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antialiasis · 3 months

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Groundhog Dave, the 16k-word Morphic time loop extra, is finally up on TCoD. If you've been following this blog for a while, you may have seen me intermittently talk about it. Long story short, Dave is trapped in a time loop on the day of chapter 13, and we explore how he responds and unravels.

Content warnings: This is a whump fic. It features some strong violence including gun violence, suicide and suicidal thoughts, brief vomiting, a deluge of strong and demeaning language, consumption of alcohol, heavy emotional distress, existential horror, and a whole lot of children dying.

Some rambling below the cut about how it came to be and my favorite bits in it.

The first inkling of this story was when I saw someone in the Groundhog Day tag on Tumblr writing a Newsies time loop fanfic titled Groundhog Dave. I have never seen Newsies and have no idea who that Dave is, but I think of Morphic Dave every time I see the name, so instantly I pictured Dave in a time loop on the day of chapter 13, and I could not stop intermittently thinking about it. Eventually, I started writing it.

I don't remember the process of beginning to write it super well, but I remember waiting for a coach at Port Authority with Negrek after seeing the actual Groundhog Day musical and typing up the bit in the third iteration where Dave rages at God on my phone, which was definitely one of the earliest bits I thought of. I know that for a while, what I had written up in the document was the first four iterations and a bit: the original, the one that more or less spawns the Dave and Mia Discuss Family AU, the one where he snaps and gets himself killed, the one where he wakes up after that and decides he can experiment and figure this out, and the summary of his next few goes. I know the document was stuck there for a while, with intermittent tinkering and vague ideas but nothing really in the way of writing progress. On August 12th 2021, I posted in the Thousand Roads Discord about how I'd just written an entire NaNo day's worth of Groundhog Dave, and I'm quite sure there I was referring to the scene where Dave is at the hospital, fails to shoot himself to end the loop, and talks with Cheryl. In 2023, I started doing regular sprints working on it (thanks, Negrek), which was what finally got me past the finish line; before that, the document stood at about 8500 words, while it ended up at about 16500 (though with some bits and notes at the bottom).

The actual ending went through a series of iterations as I was working on it. My first idea for an ending for it was just a cruel, "He does finally fix everything and all the kids live, and then he goes to bed and wakes up in the canon timeline, because he cannot have nice things." This wasn't a super satisfying idea, of course, by itself. I went back and forth through various possibilities from there over the story's development time. At one point or another I considered different variations on whether he does manage to stay in a Better Timeline or whether he ends up back in the canon one at the end, how exactly the loop ends up breaking (initially I was genuinely thinking the loop would break one way or another once nobody dies and the Character Development would have to be leading up towards that, but later I realized it was actually tastier if he does manage it and the loop just keeps going anyway; the precise nature of the Character Development involved was also a bit back and forth), and whether the whole thing would be completely unexplained in the vein of Groundhog Day itself or if I would make more ambiguous use of Lucy's recurring penchant for being involved with bizarre supernatural happenings in non-canon extras.

I'm pretty satisfied with what I did end up with, at any rate. My first inkling of the Lucy thing was just sort of ending with ambiguous Lucy, and I wasn't sure that would really work, but it felt a lot more appropriate to actually do that once Lucy tied more into his overall character development - the couple of early iterations where he takes things out on her specifically as if it's her fault or she should have intervened, his general guilt about actually using her to intervene, the repeated conversations in the car where she manages to confront him at the right moment with why he's so mean, him managing to choose to let go and not be an ass to her in the final scene. I'm also pleased with what I landed on with the several different things happening for the first time in the final iteration: him actually mustering the ability to articulate how much he needs the kids for his life to be worth anything, and affirming that he'll keep doing it even if he'll never get to live in the good timelines, and being forced to confront the ways in which he's been cruel and unpleasant to the kids despite how much they mean to him and choose not to, and finally being able to express an honest vulnerable emotion to Jean, accept her offer for emotional support and ask her to stay up with him because he needs that. Something just feels a lot stronger to me about it with a greater degree of ambiguity about the end of the loop, no one single obvious switch that's the thing like someone was dutifully waiting for him to just say this one magic word. (Similarly, what exactly Lucy did in fact have to do with this, if anything, had to be ambiguous. The loop cannot be a concrete phenomenon with a clear singular cause, or it would have just felt wrong. I have realized I have strong feelings on when fiction should be deliberately ambiguous, not because there is a concrete truth that the author is arbitrarily concealing to force you to guess, but because one way or another establishing any concrete truth would detract or distract from the story being told.)

