wild

i draw fantasy women

[evakilroy]

but…

[evakilroy]

you could follow me here or on telegram (https://t.me/myrthmyth) ♥️ i love fantasy but no one sees my oc art here which is sad… so…. i’d be flattered

чертиха рисует

и не пиздит

[evakilroy]

fem version actually…. ummmmm

[dakeus-art]

The Drowned “pilot”

This last summer I started working on a project that’s been cooking in my head for a while. I took the opportunity of a school assignment to make the first 8 pages of a hypothetical comic, now called The Drowned.

The Drowned will follow Aconito as she discovers what’s causing her nightmares, what really keeps her bound to her home and what it takes to leave the past behind. It’s set in a land inspired by my own, the northern italian region Veneto, with its fog, rivers and folklore.

Months have passed since I first started working on this project and let me say: I don’t like anything about these 8 pages anymore. The characters’ designs are weak (if not straight up ugly) and the setting is not what I truly envisioned. But! It’s a starting point! There will be more to come in the future.

[fuckyeahwomeninarmor]

Sequel to the previous image. Painting of another scene from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, this one done by artist Mary F. Raphael in 1898. It depicts Lady Amoret kissing the hand of her rescuer, the female knight Britomart. Has a lovely femslash vibe!

[platoapproved]

Just so you guys know they totally do it in the poem.  Amoret insists on having her own room while she thinks Britomart is a man, until she finds out she’s a woman and is like OH, THAT CHANGES THINGS and they hop in bed and Spenser gives the renaissance poetic equivalent of “AND THEN THEY HAD A LOT OF FUN LET ME TELL YOU”

[evakilroy]

“if you want to fight monsters you should become a monster”

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

[mindfulwrath]

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

[jeanjauthor]

I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.

[oh-opossum]

One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.

[brehaaorgana]

More stuff!:

European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own

Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!

R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.

Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.

Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.

Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide

Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...

Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...

Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)

[dedicatedfollower467]

If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!

[aetherograph]

@thelawfulchaotic resources for u!

[evakilroy]

hiii today is my birthday!! so thank you for repost i guess

[peptodismaltruck]

was thinking about why the lack of female characters in lotr and the hobbit dosen't feel like exclusion and it's because they're just dudes being friends, like they are all just a gang of besties wandering about and the three female characters basically go "right we're doing this now" and they all just go "alright we're doing this now :)"

[nothingiswrongwithyourarmrests]

The women are treated as people, who are important, but happen not to be the current main characters. The men aren't men because they are better than women at swinging swords, they just happen to be male. They go off to war/ the quest because it happens to fall into their hands. None of them particularly want to. They all want to go back to their life at home where they left the women and families.

Mrs Maggot is kind and sensible. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is jealous and petty but in the end principled and stout. Arwen is beautiful and kind and learned. Galadriel is powerful and ancient and wise, but is tempted by terrible power. The Ents have lost their womenfolk and miss them, because without women there is a loss greater than not reproducing. Ioreth of the houses of healing talks too much and is a little annoying but is knowledgeable and capable. Eowyn believed her work looking after her uncle to be less important than going to war, but she realizes she was wrong. It may be noble to lay down your life, but it's possible to keep on living and building and healing and that is more important than any battle, and much better than making a home in your despair. Rosie Cotton is faithful and patient and does not take bullshit and keeps the hearth warm in times of crisis.

The women aren't excluded. They have other important things to do.

[mistmoonandheart]

But why in the first movie are all the representatives from the different species, elf/dwarf/human, men? These are the important people, the leaders, the best and they're all men.

[defiantcatlady]

lotr doesn't feel like exclusion because women are used to making ourselves forget we're women in order to enjoy a story, especially if said story is otherwise enjoyable. we're very good at pretending that our womanhood isn't an integral part of our humanity.

the only female characters in lotr who actually sort of affect the plot at all are galadriel and eowyn. arwen pines and rosie cotton doesn't exist until the last 15 minutes of the last movie. and they're both very much a male character's reward.

lotr is a story that someone deliberately wrote, not a documentary. no quest "just happened" to fall into anyone's hands, it was all a deliberate choice the writer(s) made. tolkien could have just as easily made one or more of the members of the fellowship a woman. peter jackson could have decided to make that change too, and it would have been less detrimental to the story than whatever he did to gondor.

they chose not to make even one of the main characters female, and it's very much because women aren't full humans to them, and so they couldn't even imagine using female characters to discuss such deeply human things as hope and regret and longing.

[hugewoman]

@icarus-free @nothingiswrongwithyourarmrests

The reach is so unreal it’s pathetic. Think critically please, I’m begging you to think critically with your adult brain.

