#this dude's existence vexes me so much | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vexcraft · 4 months

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i present you: grub species swap! avian cub and vex grian with some vex scar trying to eat everyone on the side (so warning for cannibalism mentions but like in a funny way). can also be read on ao3 here!

backwards

“What did you do?!” Grian basically screams as he lunges at Cub with almost inhumane speed. Cub steps to the side, avoiding Grian more easily than he should have been able to.

Right.

Grian is considerably smaller and easier to dodge without his big bright wings that easily triple the amount of space the man needs around him even when they are neatly folded against his back. The wings that are currently not on Grian’s, but Cub’s back.

Which brings them to their current problem, which isn’t even Grian’s confused anger. At least that isn’t the main problem and Cub is fairly certain he can hopefully deal with it, though he’s no Grian-whisperer.

“Man, I didn’t do anything!” he replies, raising his hands in surrender. It was true – for once. He had nothing to do with this. The wings on his back shift as he moves, feeling unfamiliar and weird. “Not my fault, I swear!”

“You have my wings!” Grian stares at Cub like he has grown a second head instead of wings, his deep black eyes even more ominous than usual.

“Not by choice,” Cub argues. “Not everything is always someone else’s fault, y’know.”

Grian glares at him and Cub shrugs. The weight of the wings seems to put pressure on muscles Cub didn’t even know existed – hell, maybe they didn’t exist before this, who knows what the extent of these changes to his body really was? Whatever it was, it was certainly making him uncomfortable.

“I’m having kind of a hard time believing that you here, Mr. Vex Magician, don’t have anything to do with you mysteriously having my wings, ouch-” Grian flinches suddenly and pauses, sticking out his tongue. “Bit my tongue, dude, that hurt .” Cub watches the blood bleed on his lips blue. His eyes widen in realization and Grian looks at him questioningly. “What? Stop staring, you’re being weird.”

Cub sucks in a breath and ignores the feeling of feathers puffing up behind him. “You’re a vex,” he says.

Grian’s face twists from confusion to some sort of furious disbelief. “I’m what!? ” he shrieks. “Cub, what did you just say!?”

“You’re a vex,” he repeats. Suddenly things make more sense – still not enough sense, but more nonetheless. Something is very wrong, that much Cub can tell. “I’m a bird, you’re a vex.”

“An avian,” Grian corrects sourly as if that was the biggest of his concerns right now. “What do you mean? How can you even tell?”

“You’re bleeding blue,” Cub points out and Grian instantly wipes his mouth on his sleeve, staring at the stain left behind, dumbfounded. He opens his mouth to say something and Cub notes the row of pointy teeth clearly visible. “Also your teeth are sharp, like vex.” He watches Grian run his tongue over his teeth and does the same himself, noticing his own teeth are no longer like little daggers lined up but instead flat like humans and hybrids that didn’t have special diets tended to have.

“What does this mean?” Grian asks, sounding alarmed by the new discovery. “Being a vex, what does it mean for me?”

Cub thinks – what does it mean? He’s so used to his own nature and all the big and small quirks that come with it that it’s not as simple of a question as one might think. Now that he knows to look, he can tell Grian’s nails are sharper too and there’s a light blue tint to his face where normally he’d be flushing red.

“Hopefully not much,” he ends up shrugging. “If we get this fixed quickly.”

“That’s a pretty big if, considering neither of us seem to have any idea what happened!” Grian huffs. “What if we can’t get it fixed quickly, what then? Cub, vexes are weird creatures! I don’t know how any of this works!”

Cub snorts, not taking offense. “Can you hear them?” Grian shakes his head, visibly confused. “Good, good. Are you hungry?”

“I don’t think so?” he replies, taking a moment to focus on his now rather foreign-feeling body. “I feel like I could eat something but not hungry, I don’t think? Wait, what do you mean by hearing them? Can you hear them?”

“That’s normal, if you’re not feeling hungry then there’s nothing to worry about,” Cub hums. There might, most likely will, be something to worry about in the future if they can’t get this solved, but right now he’d prefer to… avoid going into certain details unless he absolutely has to. “I can usually hear the vex, but not right now though.”

He’s grown so used to the little yells and screams in the back of his head that he hadn’t even realized they weren’t there anymore. The silence is odd now that he pays attention to it, but he’s relieved to know the cacophony hasn’t moved into Grian’s head instead.

“What do you mean you can usually hear them?” Grian asks, sounding so horrified Cub is even more glad Grian apparently can’t hear them. “That’s awful, can Scar hear them too?”

“Yep,” Cub replies. He would have assumed Scar would have told Grian, considering the two were good friends, but then again, it really wasn’t that much of a big deal. “It’s kinda annoying but we’re used to it by now. It’s not too bad.”

“Doesn’t sound like something ‘not too bad’ to me,” Grian insists. “Does Xisuma know?”

“If he knows anything about vexes, then probably yeah. Seriously, it’s no big deal, I’m sure there are some bird things you don’t think are odd but others do,” Cub says, rolling his shoulders. The wings are starting to feel uncomfortable like things aren’t in the right places. “Like for example how itchy these wings are,” he mumbles, trying to reach for the itchy spot before realizing that one, he can’t reach it, and two, the wings aren’t moving in the ways he thinks they should be. “How do you even deal with this, mine are never like this-”

“You can preen them,” Grian points out with a shrug. “I’m kinda lazy with that though, so I’ve just gotten used to the discomfort. Hold on, what do you mean by your wings?”

“My vex wings. You do know that vexes have wings, right?”

Grian gapes at him and Cub pinches the bridge of his nose.

“I know the little creatures have wings!” Grian defends himself as Cub sighs in fake disappointment. “Don’t act disappointed, I’ve never seen yours or Scar’s wings, how was I supposed to know?!”

It was true neither of them really kept them visible, as they weren’t really all that useful and it was often easier to keep them hidden than to have them be on the way all the time, but still. Did this guy really know nothing about vexes at all?

“I don’t know, maybe like, look behind you or something?”

Cub watches Grian turn around a full circle, only to realize he’s trying to see something on his own back, and then trying to look over his shoulder. The wings are transparent and nearly invisible, but still very much there, just like Cub had thought they would most likely be, considering Grian would not know how to hide them with magic. Grian gawks at the wings with his mouth open, looking quite stupid in Cub’s honest opinion.

“Shut up!” Grian yells before Cub can even open his mouth to say anything. Instead, he raises an eyebrow. “Maybe I don’t know anything about vexes but that just means we really need to fix this even faster. I don’t want to like, start hearing them, or whatever that was about.”

Cub decides to not argue that he can usually hear the vexes because of his connection to the vex, which despite apparently having his species swapped with Grian, should not transfer over like that.

“Right,” he says instead. “We should probably go find Xisuma once he comes back online.”

Grian plucks his communicator out of his pocket and Cub watches his face drop in real time as he realizes they’re the only ones online. “Dude, this sucks. What if it’s a bug and the others will come back wrong too?”

The communicator in Grian’s hand pings. “We’ll see, I guess?” Cub says, recognizing the sound of a player logging on to the server.

“Scar!” Grian shouts. He makes a weird attempt to jump and it takes a second for Cub to realize he’s trying to fly. Before he can say anything, Grian has already noticed his mistake and taken off on foot, running towards the location of Scar’s base. Cub hurries behind him clumsily, weighed down by the wings against his back.

“So what exactly happened?” Scar asks curiously, unable to keep the amusement out of his voice as he watches Grian pace around the room. Cub had sat down as soon as he could once they made it to Scar’s base, tired from the running. “Cub is a bird and you’re vex? Like you got swapped somehow?”

“Cub is an avian,” Grian grumbles, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “And we don’t know what happened, but whatever it is, I don’t like it.”

“You’re feeling fully normal?” Cub asks Scar, who certainly looks normal. No weird wings, none of his usual visible traits missing. Cub can’t sense him like he usually can through his vex magic, but that seems like a given considering the current situation.

“Yep!” Scar grins and Cub can see the row of sharp vex teeth in his mouth glimmer in the light. Yeah, everything seems normal. “Never been better in my life!”

“Can you hear the vexes?” Grian asks and Cub rolls his eyes.

“Why, of course I can!” Scar replies cheerfully. “I’d be worried if I couldn’t. They’re a little irritated that they can’t reach Cub right now, but it’s probably fine.”

“Probably,” Grian repeats, not nearly as convinced as Scar seems to be. “We need to fix this, I don’t want to end up on the vexes’ bad side because of this or something.”

Cub snorts and Scar bursts into laughter.

“Don’t laugh!” Grian hisses. “Dude, this is what people mean when they say vexes are vicious little creatures, I’m losing my marbles over here and you two are laughing!”

“You’re not going to make an enemy out of the vex because of something like this,” Cub assures, though he feels like his tone probably wasn’t as comforting as needed, considering the glare Grian sends his way.

“Cub is right! It’s very unlikely,” Scar chimes in to add. “It would be really funny though.”

“It would not!” Grian argues exasperatedly, dragging his hands down his face. “This is impossible. How is today the one day when barely anyone is online?”

“Don’t be such a downer! You both should try to get all the fun out of this while it lasts!” Scar says with an excited smile. There’s a glint in his eyes Cub can recognize as the one that never means anything good. Grian looks suspicious of Scar’s suggestion. “Cub, can I eat you? I’ve always wondered if avians taste like chicken-”

“Scar!” Grian screeches, horrified.

“Fine, can me and Grian eat you?” Scar corrects himself.

Grian stares at Scar in horror. “No one is eating anyone!”

Cub shrugs – it wasn’t the wildest thing Scar could have suggested. If he had some clue what had happened and how to fix it, he would probably be taking the opportunity to do some experimenting too. “It’s probably better we don’t die and respawn before we can figure out what went wrong,” he says. “So we don’t mess things up even more.”

“Boring,” Scar laments.

“Wait, you said you’ve been wondering what avians taste like?” Grian stares at Scar. “Have you been wanting to eat me ?”

“Well, not necessarily you,” Scar says thoughtfully. “I don’t think you would agree so it would be kinda pointless.”

“And Cub would?” he questions further.

“Usually!” Scar says happily at the same time as Cub replies, “Yes.”

The expression on Grian’s face twists from suspicious disbelief back to looking absolutely horrified as his gaze flicks between Scar and Cub like the two weren’t known cannibals due to their vex nature. Grian hadn’t witnessed it firsthand, but with how things seemed to be going, he should probably start getting used to the thought.

“We really need to fix this,” he says, looking a little pale. Scar chuckles and Grian glares at him.

“Yeah,” Cub agrees, again trying to reach for the colorful wings on his back to ease his discomfort. “I need to get these itchy wings off my back.”

“I told you that you can preen them if they feel uncomfortable,” Grian points out, taking a step towards Cub. Scar watches them curiously, tilting his head a little. It’s a habit he has that Cub is certain he subconsciously copied from Jellie.

“You do realize that I don’t usually have feathers and barely know what that means, right?”

“Well, you could have said that!” Grian exclaims, throwing his hands in the air dramatically. “You can ask for help, y’know? I’ll help you sort them out.”

Cub moves back a little, noticing the wings folding even closer to his back as he shies away when Grian tries to approach him. “I don’t want you touching me,” he says, and Grian stops to stare at him.

“So you’d rather suffer with uncomfortable wings,” he phrases his question as a statement. Cub nods and Grian rolls his eyes.

“I can help!” Scar offers, perking up a little.

“It’s true,” Grian confirms. “He knows how to preen. Kinda.”

Cub blinks – he was not aware of Scar having such skill. “Really?” Scar nods enthusiastically, always eager to help. “Okay, sure, you can help. It’s just this one spot I can’t reach that’s bothering me.”

Scar stands up and makes his way behind Cub and the chair he’s sitting on with a few swift steps, seeming to easily find the feathers that had been bothering Cub. It’s a weird feeling as Scar touches the feathers, the discomfort becoming more obvious before disappearing as he seems to rearrange the feathers.

“Why does Scar get to do that but I don’t?” Grian asks, sounding more curious than offended. Cub suspects he wasn’t all that excited to help out of the kindness of his heart, but rather feeling obliged to do so considering Cub did have his wings.

“Vex privilege,” Scar hums easily as he straightens out a few more feathers and Cub feels the bad feeling slowly disappear and some tension he hadn’t even noticed melt away from his body.

“I’m a vex now though,” Grian remarks.

“You don’t count,” Scar says cheerfully, stepping away once he deems he’s fixed the feathers. “Doesn’t work like that. You gotta sell your soul to the vex first and then you get the vex privilege.”

Cub chuckles at Scar’s explanation that isn’t really all that far-fetched despite being told like a joke. Grian doesn’t seem particularly amused by it, nor does he seem to have taken it too seriously, which is ideal considering Cub doesn’t feel like explaining the details of the vex bond between him and Scar to anyone today if he doesn’t have to.

“That hardly sounds worth it,” Grian retorts, crossing his arms.

“It’s not too bad, it’s not too bad,” Cub shrugs.

“You guys have to eat people.”

“Like Cub said, it’s not too bad!” Scar adds cheerfully. “If you’re that disturbed by it, we better get this solved before you get hungry or we’ll have to eat Cub!”

“I’m not eating anyone!” Grian argues.

“Correction, we better get this solved before you get hungry or I’m going to have to force-feed you Cub before you go insane and cause irreparable damage to yourself and others.”

Grian gawks at Scar and this time Cub has to admit that was a pretty wild thing to say, even if Scar wasn’t exactly wrong. Vexes did not like being hungry. The horrified silence that had fallen is broken by a ping from Grian’s communicator.

“Xisuma is back!”

“Oh my goodness.” Xisuma looks rather caught off guard as he stares at Cub and Grian before him, confusion visible even through his helmet that hides most of his face. “You two certainly look… a little wrong.”

“Isn’t that a little rude?” Scar comments from the side. “I don’t think they look that bad.”

“You know that’s not what I meant,” X sighs and Cub sees Scar’s trademark little smirk appear on his face as he tries to act all innocent. “What happened? Is it just you two? Scar seems fine.”

Scar smiles proudly and Grian rolls his eyes.

“Just me and Grian, so far at least,” Cub explains. “I just logged on after testing some redstone stuff in a private world and suddenly things just kinda were like this. We might have logged on at the same time or something.”

“I see… Something must have gone wrong during the materialization process. Code problems happen but I haven’t seen them like this,” the admin mumbles mostly himself. “And you’ve both been feeling alright? No sickness or glitching?”

Cub shakes his head.

“I’m starting to grow a little sick of Scar but nothing aside from that,” Grian snickers.

“Hey!” Scar exclaims, pretending to be offended.

“You threatened to force-feed Cub to me!”

Xisuma looks a little helpless as he looks between the two in confusion, eyes occasionally flicking to Cub who is mostly just enjoying the show, already more than used to Scar and Grian’s shenanigans. He shrugs and Xisuma sighs. “Alright, alright, let’s calm down now,” he says, pulling up the admin panel in his communicator. “I’ll see if I can find something in your code.”

Scar and Grian stop, freezing into an odd position that looks like Grian is trying to tackle Scar to the ground, and Scar is trying to bite Grian’s arm, before standing up straight as if nothing happened. Cub gives them an unimpressed look.

The three of them not-so-subtly inch closer to their admin to see what he's doing on his communicator as he scrolls through the lines of code none of them aside from him are familiar with. Grian yelps a little when Cub accidentally hits him with the wings, still not used to needing more space than usual.

“I’m looking at the arrival logs,” Xisuma says thoughtfully. “Cub is right, it seems you both joined at the exact same time, down to milliseconds. The server must have gotten confused trying to materialize both of you at the same time.”

“And?” Grian inquires impatiently. “Can you fix it?”

“I can correct the species you’re both assigned right now to your actual species and then hopefully a relog should do the rest.” The three of them watch Xisuma type something in the admin panel. “Alright, there we go. That should do it, hopefully.”

Grian looks a bit suspicious but nods. It’s not like they really have other options, Cub supposes. At least if something goes wrong again, Xisuma is here to help them right away this time.

“Should we just relog then?” Cub asks, quite frankly rather excited to have his own traits back.

“Yes, I think that should fix things,” Xisuma replies, looking at Cub and then Grian. “As long as you don’t log back in on the same exact second again,” he adds, amused.

“Good luck!” Scar chimes.

