Or, how an otherwise incredibly private man came out to the world because when I play-tested his first challenge he physically refused to flirt with women.
Kiss Me in Komorebi 🌹 New Save+
Below you'll find an explanation of why I'm starting this Challenge from the ground up, an apology for my former applicants, and the form to follow for your submissions! Thank you for indulging me for so long in my obsession with this blorbo of mine.
Why the plus? Because otomes will smack lil' plus signs on updated versions of their dating games, and I'm a dork.
Deadline for applications is April 1st! 🌸
Let's be real - I bit off a little more than I could chew the first time around! This new version of KMIK will feature gameplay-heavy storytelling with posed scenes in-between!
I want to make it up to the applicants who waited so long to see this Bachelor Challenge come to fruition, and I genuinely want Daniel to have a fair shot at meeting someone truly meant for him - so I'm opening twenty one slots: seven for my former Contestants (two of which are taken by Daithi Calloway and Josiah Bolton), seven for my former Outsiders, and seven slots for new sims! Of course, the final number will be decided by the number of slots filled!
These three houses will rotate group dates and challenges with Daniel as he whittles down the numbers. In-universe, Dan hates the spotlight of fame, and was an incredibly private man (bar his new cult following on SimTok) before being influenced to be the star of his own Bachelor Challenge by his (well-meaning) agent and siblings. He went into this in the hopes that the contracted work would mean he'd not have to worry about his mother's health bills or his nieces and nephews' college funds for a little while.
However, when he got actual applications in, pictures of real sims who had applied just for the chance to meet him, to fall in love with him... well, it gave him a cold shock of reality. After a period of radio silence, the studio released a statement that said Daniel was deeply sorry, but that he wanted to give this a fair shot, and that meant he'd have to be more open and honest about himself than he was ever comfortable being.
🌸 THE APPLICATION 🌸
Name:
Age: (lifestage and number, please)
Traits:
Aspiration:
- please feel free to include any fun facts about your sim that you'd like to list!
- i'm a dork and i love writing prompts based on the autonomous actions sims choose in-game. developing your sims' skills and likes will help them act more like themselves!
- i will be using height sliders when i can, so feel free to include your sim's height! (for posing/gameplay purposes)
Please tag your application with #kmikapp! 🌸
Though I am excited for this clean start, I do want to apologize to all of my former applicants - both for the time it took for me to go through the acceptance process, and the time it took you waiting for me to get back to my desktop... only to learn that the sims you made weren't even going to be used. Believe me, I am no stranger to the loss of a Challenge sim: and I hope that by offering you all an automatic spot in this new save, I can make it up to you a little!
The two existing male contestants (Daithi Calloway by @buglaur and Josiah Bolton by @retro-plasma) will remain in the competition, seeing as they were already written to participate as contestants. But given that I'm forgoing the Outsiders concept for the ease of the Bachelor Challenge format, I thought I would offer all of my Outsider applicants the chance to make contestants! As some of my former participants are inactive, I thought this was the best way to reach out - I am really going to be better about talking one-on-one, though.
ANYWAY, I'm so excited to go on this journey with Daniel, and I can only hope you guys are as eager to see what awaits us as I am! Thank you for reading this far - let's try this again, shall we? 🌹
@hauntedtrait @kawaiishitty @wastelandwhisperer @occultpuppy @gothoffspring @foxsimthings @king-tower @morrigan-sims @akitasimblr @wormsimblr @10000and1dreams
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i do think the key to how things will fall out regarding death on remnant is the jabberwalker, bc like
the brothers created death by creating him
the god of light, fearing they had disrupted the balance, tried to get rid of him. the god of darkness refused to countenance this, and they fought about it.
they leave the ever after. jabber remains, implying one of three possibilities: 1. dark ‘won’ the argument and both brothers agreed to let jabber live, 2. dark recreated jabber one last time in secret before they left, or 3. jabber came back later a la modern humans. given light’s general inflexibility my inclination is 2 or 3.
in any case the tree seems to accept jabber as part of the ever after and the presence of his figurine on the blacksmith’s worktable implies that he will continue to exist in some form.
during the creation of remnant, the brothers agree that death will be permanent. their reasons are not yet fully clear, but light was the only one concerned about enforcing this rule; i think it is almost certainly a rule that originated with the god of light.
“but balance cannot be restored by force or calculation; true balance finds its own equilibrium”
force = destroying jabber. calculation = creating a new world with permadeath.
