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dukeofriven · 7 months

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To Ravel-Out The Weaved-Up Follies: The Decline and Fall of Homestuck^2

[I first started this essay a few months ago during a strange, brief resurgence of Homestuck^2 discussion that vanished almost as quickly as it began. Because my brain is A Wretchedly Uncooperative Thing this essay has stayed in draft form, being picked at, until—naturally—Homestuck^2 surprised us all by relaunching with a completely new team at its head. I’ve decided to push myself to publish this anyway, because I still think the core of my thesis is correct. So, keeping in mind that this leaves the starting gate slightly later than I would have wished (not knowing I was in a race), let us commence.]

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“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. -Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965 “Once upon a time there was a Boojum——" the Professor began, but stopped suddenly. "I forget the rest of the Fable," he said. "And there was a lesson to be learned from it. I'm afraid I forget that, too." -Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893

Several posts about Homestuck^2 have started to crop-up… adjacent to my dash. I'm not attaching myself to those posts because it seems rude, but their points are largely an attempt at revisionism of the fate of Homestuck^2. Understand I'm not using the term ‘revisionist’ pejoratively: it is common, even sensible for artists to look back at failed projects and try to pick up the pieces and derive some value from them. I’ve done it myself, many times. Nobody likes to say "I entirely wasted my time, my passion, and my creative energy for [X] days, months, years.” It is important to look at a failure and see what you did right, treasure the parts that were worth treasuring.

But equally I don't want to go too far in rehabilitating what was, undeniably, a failure. There's a lot of critical theory being brought-up, a lot of talk of Homestuck^2 from a standpoint of post-modernism, or post-post-modernism, trying to engage with what Homestuck^2 was as a platform for ideas. A habitus, if you’ll forgive the jargon, what Bourdieu famously called (in a Hussie-like masterwork of language) “the structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.”

I get it. I get what the Homestuck^2 team was trying to do intellectually: where their minds were at, the hostility they faced, the vitriol they were harmed by. I get it.

But that's not why Homestuck^2 failed. Homestuck^2 did not fail because it dreamed too big, or was too intellectual. It did not fail because its themes were not worth exploring, or because its lens was too meta: for most of its original run, after all, Homestuck is nothing but an interrogation of Homestuck. Its brains were not why Homestuck^2 failed. The problem was its execution. The problem was its heart.

There's a lot to be said about not giving fans what they think they want. The internet drowns in coffee shop AUs where everything interesting about a franchise's characters has been vulgarly ripped from the text, leaving a drama-less, tension-less pablum where everything is stagnant and unchanging, everyone gets along, all the romances are cute and smooth, and you can burrow in the comforting ooze of artistic and narrative death. Give fans exactly what they want and frequently nothing creatively meaningful will result. Fandoms famously resisted both The Empire Strikes Back and The Wrath of Khan when they first released because they pushed characters to change, and yet they grew to be beloved as fans realized that what they thought they wanted and what it turned out they could enjoy were not as alike s they assumed. There's nothing wrong with showing fans that there can be more to a story that just doing the same thing over again, retrenching into the pablum wastelands of growth-free comfort fics.

But when asking whether Homestuck^2 did or did not gave fans what they wanted or needed, we must first raise an important establishing question: which fans? That is to say: who was its intended audience? Who was Homestuck^2 written for?

At its peak, Homestuck Classic had millions of readers and a million page-hits a day. There was a whole contingent of fandom who came only for the trolls (in some baffling cases actually skipping the first four acts of the story to jump right to into Act 5). There was another contingent who loved the video game parody, there were Problem Sleuth junkies, and in the early acts there were the suggestion box obsessives: all of these were readers who were fans of parts of the story but largely stopped reading Homestuck as the story got more concerned with the complex nature of stories and narrative itself. Homestuck^2 is clearly not for them—as indeed Homestuck Classic itself had not 'been' for them for much of its run. Homestuck^2 is also not for new readers: if you haven't read the Homestuck Epilogues through at least twice, if you don't remember all its major plot points and the plot points of Homestuck Classic, it makes no attempt to onboard you and is, probably in-arguably, outright impenetrable to those not already in the know. It’s not impossible—there were SBaHJ fans who onboarded with the first context-free SBaHJ and went ‘yeah, I can vibe with this’ and never knew or cared that it was a reference work for something else— but it doesn’t seem likely that many people ‘jumped on’ the Homestuck train with Homestuck^2. I think Homestuck^2’s writers would agree that Homestuck^2 expected you to know the lay of the land. So: nobody new was likely going to read Homestuck^2, and (given its density of Homestuck call-backs) neither was it for more casual Homestuck fans. Homestuck^2 was not even for the truly otiose Andrew Hussie diehards: Hussie was only tangentially involved in the project, they weren't writing it, and there's seemingly no references at all to Barty's Brew-Ha-Ha or Inappropriate Time for Ham, so that's a full seventeen readers it also likely turned off (sorry, comrades. One day…)

So who, then, was Homestuck^2 for? Its intended readers seemed to be those who read the Epilogues and loved them. This is a complicated issue: for those who weren’t there, the Epilogues were… controversial. I defended them at the time: I liked them, even admired them, partially because I believed with the fervor of a zealot that there was still something else to come. I called this final entry ‘Pumpkin.’ Homestuck, a story that always rejected binaries, surely was not meant to conclude with over-the-top Candy and/or grim, dour Meat. I knew in my heart that Pumpkin was coming, where John rejected both of these dark and crazy futures and found a third way in which his friends grew up and matured without losing themselves and their friendship: not a story without conflict, but surely the prime timeline as existed in general fandom imagination could not accept Dirk’s grotesque, manipulative suicide, breastfeeding Gamzee, brutal civil wars, and Dirk and Jane becoming so cruel and hateful. Surely that was set-up to pay-off a better future later: after all, like its author, Homestuck abhorred a binary.

But Pumpkin never came, and now I look at the Epilogues and I find lot in it (for lack of a better term) ‘edge lord showboating.’ It feels like reading 90s comics all over again, including the bits with cannibalism. A lot of bleak and miserable things happen in the narrative, and I find myself asking ‘do they happen because they should, or just because they could?’ (And how many times can one franchise treat Jade Harley like absolutely garbage?)