Some little things I enjoy in this story:

Dave's increasingly frazzled awakenings in the first few loops just really tickle me.

Him knocking on the door, then realizing Cheryl heard his sky-rant and just immediately turning around to go on an ill-advised suicide mission to the church rather than have to try to explain that to her amuses me greatly. What a timeline.

My favorite bit of said suicide mission is actually the bit where he's lying there dying and manages to spend that time being restlessly, angrily impatient about how long it's taking and grasping hard for some sense of satisfaction in having killed this stranger, without ever managing it. The most pathetic possible suicidal rampage of revenge.

The hospital bathroom scene is still my favorite scene in the whole thing. It presses my particular whump buttons extremely hard, and it's just extremely representative of Dave and his problems, him mercilessly bullying himself and Cheryl trying very genuinely to reach out to him and let him know he's not alone while he compulsively rejects it, adamant that he doesn't need anyone or anything even though he's acutely suffering, resenting her for it and shooting back at her efforts with pointless, uncalled-for sarcasm. It also has some of my very favorite lines: "There was a knock on the door and he lowered the gun quickly, like a kid caught playing with something he shouldn't," "What the actual fuck did she think he was doing in here," "Still there?" answered irritably with, "There's only one door. Do the math," when he came so, so close to not in fact still being there. So fond of it.

The offhand unelaborated upon mention that Dave has at one point or another read enough to not bungle a suicide by gunshot is extremely some precise button that I have.

I'm also deeply fond of the iteration where Gabriel dies. Dave tries so hard to force himself to decide he can live with that and just decidedly does not succeed. I enjoy him sitting there irritably thinking maybe they should have just done this in the first place when the others attempt to safely reach the police, silently pretty much convinced that would have been a better idea and thinking all this could have been avoided (but without actually consciously admitting to having been wrong, of course), only to immediately go, "He'd always known this was a bad idea. Why'd he even fucking let them?" when the consequences come knocking. You fucking let them because you thought it was probably a good idea at the time, Dave.

I really enjoy how much Dave cares about the kids, can't not care about the kids, while most of the kids have a hard time grasping how much he cares because he's so persistently Like That. Loved to write the multiple times Jack viciously accuses him of not caring about Gabriel, and the way Dave's idea of disabusing him of the notion is just to be an asshole to him, because he's incapable of expressing sincere emotional sentiment. Lucy, similarly, keeps probing him about what he's going to do if the loop doesn't stop, and he just keeps answering in evasive, defensive irritation as if she's challenging him somehow, until he finally manages to realize that no, she was worried that if his efforts wouldn't end the loop he might just stop bothering. (Only then he's finally been driven far enough to actually manage a smidge of emotional honesty.)

Similar recurring horrible dramatic irony I enjoyed: Dave hates Jean's evolved form so, so horribly much when it's just a hypothetical manifestation of Something Horrible Happening To Her that he's trying to stop and not what his daughter really looks like. One of the things that only quite felt right when I'd finally landed back on him ending up in the canon timeline was that he then actually has to confront the cruelty of that with himself and affirm his unconditional love for her, instead of being 'rewarded' with the cuter, unevolved Jean.

I always get a kick out of how relatively easily Dave in nonsenscial situations just slides from adamant atheism into antitheism without a pause. He's perfectly genuine about thinking God doesn't exist, of course, but there is a level on which he kind of wants him to, just so he can face him and walk backwards into Hell, and as a result you get these situations where he sort of entertains the idea far more easily than he rationally should given his priors. The yelling at God about why he isn't curing malaria instead of whatever this is is pretty unique to the very particular mental state he's in on that iteration, but the multiple times he offhandedly thinks maybe this is literally Hell are total nonsense in his professed belief system but nonetheless a place where his mind is just inclined to go.

