Tidebound, Splishy-splash

She/her, 31, autistic and lonely but a lover of languages (Finnish) and TDP

[nothingmorethanageminiboar]

This is my bestest friend—Dan de Lion, "Dandy!" He’s the fanciest of Dandies.

Likes: house keys, new clothes, working with me, and when you call him "Mr.”

Dislikes: being naked.

Trivia: His intestines are warm, and he’s a Scorpio-Tiger!

[nothingmorethanageminiboar]

Styles of Dandy

[nothingmorethanageminiboar]

Finnish Dandy

[dailyrayllum]

[delphinusdelphis]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: ¾ Fandom: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Azymondias & Ezran (The Dragon Prince), Ethari/Runaan (The Dragon Prince), Callum/Rayla (The Dragon Prince), Aanya & Ezran (The Dragon Prince), Corvus & Soren & Terry (The Dragon Prince), Amaya/Janai (The Dragon Prince) Additional Tags: AU-gust 2026, Week 1 Plot, Canon Divergent, dæmon AU, His Dark Materials AU, Arc 2, Arc 3, speculative slice of life’s, Processing Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Domesticity, Found Family Series: Part 1 of AU-gust 2026 Fandom Event Summary:

As the world waits and prepares for the Fallen Star’s return, life continues on. The people of Xadia and the Pentarchy build a new world together, with their dæmons by their side. A speculative slice of life between Arc 2 and 3.

For AU-gust 2026 fandom event, Week 1: Plot. Updated Daily.

[dailyrayllum]

[koalas-koalas-everywhere]

Rayla in “The Great Bookery”: So I’m carrying this burden, but don’t worry, I won’t put it above the mission.

Callum: It’s okay; I will.

[nieanor]

Быстрый скетч по The dragon prince

[lunastrider20]

Headcanon time!

In a modern au where Rayla and Callum meet as young kids,the thing I love to imagine most is the dynamic between their parents. I mean — guys I'm cracking up just picturing this:

Runaan and Sarai both disapproving of their kid's new friend initially because "Callum,that girl doesn't play nice,you need to be careful" and "Rayla,that boy can't fight and looks too innocent to be trusted,he might be trouble"—

And when they meet its all :

Runaan,watching baby Callum chew on his pencil while scribbling on a wall using a permanent marker,face covered in charcoal smudges and hair looking like its been dipped in a paint can: Your son is certainly rather... gifted.

Sarai,watching baby Rayla scream "gonna get you!" and laugh maniacally as she chases some poor bird across the lawn Naruto style holding a baseball bat: You sure your daughter doesn't need a toddler leash? She is six after all.

Meanwhile there's Ethari and Harrow in the background bonding over embarrassing pictures of their kids on their phones, their respective spouse's disastrous cooking attempts,woodshop. Dad jokes flying in all directions. Numbers exchanged,dinner invites given,plans for play dates for their kids already in session— do you see my vision —

[zuppizup]

AU-Gust Rayllum Bodyguard AU

At least 3 chapters ready to go for AU-Gust!

[temerity14]

Full Circle

“Do you ever think about how impossible it was, that we found each other?” Callum had said to her one night. 

Rayla had looked at him with a soft smile and a scoff, and not said anything more. He hadn’t needed her to - he often got like that, a dreamy, not-quite-there look on his face as he mused aloud, and she never had much more to add. He was the thinker of the pair, always with his head in the clouds and turning over some new concept, some wild invention or philosophy he’d read in a book. 

She loved him for it, for the silly things he said with no need for a response, even though she often couldn’t quite follow the places his brain seemed to go in a fraction of a second. 

They were simply different, and that was wonderful.

That particular question stayed with her, though. 

“How impossible it was, that we found each other?”

Because it was, it truly was. 

They shouldn’t have, was the truth. That night, his family should have died, and she should have melted away into the shadows like she’d never existed. All they would have known of each other was the mutual grief they had been caused, and hatred would have bloomed.

Instead… 

Well. 

Impossible was a good word for it. 

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[kradogsrats]

Arc 1 Callum, Rayla, and Ezran Design Analysis

So while rewatching from the very beginning for the first time in... years... I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what it's like to enter the series with a completely clean slate, and the writing and design choices that were made to draw the audience into the story. There's some incredibly elegant and efficient writing going on in the first few episodes to introduce the characters and their dynamics with each other, but even before that, the first impression those characters make is on our eyeballs with their visual designs.