But if the Epilogues had a true and golden virtue, it was their framing as intrinsically being fan-fiction: Meat or Candy, this was not the 'true' continuation of the franchise (as much as that means anything), this was speculative futures, not much different from Doc Scratch’s story of the Vriska/Noir battle. A one-shot, in other terms, an elseworlds: not a definitive statement about What Homestuck Was From Now On, but an experiment in tone and structure. How far can you push Homestuck before it doesn’t feel like Homestuck any more? (Turns out not nearly as far as you might think.) A lot of people didn’t notice, however, or perhaps simply didn’t care: the Epilogues ripped the Homestuck fandom apart. Homestuck Classic often did things in bad-taste as part of its odd charm: Gamzee’s codpiece, Jack playing dress-up after slaughtering a nice couple on a date, Caliborn’s cartoonish misogyny. Some bits land, some don’t, but for fans—I think for many, if not most—the Epilogues crossed a line that they were not comfortable with.

In some quarters the Epilogues are reviled, and I honestly can not fault people who found them off-putting. They are: intentionally so, provocatively so, and it should be okay for people to be put off by them without insisting that the haters ‘just didn’t get it.’ Often they did: they ‘got it,’ they just didn’t like it. It ‘squiked them out’ as we used to say, and the writers had to have known it would: discomfort is the nature and partial purpose of provocative art.

(Sidebar: Epilogue writers, you wrote a plot-line in which 16-year old Homestuck Act 6 protagonist Jane Crocker grows-up to become a racist dictator who has a cuckolding sexual relationship with Gamzee Makarra that involves kin-play involving public breastfeeding.

Sorry Andres Serranos acolytes, that’s not going to go down super-well with the majority of people, not because they are uptight suburban prudes but because they liked Jane Crocker and felt this outcome was not grounded well in the character they knew: only the obtuse would act shocked and try and argue it was due to a lack of sophistication. You took a gamble, you took a risk, you faced the outcome. You fucked around with ICP Hitler breastfeeding cuckoldry and you found out.)

So: who was Homestuck^2 for? It was for people who had read Homestuck multiple times, had read the Epilogues multiple times, and wanted a sequel that involved those Epilogues.

That is… a small audience. A very small audience. I counted myself among them, but had no illusions that its reach was ever going to be very large. Homestuck^2 was never going to be the Second Coming of Homestuck as a sui generis cultural phenomenon: seemingly by design, it was deliberately written for an insular audience who liked a controversial and difficult interpretation of a famous story and wanted more of that interpretation. So the Homestuck^2 team wrote for them: they came to the table with big dreams and big ideas. They came to the table with lots of critical theory under their belts: they knew their Barthes and Baudrillard, they could reference queer theory and the legacy of post-structuralism, they were the sort of people who knew how to situate Homestuck in post-post-modernism and what that meant for the nature of its exploration of stories.

They had an audience, and they had a plan. They were going to give the fans what they wanted.

So after much hype and fanfare, after interviews and the Tumblr equivalent of a press-junket—which saw the new team saying how excited they were to tackle Homestuck’s legacy, how many great ideas they had, how much having a diverse team was going to see Homestuck ‘done right’—Homestuck^2 first published on the 25th of October, 2019, releasing 32 pages.

We start in the glittering majesty of space. The camera swoops in among the stars, barrelling towards a rushing spacecraft (every frame of Homestuck^2 looks great, the visual arts team's work is its unquestioned highlight). We aim at a viewport in the spacecraft’s hull and slowly the Muti-Narratively-Dimensional Ubervillian Dirk Strider comes into view. Fresh from his triumph in the Epilogues, continuing his wicked schemes, he looks right at the camera, and—speaking directly to the audience—he voices the first line of dialogue in Homestuck^2:

"Surprise, bitch."

…

There is…

…

… there is no coming from back that.

There is no saving it.

It is the 25th of October, 2019, and Homestuck^2 launches with its own death-rattle. It stumbles out of the gate like a beautiful racing pony catching its delicate hoof on the sharp, treacherous edge of an unwieldy analogy and tumbling into the indifferent soil of hard reality, shattering all four legs and immediately marking itself for teary euthanasia at the hand of the devastated young girl with the violet eyes who raised it from a foal and dreamed of making Nationals.

We have established that Homestuck^2’s potential audience was small. The people who were most likely to like it were already an insular, distinctive group who had bought-in to what much or all the Epilogues had to offer. Homestuck^2’s opening-day crowd did not need to be sold on the word of the Lord—they already believe it: they came to see their first glimpse of the promised land.

And in its very first conversation with that audience, in its very first words, Homestuck^2 makes the most spectacular miscalculation of tone since 2013's DmC: Devil May Cry—or for those of us of who remember the 90s: ‘Dirk Strider’s about to make you his bitch.’

There's nothing wrong with starting a story with a villain, there's nothing wrong with a villain being a contemptible heel to its audience, but Homestuck^2 spends its opening 32 entries—which, at over 7600 words are longer than the prologue to the Homestuck Epilogues—jumping between Dirk’s smarmy conversations with fellow characters and a monologue to the audience, pages infused with an arrogance and condescension that is downright enervating. The text is frequently dense, so dense it feels like chewing your way through a plank of wood. It is actively tiring to read: I bailed on my first attempt at reading Homestuck^2 when it originally dropped because I just did not have the energy to squint at my screen and read that much orange-on-off-white text.

It is, to be clear, contemptuous. Dirk did much the same in the Epilogues, but the locus has changed. In the Epilogues Dirk taunts the reader with the changes he is making to the story: he knows they object to his manipulations, and he preens as good villains do. But in Homestuck^2, Dirk speaks not of his changes but of the very existence of Homestuck^2 itself. He treats his audience as inherently hostile to the entire existence of the work they have just shown-up to read (or even support via a Patreon), a hostility that culminates when he ‘opens’ a suggestion box and receives the suggestion ‘Dirk: Stop Making Homestuck,’—which he at-once rejects and goes on to monologue some more.

