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Cursed to be stuck inside this ancient amulet for years but you know I was kind of getting used to it. The solitude had eaten away just enough of my sanity that I'm pretty sure it only would've been a few more days before I started hallucinating some really neat shit.
But then. THEN. This fuckass twink descendant of my mortal enemies picks up my amulet. Takes right out of the sacred chamber. I guess it was finally a ruin now? Worse timing possible, too late to stop me going insane and right before the insanity could pay off.
So some clueless idiot is actually wearing me for the first time in centuries. I'm gonna wreck this dude's shit, I don't care if he is weirdly nice and kind of pretty in the face department. The second I accumulate enough power I'm breaking out of here and making him regret being born.
Okay so I did accumulate enough energy that I might have been able to break out, maybe, but also probably not quite just yet. Which is why I had to use it to stop that dragon from killing Captain Fuckwit.
Like I had to do it. If the dragon kills him how am I supposed to be the one to do it? I didn't rot in that sealed chamber for centuries just so that the last living descendant of my most hated enemies could get offed by something that wasn't me. There's no poetic justice in that and also I am NOT owing any dragons any favors.
I've been thinking about how I'm going to kill this guy. I mean there's not a lot else to do, I'm still stuck in the amulet so mostly I'm limited to being spooky in his dreams until I suck up some more power. But it's going to happen. I'm out of the sealed chamber now there's so many opportunities and also I'm patient. I've learned to be extremely patient. Would be weird if I hadn't.
Anyway I'm not going to kill him right away. Where's the satisfaction in that? He's the last descendant of my enemies (pretty sure) so of course I gotta drag it out. This is the only revenge I might ever get. I'll have to capture him. Keep him sealed away for a long time, see how he likes it. But like. In a nicer placed than that fucking chamber because unlike some long dead assholes, I have standards. Plus I'm also going to spending a lot of my time there too, menacing him and shit, so it better be nice for me.
I'm thinking summer house on an otherwise uninhabited island. I keep him there where there are no dragons or ogres or demon kings to interrupt, and I tell him all about the shitty things his ancestors did, to like. Demoralize him. So that he knows that even though I'm a scary evil creature that's going to be his ending, he doesn't get as much moral high ground as he'd probably like. I make him eat meals with me just to draw out the tension, and then I give him nightmares, making him twist and writhe in his sweat-soaked sheets while his heart hammers against his ribs and he wonders if this will finally be the night I finish him.
Listen. Giving him command of the remnants of my dark army is just practical right now. I don't have the energy to communicate extensively with them myself, and they'll keep him alive long enough for me to take my elaborate revenge without me constantly having to intervene and sacrifice my own energy to do it. And anyway I have ceremonies to plan, it's going to be amazing, I'm going to round up every last remnant from the old days so that they can witness my final triumph when I claim his life and soul forever.
Also, he used them to humiliate that other fuckass descendant guy. Even I can begrudgingly admit it was pretty well done. Corrupting influence gain! I'm kind of surprised his allies haven't all abandoned him for using dark and sinister forces to save their lives, though, but I guess it's fine if they don't. Sure why not. We can be cool with raising cursed armies in this day and age apparently. Yeah that thing I was sealed away for for centuries is just not a big deal now. Cool cool cool.
You know what, I'm going to make his friends come to the ceremony too. So they can also witness my triumph and his utter defeat and subjugation at my hands.
Maybe I'll even let them visit him in his woeful imprisonment afterwards as well. Just to really hammer the point home. They're not the worst company, at least. Not as annoying as heroes used to be. We can have them over for dinner while I lord my victory above their helplessness. Real power move to just let them come and see the guy that they are nevertheless unable to free from my dark clutches.
I guess I better make sure they also don't all die either, if that's the case. It's a good thing I'm patient. So many fucking setbacks!
Those guys were supposed to be dead for centuries! And they're still ruining my life! Fucking. That fuckass other descendant managed to summon them and of course THEY are still not cool with me or my dark forces, although I'm going to be real, they weren't looking too noble and above-aboard themselves when they turned up. That was some hypocritical undead revenant bullshit.
Of course I ended up fighting them. They attacked first! Again! They were even trying to kill their own descendant! And those heinous bitches called me the monster. I've never tried to kill my own descendants. Probably because I don't have any but still. At least try and take over his body first or something!
