New blog moment /pos
Hello! I am here to formally request you may or may not tell me more about this selkieverse. Is it an au where everyone is a selkie (or at least, some bugs are)? Do they just turn into aquatic like bugs instead of actual seals? If actual seals, do you have species picked out for the selkie characters yet? How does it work? Are they even selkies at all? Once more, you don't have to answer if its information you'd like to withold but as local marine biology (mostly seals and jellyfish though) nerd I must know if this may be an au that is like. Right up my alley.
Oh boy, we can answer questions! Technically, we've had this blog for a bit, we just... haven't been using it (we are afflicted with a chronic need to illustrate our worldbuilding and we just Haven't Been Drawing recently).
Not everyone is a selkie, but some bugs are - actual species varies! They're seals, or other assorted... vertebrates, mostly. "Selkie", here, is less referring specifically to seals and more referring to the general category of Bugs With Bonus Pelt. We've got actual species picked out for the selkie characters, but we do want to keep a few under wraps - of the few we can reveal, Leif is a ribbon seal, Mothiva is a leopard seal, Cenn is a yellow-bellied water snake, and Vi... well, her pelt was an ermine.
In terms of how it works - selkies are, more or less, bugs that come in two... pieces, or with two forms. It's genetic, though it can very much skip generations and occasionally appears to manifest from nowhere - generally, you have a few main strains of selkie in an area, maybe with a scattering of other species around. Seals are by far the most common around both Bugaria and The North, and the gene's most common in moths (as far as anyone knows), though it can appear in other species - and, as previously mentioned, sometimes you just get a kid who's a selkie without any previous selkie relatives.
A selkie's pelt isn't present upon hatching, but manifests later - generally either when they metamorphose, in the case of bugs like moths and butterflies, or during one of their first few instars on bugs who do That. It is, functionally, a part of them - a selkie cannot be separated from their pelt for too long, though they can wander farther from it with age and practice, and trying to keep away from it causes fun side effects (like organ failure, and feeling like you're being physically peeled out of your shell, and death).
The pelt itself is, as is typical with selkies, a pelt - seal, or snake, or ermine, or whatever else someone might be. Looks like you'd expect a seal pelt to be - although a selkie's pelt contains a few more bones. Generally, you've got a skull, spine, and ribcage, but it's not uncommon to have a few other bones - they shape the skin, more or less. As is standard, once the skin is donned, they gain the form of their pelt, but the selkie has some control over it - as well as some control over how the pelt moves.
The thing about selkie pelts is that, as they're a part of the selkie, they're functionally "alive" - an extension of the self, an extra limb. Technically, anyone can don a selkie pelt and take on the form of whatever creature they are, but it'll be... strange. Uncanny. They aren't the selkie, and this isn't their form - they're just wearing their skin. Unlike on the selkie themself, the bones aren't going to merge to them properly, they're just going to stick in there, wearing away at their shell until they eventually take it off. A pelt only retains its transformative properties while the selkie it belongs to is alive - once they bite it, it becomes just a piece of leather, though with selkie skin being the only real option as far as skins go, it's still pretty damn valuable dead.
If a selkie's pelt is destroyed, the selkie dies. Likewise, if a selkie dies, the pelt becomes inert. It's a bit like holding a vital organ in your hand - and if the selkie and the pelt are taken too far apart, the connection is severed and the selkie will die even if no damage is dealt to either them or their pelt.
As is standard for selkie mythology, having a selkie's pelt gives you some measure of control over them. Specific degree of control varies, largely based on the selkie - though all selkies can be commanded while you're actively holding their pelt, if they'll keep following that command once you've put it down is a whole 'nother ball park. If you had Leif's pelt in hand and told him to do something, he'd keep doing it even if you put that pelt down later, but if you tried the same with Vi (again, while she had it) she'd stop the second you put it down. With Mothiva, just possessing the pelt is enough - you don't need direct contact, you just need to have it. The effect's at least partially psychosomatic - while it's a direct compulsion with direct contact, anything past that is largely based on if the selkie thinks you should be able to tell them what to do.