Dirk is talking to an audience who isn’t there. He is speaking to everyone who didn’t like the Epilogues and objects to Homestuck’s 'sequel' directly following them: but that audience isn’t reading Homestuck^2. They bailed in advance, and any who did try and keep an open mind likely jumped ship the moment the comic started by calling them a bitch and implying they’re idiots. The only people likely to read past the fifth page are those who already bought-in to Homestuck^2’s plan: and they are greeted with some 32 pages and 7600 words of the comic’s villain re-litigating and justifying that plan over and over and over again to people who nominally already agreed with him.

It is draining. It is annoying. It is boring to read.

There’s so much you could critique about Homestuck^2’s choices: from Rose cheating on Kanaya to impregnate Jade to Jane Crocker going full Trump and keeping kids in cages. Equally there’s arguments to be made that Homestuck^2’s very premature cancellation inhibits any ability to judge the story fairly: like any serialized narrative stopped mid-way, we have no way of knowing what narrative payoffs were supposed to be. Decisions that seemed baffling on page 8 might prove brilliant and bold by page 8000. But we never got to page 8000, because Homestuck^2 made one crucial error:

It started by telling its audience they were fools for not being smart enough to appreciate how brilliant Homestuck^2 was going to be, and then spent a majority of some 7600 words repeating itself like the worst self-pitying incel you’ve ever had the misfortune to be trapped with at a party. If only the ungrateful could realize how smart, handsome, and well-educated I—Homestuck^2—am, the love I deserve will come flowing in. I’ll show them all.

Homestuck^2 never recovered from that first, fatal error. The rest of its choices, good and bad, are almost irrelevant in the face of that opening broadside, that hostility, that tedium. Homestuck Classic earned its walls of text and at least knew how to space them: Hometuck^2 took its audience forbearance as a given and opens with a lecture on its principles and quality like an unusually snide abstract on a sociology paper. Homestuck^2 essentially began by telling its audience to leave unless they were willing to give it carte blanche, to roll over for its brilliance from the first, to accept in advance that its intelligence and virtue were first rate. So the audience did leave and it never came back and eventually the whole thing collapsed via artist infighting that was so rancorous and possibly subsumed by NDAs that to this day no one has ever halfway adequately explained what happened at the end.

But that ending was preordained from the beginning, for the balance was hopelessly incorrect.

So to anyone trying to write a revisionist history of Homestuck^2 in which its downfall was the fault of readers who simply didn’t ‘give it a chance,’ who didn’t appreciate its themes, who couldn’t grasp (or didn’t care to grasp) its intellectual bonafides (not to mention its extraordinary self-assurance that it was going to be queer Homestuck ‘done right,’ which is a whole essay about a priori reasoning in and of itself)... in other words, a history in which Homestuck^2' downfall happened because people just didn’t ‘get it,’ I’d like to sum up my counter-argument succinctly:

People didn’t like Homestuck^2 because you wrote it bad.

[Afterwards:

There is something bitingly funny about the ‘return’ of Homestuck^2 with the announcement that, from what I can gather, seemingly every person involved with the original project was fired (or, as they’d probably insist, refused to come back). Dirk’s preening, overwhelming arrogance, that ‘Dirk: Stop Making Homestuck’ prompt, will forever haunt the original team’s unwieldy vision. “I’d bet you just looove for us not to make Homestuck anymore” the team said, with all the confidence of an entrepreneur dismissing safety regulations before climbing into his homemade submarine, and boy were lessons learned. My problem with the return, however, is that I don’t know who genuinely wants to see the story of Homestuck^2 finished: the remaining cadre of die-hard patrons who still have enough goodwill to want the promise of the story’s finale fulfilled is microscopic. I’d argue there’s more people waiting for the conclusion of Wizardy Herbert, and I’m the only person I know who has ever read it. What I mean is: as a choice to revive a struggling franchise it doesn’t make much sense, and further—if it is not clear—I don’t think this is a story worth finishing. What is to be salvaged? Jane-the-Dictator, Rose’s cheating, Obnoxious BabyVriska, Dirk Strider the monster? The problem with Homestuck^2 is that Pesterquest happened, and those who played it went ‘this—this is the kind of story we were hoping for, not your edge lord showboating.’ And we only got one Pesterquest and Homestuck^2 limped on for another year reviled, ignored, and eventually forgotten. When it died, most people didn’t have any idea, because the drama never crossed their screens: nobody was talking about it any more. As my best friend noted, give us more Paradox Space. Give us more stories with joy and some sense of fun, something not written by people who often felt like they had an ‘End of Evangelion’ style hatred of Homestuck, or at the very least took the old joke that Hussie was ‘trolling’ his audience at face value. (Writing a good story with twists, set-backs, and tragic moments is not trolling, it is just writing a good story.) Homestuck^2 never felt like it understood that: it was rude and iconoclastic for no more compelling reason than it thought that was meaningful. But then I think the legacy of Epilogues has been extremely toxic—part of the positivity towards Pesterquest was that it let the Epilogues go, featuring a triumphant moment where YoungDirk confronts his Epilogues self and goes ‘I don’t have to be a huge wanker, actually, I can stay a character people can stand and even love again.’

Do that, new team. Pesterquest is named-dropped on the new site more than once, and my dream is that its cast arrives and overthrows the corrosive toxicity of the Epilogues, banishes it to the far realm of underbaked elsewhere ‘what-ifs’ along with every DC cannibalism story and that time Peter Parker’s radioactive semen gave MJ cancer.

The Epilogues and Homestuck^2 are, at this point, not worth salvaging—but I’d happily see them formally buried.]

#homestuck #Homestuck 2 #Homestuck^2 #homestuck beyond canon #andrew hussie #dirk strider #pesterquest #homestuck team #james roach #jane crocker #rose lalonde #kanaya maryam #homestuck epilogues #Wizardy Herbert #Vriska Serket #Jade Harley #daikatana #john romero

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mushroom-madness · 1 year

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🍄 Round 1: Match 25 🍄

🍄 Vote for your Favorite Fungi! 🍄

Descriptions Below ⬇️

Zommoth

“Zommoth is an optional/hidden boss in Bug Fables, fought at the end of the Leif's Request side story. It is also a cordyceps fungus inside a moth host and Leif (whom we also submitted) refers to it as their sibling. It was an experiment to see if bugs could be given magic by infecting them with the parasitic fungi, and the result was This Beast (affectionate). There are other cordyceps in the same laboratory it's found in, but Zommoth is the strongest and the most notable by a large margin. Very little is known about it as a person but it's stated to be a "guardian" figure and implied that it was protecting the lab and the other zombies in it. We are emotionally attached to it. Also, its color scheme is the nonbinary flag.” - Submission 47

“Oh boy, do we LOVE this fungus! Zommoth is a cordyceps beast and immortality experiment made in search of the power of the Everlasting Sapling, a thing said to bring eternal life. Unfortunately, as it often is with this sort of things, they the fungus and they the moth were both quite displeased with being involuntarily used for the sake of roaches chasing immortality. It killed everything in the lab and proceeded to take it over with their many, many fungal siblings.