Well actually they did try it, I think? But that hero of theirs had worn my amulet for so long that he was too corrupted for it to work. Ha!
Small victories.
I'm going to need to hang onto those.
Because now I'm sealed back in the fucking Chamber Eternal again.
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKING---!!!!
Okay.
Alright.
I'm not going to lie this isn't looking good. I'm not in the amulet anymore but the seals on the chamber are strong, made with the souls of those fuckdamn ancient heroes. All my power is left with their descendant on the outside now. My plans are thwarted. I'm going to languish in this minimalist hell of a chamber until those ancient souls run out of juice, and currently they're forming a dome of spiritual energy so flush with power that the ghosts on the moon can probably see it.
It... it's going to be... I mean. It'll be fine. Back to getting to the good part of going insane, right?
I was really confused at first because, why would my sworn enemy who I've been plotting vengeance against this entire time free me from the chamber? At great effort and personal risk, no less? That fight was absolutely brutal, I'm not sure I could have even done it myself in his place, and I mean his situation without even bothering was quite good. He had all of my power. His ancestors were likewise distracted with sealing me away. He could have ascended to become the next Dark Lord or, I don't know, ran around doing his Power of Friendship bullshit for the next ten thousand years largely uncontested. Not only does he not have a further use for me but if anything, I present a massive threat to him if I can regain enough strength to take my power back.
But I think that's it! That Power of Friendship bullshit! Somehow, this guy has mistaken me for an ally.
I can work with this.
As long as he doesn't suspect that we're actually enemies, I can bide my time, restore my power, wrestle control of my armies back from his grasp, and then get him back on his knees.
I just need to pretend that I've actually been helping him out this entire time.
I really want him back on his knees. That was a good look on him. He's got like super long eyelashes for a dude. Plus you know that's where he belongs, groveling before my might! Mwahahaha!
Well this is going surprisingly well. Like I don't think it's even occurred to him to be suspicious of me? He hasn't even tried to drug me with truth serum or test me at a holy spring or drag me in front of any tribunals. When I caught one of his little friends passing information to his rivals he just... took my word for it. I could have been lying. I wasn't, because I was actually expecting him to check, but I could have been.
I'm almost starting to wonder if he really is descended from those ancient hero fuckers, he doesn't act like them at all. The apple must have rolled into a goddamn river and been carried off to sea after it fell off that tree.
Just because I'm pretending to be his ally doesn't mean I can't still sabotage him, of course. That one little traitor might have been a real mole, who is... somehow still in the group, and not beheaded or anything(????). But I'm pretty sure the king's son is genuinely devoted to his brother-in-arms, to my hero-enemy, and hasn't committed any convenient betrayals that I can dig out and wave around to get rid of him. If that even would get rid of him (see: traitor mole still in group). More's the pity.
Such a strong political alliance with the ruling family will further cement my hero's power in this region. Potentially, that will make it even harder to extricate him for my own purposes later on. Of course, it's not worth the risk if I do something too extreme and it gets traced back to me, so I can't simply kill the prince.
But I didn't study medicine at my grandmother's knee just to forget all the useful bits in my dark rise to power. That idiot won't be riding out to adventure alongside his 'sworn brother' tomorrow if he has too many embarrassing rashes to get into his saddle.
This might seem like a petty plot that is beneath me but it's tactically sound. I've thought about it a lot.
I take it back these people are abominably over-observant. I'd rather be caught trying to poison the prince again, but the hero's singular suspicious friend, that woman knight, just had to follow me to the abandoned shrine instead.
Cats are one of nature's most successful predators. Properly trained, a dark familiar is an excellent spy and helper, and I am in need of every advantage I can get right now. Everyone knows the best way to ingratiate yourself to animals is to get them young. Feeding kittens is a sinister action.
I mean it's good that it helps my cover that these people think otherwise, it's just that they're wrong. Half of my family was executed for feeding cats. Back in those days everyone knew what was up and nobody cooed about it.
Shit, shit, I knew we shouldn't have kept that mole around. Fucking sob story bullshit. The hero's captured. My dark feline army isn't ready! I'm going to have to turn to some other means of regaining him before the enemy steals my power from him. They can't be allowed to do that. It'd kill him but more importantly it would make it that much harder for me to ever reclaim it.
The only one allowed to strip him and put him in chains is me!!! ME!!! He's mine!!! I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE FIRST TO DO THAT TO HIM!!!