Grian and Cub share a look before nodding in unison. Cub watches Grian dematerialize next to him before disconnecting from the server as well.

He waits a moment before logging back on to make sure Grian has a chance to log on first.

Cub instantly feels more comfortable as the familiar world appears before his eyes. He blinks a few times, his gaze focusing on his friends standing where they had been when he left – his eyes are automatically drawn to the large and colorful wings behind Grian and a relieved sigh leaves him.

“It worked!” Grian cheers, his wings opening behind him as he does something that looks like a big stretch. Now that he knows what the wings feel like, Cub can imagine how nice that must feel. Grian flaps them a few times, gathering air under them before jumping into the air. “Oh man, how I missed flying!”

There are happy little high-pitched giggles in Cub’s head, joyous and gleeful. He smiles a little – everything feels normal again. His teeth and nails are sharp, he can tell his wings are there even if he can’t see them. He can feel his connection to Scar, and from the man’s grin, Cub can tell he can feel Cub again too.

“That was pretty wild, that was pretty wild,” Cub laughs. It feels good to be fully himself again. “Thanks, Xisuma.”

“No problem,” the admin replies as he watches Grian soar through the air. Cub can hear his smile even if he can’t see it. “I’m glad it was a simple fix, though I’ll have to look into the server code to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Cub hums in agreement.

“Grian!” Scar shouts, trying to get the avian’s attention. His hat nearly falls off his head as Grian flies past him. “Now that you’re a bird again, how do you feel about the whole eating thing?”

“Scar! ” Grian screams in horror. Cub and Xisuma laugh.

Everything’s back to normal.

#cubfan135 #grian #goodtimeswithscar #convexian #jules hc txt #cw cannibalism

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ok-ish-hermitcraft-headcanons · 4 months

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Just a bunch of species headcanons for the hermits! Also they are all either gods/immortal for fun :)

Xisuma (he/void): Voidwalker prince. Knows he's immortal. One of the oldest immortals

Grian (he/parrot/chirp/they): Parrot hybrid, Head/First Watcher. Minor god of chaos. Has lived a thousand lives. Treats YHS as a joke because why not?

Mumbo (he/him): Half Watcher, minor blood god. Does not know he's a god. Eats redstone for fun, scares his friends because of it.

Scar (he/it/vex): Vexling elf (Vex with allay magic). Does not know he's a god. Was born in Riverdale, kidnapped at a young age.

Pearl (she/her): Half-Watcher/moth hybrid. Also knows she's a god, actually likes the Watchers.

Impulse (he/they/yellow): Demon. Very much knows he's immortal, wishing that he isn't because he doesn't want to watch his brothers die. One of the oldest hermits

Tango (he/magma/they): Netherborn avian, Listener hybrid. Party knows he's a god. His Listener traits aren't visible and more of a development from the experience that was his high school to keep him fucking alive

Zed (he/void/wool): Harbinger of the Nether. Knows he's immortal. Looks like a basic sheep hybrid but also has demon wings and black blood!

Gem (she/her): Faun. Thinks she might be a god but it would mean her brothers aren't. Also has magic and can world-hop!

Etho (whatever vibes work for you): Voidling (Voidborn changeling), Watcher. Knows he's a god, could care less. First player turned Watcher. One of the first players

Iskall (they/he/she + some neos): Cyborg (also something else. I don't fucking know anymore). Doesn't care about gods, marked by the God of the Hunt.

Doc (he/it/blast): Creeper/goat/cyborg. Can and will fight the gods, Xisuma hopes that he doesn't find out he is immortal (he knows).

Ren (he/pup/they): Wolf-shifter. Knows he's the god of the Hunt. Idk this dude is cool

Bdubs (he/sun/sky): Glare/phantom hybrid, also has a connection to plants. God of the sun and flaunts it. Also is a full blooded Listener

Stress (she/leaf/spring): Nature spirt. Knows that she's immortal. Looks like a cinnamon roll, would kill you.

False (she/wing/they): Avian, with golden eagle wings. Does know she's a god, could care less.

Cleo (she/they/rot): Zombie hybrid. Knows she's immortal. Spites her old friends by getting attached to Joe. Also one of the oldest players

Joe (any pronouns): Angel of life. Known immortal. Just vibing with the soul he was meant to harvest.

Jevin (he/it/slime): Slime hybrid. Doesn't know he's immortal. Honestly idk much about him

Cub (he/it): Allayling (allay with vex magic.). Doesn't know he's a minor god. Claims to be a vex for fun.

TFC (he/ender): Ender dragon hybrid. Knows he's a god. Brothers with Notch and Herobrine.

Beef (he/they/it): Cow hybrid. Doesn't know he's immortal. He is basically just existing. Gotta love it.

Keralis (they/he/black/empty): Watcher!. Knows he's immortal. I also know next to nothing about this dude

Xb (he/river/fish/they/it): Guardian hybrid. Doesn't know he's a god. Idk fish

Hypno (he/they): Fire sprit. Could care less about being immortal.

Wels (he/him): Angel hybrid. Knows he's immortal. Hates being an angel because they are a bunch of stuck up beings.

----

Bonus (5) Helsmits:

Ex (he/they/void/end): Voidwalker prince, 2/3 Watcher. Yeah knows their immortal

Hels (they/it/he/fire/blaze/hell): Fallen angel/Watcher. Same as Wels tbh. But 10x worse because Wels escaped and Hels suffered.

Badtimes (he/blue/xe/they): Allayling! Also a Listener! Just vibing :D

Xornoth (they/it/red/dark/vine/he): Demonic elf! Demigod and just out there living vines life

Grain/Ariana Griande (she/it/chirp): Watcher! She knows it's immortal! (trans mtf not important to the hybrid sheet but important to me <3)

I went nuts with pronouns the rest of the helsmits have so much more I'm holding myself back bc I'm being forced to bed :( - 🔮🍄

fun!!

(also i’m so sorry this is from jan 2023)

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thedawningofthehour · 6 months

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I meant to send this yesterday, but did you ever mention what exactly Josh is? I honestly don’t remember there ever being clarification (and if there was it totally went over my head) and while i was rereading for the umpteenth time Josh was referred to by splinter as “the copper one” and my mind kinda went “Excuse me, Copper???” I figured he was a Yokai of some kind but then we know that Rose is a witch/from witch town (right?) so whenever I vision Josh is just a very wobbly image of some nerdy buff guy idk and he’s always wearing a blue shirt for some reason :P

Lol well you're pretty close! Josh and his brother and sister are all witches from Witch Town and look vaguely humanish, as Yokai witches are shown to be.

Like yes, these people are undoubtedly Not Human, but unlike many other Yokai they don't seem to be anything else in particular. (in general-I see Lion Dude up there, but he's an outlier) (I've actually thought a lot about the lore of Witch Town and I have no idea if I'm going to end up using any of it so I might do a write-up one of these days)

Josh and his family (his twin sister, their little brother, and the little brother's husband, and maybe his niece I haven't decided if she exists here) all live in Witch Town and run an apothecary. They actually met Bella because the little brother Reed (who I apparently haven't even referenced by name yet, sorry Reed) was her bodyguard while she competed in the Nexus. He got into some debt and the debt was then purchased by Big Mama, and he refused to fight for her. Big Mama basically rigged his contract so he could never pay her back, effectively enslaving him, and had his tongue cut out for talking back to her too many times. He got assigned to Bella because she already knew how to sign, they became friends, and when she left she bought out his contract. Turns out his sister was hot and his brother was her platonic soulmate, so happily ever after. (Bella and Reed are still really good friends, they're just less reasons to mention him because his skills aren't really plot-relevant)

Josh is definitely a nerd, he's pretty tall and broad-shouldered but skinny. He's kind of pink, not intensely so but definitely a few shades into 'not a human skin color'. His hair is either blond or he's a very light redhead, depending on how I feel that day. He has an extremely prominent nose, which...I just realized that doesn't sound good, considering he's Jewish. Okay, to be fair, when I designed him he was not Jewish. He's a Dishonored OC, the Dishonored world does not have any real-world religions, they have one twink who is also a whale as their god and their religion is centered around hating on him. I made Josh Jewish because Bella was Jewish and I kind of liked the idea of her bonding with him and his family over that. (I don't know why Bella is Jewish, she just Was) (also Bella and Josh aren't religiously Jewish-they're atheists)

Rose looks pretty similar, except she's much shorter (which vexes her greatly, as she's the oldest) and her hair is more of a ginger color. Reed however is massive, taller than his brother and super buff, like 'body of a Greek god' but unironically. His coloring is more pinkish-purple and darker because he has a different father. Everyone thirsts over him and he is entirely oblivious. His husband got a lot of high-fives when he put a ring on it. (and a lot of jealous glowers, especially when the story of how he proposed with a BBQ sandwich came out)

Splinter calls him 'the copper one' because their last name is Copperspoon but he couldn't remember. (he's old) And they have that name because their mother is this bitch:

Delilah Copperspoon, bisexual poly witch and bastard daughter of an emperor. She's such a wonderfully evil character.

#doth asks #i do need to be better about weaving in physical descriptions of characters #i hate the 'i have long brown hair and brown eyes' thing and really want to avoid doing it #but then i end up not describing my OCs at all #what's also really funny is that the fic josh rose and reed are from was not the fic i developed them for #there's like five layers of cross-universe on these bitches

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daandyli0n · 2 years

Text

Shut Eye, Act One: Uneven Footing

chapter two: urban legends and mounting tensions

hey guys :] the myths and legends mentioned are of some minecraft youtubers/streamers and other famous minecraft things!

(warnings: very brief moment of dehumanization and more hybrid stereotypes)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It had been five days. Things were going well.

Well, as well as things could be going, given that-

“Did those two F**KS seriously destroy the cow and chicken fences AGAIN?!”

Yeah…

Signal and Coyote aren’t the best neighbors.

Hickory ran outside as Slate and Vexen continued eating their breakfast. Slate groaned. “I guess Ory’s not gonna be able to play with us again, huh?”

Vex sighed. “Yeah, I guess not…”

“You wanna go play in the woods? We can play Alex and Steve again!”

“You know I love that game!”

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

They had been running around the woods surrounding the cabin for around an hour now.

Now they were lying on the forest floor, with Vex picking at a bright red poppy and Slate stared up at the sky. “Do you know the legend of the Blood God?”

Vex paused her plucking for a moment. “What?”

“The Blood God. Y’know, the one who was one of the greatest PVPers in all the servers and all the lands? The one so great that Hypixel still remembers him to this day?”

“I remember Freeze telling me about him, yes.”

“Did you know that he is also known as the world’s best potato farmer?”

Vex sat up. “What?!”

Slate still looked up at the sky. “Yeah. He competed against another member of Hypixel to become the number one potato farmer, worked hard for days and nights, and even spied on his competitor. And after all of his hard work, he finally did it.”

Vex blinked at him. “Did…something bring this up?”

“...All I’m saying is that if Coyote really believes that I can’t be both a good farmer and a good PVPer, then I'll just tell him about the Blood God.”

He slowly sat up. “Do you wanna hear about some other ones?”

Vex nodded. “Sure.”

Slate held up his fingers. “There’s The Angel of Death-it’s said that he was very close to the Blood God and is even married to Lady Death-who is said to be a wonderful builder and has lived for millennia, this totem demigod who once built a statue for a god, this country that didn’t exist for very long, but was very beloved, and called L’manberg or something, Steve, Alex, Herobrine, all of those dudes, y’know?”

Vex gave a shy smile. “You really got into those mythology books from Freeze, huh?”

“Yeah…” He stood up. “So, you ready to keep going?”

Vex grabbed onto his hand. “Of course, Sheep Steve.”

“PFFT-”

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

Hickory led the cows and chickens by some leads. “Primes f**king darn it-” he grumbled. “It’s the second time this week.”

He led the animals further into the woods, searching for the final chicken that was missing.

Which was somehow much harder than he thought it would be.

It was starting to get annoying.

He was about to consider turning back and just hatching another chicken when he heard voices nearby. Familiar voices. He turned to see who it was and-

Well, wouldn’t you know it?

“HEY!” he yelled.

Signal and Coyote turned to him quickly. They appeared shocked for whatever reason.

“You two have a lot of nerve deciding to try that f**king stunt again.” He spat as he marched over.

Signal got in front of Coyote and held his hands up. “Now now, let’s talk about this-”

“I think we get a tad bit past the point of talking when you guys show up to my house and “prank it” almost daily and let my farm animals out.”

“He honestly acts like he’s much better than them.” Coyote muttered, loud enough for the other two to hear.

Hickory snapped his head to look at him. “Wanna say that again?”

Coyote opened his mouth, but Signal held his hand up to quiet him. “Listen, Hickory, we like to do some pranking around here, and we genuinely mean no true harm behind it.”

Signal paused. “Along with that, there’s also something we’ve been meaning to talk about with you…you act…very different from how we were expecting.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sheep hybrids are usually, how do put this, more likely to follow what people of authority say.”

And, oh, how that statement pissed him off.

“Oh, so that's how we are? All of us?”

He stepped closer to them, anger radiating off of him like a heater. “Look, I’m not gonna sugarcoat this for you a**holes since you can’t seem to understand otherwise: Me and my brother aren’t like that. I’ve seen where the kind of culture my kind has can lead people, and so I decided that I wouldn’t go down that path. I’ll repeat it again because you don’t seem to understand this-”

He grabbed onto Signal’s collar, “I’m not just gonna follow your orders, whims, and demands due to the simple fact that you’re both above me in status.”

He let him go. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some animals to take home.”

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

“Slate? Vex? Can you two come here for a second?”

Covered in dirt and leaves, the pair walked into the kitchen. Slate was the first to speak. “Yes, Ory?”

Hickory took a deep breath. “Look. Things are getting…complicated between me, Signal, and Coyote. So I need you two to promise me something.”

Vex nodded. “Of course we can.”

“Okay. If I tell you two to go play in the woods and to take Elliot with you, I want you to take Elliot with you and go to the main area of the server. Stay there until I come get you. Could you two do that for me?”

The pair spoke in unison, “Of course!”

He sighed. “Thank you. Go get cleaned up, I’m about to get dinner ready.”

As the pair ran off, Hickory sat at the table, attempting to calm down. Only one thought crossed his mind.