Technically speaking, Zommoth is a blend of both the fungus and its moth host, now twisted beyond recognition and unable to separate even if they wanted to, but we do think it still counts. It's at least 50% fungus. Probably more, it doesn't seem to have had much use for most of those moth bits. It is loving sibling to many undead fungal hybrid abominations, and its hobbies include screaming, firing lasers at people who intrude into its lab, and crawling out of the water like a beast from a horror flick. We believe it deserves to compete, and also to win.” - Submission 52

“Oh yeah this thing is a fungus isn't it. Positively overflowing with cordyceps. Honestly kinda forgot about it for this but saw my mutual bring it up and I figured it would need the support. It sure is a Phucking Phungus” - Submission 68

“A zombie moth full of Cordyceps fungus, the result of a horrific experiment. “Sibling” to Leif, as in created through the same unethical project, if you read my last submission.” - Submission 105

Bug Fables Wiki

Room

“Room is a giant radiation-mutated mushroom and the partner of Lou (the smartest person in Laketown City) (a genius teenage girl) who often carries her on their shoulder and stuff and is the brawn to her brains. Also this is my way of saying listen to Join the Party campaign 2, it's D&D reskinned for a modern day superhero setting and hey. Mushrooms play a big part in the plot ;)” - Submission 58

No Wiki Available. Sorry Room, I’ve been trying to flesh out character descriptions so everyone has about the same amount included in the posts in an effort to create a fair vote and include links for everyone since I started including links for some. But I just. Couldn’t find anything other than the submitter’s description. Only image I could find too.

#mushroom madness #polls #zommoth #bug fables #join the party #join the party pod #room join the party #round 1 #poll #bracket #competition #tournament #room #Zommoth bug fables #bug fables zommoth #bf Zommoth #Zommoth bf #join the party podcast #join the party campaign 2

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connorsnothereeither · 9 days

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Hi! this is a mainly DnD based question that sorta runs into Fable-

So I'm currently running an entirely underwater campaign! The species I've included is basically every aquatic DnD species (some with a few twists) along with some homebrewed underwater dragonborn, etc-

However, I'm having trouble with choosing a clothing type to put on the sea elves? My version has them more telchin-ish- aka, maybe funky colored human base with longer legs, a tail, and I've given them webbed, frog-like feet and fins in a variety of places.

Logically, they honestly really wouldn't wear clothes- but I'm not doing that because that'd make certain scenes very hard to draw-

so what do you generally imagine the telchin wearing? normal clothes, edited versions of those, etc? Right now I have the two sea elves my party interact with on a regular basis in sort of tank-top-esque wear and edited shorts of a kind.

Ooooh okay that’s a really fun question my worldbuilding gears are turning lmao-

I have a post somewhere here on my blog about Telchin clothing and specifically my development of Ulysses design and the cultural influences, which basically boils down to “Telchins at the start of war = Ancient Greek clothes (chitons, togas, cloaks, etc). Telchins during the projects = WW2 fashion (pants, jumpsuits, jackets, etc)”

If you wanted my thoughts on how I would maybe clothe them in a broader sense/outside the context of Fable, I have some ideas! ✨

I think tank tops and shorts definitely fit the vibe. More-modern style clothing just underwater is always a super fun route to take, even for the visual of just clothing underwater being funky and something that’s a little different and new!

Typically in my mind, when it comes to clothing in world building it usually boils down to resources and purpose.

Resources is more the boring side of things. What kinds of materials do they have access to, how do they manufacture the clothing, blah blah blah. Not really something you need to worry about in fantasy worlds cause usually the answer is “cause magic” and “because it’s cool so I said so” which is the more fun kind of fantasy imo, and getting too bogged down in the granular details as a DM/storyteller just ain’t very productive.

Purpose on the other hand is where you can really have fun with underwater clothing! Is it designed to be functional, or stylistic? If its purpose is to be functional, maybe their clothing develops like swimsuits, almost? Like you said: shorts, crop tops, swim-shirts, etc! Something that covers enough or the body while still not being too cumbersome in the water, prioritizing movement when swimming! Or maybe you want to take that to the extreme; maybe their clothing developed like wetsuits! Skintight, smooth, shiny, and insulating! Designed to move with them, just a layer of covering for their bodies to make them more hydrodynamic! Or, if the purpose of the clothing is to be attractive and fashionable and flashy, maybe they do go in a more Greco-Roman route! Maybe it’s all about togas and dresses and cloaks and veils! Layers of long, flowing fabrics which shimmer and billow out in the water and draw attention to the person wearing them! These huge billowing clothes which make a statement, rather than help with movement or anything!

And it doesn’t have to be one or the other, either. You can mix and match both! Maybe the skintight wetsuit-like clothes are designed with patterns that ripple and shift as the wearer moves and they become beautiful and hypnotic! Maybe the large billowing cloaks are useful when avoiding predators underwater, making the wearer seem bigger, scarier and more imposing to any underwater monsters! The telchin’s clothing in my eyes follows a direct path almost: the fashionable pre-war clothing in billowing fabrics which allow freedom of movement and expression, that slowly transition into cleaner, more tailored clothing as they need to conserve fabric, and avoid being grabbed by drowned, losing that expression in the process. There’s so much room to play around with elements of either or both when it comes to it!

I know this was very rambling but I hope it was somewhat helpful!! Your campaign sounds really cool, an underwater campaign is such an interesting concept!! I hope you have fun running it!

#worldbuilding #dnd #fable smp kinda #sea elves #fantasy clothing #writing

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hitthebrickspod · 1 year

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Come Hit the Bricks! You can listen to the entire first act on Nebula or your favorite podcatcher.

