Over a year ago, I drew my first Rain World fanart! This is Zero Fables: The Superstructure in all its uhh... mouse-scribbled glory. Some of this is outdated of course, like the multiple chambers probably aren't a thing anymore, etc...
Shortly after drawing their structure, I'd give them a puppet design -
(on the left is one of their local group, Reflections of Drifting Light, or Drift for short.)
A headshot of the second picture used to be my icon! I almost named my blog zerofables as well, but I didn't want to use them as a mascot or anything like that, so I ended up going with Flicker instead.
Zero Fables is a part of an experimental local group stationed across an archipelago. They're an old, cryptic iterator who speaks in loops and tangents. In contrast to common teachings, Fables believes that the cycle is to be celebrated, and the true answer to the Great Problem - the ultimate escape from suffering - is to love existence itself.
Fables was dressed as an echo due to their relation with void fluid experimentation. It was a bleak warning for their possible end. But they didn't care, and they were pretty blasé about their opinions. Many of Fables' citizens hated that Fables did not fear becoming an echo like they did.
There's also the Mystic, a descendant of slugcats Fables purposed many years before. It and Fables have a special bond. Mystic has been my banner image this entire year actually...
Can't believe it's been this long already~
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i've seen ppl talking about Meryl & how little we know about her family, but the geo-plant arc of trigun chapters 10-12 gives us some really useful pieces of info, i think
first, we see her thinking of herself as Cold Blooded, just like the dude that wanted Badwick to kill his own parents
[ID: Meryl stands with her gun drawn and a troubled expression on her face as she thinks to herself, "Exactly as you described him... the cold-blooded type..." In the next panel, she closes her eyes and wonders, "Am I really... any different?" End ID]
at the start of this arc, Milly wrote one of her massive letters to her family, while Meryl mentioned not knowing what she would write to hers. then we see Milly get PISSED at Badwick after she learns he threatened his parents at gunpoint, which leads to this page:
[ID: Meryl, held back by Milly, tells her, "Milly... I envy you... My father would have wanted me to get justifiably angry at a person who points a gun at his parents. That is an important thing." She flashes back to the moment in the chapter before where Milly is attempting to punch the son, Badwick. Milly calls in concern, "Ma'am?" Meryl continues, "But I... I just stood there and took it all in without even budging. I am such a cold person. I chose this path of blood and tears without thinking about the rest of my life. All I can see is what is right in front of me." The page shows the face of the father, dressed in basic battle gear, who is watching silently. Now in tears, Meryl laments, "Why could I not see... that when I closed myself off to him, something was wrong? I..." In the last panel, Milly stares down at Meryl in surprise as Meryl slaps her own cheeks and exclaims, "No... Nevermind!" End ID]
this entire situation is obviously striking something in Meryl's heart. some kind of insecurity she has about her distant relationship with her own parents. she shakes herself out of it, determined to not fall into a funk, and then jumps into defense of the land.
after the battle's over & the father's fallen to his ass, we see these pages:
[ID: In the first page, the father, off screen, tells Meryl and Milly, "There are no words to express how thankful I am for your help." Meryl replies with a smile, "Ah. There's no need." The father goes on to tell her, "Ms. Meryl... I know it was rude of me, but I overheard your conversation earlier. Having raised that rebellious son, I don't know if I have the right thing to say, but... All people are different, but the bonds between parents and children are inseparable. It is a great burden, but also the most precious thing in the world..."
In the second page, the father concludes, "... Choose your own path, and walk it with confidence. All of life... is connected. You must live your own life, and your parents will love through you." As he speaks, we see Meryl listening to him with a surprised expression. End ID]
this entire arc feels like a metaphor for Meryl's own situation. after these pages, we see Badwick turning in the deed, then finding out that his parents were entrusting the property to him after all. he's the problem son, someone who separated himself from his parents due to his disagreements with them (likely stemming from his dead younger brother). yet at the end of the day, his parents still love him and entrusted their life's work to him.
