whether he cares about what happens to someone depends on whether he personally likes them, he is always capable of letting something go if he likes you more than he likes the person or people you did something to. I once had a tierlist for this actually, but my position was basically that if someone at S tier hurts someone at A tier, Guts might not like it, but he’s able to let it go if you give him a good enough reason to do so. But if someone at B tier hurts someone at A tier, that’s when he can’t get over it. Basically, if you’re only hitting people he likes less than you, you can work it out even if it’s hard.

And this is relevant because despite many fans’ insistence, Griffith, not Casca, is the top dog of the tierlist. This is extremely evident by the way he lives, the way he prioritizes, the way his inner dog behaves. When he’s chasing Griffith he never thinks about how he should be there for Casca, but when he’s protecting Casca, he’s always twitching to go back to chasing Griffith. He physically and sexually assaulted her becausee he wanted to become closer to and more like Griffith. More on that when it comes up obviously but the point is...Griffith is the top of the tierlist. The only competition he’s ever had was Gambino, who is dead. And that being the case, I do think he would forgive Griffith if he had any reason to, any reason at all.

And if anyone thinks Guts is incapable of letting go of the Eclipse, i mean it was Miura himself who said if Casca weren’t with him, he’d eventually move on. That’s why Miura kept her around.

But even more than that, I do think that even more than the Eclipse itself, Guts’ rage and pain stems from the way Griffith doesn’t care about it, doesn’t regret it, wouldn’t take it back, dismisses it, dismisses him. Until the most recent meeting, that was always what set him off going back to the Black Swordsman arc and I... the most recent chapters aren’t by Miura. Like I appreciate the opportunity to find out where the story was going, and I accept the broad plot strokes as ‘true’ but obviously the details blur a little, or a lot. 

Another thing is, Rickert’s face.  Rickert is aware that Griffith is talking about Guts specifically, because he’s aware that Griffith has always been weird about Guts – he’s right there with the others when Griffith found out that an immortal mega-warrior is about to confront Guts, and all the captains stopped what they were doing to watch Griffith for panic attacks.

He’s also the one who put it out there that Griffith’s self-destruction was probably about Guts’ departure:

But also... what Griffith says – I came to know for certain whether anything will shake my heart as I stand before you in this new body of flesh” – so the word he’s using that’s being translated as heart is kokoro and it’s a little more complicated than just heart, it’s like mind and spirit and emotions – I pulled this quote from here

So it’s interesting – I think in context heart is the right choice in English – certainly more accurate than something like ‘shake my spirit’ or whatever – but he’s talking about Guts’ potential to destabilize him mind and body, heart and soul - to shake him to the core. Which is not only an accurate explanation of Guts’ impact on Griffith pre-eclipse, it also explains the look on Rickert’s face. Because that’s a lot.

Also this page – the emphasis put on Griffith’s “freedom”, the prominence of the panel itself  – it speaks to the reader’s assumed understanding of how much and how deeply Griffith had felt for Guts.  Because it serves as the moment when the Griffith we knew – who perhaps the reader expected to see again now – is confirmed to be gone.

At least in theory.

The funny thing about it, though, is that while Rickert and the reader know that Griffith was basically obsessed with Guts, Guts doesn’t know that. So when he says he’s free (of the hold Guts had on him), Guts reacts to it as though he’s saying he’s free of guilt over the Hawks. Which in fairness I guess he probably is, but the point is Guts doesn’t really “get” what he’s saying, as usual.

Also, this is what I mean!  I’m not saying he isn’t mad at Griffith regardless, but until Griffith blows him off, he’s letting himself be restrained by Rickert – there’s rage, but there’s also a little hesitation, and I think – in that moment when Griffith says he came to see whether he still cared – a bit of hope mixed in there, too. Hope that coming back to the world has brought back more of the person he was – that he won’t be a monster anymore. And it’s evident on his face – Miura was such a master of facial expressions – that’s not even really rage in that bottom panel its something of a plea – a desperation to find something in Griffith that he recognizes.  It’s pain, and the need to have Griffith acknowledge that pain and have some kind of reaction to it.