Hit the Bricks is a musical audio drama in the style of old radio plays. 100 years after L. Frank Baum's Oz books, a modern girl named Jessi and her cousin Wallace find themselves spirited to Oz after discovering an abandoned farm that once belonged to Dorothy Gale's family. Oz is still a world of magic and wonder, but a little worse for wear. As the ever-encroaching mistakes of the past make the present unlivable, it's up to Jessi and a new generation of heroes to push Oz into the future. Hit the Bricks stars Michelle Agresti (Arden, Wolf358), Keilidh Hamilton-Maureira (WFMU), Jordan Higgs (Tides, Greater Boston) and features performances from beloved audio artists like Lauren Shippen (The Bright Sessions, In Strange Woods), Morgan Givens (Flyest Fables), Jordan Cobb (Janus Descending, Primordial Deep), Briggon Snow (The Bright Sessions, CARAVAN), Christopher Dole (Arden), and many more.

Hit the Bricks also features music by various artists, both new to the scene and established, like Kathryn Hoss, Jeff Ball (Steven Universe, The White Lotus), A.p. Harbor, and David Russell (Project Destati, Kingdom Hearts VR)

Hit the Bricks' art is done by Chandler Candela, it's executive produced and sound designed by Ester Ellis (Station Blue, Dungeons and Daddies) and is written and directed by PJ Scott-Blankenship.

Hit the Brick's new special episode Intermission: I'm Still Here will be hitting public feeds on December 27th and you can listen to it early on Nebula.

#audio drama #the wizard of oz #l. frank baum #the oz books #Michelle Agresti

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focusontheheart · 8 months

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Meet the Team Lead - Foibs

Who could the Lead for the Talanah route possibly be? Of course, it's the ever-talented @foibles-fables! You can also find them on AO3 as foibles_fables!

Howdy and hello, I’m Foibs! You might already know me as that clown who’s always crying over Talanah. Well, get ready for more tears, FOTH-style! My first exposure to the Horizon series was scrolling Twitter, seeing the reveal trailer for Forbidden West, and thinking, “This seems relevant to my interests.” I proved myself right when I started playing in late 2020 and fell in love with Aloy’s incredible world. Since then, I’ve churned out an embarrassing amount of fanfic (overwhelmingly Hawk and Thrush), become a lore connoisseur, and formed lifelong relationships with amazing folks in the fandom. I’ve written fanfiction on and off for—well, most of my life! My inspiration usually comes from epic sci-fi/fantasy and modern poetry, so game script writing has been a fun and rewarding challenge already.

Q&A with Foibs under the cut!

What is a favorite piece of work you've done (completed/ working on/ in-concept)?

True story: I came into my Horizon fixation thinking I wouldn’t write any fic for the series. Then I met the (future) Sunhawk, and all bets were off. This is a tough choice—I’m proud of everything I’ve created for the series—but lately I’ve been feeling soft for rest like you belong here., my first ever Aloy/Talanah fic. It was compelling and fulfilling to explore Aloy’s manifold struggles with vulnerability in a Zero Dawn missing scene.

What are some of your favorite tropes (to read/ write/ draw)?

I tend to gravitate towards capturing and developing those unseen, in-between moments of canon. I’m also a huge fan of diving into a character’s psyche with introspective studies—usually of the romantic variety. Beyond that, I’m a huge sucker for writing pining (mutual or otherwise), friends to lovers, and emotional/physical hurt/comfort.

What is an unexpected thing or fun fact about you?

Outside of fandom-adjacent activities, my hobbies include picking up heavy things and putting them back down. My heart is big, but my deadlift number is bigger.

What has been your favorite thing about working on this project so far?

Definitely the profound spirit of enthusiastic collaboration between all of these fabulous creators. It’s been utterly inspiring to put together a project of this scale and complexity with folks I might never have gotten to work with or befriend otherwise! I’m also very excited to get to explore the development of Talanah and Aloy’s relationship after the events of Forbidden West in this new and interesting way!

#focus on the heart #foth #foth dating sim fangame #foth visual novel fangame #meet the team: leads #team lead (talanah) : Foibs

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anticidic · 24 days

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He heard several variations of the tale that befell this place. Most not so good. But the story was so old that it was impossible for it not to have turned into something fantastic and whimsical in the modern age. Whimsical, because it became a children’s bedtime story. Children did not like the idea of going to sleep with the story ending in the man-eating kitsune devouring its lover hand-by-hand and leaving the head for last. All the merrier, so the poor, dead human can feast their soulless eyes upon their trickster that was once between their thighs and now closed in on their face. (Or: Chuuya uncovers the harrowing tale of the nine-tailed fox and lives to tell it.)

I ended up writing an epilogue chapter for my kitsune!dazai and human!chuuya fic of them being cute. ♡

33,029 total words

E (for smut)

Dazai/Chuuya

#ao3 fanfic #bsd fanfic #bungou stray dogs #bsd #soukoku #bsd dazai #bsd chuuya #kitsune dazai #fic: foiled fables #my fic

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rockybloo · 4 months

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Hi, feel free to ignore this ask, or point me wearily to the FAQ if i missed it, but can I asked what inspired the world of Lore? Specifically the holistic nature of it, where different tales live side by side. I am a…hopeful, one-day fairy and folk tale scholar, and in my studies I’ve seen this concept pop up in a lot of more modern retellings/reimaginings, and one of my projects has been to see if i could find a source. When i say inspiration/source, I don’t mean singular piece(s) of media that gave you the idea (if you have one id love to know it though!) i more mean sorta your own internal source, the emotional trigger that led you to grouping separate fairy tales into one larger world. I know theres a lot to be said for the simple concept of “because it fucks, thats why” (some of my favorite interpretations of tales spawn from similar concepts) but if you have the time or energy, id love it if you’d be willing to ponder deeper motivations.

Sorry for the long ask, im absolutely obsessed with your characters and the worlds you create by taking archetypical settings and twisting them into something new and intriguing. Thank you for sharing your art (in all senses of the word) with us!

Thank you! And I very much love overthinking fairy tales and their existence SO I SHALL DO EXACTLY THAT!