Meryl sees all this go down, hears these words, and it touches something in her heart. so we see her go from talking about writing to her family like this in chapter 10:
[ID: A single panel of Meryl with her eyes closed and a peaceful expression on her face. She tells Milly, "That would be the normal thing to do... especially when I've been away from home for so long. But I don't know what to write beyond 'it's dry'..." End ID]
to this bit at the end of chapter 12:
[ID: Meryl approaches a mailbox with luggage in hand. She slips a letter inside, then sighs with a smile. Milly yells, "Maa'aam! What are you doing?! We're already late!" To which Meryl replies, "Ok! Ok! Ok! I'm coming!" End ID]
the experience was enough for her to accept that she might not be the closest with her parents (or just father? considering she only ever mentions a father in this all), but it's still worth reaching out even if she doesn't have much to say.
this arc is the most we see about Meryl's backstory in the manga, but I think we can draw a few things from it. we have a definite mention of a father, but no others. no mention of siblings or any other family members. she's distant from her father, too busy following her heart & goals, but she doesn't have a bad relationship with him. just Distant. she feels disconnected from him, even Cold, for her focus on her work & the practicalities in front of her. but even with that disconnect, she still cares enough about him to feel guilty when she realizes she's been doing this.
and then considering later, when we see the flashback of a man giving her the gun... i'd assumed that was possibly a senior at her work (probably tristamp giving me that perception, from Roberto), but keeping all the rest of this in mind... it really could have been her father.
i went looking to try to find that part. did not find that one exactly, but i DID find this one from trimax chapter 34:
[ID: A nearly bald man with a kind face and what appear to be shooting ear muffs around his neck tells Meryl, "Consider guns delicate. Women, most of all, should make use of them. One shot will level the playing field between you and a big, strong man." End ID]
if this is indeed her father, it would explain why she knows how to shoot like she does. perhaps her father taught her as she was growing up out of the wish to help her protect herself. maybe they weren't incredibly close, but he still clearly cared about her & wanted what was best for her and her safety. the kind of father that's content to let her do whatever her heart wishes, since her happiness is his happiness.
and then chapter 12 ends with this page:
[ID: A black framed page with a single panel at the center. The panel shows Meryl from behind, running with her luggage in hand. The text boxes to the sides state, "All of life is connected by a river... And the beginning of the river... is now." End ID]
she continues on her own path, not looking back, but she is still connected to the ones in her heart... including her father.
(Manga panels referenced from @trigun-manga-overhaul !)
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into the deep end - 30k T orufrey fic, focusing on memory trauma, disability, and romance.
the sweet oblivion of the victim, the poisoned freedom of the other.
for one moment - it had felt like two parts returned - the needed reunion of two disparate halves. no more secrets, no more pain.
the moment you get to give back what you never wanted to take. that moment, under the night-blooming flowers, when they had both let out the same single broken sigh of relief.
but they were never whole to begin with, were they?
qifrey swore he wouldn't say 'sorry' to this man any more if he could help it - sorry is cheap now. he didn't want to be in a position ever again where you only have 'sorry' left. so he just looks down into the threads of his blanket, strains his eye until it hurts, feeling his insides - his throat, heart and head - burn with pain. he expects more, but olly says nothing.
olly says nothing.