To go back to the my-ex-doesn’t-affect-me-the-same-way metaphor, its like Guts is the ex in that equation and he was kind of hoping they could get back together, but nothing he says or does can make Griffith react to him the way he used to.

It reminds me of that quote from Miura about how Griffith brings out Gut’s will to fight, but also his loneliness.

Which brings us to this:

In all the discussion about whether Griffith has any feelings, it’s kind of odd how no one ever discusses that Griffith never actually said he didn’t have any feelings. Because the conversation was like

Griffith: I came to see whether you can still destabilize me, but as it turns out, no. Guts: Are you saying you don’t feel anything about all that shit you did? Griffith: All I’m saying is that I won’t betray my dream.That’s it, thats all I’m saying.

It’s a trap I I fall into as well – referring to his emotionlessness. To me though it’s always been more about having his feelings blunted than completely eliminated. In any event, it’s a bit of an evasion. Because he never says yes, exactly, I have zero feelings about you or anything else, he just implies that he is no longer controlled by whatever he has going on internally, if anything.

Which, if you think back to the bit above about Guts’ misunderstanding of Griffith’s point, makes the conversation a bit more interesting, because Griffith’s final comment – I won’t betray my dream, that’s all – becomes more of a direct statement about the power Guts has over him:

“Are you saying you don’t feel anything?”

“What I’m saying is that you’re not going to derail me again. That is all that I’m saying.”

And now some visual markers.

How does this series of images confirm that the scene is about Griffith and Guts not Griffith and the Hawks? Well, that’s why we keep going back to Griffith’s calm face while Guts fights for his life against Zodd. We remember the way Griffith reacted to Guts being danger, so his nonreaction serves as an indicator for how much he’s changed.

This is.... one of the things I think people lose when they think he’s a sociopath or a serial rapist or whatever, because Miura did the same thing with Femto’s rape of Casca – he established that Griffith has a history of protecting Casca from sexual assaults, or in the case of Wyald of wanting to so much that he damn near jumped into the fight despite being unable to walk or hold a sword. And while he does seemingly make some kind of move on her in the wagon, when she tells him to stop, he just stops. Yet, the first thing he does as Femto is rape her himself. It’s a narrative shout to the reader that things have changed – he’s changed. If you think he raped Charlotte and tried to rape Casca in the damn wagon you miss this point entirely and if you think Griffith didn’t care about Guts you miss what’s going on in this scene. It’s here to tell us that he’s changed. He’s empty now, he doesn’t care about anything – those boundaries that once confined him, those feelings that bound him, have no pull any longer.  There’s literally no other reason to keep going back to that empty expression.

But, the thing is, much like his vague “I’ll not betray my dream,” which may or may not mean what Guts thinks it means, the look itself may be misleading, too. Because...

His dearth of expression is undercut as his face doesn’t change at all even after the story takes a moment to point out specifically that he does feel something. I’m not getting in deep into whether the feelings are his or the baby’s at this specific second because it doesn’t matter for my point which is that Griffith’s face doesn’t change even when he’s feeling some type of way, which means we never really know whether he is or isn’t.

As a sidenote, that actually isn’t too different from his human self, it’s just that back then he’d reach a point where the situation escalates too far and he starts sweating and bugging out. But at first he tended to be pretty stoic.

Which again seems to imply to me that the major change is in the intensity of emotion more than their existence or nonexistence. He reacts, but it never escalates.

Apropos of nothing, I love this panel. Geez Zodd. ...sometimes I wonder what makes some apostles look so bestial in their human form whereas some of them look completely human (e.g. Locus, Rosine, etc). I imagine it’s something to do with choosing their forms or temperament or whatever, but it’s an interesting question. I have so many questions about Apostles in general...

Anyway skipping the fight for the most part since it’s just like grunting and commentary from Rickert.

And this, which is one of my favorite images in the entire series.

There’s the famous “... ... ... ... ...” of significant silence as Griffith contemplates the meaning of his beating heart. And then....

And the fact that something has changed in Griffith’s reaction gets highlighted covering his eyes with his hair – if you look over the way Miura portrayed his hair situation, you’ll find that he did a lot of covering Griffith’s eyes (usually one) with his hair in moments of internal struggle.