For me, the reason I just plopped down every fairy tale into the same world, aside from a simple "Because everyone else does it and it's my favorite type of fantasy world" is because it makes so much sense to me.

There's a ton of repeated themes and characters in fairy tales to the point they have a classification system to make folklorist's lives easier when categorizing them. There are so many different Cinderellas, and I don't mean just the European one, as it's a fable that has been found all around the world. There are very much big differences in each story but the literal age old tale is still noticeable.

I took a mythology and fairy tale class in high school where we talked about "The Hero's Journey" which is like a template nearly every story falls into regardless of where a story is from. And for me, it was wild seeing just how many shared tropes humanity has as a whole in our storytelling.

A character that pops multiple times, aside from Prince Charming, is the Big Bad Wolf. OF COURSE it's because wolves were (and still are somewhat) dangerous animals and so that is how they are characterized in fables such as Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. But it's still noticeable that these stories overlap with each other so fitting them into a single world just makes a lot of sense.

Another gigantic reason is that we all live in reality. There's a general understanding of what can and cannot occur on Earth. We know we can't fly without some machine to aid us or talk to animals and have them speak our language back to us. And many mythical beings can potentially be traced back to specific interactions early humans had with rare instances in nature and a need to have a reason "why?".

In fairy tales, reality is fantastical. Numerous tales have talking animals, super natural beings, shapeshifting, characters defying death and recovering from "should have been" fatal injuries, and being able to live happily ever after with never ending love.

We humans don't really get that. Especially that last part with happy endings and love. Sure, we can live a peaceful life or try to but there's this level of joy in some tales that only exists in fairy tales. And love so so much more complicated than the typical "love at first sight that lasts forever without problems".

With all these elements that land fairy tales in a different realm of reality than us, I thought it made sense to actually make a realm (or rather a planet) that explains why things in the world of fairy tales are so much more different than us and even somewhat explain why our reality doesn't have magic in it.

It basically traces back to that age old human urge to explain the unexplainable with some story.

#ask #ask: beanstalked

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spanishskulduggery · 1 year

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what are some spanish books you'd recommend? (i'm probably about a high schooler in terms of reading comprehension, but if you have any difficult/gritty recommendations, that would be perfect) muchos gracias :D

(An anon sent in a similar question looking for B1/B2 level books)

One of the better contemporary authors of what you might consider YA fiction is Laura Gallego García so I'd recommend her especially if you like fantasy.

I first found about her from Las memorias de Idhún. If you're on Netflix, you can see an anime based on it called "The Idhun Chronicles" - and one of the main actresses is Michelle Jenner who is an extremely well-known Spanish actress [she played Isabel in the well-known historical drama Isabel about the Catholic Monarchs in Reconquista times]

If anyone has any other suggestions, please write them in

Other books/stories you might like:

Esperanza renace by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel

La casa en Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

La sombra del viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafón [fairly advanced]

La casa de los espíritus by Isabel Allende [somewhat advanced]

El Conde Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel [advanced at times; but it's styled like fables or multiple short stories]

El burlador de Sevilla y el convidado de piedra by Tirso de Molina [advanced at times with language, but very easy to follow; also a play]

I would also say look into translations of things like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or Hunger Games [Los juegos del hambre] and other YA fiction that is more geared towards highschoolers and teenagers because the language used is not as complex but still really useful. Also, many 1st person novels are really good for showing you the yo forms of a lot of verbs especially irregular verbs.

Also some people really recommend El alquimista "the Alchemist" in the Spanish version by Paulo Coelho. It's a very well-known book for high schoolers though it is somewhat advanced in places

PS Also gotta recommend Hombres necios que acusáis by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It's a poem, but it reads like the rawest slam poetry you've ever heard and also still frighteningly relevant in feminism

You may also enjoy short stories. If one author has multiple stories I'll just include the name once in the list. Some of these are translations of other short stories you'll probably know of which helps the comprehension better!

El rubí by Rubén Darío La ninfa El velo de la reina Mab La muerte de la emperatriz de China El palacio del sol

Blancanieves [Snow White] by the Brothers Grimm Rumpelstiltskin Pulgarcito [Tom Thumb] La Cenicienta [Cinderella]

Cuentos by Esopo [or, "Aesop's Fables"]

El barril de amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe Los crímenes de la calle Morgue La máscara de la muerte roja

El loco de Sevilla by Miguel de Cervantes [a story within a story; it's from Don Quixote, but it's a very well-known vignette in the novel] La pastora Marcela [also a story within a story; some frame of reference, Don Quixote is riding around and comes across a funeral and people are accusing a shepherdess Marcela of spurning this dude's love and he couldn't handle it - Marcela then appears out of nowhere and drags everyone and we love to see it]

Cine Prado by Elena Poniatowska

El regalo de los Reyes Mago [The Gift of the Magi] by O. Henry

La sirenita [The Little Mermaid] by Hans Christian Andersen

Caperucita Roja [Little Red Riding Hood] by Charles Perrault La Bella Durmiente [Sleeping Beauty]

Las mil y una noches [1001 Nights] by Anonymous

La muñeca menor by Rosario Ferré

El almohadón de plumas by Horacio Quiroga

La noche boca arriba by Julio Cortázar

Los dos reyes y los dos laberintos by Jorge Luis Borges

Biblioteca Digital Ciudad Seva

This is my usual go-to for reading classics translated into Spanish [there's also the Gutenberg Project if you're looking for ebooks]

Just some general advice:

-Anything by Cervantes is quite old and you will need to find a more modern version or you'll end up with some very antiquated spellings and grammar. He wrote Don Quixote and some other short stories/plays, and all of his mini-stories from Don Quixote are the same general difficulty.

-I do love Borges but for God's sake DO NOT read El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan "The Garden of Forking Paths". It is advanced, and confusing even for native speakers. I mean this is a story people dedicate a thesis on to try and unravel. It's the kind of thing that you read, you read the wikipedia/rincón del vago entries, and reread and still get confused

-If you're feeling like you want a good challenge, try reading El Popol Vuh which is a book of Maya myths/history/etc, and it's an extremely important in indigenous cultures and history. People have called it the Maya Book of Genesis [though be aware the original translation was done by a Dominican friar named Francisco Ximénez, and there are some modernized versions]

...