Meanwhile, I also enjoy the bit where Mia gets him to contemplate that he might be experiencing proof that souls exist - but he's less willing to entertain that in the same way because it doesn't have the same emotional valence for him, so it's not something that properly occurred to him before that, and then he just throws up his hands and moves on.

Thanks if you read it! I would love to hear any thoughts on it.

#morphic #actual writing #groundhog dave #dave's terrible horrible no good very bad groundhog day #david ambrose's many issues let me tell you about them #ramble

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wikagirl · 2 months

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artwork and some cool little stories about skyrim inspired tabletop a friend is hosting for me and my friends below the cut cuz zhis is kinda long

Okay so I have mentioned this thing before a couple times on my blog but now I actually have all the character art done so let me actually tell you something about The Company Of Dragons or TCOD as we called the discord channel for it.

My homie Emmet wanted to once again host a tabletop after not having done one in quite a bit and all of us are reeaaaaaalllllyyyyyy into skyrim, like it wa sliterally my first actual big game title I have ever played and even his friggen stepmom played it after his dad just wouldn't shut up about it after he convinced him to play it so he took the story of the game and modified it into a tabletop cambaing based off of the system of the german The Dark Eye tabletop.

He basicly wrote a skyrim AU where we still more or less play through the game but with quite a lot of changes so it is multi-player friendly and he also made it so the big guild questlines would be shaped into something of a little character questline since we somehow managed to nicely distribute our characters in such a way that we only ever really had one per big guild (like the mages, thieves, dark brotherhood and so on) and I thought it would be a cool idea to draw our characters in their "final form" so to speak at the end of their own arc where they get to be the main story focus and now I'll introduce you to all of them and some notable reappearing npcs that were played by friends and family who liked to listen in on our sessions.

Starting off with Myrkviar Valourheart which is a "written as you hear it" version of Myrkviðr which is the old norse word for darkwood or black forest and he is played by the literal dad of the DM and the metaphorical dad of our friend group, Yuri.

He is our dragonborn and actually did not start out as someone that is supposed to go to the block in helgen. He is a trusted guard from Falkreath and former captain of the helgen guards before the civil war broke out and the Jarl let the impirial soldiers take over the fortress and he basicly stuck around in helgen to serve as joint of communication between the impirials and falkreath itself. He lost his wife and one of his sons to the dragon attack and took it upon himself to slay the beast for the safety of the people he swore to protect when he joined the guards and to avenge his lost family members.

He stems from a long bloodline of werewolves, it doesn't really have much to do with the story we actually play through it's just a running joke that everyone in my friendgroup besides me goes were beast so they also made their characters were beasts in our tabletop.

His final kit is the nordic armor with nordic hammer and he wears the blueish sash that normally comes with the falkreath hold armor over it as a sign of his dedication to his duty and the people of his home.

Raggi Valourheart was originally supposed to be called Ragnar but his mother kept calling him Raggi as a nickname and now he is forever stuck with a name meaning something like "a tuft" or "shagginess" and he is played by our DMs brother Dwoshak.

Like his father he lost part of his family in helgen where he had lived all his life and was working as a smiths apprentice with the dream to forge a sword that could cut mountains.

After helgen he went with his father to whiterun where he would stay for most of the main story (mainly because dowshak didn't have a lot of time to play with us at that time and din't wanna hold us back by making us wait) where he just kind of existed in a state of shock for a while. Even though the wolfblood runs deep in his family (for previously mentioned in-joke reasons) he never managed to turn even after consuming werewolves blood but the trauma eventually broke what ever held the dam, leading to him more or less involunteerily getting dragged into the companions questline through some roundabout shenanigans and helping him past his trauma with the power of found extended family. He only takes on the mantle of Herold of the companions for about a year before passing it on to vilkas and resuming his passion as a smith under eorlung grey mane at the skyforge where he has just kinda been chillin for most of the sotry but he joins in every one in a while for some adventure.