Bastards! Hacks!
I didn't sell my soul to eight different devils to be upstaged by some fuckers who barely grasps the fundamentals of summoning circles. Fuck the low battery I don't need the dark forces of beyond to take these bitches out, their rituals are shit enough I'm going to end them with a piece of chalk and three drops of blood. Hold my fucking beer.
Hero says he needs to reward me for saving him when we get back. I should probably decline whatever it is, that's what all these people seem to do, but I'll at least see what he's offering first. Just in case it's worth cracking my cover for.
I love your fics and your Shane Hollander characterization is IT for me. What do you think about Shane's 'obliviousness' in asking a Russian to keep their gay hookup on the downlow when telling would have likely gotten him killed and in The Long Game?
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t really read this as Shane being oblivious. I read it primarily as 1) he just didn’t know much about Russian politics, and 2) even if he did know, it was more the product of understandable anxiety than obliviousness.
If we’re asking ourselves what we can reasonably expect Shane to know the first time he hooks up with Ilya, we have to put ourselves in his position: a 19 year old boy who’s fresh from Canadian junior hockey leagues in 2010.
I legitimately don’t think someone in Shane’s position would reasonably know about the queer experience in Russia.
First off, it’s 2010. I’m thinking back to over a decade ago, so I may be misremembering this, but I don’t recall there being a very big focus on the Russian queer experience in the news back then. Like. In 2010, gay marriage is still illegal in many parts of America. It’s been legal for less than a decade in Canada. The news was much less inclined to put a spotlight on queer struggles and was certainly much less inclined to portray queer people in a sympathetic light. I don’t personally recall Russian queer rights entering the global conversation until 2014, because they only made it illegal to promote LGBTQ+ rights a year or so before the Sochi Olympics. I don’t think you can reasonably expect most Canadian teenagers to be educated on the topic back then. It’s just not in their realm of experience.
I especially don’t think you could expect a boy from the Canadian junior hockey league to know it. Because, speaking broadly, boys who participate in Canadian junior hockey—especially at a high level—tend to be very undereducated.
Please do not misunderstand me: I am not saying “hur dur boy hockey players are stupid.” They are not stupid.
They are exploited.
That is different.
So, I just started reading We Breed Lions, and I’m already going to start promoting it because it’s so far it’s been phenomenal.
Right at the start of the book, there’s a really fantastic breakdown of how this system exploits young boys to their detriment. The junior hockey league has its own draft. Teams draft promising young players, who often leave home to live with billet families, leaving them with their only structure being their team. They join for-profit teams, who are promoting them as young celebrities and making enormous amounts of money off them. It is frankly weird to think about, because America doesn’t have any kind of corollary system that I can think of where a children’s league is promoted like they’re pro-level teams, but apparently in Canada they’re very profitable enterprises. Top junior hockey competitions are broadcast nationwide. The teams receive sponsorships from major corporations. The absolute best players gain celebrity followings.
All of the boys playing on the team are being paid below minimum wage, because they are “student athletes.”
It is industry standard to have them be professionals in all but name. These athletes regularly miss school and assignments to accommodate the demands of their hockey schedule. Teachers regularly look the other way and just let them fall behind so as to not interrupt their participation on the team. The book describes one student who was still playing despite pulling a 16% average in math class. There’s another student who got suspended for one (1) game because he skipped school for 30 days straight.
Recently, a video of Macklin Celebrini went viral because he was playing a game of Heads Up, where someone holds a card to their head with the name of a famous historical figure on it, and you have to describe that figure to them so they can guess it. Celebrini had to keep skipping basic prompts like “Henry VIII,” “Julie Andrews,” “Dick Van Dyke,” “Charles Darwin,” and “George Orwell” because he had no goddamn clue who any of them are. The Canadian junior hockey league for the most part does not produce well-educated people, especially if they are performing at a high level, because those are the players who have the most demands on their time.
These educational failings are not the fault of the 16 year old boys who have been taken from their homes and drop kicked into a hockey town where they’re flooded with the message of “you are SO SO special for your hockey, just focus on your hockey, YES you need to miss class again but do not worry king!! hockey is all you should focus on!!! We will look the other way for you!!!” all to accommodate the demanding schedules of the extremely exploitative teams farming them for cash while giving them stipends that are below minimum wage.
