Info dump for Teren?

Infodump for Teren!!!!!!! (thank you sm for asking I love her so much) She's like, basically human but has pointy ears because I thought it would be fun for her design. She grew up on the streets of Corellia and when she was pretty young she got kidnapped by these Mercenary guys who put her in their mercenary school with other kids they were planning to make their mercenary army (where she got training for weapons and spying). Years later the Republic busts the mercenaries' operation and Teren runs away, ending up with Separatists (a few years before The Clone Wars). After that, she serves as a spy for The Separatists mainly for the money, but also because of the grudge she holds against The Republic. (this is where it gets sillier) Close to The Clone Wars' end, Dooku sends her out as a spy to see if he can recruit Jedi!Asajj. She's disguised as her Clone Commander for a while, reporting back and studying her all the while, when Order 66 comes around. She saves Asajj when she fires back at the rest of the troopers with no hesitation out of pure instinct and knowledge that she needs to protect her. It takes a while until Asajj trusts her, but they then flee on a ship and have stupid-ass adventures, and also become stupidly obsessed with each other.

So yeah that's her basic story and origin, might actually write a fic with her someday but she just inhabits my mind a lot of the time lol

For the Seven Forms of Love questions...how about Stroge 4 for Teren, Eros 5 for Tristo, Philia 5 for Vienna, and Philauta 3 for Wyleth?

This is a mess so sorry in advance, I'm so bad at writing my thoughts out heheh

Teren, Storge 4:

Ooh I actually hadn't thought about this!!! I feel like he probably has several half-elf siblings (because I love tieflings that aren't just from human families for some reason). He seems like an eldest son to me, so I feel like his younger siblings all look up to him so much.  His parents probably didn't have a favorite, but since he's a tiefling and his siblings aren't, I feel like they would spend extra time with him to make sure he turns out "good".  He's a paladin of Shelyn, so I feel like his family probably raised him to be fairly religious and he would probably do church-y stuff with his younger siblings.  I also feel like he would be in charge of arts and crafts in his household probably, and would always have little crafts planned out for his siblings until he goes off to be a paladin.  He probably becomes a paladin to protect them, actually!

Tristo, eros 5:

Tristo usually doesn't feel very attractive.  He doesn't think he's unattractive either though, he's very neutral about himself and it's not directly linked to his confidence?  I feel like he doesn't think he deserves love, but he wants it so badly. He doesn't directly tie that to how attractive he feels though, it's more like he thinks love is messy and loving him is messy and 'it's awful work' and aaaa he's such a mess tbh I love my angsty boy

Venna, philia 5: SPOILERS for wotr here heheh

Venna wants her best friends to just be content.  I feel like in WOTR she's platonically closest to Woljif, Lann, and Seelah (and romantically closest to Daeran). She works against her own interests sometimes to make sure they're just okay at the very least. On that note, in her playthrough of the game she does what she thinks is best for Lann, and lets him try to fight Savamalekh on his own and when he dies she's just b e r e f t and doesn't recover for a while afterwards. His death makes her trust people less honestly, and I feel like she doesn't handle loss well after that.

Wyleth, philautia 3:

Wyleth is the "lawbringer" archetype basically in our tyrant's grasp game. She suffered a lot when her family and all of her childhood friends were wiped out in the orc raid on Roslar's Coffer and it kind of codified her sense of justice and the standards she holds herself and others to. She's not really hypocritical because of this and has a pretty high set of standards for others and even higher standards for herself. Her partner is the only person who really keeps her in check as far as that goes. He's a former priest or cleric (idr which I actually decided on) of Zon-kuthon and thinks that the mental abuse she puts herself through when she fails herself is worse than any physical pain he experienced (or inflicted) back then.

Let me talk a bit about Saahe’s family. His dad is still a bit of a question mark, because yes, he’s a full-blooded drow, but I need to do more research into drow in general to decide where he originates from, whether he’s from the Underdark or not.

But regardless of where he’s from, he met Saahe’s mother way back when she was 23 years old. She’s always been a rather... Headstrong woman, unafraid of breaking the mold or busting the expectations placed on her (or of anything else for that matter). So where most would’ve been a bit nervous upon meeting a drow, she was only intrigued, and regardless of Saahe’s father’s exact origins, she would’ve been the first friendly face he saw in a long time.