He was close to reaching his limit.

~~~~~~~~~~~

the angst is next chapter my friends :]

also, (young) Slate my beloved <3

#Shut Eye (oc story)#Act One: Uneven Footing #oc: hickory #oc: slate #oc: vexen #oc: signal #oc: birch #p0psy storytime

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tigerkirby215 · 3 years

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5e Vex, the Gloomiest build (League of Legends)

(Artwork by Horace “Hozure” Hsu. Made for Riot Games.)

Writing this build in a dark room late at night, super tired and stuff... Stuck inside cause of this dumb virus... AFKing in TFT for a Prestige skin like a tryhard... It’s kinda aesthetic, ya know?

GOALS

Another person to kill... Shadow? Can you handle it? - You don’t need best friends: you’ve got your Shadow. He’s the only cool one, because he’s basically you.

Ugh. Can we get some rain clouds in here? - No one likes a debbie downer, but everyone loves a good scare!

Man, walking suuuucks - Nowadays even the anti-dash champion needs a resetting dash. “Do the thing, Shadow.”

RACE

I could make Vex a Harengon to justify her rabbit ears, but she doesn’t really do much “jumping.” That, and I didn’t buy Wild Beyond the Witchlight. So Halfling still works good enough for a yordle. Your Dexterity increases by 2, and while your movement speed goes down to 25 you have Halfling Nimbleness to move through people who are bigger than you. You’re also “Brave” for advantage against fears (when you hang around the Shadow Isles stuff really isn’t that scary) and of course have good ol’ yordle Lucky to reroll Nat 1s.

Halflings are normally pretty cheerful but Ghostwise Halflings are perfectly dark. You’d normally increase your Wisdom by 1 but I’d recommend increasing your Constitution instead. But I mean, it’s not a big deal if you take Wisdom instead. It is only +1. You also get Silent Speech to keep to team chat with 30 foot telepathy. I mean, they have to understand your languages but at least you don’t have to tell everyone what you’re talking about. And oh yeah you obviously speak Common and Halfling.

ABILITY SCORES

15; CHARISMA - Turns out when you don’t release any new yordles for (wait it’s been 5 years since Kled was released? Holy shit) people end up wanting them.

14; DEXTERITY - Just because you don’t like walking doesn’t mean you’re slow.

13; CONSTITUTION - Imagine dying like a normie.

12; WISDOM - Vex isn’t sad because she’s pessimistic. She’s just realistic.

10; INTELLIGENCE - You’re too cool for school. (And I needed everything else more.)

8; STRENGTH - Ughhh I don’t wanna lift heavy stuff! I’m tired...

BACKGROUND

I guess you’re technically a Haunted One, even if the black mist is the best thing that ever happened to you. You get proficiency in Arcana and Survival as well as two language of your choice to talk to your "allies.” (I guess one of them has to be exotic or whatever.) (I’d personally pick Sylvan as the language of yordles and whatever language the majority of your party knows as your second choice, but that’s just me.)

The thing that sucks about having a Heart of Darkness is that everyone keeps trying to help you, thinking that your sadness (and the living shadow on your back) is something to be fixed. I mean, at least you can get the NPC normies to help you, as long as you don’t spook ‘em. “No doctors! I told you: being sad makes me happy.”

(Artwork by @ToggleD0wnFall on Twitter.)

THE BUILD

or whatever...

LEVEL 1 - SORCERER 1

Starting as a Sorcerer for saving throws and stuff. Also proficiency in Intimidation and... Persuasion, I guess? Look, persuading people that you’re fine “no really” is a skill too.

I wonder what Sorcerous Origin we’ll pick... If only there was one based entirely on shadows and darkness... Oh hey Shadow Magic. As a Shadow Sorcerer you get Eyes of the Dark for 120 feet of Darkvision to see with your dumb Halfling eyes, and Strength of the Grave which will let Shadow take a hit for you. (As long as you make a good Charisma save.)

But of course the main appeal of a Sorcerer is the Spellcasting. You can learn 4 cantrips from the Sorcerer list and two level spells: For cantrips Mage Hand will let Shadow pick things up for you, Mind Sliver and Sword Burst will keep loud people off you both up close and from afar, and Prestidigitation will let you do all sorts of normie yordle magic. As for leveled spells Shield and Mage Armor are both kinda mandatory for some Personal Space.

LEVEL 2 - WARLOCK 1

What? Did you really think we wouldn’t get at least some support from adults? Work for that cool gloomy dude Viego and make a pack with The Undead. That’s because Undead are super dark and morbid and have a Form of Dread: as a bonus action you can turn on your Doom and Gloom for 1 minute. You get some temporary hit points, fear people when you hit them, and are immune to fears yourself. You can transform a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus and regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

You also get Pact Magic, which is different from normie Spellcasting because you get the cool stuff done with just a Short Rest. Anyways you can learn two cantrips from the Warlock list like Minor Illusion to have Shadow trick some normies and Eldritch Blast to Eldritch while you Blast. You can also grab some first level Warlock spells like Hex to mark people you don’t like, and Arms of Hadar if you really need your Personal Space.

LEVEL 3 - WARLOCK 2

Second level Warlocks get their Eldritch Invocations for extra stuff that you don’t have to put effort into. While Armor of Shadows does exist it’s honestly better for you to cast Mage Armor with a spell slot, so with that being said take Agonizing Blast to agonize while you blast and Eldritch Mind so you can keep your concentration around annoying people.

You can also learn another spell like Hellish Rebuke, because people just keep barging into your Personal Space!

LEVEL 4 - SORCERER 2

Now that you can agonize your blasts it’s time to go back to Sorcerer. Second level Sorcerers get a Font of Magic for Sorcery Points which currently don’t do much other than give you more spell slots. You can turn your Warlock slots into Sorcery points though, which is good because they come back on a Short Rest but the rest of your magic does not.

You can also cast another spell like Earth Tremor, to slow people down with Looming Darkness and sunder the land with your edginess.

LEVEL 5 - SORCERER 3

Third level Sorcerers finally get Metamagic! Empowered Spell will allow you to maximize your damage and retain your role as an artillery mage. Alternatively if you want to guarantee fears in your foes take Heightened Spell to give them disadvantage to resist Shadow’s influence.

If you want Shadow to stick around then Dust Devil will swirl around for quite awhile. Alternatively Shadow (Magic) also teaches you Darkness for free, and you can cast it with 2 Sorcery Points to see through it! Your friends can’t see through it, but you can team up with Shadow for some powerful combos when you can see them but they can’t see you!

(Artwork by @jpdiasarts on Twitter.)

LEVEL 6 - SORCERER 4

4th level Sorcerers get the first of many Ability Score Improvements, but I can’t take Fey Touched every time for Flash. That, and we won’t give into basic yordle society. So let’s get value out of our Halfling race with the Second Chance feat. Along with +1 to your Charisma you can also use your reaction to make an enemy you can see attacking you reroll their attack roll, potentially making them miss.

Don’t use this against an attack that you can Shield against, but if someone gets a really good roll you can use this to get your Personal Space back! You can only use this once per combat though (it comes back when you roll for initiative!) so make sure to use it when it matters to keep your spell slots in check.

Oh and you can also learn another spell, and another cantrip! For your cantrip Shocking Grasp will help you push people away if they get too close (folk tend to react poorly when zapped by a tazer!) As for leveled spells Web will keep foes from dashing around, and is also pretty flammable. Huhn; wonder if that’ll be useful.

LEVEL 7 - SORCERER 5

5th level Sorcerers get gifts from the Ruined Queen Tasha in the form of Magical Guidance. You can use a Sorcery point to reroll a d20 if needed, potentially squeezing a success out. Don’t use this all the time (even if Warlock slots means you’ll have plenty of Sorcery points to spare) but this can be very useful in an emergency!

You can also learn third level spells and hey: Fireball may be a normie spell, but it’s still pretty effective. It’s maybe a bit too flashy to be Looming Darkness but it’s a good source of AoE damage which isn’t as loud and annoying as Shatter.

LEVEL 8 - SORCERER 6

All this time being a Shadow Sorcerer and Shadow hasn’t even done anything for us! Well how about you go out there and get some work done, Shadow? For 3 Sorcery points you can summon a Hound of Ill Omen to target a foe within 120 feet of you.

Shadow is basically a Dire Wolf except he’s Medium, has temp HP equal to half your Sorcerer level, can move through stuff (but takes damage if he ends his turn in stuff), and automatically chases whoever you told him to go for. Shadow will appear 30 feet away from the person you told him to get, and will chase after him like I said. All he’ll really do is attack the target you told him to though; he won’t even opportunity attack unless it’s the person you told him to chase. But if Shadow’s near someone they have disadvantage on their saving throws, which is pretty cool. (Unfortunately it’s only against spells, not your Form of Dread.)

Speaking of saving throws: Slow is a really great way to keep normies from running around doing annoying stuff. And you don’t have to hit Shadow with it which is pretty cool.

(Artwork by @Lauriquess on Twitter.)

LEVEL 9 - WARLOCK 3

Third level Warlocks get to choose their Pact Boon: if you want a really small Shadow go for Pact of the Chain, and if you want your cool necklace go for Pact of the Talisman, but we’ll be going for Pact of the Tome because you’re mostly a spellcaster really. (And we definitely don’t have enough cantrips.)

You get a Book of Shadows (See? Books can be cool!) with three cantrips: take Thaumaturgy to be extra spooky, Vicious Mockery for some sick teenage burns, and Sapping Sting to make normies fall over when you fear them. Some might say that 10 total cantrips by level 9 is a bit overkill but look on the dark side: you’ve now got a cantrip for basically every type of saving throw in case you can’t hit with Eldritch Blast!

Honestly none of the Pact Boons are particularly important for Vex so I picked the one that made the most sense. Feel free to take something more practical since 10 cantrips is admittedly overkill.

Oh and you can learn more Warlock spells, so now it’s time to finally take Misty Step. For Flash!

LEVEL 10 - WARLOCK 4

4th level Warlocks get another Ability Score Improvement: getting more Charisma for better spellcasting is probably a good idea.

You can also learn another spell, and hey look another cantrip. For your cantrip even if more damage options are kinda overkill by this point Chill Touch inflicts Grievous Wounds, which might be useful. You can also grab another second level spell and Blindness / Deafness (which is on the Undead list) is far more useful than any of the other normie options you’d have at this level anyways.

LEVEL 11 - WARLOCK 5

5th level Warlocks get another Eldritch Invocation, and even if you’ve got a resetting dash you’re still a squishy mage. So grab Tomb of Levistus for Zhonya's Hourglass.

You can also grab third level Warlock spells now! Remember how I took Fireball and complained that it wasn’t a good replica of Looming Darkness? Well Hunger of Hadar takes your Concentration but it’s a lot edgier!

LEVEL 12 - WARLOCK 6

6th level Undead Warlocks have become Grave Touched by the mist, and can make mist of their own! Along with being able survive without eating, drinking, or breathing you can turn any of your damage into necrotic damage. If you’re in your Form of Dread however you can add one extra damage die to whatever you’re using to get people to buzz off, adding to that morbid and macabre aesthetic.

You can also add another spell and if you’re bored with Shadow being a wolf how about you make them a Summon Shadowspawn? Weaponize your Fury, Despair, or Fear (I’d honestly recommend Fury since it has good synergy with your Dreadful Aspect) and work together with Shadow to deal with all your annoying foes! I’d also suggest replacing Hellish Rebuke with Counterspell, because even if the former fits better the latter is way more useful.

(Artwork by Jennifer Wuestling. Made for Riot Games.)

LEVEL 13 - WARLOCK 7

7th level Warlocks can finally activate Shadow Surge. Relentless Hex lets you mark a foe with Hex and then dash to them. And technically you can move Hex around after the fact to reset your dashes! And while you’re at it you may as well grab Dimension Door for Summoner Teleport.

You could also upgrade Summon Shadowspawn to Summon Aberration if you so desire, but Summon Shadowspawn is more than strong enough and far more fun and thematic.

LEVEL 14 - WARLOCK 8

Another Ability Score Improvement. Yay. Cap off your Charisma for the best spellcasting you can get out of Shadow. You can also learn another spell, but we’re going to wait for...

LEVEL 15 - WARLOCK 9

9th level Warlocks get another Eldritch Invocation: even if it’s kinda ineffective Ascendant Step is still pretty useful to have Shadow carry you around. I mean yeah it’s slow but not that much slower than walking for you, and Shadow can lift you up in the air. “Shadow; carry me...”

You can also learn 5th level spells. If one guy’s being particularly annoying Negative Energy Flood can get them to shut up and work for you. Alternatively if you want more Personal Space Antilife Shell is on the Undead List and will make sure normies keep faaaaar away.

LEVEL 16 - WARLOCK 10

Are you ever so sick of everything that you just want to explode? Necrotic Husk has two benefits: for one you’re resistant to Necrotic damage, and immune while in your Form of Dread because being around Viego for so long means you’re used to his work.

But additionally when you are reduced to 0 hit points you can use your reaction to drop to 1 hit point instead and cause your body to explode! Each creature of your choice within 30 feet of you takes 2d10 + your warlock level in Necrotic damage. You do gain 1 level of exhaustion after using this, and after using it once you can’t do so again until you finish 1d4 long rests. So I’d perhaps use Strength of the Grave first unless you really need to lash out.

I hope you weren’t expecting more spells because you aren’t getting them from Warlock: just a cantrip. By this point we’ve honestly got far too many cantrips so I dunno maybe just grab Prestidigitation again and swap it out from Sorcerer when you get the chance.

(Artwork by @DukkoArt on Twitter.)

LEVEL 17 - SORCERER 7

Finally back to our yordle roots: 7th level Sorcerers get 4th level spells like Storm Sphere for a sphere of darkness and angst. But I mean the real benefit is that you get more Sorcery points let’s be real.

Oh and you can swap out Prestidigitation for Gust I guess. Spooky winds and stuff. Either this level or next level depending on your DM.

LEVEL 18 - SORCERER 8

Your last Ability Score Improvement... You’re gonna have to ask: what’s more important to me? More Metamagic, or more Eldritch Invocations? If Metamagic is to your liking take Metamagic Adept for Careful Spell and Distant Spell along with two more Sorcery points to use on them. If you like Eldritch Invocations though Eldritch Adept has a ton of options as a level 10 Warlock. I won’t tell you what invocation to take (they’re all great boosts but none of them shout out at me as something you should prioritize) as there are plenty of options to make your own Vex now that they’re all grown up.

I can at least tell you what spell to take: none of them! Wait until next level!

Oh and you can swap out Prestidigitation for Gust I guess.

LEVEL 19 - SORCERER 9

9th level Sorcerers can learn 5th level spells which means you’ve finally caught up to your Warlock slots. And look at that: the good wish Tasha gave you one last way to weaponize Shadow. Bigby’s Hand does a bunch of cool stuff and is pretty much the ultimate way to make Shadow crush some normies. (Most literally.) Alternatively if you want to borrow from Viego Enervation will let you heal from the mist and also do some damage. Great if you’re stuck in a corner with a bunch of annoying normies.

LEVEL 20 - SORCERER 10

Our final level is the 10th level of Sorcerer for one last spell, one last cantrip, and one last metamagic option! For your metamagic it’s honestly about time you take Quickened Spell to up your DPS. For your cantrip take Mold Earth to dig holes in the sand and brood. And as for your leveled spell? Honestly I just like Synaptic Static, and there isn’t much else I want anyways.

FINAL BUILD

PROS

We’re all doomed. But you’re more doomed - 5th level spells pack more than enough punch, and you’ve got plenty of them. Warlock slots will always be at your fingertips, and Sorcery points give you plenty of flexibility too!

I can feel it: someone’s happy over there! - Along with giving you a temporary hitpoint shield Form of Dread puts a nice bit of CC on all your abilities. Keep enemies scared and sad with tons of Doom and Gloom!

Ugh. Stop copying me Shadow! - Hounds of Ill Omen are cool. Summon Shadowspawn is also cool. Bigby’s Hand is especially cool. And hey: even your lower level Concentration spells like Hex? They’re pretty cool too.

CONS

Ughhhhhhhhhh this is gonna take foreeeever! - You’ve got limited fumes, even for a coffeelock. Form of Dread has limited uses and there’s only so much spell slot melting you can do to get your magic back.

I’m dancing... Happy? - You’ve got a really boring set of really normie skills... and if you’re playing Vex the way she’s meant to be played you’re probably not going to use any of them except for Intimidation.

Yup; the glass is half empty - Half your levels are Sorcerer levels, meaning you’re squishy. You’ve also got Mage Armor on which guess what: also means you’re squishy. People who hit teenagers sure are lame but it’s really not hard to Power Word Kill you.

But I guess you’re pretty cool overall. Shadow’s an alright partner and you can spread Ruination even without Viego. Trudge around and get people to frown for once. There’s nothing wrong with being sad, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting the world to be sad. But do try to at least be happy out of character, because we play games to have fun. I mean, who’d play a video game that just makes you depressed and angry?

(Artwork by @AzzylumArt on Twitter.)

#dnd #dnd 5e #dnd build #dnd guide #League of Legends #League of Legends Vex #vex league of legends #Vex #yordle #shadow isles #dnd warlock #dnd sorcerer #shadow #meh #whatever #I dunno what to tag this

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theriverpersonshadow · 3 years

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Lamia Drama 12

Heeeeeey, guess who isn’t dead!!! >:3 Sorry for the long hiatus, I have no excuse really XD But I’m back! At least for now lol.

As always, the species belong to @vex-bittys . Now enjoy as Keith has a slight existential(???) crisis and Nikolai has big mom energy. Hope you guys like it.