Fortunately, all design is communication. So what are the designs of Callum, Rayla, and Ezran—the Arc 1 story's principal hero characters—saying? What does their appearance tell us about them and the story?

Notes on Broader Design Language

Since these characters represent a clash (and joining) of opposing cultures—humanity (as represented by Katolis) and Xadia (as represented by Moonshadow elves)—I feel we need to quickly talk about the contrasting design language of those two groups.

I mentioned in my Pip design meta that Katolis leans primarily into warm colors, while the Moonshadow assassins share a cool color palette. Katolis (at least when it comes to the royal family, which is like 80% of what we care about) particularly emphasizes red and gold, as those feature in their heraldry, and you could say that Rayla and Runaan, as the most prominent Moonshadow elf characters, emphasize green and dark blue.

However, equally important in the Katolis/Moonshadow design contrast are their opposing motifs. I recall it being said that the geometric design language of Katolis was one of the first things they established for the overall look of the show, and it features heavily in the characters. Katolis designs use mostly straight lines, especially verticals (as appropriate for a culture whose identity symbol is towers) and diagonals—all the Katolis character designs have at least one very prominent, strong vertical at their center line, emphasized with a color shift like the gold trim on both Callum and Ezran. Moonshadow elves, meanwhile, don't have a single straight line anywhere that could be a curve, instead. Not just the trim on their clothing and weapons, but also their shape and cut—nearly all of the lines in all of their designs are curves. Rayla's blades alone are like 50 miles of curves compacted into a 3-foot space.

This is slightly less important and interesting with the trio than when we branch out into characters like Viren, because curve-heavy designs also become prominent in proximity to magic... but it's something to look at and notice in how the designs relate to each other.

But let's look at Callum, Rayla, and Ezran individually in detail.

Rayla

Rayla represents a difficult design challenge in that she has to bridge a lot of gaps. She has to represent the exoticism of Xadia, but remain relatable and mesh with Callum and Ezran. She has to convey the kind of confidence and competence that would see her added to an elite team on a deadly mission, but also youthful inexperience and insecurity. She has to be the trio's warrior (the "hand" of "head, hand, and heart"), but can't lean so far into martial aggressiveness that she comes across as harsh or jaded next to the (relatively sheltered) princes.

The prologue conveyed that there are several diverse elven cultures with their own characteristic features, but the Moonshadow assassin team is the first close look we get at elves, and there are a few things worth noting in what their collective design tells us.

Basically, Moonshadow elves are depicted as an interesting balance of individuality and conformity. We are shown several different skin tones, but all six have white hair. (White hair on youthful characters gives an ethereal, ageless impression and hints at the supernatural, linking well with the exotic and magical impression of Xadia. Rayla doubles up on this effect with her purple eyes.) Compared to elves we see later, Moonshadow elves also have a very consistent style of horns. Those two prominent consistencies across all six assassins are balanced out by the individuality of their clothing and weapons, which share enough features to harmonize and convey shared utility, but distinguish them from the Katolian guards, whose armor and weapons are interchangeably uniform. In that way, we perceive them as elite individuals in a cohesive team, and a believable threat even against a much larger number of those "disposable NPC" soldiers.

There are a few places where Rayla herself is an outlier among her companions, mostly in ways that convey her youth and inexperience. She appears to be unarmored, while the other assassins each have either some piece of metal armor or something that reads much more as protective leather than Rayla's clothing. There are actually a few designs for a more armored Rayla, and you can see how it changes the vibe:

In combination with the way her blades fold up completely out of sight (contrast with Runaan's always-prominent bow), this keeps her overall appearance from being too combat-oriented in a way that lets her fit better with Callum and Ezran. The lack of armor also suggests that she is junior and inexperienced compared to the rest of her team.

Also contributing to Rayla's less-experienced look is the lack of styling to her hair. Compared to Runaan, Andromeda, Skor, and Callisto, she's borderline shaggy, with just her tiny little braid—it makes her look less "put together." Ram shares this less-styled approach, where it contributes to making him look very young, as well. Furthermore (and distinct from Ram), Rayla has only the two relatively bold face markings, while the other assassins have more intricate designs that extend beyond their faces to their limbs. We don't know what the markings mean (like... we still don't), but for Rayla to have fewer and simpler ones suggests, again, that she is younger and less experienced.