Shane Hollander was one of the most talked-about prospects on the fucking planet. He has most likely been working sixteen hour days minimum since he was fourteen years old and then had to be a full-time student on top of that. There are literally not enough hours in the day. He was probably fighting for his life trying not to fail out of fucking math class. That guy is not reading up on the Russian sociopolitical landscape in his free time. He doesn’t have free time. And he is not in the kind of environment where the common topic of conversation is “hey fellas, maybe we should educate ourselves on the struggles of the Russian queer population” like fuck no. The main topics of conversation for Canadian Junior hockey players are hockey and their own dicks. Shane likely had no idea what it was like for queer people in Russia. He didn’t have a reason to know.
There is one other way we should contextualize that statement within Canadian junior hockey culture. And that’s in the context of the normalized degradation of your sexual partners.
Canadian Junior hockey is very sex obsessed. It is very misogynistic. It is very homophobic. And the widespread expectation is to go into that locker room and talk about your sexual partners like they are objects to fuck and sexual exploits like they are conquests.
Canadian junior hockey leagues typically have players aged 16-20. But Shane is an exceptional player who was recognized when he was very young. His real life analogue, Sidney Crosby, was drafted by his junior team at the age of 13. He started playing some games in the season with them by 14.
So imagine Shane is 14 years old. He is the youngest person on the team. There is already a crushing amount of national attention on him. And he is going into that locker room for the first time with his 20 year old teammates, who are standing there talking about how this weekend they fucked this bitch who was such a slut for it, fuck, she was on her knees slobbering for it like a whore in seconds.
Hey, Hollander, have you fucked anyone yet?
In Shane’s experience, telling people all the gorey details about your hookups is what you do. It’s what the people around him have always done. It is baked into the culture that he has been marinating in since he was a very young child. With those experiences in mind, I think it’s very understandable to be in your first hookup with someone and have a flash of fear that they’re going to walk out of this room and go tell their teammates “Shane Hollander dropped to his knees and started slobbering on it like a whore the second I shut the door.” Because that is what happened to every single woman who hooked up with one of his teammates. He has been hearing that shit almost every single day since he was 14. It is so deeply understandable to be afraid of that.
Now, granted, his teammates are not regaling the locker room with their gay hookups. This is where you get to prong two of the analysis.
Sometimes you ask someone to confirm something that is seemingly obvious, not because you don’t see it yourself, but because you’re scared and anxious and you want reassurance.
Like. First off, even if he had the context of Russia, he doesn’t know if Ilya has some queer-friendly person in his corner who he can share secrets with. He already knows Ilya has had other gay hookups. So it’s understandable to want to voice “I don’t want this to be told to anyone else” because this is not the kind of secret that you just assume everyone is on the same page with on keeping it. But beyond that, I think you could be fully aware of all of the reasons Ilya had to keep it a secret and actually believe he would keep it a secret and still want the vocalized assurance that this isn’t going to be spread around.
Look. I am an adult with a law degree. My brain is fully developed. I am very well educated. My entire job is to be articulate and reasoned and to weigh risk.
I still walk into my coworker’s office five times a week and say “hey so I’m gonna ask a stupid question and I already know the answer to it but I just need someone else to confirm for me before I do this because it’s pretty big and I need the reassurance.” And my coworker, who is equally intelligent and educated and accomplished, turns around and does the same thing with me. Sometimes, you say something that sounds stupid not because you’re stupid, but because you’re human and it’s natural to seek reassurance in others.
I don’t read that scene as Shane being oblivious to the risks Ilya faces if this comes out. I read that as him being a 19 year old boy who is battling a lifetime of fear around his own sexuality, who is extremely aware of at least some of the risks but who just wants some extra reassurance from the dude whose dick was just in his mouth. And that is okay. It’s not obliviousness. It’s just being human.
I personally find that I have the best experience with a narrative if I read the characters’ actions in a compassionate light. If something they do doesn’t make sense, put yourself in their shoes and try to see where they’re coming from. Give them grace and understanding. And usually, what characters are doing makes a lot more sense and the narrative overall becomes more interesting. Personally, I think “Shane’s seeking reassurance from one of his first ever sexual partners because he’s a child coming from a sex-obsessed environment where your sexual partner is routinely degraded for the amusement of your peers” makes for a much more interesting story than “haha, Shane’s so fucking stupid and oblivious.”
