Fandom Stuff

Headcanons, Plothooks and sometimes reblogs.

[slayeroforanges]

Lacenet would still exist if Lace were a man, but it might be smaller.

An uncommon but somewhat toxic point that I have seen brought up before is the idea that Yuri is the only appeal, and most Lacenet shippers would give it a wide berth if Lace were a man. This is incorrect. (For me, at least.)

The appeal of Lacenet is the brat-and-responsible-person dynamic and the healing that comes with Lace being in a healthy relationship, alongside the angst and hurt that can be written through such a process. If Lace were a male, indeed, I suspect some people would find Lace less sympathetic, and as a whole, the number of Lacenet shippers would probably decrease, but there is much more to Lacenet than just Yuri. I'd still ship Lacenet no matter what gender Lace or Hornet is; who's with me?

[fandom-and-plothooks]

Lace being "a brat" as featured in common Lacenet dynamics is honestly distending her character to fit the feminine archetypes for such. Male-Lace's fandom interpretation naturally drawing from the masculine analogues would be almost guaranteed to be in the "punk" space, given her violence on bystanders for entertainment and violence on authority figures out of spite for limited agency aforementioned distension mostly glosses over.

Given the amount of complaints about power dynamics in Pharloom I've seen, this could actually go quite well since he'd be a clean audience-insert for "burn this mess to the ground" contrasted against Hornet who's familiar with how bad that gets, how actually running things works no matter how much of her doesn't want to, and possibly even "clean" regime-change depending on how her parents' respective claiming of power went.

I'm not aware of any "stock" shipping dynamics in the Tumblr-adjacent space that interface with this well at all, though. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a "well-off manager lady/teacher cleans up a bad boy into a respectable husband" framing for older-woman younger-man relationships, and similar concepts feature in deeply traditional relationship advice I've heard, but I have not come across it myself.

[hornetposting]

btw if anyone is concerned over hornet being related to grand mother silk and therefore being related to lace; the two pieces of info that might have confirmed this are her name, which y’know, could very much just be her title (“mother” is used for quite a few other enemies/characters, gruz mother, moss mother, mitemother). and what first sinner says about grand mother silk calling the weavers her daughters. and in the same bit of dialogue, first sinner says that grand mother silk lied.

grand mother silk evolved the minds of pharlids like how the pale king evolved the minds of hallownest’s bugs. she didn’t literally birth the weavers.

[fandom-and-plothooks]

This could still lead to some "step-niece" angst from interpreting it as relation by adoption, though with how hereditary aristocracies like Hallownest has go it's unlikely to be close enough for Hornet to be bothered and Lace could easily lack an understanding of these matters depending what "basic" knowledge she was made with and how sheltered her life has been.

[the-grand-nebular]

I think many are falling into the same trap with Lace as they did with the Knight, when they finished the first game still believing the Knight was a perfect and hollow Vessel. Despite seeing that Vessels DO have minds, will, and even voices to scream with, the environment and NPCs repeatedly calling us hollow had many take it at face value. In Hollow Knight what the flavor text or NPCs say can be (and often is) directly contradicted by what the player actually sees and experiences.

Lace’s situation explicitly reminds Hornet of her siblings; the parallel is intentional. And all throughout Hollow Knight, Vessels were repeatedly and with confidence said to be empty and soulless and incapable of xyz. The point of the game was that this was Not True. So if an NPC says that Lace is just a doll with one purpose, despite her demonstrating the opposite and not looking or acting like a child whatsoever… it seems like a similar false presumption not to be taken at face value.

When a game involves propaganda and unreliable narrators, a good practice is to trust what you see over what you’re told— especially if what you’re told doesn’t make sense. We see:

Hornet has a roughly teenaged appearance and is often called “child” for it despite being much older (which feels a lot like a deliberate parallel or foreshadowing to me).

Lace’s own body language and way of speaking (which is frankly flirty af and if TC wanted Lace to be a child then dubious writing/character design/animation choices were made, and I have to believe TC is better than that).

Hornet admits that she knew from the start that Lace was a homunculus and thus of indeterminable age; meaning she is in fact insulting Lace’s maturity and matching her energy by being patronizing.

A cinematic confrontation in a field of roses and rescue from the underworld. Thematically loaded imagery that could’ve/should’ve been tweaked if TC didn’t want confusion on such a serious matter (and I again have to believe they’re good enough writers to do so).

The only potential evidence that Lace is a minor is the epithet “child”/ “silk-spun child”, which is commonly not literal and applied to young-looking people, offspring, or teenagers— as is canonically done many times to “the gendered child” who looks “freshly hatched”, Hornet.