So here’s where Casca enters the story with...

I’m not saying Guts is a terrible person for the  things he says to Casca sometimes – I do think in this specific instance its how high his emotions are running and what’s going on at the time. But it’s just. Interesting isn’t it? Just the way he insults her kind of foreshadows how he treats her as a burden for... much of the rest of the series, really, but especially until Farnese and Serpico turn up again.

One day I’ll write a thing about my perception of this triangle between Guts, Griffith and Casca – which more or less comes down to “most of them have always been worried about losing the rest of them to each other,” with the sole exception being Griffith’s arguably not caring about losing Casca to Guts so much as he cared about losing Guts to Casca.  But really the relationship between them begins with Casca being terrified to lose Griffith to Guts, and then Guts steps back and pushes Griffith and Casca together despite how he feels about it, and then of course during the rescue he worries about losing Casca to Griffith and then them to each other.

Now, what’s going on with this whole situation is kind of different but it also plays on that, because Guts doesn’t know that Griffith is carrying the remains of their son in his body so he interprets Casca’s reaction to Griffith as, well, her reaction to Griffith. Which, considering how that particular relationship ended, can’t be easy for him to see.

As evidenced by his anguished reaction to Casca reaching for Griffith’s face.

And now we proceed to some of the most important pages, I M O, mostly in terms of Guts’ reaction to Griffith because I just wish people would read more closely and look at the art when they’re interpreting things, but anyway woe is me, moving on.

So Griffith’s like, fuck worrying about this baby, I’m out of here. And Guts’ immediate reaction is...

“W... wait! Where’re you...?!”

I mean look his immediate priority isn’t taking a shot at Griffith’s back, it’s not talking smack, and his face isn’t even angry, not even when Griffith first gives his reasoning:

It’s... complicated.

I mean, again, I’m not saying he doesn’t want to beat on Griffith or kill Griffith, I’m aware that he does, just that there’s a lot more going on there and in this moment– in this moment - when he realizes that Griffith is leaving, he isn’t concerned with revenge. He just. Doesn’t want Griffith to leave. Which...

Consistency!

Because I think even at this moment, even now after Griffith said he didn’t care (well implied) and all of that, he still has a corner of him that wants to believe this can be the beginning of something instead of the end. Going back to the exes thing, it’s a situation where a guy (Guts) breaks up with his boyfriiend (Griffith) because he’s going to college and having “experiences,” but it causes a huge fight, but one day they decide go to lunch and catch up but they go into it with different intentions because the guy is kind of hoping they can work it out, but the boyfriend has already moved on with his life.

This becomes even more evident in a few pages but for now...

As noted, he doesn’t even acknowledge Rickert on panel until he’s finished dealing with Guts and is ready to get to the next thing.

And it’s only then – after Griffith decided to take off in the middle of their reunion and blew him off when he objected, that Guts finds his anger again.

And I’ve seen some people wonder why he extends this offer to Rickert but not to Guts. I think that’s a pretty easy one to cover, though. A few things.

First, Rickert isn’t a sacrifice. You can’t bring Guts around the apostles and Griffith’s supernatural mojo even if he were willing to go, he reads as food to them.

Second, Rickert wasn’t in the Eclipse. As such, there’s still a chance that he can deal and put it aside – and in fact Rickert didn’t really decide what to do until the last minute, so yeah there was presumably a chance that it could go the other way.

Third and arguably most importantly, Guts is incredibly dangerous to Griffith. He’s the Achilles’ Heel that took him down twice in the past. Even after his ascension he was unable to make himself hurt Guts. Now Griffith has come all this way to make sure he didn’t care anymore... and ended up realizing that for whatever reason, he does. There’s no way he’d invite that into his world even if there were a chance that Guts would accept, which there isn’t, which is the last thing.

Fourth, why waste his breath?

“Wait, Ariel, didn’t you just say you think Guts kind of wanted to make up with Griffith?” Yeah, and I meant that, but I think in order to bridge that gap, wide as it is, Guts needs things from Griffith that Griffith isn’t giving him - arguably isn’t even capable of giving him. Because unless Griffith could tell him he regrets it, that he made a mistake, and that he still cares about Guts himself, there’s no ground to gain there. And he won’t. So there isn’t.