A lot of the analyses of the character’s actions—and in particular Shane’s actions—that I’ve personally seen coming out of this fandom are almost entirely devoid of compassion and understanding. And it’s kind of hard to be surprised when the author herself is climbing onto discord to say “Shane is so stupid and oblivious.” Like. The call is coming from inside the house.
Narratives are so much more fulfilling and engaging if you extend compassion and grace to the characters. Let them be human. Let them ask stupid questions. And as the audience, try and ask yourself why that question is important to them. Stories are way more interesting when characters aren’t these shallow strawmen whose actions can be boiled down to “they’re just fucking stupid and oblivious.” Give them some grace, and you’ll have a better story.
when racial humiliation gets mistaken for complicity: on the hudson williams "discourse"
i've been thinking a lot about the whole hudson williams inflammatory photo situation, about whether i want to post anything into the internet abyss, about what i can even contribute to this matter. i've decided i'm going to dump some of my thoughts because this whole thing feels a lot less like run-of-the-mill internet discourse and more like a huge, racially-motivated internet defamation campaign.
it’s disappointing to see people demand accountability from a cyberstalked celebrity for something that may very well have been racial humiliation, coercion, and/or targeting when he was a minor. and just to be clear, the symbols in the photo are absolutely offensive. i’m not disputing that. however, a huge part of the issue for me is how few people seem interested in context & how quickly a decontextualized image has been treated as definitive proof of intent, agency, and endorsement.
i’m going to try to share this without doxxing myself. i’m white. i grew up in a very white suburban neighborhood and attended a predominantly white public high school. the racist bullying in my school was so bad that a major news network made an entire documentary about it. i share the below having spent a lot of time reflecting on my own complacency as a white person & through conversations i’ve had (and still have -- the trauma fucking lingers) with long-term friends who experienced racially-motivated hate daily in our school. i know my school is not unique, which is a large part of the reason why i've decided to share this.
(i’m about to share examples, so if you don’t want to read, i've noted below where the examples end. if you're white, please sit with the discomfort & continue reading.)
in my high school, it was commonplace for students of color -- especially melanated students of color -- to be hazed, degraded, and publicly humiliated. racist harassment and acts of racial terror were normalized, and assimilation to whiteness was expected in order to maintain the school’s (and broader community's) racial hierarchy. for many students of color, belonging was conditional. social acceptance usually required minimizing experiences of racism, laughing along with racist jokes, distancing themselves from other students of color, tolerating humiliation and abuse, proving they were “not like the other [students of color],” etc.
the reward for “playing along” was limited and precarious social inclusion. the punishment was exclusion and ostracization by students and parents alike. for many of my friends and peers, assimilation to whiteness was not a desired choice -- it was survival. people of color are often taught that they must endure racism, degradation, and humiliation to gain access to spaces that white people inhabit by default.
the same weekend my school hosted its annual “diversity night,” a white jewish student drew a sw*stika on a Brown student at a party and posted it on instagram. the Brown student was suspended for three days, and the white student -- whose parents defended him like they were in court -- got away scot-free. my friends of color have repeatedly shared that they felt gaslit by our school, which proudly hosted diversity initiatives, multicultural events, and anti-bullying campaigns, yet did little to hold individual students/friend groups accountable for racist harm. instead, the students who were held accountable were often the very students of color who fell victim to this racist harm.
(examples over)
i feel like a lot of people engaging in the hudson discourse are failing to recognize how often racial humiliation functions as a social ritual that reinforces white supremacy. we now have access to a photo of a teenager who was one of the only people of color in a predominantly white social environment, surrounded by white peers, with hateful symbols drawn on his face. maybe he made terrible decisions. maybe he should have objected. maybe he felt like he couldn’t. the point is, we don't know the context. why are we so quick to dismiss the possibility that an asian teenager in a predominantly white social environment may have been the target of racial humiliation, coercion, or abuse?
i also can't help but think about the model minority myth. asian folks are often expected to navigate racism in ways that are legible to white audiences -- be respectable, agreeable, non-confrontational, respond "correctly," etc. yet racism ofc doesn't always look like open hostility, and survival doesn't always look like resistance. sometimes it looks like silence. or laughing along. or enduring humiliation because the social consequences of refusing are worse. like i said above, for many people of color, assimilation is a strategy for survival. the speed with which folks have dismissed those possibilities says a lot about how narrowly many people understand racism, victimhood, and accountability when asian people are involved.