From a design standpoint, Rayla's face markings (aside from just being a distinctive feature) have the neat effect of acting almost like strong cheekbones, sharpening and narrowing her face. However, they also draw attention to her eyes, which are huge. This is the kind of clash of mature and childish features that makes a very convincing teenager design.

Rayla's eyes are also unusual in that she is one of only a handful or two of characters with distinct eyelashes, rather than the single, heavy line used for 90% of the cast and only varying in the degree of winged-eyeliner length and sharpness. Long, curling eyelashes contribute to a feminine appearance, but on Rayla I think they are equally suggestive of youth and innocence. A lot of the other characters with prominent eyelashes have more feminine designs (such as Kim'dael, a classic femme fatale), but the only character that I would say uses the same design as Rayla's is... Leola. Which. Hm.

Ezran

Ezran, meanwhile, is actually very straightforward: just about every feature of his design is set up to emphasize his youth and innocence. His poofy hair makes his head appear larger, which exaggerates his child proportions. His freckles express both youth and some of his mischievousness. His big, blue eyes are a dramatic pop of color that draws attention to his face, but blue eyes are also emblematic of angelic innocence and kindness.

(Blue eyes being associated with a lot of positive traits like beauty and innocence is an inherently racist cultural convention, and giving blue eyes to a Black character also falls into longstanding racist patterns of character design, in that a lighter hair or eye color has frequently been an attempt—whether conscious or unconscious—to make them more palatable/relatable to white audiences. I don't think that negates the many positive things they did with a pretty significant diversity of Black characters in TDP, but I also think it's worth saying.)

Ezran's overall color scheme of red and dark neutrals links him very closely to Harrow, but he doesn't have the complexity of patterns and diagonals that Harrow does:

He does have the strong center vertical that characterizes Harrow, Callum, and the other Katolis characters, but to keep it from visually elongating his torso too much, it's broken up by a sequence of rectangles that also evoke oversized buttons or fasteners. Even his little spats serve to gather his pants at the knee and give his legs a silhouette reminiscent of knickerbockers, historically worn by young boys. They also help to anchor the overall impression of the trio in the medieval/old-timey aesthetic of the rest of the series, which Callum and Rayla stray pretty far from. Interestingly, this seems like it may have always been part of his design intent, given some alternate looks that are very "Disney prince":

Finally, there's Bait, who is functionally a part of Ezran's design, acting as his key character prop for all of Season 1 and most of Arc 1 overall. Bait's default yellow and blue colors, in combination with Ezran's red, create a bright primary color scheme that is (again) linked to youthfulness. Bait is also designed to look and act like a crotchety old man, which contrasts with and emphasizes Ezran as an optimistic and carefree child. Furthermore, the fact that he is a loyal friend to Ezran highlights Ezran's charisma and empathy for people unlike himself.

Callum

Then there's Callum. Most of Callum's design is oriented toward maximizing the impression of his insecurity in his role (or lack thereof). His hair is shaggy in that low-effort teenage way, but it particularly falls in a way that could get in his eyes or even cover them. This is animation, so they're careful to keep his eyes and eyebrows fully visible to not impede his expressiveness, but it has the overall effect of suggesting a curtain he's hiding behind. His jacket has a looser silhouette with very baggy arms, conveying a lack of both physicality and of confidence. It's not quite what I'd describe as "oversized," but it definitely has a concealing and minimizing effect. You can see the difference when his jacket silhouette is sleeker and his arms are more exposed:

The jacket isn't entirely shapeless, however. It doubles up the strong central vertical with his shirt, though that's frequently broken up by the diagonal line of his crossbody sketchbook strap. Depending on his posture (and the camera angle), the emphasized shoulders and inward-curving sides can enhance either a slumped, insecure attitude or a confident one:

(Also, like: the way his leap of faith at the end of Arc 1 has the Manus Pluma Volantus runes first shine through from beneath his jacket sleeves, and then he bursts out of it entirely as he gains his wings... sometimes they are not exactly subtle with this stuff.)

The jacket is also responsible for Callum's distinctive color palette. I doubt that blue on the Katolis-aligned characters (most notably Callum and Amaya) "means" anything explicit in lore terms, considering that there are examples in the artbook of designs for both Ezran and Soren in blue, but it's distinct from red (obviously). It acts to distance characters using it from the red-dominant characters of the royal family. In Callum's case, it also harmonizes with the blue (and the curves) in Rayla's design, helping make the trio more cohesive as a whole by bridging the otherwise-significant design gap between her and Ezran.

