And Sokka’s all casual: “Oh yeah, in fact once I pissed her off so much she blew up a giant iceberg before she even knew how to bend. That’s how we met Aang actually..”
It’s the name of a fiction setting I made up almost 20 years ago, which is like Pokemon or Digimon but more “morbid.” It’s not really a dark or scary setting though, I think of it as goofy and upbeat. I used to draw the monsters all in pencil:
But nowadays I’ve tried to practice digital color:
(This monster is Nemateuthis, a creature with giant parasitic worms that it uses as tentacles)
I really don’t talk a lot about this setting, do I? I’ve done it so long I kinda take it for granted and let it plug along in the background, but now I’m getting a lot of new questions about it, and some people who follow me still didn’t know it existed.
I’m just gonna dump a bunch of generalized information that maybe some people will think is interesting:
“Mortasheen” itself is the name of a city where the buildings are so huge, they have their own biomes and the upper floors can be perpetually frozen.
The entire planet is affected by the weird pollution of the city.
Nobody knows how the city started but it has existed for thousands of years and at this point is builds and expands itself. Nobody runs it.
Monster trainers are also basically monsters, but monsters more closely descended from humans.
Knowing some sort of bio-engineering science is more common than knowing how to cook or clean or drive a car in our world.
Real humans survive only outside the city in various ways. To them it’s a monster-ridden wasteland, but it’s still not a bleak existence. There’s more of a Fallout + Addams Family vibe where death isn’t a real big deal.
Even the metahumans can’t really get by without some monsters on their side though. It’s like if Pokemon world were thousands of times more dangerous.
Basically all monsters are also sapient characters unless otherwise specified, so in this sense more like Digimon or Yo-Kai Watch than Pokemon, but even though they might eat you they’re still not “evil.”
Before I felt they were terribly overplayed, I also established that all normal humans get back up as zombies when they die. They’re considered almost totally harmless though, kind of just an environmental feature.
Regular animal life still exists but is based primarily around everything our world considers pests and weeds. Almost all birds and mammals are just different kinds of crows and rats now; like pelican crows and badger rats and stuff. The surface of the ocean is a solid mat of jellyfish.
I’m gonna go over the monster classes here but I’ll put it under a cut:
There’s a lot of older ones whose descriptions just don’t get into that but every monster has to have something cute, funny or sad about its personality and habits, I never want one to just be grimdark.
I do this with the designs, too, I’m not into things that “just” look completely cool and serious.
Obviously I like big goofy eyeballs but I do also rationalize this with the fact that the atmosphere is so often murky with smog.
For the same reason, all plant life within the city is non-chlorophyllic and for botanical monsters I avoid using the color green as much as possible.
Fur is rare for mammaloids, and feathers as well as flight are rare for bird based monsters.
I try to avoid traditional “elemental” stuff; there are monsters that generate heat energy but not many that directly produce fire, and there are monsters that chill their surroundings but they don’t use ice as a design element.
Except for the garbage class (which can still have secret hidden powers or be modded) every monster has to be “powerful” in its own way by default. There are none that would be dead weight on a team or not viable as your main partner
I also now realize that my designs come from how my ADHD thought train works. I think this might be my favorite monster personally so I’ve used it as an example before of seguing from one idea to the next but I didn’t know then that I was so badly attention-deficit. This monster was the result of my brain going “I want a flypaper monster -> long and sticky thing catches bugs -> that’s also true of a frog’s tongue -> but the tongue part is the monster -> so the “frog” is just a part it can retract into -> so that’s like how a snail works -> so there’s a shell -> so now it also evokes a tape dispenser -> so the flypaper tongue monster may as well also look a bit like a tapeworm -> frog snail tape dispenser coughing up a tapeworm tongue to catch bugs -> is anything left? -> nobody’s going to think of it visually but flypaper often attracts flies through sweetness -> so this is also like a fruit roll-up or a gummi worm and in-universe some people eat it like candy”
I feel like somehow that long list of things manage to make a relatively simple design. If they didn’t, I’d have cut some aspects out and often do!
It’s the name of a fiction setting I made up almost 20 years ago, which is like Pokemon or Digimon but more “morbid.” It’s not really a dark or scary setting though, I think of it as goofy and upbeat. I used to draw the monsters all in pencil:
But nowadays I’ve tried to practice digital color:
(This monster is Nemateuthis, a creature with giant parasitic worms that it uses as tentacles)
I really don’t talk a lot about this setting, do I? I’ve done it so long I kinda take it for granted and let it plug along in the background, but now I’m getting a lot of new questions about it, and some people who follow me still didn’t know it existed.