The selkie form itself is fairly standard as creatures of its species go, albeit downsized for bug scale. They're around the size they'd normally be relative to a human, relative to an average bug (using an ant as your Standard Human works, here). A selkie is, functionally, both their bug species and their pelt species - behaviors in one form will affect the other, and vice versa. Generally, this'll manifest most noticeably in either tics or diet - a craving for raw fish, an odd sense of territorialism, an impulse to drag dead things to your dumb, bad-at-hunting teammate. It does, however, vary - and a good chunk of selkies do try to keep the fact that they're selkies hidden, especially if they might have reason to fear a stolen pelt.
...this is a whole lot of rambling on Selkie Magic Mechanics and not a whole lot of marine biology, uhh. Hope this helps sketch out the general mechanics for ya! We're always glad to talk about Cool AUs!
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Steve, Tommy, Carol, and (I think?) Billy being one year older than Nancy, Jonathan, Robin, etc. has caused me NO END of problems in plotting fic. For example:
I just realized that, in Tonight, Tonight, I made Steve, Tommy, and Carol seniors in fall 1985, when they would have graduated in spring 1985. So then I had to choose between making them all high school graduates who have moved on (like, Steve could definitely still be dating Nancy in that scenario but he wouldn't be hanging out with her in the local Tragedy House with his buddies, so the whole first chapter is different), making them all high school graduates who haven't moved on (doable, maybe? But that would require either making Barb's disappearance a lot more impactful to them as a group, which means Nancy is in a really different place, or creating separate reasons which would probably be too busy), and changing the setting to fall 1984 (which means Nancy and Jonathan are both dealing with much rawer trauma, but they are the main characters of the fic so that seems like a better avenue to go down, and also it might actually make more sense with how I planned the dynamics between Jonathan and his New Jersey relatives). I did choose the third option ultimately.
I have an idea for a no-Upside-Down fic that's basically Nancy, Jonathan, Mike, and Will dealing with the conflicts I think they might've had in the absence of all that death and supernatural horror, and (for plot reasons) it bugs me so much that Mike can't be in high school at the same time as Carol.
I've had a couple Stonathan ideas where there's no Upside Down and Steve and Jonathan both end up at the same state college (Steve makes it because his academic/athletic performance is better when he's not dealing with constant physical and psychological trauma; Jonathan's dealing with a more stable family situation so he feels like he can leave home, but nothing ever really changed at home to allow him to consider an out-of-state school as an option). And it would be so much simpler for the set-up of these fics (as I conceive them) if Steve graduated the same year as Nancy and she broke up with him right around graduation before going to a different college.
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In a fight Svern's priority is usually to escape or make an opening to escape rather than bruteforce knockout his opponents. Back when he was roaming around unbeknownst to his parents and others, he had to prioritise not getting visibly hurt above all else. Minimising things that would require explanations was of utmost importance when sneaking out. Being able to flee unscathed and being able to stay unscathed in a hairy situation are equally important, but running took marginal precedence over direct combat.
These days Lilly is a big help, but back then she was often covering for him back home so he couldn't rely on her to get him out of a sticky situation. (Technically she was in a sense already doing that.)
So Svern is very fast and very nimble. He's athletic more than he is built for combat. He's strong enough, as he needs to be, I mean, you need physical strength to be running and climbing and doing all gymnastics in the first place, but he's definitely not on the tier where only a few people could overpower him. It's better for him not to be in a situation where he could be overpowered in the first place.
Mind you, unless he's in serious danger, taking a bit of a beating isn't as bad to deal with now that he's not sneaking away from home all the time. He's let himself take blows that he could have dodged, or allowed himself to be thrown around. His self-preservation sense is shoddy, pain/displeasure is one of the things he doesn't process normally thanks to his Issues, and sometimes? He just felt like letting them land the blow. Pain is in itself a stimulation.
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