He is wearing the ancient nord armor which usually doesn't come with any under clothing except for the leather bits that the plate is attached to but he is wearing his shirt and pants that he usually wears to work underneath because why the hell not also he has just accepted that his face and hands will never be clean of soot ever again.

Kåre Dahlson is a cousin to the Valourheart clan and likes to cosplay as a priest of mara to cover up his sithis worshipping and man murdering tendencies and just like his player, my friend André, he likes to tell some tall tales about the scars on his face when in reality they are just leftover of some poorly healed infected scratches from when his mothers rooster got to his face as a kid when he annoyed the bird a bit too much.

We haven't gotten around for his time to be the main character yet but he does get some time to shine on our characters first trip to solstheim where he aquires his werebear self and joint the ranks fo the injoke club.

He is wearing standart monk robes over top of the standart dark brotherhood assassins gear together with an amulet of mara. I drew him with allready having astrids dagger because.....reasons and don't let me saying that he "cosplays" as a monk of mara fool ye, he is quite proficient in the more....physical aspects of worshiping the goddess of love and he is very very lucky that our DM is not like me and does not make him flip a cin every time to see if he got an std or not.

last one on the werecreature club is our local thiev and honorary member of the girls club, M'lady who insists his name is pronounced Muh-La-Dee but that would not be funny now would it?

He is actually the one to be carted into helgen at the beginning and b makes it out with just a little bit of furr scorched off the top of his head. He has been a pick pocket for a long time but felt the need to leave the country after getting attacked by sinding when he was unfortunately in the area when the guy went into his murder frenzy which is how he ended up getting caught at the border.

Tumblr doesn't have enough space to actually even just describe this shit this guy gets up to when noone is looking but he does restore the thieves guild to its former glory and he also does do the sinding quest where, instead of accepting the saviours hide or the ring, he strikes a deal with hircine to please just make him a cat in wereform too.

some honorble mentions of the shit he has done are:

sneak into haelgas house to lace her horker tooth that she most definetly uses for kinky stuff with "foreign spice oils" after she got on his nerves too much one time.

Periodicly sneak into the house of maven blackbriar and move certain things just a little bit more to the left every time he does.

And once he got the nightingale armor he would put it on an stand stare at maul from the distance at night or through his window, standing juuuuuuust far enough in the shadows to have his form be obscurred but still have the blue glowing eyes the armor gives you visible because the idiot needs to learn to keep his mouth shut. M'lady did that for over three weeks until maul got paranoid and almost killed someone out of anxiety.

M'lady actually hates the nightingale armor because it tugs and squeeses at his fur so he wears a modified guildmasters armor. The glassdagger is kinda shitty in stats but he likes it because oooohhh shiny and the golden coin in his mane has the face markings of his mother engraved in it.

Also funfact the M' prefix for khajiit means something like "inexperienced" "apprentice" and sometimes also "virgin"

now the last major character is meeeee, and I was very creative because her name is literally just Vika... Vika Aldervel, her mother was a nord which is how she got the pasty bitch look but her father is a darkelf which is how she got the last name and her affinity for magic as well as the short queen genes for nord standart.

The whole point of this character was just to see how crazy the DM would let me get with it and how op he would let me go until he would slap me on the wrist....it was surpsiringly far because he actually used a lot of the chaos I created against me a lot of times.

Vika is the granddaughter of my oblivion character and if you have played the shivering isles dlc you know that your character literally becomes sheogorath, the daedric prince of madness, who you can also meet in skyrim. Vika traveled to skyrim to study the falmer and their ancient magics, the rest of the crew just kinda run into her in a random ass cave at some point while she is looking for anything falmer related and she just kinda tags a long from there on serving as the healer of the group and also money management. As you can tell by the art her plot is mostly the plot of the dawnguard dlc mixed in with sheogorath popping in every one in a while to cause chaos for his little darling granddaughter who is honestly more like a fun object to rotate to him but ey it makes for good plot moments.