Long story short, ~romance~. Unfortunately her parents weren’t such fans of that, and when she straight up announced she’d marry the drow, they openly voiced their disapproval.

Strangely enough, they each died one after another not too long after that! But they were both old. She was their youngest and had seven siblings, so no one was surprised old age would finally claim them.

Now, she’s never told anyone what really happened to her parents, not even her husband, but her children (and her man too), knowing her, all kinda suspect grandparents may not have died so innocently, even if even Saahe’s oldest sister was born after their timely demise so none of them ever met them.

But so! Grandparents still owned their farm. All Saahe’s mom needed to do upon their deaths was make sure she would be the one to inherit it instead of any of her siblings, which wasn’t too hard since all the rest had already established their own lives at various places, and none had any real interest in returning to the farm. She was the only one of the children still living and working there, helping out her parents and whatnot.

She succeeded in that, the farm was now in her name, she successfully married the drow dude, and they had their first child together very soon after because Saahe’s mother is a woman on a mission in everything she does, and at that point in time the mission was to make some tiny helping hands. Of course it’d be a delay of a few years before they’d be any use, but it’s a long term investment!

Don’t get her wrong, she does love her children. However, momma Teren is, above all, a pragmatic woman. You don’t need to pay wages to your children so better to have those work than employed farmhands.

Of course, children also don’t stick around forever, so by the present day with Saahe having set out on the adventuring life, his two older siblings have left home and started their own families, leaving only the two youngest still at the farm.

And about that. Considering the personalities of his two older siblings, Alane and Khaishal, people in general were expecting that they might get kinda adventurous and forego the quiet life. With Saahe, the expectation was that he’d just start a family someplace, not venture way out into the wide world.

That didn’t happen. Alane and Shal are both married with children and perfectly happy that way. Meanwhile, Saahe just kind of took off in lieu of finding himself a partner. Sure, he found a partner on his travels, but that absolutely was not his goal.

Warszawa, park Arkadia.

The first shot Evan Wright took of Colbert, in an attempt to break the ice. Colbert was not too pleased. Colbert would later frame this photograph on his wall.

Holsey was not very thrilled to meet Wright, either. Bonus: Doc Bryan in the background, lying down.

In the lead-up to the 1st Recon 20 year reunion, (which is happening this month!), Evan Wright has published some never seen before shots he took on that fateful embed.

this is probably one of the most niche fandom posts i'll ever make but i was rereading the young elites trilogy and i realized.

teren santoro 🤝 eli ever:

- regeneration powers

- part of a rare group who gained powers after a near-death experience (the blood fever counts right?)

- condemns that same group and dedicates their life to hunting down the rest of them

- self-hatred

do you see it. i'll be surprised if even one person sees this and recognizes both characters but tell me you see it.

sword too heavy :(

oc posts don't do well on tumblr but whatever here's some oc sketches

Good news! My already overly long Generation Kill fic for Ray/Doc Bryan Unit finally continues after almost a year of being shamefully neglected!

Current word count: 540.000

I'm also starting to post another fic in the Unit verse, which is a Teren Holsey/Micheal Stinetorf story called The World's Smallest Book Club.

It has 380.000 words so far, so get ready for a lot of plot, character development and (of course, you know me) smut ;D

something I love doing with my OCs is giving them shipnames. get fandomed idiot

hi!! wanted to ask if you have any favorite books, either that you've read recently or of all time. Your prose is insane and I need to broaden my own vocabulary so if you have any book recs, fiction or nonfiction, I'd love to know :')

Hii :D ! ahaha, what a well-timed question; lately I've become the kind of guy who just really wants to talk about what people are reading, or are planning to read, and responding in kind, so thanks for giving me an opportunity to indulge that, haha. What a wicked invention the printing press was!!! (Also--thank you!! I'm glad my prose is to your taste. I'm happy !💕)

If you don't mind, I'll put a cut on this right away, because I know I'm very talkative, but let me put a TLDR above for all the novels/authors I mention here. Disclaimer also that I am kind of a dunce (I think you know this) so I like silly shit a lot of times . please be nice to me adfhbjkdg. :D

(No nonfiction also because I'm a frivolous and unworldly little sprite or something but if you want straight philosophy [which counts] come back and I'll do my Top Ten Epic Platonic Dialogues Compilation for you .)

