High Spring Tide

A sideblog where I actually post stuff. Mostly Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and the Daevabad Trilogy, but random other stuff as well.

[maridoodles]

mini aquarium 🐟🐠🐡

[acorviart]

an encounter

[faeberrywine]

User credit: kyoto_aquarium on insta

(please like, reblog and give proper credit if you use any of my gifs!)

[bevanne46]

FREE Pattern: Along the Coast - Migration Quilt https://www.blankquilting.net/along-the-coast-migration-quilt/

[draconym]

Tonight's rehearsal sketch brought to you by Apparently Sir Cameron Needs To Die

(based on this)

[salmakiis]

the city of brass

[lobsteronakeychain]

sometimes you read a book and then just decide to play your own dress up game

[kaizokuseb]

me before reading the book: oh i just know i'm going to love this cameron brat so much

me now: *shaking, sobbing, wrapping merulo in a blanket and giving him scones* no one else has ever mattered

[lobsteronakeychain]

ladies ladies you’re both pretty stop fighting

[highspringtide]

I really enjoy the idea that the book is pretty much just standard epic fantasy when seen from merulo's perspective

(spoilers below cut)

like, first, he's obviously the (mad) sorcerer planning to kill god. but on top of that, he's also one of the last three dragons. he has unfathomably powerful magic. he can use his own blood to make his magic stronger. he's an orphan whose egg was trapped in an archive as a valuable historical artifact. he's been alone for decades. no one understands him, not even his own sister. he was raised in a secret underground city full of forbidden magic technology and corpses. his mother was tragically killed. her heart was burned by his enemies to learn how to destroy him. his other sister has been kidnapped at birth and raised to hate him. he's acutely aware that he's a creature with no place in the world he longs for. he's willing to sacrifice everything he is to return humanity to its old birthright of striving, to reconnect Earth and the stars.

Basically, he probably thinks of himself more or less as the angsty and morally grey hero from a doorstopper of a high fantasy novel.

And then Sir Cameron shows up. And Cameron's leitmotif is played on a kazoo. And the longer he sticks around, the more that starts to really harmonize with certain kazoo background notes in Merulo's own leitmotif, kazoo notes that perhaps. if he's being honest, which he isn't. but just perhaps. have been there this whole time.

[idkjustlee]

Not to sympathize with the elves/church on main, but it must have felt so good to make that prophecy and realize that the guy who needs to die is the one everyone already hates. Like wow. We need to sacrifice someone, and it specifically has to be the guy that sucks so much. Imagine that. "To save the world we must kill the coworker you can't fucking stand." I would have had a party.

[highspringtide]

post of me speculating about extremely minor worldbuilding detail cancelled. instead, here's a poll where we can all speculate together about said extremely minor worldbuilding detail.

(under a read more because spoilers)

One thing I thought was fun in Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die is how not only have unicorns replaced all horses, but they also seemingly come in all the varieties that horses come in (palominos, bays, duns, roans, etc). There's war unicorns and I'm guessing also draught unicorns and like, idk race unicorns and dressage unicorns and what-have-you.

Why do we think this is?

Were the original game devs for Legends of Larnia big horse nerds who poured their hearts and souls into animating dozens of different unicorn models?

Did Legends of Larnia have relatively limited unicorn types (eg all white) but no horses, and God decided it would be easiest to just give all horses horns and not bother to otherwise modify them?

Did Legends of Larnia have relatively limited unicorn types, which God replicated faithfully, but then humans recreated a ton of different phenotypes through a thousand years of captive breeding? Is it simply the nature of humanity to periodically reinvent the strawberry roan? They were totally doing captive breeding to get different and better horses during the Middle Ages, so I'm guessing this wouldn't count as an unworkable modern technology.

why are there so many types of unicorn

horse girl Legends of Larnia game devs

God stuck horns on all the extant types of horse and called it good

game devs and God both made white unicorns; humans recreated the other colors

Voting ended onFeb 24

[sircameroff]

Something that tugs at the edge of my brain is like... the character art for Legends of Larnia featured a villain that looked kind of like Merulo, but not quite. And a hero who looked kind of like Cameron, but not quite.

Was this battle with an evil sorcerer some kind of cycle? For a thousand years, did a Merulo show up every few generations and a Sir Cameron rise to stop him, like a Ganondorf vs Link in The Legend of Zelda situation?

That is so INTERESTING. Imagine Merulo's mother recognizing the cycle and using it to her advantage by deliberately naming her newly-hatched egg after the recurring evil sorcerer, and raising him on love and wonder and curiosity. He was always destined to be the villain, but she could step in and make sure that villain is still a good person.

And when her heart is burned for the prophecy spell, demanding the means to defeat Merulo, of course her heart could never be used to kill her baby boy. So they're given a prophecy that fills the letter of their request, but not the spirit. He'll be "defeated" by some definition, but he will be happy, he will be loved, and he will be free.

[kaizokuseb]

me before reading the book: oh i just know i'm going to love this cameron brat so much

me now: *shaking, sobbing, wrapping merulo in a blanket and giving him scones* no one else has ever mattered

[rhouxl]

Can we talk about how well-written Cameron's death and the chapters until the time reversal were?

Like, of course you know that the protagonist won't stay dead for the second half of the book, of course you know this will get fixed somehow, but I still physically gasped when it happened — especially when things kept moving afterwards. The quiet horror of realizing what they did to the body, the dread of the empty chapters, of Merulo barely fighting back when they approach his castle, of him not trying to defend himself against Glenda? And then the oh of (paraphrasing) "the last component of this spell is dragon blood"?

So good. So very good

[hibiscus02]

Reading "Sir Cameron" has brought me great joy so far. I have laughed aloud many times, but just now I teared up for the first time; during Chapter 40, when Cameron's brother reveals that he saved the dog plush from their childhood, in the hopes his brother would come back - "But now you can bring it to him. Thank you."

What if I cried for one billion years

[tanabanananani]

Reading Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs To Die: Chapter 10: Oh, she loves him like a puppy. That man is her little pet she likes to take care of because he's cute and dumb like a dog