(And while we’re at it, Phantom, Lace’s apparent prototype made for the same purpose, is clearly not a child either!)

[fandom-and-plothooks]

Being a fan of the mild xenofiction interpretations where the Vessels have brain damage eerily neatly filled by robot, largely to give the Pale King the credit of having sound reason to believe the plan could work, I'd be fine with the two being genuinely near-indefinitely young with actual psychology and anatomy approximately in the lower end of adolescent yet having the time to learn how to function as adults around the boundaries that entails anyways.

[erynthefriend]

I have vessel headcannons living in my brain

Ok so a lot of these ideas are from @cloudywritingsposts but I've been thinking way too hard about these so here they are:

So I'm pretty sure vessels eating soul is like, obscure cannon??? I may be wrong though, but yeah they eat soul.

I also think that they can kinda technically starve by this logic. As in their void will eventually erode through their shell if they can't replenish it (takes a really long time though)

I also don't think shades are fully dead, like I think they could hypothetically regrow their shells with enough soul/light and that's why they're violent.

But they can't practically do that because they can't properly control themselves so their void ends up just absorbing most of it. Also most of them are in the abyss so they can't get much in the first place.

Wow that got kinda sad

Anyway I think they have really good memory. As in like they literally never forget anything ever without interference. This is mostly from other hcs about void being really good at retaining information but yeah.

Realised these are all kinda voidy. I just think void is really cool.

I probably have more rattling around somewhere (both about vessels and other stuff) but I just think about the vessels too much they're just silly little guys.

[fandom-and-plothooks]

Surviving on Soul alone is fairly reasonable, but it'd be mildly amusing for this to be because they photosynthesize the light they DON'T give off rather than everything running directly on Soul.

I'm more of the opinion that Vessels and Shades "starving" goes through increasingly intense Void-induced loss of mental faculties to incompatibilities with Soul and inaccuracies in the Void mimicking what it saturates, ending with perfect stasis when unprovoked as the Void becomes the sole factor and reaches equilibrium.

In terms of Shades regrowing new shells, I think of it as not particularly rare or difficult, just expensive. This is to use it as an explanation for the landscape of dead Vessels having so few Shades and coming from a remotely reasonable number of eggs.

Memory-wise, I'm partial to vestiges of Wyrm prescience and the stated Void timelessness making it so that they can substitute often-dysfunctional memory (they have brain-rot, after all) with directly looking at their own state at other moments in time. Reliving experiences, more than "merely" remembering them.

[feathers-wastaken]

@progenycursed recent post got me thinking again - except my thoughts ended up drifting to something... not exactly relevant to their post. I made my response to their thoughts in a reblog if you want to see that. Still, credit to the one who got me thinking once more. So you can go ahead and blame Progeny for what I am about to do here :)

AHEM

The Radiance is imposing her will upon the dreams and minds of others. For most, this manifests passively - sort of... a thing that just kind of happens over time to an individual under her light, depending on how much they resist it.

There are, however, two individuals we meet that are being affected by the Radiance in a way that seems much more active and intentional. Sly and Bretta. We see no one else under the spell we see them in. When they are rescued, they never fall under the Radiance's influence again. A rather impressive feat, considering just how affected they were.

Sly makes sense. Regarding the Radiance's influence, Sly's state of mind - his sureness of himself and his ways, coupled with his skill and fortitude - make him very naturally resilient to the Radiance. Take into account that his services are very beneficial to the protagonist, that makes him a logistical threat that the Radiance could not ignore. She couldn't rely on her passive influence to do the work, Sly just shrugs it off without even knowing. She had to put in the effort to take him out - actively invading his mind.

But Bretta? Why would the Radiance target Bretta? She has no logistical significance. Certainly no physical might. State of mind? Very impressionable. She is not sure of herself. In every way, Bretta should very easily fall under the Radiance's passive control. But she didn't. After Bretta was rescued, there was nary a hint of the infection about her - not even in her dream realm.

Her distinct Dream. With its own world and particle affects not seen in any other Dream. And a capability of conjuring an entity of considerable power. All traits only shared by other Higher Beings.

She was a target because she was a potential rival. Bretta is a latent Higher Being and doesn't even know it.

[fandom-and-plothooks]

It could also be that Bretta either independently stumbled into or is from a population deliberately optimized for the sort of Focus the Godseekers use, in that her obsessiveness is very literally Worship in the fashion that turned Little Ghost/The Knight into the (or a) God of Gods.

The main support for this would be that Bretta herself doesn't show up in Godhome, only the Grey Prince Zote thing. While her obsession created it, the Godseekers seem wholly uncaring of any peculiar property of her, only disgruntled that their process dragged in the thing.