TLDR: Read any UKLG you get your hands on, Cain by Jose Saramago, or any Saramago (though maybe not Skylight, which is not a good introduction to Saramago), very much enjoyed Sartre's The Age of Reason recently, Shadow & Claw or The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. If you feel like it, come off anon and tell me what you like, so I can give more tailored recommendations!!

Now if you're asking for favorites, like just the particular and arbitrary objects of my partiality, that stir my stupid little heart, the true answer is probably UKLG's The Farthest Shore, just because it is very special to me. I can't, of course, in good conscience, recommend the third novel of a six-novel fantasy series to someone (but of course read Le Guin, everyone should be reading Le Guin, it's dire for universal soteriology that we all read Le Guin; You'll probably get told to start with Left Hand of Darkness, and that's pretty solid. I liked The Lathe of Heaven as well. And if you read any Le Guin it doesn't hurt to pick up a copy of the Tao. I love the Tao man.)

Some friendlier recommendations, though:

José Saramago is someone I really consider peerless; There's no way to pick up a Saramago and not know who's written it. Cain is a bit drier, a bit more abrasive (almost accusatory, in that particular way you'll find in a Buddhist parable) and bleak than some other Saramagos, but it's one I like (perhaps for the trite reason that I like bucolic atmospheres and Classical antiquity as a setting) so it's the one I'll put forward.

Uhh, I've also been enjoying Sartre's Roads to Freedom lately, starting with The Age Of Reason. I'm partway through the second novel and umm... despite all the other things you could say about Sartre, lmfao, let it not be said that he is not a serious literary force. Serious is maybe the only word for it. Dire, too. I keep a commonplace book, so usually I take excerpts, but this was the first time in memory that I felt compelled to commit entire pages, ahah (I just took pictures though, fuck copying all that).

If you're itching for esoteric language, Shadow of the Torturer (as usually collected with Claw of the Conciliator in a single omnibus edition titled Shadow & Claw; the first of the give-or-take five volume Urth series) by Gene Wolfe will scratch you BLOODY. If you're particularly fussy, you might be irritated by your compulsion to Google, but I find it really makes the experience when you type in a word and the only results are "what the fuck did Gene Wolfe mean by this?" hahaha; Honestly, though, those kinds of complaints are borne from a lack of immersion, but you'll notice pretty quickly that the verbiage is a pretty crucial vehicle OF the immersion.

It may or may not become a commitment, though, if you like Urth enough to want to read through, so if you want Wolfe without the strings--though less of the exciting vocabulary, which is pretty necessarily constrained to Urth--I'd really highly recommend The Fifth Head of Cerberus (the novella OR the novel, I mean the former is volumized in the latter so just start it and if you feel like stopping then stop, haha). Mr. Terminal E is incredible but I scrape enough time out of my daily life to gush about his crazy literary density so I won't do it again here (you should ask my coworker, lmfao, who one time went "stop, hold on, hold on." because my face started getting really red while I was explaining to him some Wolfean gesture). If you read any Wolfe, and I mean ANY Wolfe, because his permatypes and his manipulations of them are endlessly interesting, feel free to come back and chat with me over it!!!

I guess I have to disclaim that my habit is mostly to pick through an author's corpus over a course of, usually, a couple years, and then sometimes I'll read things that will inform my understanding of the genre conventions or currents that the author is writing in (been enjoying Golden Age sci-fi recently)--it's not really as deliberate of a process as it sounds, but I think if you were to map my habits, that's the landscape of it. This means, though, that my reading is actually pretty narrow in scope, and I am not very well read or very knowledgeable in general (who is, in this economy) but it does mean that of the authors I do like, I can probably find the novel that'll work best for your taste.

If you want to come off anon, or I guess just leave another message, haha, (or if someone else wants to, idgaf, we're all friends here at tumblr user hazeism) describing the things you like or look for in a novel I can probably give you a more relevant recommendation. I've been dosing people up a lot lately tbh, it's like a parlor trick I've been doing; I have a conversation with someone and afterwards they'll have a PDF with a relevant Asimov story in their messages, hahaha. I can't help myself sometimes.

Come back anyway, though, if you read anything I talked about, okay? I want to hear about it 🥺

And alsooo (turning to face the audience) if anyone ever wants to put recs in my inbox (or my dms : ) slow replies though sorry I'm a hermit) I'd be happy to take 'em down. Can't guarantee I'll read them in a timely manner, or that you'll ever find out if/when I do, but it's good for me to leave my comfort zone.