what's clear is that people have spent months digging through his entire historical internet presence, combing through the private social media accounts of people he knew as a teenager, excavating photos that were never meant for public consumption, and distributing them online to maximize outrage. say what you will about the celebrity as a surveilled public commodity -- that's not the point i'm trying to make here. people are digging through this guy’s life with the explicit goal of finding material that can be used against him, flattening every possible interpretation of the shared image into the one that causes the maximum amount of harm. we act as though the existence of a photograph tells us everything we need to know about the circumstances under which it was taken.
a lot of people seem less interested in understanding context/what happened than they are in destroying him. and (coming from a queer jew) a lot of people are suddenly very eager to weaponize antisemitism and homophobia as "gotchas" when they've never previously demonstrated any meaningful concern for either.
one last thing -- demanding accountability is not the same as pursuing justice. without context, proportionality, or any interest in the truth, it merely feels like part of the spectacle.
this post is inspired in part by this one by @cheshirepirouette and sponsored in part by convos w @asteriis and @indouscurse here’s to y’all!! this post also goes out to my brothers, who are pale as hell for reasons unbeknownst to all of us (this is a joke).
like any good headcanon, this started as a joke because i thought to myself: Ryland sounds like the type of name that somebody’s Black child would have and only use on church sundays. nobody actually has ever called him that in his whole entire life, except maybe his mama SOMETIMES and that’s why he doesn’t remember it right away. i feel like every Black person knows somebody who is called literally anything except their god given name. people call him lil r, lil grace, gracie, ry, ryry, riri, RG, lando, mr. grace, dr. grace, but nobody calls him Ryland, which is part of why he Can’t Remember for so long.
so of course i went back to the source material to see if he ever actually mentioned being white anywhere and unfortunately it is very much at the beginning of the book. so THEN i started to think about how i could get around that while remaining at least largely canon compliant (as a little treat for myself). what i came up with is what i have affectionately dubbed my “litebrite baby” headcanon.
grace was not particularly dark skinned to begin with, and then spent years in a coma with literally no sunlight. he is downright vampiric by the time that he wakes up, and upon seeing his white ass skin, assumes that he is in his own words, a Caucasian male.
unfortunately for him, this fits in really well with his theme of lack of identity and lack of connection. i think for most Black people it would be extremely hard to forget that we’re Black regardless of how light or dark our skin tone is. but throughout the book, even when Grace is thinking about his old, slowly resurfacing memories, he never thinks about family, he never thinks about friends. except for his students and Project Hail Mary, he is completely unmoored.
i’ve seen a few different headcanons for why this might be: he was an only child whose single parent died young, he was cut off by his parents for some reason or another, he just isn’t ever triggered to remember. but no matter the reason, grace is disconnected from crucial aspects of himself. i think that by making him Black, and his Blackness something he can’t remember, it add an extra heartbreaking layer to his characterization. Blackness is such a communal experience, and when it’s not, it leaves behind an ache. growing up Black in White Suburbia i know well both the experience of clinging to one’s own in a hostile world AND the hurt that comes with being severed from one’s community. grace loses so much of himself with the amnesia, unable to recall who he is at the deepest of levels, and i think if he could remember to grieve it, it would devastate him.
i do think he would remember eventually, either when his hair starts growing out (because in the book Armando shaves him iirc), or when he can finally catch a glimpse of his reflection clearly, or when he has a memory of someone in his family. my personal belief is he has a memory beamed directly into his brain of asking “Mama, am I white?” and his poor, long-suffering mom saying, “Now who the hell told you that?”
and then it still never becomes relevant because he has negative desire to explain the nuances of human racial categories to an alien who quite literally cannot see color.
the bond of being stratt’s left and right hands… hanging out with each other. developing a friendship. perhaps, for the first time, grace feels a sense of brotherhood. a sense of community. because carl gets it, doesn’t he? this situation they’re in? we’re in this together, man. right?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
saw someone saying that my new book sounds too convoluted, and can I just say, what the fuck is so convoluted about a brain slug alien taking over the Canadian parliament and then getting run over by a truck and isekaid into a fantasy world where a goddess tasks him to kill the demon lord and reincarnates him into a pale twink but he falls in love/lust with a spider centaur instead? hello????