—
the god of light conceives of balance as a fragile order that must be meticulously maintained or else fall apart: his purpose, as he sees it, is to maintain order. everything he does comes from this. he cannot tolerate change because he lives in abject fear of ‘disrupting the balance’ again—as he believes they have already done once, by creating jabber.
so there is a certain narrative equivalency being drawn here between removing jabber and making death permanent for remnant. both decisions are predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of what balance is.
thus the problem of death is not that it exists, per se. the problem is that death is the locus of light’s anxiety about change.
he first attempts to fix the ‘problem’ by getting rid of jabber, eliminating death. but he can’t, because dark won’t let him. so plan b is to leave the ever after and create a new world where death is part of the design—which isn’t contradictory at all if the intention is to prevent disruption of the existing order.
and something to keep in mind here is that 1. the cat and the jabberwalker were both deathless and unable to ascend, and 2. the brothers created death by mistake. for light these are crucial factors that must be accounted for in the new design. the only way to ensure that the disruptive introduction of death can never happen again is to include death from the start, transforming the accident into a deliberate choice.
which is all well and good except for one teeny, tiny wrinkle: for humans, death is not actually annihilative. they don’t simply cease to exist when they die.
i think it’s extremely likely that wasn’t supposed to happen. in a system where death is final and forever, spiritually immortal humans pose an obvious risk of disruption—and the ‘afterlife’ is evidently just permanent unconscious stasis, so it doesn’t seem like human souls were preserved for any purpose.
if your aim is to design an orderly system that can be maintained exactly as-is forever, and one of your core building blocks is that death is permanent, no exceptions, then why would you ever create beings capable of rising from the dead? you wouldn’t!
but once humans with immortal souls exist you’re sort of stuck with them, aren’t you? and i think that dilemma makes the most sense of why light’s afterlife is… like that. the souls of the dead ‘resting’ in everlasting oblivion in another realm that living humans cannot enter is the same in practice as annihilative death as long as every being capable of reaching the afterlife follows the stated rules.
the instant dark decides to make an exception, the whole system collapses. it reveals to salem that death isn’t inherently final or forever—that this is an arbitrary rule that the brothers decided, and one of them is open to the idea of changing those rules. then the gods make her immortal and light reprimands her for failing to understand how important his rules are (rules his brother just broke with no consequence except that light got mad), but ultimately what she learns is that the brothers are fallible and their rules can be changed. her rebellion is underpinned by this revelation.
the divine order suffers one small disruption and almost immediately, catastrophically fails, just as the god of light feared.
but that failure did not happen because of the disruption; the system failed because it was artificial. the brothers designed it a certain way and then light focused all of his efforts to keeping it that way, unchanging, forever—because their world wasn’t an ecosystem so much as it was a lawn in arizona. that lawn can only exist for as long as someone is doing the work to keep it on life support.
anyway the point i’m getting to is that remnant still isn’t in stable equilibrium, largely because of salem’s immortality and ozma’s reincarnations but also in the more general sense: the people of remnant are spiritually immortal but made to spend the vast majority of their existence essentially comatose because One God is afraid of change.
you can’t bring remnant into equilibrium by eliminating death: killing the jabberwalker isn’t the right answer. and you can’t restore balance by restoring the old system of divine rule and rigid adherence to the original design, because that system was a spindly papier-mâché machine that imploded the second somebody breathed on it wrong. and you can’t just yank the dead back to ameliorate your grief because that isn’t your choice to make, that’s an ethical position the narrative has made very clear.
which… really leaves changing the nature of the afterlife as the likeliest direction. death isn’t the problem, the afterlife of eternal stasis is. death isn’t the problem, light’s refusal to allow beings with immortal souls to keep going after their first life ends because the rules say death is final is the problem. because that finality is just… not reality. a person’s soul persists after death, ipso facto death isn’t the end.
but the reverse idea that death shouldn’t happen at all is not reality either. salem can’t die and her immortality is isolating and endlessly painful. ozma can’t stay dead and it’s eroded him down to a miserable shell of who he used to be. afterans choose to leave their memories behind when they ascend—nothing can happen to you in the tree except what you want to happen. without destruction, creation stagnates. death is part of life, not its enemy.
i doubt very much that the endgame here is for afteran ascension to be directly ported over into remnant—these are different worlds, different peoples, different systems, and while people from remnant can spiritually connect with the tree they are still fundamentally not part of it. afterans are emanations of the tree; humans and faunus are not. when afterans ascend they return to the roots of the tree and flow upward to blossom again from its crown, and that is, to put it mildly, not a system of reincarnation that physically makes sense for remnant, where things reproduce and have babies instead of new lives budding from the cosmic tree. if reincarnation brings equilibrium to remnant then it will presumably happen in a manner more natural to remnant’s people, and may not even involve passage through the tree at all.
it’s also not the only possibility: for example, there’s no reason that remnant’s afterlife has to be eternal sleep. it could just be… a new realm, a new world to live in after your life on remnant is ended. the brothers’ departure from the ever after into the boundless potential of the unknown is as likely a model as ascension. maybe remnant’s dead can’t return except by an act of god, but “gone from remnant forever” can coexist with the afterlife being… alive, as opposed to cold storage for inconveniently immortal souls.