It’s like a roller coaster with Guts and his feelings about Griffith – the anger comes and subsides and comes and subsides, largely dependent on what Griffith is doing.

I feel like here and also to a lesser but still significant degree in the meeting with Femto back in the Black Swordsman arc, Guts’ initial reaction to Griffith is... anger but almost like an anger that’s slightly hesitant – he’s easily discouraged in this case, he’s blocked by Rickert and all of that. And then he looks for something of the original Griffith – its like a hostile interrogation – look at you up there putting on godly airs, what do you mean you don’t feel anything, feel something, how can you say that, what do you mean I don’t matter?! And when that fails to provoke the response he wants and Griffith inevitably basically says go away insect, that’s when the real anger comes... mostly to swallow the pain.

I see a lot of people saying that this is Griffith admitting he was an evil monster the whole time and literally nothing about him has changed. I think that’s a bit of a stretch – he’s talking about how Guts is the only person who would know that he’s ruthless when he has to be, but of course when he did that around Guts in the past, he was visibly shaken by the need to do so and asked if it made him a terrible person.

My point is I don’t think he’s making a comment on his dearth of emotion as a human person – he’s just saying that even despite having done awful things, he isn’t going to stop. It doesn’t really matter whether he feels badly about it or not -- I don’t think he does, but it also doesn’t matter that he doesn’t feel guilty just like it didn’t matter that he did feel guilty in the past. Griffith is, and has always been, able to cut some throats and keep it pushing. And Guts – only Guts – would know that about him.

It’s a sort of similar situation to another thing people use to make that “Griffith was always a sociopath” argument – Rickert saying that NeoGriffith is “different, but somehow more Griffith than before.” As in “oh he masked off and revealed his evil and Rickert realizes that this demon guy is more of Griffith’s true self than he’d seen before” I guess. Which I think is s silly interpretation, but I guess we’ll get into that when it comes up. But, preview I guess, I think it’s clearly Rickert comparing NeoGriffith’s embodiment of the White Hawk image – the impression Griffith left (and attempted to leave) of a large than life aloof hero driven primarily by his dreams” – to human Griffith, who was those things but in a less “pure” form due to his human frailties, self-doubts and attachments. 

But I also think his saying that, his claim that the current heart-poor version of him is the same as he always was, is part of the reason Guts is able to “let him go.” Because Guts does this thing where whenever he gets more information about Griffith he tries to integrate that information into his views, and it ends up changing everything about his perception of Griffith’s personality and his behavior. And you can literally see it happening on the page:

Originally, he was confused about why Griffith kept risking his own life for Guts, and Griffith said “I have no reason, it’s just for you” and Guts reworked his understanding of Griffith and their relationship in his head.

And then he heard Promrose, and he recontextualized everything again - suddenly he was wrong, they weren’t friends, he was just being stupid. This is where he develops this view that Griffith is “the boundless hawk,” who is “always taking” and "would never come down to the land where we crawl.” At this point he’s chasing Griffith the way his child self used to chase Gambino - I’m not saying Griffith’s his metaphorical father or anything, I’m saying Griffith becomes the hero that he wants to be seen, valued, and validated by.

Then during the rescue he starts to understand Griffith again and begins to realize that Griffith wasn’t cruel, wasn’t cold. He wasn’t anything like Gambino, he really did care, and Guts was wrong about him the whole time. This is when he gets the closest to fully understanding Griffith’s motivations - to the point where just before the Eclipse actually occurs he is finally starting to see how much of Griffith’s... self rests in his hands - that maybe his absence is what caused Griffith’s fall. But then...

After the Sacrifice, Guts pulls a Berserk fan: he can’t understand how someone could care and still make this choice, and all the things that made him dazzling become evidence of his ability to be heartless.

That brings us here, because ever since the Eclipse, in both his meeting with Femto and this meeting with NeoGriffith, Guts searches for reasons to recontextualize his understanding again. He demands to know how Griffith feels, whether he cares, does he regret anything, how can he be so calm about this, how can he be so dismissive. It’s anger, but he’s also trying to understand so he knows what to think about both Femto/Griffith as he is now and about Griffith as he was, then.

