With your redesigns of gods, demon lords, and various other figures prominent in DnD's loose canon, I have wondered, what would be your take on Baba Yaga?
Nothing, Baba is perfect and I hope she spares me.
In all seriousness though, I often take umbrage with how d&d and it's associated systems (LOOKING AT YOU PATHFINDER YOU'RE EXTRA GUILTY OF THIS) just rip a folklore character out of its cultural context and drop it into an adventure or monster manual for the players to fight without understanding the role it played in the stories that gave it shape.
Everyone knows that Baba Yaga's cottage has chicken legs... but can you tell me WHY? other than being a particularly striking image that's cemented itself into the iconography of the character?
The answer is because someone somewhen told a story where a character had to find Baba Yaga's cottage and it kept moving deeper into the dark forest. They were telling a story about the primeval fear of being lost in the wilderness and how sometimes it felt like no matter how far you walked you'd never reach your destination, never finding your way there or back.
That feeling of helplessness is fundamental to quite a lot of folk stories, but is at odds with d&d's central play fantasy of empowerment. Folk heroes get by on wit, bravery, politeness, or even kindness alone.... d&d heroes get by on being able to outpace their opponents in the action economy. That's why I'm always up in arms whenever I see these characters statted out like just another monster for the players to chop through: it removes all their majesty and mystery and wonder (along with the potential character growth that comes along with such themes) and imagines a world where the primordial fear of being alone in the woods at night is something the party can defeat if they stab it enough times.
As for the character herself, Using characters like Baba Yaga to fill out d&d's roster of villains is the worst of both worlds, because you are at once beholden to the stories she comes from but also not doing those stories justice by poorly translating them into a new medium. Why not instead create an original crone character that references Ms. Mortar & Pestle who better embodies the gameish you want to use her in?
Anyway, sorry for the ramble there, have some dark folk beats as way of apology.
Well, yes... I haven't drawn you for a long time. But the main thing is that I drew it and that’s already good.
It has become much easier for me to draw on the computer thanks to a special tablet. It's easier to draw and it's easier to draw the necessary details. I don't know why I haven't used it before. Although I've had it for 2 years already.
Oh yeah, where did I disappear to? Maybe someone is interested, but who isn't? I'll tell you anyway. I wasn't in the mood to do anything. I just wanted to lie down and sleep. Maybe I'm going through a period like this. And this crap will pass. And I will start drawing actively again.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In 1976, Congress set fire to the country's libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!
For most of US history, copyright was something you had to ask for. To copyright a work, you'd send a copy to the Library of Congress and they'd issue you a copyright. Not only did that let you display a copyright mark on your work – so people would know they weren't allowed to copy it without your permission – but if anyone wanted to figure out who to ask in order to get permission to copy or adapt a work, they could just go look up the paperwork at the LoC.
In 1976, Congress amended the Copyright Act to eliminate the "formality" of copyright registration. Now, all creative works of human authorship were copyrighted "at the moment of fixation" – the instant you drew, typed, wrote, filmed, or recorded them. From a toddler's nursery-school finger-painting to a graffiti mural on a subway car, every creative act suddenly became an article of property.
But whose property? That was on you to figure out, before you could copy, publish, perform, or preserve the work, because without registration, permissions had to start with a scavenger hunt for the person who could grant it. Congress simultaneously enacted a massive expansion of property rights, while abolishing the title registry that spelled out who owned what. As though this wasn't enough, Congress reached back in time and plopped an extra 20 years' onto the copyrights of existing works, even ones whose authors were unknown and unlocatable.
For the next 20 years, creative workers, archivists, educators and fans struggled in the face of this regime of unknowable property rights. After decades of well-documented problems, Congress acted again: they made it worse.
In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, AKA the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act, AKA the Copyright Term Extension Act. The 1998 Act tacked another 20 years onto copyright terms, but not just for works that were still in copyright. At the insistence of Disney, Congress actually yanked works out of the public domain – works that had been anthologized, adapted and re-issued – and put them back into copyright for two more decades. Copyright stretched to the century-plus "life plus 70 years" term. Nothing entered the public domain for the next 20 years.
So many of my comrades in the fight for the public domain were certain that this would happen again in 2018. In 2010, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart and I got into a friendly email argument because he was positive that in 2018, Congress would set fire to the public domain again. When I insisted that there was no way this could happen given the public bitterness over the 1998 Act, he told me I was being naive, but said he hoped that I was right.
Michael didn't live to see it, but in 2019, the public domain opened again. It was an incredible day:
No one has done a better job of chronicling the fortunes of our fragile, beautiful, bounteous public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Every year from 2010-2019, Boyle and Jenkins chronicled the works that weren't entering the public domain because of the 1998 Act, making sure we knew what had been stolen from our cultural commons. In so many cases, these works disappeared before their copyrights expired, for example, the majority of silent films are lost forever.