Keith stared down at his phone. It was late, but he couldn’t sleep. The day’s events were churning in his mind without anything to stop them. Had all of that actually just happened? It felt absurd, honestly. He’d just been having a normal day, then suddenly his bonded finally shows up, he immediately fucked up with Nikolai and the babies, and then she started making a DnD character. It was oddly smooth. Smooth and gentle, not at all what he’d pictured all these years: no old fart dragging him away, no weird dullness in his mind, minimal screaming given his friend group, no immediate adoptions and being shipped off with a stranger within just a day, nothing. They’d met, had some ups and downs, and built characters together. It didn’t feel real.

He’d doubt it’d ever happened if not for the faint feeling of warmth, contentment, and fog… was this what sleep felt like to people who weren’t asleep? Keith chuckled quietly at the thought. How would you even measure something like that? Would anyone else even understand what he was talking about? Maybe other Chains?

Keith’s eyes flicked to the Coral snoring barely a foot away from him. Would Hux understand?

… no. He wouldn’t. And he’d hate the very mention. It was better not to mention it. Just because they were bonded didn’t mean he had to change his life much, right? Just have her over for DnD once a week, that was more than enough… right?

Keith had heard what other Chains said, talking about how happy their bondmate made them, but they were usually so much younger. Did they know any better? What kind of lamia wouldn’t love who they were living with (so long as they weren’t abusive, of course)?

Keith started quietly slithering the halls, trying not to disturb the lamia who’d decided to crash on the floor. Not that it’d do much, most were so used to other lamia they’d probably just sleep through it. Keith definitely had before; Hux seemed to consider him the best bed in the house. What would he do without this? Without a scaly body pressed against his in the middle of the night? Without occasionally being woken by a kid in his face or bones tangled in his ribcage? Sure it was aggravating, but it was home. He was too old to start over, too settled here, he’d just be the DnD guy for Nikolai and the rest, and no one else would ever come get him because he wasn’t theirs.

Things didn’t have to change. His bones felt heavy, was it his own tiredness or hers? They didn’t. He could work with this, juggle it. If he closed his eyes too long the lingering colors almost made outlines of someone else’s dream. Do both. Everything could just be the same. He felt like he’d been relieved of some pain he’d not been fully aware of. So who cared if there was something friendly, warm, familiar alien attached to him now? He already had a life. Was it enough? Could he go back to thinking it was?

His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket, bringing him out of his thoughts. A smile quirked his face.

Nik: Are you doing alright?

Nik: I meant to ask earlier, but Maia was having some issues. She’s sleeping soundly now though.

Keith: >-> Are you psychic?

Nik: Not that I’m aware of?

Keith: lol, jk. I’m just… thinking. You texted at a good time m’dude.

Nik: As I said, I meant to check on you earlier, but Maia needed a little extra help today.

Keith: Dude, no worries. I’m all grown up n shit, y’know? Take care of your person. <3

Nik: Thank you, but really, I meant to stay for a while. How are you feeling? I know you’ve had some doubts about soul bonds, but it seemed like you were getting along with her.

Keith stared blankly at the phone: 11:43 P.M. Seven hours since his life turned itself on its head. At least supposedly. Maybe it was a fluke, just his soul reaching out blindly for anyone. Was that how it worked? It felt like he’d have found someone long before then if that was the case. Was it truly fate? Soulmates? He wasn’t sure how he felt about that either. It’d just mean that something outside of his control had decided him and some other person would be inexorably linked forever. It was never in his hands. He’d heard some good things about soul-bonds, but why would they ever tell them about the bad things? Surely they existed, right? But they’d never tell them because they wouldn’t want Chains worried about having a bond.

No one would want a Chain like him. That thought didn’t make him as proud as it used to.

His phone buzzed again and Keith wiped the tears welling from his eyes.

Nik: Keith? Did you miss the ringer again?

Keith: Nah. Nah. Just trying to get my head on straight. I… I really dunno how I feel right now, honestly? I guess it just, like, snuck up on me. Got all caught up in it before I knew what was happening and now I’m trying to figure out how to feel about it.

Nik: I understand.

Keith: Do you though? I must be the only Chain who doesn’t immediately light up to feel his soul bond, huh. Heh.

Nik: It’s a big event. Having complicated feelings about it is natural. <3

Keith: How are you??? This good at this???

Nik: Practice and love <3

Keith: How are you??? This pure??? This ain’t fair m’dude. Who gave you a permit to have this much mom energy?

Nik: Maia, probably.

Keith: Heh. Maybe I could see her sometime? Would that be okay?

Nik: I’ll have to ask her about it, see how she’s feeling. Not tonight.

Keith: Nah, not tonight.

Keith: I kinda wanna ask if we should talk tomorrow, ‘cause all this feels like an in-person chat kinda thing, but also, idk if I could sleep like this.

Keith: I just hope she isn’t having to deal with all my BS, and it’s kinda scary ‘cause I don’t know why I care.

Nik: You care because you’re a good person. I won’t pretend the bond is irrelevant, but you care because you’re *you*.

Keith: Aw, shucks. Thanks m’dude.

Nik: No problem. <3

Nik: Why don’t we take this slow? Just spend some time with her and everyone else, get a feel for things. It doesn’t have to be immediate.

Keith: Guess you’ve got a point. No reason to rush. I’ll see you tomorrow, alright? I’mma try to sleep.

Nik: Alright. Hope you sleep well, I think I’m about to turn in with the others. Love you.

Keith: You too, *Mom.*

Nik: Make sure to clean behind your ears

Keith: >:/

Nik: I’m joking, I’m joking. We don’t have ears. Sleep well <3

Keith: You too. Night dude.

Nik: Goodnight <3

Keith put down the phone and took a deep breath. Just a day at a time… He wandered back to Hux easily, the dude snored like he was trying to out-snarl a bear. Most people couldn’t sleep through it, but Keith just rolled his eyes and focused on the noise until it drowned out all the messy thoughts, bones rattling ever so slightly from the sheer strength of snores.

He wasn’t sure whose dreams he had that night, but they were fun either way.

#lamia drama #lamia drama part 12 #part 12 #Keith #Nikolai #Nikolai the King #Keith the Chain #vex bitties #anxiety #getting philosophical over soul bonds #idk how good it is but shhhhhh #in universe texting #text speak #Maia #Maia the human #Guess who isn't dead

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femboty2k · 3 years

Text

Long post about something I think about a lot and that doesn’t matter to anyone else but me probably

I’m sure there’s a million posts out there on why good representation is important and good but I just wanted to talk shortly about something that happened to me in a recent span of a few months involving a character in a dumb game about collecting jpegs of anime women and hunky dudes with giant swords.

There’s a game called Granblue Fantasy, its an extremely popular gacha game/JRPG with a very large roster of characters and a lot of stuff to do as far as reading through character lore, fighting JRPG battles, raids, and basically playing VNs for character dialogue. It’s a pretty good game, and one of the coolest things about it, is it has (to my knowledge, I dont play/keep up with it very often) 2 canon trans characters. One is named Cagliostro, an alchemist who was born as a man but through extensive experimentation and some self discovery has since transitioned into a woman, hell bent on making herself as cute as possible. Fun right? She’s presented extremely well and is one of the game’s more fun characters. The second character is one that has become a personal favourite for me for many reasons, her name is Ladiva.

Ladiva is a part of a race of people called the Draph. The Draph are a humanoid, and pretty much human looking, race of people with their defining features being their large stature and bovine like horns and ears. This is important because male draph are usually much larger and more muscular than female draph (but its a horny anime game so who can say they’re surprised lol). Ladiva, as my discussion here makes obvious, is a trans woman belonging to these folk. Because of this, she’s both quite large, muscular(and more masculine presenting on the surface), and has rugged looking facial hair. The surprising thing about her presentation in comparison to how she looks, is that she’s presented incredibly well. despite her appearance being not as feminine as it could be (with Cagliostro even offering to make her a new totally feminine body only to have Ladiva refuse, stating that she should love her own body along with the rest of herself) she’s treated as what she is, a woman.

So why am I talking about this? Why am I putting my poorly put together thoughts on this tumblr post no one will read? Well, I am trans. I have felt a certain way about myself all my life that I’m sure most trans people can echoe so I won’t wast time waxing poetic about how I’ve always felt more feminine than I was “supposed” to be. My core purpose of this post comes from the fact that I am 6′2, nearly 300lbs of muscle/fat/body hair, and have had a full beard since I was 14. I am EXCEEDINGLY masculine, which has made my own internal struggle with my transness sort of difficult to accept. A sort of constant push and pull of wanting to just repress it all because I already pass as a man and wanting to work towards being who I know I actually am. Another factor is that I never felt truly comfortable with purely feminine pronouns. In highschool I went by a different name, and I used she/her pronouns and for a while it felt okay. But it was always just, okay. It never felt right on top of several people giving me some rather hurtful backlash for it and how it contrasted so much with my physical appearance. So I stowed it all away until about a year ago. I now have something that I didn’t have before, a truly wonderful and supportive group of adult friends who treat me like an adult as well and take me seriously. So through careful examination of how I felt i began trying new things to explore my identity. It began with me deciding I wanted to use they/them pronouns, this stuck and still feels like its the right thing for me along with the label of Nonbinary. However, slotting myself into this new label and finally feeling comfortable in an identity brought about new thoughts as well as new things to mull over in my head. Things like the fact that most nonbinary representation in media falls under the same category of a waifish AFAB person who presemts femininely if not androgynous, and how people like me are a vocal minority within the community itself even being excluded by a small portion of it. It was a new set of things to tackle and think about. But that aside, with them came the most important thing I asked myself, “am I comfortable with how I am now? Or do those thoughts I had all those years ago mean something?”

This question isnt easy. Gender is a strange subject and is different to everyone who experiences something with their identity, so I wont pretend like I have any definitive answers for anything because, there arent really any of those. The question for myself, boiled down to “Am I more comfortable identifying as transfeminine, or am I comfortable with just being nonbinary.” This question vexed me for a little while. It hurt to think about. A lifetime of bullying and being made to be ashamed of my body type and stature had made my confidence in myself rather lackluster. This made the decision more difficult. It would be easy to try and own a sense of pride in being a masculine presenting nonbinary person. There aren’t many of those in representation as I mentioned before, and at the time it made me feel nice to think that it was what I wanted. But those thoughts I had all those years ago did mean something, and thats not who I am. The answer I ultimately came to, was that I am trans, and want to present more feminine than masculine, because that’s who I know I am, and not just what I think would be easiest. So, to bring it all together, how the everloving fuck does this relate to a character from a gacha game? Well, when i first saw Ladiva I nearly wrote her off as a character that probably was used as a disrespectful joke on trans women and how they’re viewed. She’s not though. She has an entire montra of loving herself and others for who they are and owning every aspect of herself, including her body. She’s not a small lady, she’s a large/muscular wrestler who, in no mistake of words, still looks very masculine, right down to her facial hair. But none of that matters, not her appearance, not her beard, not her height, she’s still a woman and she’s seen as one by the others around her because, well, that’s what she is. She makes it known and others accept, or at the very least, respect it. It was something entirely new to see something like this in a form of popular media, and in turn it gave me an odd sense of self confidence in my own current appearance, even though I do intend on changing it through HRT and other means (exercise and other health related means). It meant a lot to me to see someone who was, in at least some way, like me who was loved by the community of the game she was in. And it still does. In conclusion, Ladiva is a very cool character, and her existing gave me a boost of confidence that helped lead me towards accepting things about myself that I had found it hard to previously. Go look into Granblue if you like games like that, there’s even a fighting game that came out not too long ago. Thanks for reading, if you did, this whole post is long and kind of dumb because I’m kind of dumb. But I wanted to put it somewhere. Have a nice day <3

#rambling #long post #ladiva #granblue fantasy #thanks granblue #kinda dumb just ignore me lol #im just talkin to myself #trans #guess ill throw that tag on there #shrug #nonbinary #gender stuff

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assigned-k9 · 2 years

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Everyone loves reading art explanation so here's a free ticket to talk about the details you drew and no one pointed out!

IM REALLY MAD I WAS WRITING A LONG WINDED ANSWER BUT LOST IT. So this one is more “pointform” [its not its still very long..] instead because im Lazy :D But this is so sweet of you dude thank you anon ^__^ Enjoy the ramblings!

OK! So hermit designs. Lets talk hermit designs shall we??

- Keralis is a siren fish type guy, hes got claws and fin ears, a long tail and a fin from the back of his head down his back! Why a siren you may ask..? Because his eyes are hypnotic! Ooooo.. Stare into his eyes nothing but his eyes...... I also just wanted to add features that went well with his colour pallete!

- Xb is a guardian... I dont need to explain further but if you dont watch xb, he really likes guardians and tends to add them into his bases :D My favourite thing hes said about them while on a base tour is “I recognize that sound, you have guardians?” while i didnt even hear a SINGLE guardian noise. Hes got fish senses i guess. He also falls into that exact tank full of them and doesnt get hurt ONCE. So xb guardian dude. Him and Keralis are fish bros :D

- Cleos got her brain stickin out! I know zombies dont have brains but I like to think shes stolen part of Joes and so they LITERALLY SHARE BRAINCELLS. Its just funny to me. Oh, and her flower crown is more like a twig shaped tiara with flowery bits! Her exposed ribcage also has the same flowers growing on vines :D Just some design details :P

- nHo all have bows in their designs; Bdubs’ bandana ties in a bow and hes got one on the end of his tail, beef has a bow that ties his apron, etho has a very slight bow at the back of his neck tying the mask up, and docs got a small bow holding up his hair behind his neck! Some of these arent visible but its an idea i’ve had for years now! I think its neat ^__^

- CONVEX okay okay so scar and cub both have pointy ears and magical vex wings that they can will in and out of existance, they’re soul bound! [canon..?] Cub likes to keep his wings out because he thinks they’re neat + they remind him of good memories :D Scar keeps them hidden for the most part, as they can get in the way of elytra! He lets them out very rarely. They both have pointy ears constantly however! Another design thing not visible in art, they have matching blue anklets!!

- A small non visible thing about Scars season 8 design that i’ve had since he got his giant hat, all the hermits have tried it on and afterwards signed their names on the brim and inside of the hat per his request :D

- Grians mouth is just nonexistent if he isnt talking, so when hes not speaking hes got this ominous stare... I thought it worked well LOL. His neck is feathery but he covers it with a turtleneck because it tends to get cold! He doesnt bother with his arms much though

Theres so many more i can think of but I’LL SPARE THE DETAILS YEAH?

#Long post #Im such a nerd oh my gosh #Glad i dont have irl friends #because i’d never shut up LOLLLL :D

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ultramaga · 2 years

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High Confessor Tektus The second photo is of him emerging from the mortuary section - the location where the fresh bodies are laid to rest. He seemed ... odd .. somehow ... I admit “The Nucleus” does a good job of capturing the feel of “The Planet of The Apes” and “Gamma World”. These nutjobs need rescuing from their cult, but there’s no option for it. At best, you can assassinate this dude, which is satisfying but it doesn’t change their essential nature. I have played through with setting him free in exile, but I always figured that meant he would just cause problems elsewhere, and now just kill him. Despite my pleasure with the atmosphere, dialogue and voice acting work, I will point out that Deacon’s constantly losing affinity points. Why? Because you are saying mean things about the other factions in order to infiltrate the Children. But you are an undercover agent. You lie. He knows that. Why would he be bothered at all by it? It only makes sense if he thinks you are sincere, but elsewhere the dialogue is like this Do you like carrots? a) Yes. (*Truth*) b) Yes. (*Lie*) c) No. d) Joke that is randomly taken far too seriously for unknown reasons. Now it would make sense for Deacon to dislike it if the dialogue was Should we kill synths? a) Yes. (*Truth*) b) Yes. (*Lie*) c) No. d) Joke that is randomly taken far too seriously for unknown reasons. And you pick a). Sure, Deacon’s motivation is that he wants to protect synths, so if he believes you are genuinely sympathetic to that idea, he will dislike or even hate you. But in the context, he would be careful to check if you are just saying lies to get the mission accomplished - and since that is how i am roleplaying it, and am consistent, it vexes me. I infiltrated the Institute, Brotherhood and now the Children of Atom to gather intel, and he knows it, the game mentions it through the voices of other associated characters too, but suddenly the game is acting as if you are genuinely changing allegiances if you lie. It’s dumb, and it’s cheap, because it wouldn’t have cost them much to have a lie option, but there’s the feel that some areas were just rushed over. I see this a lot in software now - the reliance on crunch times, on understaffing, and on overworking. It’s corner-cutting that is only acceptable because it is nigh universal, and because customers are always assured that bugs will be patched sometime - and they are almost always ignored unless they are “fatal errors” rather than obvious errors in implementation. The unofficial fallout patch just shouldn’t have needed to exist in the first place, and the fact that, five years later, the fanbase is still trying to clean out the bugs is just sloppy. I love this game, I really do, but Bethesda has burnt the good will of a lot of its old fanbase and I have to wonder if they really are getting enough new fans on board (via fo76 etc) to remain viable. The Elder Scrolls Online seems to have a lot of registered accounts, but I have to wonder if that’s not inflated, as I never hear anyone talking about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_video_games_by_player_count Starfield is being hyped up, but I still haven’t seen anything to draw me in. The elements that used to be interesting - it was based on Traveller - have been removed due to licensing issues. Overall, I’d have to say, if Bethesda vanished tomorrow, would it matter? I think Doom Eternal is about the only thing that really creates any excitement from them. Or at least, people used to talk about the trailer for it a lot - I really haven’t rants about it otherwise, but perhaps I am simply missing the buzz out there.