This does result in the funny possibility of Little Ghost deciding to give a go at the Panthon while the subject of Bretta's obsession, only to notice her cheering from the stands.

[hidevessel]

Anyway... Has anyone noticed how strange it is how the Lifeblood Creature (probably a Higher Being) is in the abyss?

I have a headcanon that Lifeblood is kind of a by-product of void or something made alongside void

[fandom-and-plothooks]

Could be the “long-term” or a stable result for Void-affected Soul, with how some of the Soul Totems seem to have a slight bluish tint to them and the only healing “magic” otherwise being Soul-based.

[fandom-and-plothooks]

Regarding adding classes for Hearthstone: Death Knights

The biggest problem with adding new classes is that there's too much overlap. Look at how many different classes the Lich King boss pulls from for "obviously" fitting effects.

Introducing the Death Knight as a new class has the problem of the Arfus and The Lich King cards pulling from the entire class list. Ignoring that, classes need niches and card balance. Each class gets 10 cards per expansion, 10 Basic set cards and 14 Classic set cards. That's an absolute minimum of 34 cards to be introduced all at once for a new class, of which 24 must be made to be always considered for every expansion, and that can only happen during the April expansion that removes the previous year's cards from rotation so the classes are on an even playing field.

When it comes to niches, most are already covered. For Death Knights, which I will use as an example because we already have a card facing for them, you have to work with Deathrattle and Lifesteal. The mechanics are just too fitting. The best nich for this is a class built for the midrange and late game, with a side of aggro for being able to recover lost health. Lifesteal is something that promotes weapon use and health costs, including face tanking. Deathrattle promotes trading frequently and rapidly.

If we want to have the Hero Power play into this as hard as possible, I'd have it be making the Hero gain 1 attack and Lifesteal, which represents the tanking spec DKs quite well. This makes weapons have to be lower in attack value, otherwise the lifesteal drives value too high and the hero power becomes a major damage component. Face Hunter reborn.

So, weapons having their value biased towards durability instead of damage, because the Hero Power turns that damage into health. But high-durability weapons mean killing lots of low health minions. However, the damage comes once per turn, so it further pushes for a late-game playstyle. This is a problem because late-game decks aren't interesting to play against. The exception is when being late-game comes from having enduring resources, which is exactly what Lifesteal and Deathrattle do.

Solving the issue of late-game decks being anti-fun due to having to shut down early game plays thus means having the minions be built to work for both aggro and late-game, one way or another. Deathrattles that generate longer-term resources that can be spent in the short term, such as minions, armor(attack a minion) and cards into the hand/top-decked, fill this role. Lifesteal inherently does this, as a Lifesteal minion can trade for a short-term gain, killing an enemy minion, and a smaller amount of a long-term resource, health. However, going for lower-attack minions lets you get Lifesteal multiple times, but deals with weaker threats. Going face gives the most health, of course, so Lifesteal still needs to be a bit sparse.

To sum it up for DKs: You need to do something about Arfus and TLK, +1 Attack and Lifesteal hero power, weapons focused on durability value rather than attack value, Deathrattle and Lifesteal as class-common mechanics with Deathrattle prioritizing stuff that's useful late-game but usable immediately or close-to and an overall card design of "aggro now, or fatigue-tank later." What you think of this idea for DK as a Hearthstone class?

(this has been cross-posted from the Blizzard forums, because I happened to have done a text-wall there and wanted to put it somewhere else)

[fandom-and-plothooks]

Fanfiction Plothooks, Round Three

In Pokemon, what if the Mirage Mew from the Mirage Master Pokemon movie became able to travel? (One way is to dismantle and miniaturize one of the remote projectors and turn it into a mobile body. Another is to have a Porygon accidentally download all the data of the Mirage Mew, effectively becoming it)

In Star Wars, The Chosen One is destined to bring balance to the Force. This is typically interpreted as removing all Sith. What if Anakin(?) recognized the interpretation that happened(Kill massive numbers of Jedi to balance the power of the Light and Dark side users) and set to work making an order of Force users who used both sides equally to carry out the prophecy without killing?

In Pokemon, what if Mewtwo from the first movie learned how to do Mew variety shapeshifting? (Disguise as a human and do science stuff for money to get stuff for his clone group, probably. Or wacky hijinks with Ash suddenly having a Legendary on hand whenever one of the Legendary related incidents are involved)

In Star Wars, what if Anakin killed Palpatine when the then-Chancellor revealed he was a Sith?