Watanare 5

Author: Teren Mikami

Illustrator: Eku Takeshima

Label:  Dash Ex Bunko

Release Date: 24 February 2023

My Score: 2/5

English Release: This series is currently being published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment under the the title of There’s No Freaking Way I’ll be Your Lover! Unless... so please pick it up if the series interests you.

At the end of last volume, Renako made a choice: she would date both Mai and Ajisai and make them both happy. The volume ended with a cliffhanger with Satsuki messaging Renako and asking to date her too. At the start of this volume, Satsuki confronts Renako who has been avoiding her. Satsuki tries to convince Renako to take on a third girlfriend but when Renako asks Satsuki if she’s seriously in love with her, Satsuki passes things off as a joke. Meanwhile, the new throuple is going strong with Mai and Ajisai satisfied with how things have ended up but Renako’s just not confident that she can make the two loves of her life happy. And the third plot of this volume begins when the Queentet (that is, Mai, Ajisai, Satsuki, Kaho, and Renako) are challenged by a group calling themselves the 5(Go)dèsse. The showdown will decide who are the popular girls in the school and will take place during the upcoming sports carnival.

First of all, let me say one thing: this volume is way too long. It clocks in at 488 pages. For comparison with some of my recent reads, Sword Oratoria 13 was 376 pages and YouZitsu 10 was 328 pages. The only volume I’ve read recently that surpasses this one in page length is Danmachi 18 which is 640 pages which is more excusable seeing as it’s a fantasy, the climax of an arc, and was written by an author with an excellent sense of pacing. Watanare has none of those excuses and this volume was such a slog to get through as a result. I would never feel like picking it up because I knew that the chapters would take me forever to get through. If the plot was more interesting, this wouldn’t have been as much of a problem, but so much of this volume was bogged down by subplots and random scenes. For example, there’s a subplot where Mai’s servant disapproves of Renako and believes her to be unworthy. This is an unnecessary subplot that becomes very annoying once there’s a random scene where the servant baths Renako and gives her an erotically charged massage to “prepare” her for her date with Mai. It was so uncomfortable and did not need to be here. The subplot does have some payoff as it’s referenced in the cliffhanger set up for volume 6 but that scene made me so uncomfortable and made me remember why I never really liked this series.

As for the main plots, Satsuki’s storyline doesn’t get a resolution here and didn’t get nearly as much focus as I thought it would. There were several times in the volume that I forgot that it was even a thing that was going on because she just didn’t appear much. It does seem like she will be a focus in volumes 6 & 7 but I was disappointed in her plotline here. Otherwise, so much of this volume is just Renako training for the sports carnival and scenes of her practicing basketball. The sports carnival subplot also introduces so many new characters at once and I could not keep track of all of their names. It was good to see Renako giving her all for the sake of her girls but it got real repetitive and boring. Her scenes with Mai and Ajisai were cute and I’m happy for polyamory representation but I couldn’t bring myself to really care about them. Also, we are 5 volumes into this series and Renako is dating two girls and she still insists that she’s not attracted to girls!!! This is so annoying!!! I’m guessing this might get addressed as some internalised homophobia in future volumes but it’s still super annoying in the mean time.

Overall, I was really disappointed in this volume. I remember really enjoying volume 4 and I think I just forgot about how boring and uncomfortable this series can be. I don’t think I’m going to read volume 6 as I was kinda satisfied with how this volume ended and I don’t feel like I want or need to read more.

Teren and Arachne, Taylor and Liu's parents. Arachne was the lover of their bio parents but she didn't contribute directly to the kid, so Taylor's not related to her by blood, and Teren came into the picture afterwards. Liu is a direct product of Arachne and Teren, though, and inherited the latter's knack for magic to the great chagrin of the local witch.

Teren is from Terios originally, and formally works as a trader selling antiques and valuables that he brought with him, though mostly he prefers to not do work (the stodgy, dour work ethic widely espoused in Hoarfrost doesn't necessarily agree with his free-spirited corner-cutting mentality). He's trustworthy deep down, though, as he knows the witch is getting on in years and chasing him around to scold him is no good for her health.

As one of the island's senior weavers, Arachne is a pretty sought-after and well-respected lady. Childhood sickness left her with permanent facial palsy but she's mastered how to turn it to her advantage with gracious, enigmatic half-smiles.

Taylor thinks she's pretty much the coolest and wants to be like her when they're older.