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maybe a slightly unpopular/in the minority opinion but i think that if kaz and inej were to get married in the future, inej would take kaz's (real) last name. and now hear me out—
kerch is a seemingly considerably religious and conservative country, even if for just the reasons of profit and gain. but regardless, things like marriage are probably pretty by the book and in order to make a marriage legal, i would assume that it would require the tradition of a wife taking her husband's last name
of course kaz wouldn't like the idea of inej taking his last name because it implies a certain sense of ownership, especially in a country like kerch, but their relationship is not even remotely based on that at all, so inej would talk him down and say she would be honored to take his last name—his real last name—because that is a piece of him that no one else (except for maybe jesper and wylan, should he decide to tell them) gets. in a way, it is a shared last name and not just kaz's because he chose brekker and made that name his persona, versus becoming rietveld again with inej's help and love
of course, that doesn't mean that inej would suddenly use rietveld as her last name. after all, "she was not a lynx or a spider or even the wraith. she was inej ghafa." she would simply be taking rietveld as a legal necessity that is only used for official documentation, and because it signifies the progress she and the man she loves have made both individually and as a couple
so anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk. this is a hill i will absolutely die on (although honestly, not to negate this entire post, but imo kaz and inej wouldn't get married, unless in a suli ceremony. but that is a whole other post)
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I haven't seen people talk about it much but I think Paimon reminds Alhaitham of Kaveh a little when she's being fussy.
Like mb I'm just delusional (or mb it's all obvious and that's why no one's talking about it) but I thought the reason Alhaitham brought traveler and Paimon to his house was exactly that. Alhaitham already said goodbye, but then Paimon started acting out.
And it's like, yeah, this reminds me of some interaction with Alhaitham we've seen before.
(Also, the framing of this last shot with Alhaitham and the first shot with Kaveh (which is the first shot in that entire interaction) look so similar in the way only half their faces is shown. Would be a perfect transition for a flashback.)
And then Paimon says
And Alhaitham stops in his tracks and thinks of something (ALMOST smiling)
And decides to bring them home and help after all. And I immediately thought of this.
So for my money, Alhaitham was super done with this entire adventure and wanted to go home but Paimon started throwing a tantrum and he was like "I've already heard this shit today from someone else and I need to go or I'll get another tantrum from that someone at home". But than she uses almost the exact words Kaveh said and Alhaitham just goes "Damn, just like him. That's kinda cute. And he was so mad back than. I should help. And also bring them home and make these two loud idiots interact so Kaveh can experience firsthand how annoying he can be."
And that's it.
Yes, I am delusional. No, I will not take criticism.
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i feel so strongly about their friendship it's incredibly important to me
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the whole…honey scene where after it first drips on him, to identify it he then squishes it between his fingers and licks it…………. very sexual, i feel
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hello and good evening, can we pls talk about “i saved it all for you” vs “im saving this all for later” and “i don’t have the right name or the right looks but i have twice the heart” vs “twice the dreams but half the love, be careful what you bottle up” and “im here to give you all of my love” vs “will you still love who i am?” and “id trade all my tomorrows for just one yesterday” vs “scar(star? patrick, make up your mind. please.)-crossed lovers forever, here we are, untouched forever” and “heaven’s grief” vs “heaven, iowa” bc i feel like im going crazy
hi, hello!!! (^: oohh i think one of the things that makes fob songs SO fun is that you can take two songs from any album and compare them to see what similarities and differences you come up with and any ties between them, and i would say, a majority of the time, there are some threads that you are able to pick at and play with.
to me, just one yesterday is overwhelmingly pete. it's melancholic, it's bitingly self-aware, and it also reveres the past (whatever the past may have been good or bad) not due to glorification of the past itself, but simply because it was "yesterday" when there was something between two people. it's overall a lament but also a declaration and a promise all wrapped in one — i'm bad news but i still saved everything of me for you, if i had one more yesterday, one more chance... the bridge especially kind of makes me want to explode sometimes if i think about it too long because i think this sentence can truly go both ways if you think about it a bit too deeply but — "if i spilled my guts / the world would never look at you the same way / and now im here to give you all of my love / so i can watch your face as i take it all away".
it's worth noting that patrick has said in a commentary on SRAR that just one yesterday was one of the earliest songs (whether that means to be written or in the case of actually being recorded, that is up in the air) and patrick states that at first he didn't "understand the song when [they] wrote it". i've talked a lot in the past about how people tend to up play patrick's obliviousness and my distaste for it but in this case it seems to only strengthen my thoughts on the fact that this song IS more of pete's thoughts than anything else.