The issue is that when Griffith says, “I dont care about you, I don’t care about them, I’m just going to go conquer things and no I don’t feel about about it,” and then follows that up with “You of all people should know is and has always been the way I am...”

Guts kind of gets his answer. And if he operates under the assumption that Griffith has always been this person - the person who could rape Casca just to hurt Guts, the person who could straightforwardly say he doesn't care about all the people he fed to demons - then honestly what is there to hold onto?

I mean, he’s wrong. Griffith obviously has been changed by the loss of his... softer pieces. I don’t want to keep calling it humanity because of all my ranting about Berserk’s humans recently, but you know what I mean. But even if he’s wrong, he isn’t aware of it, hey. And that  facilitates his ability to kind of let go, at least to the degree that he does which is marginal anyway. And while it doesn’t really eliminate the ambivalence entirely, but it does let his emotional conflict settle a little.

tl;dr: he’s just being wrong again, but what else is new.

Anyway!

So now I’m going to take a moment to talk about what I didn’t talk about before, namely whether Griffith’s emotions derive from the infant.

I think they do, and also they don’t.

The thing is, way back before there were any demon babies, Femto had already failed to attack Skull Knight specifically because Guts would have gotten caught in the attack. And, given that when Guts asks him directly if he has zero feelings he doesn’t answer the question but rather evades it, I think it seems probable that Griffith does retain some emotion – it’s enough that, no matter how vague and distanced, it made him hesitate and thus saved Guts’ life. This is also, I think, the reason Femto is such a petty bitch around Guts – the guidebook even notes that Femto goes out of his way to do things to humiliate or hurt Guts, “perhaps due to the complicated feelings he harbored prior to reincarnation.”

That said, it does seem likely that Femto/Griffith’s emotions are extremely blunted – frozen so to speak – and that the child acts as an enhancer, or that its feelings mix in with his, or its impulses influence his actions, or all of the above. In that sense you could say the baby is the chain that holds him, but I don’t see how his own feelings could be completely void without a retcon which, I mean, maybe there’s a retcon, I have no idea.

Also people like to say the manga states directly that the feelings all come from the kid, but it’s Griffith that says it, and it’s not exactly unGriffithlike behavior to deny his own feelings or explain them away.

So right now smart money for me is on “Griffith has feelings but they are dulled and the infant catalyzes them and influences his behavior,” but I’m open.

Casca magically sensing her kid so fucking weird.

“I was... I’m a Hawk too.” I love that even after everything with Griffith, they really... still identify that same way. Even way in the future when Rickert confronts Griffith in Falconia, he doesn’t disavow the human leader he followed, only the demon that leader became.  Guts’ reaction is a little more complicated, but even he conceptualized them as the Hawks with Casca as the leader and himself as the Raider Captain going to seek the enemy) when he first set out.

I love the footprints in the snow. I mean I realize Miura made it snowy because of the bit in a few pages and that obviously the snow would involve footprints, but ever since the snow duel, footprints in the snow have sort of represented paths and choices for me, at least when it comes to Berserk. In this moment, Rickert is kind of faced with the same decision Guts is dealing with – to go after revenge or to protect the girl. And Rickert is who he is, which is why he obviously struggled with it less than Guts does.

I really wonder what he would have done if Zodd didn’t collapse the cave.

Because even though he says he won’t leave her again, that’s what he said when he set off for the Tower to begin with, and then he was like yeah idk maybe I should ditch. Even now he’s thinking about other places he could drop her – other elf dwellings - and Puck even picks up that he’s considering just locking her up again.

Then... when they finally started for Elfhelm... he decided to focus on her and get her to safety, but he was obviously struggling with the desire to drop her off there and leave. People like to say he chose to protect her over pursuing vengeance, which he did but I do not think that was ever going to last and what’s more I don’t think he *really* intended it to. He was never going to like, settle down in Elfhelm with her. He may have considered it, he may have even told himself he would... but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

And I do think it’s evident that he knew that on some level.

No point here, just lolz.