#far harbor #fallout 4 #gamma world #Bethesda

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mel-at-dusk · 4 years

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SEX, LIES AND CHEAP COLOGNE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF ABERCROMBIE & FITCH’S SOFTCORE PORN MAG

The story of how an oversexed, strangely intellectual magazine by a polo shirt brand completed the improbable task of changing the course of sexuality in America’s malls, homes and moose-print boxers

Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was a shrewd businessman, but he didn’t always make the best decisions. Between the blatantly racist T-shirts he signed off on, the child thongs he called “cute” and the series of public statements he made admitting that his brand intentionally excluded anyone who wasn’t “cool” and “good-looking” with “great attitudes and a lot of friends,” it’s no wonder that he spent the majority of his reign at Abercrombie in hot water. (For the uninitiated, Abercrombie made what fashion writer Natasha Stagg calls “sexy versions of the clothes kids already wore to school: T-shirts and jeans, stuff you could toss a football in or throw on the grass if everyone decided to go skinny-dipping.” More importantly, as she writes in her book Sleeveless, it was “for those who were casually peaking in high school.” It, meanwhile, peaked in the 1990s.)

An exception to Jeffries’ questionable CEO-ing would be A&F Quarterly, the glorious, controversial and questionably pornographic “magalog” he created at the height of the brand’s popularity in 1997 in order to connect “youth and sex” to its image. Woven in amongst surprisingly thoughtful interviews with A-list humans like Spike Lee, Bret Easton Ellis, Rudy Guiliani and Lil’ Kim was a cascade of naked photos from photographer Bruce Weber which showed nubile youngs in various states of undress. They were frolicking, they were caressing and they were deep in the throes of experimenting with types of sex that — at the time — had never been portrayed by mainstream brands.

With issue titles such as “XXX,” “The Pleasure Principle” and “Naughty and Nice,” the Quarterly dove headfirst into the risque. During its 25-issue run between 1997 and 2003, it printed interviews with porn star Jenna Jameson, offered sex advice on how to “go down” in public and suggested — on multiple occasions — that its readers dabble in group sex. One issue published an article on how to be a “Web exhibitionist,” another featured a Slovenian philosopher barking orders to “learn sex” at school and big-dick Ron Jeremy even stopped by to talk about performing oral sex on himself and using a cast made from his own penis.

The actual Abercrombie clothing being modeled in the magalog was an afterthought, appearing in Weber’s photos as more of an impediment to nudity than an actual, purchasable item. The whole thing was, as journalist Harris Sockel put it in an Human Parts essay, “20 percent merch, 20 percent talk and 100 percent soft-core aspirational porn.”

None of this would have been vexing had a more adult-oriented brand been the ones hawking it, but Abercrombie & Fitch was — and still is — marketed toward suspiciously toned teenage field hockey players named Brett. Though he might have looked like a man in his big salmon-pink polo, Brett was but a child. Abercrombie was fond of saying its clothing was for college-aged clientele, but we all knew where its real haute runway took place — inside the crowded halls of every middle school in Ohio.

The Quarterly, too, was intended for college kids, and to prove it, Abercrombie shrink-wrapped it in plastic and sold only to those over 18 for $6 a pop. You could buy it as a subscription, of course, but it was more commonly found in-store, nestled alongside A&F’s cargo shorts and “thongs for 10-year-olds,” a questionable placement that prompted concerned parents, conservatives and Christians to accuse Abercrombie of sullying their children’s minds with impure thoughts.

As such, the Quarterly became the subject of a mounting number of boycotts, protests and controversies that some believe were responsible for its eventual demise. By the time circulation peaked at 1.2 million in 2003, it had been denounced by organizations like the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the American Decency Association, Focus on the Family, the National Organization for Women and, of course, the Catholic League.

Yet the outrage against the Quarterly was matched — if not exceeded — by its cult following, who found its frank portrayal of sexuality to be transcendent. Journalists, artists and the teens whose hands it fell into adored the magazine, and its rarity — plus its utter absurdity — makes it a sought-after collector’s item to this day.

At the same time, few people know about the Quarterly and even fewer realize what it meant to the generations of young people discovering themselves and their sexualities through the unlikely lens of branded content. As journalist Emily Lever puts it, “There’s no weirder way to learn about sex than to pick up a magazine by Abercrombie & Fitch — a brand for hot, mean mostly white kids who shoved you into lockers — but, I guess I’ll take it?”

This is the story of how an oversexed and strangely intellectual magazine by a polo shirt brand completed the improbable task of changing the course of sexuality in America’s malls, homes and moose-print boxers.

AND IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS ASS

The first issue A&F Quarterly debuted in June 1997. With 70-ish pages of full-color hard bodies, it was relatively tame compared to later editions, but it quickly became popular when Abercrombie’s nubile clientele realized it was a paper-backed portal into an adult world of sex, nudity and the kind of unbridled sensory hedonism their parents warned them about. As rumors of its legend began to spread, people began to wonder: What the hell is A&F Quarterly, and why is it printing ass for teens?

Emily Lever, journalist and chronicler of the Quarterly’s absurdist philosophical leanings: A&F Quarterly was an in-house magazine put together by Abercrombie & Fitch that published a who’s who of literati to accompany their images of young adult and teen bodies in order to hawk expensive distressed jeans and polo shirts to kids who would shove you inside a locker.

Alissa Quart, author of Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project: From what I recall, it had a Bruce Weber-y vibe — gorgeous young men and teens unapologetically objectified, a leering retro pin-up element, also sort of like the highly stylized, sexed-up, nostalgic 1980s and 1990s black-and-white Guess ads. Men — boys, really — were photographed without their shirts, elaborately muscled abs, sometimes naked.

Harris Sockel, in his Human Parts essay: [It was] Playboy crossed with Fratmen.com and a bit of Field & Stream. The Quarterly made my hormones do a kick line across my frontal lobe. I wanted to nibble the soy ink for snack until sunrise. To absorb it so deeply I sweat grey drops onto my pillow. To rip a page from that issue and fold it into a paper flower and stick it all the way up my ass until it came out my mouth.

Lever: Yeah, it was hot. But it was also extraordinarily literary. It featured big-time thinkers, writers and philosophers — stuff that was supposedly intended to expand your mind. It was way too high-brow for the average Abercrombie teen, and its existence made almost no sense given what the brand represented.

Savas Abadsidis, editor-in-chief, 1997-2003: There was nothing else like it. We were the first mainstream brand to combine playful, irreverent, intellectual content with sex and youth in this beautiful, high-art magazine format. Was it controversial? Sure. But it made the entire country take notice.

What they didn’t necessarily see, however, was what was going on behind the scenes. Not only were we the first brand to do this kind of advertising, we were also the first big brand to normalize gay culture for a mainstream audience, expose America’s youth to some of the era’s most progressive thinkers and use our platform to address sexuality in a useful, hands-on way. And you wouldn’t necessarily expect that from Abercrombie. That’s what made it so cool.

It all began in 1996. I was 22 and working at a temp job for a prominent New York architect who happened to be friends with Sam Shahid, a big-time creative director for Calvin Klein, Banana Republic and later, Abercrombie & Fitch. He was looking for an assistant. I had taken a deferment to go to law school and was looking for a job for that interim year, so I applied. I got in.

It was a horrible gig at first. Just awful, Devil Wears Prada-type stuff. I left crying many nights. But I had two things going for me. The first was that Abercrombie had a really small office in the West Village. Mike Jeffries, the president and CEO of Abercrombie, used to come in. He wore flip flops, had a desk made out of a surfboard and began each sentence with the word “Dude.”

Mike Jeffries, ex-CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, speaking to Salon in 2006: Dude, I’m not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders.

Abadsidis: I didn’t know it at the time, but Mike was gay (I wouldn’t find out until much later). I think that was part of the reason why he and Sam — who was also gay — took me under their wing. They actually didn’t realize that I was, too — it’s not like we all sat around a bonfire at Fire Island and talked about how us gay guys were infiltrating Abercrombie — but that dynamic dovetailed nicely with Bruce’s photography for both the brand and the Quarterly, and it certainly set the tone for what was to come. I was grateful to get what amounted to an unofficial apprenticeship from both Mike and Sam, and eventually, they had me doing much more involved tasks than I was hired to do.

One of them was sitting in on important meetings. At the time, Mike was inviting all these different editors from magazines like Interview, Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone to come in and brainstorm ideas for what the Quarterly could be, but their ideas were flat. They felt like ideas coming from 45-year-olds writing for college kids, and I could tell Mike was getting frustrated by how little they seemed to grasp what he wanted.

One day in a meeting, one of the magazine editors threw out an idea. Without even acknowledging him, Mike turned to me. “Savas,” he asked. “What do you think about that?”

My mind raced — I could tell he was testing me. If I flubbed the answer, I’d be done. I briefly considered censoring myself, but then I thought better. What did I have to lose? I was young. Surely, I’d find another summer job. “I don’t think it’s a great idea,” I told him.

Apparently, that was the right answer. Mike practically threw the guy out of the room.

After that, I started to think more about what I’d want to see out of a magazine. I was just out of college as a French comparative literature major at Vassar, and I was super into that sort of 1950s-style Esquire journalism with the dapper closing essay. I was deep into The New Yorker, Interview Magazine, 1990s-era Details, MAD Magazine and 1980s pop star mags like Tiger Beat, too — those were all an influence. I also loved philosophy, social theory and comics. And graphic novels. You know — college stuff. Then it hit me: If the magazine was for people like me, why not get actual college kids — not 50-year-olds — to create our content?

I suspected my ideas were what they were looking for and knew they’d look fresh compared to what other editors were throwing out, so I decided to take a risk. I got up at 2 a.m. and typed out a 20-page proposal for what I thought the Quarterly should be. The next morning, I faxed a copy to Mike. I left another on Sam’s desk.

About a (very anxious) week later, Sam called me into his office and told me to pick up his phone. Mike was on the other line. As I reached for the receiver, he leaned over to me and said, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

I didn’t even have time to comprehend what that meant before Mike’s voice was in my ear. “Congratulations, kid,” he told me. “You get one shot.”

Shortly thereafter, I was promoted from Sam’s assistant to the completely green, 23-year-old editor-in-chief of the Quarterly. It was a Jerry Maguire moment. I was thrilled and terrified at the same time.

They gave me a month to put together a staff and get the first issue out. Bruce Weber was named as its exclusive photographer — he’d already been shooting ads and campaigns for Abercrombie — and Sam was the creative director. As for me, I knew I’d need an editorial staff, and stat.

HOLY SHIT, THERE ARE NO LIMITS

Abadsidis quickly throws together a team composed of two college buddies, Patrick Carone and Gary Kon, who he describes as “pretty funny and stuff.” Carone became the only straight guy on the editorial side. Kon is Jewish and gay. The three of them vow to stay as true to the idealized college experience as possible with their content — even if it means chasing white whales.

Abadsidis: I can’t remember the exact starting budget, but it was upwards of a few million, probably much larger than most magazines get for their first issue! But our budget was also Bruce’s budget. He was getting advertising money, so we were well taken care of in that regard.

We weren’t really expected to turn a profit, though. That was never the point. Come to think of it, I don’t even think we tracked how much the magazine impacted clothing sales, although from what I can remember, clothing sales bumped up double digits every quarter after we launched (for a while, at least). [This statement is unverified.] But that didn’t matter: Our mission was just to set the brand image and make people aware of us. That was our version of success. We were also our only advertiser for a while, so we could get away with a lot of stuff that other publications couldn’t.

Gary Kon, managing editor, 1997-2003: When Savas offered me the job, I jumped at the opportunity. I’d already interned for Sam, and I’d have to scan hundreds of Bruce Weber images that he shot for Abercrombie as part of the job. And I fell in love with his work. It was the visual connection that seduced me. Weber’s photos were like a new Greek mythology; the men and women depicted in the photos were both idealized and sexualized. As a gay kid, who was pretty comfortable by that time in my own skin, I had no problem recognizing the eroticism in his work.

Abadsidis: Me, Gary and Patrick was definitely something special. I don’t think I’ll ever have an opportunity to create anything like that again. I was a huge comic book fan. If I had to describe it, it’s the closest thing I’ll ever come to Stan Lee’s Marvel comics bullpen. Pretty much everyone I hired was super unique. We weren’t all gay (maybe half of us were) but few of us really adhered to the Abercrombie image.

I think Sean came on in 2001.

Sean T. Collins, managing editor, 2001-2003: I was a little skittish about it at first because Abercrombie & Fitch represented everything I was not. They marketed, almost exclusively, to the lacrosse players that called me names I cannot repeat. It was very preppy, and that was not me at all.

I was alternative, maaan. I was a big fan of Nine Inch Nails. I wore a lot of black. A&F was everything I wasn’t, and in a way, everything that had tormented me as a kid. The irony of me working for them was palpable, but what I learned very quickly was that at the Quarterly, you could do anything that you wanted.

One of my first articles was an interview with Clive Barker, the writer and director of Hellraiser (he also wrote Candyman). Now, if you’ve seen Hellraiser, you can imagine just how far of a departure a sadomasochistic horror film was from Abercrombie & Fitch, but getting him to sign on was easy. He’s gay, and at the time, he was super ripped. I think he appreciated the extravagant gayness of the Weber stuff in particular. He was also a photographer, and his husband was, too. I think he recognized what was going on with the photography.

We had an unlimited expense budget, so I took him out for drinks at the Four Seasons. I talked to him for hours, and then he invited me to go back to his house and hang out and see his art studio. He had three mansions in a row on Sunset in Los Angeles, up in the hills. One for his office, one for his actual domicile and one that was a painting studio. I got to see that. I was just a 23-year-old kid. This was my first job out of college, and I felt like Cameron Crowe from Almost Famous. After that, I was like, “Holy shit, there are no limits.”

Kon: I have to credit Savas with pushing us to work without limitations. We were very lucky. At some point during my tenure, I realized that as long as we worked within our (sizable) budget, we had almost full autonomy. We could plan trips to Hollywood to shoot our favorite actors. We could travel to Thailand to reenact our version of The Beach. We could tag along to London or Rome or wherever Bruce was shooting the catalog. We could stroll into the office at 11 a.m. and work until 11 p.m.

Collins: If I wanted to talk to Bettie Page, the pinup model from the 1950s, they’d be like, “Okay, sure.” If I wanted to feature Underworld, my favorite electronic music band, it was, “Sure, go ahead.” It was total editorial freedom, which was so strange knowing how specific of a person the “Abercrombie type was.” I’ve been writing for two decades now, and I’ve never experienced anything like it since.

Abadsidis: Everyone wanted to be in it, too. At first, it was just indie musicians. But then, in the second issue, we snagged Lil’ Kim. That’s when I knew we’d made it big. She was into it — she loved everything about the Quarterly. A lot of people did. The whole high-brow/low-brow thing was really appealing, and the idea of going to college, reading good books, getting drunk and having sex felt uniquely nostalgic and fresh in the context of America back then. Clinton was getting impeached for getting a blow job. It was just a weird, puritanical time, and the Quarterly gave people a national platform to let their freak flag fly.

We had Rudy Guiliani, early Britney Spears, Paula Abdul. There was the New York issue where we talked about the Harlem Renaissance. Spike Lee — one of my idols — asked me if he could be in it. He’d done advertising, you know? I remember him being like, “Yo, this is the deal. I’ve got to give you mad props. This is the dopest thing out right now, advertising-wise.”