Also, speaking of Rincón del Vago is like a Spanish version of Sparknotes. I'm not saying you should be using it to do your homework, but if you happen to find something like Alice in Wonderland / Alicia en el país de las maravillas you can read through the entry in Spanish as reading practice

#Spanish #langblr #recommendations #books #learning spanish #language #languages #learn spanish #asks #ref #refs #recursos

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thenixkat · 2 months

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Me: [clicks on a vid] The vid: We all know about the strong pack bonds-- Me: And you lost me

The whole werewolf pack thing is actually really really recent in modern werewolf fiction. You'll find next to nothing if you look at ye old werewolf folklore and fables of them grouping up with other werewolves outside of like special events (that could include werewolves cannibalizing their temporary comrades for things as simple as getting too fat to jump high enough to score well in a game), whole families being cursed, or the werewolf dream warriors that astral project and fight demons and witches. And even in those groups the werewolves don't act or relate to one another as a pack or anything wolfy.

You don't have to have werewolf packs in yer werewolf stories.

#nix meows #werewolves #werewolf pack tropes

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chroniclesofamber · 9 months

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Zelazny's 'Shadows', NyCon 3, The Statler Hilton, September, 1967

"Literature, of necessity, contains shadows"

[O]ne of his most crucial self-critiques was [Zelazny's] decision that he was “overexplaining” to the reader and should instead “avoid the unnecessarily explicit” and not “go on talking once a thing had been shown.” In a speech given at a 1967 science fiction convention he elaborated on this insight, declaring, “Literature, of necessity, contains shadows … A writer never writes an entire story … You live part of it yourself.” He went on to identify these shadows, gaps that the reader fills in, with the fabled “sense of wonder” that, to science fiction readers, defines the texts they love:

“Writing involves your taking everything in through those little cryptic bugs that crawl across the page and construct things around them. This is where that strange thing called ‘sense of wonder’ comes into play … It sort of enfolds this shadow area. Into those shadows you project those things you are looking for.”

Krulik considers this determination to avoid overelaboration “a central philosophy” of Zelazny’s writing. But what Zelazny posits in his speech, and what remains foregrounded even in a linear, plot-heavy work such as The Chronicles of Amber, is that readers experience the magic of shadow, and thus the sense of wonder, through language. Readers can imagine the streets, the plumbing, the business models of Amber as they see fit; the “emotional archetype” of the fantasy novel derives from Corwin’s story and how he tells it — both the worlds themselves and the ellipses that lie between.

Just as the reader experiences Amber through Corwin’s voice, the fate of Amber lies in Corwin’s hands, even after he decides he doesn’t want to be in charge any more. The outcome of the first half of The Chronicles of Amber comes down to learning who among the scheming, self-involved members of the royal family can master the Pattern — can, that is, control and focus their actions to execute a careful plan in order to achieve a goal.

"...the Pattern I drew to the sound of pigeons on the Champs-Elysées..."

By walking the Pattern, Corwin regains his memory and Dara assumes her true form; by failing to master the Pattern, Brand is defeated; by failing to repair the Pattern, the patriarch Oberon is doomed. And when Corwin gains access to the Courts of Chaos, enabling his ultimate victory, he does so not through the old, broken Pattern but by making a new one, a process that calls forth memories of a happy interlude in his past — on Earth in 1905 Paris — even as it demands an excruciating precision:

“I did not meet with the physical resistance that I did on the Pattern … a peculiar deliberation had come over all my movements, slowing them, ritualizing them. I seemed to expend more energy in preparing for each step — perceiving it, realizing it and ordering my mind for its execution — than I did in the physical performance of the act. Yet the slowness seemed to require itself, was exacted of me by some unknown agency which determined precision and an adagio tempo for all my movements.” (542)

Could there be a better description of the act of writing? If Zelazny began The Chronicles of Amber struggling to find his preferred artistic path, he ended the series’ first half with a reminder of the difficult requirements of both creative process and practical accommodation, and, arguably, a more mature vision of both. For Corwin, if Amber is not what you thought it was, it is well worth preserving. If the Pattern you thought was your legacy no longer works, the only thing to do — the only way to defeat the forces of Chaos — is to draw a new Pattern of your own.

— Cox, F. Brett, “A Series of Different Endeavors 1972-1979”, Roger Zelazny: Modern Masters of Science Fiction, 99-101, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021

#chronicles of amber #roger zelazny #the chronicles of amber

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afoolandathief · 1 year

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✨Mythology & Folklore Retelling Writeblrs Masterpost ✨

So remember a couple months ago when I put out a survey to make a list of writeblrs with myth-retelling/myth-inspired WIPs? Well, I finally put all your responses together!

Below you can find blogs with projects or published works weaving in mythology or folklore, whether it's a retelling or inspired by it. Keep in mind, except for some formatting, I copied these entries directly from the survey.

If anyone does still want to add their WIPs, I'll leave the survey up for now:

Mythology and Folklore Writeblrs and Their WIPs:

@flowerprose

WIP(s): Namesake, a Hades and Persephone myth retelling in which Hades is a skeleton, stripped of his godhood and powers, and Persephone is a young flower maiden, in search of her missing mother. WIP intro, Writing tag

Mythology(ies): Greek Mythology

@violetcancerian

WIP(s): The Dragon and the Herald, Tales of Tirinth, A Song of Three Hundred Spears

Mythology(ies): Arthurian, Irish, Norse, old English

@writeblrfantasy

WIP(s): Queen Artura and the Knights of Arrinshire, a series of stories inspired by the King Arthur tales! I don’t post about it that much, though

Mythology(ies): The King Arthur tales

@lockejhaven

WIP(s): Fable: Servant to Dragon and King

Mythology(ies): Arthurian retelling

@ambiguouspuzuma

WIP(s): I did a three part retelling of the Furies and various Ancient Greek heroes here:

Deianira’s Fury

Ariadne’s Fury

Andromeda’s Fury

I also post regular short stories dipping into other mythology and folklore, featuring golems and sirens and others, including this mash-up of various figures from British mythology: Pantheon

Mythology(ies): Various, mostly Greek

@fearofahumanplanet

WIP(s): The Serpents They Stone - In an alternate version of our world where gods lived alongside humankind and brought them to a new level of technological prosperity, the dreaded World Serpent Jörmungandr reveals herself to have survived Ragnarok while rescuing her villainous old flame, the Phantom Queen Badb. Quickly finding herself pursued by the entire world for the prophecy that promises she will end the world, Jörmungandr dedicates herself to saving Badb from the "Black Pharaoh" that enslaves her - even as Badb is forcibly driven to remain sinister and create chaos.