Okay we’re in the home stretch, this is a long rambles session, sorry about that.

Wow look at all that simple and uncomplicated pure hatred.

But seriously, we come back around to what I was saying earlier – even though Guts hates him and wants to kill him, he also wants.... him back in his life?? I don’t know how else to put it. Guts feels dismissed and deserted. He abandoned Griffith and thus was abandoned in turn. You don’t describe yourself as abandoned/deserted by someone unless you feel their loss - but more than that, he explicitly draws a parallel between the way he abandoned Griffith, who desperately wanted him to stay (and engaged him in violence to that effect, for that matter), and now, when Griffith has abandoned him despite his vioiently desperate attempts to make him stay.

Also, in a minute I’ll explain this, but he views the loss of his friend as his own fault – a result of his own actions, his decision to walk away. Because again, there was a part of him hoping for a reconciliation. I will die on that snowy hill.

From there...

So I went back to the Japanese on this because sometimes the specifics of the Japanese phrasing clarifies what’s being said/done for me. As I always say, I’m not fluent in Japanese, I do my best, I’m not perfect, correct if necessary but...

What he says that’s translated a “I won’t lose you” is “I wont forfeit” with furigana that says “lose.” Also as is typical in Japanese it leaves out the pronouns but I do think that kind of changes the narrative just slightly, and no I’m not going to say he’s not talking about her, he’s obviously talking about her.

It’s just...

He’s thinking about the way he abandoned Griffith, which now leads to him being abandoned by Griffith, which leads to him kind of reflecting on that relationship - the distance that's between them, the destruction of that relationship that resulted from his having left Griffith behind. Then he looks at Casca and remembers her reaching for Griffith, which evokes that old fear of loss.

Which brings him back to how he'd abandoned her, too. And this is why I find the use of “forfeit” important – because forfeiting is to suffer a penalty as a result of a mistake or general wrongdoing or breaking of rules. And he’s using the same terminology for what he is not going to do to Casca... as he does for what Griffith has done to him.

So basically what I’m getting is that he perceives his relationship with Griffith as something he lost as a result of his having made a mistake/committed a wrongdoing and, recognizing that he almost did the same thing to Casca, he decides he isn’t going to repeat that mistake.

And I mean, again it’s about her, but not unlike the time he said he wouldn’t lose the flame and it was translated as him not wanting to lose Casca, it does kind of change the narrative in a negative way. Guts’s arc regarding personal relationships is that he goes from someone who values no one and is valued by no one to someone who is able to recognize that there are people he loves and needs, and people who love and need him. And his ability to face that and deal with the reality that his actions affect those people is what ultimately spurs him to change his behaviors.

-Guts leaves the Hawks, and as a result he loses Griffith AND the Hawks.

-He leaves Casca, and as a result when he comes back to Godo’s cave she’s run away and he nearly loses her.

-When he leaves to go get her, he doesn’t bother to look back at Godo, and when he gets back Godo has died.

It’s a repeating pattern - a series of actions that trigger losses that ultimately bring him to the point where he decides he can’t keep doing this or he’s going to end up with no one and nothing. And even though the outcome is the same: Guts decides he isn't going to throw Casca away because he won't lose any more people he loves, making it about losing her specifically makes it read as though he’s motivated by his romansu. And you can tell people read it that way because people who read it in english thinks he’s... motivated by his romance with her.

But that... misses the point of his journey and wastes the buildup of all those losses. It isn’t just about her. It’s about him and the way he treats people, and his growing understanding that he has to change.

Finally, before we go...

It’s kind of fascinating the way Griffith is still remembered as the savior of Midland – their guardian angel.

I guess this is a bit out of nowhere, but people’s hate for Sonia is so bizarre to me. If there’s anything I understand even less than disliking a character because they did something mean to a character I like, it’s disliking a character because they like a character I dislike. Sonia herself is just an innocent psychic teenager who can hear the whispers of the world.

 I don’t know that I will ever have anything interesting to say about Silat, so...

I’ll leave you here.

...is that a magical horse? Inquiring minds want to know.

#berserk #berserk meta #rambles about berserk #ariel talks about berserk