Her gear is a modified version of the fur trimmed cloak to have a hood that protects from the sun. Her eye makeup is a direct rip from the swirly pattern of nocturnals robe decoration since, as someone raised by a dark elf, she mostly worships azura who often has nocturnal credited as her sister so she worships them as a duo but msotly still focusin on azura. Due to her amassing great power and devoting herself to azura even after taking the vampire form (which is a Molag Bal thing) the daedric prince of dusk blessed her with keeping her true face even in the normally hideous vampire form so that Vika may show the duskmothers true grace and beauty even when fighting in her most powerfull form (this took a several sessions long quest to beg for azuras forgiveness tho)

and now that we are done with the main squad, on to some lesser reoccuring characters, starting off with the spouses

So first of we have Moira (yes the hagraven you get married to in the sanguine quest) and Elmora.

Moira is an npc played by our DM and becomes part of Vikas quest to redeem herself in the eyes of azura after the whole crew takes a celibratory drink with sanguine after helping Elmora become the new headmaster of the mages college. All the other characters got one part ofn the Sanguine quest and Vika got the getting married to a hagraven part.

Azura promised Vika her favour back if she could turn the hagraven to worship her fully and wholeheartedly, and since azuras worship includes loving not only yourself and the goddess but also those who are around you and close to you fully and with your whole self, Vika got a bit over dedicated and her to her friendy dismay and the daedric princes surprise actually ended up falling in love with the hagraven and in turn turning her to azuras worship. Upon their (proper) marriage under azuras blessing the hagraven had her youthfull breauty given back to her. (your beauty is one of the things you sacrifice when you become a hagraven, also now is probably a good point to mention that azura is not only the dogges of magic, dusk and the stars but also of beauty and vanity and I did not pick those glow ups, the DM decided that that would be an azura thing to do)

Elmora or Elmo for short is played by Yuris IRL wife Anastasia and a high elf with high expectations of herself and those arund her. She initially starts out as a thalmor under Ancano at the college of winterhold, incredibly racist and classist and just generally a stuck up bitch but she recieves a reality check when the she gets sent to observe what ever the mages were up to in the saarthal digsite and gets locked in there, barely making it out alive.

We streched this questlien out over the course of the whole story so she kinda goes through a bit of a behind the scenes arc of actually wanting to learn more about magic and the college and, after finishing off Ancarno, ends up sticking with the group because she fears retaliation from her own former affiliates. Anastasia didn't play with us often but Elmo, mostly through exposure to our stupidity, warms up to the skyrim kind of life and accepts the position of headmaster og the guild after initially turning it down. Since we streched out the whole story from what feels like just a few days in game to the course of over a whole year in game she first develops a one sided infatuation for our dragonborn which eventually becomes equal once the guy gets over his grief and accepts that he needs to move on and is allowed to have good things in life too. They never actually end up getting married but they sure do act like they are.

and lastly Kena and Dra'meri

Kena means "scholar" in the dark elven language and is a name given to the falmer by Vika after finding her locked up in a cage badly bruised in a bandits cave. Falmer are blind and live underground so not knowing what to do in the unfamiliar ouside worls the falmer juds kind of followed the group around and eventually integrated similiar to the folks you can have in camp but not in your parts in bg3. The group eventually manages to help her find her home but she shows up every onve in a while to teach Vika the current falmer languge which is very different from the one of the ancients. She lets her hair grow longer as a sign of sisterhood with all the other women in our party who have longer hair and she is the first falmer since before the nords arrived to brave the valley of winds (the valley where whiterun is located, in the lore the falmer feared the place and the ancient nords didn't know why but since the skyforge was there and the place is associated with kynareth there are theories that it is basicly kynareths domain and she does not like the elves a lot iirc). She is played by our DM

Dra'meri is M'ladys elder sister and a mage. She was part of a one shot fun adventure that our DM wrote for us and she is played by our DMs little sister. The prefix Dra' can mean a lot of things, in this case it means wise woman. Dra'meri came to skyrim to drag her runaway brother back home by the scruff...which doesn't really work when you are only a tenth his size. She's mostly just a joke character who lives in whiterun but we love her a lot and if anything happens to her I will kill everyone in this room and then myself also I designed her outfit myself do you like it?