Miasma - Based on the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland & the later Black Death, the island of Ériu is besieged by the foreign Anglii and their High King is killed. His daughter, Hail, dies with him, but she is resurrected by the serpent goddess Corchen with one objective - to kill King Godric across the ocean, no matter the cost. Her mission soon intertwines with that of a mysterious plague doctor's, who seeks to stop an oncoming plague - one that could spell the end of all life.

Mythology(ies): All, but predominantly Norse, Egyptian, Aztec, Celtic (mostly Welsh/Irish), Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Sumerian, Mayan, Slavic, Hawaiian, Christian, etc.

@nikkywrites

WIP(s): Maidens and Monsters: sapphic retelling of Scylla’s monsterization, in which she is so beautiful, the ocean (and it’s patrons) cannot help but be drawn to her and too much divine attention in one place always leads to ruin.

Light and What Lies Below: In-between of Maidens and Monsters and OH, in which Calypso makes a deal with Hades, creating Davy Jones’ locker before the sailor is even born.

Ocean’s Heart: Dual POV retelling merging Ogygia Calypso with Davy Jones Calypso, in which when he binds her to a mortal body, he binds her to the island as well.

Her Name is Kore: Persephone/Hades retelling in which Kore knows, even as an unannounced goddess, that she is destined to be something more than just Demeter’s daughter.

Mythology(ies): Greek

@abookishdreamer

WIP(s): Kingdom of Ichor (A YA fantasy series) A modern retelling of classic Greek myths with the gods and goddesses being a focal point. Each book in the series will be told in dual POV following a potential couple. I don't know how long I want the series to be, but I do know it's gonna be pretty expansive! The first book is titled Of Flowers and Darkness, which will be a retelling of the myth of Hades & Persephone.

Mythology(ies): Mainly Greek mythology!!!

@galaxialdarktale

WIP(s): A Prophecy Most Divine (only one on my blog atm)

Mythology(ies): It's a made up mythology set, but I've been obsessed with myths since I was like able to read. I have another one that's not yet on my blog that is a retelling of Norse

@wherearetheplants

WIP(s): Fuck Gods (also referred to as WIP MILF). Life has not been kind to those at Nueva Vida Institution, a residential facility for “deeply disturbed” individuals. The institution seems normal from the outside, but a group of friends on the inside think that there’s more to this place than meets the eyes: they think it’s a end-of-life sacrificial home for those the gods have chosen, and that their life-forces are being drained. They’ve decided that before the gods can get to them, they’re going to complete their life-long goals of getting closure. And to do this, they plan to kill some gods.

Mythology(ies): Greek myths are retold through the character arcs and through parallels. Achilles, Sisyphus, Medusa, Icarus, Pandora's Box

@ladywithalamp

WIP(s): (1) A Casting of Lots (2) Where the Blackbirds Roost [both are linked to my pinned post!]

Based on: Greek mythology for ACoL but I've toyed with hints of Slavic mythologies in WtBR though it isn't as fleshed out

@nicola-writes

WIP(s): the other ones, a horror story about a forest that steals your memories and the monsters waiting within.

Mythology(ies): icarus! contains heavy icarus symbolism, and the main character's arc is directly based on that of icarus'.

@stuck-in-this-mortal-form

WIP(s): Children Of The Prophecy aka a story about half demon children, loosely based on various mythologies and urban legends

Mythology(ies): Slavic, bit of Japanese urban legends & other stuff

@maguayans

WIP(s): Elementalia Chronicles: A fantasy series of five books—Maharlika, Charmed, Sunshower, Waves, and Hiwaga—featuring the lore and creatures of Philippine Mythology. Set in the fictitious province called San Andres, following the lives and misadventures of related characters, all while uncovering the secrets of their ancestors and the land. The expanding universe of the series is affectionately named, Elementaliaverse (@elementaliaverse).

Fair Waters: A novella set in Elementalieverse. | The story follows Elias Hernandez, a photojournalist, and aspiring news writer. He finds himself traveling to the northernmost province of the archipelago after discovering the mysterious case of one of its islands. Soon, he realizes the mystery he’s trying to unravel goes as deep as the ocean. And himself, a pawn to more malicious affairs.

Mariang Makiling: A retelling of the legend of Mariang Makiling. | A group hikes across the inland territories of Maquiling to visit its apparent hidden waters. Failing to reach their destination in time, they camp near a burial ground. There, they would discover something ancient and vile.

Mythology(ies): Philippine Mythology

@fanficwriterblockblog

WIP(s): Just Another Fairytale: 12 kingdoms with 12 “princesses”, facing sociopolitical and mythic problems, especially when their pantheon throws them a curveball. A series of 13 novels, each from a different “princess’s” point-of-view, with myth retellings and fairytale retellings

Mythology(ies): Arachne, Odysseus, etc (too tired to think of the others in there, but it’s not just Greek)

@constellationapex

WIP(s): Most Holy

Mythology(ies): As of this moment, I’m mostly tampering with Greek and Roman gods, but I want to expand to Norse folklore soon!

@literallylore

WIP(s): Glass Gods - a thousand years after Ragnarok, Norse deities are reborn on Earth and must fight to protect their world from an army of frost giants set on conquering the planet.

Mythology(ies): Norse

@fruitbatwoman

WIP(s): Tröll, Álfar, Hestar: 3 Magical Short Stories Inspired by Iceland — What if all the myths and legends surrounding Iceland are true? What if there is a troll under every bridge, elves hidden behind the veil, and wicked horses lurking in the water? In this adventurous, romantic, and magical collection of three short stories, fantasy collides with reality, as tourists and travelers experience a modern take on Icelandic folk tales.

Mythology(ies): Icelandic folk tales, Nordic folk tales, Trolls, Huldufólk, Nykur

#writing #writeblr #writblr #writers of tumblr #mythology #myths and legends #myth retelling #folklore #folklore retelling #scheduled

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