I’m just gonna dump a bunch of generalized information that maybe some people will think is interesting:
“Mortasheen” itself is the name of a city where the buildings are so huge, they have their own biomes and the upper floors can be perpetually frozen.
The entire planet is affected by the weird pollution of the city.
Nobody knows how the city started but it has existed for thousands of years and at this point is builds and expands itself. Nobody runs it.
Monster trainers are also basically monsters, but monsters more closely descended from humans.
Knowing some sort of bio-engineering science is more common than knowing how to cook or clean or drive a car in our world.
Real humans survive only outside the city in various ways. To them it’s a monster-ridden wasteland, but it’s still not a bleak existence. There’s more of a Fallout + Addams Family vibe where death isn’t a real big deal.
Even the metahumans can’t really get by without some monsters on their side though. It’s like if Pokemon world were thousands of times more dangerous.
Basically all monsters are also sapient characters unless otherwise specified, so in this sense more like Digimon or Yo-Kai Watch than Pokemon, but even though they might eat you they’re still not “evil.”
Before I felt they were terribly overplayed, I also established that all normal humans get back up as zombies when they die. They’re considered almost totally harmless though, kind of just an environmental feature.
Regular animal life still exists but is based primarily around everything our world considers pests and weeds. Almost all birds and mammals are just different kinds of crows and rats now; like pelican crows and badger rats and stuff. The surface of the ocean is a solid mat of jellyfish.
I’m gonna go over the monster classes here but I’ll put it under a cut:
Bioconstructs are the majority of monsters, organic or technorganic things designed for combat or for practical, everyday functions like doing laundry or advertising snack foods which also end up having offensive and defensive applications.
Arthropoids are human-arthropod hybrids and among the monsters most prone to establishing “feral” populations.
Vampires in this world are almost all derived from sea creatures. There’s no magic, so these are “mutagenic virus” type vampires. Specifically it’s a space virus that guides rapid evolution over many generations. They all suck blood and have mental domination powers.
Biomecha are a small and actually pretty unpopular (in universe) category, seen as antiquated and mostly lost in comparison to fully organic monsters, though despite how they look they’re still very much alive and can reproduce themselves.
Fectoids are intelligent diseases that can pull their microbial bodies together to build one giant one, which keeps growing and growing until it collapses back into microbes, their life cycle shifting between epidemic and kaiju.
Zombie Spawn are born from zombies, but never develop into anything remotely human. They’re unstable and always in a cycle of decay but are virtually unkillable. There’s an implication that the zombie infection itself was just supposed to incubate whatever Zombie Spawn really are, and like vampires it may have originated from another world.
Jokers are mostly hollow, rubbery creatures whose minds are partially a toxic gas they’re filled with, and have impenetrably chaotic thought processes. A lot of them live in underground hives and the first one may have hatched from a meteorite.
Unknown are monsters pulled out of another reality, and still don’t interact quite right with conventional physics. I feel like someday I want to change their name and rework their concept a little bit so they feel more like a proper class of their own.
Botanicals are hybrids of plant, animal and fungus, though there’s a fungus-themed subcategory where the plant aspect is vestigial. This was inspired by a theory I had about grass Pokemon :)
Ectosaurs are semicorporeal monsters who can slumber for millions of years in a mineralized form, in other words they’re “haunted fossils.” They are much older than the Pokemon Dreepy.
Wormbrains are monsters created by a type of intelligent parasitic worm. They usually have a vertebrate-derived body with giant parasites for appendages but even those parasites are under control of the true, tiny worms which constitute the monster’s entire consciousness.
Devil birds (I’ve never done any of them in color yet) are psychic ancient weapons that manipulate emotion and the one monster class with a more “magical” feel, though it’s still officially just really messed up biotechnology.
Finally there’s Garbage. Garbage class monsters developed spontaneously from the semiliving waste runoff of the city and most of them are harmlessly weak rejects of nature, but they can be modified to be more formidable and a few species have “evolutions,” unlike any other class in the setting.
And showed us what they originally looked like before they where old, broken, and turned into flying farm trucks:
The hull was just ripped off. Probably to make maintenance easier, and or because it was damaged and they where unable to replace it because they where stolen from an Imperial ship yard.