Anyways that is the main cast of our homebrew The Company Of Dragons....a bunch of idiots who like to travel in the company of dragons...and also fight the ones who don't wanna be their friend and eat their souls sometimes too. hope you had fun and no i did not checkread any of that.

#skyrim #skyrim oc #company of dragons #my fingers hurt #the elder scrolls oc #writing this took me three hours bc I kep re-writing stuff #I gave my character a bit of tummy chub in vampire form bc I have tummy chub #and that gave me so much anxiety when I drew it originally but now I like it a lot #kinda funny how my character worships azura for the magic but just keeps on getting the beauty instead #like emmet seriously let my char have a cool powerfull stick or something the star isn't really that usefull in combat you know #maybe I should try throwing it and have my character invent the elderscrolls equivalent of frizbee

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thecurseofdemisecomic · 2 years

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Hey guys! I started a discord server for the curse of demise! You can join here! I also talk about my other aus but TCOD is the main focus!

https://discord.gg/u3vvpfVj

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iloveallmyfandomsequally · 3 years

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Thoughts on azulaang?

Y’know what’s funny is that I’ve never actually thought thoroughly of Azula and Aang being a couple. I’ve definitely seen fanfiction for them, but I’ve never clicked on it since it’s not my cup of tea, but I don’t really have anything morbidly against it.

Obviously, Azulaang is an enemies to lovers trope because of A:tLA, however I do think it’s a little bit more on the toxic side than most of the enemies to lovers tropes. If you look at all the interactions between them, it’s usually Azula trying to capture and/or kill Aang, so really in retrospect it’s not a good foundation for a relationship.

If there are shippers who ship it based on the potential that they have, like if Azula wasn’t a manipulated, groomed, mentally unstable maniac then I have no problem with that. AU’s are really fun when it comes to fantasy. And actually I think a firebender x airbender would be quite cool, I love the warm colors when it comes to aesthetic. It just wouldn’t work in canon portrayal with Azula and Aang. But that’s what a good ol’ AU is for!

I’d definitely turn my head if it was someone who was like “Omg remember when Azula shocked Aang in TCoD? That’s basically the same thing as ‘if they pull their hair they like them trope’! OTP 😍😍😍!!!” Yeah, no, killing someone is not the same thing as hair pulling and please reevaluate your perception of what you consider to be romantic in media.

Also I personally believe Azula likes women, just from the vibes I get from her, but I know not everyone has this opinion. Also with Aang I don’t really ship him with anyone, simply due to the fact he does not have the romantic maturity or capacity in my opinion. Plus, like in the case of K//ataang, I don’t think a 14 year old girl (yes, Azula’s 14) would be attracted to a 12 year old boy, even if he is the most powerful being in the world.

Even if Azula wasn’t groomed to be a villain, I don’t think their belief systems would clash very well. Azula to me is very calculated, mathematical, she likes logic and reasoning for explaining things. Aang is more spiritual, a more free kinda guy, and while opposites can attract in some cases I do think they’d clash with their views pretty quickly.

Also the fact that Azula might have a buried abandonment issue. I know she doesn’t outright show it, but you can tell it’s there. And what with Aang’s flighty and non-commital personality it would definitely be bad for both of them in the long run.

The only condition I’d ship Azulaang is if Azula wasn’t mentally unstable and killed Aang, and if Aang was more accepting of a partner who had clashing views with him. However, I’m not going to bash anyone who does, just definitely would stay away from the looney ones who think killing someone is romantic. Other than that, nothing really against it, just not my cup of tea.

#avatar the last airbender #avatar: the last airbender #a:tla #atla #avatar: tla #aang #atla aang #azula #princess azula #atla azula #azulaang #ask response

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