In [Prototype], what if Alex Mercer didn’t go ‘Take Over the World’ and instead just fortified NYC to wipe out Blackwatch with negative publicity? (Same setup as [Perototype] 2, but no reason for any Evolved to go against him. After all, he’s just trying to get rid of the people who destroyed their lives)

In Naruto, what if Shin and Jugo were distant relatives with different versions of the same bloodline? (Shin’s clones all have the same Sharingann, which would only be possible if Shin assimilated the genetics of his implanted Sharingann or gene spliced it manually. Jugo, in contrast, has the genetics of most known fauna, given that EVERY SINGLE CURSE MARK is the result of splicing his genes into another person.)

In Pokemon, what if a Rotom possessed the cybernetics of a Genesect? (Overcharged Genesect with mental problems, or a Genesect with a Super Mode?)

In Naruto, what if Tobi (the Zetsu, not Obito) really was a good boy and fixed a lot of the problems in the series with his Zetsu hax? (For reference, Tobi has all five basic chakra natures and Wood Style)

In Starcraft/Warhammer 40K, what if Korhal was rediscovered by the Imperium and the tech was salvaged, Odin included? (Remember, the Odin has an inbuilt tactical nuke assembler and launcher)

In Starcraft/Warhammer 40K, what if the Brood Mother from the Heart of the Swarm mission with the implanted larva landed on a Feudal World? (In this scenario, the Tyranid are an offshoot of the Zerg that got lost in a different way)

[fandom-and-plothooks]

Fanfiction Plothooks, Round Two

In Bleach, what if Marumasa, the filler arc antagonist, became one of the Espada? (Marumasa did eat a lot of Hollows, after all, so going to them isn’t an impossibility)

In Soul Eater, what if Ragnorok didn’t eat normal people, instead only going after the spiritually powerful? (Still horrible, just not eating random normal people and effortlessly killed thugs)

In Bleach, what if Kaien Shiba joined up with the guy lost in the Menos Forest? (Cue early Rukia freak out)

In Warcraft, what if a Warcraft 2 Death Knight was controlled by the fallen hero instead of the orc warlock, deciding to continue with the hero thing? (Think a mix of Affilction Warlock and Unholy Death Knight plus one more class/spec in WoW. Lots of tricks, but no Holy healing. If angsty, Paladin, if curbstompy, Mage. If both, Disipline Priest followed by going Shadow Priest. So much damage…)

In Diablo, what if the Diablo II Necromancer fought alongside the Diablo III heroes? (Minions, EVERYWHERE. Or nigh unstoppable golems. Or skeletal warriors and mages surrounded by poison, fire or frost magic with a flaming, bloody Iron Golem leading the charge)

In Soul Eater, what if Crona learned magic? (They give no reason why males can’t use magic, they just say males can’t use magic)

In Starcraft, what if Ulrezaj showed up during Legacy of the Void and started eating Hybrids? (For added fun, bring Maar back for a showdown)

In Diablo, what if the person who was possessed by Diablo in the second game came back as an undead and tried to stop round three? (May or may not be a skeletal Diablo due to the whole ‘body was made Diablo’s’ thing)

In Starcraft, what if Kerrigan’s personality was unchanged upon becoming the Queen of Blades? (Angry at Mengsk? Check. Overmind not in control? You decide! Is the Dominion screwd? Almost certainly)

In Warcraft, what if Arthas tossed Frostmorne into the ocean on the way home? (I.E., Arthas doesn’t become a pawn of Ner'zul)

[fandom-and-plothooks]

Fanfiction Plothooks, Round One

1. Digimon characteristics are based on data. So is Porygon. What if the two met? 2. Digimon's digital world is connected to the human internet in some places. What if it connected to the setting of Code Leoko, Tron or Mega Man Battle Network? 3. Magic: the Gathering has many psychos. One group was old Phyrexia, who had items that allowed for interplanar travel. Insert Phyrexians into whatever setting. 4. In Warhammer 40k, the Warp allows for time travel. What if the Astronomicon had an encoded date signal to tell time traveling Inquisitors when they are? 5. What if the Tantabus of MLP:FIM ran into someone who trapped it? 6. In Warhammer 40k, Kaldor Dreigo is the most powerful Grey Knight ever to live. What if he figured out how to permanently destroy daemons? 7. What if King Sombra in MLP:FIM was an amnesiac who only remembered his fear and hate power amplifiers? 8. What if a scientifically knowledgeable person from our world became a M:TG planeswalker? 9. In Mega Man Classic, Protoman has full free will, the must powerful buster yet and a flawed power core. What if he was fixed with a new power core in Mega Man X that worked as well as his old one 10. In Mega Man Zero, it's been two hundred years since Mega Man Classic. What if Base showed up to help his 'younger brother'? --- Correct me if I got any background material wrong. And feel free to comment on the ideas themselves.