More important for Callum's design than the blueness of the jacket in isolation is the way that blue and red are layered. His innermost layer (the shirt/vest) is red and has a geometric design similar to Harrow's, closely aligning him with Harrow and Ezran as part of the royal family. However, he is insecure in that relationship and his role as prince, so he covers the red inner layer with the jacket and distances himself from them. On top of that is layered the red scarf, which is probably the signature non-prop (i.e. not his sketchbook) feature of his design.

On an active character with an otherwise sleek silhouette, a long scarf can add a lot of visual motion and make them more dynamic. In TDP that's not very common because of the animation style used, so scarves are generally shorter and indicate a more reserved character—such as with Corvus, Ethari, and Arc 2 Viren. Callum's scarf adds to his loose, shapeless silhouette as a cowl he could conceivably retreat inside like a turtle. At the same time, it's a very bright pop of red near his face (which will always receive the majority of visual focus), preventing the blue of his jacket from becoming his primary color association.

Back to the color layering, though. The red scarf aligns him back with Ezran, in particular, due to its less ornate design (compared to the red shirt that resembles Harrow's) that explicitly references both the simplified heraldry of Katolis and the diamond design of Sarai's armor (seen more frequently in Amaya). It's both laid on his shoulders and wrapped protectively around him, a banner he flies signifying his love and "allegiance."

Finally, while I personally hate fingerless gloves as a design element, I have to grudgingly admit that on Callum they do serve a legitimate purpose. They are associated with higher dexterity and fine motor control, due to their real-world application of being a trade-off between preserving those things and keeping the hands warm. (Though they can have other connotations. In this particular context, though, I'm pretty confident that's what the design is going for.) Callum is an artist, which uses a lot of that fine motor control. Additionally, the gloves highlight the ends of his fingers—there's very low contrast between the jacket sleeves and the gloves, and much higher contrast between the gloves and his fingers—which are integral to the visuals of his spellcasting.

Conclusion

Look, this isn't a series anyone watches for stunning visuals. (That's definitely not to disparage anyone involved in producing it—I'm frequently impressed by what they manage to do despite very obvious imposed limitations.) But it does still have coherent and intentional design going on, particularly at the forefront of the story and characters, and it has definitely been worth analyzing with fresh eyes.

If I can work up the motivation, I may do more posts like this for Viren, Claudia, and Soren, or possibly for Aaravos (since he's actually pretty unique in that they've shared a lot more unused designs for him, and that's always super fun to look at).

[rayllum-weekly]

Rayllum Six Sentence Sunday

Reblog this post or tag @rayllum-weekly if you want me to share!

[blutopaz15]

👀👀👀

[tategaminu]

We have been focused in horn cuffs but what if these are the actual wedding engagement objects? I know horn cuffs seem to be the common thing with moonshadows but Callum isn't a moonshadow and Rayla doesn't need to follow the norm.

Both seem to be metal‚ moon shaped‚ same position and have the other's eye color (not exactly matching but still)

[blutopaz15]

pov: people keep fucking with the super cute pregnancy announcement you planned. you have a t shirt and everything!!! 👿

july 5th: expecting

[m4rs-ex3]

.𖥔 ݁ ˖╭ ┆rayllum month: drawing / muse

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[funkytoesart]

Rayllum with their daughter out for a stroll on Melodaisy Lane :) also i’m not saying this *might* be spoilers for The Halfling Child but depending on which ending I choose, this *might* be a spoiler for The Halfling Child ;)

[zuppizup]

Rayllum BodyGuard AU

This AU has consumed my soul.

[hashtagloveloses]

this kid’s post and his replies to people’s questions are so pure I’m sobbing

[digidiskette]

What’s better— the thread is filled with people giving some good advice on how to respect a woman’s boundaries and how to ask what she would be okay with, publicly. Lots of trans girls thanking him for being so patient and thoughtful with his words, and lots of people cautioning him that his purpose as a boyfriend would be to keep her safe, even from his own friends and family if need be. A+ shit right here.

[stop-stalin-and-suck-my-dick]

This is so FUCKING cute help me

[gardeninthevoid]

hey, trans girls who are into guys? THIS is what you deserve. don’t you ever believe that you have to bend over backwards for men to like you, that you have to accept being disrespected and mistreated, that you’re something to hide or be ashamed of. you’re beautiful, you’re a fucking princess, and you deserve someone who sees that and loves you deeply and unconditionally, who will choose you over the world and fight the world for you. THIS is the kind of guy.