genuine sincere question but why does he need to be in canada at all at the start. why set it up with him being an alien in a foreign world he is unfamiliar with and is strange to him, meaning he has no real attachment to it or knowledge of it, and then immediately send him to a different world that he is unfamiliar with. why not just have an alien crash on a fantasy world would that not have the same effect entirely? lands a spaceship on top of the supposed chosen one of the dark goddess and then has to awkwardly take their place until the spider romance gets in the way? i see the appeal of the sci-fi and fantasy blend but i don't get why the canada bit has to be there like, thematically or structurally, so I'm wondering what the appeal of it is for you to have it set up in this way
it is fun, because when he's a brain slug in a Canadian setting, he has the ability to 'mask'. because he's puppeting someone's body and wrapped around their brain, and he can use what's left of their mind to smooth out any social situations.
but once he's isekaid and transmogrified into a full on human being, that's it, no more convenient brain to reference! so he almost completely loses the ability to act human, and has to just rely on the scraps he remembers from the last body. which adds another layer of "oh, I'm fucked" that you wouldn't usually get in an isekai
saw someone saying that my new book sounds too convoluted, and can I just say, what the fuck is so convoluted about a brain slug alien taking over the Canadian parliament and then getting run over by a truck and isekaid into a fantasy world where a goddess tasks him to kill the demon lord and reincarnates him into a pale twink but he falls in love/lust with a spider centaur instead? hello????
genuine sincere question but why does he need to be in canada at all at the start. why set it up with him being an alien in a foreign world he is unfamiliar with and is strange to him, meaning he has no real attachment to it or knowledge of it, and then immediately send him to a different world that he is unfamiliar with. why not just have an alien crash on a fantasy world would that not have the same effect entirely? lands a spaceship on top of the supposed chosen one of the dark goddess and then has to awkwardly take their place until the spider romance gets in the way? i see the appeal of the sci-fi and fantasy blend but i don't get why the canada bit has to be there like, thematically or structurally, so I'm wondering what the appeal of it is for you to have it set up in this way
it is fun, because when he's a brain slug in a Canadian setting, he has the ability to 'mask'. because he's puppeting someone's body and wrapped around their brain, and he can use what's left of their mind to smooth out any social situations.
but once he's isekaid and transmogrified into a full on human being, that's it, no more convenient brain to reference! so he almost completely loses the ability to act human, and has to just rely on the scraps he remembers from the last body. which adds another layer of "oh, I'm fucked" that you wouldn't usually get in an isekai
᯽ I've been thinking a lot recently about how we see Dora only through the eyes of Harry "Unreliable Narrator" Du Bois. Clearly he really put her on a pedestal, right. I've seen some interesting discussions about this so if you have any thoughts about Dora please let me know because I'd be very happy to hear
᯽ I wanted to draw Dora without mentioning Harry (even though she's kinda through his eyes), because this is about her. Maybe in her own personal self she feels inadequate. Maybe she feels shame, or grief, or guilt. But, we'll never know because Harry has amnesia and his baggage interferes anyway.
᯽ I am happy with how Dora came out, and this drawing has some personal meaning for me, but I also drew things I thought would be interesting, one detail being that her hair is actually dyed blonde (not sure if this is obvious in the drawing or not) -- I saw someone mention this, sorry, I don't remember exactly where I saw it!! But I find this really tasty given how much Harry seems to be obsessed with her "welkin" blonde-ness.
᯽ Listened to Berghain while drawing and this raises some interesting questions. Literally read the lyrics and think about Dora omg
᯽ Timelapse:
--ok I did think about doing like dolorian designs or some plant-like imagery, or like apricots or something but I changed it to like a "oh no we're in the pale and everything's disintegrating" background. Idk what's going on
I rarely scream about books on this blog, but for the love of everything if you have any interest in horror at all please read The Starving Saints. It is one of the most exquisitely written books I've read in years, and the three main characters are all incredibly different and complex women with deeply understandable and completely unique motivations. The imagery is amazing, the plot is fascinating, the world is complex and vivid, and -
Look. I'm a simple lesbian. Lady knights struggling with devotion and what it means, murderous fallen noblewomen out for revenge, and brilliant but slightly deranged lady alchemists in a tangled nightmare throuple will never not have my full attention.
origamiaround
gamechangershow
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
theartofmadeline
stormborns