This is a nice bit of continuity for the “lived-in look” of Star Wars, where little details imply that everything in the world has a history. The missing panels of Luke’s landspeeder also suggest he has been tinkering with the engines constantly,
which leads back to American Graffiti and George Lucas’ love of cars
Fun fact: In the old EU the Y-Wings were clone wars era army surplus. The Juggernaut, or Turbo Tank was one of many concept vehicles for the battle of Hoth in Empire Strikes back, but was eventually cut in favor of just the AT-ATs and AT-STs.
The old EU would take this design and use it too as older clone wars hardware that was left over from a by gone era.
When it was time to finish the prequel trilogy with Revenge of the Sith, Lucas dug deep into the concept art archives from all previous 5 films and put the Juggernaut into the battle of Kashyyk scenes.
These two vehicles are some of the only things in all of Star Wars who’s canon has been consistent throughout the original trilogy, prequel trilogy, expanded universe, and new Disney canon!
BREAKING NEWS: #Toonami will be having a #DragonBallSuper marathon this Fourth of July weekend. Then starting on July 11, Dragon Ball Super will be taking the midnight timeslot on the block. The series will pick up at the beginning of the Universe Survival Saga. #DBZ #Anime #DragonBallZ #funimation #adultswim
https://www.instagram.com/p/CB35NUWD8Lk/?igshid=sql5n7cr5k8o
people with bad taste are always like “yurr hurr The Beach is about zuko and mai and how they’re a great couple” while intellectuals know that Actually The Beach is about mining any and all of the untapped friendship potential of this striking exchange
One of the best twist moments in Avatar is when Ty Lee suddenly and dramatically turns against Azula at the Boiling Rock. Azula was completely convinced that Ty Lee would obey her without question forever, but Azula wasn’t the only one fooled. Mai is just as shocked when Ty Lee rebels as Azula is. Ty Lee’s survival instincts were so sharp that she never let anyone know what she was thinking, not Azula, not Mai, and certainly not Zuko.
Zuko really believed that Ty Lee didn’t understand who he was at all. He completely bought into the act that she’s just a puppet for Azula, who lives in her “little Ty Lee world where everything’s great all the time”. But the thing is, Ty Lee is one of the most perceptive characters in the show, and she’s excellent at keeping that on the down low, but she sees a lot more of Zuko than he thinks, and a lot of what she sees is very familiar to her.
Overshadowed by prodigious siblings?
Wanting to be acknowledged for the talents you have rather than the talents you don’t?
Kept in line by fear?
Spending your whole life bending over backwards to fit the persona the royal family has set for you?
This characterization is definitely emphasized with Ty Lee’s acrobatics, flexibility, and ability to hit pressure points. There’s a level of subtlety and precision that is required for such skills. She had to know her own body to be able to bend it in such ways, and she has to know other people’s bodies to be able to disable them.
And pretty much from the moment you meet her, it’s fairly clear that there’s more to her than her lighthearted, bubbleheaded persona, long before she uses her battle skills. Look at what happens when Azula recruits her.
Azula used blatant intimidation tactics to get Ty Lee to comply, ordering the net to be set on fire and all the animals released (which, for the record, would not only have endangered Ty Lee but the circus creatures themselves–I bet Ty Lee was attached to them, and that would’ve been a double threat in itself). Ty Lee is visibly terrified, but instead of calling her out or letting Azula see that she was intimidated, she says this:
Instead of endangering herself by pointing out that Azula crossed a line, Ty Lee falls back on her talk of “the universe” and “auras,” talk that canonically gets her indulged or dismissed but never taken seriously.
She knows that Azula’s dangerous. There’s no way she doesn’t know that Azula is threatening her. But if she can keep Azula from realizing she knows that, she’s a little safer.
Because she’s one of maybe two people Azula never considered as potential enemies–even (especially, but that’s another thread) Ozai is a threat in her mind, but Mai and Ty Lee are the closest thing Azula has to trusted friends, right up until their betrayal.
Ty Lee’s spent a lifetime cultivating a personality that not only allows her to stands out among her siblings–it protects her from being treated as a threat. When you’re friends with Azula, that is an essential facade to maintain. and she does it consistently enough that no one ever sees through it.
All of the Fire Nation kids are so messed up. Zuko’s just the one who gets in the most trouble, because he’s the only one who doesn’t have a mask.
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