basically the narrative setup isn’t toward rejecting death, it’s toward rejecting the state of affairs where you die and then millions of years later a god wakes you up and you have no awareness or memory of your existence since the moment of your death because you were kept unconscious until that god needed a servant. the point is that death isn’t the natural end of existence (because souls are immortal, on remnant as in the ever after) and remnant’s dead shouldn’t be held in stillness by light’s futile effort to make the facts of reality conform to his intended design.
the jabberwalker has existed for eons without bringing the ever after to ruin; the balance shifted, things changed a little, and life went on. remnant is existentially threatened by the factual reality of life-after-death only because light is so convinced of this danger that he is determined to prohibit it by any means necessary, including “demolish everything and start over from scratch.”
even a god can tilt at windmills.
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𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐆𝐎𝐍 𝐁𝐎𝐍𝐃
Friendly reminder that this headcanon specifically applies only to this RP blog and character, it's not meant to be used as a theory for the series as a whole.
It's widely known that only those with the 'blood of the dragon' are able of riding dragons, though the reason behind this is up for debate, but it hints to some kind of connection ( be it to the genetic level or through bloodmagic sorcery, which I expand on over here ) between Valyrians ( specifically, Dragonlords ) and dragons.
What is also known is that Dragonlords did use magical objects such as horns, to more effectively control their dragons. These were intelligent creatures with their own wills and whims, so they did disobey their riders often enough, especially if the bond was still weak. In time, as the bond is fortified, then these instances occurred less. Horns and spells were sung in an attempt to fortify that bond and prevent this 'disobedience' through magical control. However, it was not necessary, as Targaryens and their 'dragonseed' could bond with dragons without the use of them.
A dragon bond is in itself a magical connection, which is why Valyrian Dragonlords practiced incest to preserve the magical quality of their blood as pure as possible, to maintain that ability to bond with and ride dragons ( aside from political reasons, of course ). The bond does not only involve the rider but the dragon, so this means that the dragon also must 'choose' the rider, and this depends on each of them individually. For the rider, the bond may begin first as an allure of sorts, an affinity to a certain dragon or even a developed interest, which can happen when they have been exposed to the frequent company of one. An example of this can be how Targaryens placed dragon eggs in the cradles and the dragons that hatched ( if they did ) were bonded to the babies.
Aside from being able to ride dragons, the bond allowed for the pair to be connected on an emotional and subconscious level. Dragons learn commands initially through the emotional communication with their riders as they are being taught/trained, associating the words with what they can subconsciously perceive from the rider ( their 'will' pretty much ) when the word is spoken. Afterwards, as highly intelligent ( in ways people cannot understand ) creatures, this will enable them to better learn and understand the human language of their rider. They would also grow aware of where the other is and call for them ( though very large distances may hinder this to an extent ), if they are in danger or alarmed, as well as feel their pain as their own. This merger also seems to benefit the rider's health, perhaps triggering magical properties in their blood, which could render them resistant to diseases or illnesses. They can even feel as the other passes away, which would be an incredibly tormenting and traumatic event.
From this subconsciously emotional connection can also come new challenges for both of them. When the bond is being developed, there is a clash of 'wills' so to speak, in which one part may push against the subconscious of the other, influencing their actions or even moods. For example, while a dragon is in the middle of the hunt, its rider may feel hunger, a surge of adrenaline, more violent tendencies, or altogether be repulsed by certain foods due to what the dragon is eating. If the rider is upset, the dragon may become violent and prone to 'disobedience', as it may confuse the emotional turmoil and act on it or against it. As the bond develops and solidifies, a balance will eventually come in which both dragon and rider will be able to distinguish their individual 'wills' by consolidating them into the bond. It will form a more effective communication, to the point where those more deeply forged bonds will allow for the rider to fly upon the dragon without even needing to voice instructions or commands of where to go or what to do.
Usually, the stronger bonds are formed when both rider and dragon have grown together, since they were an infant and a hatchling, respectively. But there have been instances where older riders have bonded to mature dragons, and developed a strong and deeper connection quickly. Since the bond tends to depend on each individual rider and dragon's character and circumstances, then it's near impossible to set a standard for its intricacies. But what is known is how a rider may not claim another dragon, even if their own has perished, although a dragon may accept another rider if their previous one died. This may be due to the differences in the lifespans of human and dragon, the former expected to not reach old age and the latter being able to live over two centuries ( likely longer still ). Or it could also have to do with how the rider's blood has already forged a connection with the one dragon, and is unable of doing so again with another. It's yet another of the mysteries surrounding this bond.
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