We had big-time philosophers and literary figures, too. They were great. We wanted to mimic the experience of being in college and having your mind expanded, so we got writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Michael Cunningham on board. There was a whole Sex Ed issue plastered with musings from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a friend of a professor’s from college. I believe Jonathan Franzen was in there, too.

Jonathan Franzen, award-winning novelist and essayist: I gave hundreds of interviews between 1997 and 2003, almost all of them at the request of various publishers. One of them must have thought it was a good idea to talk to A&F. The fact that I apparently did (I don’t remember it) signifies nothing except that I felt grateful to my publishers.

Collins: We got a lot of weirdos, too. John Edward, the guy who talked to dead people. Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote Fight Club. At the time, it didn’t have the meathead reputation that it does now. It was legitimately looked at as this piece of anti-corporate, anti-capitalist art, the irony of which was just delightful given that we were a capitalist brand trying to sell polo shirts and $90 ripped jeans.

Abadsidis: The only guy who refused an interview was Donald Trump! I have a feeling his 90-year-old secretary had something to do with it. Though we were technically a magalog and did belong to the brand, our stuff was just really visionary. David Keeps, who was the editor of Details at the time, always defended the Quarterly as a real magazine and publicly said that we were doing more innovative stories than most “real” magazines at a time.

ASPIRATIONAL HOMOEROTICS

It’s no secret that the photography and creative direction of Weber and Shahid contained homoerotic undertones. Irreverent, minimal and moody, it was suggestive without being literal, spinning entire storylines into a single frame. At the same time, it was too idealized to be “real.” The queerness that their photos showed was, as Collins puts it, “aspirational,” meaning that like the mostly white, ab-riddled models instructed to sell cargo shorts by taking them off, they didn’t necessarily represent the full reality of what queerness actually was.

Still, the photos that the Quarterly published during its seven-year run did more to normalize and represent queerness and non-monogamy than any other mainstream brand at the time — weird, considering that Abercrombie’s target market was hegemonic suburbanites whose parents bred genetically pure golden retrievers and had cabins in Vail. Without these photos, the Quarterly might have read more as a minor-league Esquire or Ivy League MAD Magazine, but with them, it became one of the least-discussed, most under-appreciated items queer history.

Collins: Our editorial content — which almost functioned as a parody of so-called “Abercrombie people” — was always accompanied by this extremely beautiful photography that was also extremely queer. But it was never explicitly so. It was all this nudge, nudge, wink, wink stuff. I don’t know how you could miss it, though. The homoeroticism was so overt.

Abadsidis: You’d have had to have been blind not to consider the imagery homoerotic (though, it was really in the eye of the beholder). We had the Carlson twins posing on the cover and riding a motorcycle. We had a drag queen named Candis Cayne. There was a lesbian couple kissing at a wedding.

Kon: David Sedaris, Gus Van Sant, Gregg Araki, Avenue Q, Stan Lee, Peaches, Fischerspooner… you could teach a queer theory class with everyone we featured.

Abadsidis: At the same time, we never labeled anything as “gay” or “lesbian” or “queer.” We never came out and said, “Welcome to our gay magazine!” and we never had a meeting where we were like, “Okay, guys, let’s figure out how to make this thing gay.” It was more nonchalant. The imagery implied it without saying it.

Hampton Carney, A&F Quarterly spokesperson, 1999-2003: The message we were sending was clear: “You do you, whatever that is. Have fun!”

Abadsidis: That was a very 1990s thing.

Collins: There was a specific brand of Abercrombie gayness that got shown, though. The word that they always used to describe Abercrombie as a brand was “aspirational.” They didn’t want to make it like an everyday, normal-people brand. They wanted it to be associated with money, glamour and that WASP-y aesthetic. So all the gay raunch of it was presented within the context of what appeared to be a very square, nuclear family: white, wealthy and secure.

At the same time, that was really when same-sex marriage was kicking off as a political issue. I think you can see a commonality in how Abercrombie was essentially making an argument that you could be a normie and also be gay. That was a newish thing at the time (though I’m barely an expert as I’m not gay myself). Still, I can’t help but see a resonance between coming up with this clandestine content that normalized being gay at the same time this big political fight that was brewing.

Maybe being more forward about it would have come across as “too political.”

Abadsidis: Part of me wishes we’d gone a little further with being more outwardly queer, but I don’t think the time was right. Maybe with a braver CEO — no one at the time was brave enough to take on queerness or gay rights as a mainstream brand, including us — and that’s why few people remember the Quarterly as the sort of transcendent queer thing that it was.

Kon: It’s never been credited as such, but the Quarterly is really an item of gay history. I don’t think we were pushing a “gay” or “metrosexual” lifestyle on people as much as we were showing that it already existed, even out in Middle America. Perhaps that’s what made people uncomfortable. We took that thread of counterculture and taboo that ran through the imagery and continued it into the editorial content. We dealt with topics like drinking, drugs, religion, politics and sex. Again, these are issues young people dealt with daily, but were rarely editorialized.

At Vassar, there was a yearly party called The Homo Hop. It was one of the biggest parties of the year and leaned on Vassar’s history as a women’s college. I bring this up because, on the night of my freshman Homo Hop, I was instructed that each student had to do something sexually that they had never done, and one drug that they had never done. It wasn’t that you had to be gay, but you had to experience something that was new and different. I think that translated well into the Quarterly. Yes, there were a bunch of gay guys writing and shooting and drawing images. But we were simply trying to expose Cargo Short Brett to ideas, images, artists, books, writers and directors that he may have never heard of before. Our shared experiences would become his.

Collins: It was culture jamming, really.

Abadsidis: It was also very “college” to be fluid or experimental without labeling it. I think it’s safe to say that college is one of the gayest places there is in life, maybe not sexually, but definitely in terms of having your mind expanded about different types of people.

Carney: I was in a frat. I’d see fraternity brothers streaking across campus together. It was never a big deal. There are a lot more people in the middle of either extreme of sexuality than people talk about. We’re not one and 10 — we’re one through 10, if you will. That kind of stuff has always happened on college campuses, and that’s the kind of mentality we had around sex. We just happened to editorialize it really beautifully.

Collins: There’s a Barbara Kruger print that reminds me of the mood we were trying to capture: It reads: “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” That’s basically what Abercrombie & Fitch was. It was an intricate ritual that allowed sunkissed lacrosse players to metaphorically touch the skin of other men.

Carney: You know what’s funny, though? It was never the gay stuff people had a problem with. It was everything else.

LET THE CONTROVERSIES BEGIN

For almost every moment of its seven-year life, The Quarterly was a controversial publication. Parents, politicians and conservative-types didn’t appreciate its no-holds-barred approach to rampant fucking, and they could not, for the life of them, understand how such an adult magazine was making its way into the hands of their precious teens (who were probably jacking off to dad’s Playboys long before the Quarterly came along, but I digress). There was approximately one year — 1997 — where the amount of people it pissed off stayed below a critical mass, but after a certain somebody published a story that vaguely suggested underage kids drink, it was off to the races.

Abadsidis: We got in our fair share of trouble with Christian groups and concerned parents right off the bat. Let’s take one of the earlier issues — I believe it was Summer of 1998. It was my story. Basically, I suggested that people could do better than beer and that they should “indulge in some creative drinking.” There was one drink I made up called the “Brain Hemorrhage” and a few others you could play a drinking game with. We also included a spinner insert people could cut out.

None of it had anything to do with driving, of course, but the issue was called “On the Road.” It was a sort of beat-focused, Jack Kerouac thing, so some people interpreted that as us promoting drunk driving (though we did nothing of the sort). Also, the kid on the cover was underage. He was 16, if I remember correctly. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) didn’t like that.

Karolyn Nunnallee, vice president of public policy for MADD: We had been really focused on underage drinking and had been instrumental in getting the country’s legal drinking age raised to 21. Then Abercrombie & Fitch comes out with this weird magazine that basically said, “Don’t go back to college drinking the usual beer. We’re going to show you a new way to drink.”

Not only did they have this drinking game, but they had recipes for these mixed drinks for young people to partake in. I was like, “Abercrombie & Fitch? Aren’t they in the clothing business?” What in the world were they doing? I mean, they were a high-end brand, not Walmart. Why would they take their focus off of clothing and put it toward alcohol? Were their clothes not good enough that year or something?

Needless to say, we weren’t happy with them. Curse words were handed out. We sent a letter to them and started a whole media campaign about it. We went on as many news media outlets as we possibly could with the story of how incensed we were.

Abadsidis: I was sure I was going to get fired over that. We had to remove the page with the spinner out of every single issue across the country. We apologized, of course, but it ended up backfiring against the protesters — that incident gave us so much publicity. It put us on the map. It also made us a target for conservative types. They hated us. After MADD, boycotts of Abercrombie started flaring up all over the place. That’s around the time we hired Hampton to do PR.

Carney: It was my job, at the time, to defend the brand. I’d go on talk shows like Entertainment Tonight or Today Show and explain away our latest controversy (there were a lot). It wasn’t hard, actually; each time, I’d give them what was more or less my go-to response: “It’s a beautiful publication intended for college-aged kids.” And that was the truth! It was way ahead of its time and was absolutely meant for people 18 and up.

Though not everyone saw it that way. The sex and nudity really got to people. A lot of them definitely thought we were making porn. That was the constant complaint: We were deliberately putting porn in the hands of young kids.

Lever: The Quarterly featured about the same level of nudity as a European yogurt commercial. Which is to say, a lot. It was a “clothing catalog” with almost no clothing. Of course [American] people thought it was pornographic!

Carney: Okay, sure — there were photos of like, six girls in bed with one guy and more than a few spreads that enthusiastically suggested naked non-monogamy — but it wasn’t porn. It was tasteful. And let me tell you — nothing we had in there was surprising to kids.

Abadsidis: The models ranged from 16 to 20. It was erotic. It was art. I don’t think there’s anything pornographic about the Quarterly unless you think that nudity, in and of itself, is pornographic.

Illinois Lieutenant Governor Corinne Wood did, apparently. In 1999, she called for a boycott of Abercrombie & Fitch because its “Naughty or Nice” holiday issue “contained nudity” and “even an interview with a porn star.” That porn star was none other than Jenna Jameson, who at the time was well on her way to becoming a household name. A so-called “child prodigy” occupied the neighboring page, sparking accusations that the Quarterly somehow intended to connect children to porn.

A cartoon of Mr. and Mrs. Claus experimenting with S&M across from the statement “Sometimes it’s good to be bad” didn’t help, nor did the “sexpert” who offered advice on “sex for three” and told readers that going down on each other in a movie theater was acceptable “just so long as you do not disturb those around you.”

The Illinois Coalition of Sexual Assault joined Wood’s boycott. Later that year, Michigan attorney general (and eventual governor) Jennifer Granholm sent a letter to Abercrombie complaining that the “Naughty or Nice” issue contained sexual material that couldn’t be distributed to minors under state law.

Carney: There were four states that tried to ban us after that. I remember Granholm. She was my arch-nemesis at the time — we really got into it. I respected where she was coming from, of course, but our whole thing was that we weren’t showing anything that wasn’t actually happening on college campuses. And I’d already made it pretty clear to the press that the magazine wasn’t for minors.

Also, it’s not like we were the only magazine talking about or showing sex. You could find all the exact same stuff in Cosmo or Playboy — it’s just that we were a clothing brand, and one whose major customer base just so happened to be teens and young adults. No one expected that from us. Brands weren’t “supposed” to be talking about sex period, let alone to teens and young adults. But we took it upon ourselves to pioneer a more open, honest view of it. That’s the wrinkle that made it so interesting.

We did come to an agreement with Granholm. We decided to wrap the magazine in plastic and make it available for purchase only to those over 18, that way, it’d be even more clear that we weren’t “selling porn to the underage.”

Kon: I believe it was one of the few times the company acquiesced.

Collins: Other than that, don’t remember getting any instruction from Savas, Mike or Sam to tone it down. It was kind of mutually assumed that we weren’t going to apologize for the sexual nature of our content. We knew we had to keep things sexy, as it were — that was our whole thing.

We weren’t deliberately trying to piss off people, but we were trying to push the envelope, and there was definitely an element of deliberate trolling of conservatives and Christian groups. It was a good thing if we pissed them off. It created the controversy that made the brand seem edgy and dangerous, which is what you want if you’re trying to appeal to young people.

Carney: We were also just showing real things that happened at college. And as anyone who’s been to college knows, it’s not just about reading and writing papers. It’s also about sex. Not only that, of course, but we’re sexual beings. We respond to images that are sexual. We were trying to take the stigma away from that and acknowledge that it’s not a bad thing to do.

But no matter how clear we made it, our stance on sex polarized people more and more. I could tell, because almost as soon as I started speaking on behalf of the magazine, strange things started to happen to me. I got stalkers. People left me messages saying I was going to hell and I’d have no afterlife. I got hate mail to my house. One person left a package containing their dirty, stained underwear at the front door of my apartment with a note saying they’d be “coming by later” to “talk to me about it.” I had to call the police on that one.

I was the face of the publication, so I got the vast majority of the harassment. But I didn’t mind. It was my job to take the fall, and I heard and respected every single person’s complaint and talked to them about it. Plus, for every message I got banishing me to hell, I got another from a journalist or a fan begging me to save a copy for them. People collected them. They really loved it, precisely because it was so sexual.

Abadsidis: Mike didn’t flinch about any of this stuff. He wanted to defend it because he could see it was working. We weren’t about to tone anything down (at the time).

Flash-forward to June 2001. The Twin Towers are still standing tall, tips are being frosted and Apple has just unleashed iTunes onto an unsuspecting populace. A&F Quarterly, now in its fourth year, is in hot water once again. Having survived a number of boycotts, lawsuits and controversies since its inception, it’s now in the midst of weathering another minor national conniption over its use of nudity.

Jeannine Stein, describing the Summer 2001 issue in an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article called “Nudity? A&F Quarterly Has It Covered”: [It’s] explicit in ways that most catalogs and fashion magazines are not, and its use of male nudity is uncommon among general-interest publications. It features 280 pages of young, attractive men and women alone and together, in serious, romantic, sexual and party modes, wearing lots of A&F clothes, some A&F clothes and sometimes no clothes at all. Among the coffee-table book-ish photos by Bruce Weber is a man, covered only by a towel, surrounded by five women; a woman at the beach reclining body-to-body with three men; a back view of a naked man getting into a helicopter (we haven’t quite figured that one out yet); and a few topless females.

There are many naked butts and breasts.

Abadsidis: We also had photos of nude women in a fountain — which were inspired by Katharine Hepburn skinny-dipping at Bryn Mawr College — and a whole set dedicated to the Berkeley student that spent a day naked in class. It was par for the course for us, but even though we’d done the whole shrink-wrap and over-18 thing, people still felt it was too sexual for branded content.

In response, an unexpected alliance formed between cultural conservatives and anti-porn feminists to boycott Abercrombie & Fitch over the Summer 2001 issue of A&F Quarterly. According to Wikipedia, the offending issue included “photographs of naked or near-naked young people frolicking on the beach,” “top-naked young women and rear-naked young men on top of each other” and an “interview with porn star Ron Jeremy, who discussed performing oral sex on himself and using a dildo cast from his own penis.” Once again, Wood was at the helm.

David Crary, journalist, excerpt from a 2001 Associated Press article: Illinois Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood — a Republican who has been sparring with A&F since 1999 — announced the boycott campaign last week in Chicago. She has recruited a diverse mix of supporters more familiar with facing off against each other than with working together.

Wood, writing on her website in 2001: A&F is glamorizing indiscriminate sexual behavior that unsophisticated teenagers are not possibly equipped to weigh against the dangers of date rape, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.

Michelle Dewlen, president of the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women, speaking at one of Woods’ press conferences in 2001: It’s not a catalog. It’s a soft porn magazine.