It probably would be more believable that the ladies you rattled off had that imaginary “better and more important shit to do in the shire while four idiot male teenage hobbits went off and saved the goddamn world” you’re talking about if you hadn’t just listed off pretty much the only female hobbit characters that have names

Rosie cotton has exactly ONE speaking line where she lets Sam know they thought he was dead but she waited for him. So romantic! Love that for her, get it girlfriend. It’s awesome for him that Sam gets rewarded for working so hard in the journey by marrying a nice girl when he gets home. That really rules for him

Now speaking of speaking roles - what was Mrs maggots first name again? Remind me

Except that was a trick question actually because according to the LOTR wiki she doesn’t fucking have one. Real important female background character, there. Lotta depth of personality. Literally her only known detail is that she’s someone’s wife. Fuck all the way off with calling her “kind and sensible” you don’t know shit about her because all ANYONE knows about her is that she’s a farmers wife - I’m pretty sure that makes her not even a character, just a background detail. Like, prove me wrong and tell me even one canon fact or quote about her.

And you DEFINITELY can’t call the entwives female LOTR characters because they’re never named, never speak, never mentioned as more than details in someone else’s story, and are out of the picture before OUR story even fucking begins.

Plus the very fact that Galadriel has such a long cool history as one of the oldest female elves is not exactly as dope as it seems when it clicks that she’s basically the equivalent of at least three different women he didn’t want to take the trouble to make into separate characters. “Long lived” say less JRR we get how hard it is to craft complex characters, you did your best

And the fact that Tolkien wrote literal armies of named and relevant and important male characters for his world and like six women is not something you can philosophize away just because unnamed and unspoken women exist in the background of his world??? Like pull your head out of your goddamn ass. This is some women who cooked the last supper shit. Being there and being completely ignored and unexplored does not a character make.

Stop giving men credit they haven’t earned! Stop praising the absolute bare fucking minimum- yeah I guess he could have explicitly said middle earth has no females and he chose not to do that, good girlboss choice JRR, thanks for not doing that. That’s how you sound.

Listen I also love Arwen and Galadriel and Eowyn, but at a certain point we have to simply be able to admit to ourselves that the dude wrote exactly three female characters in his entire world that were important enough to be included in his narrative. No more, no reaching to try and include every background female ever mentioned. Cause if we do that we can also include thorins sister Dis, and bards wife and daughters, and crazy Tom bombadils forest wife Goldberry. But they also contributed neither jack nor shit to the story, so it’s not exactly meaningful to call them good representation of women in fantasy fiction.

[radgoblin]

You can enjoy media while also being critical of it - in fact, that's preferable. What's shitty is trying to make excuses for its failings to make yourself feel better about liking it.

[ms-hells-bells]

tolkien’s belief in women

another letter he wrote talks about women an wifely duties, and another scorns feminism.

[annie-on-my-mind]

I think that the above quote is only a glimpse into how awful the letter is, and would recommend reading the entire thing (letter 43, written to his son Michael in 1941), but especially the entire paragraph.

Later, in letter 53, he condemns the spread of feminism (among other things) as diminishing the diversity of the world.

[xxriverdaughterxx]

Preface: I'm talking about the books here, and not the films. The problem is the books are about war from the perspective of Good Guys (TM). Guys being 'men', and Good being 'British, But Not The Realistically Destructive And Rapey Kind, I Mean The Kind That Appreciates Nature'. The idealized Naturalist, in other words - holding primacy over nature (and women, though to Tolkien they're the same), but deserving of this dominion.

So while he sought to create a representation of the horrors that men at war experienced in an increasingly mass-industrialized era, Tolkien failed to represent men at war accurately: that is, that there has never, in the history of the world, been an army of men that does not rape women as part of war praxis. There has never been a non-destructive army, because armies are destructive. It's what makes LoTR (and the silmarillion) fantasy.

Tolkien was absolutely a misogynist who believed that men couldn't have meaningful relationships with women. To be clear. I'm not trying to absolve him. But that's why it's written like that. I'm glad he didn't write more women, it would have been just as insulting as Eowyn - where (again, in books) she basically just wants to be a solider because an incel who wasn't a Good Man made her mind sick, and once she met a Good Man, she was perfectly happy to settle and become 'healthy' - to marry and have children and have no ambition - in other words, to be a Real Woman.

There's a reason that all of his depictions of women involve men who haven't seen a chick for months going AWOOOGA about how gorgeous all the women are. Sexual appeal is are all women are, to the mind of a man at war. And he wrote these as a man at war.

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

Something I find, uh, *interesting*, in his legendarium is the sexism with absolutely no explanation of why it exists. As the devout Catholic he was, he would know that the notion of women as lesser doesn't just happen out of nowhere. Christians have the Adam and Eve story. Eve is tempted by the serpent and therefore this somehow justifies male dominion over women, but there's not anything like that in the legendarium.

It's that "benevolent" patriarchy that says women are for giving good counsel to their husbands and the men should listen. Yet the men make the decisions. We know that later in Numenor, women can inherit the rulership, and this is considered good, as Miriel is narratively portrayed as the rightful Queen, but why in Numenor's beginnings could women not inherit the rulership, resulting in the two sceptres?

The man could not conceive of a world without sexism even as he acknowledged (some of) the problems with it. The women are frequently presented as wiser than the men, and narratively, the choices they make definitely are, but it functions as an excuse to take them out of the story. Nerdanel gives her husband Feanor a big fuck you when she refuses to leave Valinor with him. That's great! He's awful. But guess whose story we follow and guess who we never see again?