a line from just one yesterday, horrifyingly enough comes from 2006, and it's..the one and only poem. (i do have a post on it here too lol)
(more than anything however, i think that just one yesterday has the most parallels to deep blue love + the eternal song)
heaven iowa is a song that is......it reeks of patrick to me through and through — it's earnest and it's deceptively straightforward with a deep devotional undercurrent running through it that speaks to me more of patrick's style than pete's. it also, brings a connection up to where did the party go, which we know of as the first song that was written between the two of them even before joe or andy were called up (patrick here mentions that it was written right in "the middle of the hiatus"). scar crossed lovers makes me want to personally die once you think about the many times that romeo and juliet has been brought up regarding folie by both patrick AND pete (look forward to our joint folie edit coming soon<3) — star crossed lovers is an obvious well known epithet of that particular work by shakespeare, and scar crossed lovers invokes that same feeling with a twist especially regarding the concept of kintsugi that seems to flood through the smfs album itself. you're lovers (and if we go based off of the og hold me tight or don't lyrics), you're scar crossed, possibly even star crossed as well — and what are your scars full of now? like just one yesterday, this song refers to the past but it also is a song that is very much rooted in the present day and looking forward to the future ("i'm saving this all for later") — what are the lovers' scars knitted together with when undergoing healing? i'd argue what with the themes prevalent in smfs it's the process of kintsugi itself.
i think a lot of people forget that patrick did write a majority of ttyg and that "scar crossed lovers" + the bridge about being able to see that someone's "glow" reminds me a lot of sending postcards from a planecrash (wish you were here) with "my insides are copper, i'd kill to make them gold". pete mentions that the line has "almost an arma [angelus] influence" (funnily enough joe and andy seem very ??? by this song) and patrick mentions that they wrote it [postcards] because they wanted to "dance" to it in this clip from a 2004 commentary regarding ttyg tracks. for all that has been said regarding how pete sees patrick as the sun or as something golden, it should be noted that patrick has also expressed the exact same sentiment back to him from the very start.
off topic, but i would love to get my hands on some of the poems that inspired mania and smfs because i think they must be fucking insane.
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feel like the global tasks sweep strat should probably be nerfed somehow. my thought would be, give each team an individual ten minute overall cooldown on global task claims. that is to say, a certain team can only claim one global task per ten minutes. say, deliver gas masks, and then in ten minutes you're allowed to deliver tea, and then after another ten minutes you can claim hot chocolate.
another teams would be able to claim a global task for bananas during this time, and their own ten minute cooldown would start.
(the global tasks can either keep their individual ten minute cooldown [i.e. after tea is claimed no one else can claim tea for ten minutes] or a slightly shorter cooldown, say 5-7 minutes)
when a global task is claimed, everyone is notified, right? if not, in my hypothetical, they will be.
then, a team trying to sweep six tasks at once would actually take sixty minutes to do, allowing another team to swoop in and have a chance to stop it in cinematic, entertaining fashion rather than tubbo having to grind resources and then log out in front of the merchant to counter this, which is boring for everyone (including the person delivering). plus, if a team cuts it down to the last second and ends up getting delayed, they physically wouldn't have time to make a delivery, meaning even being a BIT of a nuisance could be a viable strategy, even if you can't manage to kill; if you can STALL you could still wreck their plans.
