EE Sharp @eesharp - Tumblr Blog

Baron & Zombie is releasing!

It's my Cold War Urban Fantasy novel, serializing now on RR, Scribblehub, and my own website. I'm so proud to be putting it out there, and while I doubt there'll be a ton of traffic via Tumblr, I still wanna brag about it briefly. :3

RR: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/177064/baron-zombie-cold-war-urban-fantasy

Scribblehub: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/2416502/baron--zombie-cold-war-urban-fantasy/

Website: https://baronandzombie.com/

The BLURB:

Prestige is power. Toil for the gods, make a wish, and receive a miracle.

New York City, the spring of 1952. Secular power is ascendant, and atomic weaponry casts a long shadow over the Earth. Yet secret cults still influence the course of nations. Cultists pull strings and slit throats, using money and magic to empower their vast conspiracies.

An elite Soviet assassin vanishes with the Cat o’ Nine Lives, an ancient artifact which grants its bearer the right to die nine deaths. In desperation, a waning faction of the Soviet cult hires the ageless madman-philosopher Baron d’Holbach and his invincible right hand, the Zombie. Their task? Recover the artifact in secrecy, on American soil, before the world learns the Cat is gone.

If they fail, then a carefully managed balance of power will collapse, the Cold War will turn hot, and nuclear armageddon will soon follow.

Despite the stakes, they won’t be welcome in the halls and temples of the gods. They are living relics, responsible for diminishing the power of magic in the world, and the Baron in particular is reviled for interfering in occult politics. But the Zombie insists—they will interfere, and if the Baron dies during their mission, the Zombie will bury the world along with him.

Baron & Zombie is a historical urban fantasy set in the early Cold War, in an age when magic is waning and technology is ascendant, and old forces move once again to decide the fate of nations.

What to expect:

Think of a le Carré spy novel and urban fantasy action in a modern style.

Complicated Cold War politics, where no side seems right but your own.

Realistic treatment of a magical alt Earth with deep history and myth.

Philosophy. Steep odds demand moral choices.

6 chapters release today, one per hour, with the 8 following chapters already available on Patreon, for a total of 14 right now. Over the next two weeks, I'll release another 10 chapters, and then we'll settle into a Wednesday / Saturday release cadence until the book finishes, totaling 270k words.

Early access to chapters will continue to be available throughout its serialization, from June 29th to November 25th, 2026. I'll keep a running total of 8 additional chapters, 4k to 6k in length, for an average of 40k early words. You can also subscribe to the Patreon free just to get notifications and updates.

As B&Z nears completion, I'll start posting early access to my already finished sci-fi epic, Love and Extinction in Equal Measure, so stay tuned for that as well!

If you don't like reading on Patreon itself, you can log into my book website using the Patreon button at the bottom of the front page. My book site includes its own Wordpress comments and light and dark reader modes!

#novel #prose #urban fantasy #cold war era #royal road

shih-na

and it's awesome

viralfrog

nathaliehaha

It was always about Power. Denji spent all of part two trying to find something that could fill the Power-shaped hole in his life. But he never would, because Power was the best friend he'd ever had and nothing could replace her

In the end, when the world became too far gone for anything else to save it, Pochita destroyed himself so Denji's pact with Power could finally be fulfilled. And that's what saved the world: The Power of that promise forged in true friendship.

They finally made it to that next life where they could be friends again. And now, they get to go on whatever dumbfuck bevis and butthead style misadventures they want to forever, while Denji's little sister Nayuta plays gameboy and pets her dogs. And I genuinely couldn't have asked for more than that.

xsoldier

So, to preface my post here, I'd like to focus on the end of the first Chainsaw Man Arc, and the new chapter that released today.

Chainsaw Man Chapter 96:

Chainsaw Man Chapter 231:

So, there are two possibilities for what we get in Chapter 232.

Anyone familiar with the trilogy structure knows that the middle entry is the crucible where — the heroes LOSE. That's very much where we're at in Chapter 231. If Chainsaw Man goes for a Part 3, it makes sense that what happens in the middle is doing your best and having EVERYTHING go sideways and get blown to pieces, and being left with nothing but the hope that maybe there's a way to go on.

Alternatively, it COULD also end here since this sort of abrupt end of serialization does happen in the manga industry. Plus, jumping into a new arc also makes it easy for the anime adaptation to have all the material it needs to move onto that when it wraps up with the first Arc (given the massive success of the Reze Arc film), so that OR ending the series both allow that to move smoothly for the anime-only crowd.

Depending on what Chapter 232 looks like, we may instead be headed for this sort of an ending where things circle back after a journey that's just a ton of madness, which is also in line with what this Arc always was intended to be (for better or worse).

Either way, it'll be interesting to see what March 24th has in store, and I'm quite looking forward to it, 'cause I think either scenario has potential, so I want to expand a bit on both.

Objectively when you zoom out to the big picture of how the conflict has progressed, the world has just gone into a spiral of getting completely and utterly fucked up — and Chainsaw Man has been at the center of it (even before the point where we start our story from the details we glean from Makima in the first arc).

By this point though, the sexual reproductive cycle of insects and other pests scaled into an apocalypse rapidly with the end of Death, and so fear of these creatures would also escalate exponentially as they started feeding on everyone. That's why there's an irony in Denji being so excited about having sex in Chapter 230 as that's literally the mechanism by which the whole world is being consumed. It's EVERYONE'S downfall.

Thus, our reports of what's happening in the conflict at scale are always reports coming from Fumiko, the woman who has a contract with the Sexually Transmitted Disease Devil which causes anyone who has unprotected sex with her to become a perfect duplicate of her… and so what happens when she is now surviving as "the flesh & blood of bugs and beasts" — does her contract still apply?