[xxriverdaughterxx]

^ Yes!! Thingol and Melian I think exemplify this the most obnoxiously. Melian is literally a... like angel equivalent, or if we consider elves to be demigods in a way, then Maia are lesser gods, with Vala being medium-level under the head honcho Iluvatar. Whatever semantic you choose, Melian outranks him as an entire *type of being*. And yet it's STILL her job to only counsel, nothing more. Never to decide, because men are the movers of destiny.

Just as how the half-elven line comes from the marriage of a human man with an elven woman, twice - never a human woman with an elven man. The idea was explored in Morgoth's Ring, but in that case, the elf man was like "No, I can't make you feel those feelings :(" as if it was some chivalrous thing. Or as if he himself couldn't stand the eternity of suffering after she dies, but female Elves can withstand the sadness of their male partners dying, because women were made to sit and weep. Almost every time we see a woman making change in The Silmarillion, it's through her fucking weeping and moaning and something magically coming of their beautiful pure sadness or whatever the hell.

And it's again repeated in LoTR, where Arwen (half-elven, though of her elf mother and Elrond who chose the destiny of elves rather than that of men) marries the Campbellian hero-archetype Aragorn (not technically half-elven by that point, but rather descended from a very long lineage of men starting with Elros, who chose to be human.) Women may nominally surpass men in his universe, but regardless of the lip service he paid, he didn't respect women as independent people. For fuck's sake, look at Aredhel.

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

^That's repeated often.

Galadriel (and I love Galadriel, I love her story, but in context, it's a pattern) wants a kingdom of her own to rule, and her arc, the thing that makes her great, is that she never gives into darkness to make it happen and ultimately never does become a queen. And for that, she's accepted back into Valinor.

Eowyn wants glory in battle, but it's presented as suicidal, so her arc is learning to value peace and healing.

Aredhel wants to get out from her father's yoke and ends up coercively married, held prisoner, and eventually killed for it.

Nienor wanted to help find her brother and...well...

And yeah, Melian being right about everything and being a demigod (the only Maia to even have children if I'm not mistaken, unless you count Ungoliant, but no one's really sure what she is), she's still relegated to her husband's advisor.

[walmart-the-official]

Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore

[bleu-guacamole]

Might I add, free database of mostly European folklore and myths

[bogleech]

A Book of Creatures by @a-book-of-creatures doesn't update these days but is another thing along these lines, really huge, fully illustrated all by the author and cites all sources

[aimseytv]

[evakilroy]

more su gals!!

[evakilroy]

well i’m gonna post some original art too bc maybe when i’ll find my audience they will enjoy it

buuut i’m not sure how to tag it here

anyway i’m definitely going to do writing practice in english (i need to defeat this language) aaaand there’s my main heroines (an heroes) of the story wandering around swamps

[fenkko]

one who had dreams of being a hero

This comic is based on Story 3, which speaks of his hobby of ice fishing originating from the days he'd go out with his father on the ice, 'accompanied by his father's unending tales of adventure,' and dream of being the protagonist.

Nowadays, he keeps up the hobby, though only as a method of training... and it seems he fishes alone.

I thought a lot about fairytales and stories told to children -- how they are used to impart lessons and shape a child's growing sense of morality.

I think these stories were Childe's father telling him what kind of man he hoped his son would become.

In Story 5, 'his father had no choice but to hand his beloved son over for conscription into the Fatui' in an attempt to discipline his temper, but was disappointed when Childe continued ascending the ranks, further and further from the gentle boy he was..

His father named him after the hero Ajax. Is he still disappointed in the path Childe has taken? Does he still see his son in the man he sees before him? Does Childe feel in himself the chasm between who he dreamed of becoming and who he is now?

It's interesting, that fairytales should often have a very strict good/evil morality. Childe professes he has no use for such things, and will gladly become a mindless weapon so long as he can continue honing himself for battle. And yet, has he truly given up on being human?

For a Harbinger, Childe is oddly principled, preferring straightforward battles without deceit. He retains a sort of moral code, reluctant to involve those who are defenseless in his plans.

And of course, he deeply cherishes his family. What sort of weapon has a family? Why does he cling so desperately to this identity as a defender of childhood dreams, of being his sister Tonia's knight?

Perhaps his own dream of being a hero died long ago, but a part of him still recognizes the tragedy of it and maybe... in some way, is still trying.

This is somewhat of a companion piece to my Scara comic "one who has given up on being saved". Childe, unable to live up to his childhood ideals of heroism, and Scara, whose pleas for help went unanswered.

A failed hero, and someone who never had one.

ARGHH yknow it drives me nuts. I haven't known peace since I started thinking about it.

There are NO LIMITS on the HAMS

one who has given up on being saved

[evakilroy]

“But in Jean's heart, she would rather be a shield that defends freedom and song than a sword that cuts through corruption and darkness.

"Protecting" has always been a tougher task than "destroying."

[ahotknife]

i really do fucking love the train. i sit it goes we arrive etc

[evakilroy]

i’m not sure is oc content have chances here but i’m actually mostly oc artist so let’s try o guess

[evakilroy]

i adore them