Salad Cat

She/Her Don't be surprised if I suddenly start reblogging non Pokémon stuff, I have a lot of hyperfixations

[dinovelvet]

[shitkicker-deluxe]

...Join star fleet they said...It'll be an adventure they said...

[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.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[maryellencarter]

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

[sunflowergardens-world]

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

[mysteryteacup]

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

[melonthesprigatito]

I really want to play Deltarune but every single time I think "I want to play Deltarune" my brain grabs me agressively by the shoulders like YOU CAN'T PLAY IT NOW IT'S NOT FINISHED DO YOU WANT TO BE STUCK IN CLIFFHANGER HELL FOR AN UNKNOWN AMOUNT OF TIME??!?!?!?!?!?!

On a slightly adjacent note, I also want to start watching Bojack Horseman but my brain just shakes their head like Girl, that show gets waaaay too emotionally heavy, you will not be able to cope with it. You sobbed watching The Tigger Movie, this is above your level of coping with things

[melonthesprigatito]

Chat, you should have seen the way my soul left my body when the word "doomscrolling" showed up unprompted in my silly whimsical Nintendo game

[lindleart]

this one presented a fun challenge in that both of these pokemon have bigass ears, so i went though a bunch of different poses trying to figure out the best way to have them not cover each other's faces

[lindleart]

wait. oh my god. this said espeon. how the fuck did i manage to draw this entire piece and not realize it said espeon this whole time. shit. goddamn it. fuck

[melonthesprigatito]

I really don't like how they changed Pikachu's "Worried" emotion portrait in Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, then the 3D PMD games proceeded to use the inferior Explorers version instead of the OG Rescue Team version.

These just have less sauce than the original.

[melonthesprigatito]

Went to Asda this week and something must have been wrong with the freezers because the freezer doors were covered in condensation.

And, as per human nature when confronted with condensation covered glass, every single one of them had some kind of doodle drawn on it.

The amount of 6 7s I saw was amazing.

[melonthesprigatito]

It kinda fucks me up playing BOTW knowing that somewhere in the sky, the Light Dragon is endlessly circling and deep below Hyrule Castle, the seal restraining the Demon King is slowly weakening all while I'm screwing around, getting struck by lightning.

[mukuroom]

Oh boy, a complex character who's a woman! I love messy characters who hurt everyone around them and continue the cycles that hurt them!! Can't wait to share this joy with fellow fans– why's everyone calling her a bitch

[melonthesprigatito]

I think the saddest part of PMD: Rescue Team isn't the ending, or the Fugitives arc or anything to do with Gengar and Gardevoir, it's the fact that the postgame feels so lonely.

For starters, your Partner stops being a character. They get reverted into a generic Pikachu and they lose their unique dialogue. The only time they're ever their normal selves is in the limited amount of cutscenes in the postgame (and by that I mean only really the Latios and Latias mission)

Secondly, they stop interacting with you forever. They don't greet you in the morning and they don't say "See you tomorrow!" at the end of the day anymore.

If you're really pessimistic, it feels like your Partner ended the friendship because they never forgave you for almost returning to the human world and you returned for nothing. Your Partner, who was ride or die for you all game, becomes just a coworker you only see when you're doing rescue work.

Because that idea depresses me to much, I'm pretending that the Player visits the Partner in THEIR home every morning instead of vice versa (because you do have to rebuild your team every morning anyway) and that their friendship is as strong as ever, even though the game no longer shows it.

I'm SO GLAD this was fixed in the remake. I know you can't walk about Pokémon Square as other Pokémon in RTDX but it is so not worth it if you have to sacrifice the Partner's personality for it.

[melonthesprigatito]

Any and all disappointment I had with evolving Sunny into Flareon melted away the very second I noticed that her idle animation wags her tail perfectly on beat with the Rescue Team Base music

10/10, no notes, best Eeveelution in PMD: Rescue Team

[sillysiluriforme]

This week im seeing colors on heat maps I’ve never even considered before

[melonthesprigatito]

Damn it, I knew I should have picked a different team name.

[melonthesprigatito]

There was a brief powercut in my neighbourhood because of the heatwave which kinda sucked and it was made infinitely worse by the fact that, by pure unfortunate coincidence, the power went off at the EXACT SAME MOMENT I switched on my desk fan.

I swear to god I shat myself thinking I caused it. We've blown the electricity in this house by switching on the toaster one time.

[melonthesprigatito]

I love posting on r/Link_Dies because it's just the perfect place to watch Link going through the most cartoony slapstick imaginable and it always makes me crack up every single time

I have noticed that people are starting to get really picky about what counts as a "death."

People are really out there watching Link getting kicked in the face by a Stalmoblin, causing him to ragdoll down the side of a volcano spinning like the Propellor Guy from Titanic, hitting every rock on the way down and rolling through two Fire Chuchus for good measure.

And I'm getting snippy arguments about "Um actually it doesn't count, he didn't die, he got revived by a Fairy waaaaah"

His hearts went down to zero when he shattered like glass against the rock face. He DIED. The fairy only activates when Link DIES. You really watched the most unfortunate chain of events happen to the poor guy and got mad that he didn't stay dead?

Fortunately other people aren't nitpicky.

[melonthesprigatito]

I hate how I have to go to work tomorrow in the middle of Sun-mageddon

[melonthesprigatito]

Got my ass kicked by Groudon today