that's my dream anyway idk i'm not a game designer. just think it would be interesting for most players
(i elaborate under)
red team would have to shake up their strategies, which is fun since they're a team that kinda has to rely more on strategy than outright brawn (overall the team's pvp can't be relied on unless they have carre or phil, as seen today when pierre, bad, and etoiles attacked phil cellbit foolish and baghera, and cellbit and foolish both died to etoiles in the attack, despite it being a 4 on 1 at the time. baghera was killed by bad soon after. phil was the one to get the kills. the first day, when blue attacked [niki, tubbo, and bad as i recall] carre got both kills)
the other teams would then still have a way to stop a global sweep since a sweep would have to start earlier, allowing not only more time to arrive at global to pvp about it, but ALSO allowing another team to swoop in and steal the goal out from under the team again
i'm gonna use it in a scenario bc i'm badboyhalo and i can't stop myself from making examples:
so, tonight, if the proposed cooldown was in place, bad and tubbo would both still had roughly 17 minutes when red team would have HAD to start the sweep process if they wanted all six global tasks: 1 hour until the server closed at absolute MINIMUM. more for safety's sake.
therefore, in this scenario, there's a lot to happen
blue team could wait at globals, knowing red will probably try this strategy, and attempt or perhaps SUCCEED in killing red. if they kill red entirely, the operation is a wash; red doesn't have to gear to come back from scratch and take out blue team, and even if they could, the travel time to return to globals alone would mean they wouldn't get all the global tasks, potentially meaning they don't take the lead. if blue team is unable to kill red and dies themselves or has to retreat, but succeeds in delaying red, red would face the same problem.
if red sends in all of the task items on one person, and that person dies, even if the rest survived, blue could loot the items from that person and would be able to either use the items themselves, if green is currently the owner, or could run away with the items, effectively wasting red's time and again, meaning they wouldn't get all tasks claimed even if they were able to overtake the runner and reclaim their items.
i'm unclear what would happen if red divided the task items between them since it seems like the person claiming the task doesn't have to have all (or any? again, unclear) the items in THEIR inventory in order to claim so long as a teammate is nearby with the items in their inv (evidence: pac's vod "voltei... o que tá acontecendo no QSMP?!" at roughly 3:00:00; tubbo claims tea and tea is taken out of pac's inventory. i don't know the limits of this strategy)
blue team also has time to swoop in and steal a global task out from under red during this time. say, if red team had claimed the task for 10 tea leaves, upping the price to 15 tea leaves, and then blue team snuck in and claimed the task and set the price up to 20 tea leaves, (since the proposed 10 minute cooldown on claims would be TEAM LIMITED; red's cooldown applying to red only and so on). if red waited until the last second, they wouldn't have the time to reclaim this task even if they did have the resources, possibly forcing them to start their sweep earlier to counter this possibility, at which point team members who had logged on earlier and are out of time by the end of the night, OR members who live in time zones that don't allow them to stay up until server close, may have an easier shot at participating in defending against a global sweep.
all of this DIRECT CONFLICT would make for good audience entertainment and heighten the stakes of an attempted global sweep, since it would practically have to be one team defending globals for an hour while they pipe all their resources into it, knowing that if they die another team could easily swipe their task resources and use it themselves (along with the rest of their gear). it makes it more interesting, while still mostly viable.
plus it would force more strategizing for red team which is maybe just a personal plus, i just really like seeing people planning both in advance and in spur of the moment. it's really satisfying to see how a plan comes together and succeeds or fails; plus, since red team is the main team using this strategy at the moment and their main draw and strength as a team is cohesion and communication this would be completely fucking riveting for me as a viewer so maybe this is just a personal thing. but i really really think it would be fun
but again, i'm not a game designer, or a qsmp player, or a qsmp admin, or honestly even really a gamer? so maybe i'm off my rocker and out of my gourd and this isn't viable or balanced in any way shape or form but YKNOW what is this blog except putting stupid thoughts into the void and seeing if this time the void spits back hate mail so. i'm folding this into a paper airplane and throwing it into the abyss. hopefully it made sense.
k love you appreciate you getting this far, have a good week!!
(i hope your team gets a win in dramatic fashion and celebrates together!!! i hope they come together and unleash a plan so spectacular it takes the server by storm!!! i hope it's so good it becomes a vod you go back to even years in the future!!!! i hope you have a good week!!!!!)
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oversharing lol
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