Rev. Bob Vanden Bosch, head of Concerned Christian Americans, as quoted by the AP: It’s very important for people to get involved. The exploitation of sex and young people in A&F’s catalog isn’t only atrocious but also a psychological molestation of their teenage customers.

Quart: It was predatory in a few ways, really. One was that it confused the corporate identity of Abercrombie and the advertising with the editorial. It preyed on young consumers not understanding the difference between editorial content and sales content. Back then it led, I saw, to a way that girls were objectifying themselves and commodifying themselves. It ultimately led to boys also objectifying themselves and commodifying themselves — not to the same extent, but far more than they were when I started reporting Branded a little more than two decades ago.

I have the stats on the male body image dysmorphia at the time in Branded (which has only worsened). Then, male body shaming and “manorexia” was on the rise, for the first time on a mass scale. It couldn’t help for the most popular brand at the time to have a dedicated giant glossy magazine filled with pictures of male teenagers with zero body fat half undressed.

Abadsidis: I mean, sure, as much as any advertising does. It wasn’t like we were leading that charge. Any effect on self-image was certainly unintentional, but I do think it did make people want to be athletic. You definitely saw a lot of guys trying to look like that during that period, especially as time went on. If you look at the first few issues, the guys aren’t that built. Ashton Kutcher was actually in the second one — that was his first big break — and they get increasingly more cut from there. That whole era is when men’s body issues started to come out.

Lever: I’d also submit that all this was controversial because it was pre-internet. The internet mainstreamed sexual content in a way that makes A&F or other “scandalous” ad campaigns (like the 2003 Gucci ad with the model’s pubes shaved into the shape of a G) seem quaint, even obsolete. Like, do you remember that Eckhaus Latta ad a few years ago that scandalized people for five minutes because it showed people having real (albeit pixelated) sex? Neither does anyone else.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK TEACHES SEX ED

Always filled with philosophy, social theory and intellectually minded topics that likely soared over the heads of most Abercrombie consumers, the Quarterly outdid itself in the Fall of 2003 with its penultimate issue. A gorgeous romp of summer-spirited abandon accompanied by some delightfully incoherent, Dada-like musings from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, it connected a “back-to-school” theme with a pretty clear directive to fuck. Yet, the information it presented was actually rather safe and tame, a reality which confused and irritated Quarterly staff. Their content was legit, so why was everyone up in arms?

Abadsidis: The “Sex Ed” issue was the second to last one that we did. It got some of the most criticism, and was supposedly the reason everything was finished. I literally had stuff in there cited straight from the University of Michigan’s freshman student handbook on sexual conduct, and it still pissed people off! Then, of course, there was Žižek.

Lever: Žižek identifies as a radical leftist. He’s very famous for his work on cultural theory and critical theory. He analyzes all kinds of topics in his signature, impenetrable — but also approachable — style. And when I think of him, I think of his very distinctive manner of speaking, that some people have described as being on cocaine constantly. But he’s definitely kind of a cult figure, a favorite of people who consider themselves highbrow, but also fun.

He’s really touted as the greatest anti-capitalist of our time, and yet, here he was, “sexually educating” the mean girls and boys of your high school, in a brand catalog whose entire goal was to ensnare young people for the purpose of selling them distressed jeans.

According to the magazine’s foreword, the editor wrote to Žižek and said this: “Dear Slavoj, enclosed please find the images for our back to school issue. We’ve never had a philosopher write the text for our images before, so write what you like. We’re looking for that Karl Marx meets Groucho Marx thing you do so well. Thanks, Savas.”

Abadsidis: I love Slavoj. He was friends with one of my professors from school. He only had 24 hours to write this, so we actually sent someone to London where he was to drop off the images we wanted him to write text for. They hung out for a day and then flew back with what he’d written.

Lever: It was basically a series of insane, absurdist ramblings pasted over really hot naked people.

Žižek, excerpt from A&F Quarterly’s 2003 Sex Ed issue: Back to school thus means forget the stupid spontaneous pleasures of summer sports, of reading books, watching movies and listening to music. Pull yourself together and learn sex.

Lever: I mean, that’s like the first episode of every teen TV show, where these three nerdy boys start high school and they’re like, “Okay, we’re going to be cool this year guys. We’re going to lose our virginities.” It’s very formulaic. But there’s more.

Žižek: The only successful sexual relationship occurs when the fantasies of the two partners overlap. If the man fantasizes that making love is like riding a bike and the woman wants to be penetrated by a stud, then what truly goes on while they make love is that a horse is riding a bike… with a fantasy like that, who needs a personality?

Lever: The “go learn sex at school” part really struck a nerve with conservatives. But I don’t think it was that transgressive. Fourteen-year-olds are receiving messages to have sex all the time — what did it matter if some Eastern European anti-capitalist was hitting them over the head with it through the pages of a polo shirt advert?

Abadsidis: Fox News got involved, if I remember correctly. That was one of the few times I actually got pissed off about how an issue was being covered. I mean, the information in there was handed out to students by an actual university. Half the issue was quotes from this really influential philosopher. But for some reason, people really took offense to the language of it. That whole year [2003] was just a bad one for us.

THE LAST HORNY CHRISTMAS

For its final trick, the Quarterly released a holiday issue featuring 280 pages of “moose, ice hockey, chivalry, group sex and more.” It had oral sex, group sex, sex in a river, Christmas sex and pretty much every other type of sex you could think of, all which followed an earnest letter from Abadsidis which read: “We don’t want much this year, but in keeping with the spirit, we’d like to ask forgiveness from some of the people we’ve offended over the years. If you’d be so kind, please offer our apologies to the following: the Catholic League, former Lt. Governor Corrine Wood of Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Stanford University Asian American Association, N.O.W.”

But the issue didn’t really hit. By fall 2003, Abercrombie was involved in a number of lawsuits and protests related to exclusion and discrimination, which left people cold despite the inviting warmth of a crackling, fireside circle jerk (a Weber offering which, I’m told, can be found on page 88 of the final issue).

Cole Kazdin, journalist, writing in a 2003 Slate article called “Have Yourself a Horny Little Christmas”: The challenge for me, when masturbating with my friends to the nubile nudies in the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, is trying not to think about serious things like racial diversity; it tends to kill the mood. But because most of the models in the catalog are white and because a lawsuit has been filed against the clothing retailer for allegedly discriminating against a Black woman who applied for a job at the store, it’s hard for the issue not to rear its nonsexy head. [In 2004, Abercrombie also agreed to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of promoting whites over Latino, Black, Asian-American and female applicants.]

Collins: As a brand, Abercrombie did a lot of things that were quite gross. I’m sure you remember when they came out with these T-shirts with these racist stereotype characters on them. You would just see it in the catalog and just be like, “Jesus Christ.” It was awful and stupid and self-defeating, just tone deaf. And we just couldn’t figure out how no one at the company saw the problem with it.

Stagg, excerpt from Sleeveless: Kids in my high school wore shirts that read, “Wok-n-Bowl” and “Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs Can Make It White,” accompanied by cross-eyed propaganda-style cartoons. If you weren’t part of the in-crowd (and white), A&F was oppressive. Non-jocks made their own anti-A&F T-shirts, using the brand as a catchall for exclusionary, competitive behavior and old-fashioned bullying.

Carney: That stuff was indefensible, really. Those were the darkest days of my job — listening to calls and reading letters about how offensive those shirts were. Even though the Quarterly was quite separate from the brand and we had no influence over what they did or what clothes they designed, we did still have to print their stuff at the back of the magazine. It was pretty uncomfortable.

Stagg: By 2006, Mike Jeffries’ most controversial public statement on sex appeal was really just saying what we were all thinking: “Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” Those remarks were followed by lawsuit after lawsuit, mostly involving staffing discrimination. An announcement about the store refusing to carry anything over a size 10 reportedly marked a noticeable decrease in sales.

Abadsidis: There were a lot of underlying problems at the company. The amount of negative press Abercrombie was getting was getting silly. No matter what we did, we’d end up in the news, especially if it was related to the Quarterly. After so many bad news incidents, it just felt done, like its moment had passed. It was bound to crash at some point.

Gina Piccalo, excerpt from the Los Angeles Times: Clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has pulled its controversial in-store catalogs after outraged parents, conservative Christian groups and child advocates threatened a boycott over material they said was pornographic. However, a company spokesman said the move had nothing to do with the public outcry. The catalogs were pulled to make room near cash registers for a new Abercrombie & Fitch fragrance.

Abadsidis: People like to think that the boycotts and Christian protests had something to do with it, but that wasn’t the case at all. By 2003, Abercrombie’s stock was low — something to do with ordering too much denim. The store was having negative sales for the first time. There was the line in the New York Times, who covered our demise, that Mike was “bored” with it.

Collins: We had no warning. We were all there one day, and the next, we were gone.

Lever: The Quarterly was a relic of a different time. I feel like it could never have been made after 2008 for so many reasons — economic, and cultural and political. It would just never fly. It was made before feminism pervaded everything, at a time where you could be completely flagrant about gross patriarchal shit and still get away with it.

It was kind of like this last gasp of a certain conception of what’s desirable — a very hegemonic coolness exemplified by white Ivy League frat kids who got fucked up the night before their philosophy class. That doesn’t have much currency anymore. Abercrombie kept that image on life support until its last gasp.

Now, 20 years later, what’s cool is not that. What’s cool is to have depression and ADD. The ideal is out. The real is in. And the Quarterly, having always existed in the liminal space between, is neither here nor there.

EPILOGUE

In 2008, Abercrombie resurrected the Quarterly in the U.K. for a limited-run special edition to celebrate the success of its European stores. The original team was reunited — Abadsidis, Shahid and Weber — with the hopes that Britain’s more “open-minded approach to culture and creativity” would provide a welcoming substrate on which to re-grow their original ideas of sexual liberation. The issue, “Return to Paradise,” was “more mature” than its American cousin. It was well-received — aside from the usual protests about sex and nudity — but it wasn’t continued.

Two years later, in 2010, the Quarterly was revived again, this time as a promotional element for Abercrombie’s Back-to-School 2010 marketing campaign, which bore the unfortunate title of “Screen Test.” The lead story Abercrombie put out on its website sounded like a cross between American Idol and a gay porn shot: “The staff of A&F Studios opens up to editorial to explain the steps the division takes to find new, young, hot boys. The cattle-call approach to herd young talent ends with the best of the beefcake earning a screen test that ‘could be the flint to spark the trip to the star.’”

Bruce Weber would be shooting, of course. This would become especially ominous after he was accused of a series of casting-couch style sexual assaults by 15 male models beginning in 2017. According to the accusations, he subjected them to sexually manipulative “breathing exercises” and inappropriate touching, insinuating that he could help their careers if they complied.

Arick Fudali, a lawyer at the Bloom Firm, which represents five of Weber’s alleged victims, declined to confirm or deny whether any of the alleged assaults happened on a Quarterly shoot. If they did, they’re not prosecutable as sexual assaults in New York. Because the states’s statute of limitations on reporting rape is only three years, anything that happened during the Quarterly’s run wouldn’t count toward a sexual assault charge (unless a minor was involved, which Fudali also declined to confirm).

No one I spoke with for this story remembers seeing, hearing or experiencing anything like what the allegations against Weber describe, but some expressed concern over how they might affect the legacy the Quarterly leaves behind. “The accusations are pretty grim,” Collins told me. “You feel for the people who are put in that position. People had power over them. It just makes you think, ‘Was any of this worth it?’ Not really, if people were getting hurt.”

As such, it’s difficult to conclude with definitive sign-off about the Quarterly’s legacy. Either it was a bastion of progressive and transversive sexuality that simultaneously trolled and nourished the very audience it sought to mine, or it was the product of darkness and pain. Either way, Sockel sums it up just right: “The Quarterly was discontinued in 2003, after the American Decency Association boycotted photos of doe-eyed bare-assed jocks in prairies and glens,” he wrote in his recollection. “It was nice while it lasted.”

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c-is-for-circinate · 4 years

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I just read your thing about paladins and what they're for and holy CRAP does it sum up some stuff that I've been trying to explain for ages, so thank you for that! But now I'm wondering: your footnote mentioned Fjord and Vax'ildan, who both multiclassed into paladin as part of their personal character arc. Would you mind sharing your Thoughts about them? (And if you have any about the other paladins and how they fit in this - Arkhan or Kima or Kerrek or the rest - that would be awesome to see.)

You know I’m ALWAYS ready for a good CR character breakdown :D And for shitting on classic Old School conceptions of what paladins should be, because a quick stroll through the tags has reminded me that, while many people play them very very well, the people who talk about How You’re Supposed To Play Paladins are often wrong as hell. (This includes everybody who wrote 3rd edition d&d.)

I kind of want to start by talking about Kima and Kerrek, rather than Vax and Fjord, because Kima and Kerrek are in many ways two different angles on exactly what I think a paladin character should be. Starting with the premise here that the paladin at its core is about turning ideals into actions, Kima and Kerrek are both awesome at exemplifying the class.

Kima is such a straightforward, action-oriented person. Her belief in Bahamut and her belief in justice are inextricably entwined; she follows her god because she’s sure he’s right about what’s Good and Correct to see done in the world. The ideals –> action pathway is easy and natural for her, because the necessity of taking action in pursuit of her ideals is very clearly one of her ideals. She’s not in conflict with her vows, because she doesn’t need to be. There’s evil in the world, and Bahamut wants her to smite it in the balls, and that’s both effective and fun. (Of note, Kima doesn’t feel personally responsible for destroying every single minor evil ever to exist ever. There’s plenty to go around. Smite the monster in front of you, trust Bahamut to point you towards the thing that really needs killing, and don’t kill yourself over the petty grift of the guy in your favorite bar at the end of the day because yikes, dude, just yikes–that’s how Kima functions as a character, and it’s what makes her an actually functional character.)

Kerrek on the other hand is fascinating because he’s a paladin who thinks he’s lost his ideals, at least at the start. At some unknown time in the past he tried to turn faith and belief (in something, and we never do find out what, and it doesn’t even matter) into change in the world. He got some things done. He utterly failed at some other things. And now he’s sitting here in Westruun feeling like, maybe he can’t, maybe he shouldn’t, maybe everything is a thousand times more complicated and he’s a thousand times tinier in the universe than he ever envisioned when he was younger. He’s sitting there thinking he’s lost his ideals and his drive and his faith–and meanwhile he’s still standing there taking action, doing what he can for the people of Westruun, planting his garden, being angry and disappointed and frustrated and still trying anyway. In spite of himself, Kerrek still believes. In spite of himself Kerrek still does the things he thinks need to be done, even if they’re not the things he wants to be doing, even if he doesn’t think he’ll do any good in the long run. Such a good paladin thing to do.

Then we get to Fjord and Vax. And so much of what makes Fjord and Vax interesting as paladins is, the ideals that compel them to action, compel them to take these paladin oaths, aren’t the ideals of their respective goddesses.

Vax did not wake up one day and say, ‘I believe in the Raven Queen and I believe that what she says is just and right and I will follow her because I believe in her so much’. (He almost, almost got to that point with Sarenrae, circa the Briarwoods arc, and somewhere there is an alternate universe where he did and it is so interesting, but I digress.) And Fjord didn’t really sit down and learn his way through the teachings of the Wildmother and decide, ‘y’know, yes, this is what I love and trust and want to spread in the world’. That’s not the ideal that drove either of them to action.

Fuck, Vax didn’t even like the Raven Queen when he became hers. “Take me instead, you raven bitch.” Why does Vax become a paladin of the Raven Queen? Because he promised. Because he traded himself for his sister. He believes to the depths of his soul in keeping Vex alive, and he believes in keeping his word. The ideal driving Vax to action isn’t worship or admiration. It’s the ideal of following through on his own goddamn commitments.