The Horsmen we've met thus far have been War, Famine, & Death… but the remaining force that is overpowering everything now is likely Fumiko's greatest fear and (according to some translations of the Apocalyptic texts) also the final remaining horseman — PESTILENCE.

As abrupt as it may seem, this balance of power shifting is still perfectly in line thematically with everything that's been building up. It's done in a way such that, I'll probably be satisfied regardless of the path that the manga takes from here.

There are purposeful parallels to the start of the series in Chapter 1 in the panels used:

But there's also a key callback to a flashback with Power and the experience of loss from Chapter 7, which has always been at the center of what's driven Denji's heart:

Pochita specifically says, “In a world without me, maybe you could keep dreaming.” which directly evokes the same metaphor and brings everything back to the OTHER lost friend Denji has never managed to find, and whose death had these same visual parallels when saving Denji's life in the first Arc.

There are plenty of threads that could get pulled on, but Chainsaw Man has ALWAYS been a story about struggling through loss and it's still delivering that.

Also, speaking more personally on that note:

This chapter feels like loss — as a lot of the time, the deaths of the people you care about will just blindside you. There is no warning. You don't get to finish the things you wanted to. It's an “Oh, shit. Wait, what? No way! This can't be what's happening!” and you're just tossed into a world without them, and it also feels like it's this partial echo of all the other times it's happened and an echo of those emotions.

I'm also going to mention… we still never discovered why Pochita had puncturing bite wounds when young Denji first found him, and it's interesting that he's injured in the same way when everything is seemingly sent back here. Also, the fact that this happened just after Denji gained a separate Red form he called Denji-Man with those powers in Chapter 222 focuses on how much he's grown. Whatever happens… it does feel like Denji will be able to find a dream worth pursuing.

Edit: Here are my follow-up thoughts now that Chapter 232 released.

xsoldier

Chapter 232:

Time for everybody to go back to Chapter 90 & 91

Chapter 231 & 232 are EXACTLY the scenario that Power & Denji already discussed which lead to the contract that she made with him back then to find her and make friends with the Blood Devil.

Even if the whole world in Part 2 was consumed by Pestilence and without Death everyone was reduced to being mere flesh & blood constantly alive in other things, Power's abilities wouldn't be diminished. We don't know where she's been this whole time… but she's been SOMEwhere. The last we saw of her powers was in the conclusion of Part 1… LITERALLY AS A CHAINSAW.

Chainsaws still exist because she consumed part of the Chainsaw Devil's power, which is why she replaces Pochita as the one saving Denji originally. Power's blood was used to un-made Makima, so now Nayuta is the Control Devil right from the start, because POWER'S abilities still leave Makima un-made.

This would explain why we literally see Pochita is still in Denji's heart in some form, as well as why this new reality is overwhelmingly Power-Centric, because this is all stemming from HER contract with Denji, and also an extension of Pochita's lingering power that she absorbed back then.

Just like at the end of the Reze Arc, Power just sort of showing up as the aftercredit stinger is quintessentially her whole thing.

It's the same way she shows up to save the day in Chapter 90 that sets the stage for how, even when Denji and Pochita once again find themselves in an unwinnable scenario in Part 2 — she barrels out of left field to lead the path to victory. She makes a contract and refuses to allow Denji to die until he finds and becomes friends with her, and so when Pochita eats himself — this is the result.

This is still 100% a quintessential Chainsaw Man ending through-and-through. Is it THE final ending? Who knows, but it IS completely in line with The Big Lebowski sort of reset that leaves things weird and ambiguously very much un-changed that he spoke about doing with Part 2 (mentioned in my previous post about 231).

There is plenty of framework for a Part 3 if he wants to take it that way, and sufficient closure to end things here if he wants, as well.

Either way — what an utterly wild ride!

drawnsnake

Instead of cursing her to an eternal sleep or death, Maleficent declares that the princess will grow up to betray the kingdom and serve her instead. So the king sends Aurora away, but one day the young adventurous girl strays a bit too far and right into her territory.

And of course Maleficent is like "hey kid do you wanna learn some totally normal magic that is not dark or evil at all"

falsedetective

cake is such an underappreciated band. i can’t believe we brought back low rise flare jeans before we brought back cake in the top 40

falsedetective

i’m just saying cake’s music would be widely regarded as so sexy if it wasn’t for all the mariachi horns and vibraslap and the vocalist didn’t always sound like he was explaining his suicide plans to a gun store clerk in sacramento. the world wasn’t ready for them

digital-morganism-deactivated20

The fact that it sounds like a dispassionate reading of a terrorist manifesto is a feature

apas-99

Refuse to villainise transfems. When you see a transfem being villainised, do not accept it. Do not internalise any narrative in which a transfeminised person is simply evil or untrustable. Always remember that you have not heard her story. If it is material to you, go to the primary source; if it is immaterial, discard it.

ive never seen pmmm and as far as i can tell the black hair glasses girl is some kind of icon for cucked lesbian suffering on the level of a canonised christian martyr

ageae

tikara

I know I keep vanishing from posting art here over the past few years, but I have a good reason for it... I HELPED MAKE A VIDEO GAME!! AND IT'S REALLY GOOD!! All the reviews have been extremely positive!

I wish I could put into words how much it means to me to be so deeply involved in the creation on a critically acclaimed game that many people are enjoying, let alone a game that I myself have been excited for since 2013... but that'll probably be for another time when I actually know what to say haha...

It's out right now on Steam, so go buy it at Mewgenics.com!