For Fjord, it’s similar, although a lot less fraught. He doesn’t dislike Melora, certainly–everything he knows of her seems fine, but mostly he turns to her because he’s desperate for help and she seems willing to give it. Fjord’s not great at big lofty ideals, but he is good at people, in his own way. Turning to the Wildmother is about grabbing at the kindness she’s shown him. It’s about grabbing at the kindness Caduceus has shown him. These are the things he trusts.

And yet, Vax isn’t just a paladin to the oath of Keep Vex Alive. Fjord isn’t just a paladin of Not U’kotoa. They both have ideals, and they’re both doing their utmost to follow them here anyway.

For Fjord, being a paladin seems very transactional, yes (free me from this sea serpent and I’ll be your guy, sure), but there’s an enormous ethic of devotion and loyalty involved, coupled with, just like Kima had, a belief in the requirement for action. Fjord believes that it is correct to repay kindness with deeds. He doesn’t entirely understand what Melora wants of him, but she was kind to him in a vast wasteland where he slept unbroken sleep beneath her tree, and she has saved him when he wasn’t entirely sure he could be saved, and of course you repay that in kind. At this point in the narrative, that intense loyalty is the driving ideal behind Fjord’s path as a paladin, and it’s really cool to see.

Vax could have run, when the Raven Queen came for him, and instead he went to Vasselheim. He could have done a lot of things a lot of times. The fact that he offered himself up in a fit of terror isn’t what made him a paladin–the fact that he followed through after that moment was over did.

Another really interesting thing about these paths is that perhaps the most major action our boys are compelled to take, in response to that loyalty, is simply, learn what the fuck you signed up for. Having pledged themselves to these goddesses they are now responsible for figuring out what that even means. There is no easy handbook for “this is what your goddess requires of you, break it and you’re Out On Your Ass”. The Raven Queen asks Vax for extremely little, in the grand scheme of things. He spends a lot of time fighting enemies he would have fought anyway with a little extra backup, and muddling along looking to Vasselheim and old books to figure out what she might want out of him. Fjord’s still taking Caduceus-lessons and trying to figure out what comes next.

In the end it’s hard to even tell whether Vax comes to truly embrace her ideals of fate and finality as his own, or he just submits to them as part of who he thinks he has to be now. That open question is super interesting to me, and I think it’s a really cool twist on the whole classic “paladins take these vows and then HAVE TO STICK TO THEM no matter WHAT” dynamic, where the big vow Vax made is, in fact, to be a paladin. (Even the Oath of Vengeance is fascinating for him–the Raven Queen didn’t ask that path of him, Vax chose it. He decided that was the right way for him to serve.)

I’m so curious to see where Fjord goes from here on his paladin journey. Which of Melora’s ideals is he going to work to enact out of loyalty to her, because that’s the job he promised to do? Which ideals will he actually understand and agree with in his own heart? What oath is he going to take, I’m so fucking curious: Oath of Heroism makes a certain amount of sense but is also kind of self-aggrandizing, Devotion would be awesome for Fjord but also includes that absolute injunction towards honesty, I’m eternally a sucker for the Oath of Ancients and it would make sense for Melora but I’m not sure it’s correct here…

Anyway. Tl;dr that Vax and Fjord are not, entirely, paladins to the ideals and domains of their respective goddesses–not yet. They’re both paladins to the ideal of loyalty, which they’ve given to their respective goddesses, and that’s such an interesting option for the class. It invites so much discussion about the difference between devotion to a deity as an individual, and devotion to what that deity actually stands for. And I fucking love it.

#acelania #critical role #driveby meta attack #paladins #dnd paladin #fucking paladins man #I've got some feelings about this character class #one of these days I'm going to get to play one as something other than the DM #love my NPC paladins so much at least

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sucuretcannelle · 3 years

Text

I got bored so here's some incorrect quotes:

----

Nash: Hey, you got a bag that I can borrow?

Orion: The only bags I have are the ones under my eyes, and they're specifically designed to carry the burden of my existence

Nash: You could've just said no

----

Bird: I'm going to grab a healthy breakfast

Atlas: Are those gummy bears wrapped in a fruit roll-up?

Bird: Breakfast burrito, but yeah

Atlas: I pity your dentist

Bird: Jokes on you, I don't have a dentist

----

Cup: Have you ever thought about the saying, "single as a Pringle?"

Cup: It doesn't make any sense, as Pringles always come in packs with many other Pringles

Cinna: Babe, I know people cope with insomnia in many different ways, but please quiet down, it's 2 a.m

Cup: Sorry Cinna

Cinna: It's alright. You shouldn't even be worrying about that, 'cause you're "taken by bacon"

Cup: Yeah, you're right.

Cup: ...

Cup: But can't you buy singular packets of bacon?

----

Vex, bumping into someone: Sorry...

Vex, turning around to see it's a pole: Oh sorry, I thought you were a person

Vex, realizing what he just did: ...

----

Shrimp: You know, I never considered you a rival

Finn: And I never considered you at all

Shrimp: :'(

----

Cup: Dude, look at how big my new shoes are!

Bird: Well, you know what they say about Bigfoot

Cup: You mean big feet-

Bird: They try to tell you he's not real, but I know he is.

----

Noodles: I want you to kill my ex, but make it look like it was an accident

Finn: Say no more

*Later*

News reporter: Looks like the killer smashed their head in with a hammer and left a banana peel by their feet

----

Finn: When you've been through as much as I have, you develop thick skin

Al, walking by: Green isn't your color

Finn: wha- GREEN LOOKS FUCKING GREAT ON ME

----

Prompt: What are you doing?

Alexi: Stargazing

Prompt: You're staring at pictures of you taped to the ceiling though?

Alexi: The stars are beautiful tonight

----

Al: Did you have to stab shrimp?

Cinna: You weren't there, you didn't know what she said to me

Al: What did she say?

Cinna: "what are you gonna do? Stab me?"

Al: Yeah, okay, that's fair

----

Vex: I panic when people compliment me

Vex: What am I supposed to say?

*Flashback*

Noodles: Good job today!

Vex, panicking: MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

----

Prompt: I would appreciate if you guys would stop breaking things

Atlas: Listen, we're all cool, but just to be clear

Atlas: *Points at Finn, Cinna, and Cup* They're the ones who did it

----

Cinna: You're so short, what can you see down there?

Finn: Everyone's IQ

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Amoris: For the last time Alexi, when someone threatens to kill you, the correct response isn't "then do it, pussy!"

----

Some random person: I'll kill you!

Finn: Fucking try me

Finn: Cuz if I haven't died yet, then I'm probably immortal

----

Cinna: Atlas, if we get out of this alive, I'm going to kill you

Atlas: So what's my incentive to live?

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infinite-xerath · 3 years

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Thoughts on Sentinel and Ruined Skins

Alright, I plan to give my full thoughts on the entire event once it’s over, but for the time-being, I wanted to give my general thoughts on each skin so far. I’ll be putting this under a read-more for convenience.))

So I guess I’ll start by saying that I like the concept of the event as a whole, though I’ve got some gripes (as do many) with who was chosen to partake. I think, having played through the VN up to its current point, that they do a decent job justifying most of the characters who get Ruined/recruited. That said, it does annoy me that they didn’t even go all-in on the concept; one Sentinel and one Ruined champ per region could have been great, but then there are some regions that don’t even have one of each.

So yeah, in addition to giving my overall thoughts on each existing skin, I also wanna touch on who else I think could have been included.

Sentinel Vayne: In my opinion, the best Sentinel skin of the lot. Not only does it look good (arguably better than her original design) but Vayne is a natural fit for the Sentinels. She already devotes her life to hunting monsters and dark magic, so it absolutely makes sense that she would join up at least until the Ruination is dealt with.

Ruined Shyvana: I wasn’t so sure about this one at first, but I’ve warmed up to it now that we know how Viego’s possession works. Taking the worst aspects of someone’s personality and bringing them to the forefront? Yeah, go figure that Shyvana would give into her monstrous side and resentment for being persecuted almost every day of her life. You could argue that there were better picks, but hey, better Ruined Shyvana than yet another Lux skin, right?

Sentinel Olaf: While not my first choice, I can’t deny that it works in the long-run. The dude already has a history of fighting the undead in his endless quest to find a worthy foe capable of slaying him, and of course the Ruined King seems like a suitably worthy opponent for Olaf to go up against. That being said, I feel like we should have gotten a Ruined Champ from the Freljord as Olaf’s rival, rather than it just being Vex. I don’t mind Vex appearing when she did to have us encounter her for the first time, but she should have had a Ruined champ to help her, which leads me to...

Ruined Tryndamere: Come on, this one’s obvious. There are a few characters in the Freljord that might have fit the Ruined theme, but none more-so than Tryndamere, I think. The guy’s already got a whole thing about controlling his rage and trying to use it as a force for good in the Avarosa tribe. Imagine Viego corrupting Tryndamere and causing all of that primal fury to just explode forth. Plus, come ON Riot, Olaf vs Tryndamere. Battle of the Berserkers. Frankly, it’s absurd to me that Olaf hasn’t tried fighting Tryndamere already, given that they’re both too angry to die. He HAS to have at least heard about the Barbarian King, right?

Sentinel Riven: Honestly, this one is interesting to me. With the other Sentinels, we all kind of know/expect that they’ll return to normal once the event is over and go back to their status quo. Riven feels like an exception. As she stated herself in the event: she’s a wanted criminal in Noxus and it’s not exactly like she’d be super welcomed back in Ionia. She joins the Sentinels because she has nowhere else to go and no other cause to fight for once freed from Draven’s arena. Aside from Vayne, Riven feels like the one who’d most likely stay with the Sentinels once the event is over, even though I know that probably won’t happen. Still, I like her inclusion, all-in-all.

Ruined Draven: Honestly, not the one I would have picked. I mean, it’s just Draven. Absolutely nothing has changed from him being Ruined. Granted, I do think it’s absolutely hilarious that Draven’s worst version of himself is already just himself, an egotistical prick who craves attention, but there are way better picks in Noxus to see getting Ruined. I mean, the event teaser showed Darius getting possessed, and I think there’s a lot more to work with there. Also, am I the only one that thinks that Ruined Draven feels redundant when Soul Reaver Draven is already a thing?

Sentinel Diana: So this one I have some complicated feelings about. On one hand, it makes sense that Diana would join the fight against the undead for the sake of the Lunari. On the other, it feels like MOST of the Aspects should be getting involved with this. I mean, the VN has her say that the other Aspects ARE fighting the Undead all over Targon, but then you’d think we would wanna go and recruit them as well. Seriously, Taric? WTF are you, Protector? Also, Diana needing a Sentinel weapon is weird since we already confirmed that the Mist doesn’t like Celestial magic, but... Eh, the blade she gets is cool, I guess.

Ruined Pantheon: And here comes the controversial one... Right, so like many, I did not care for this skin. In fact, I still have reservations about it. I DO like that it is actually Ruined PANTHEON, because yeah, the Black Mist turns dead things undead. Go figure it could bring back the remnants of the war god lingering in Atreus. That’s a really cool idea, but there’s absolutely an argument to be made that it fucks with Atreus’s whole character arc and makes his seemingly indomitable will look like a joke... But hey, Viego himself said that he’d never be able to take a proper Aspect, which absolutely tracks, which kinda makes Atreus the only Targonian champion he COULD defeat and corrupt.

Sentinel Irelia: To be frank, not too much to say about this one. Irelia’s entire character motivation is defending her homeland against invaders, and... Yeah the undead definitely count as invaders. While someone like Shen probably would have been a better recruit for the Sentinels, Irelia works just fine.

Ruined Karma: And heeere’s another controversial one. Yeah, Karma is not the one I would have chosen. Honestly, just about anyone else from Ionia would have been a better fit for Ruination. Ruined Pantheon can be justified by the dead war god coming back and taking over Atreus’s body again, but Karma and her vessel Darha should have absolutely been able to resist it... And they kind of do. In the event, we actually do see Karma switching back and forth. She’s the only one we’ve seen fight back against Viego long enough to revert to her normal self, at least for a time. In fact, the implication that Darha is being corrupted while the entity of Karma itself fights back is neat. Still, I would have preferred Ruined Zed or something along those lines.

Sentinel Graves: OK, I love this skin. I don’t love the context around it. First of all, the fact that he’s the Sentinel for Piltover is dumb. Graves is from Bilgewater, and should have been the Sentinel we recruited there. I also don’t care for how Twisted Fate is completely missing and never even referenced from his story. Like, OK, Graves fled Bilgewater because it was already overcome with Harrowing. Fine. But... Did he just leave TF behind? If so, why does he have Fate’s blue card? There’s so much we’re missing here. I love that he’s joining just because he’s got a bone to pick with Viego, but Graves should have been the choice for Bilgewater. As for who should be the Piltover Sentinel? Well...

Sentinel Jayce: Think about it. Jayce is a character who’s had nothing to do in the Piltover/Zaun lore for ages. He already considers himself a hero and a defender of Piltover. Plus, imagine what a Sentinel version of his hammer would be like! Hell, Jayce’s whole conflict with Viktor revolves around their opposing beliefs around free will. Of course he’d have a word or two to say about the Ruined King, who’s running around and stripping people of their free will! On that note..

Ruined Viktor: Absolutely a perfect fit for Ruination. Under Viego’s influence, he could deem undeath as the next logical step of evolution, casting aside the limits of flesh and emotion for a spectral form where one’s thoughts were dictated by a single, “superior” consciousness. It would be a perfect contrast for Sentinel Jayce, and besides: we’ve already seen a ghostly version of this concept with Death Sworn Viktor. If Draven gets two undead skins, why not? Plus, we know that the Harrowing can effect machines thanks to Legends of Runeterra, so... Yeah. Ruined Viktor. Let’s go.

Sentinel Pyke: Another controversial one. While I like the general idea behind it, frankly, I would have just left Pyke as he is. We already have him fighting the undead in the Ruined King game, and we know Nagakabouros power can hurt the undead; there was no real need for him to pick up Sentinel gear. Much as I love the line “Wraiths, wraiths are on the list,” I would have just made Graves the Sentinel rep for Bilgewater and called it there.

Ruined Miss Fortune: This one just sucks. It absolutely sucks. The Sarah Fortune I know would have never gone to such lengths merely for power, especially when she already rules most of Bilgewater at this point. Her various short stories show her doing a pretty damn good job stamping out the warring factions challenging her rule, and even if she decided that she needed some kind of supernatural leg up on the competition, it’s not like Bilgewater is lacking in magic. Also, the design sucks, turning her back into the sex icon that they’ve spent the last 7 years moving her away from. Ruined Fortune sucks. As for who SHOULD have gotten the skin instead...

Ruined Gangplank: Now HERE’S a pirate lord desperate for power. He lost his ship, he lost his fleet, he lost his throne, he even lost an arm. Gangplank has been struggling to regain control of Bilgewater ever since Burning Tides, and while we haven’t heard much of him recently, it can be safely assumed that he’s not making much progress with how much control Sarah currently has. Gangplank is absolutely ruthless enough and immoral enough to bargain with the Ruined King for power. Plus, think about it: he’s already been “reborn” once, so to him, Ruination probably wouldn’t even be that big of a deal.

Sentinel Rengar: All things considered, I like this one. Rengar, I think, has one of the best justifications for joining the Sentinels. When Rengar’s jungle is invaded by wraiths, Rengar finds himself faced with monsters that even his skills cannot take down. Yeah, these undead are worthy prey challenging his reign as the apex predator in Kumungu, and if the Viego is their alpha, then he’s the target to go for. Now, obviously he’s still got a hunt for Kha’Zix that has yet to be resolved, but let’s be honest: we’re never going to see that rivalry conclude, and this is the most lore relevance Rengar has had in ages. I’m for this skin, though of course we do still have the issue of who in Kumungu would be a good Ruined rival for him. On that note...

Ruined Zyra: Alright, here me out. Ixtal as a region doesn’t have that many characters, let-alone good candidates for Ruination. Perhaps the best and most obvious candidate would be Qiyana, but I take issue with this for a few reasons. Firstly, accepting Ruination for the power to rule is already something we’ve done with MF/GP, and second, I don’t think the Shadow Isles aesthetic works super well with her elemental-swapping gameplay. I chose Ruined Zyra because, well, Zyra already wants to spread her plants far and wide across Runeterra, and the Mist would be a great method for carrying seeds, not to mention making her offspring harder to prune. Not the most deep, but yeah, I think Ruined Zyra would have been a cool concept to work with.

Lastly...

Unbound Thresh: A mistake. I’ve already made my opinions on Thresh’s lore abundantly clear in my rewrite for him, and this skin just destroys any hope for his character for me. This sexy E-Boy is unquestionably the worst thing to come out of the whole event, and whatever Riot is planning to do with Thresh in the future, it does NOT justify this design. Plus, the whole idea that an undead character can become “unbound” is just dumb. Like, when has it ever been implied that Thresh himself was actually bound in any way? He’s one of the few Shadow Isles entities that can freely leave the Mist, at least for a time! Yeah, this skin was a mistake, but Riot has to cash in on the simps, I suppose.

Anyways, I’ll give my thoughts on the story itself once this is all said and done, but for now, these are my takes on the individual skins. Hope you all enjoyed hearing me ramble.

#Outofpower #Ruination

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