Then, in 2019, Jenkins and Boyle got to start cataloging the works that were entering the public domain, most of them from 1923 (copyright is complicated, so not everything that entered the public domain in 2019 was from that year):
So what's entering the public domain this year? Well, for one thing, there's more of the stuff from last year, which makes sense: if Hemingway's first books entered the PD last year, then this year, we'll the books he wrote next (and this will continue every year until we catch up with Hemingway's tragic death).
There are some big hits from our returning champions, like Woolf's To the Lighthouse and A Farewell to Arms from Hemingway. Jenkins and Boyle call particular attention to one book: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, its title taken from a public domain work by Shakespeare. As they write, Faulkner spoke eloquently about the nature of posterity and culture:
[Humanity] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
The main attraction on last year's Public Domain Day was the entry of Steamboat Willie – the first Mickey Mouse cartoon – into the public domain. This year, we're getting a dozen new Mickey cartoons, including the first Mickey talkie:
Those 12 shorts represent a kind of creative explosion for the Disney Studios. Those early Mickey cartoons were, each and every one, a hybrid of new copyrighted works and the public domain. The backbone of each Mickey short was a beloved, public domain song, with Mickey's motion synched to the beat (animators came to call this "mickey mousing"). In 1929, there was a huge crop of public domain music that anyone could use this way:
Blue Danube, Pop Goes the Weasel, Yankee Doodle, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, Ach Du Lieber Augustin, Listen to the Mocking Bird, A-Hunting We Will Go, Dixie, The Girl I Left Behind Me, a tune known as the snake charmer song, Coming Thru the Rye, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Auld Lang Syne, Aloha ‘Oe, Turkey in the Straw, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, Habanera and Toreador Song from Carmen, Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Goodnight, Ladies.
These were recent compositions, songs that were written and popularized in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents who took their kids to the movies to see Mickey shorts like "The Barn Dance," "The Opry House" and "The Jazz Fool." The ability to plunder this music at will was key to the success of Mickey Mouse and Disney. Think of all the Mickeys and Disneys we've lost by locking up the public domain for the past half-century!
This year, we're getting some outstanding new old music for our public domain. The complexities of copyright terms mean that compositions from 1929 are entering the public domain, but we're only getting recordings from 1924. 1924's outstanding recordings include:
George Gershwin performing Rhapsody in Blue, Jelly Roll Morton playing Shreveport Stomp, and an early recording from contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson, who is famous for her 1939 performance to an integrated audience of over 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson’s 1924 recording is of the spiritual Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.
While the compositions include Singin' in the Rain, Ain't Misbehavin', An American in Paris, Bolero, (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue, Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Happy Days Are Here Again, What Is This Thing Called, Love?, Am I Blue? and many, many more.
On the art front, we're getting Salvador Dali's earliest surrealist masterpieces, like Illumined Pleasures, The Accommodations of Desire, and The Great Masturbator. Dali's contemporaries are not so lucky: after a century, the early history of the works of Magritte are so muddy that it's impossible to say whether they are in or out of copyright.
But there's plenty of art with clearer provenance that we can welcome into the public domain this year, most notably, Popeye and Tintin. As the first Popeye and Tintin comics go PD, so too do those characters.
The idea that a fictional character can have a copyright separate from the stories they appear in is relatively new, and it's weird and very stupid. Courts have found that the Batmobile is a copyrightable character (Batman won't enter the public domain until 2035).
Copyright for characters is such a muddy, gross, weird idea. The clearest example of how stupid this gets comes from Sherlock Holmes, whose canon spans many years. The Doyle estate – a rent-seeking copyright troll – claimed that Holmes wouldn't enter the public domain until every Holmes story was in the public domain (that's this year, incidentally!).
This didn't fly, so their next gambit was to claim copyright over those aspects of Holmes's character that were developed later in the stories. For example, they claimed that Holmes didn't show compassion until the later stories, and, on that basis, sued the creators of the Enola Holmes TV show for depicting a gender-swapped Sherlock who wasn't a total dick:
As the Enola lawyers pointed out in their briefs, this was tantamount to a copyright over emotions: "Copyright law does not allow the ownership of generic concepts like warmth, kindness, empathy, or respect, even as expressed by a public domain character – which, of course, belongs to the public, not plaintiff."
When Mickey entered the public domain last year, Jenkins did an excellent deep dive into which aspects of Mickey's character and design emerged when:
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/
Jenkins uses this year's entry of Tintin and Popeye into the public domain to further explore the subject of proprietary characters.
Even though copyright extends to characters, it only covers the "copyrightable" parts of those characters. As the Enola lawyers wrote, the generic character traits (their age, emotional vibe, etc) are not protected. Neither is anything "trivial" or "minuscule" – for example, if a cartoonist makes a minor alteration to the way a character's pupils or eyes are drawn, that's a minor detail, not a copyrightable element.
The biggest impediment to using public domain characters isn't copyright, it's trademark. Trademark is very different from copyright: foundationally, trademark is the right to protect your customers from being deceived by your competitors. Coke can use trademark to stop Pepsi from selling its sugary drinks in Coke cans – not because it owns the word "Coke" or the Coke logo, but because it has been deputized to protect Coke drinkers from being tricked into buying not-Coke, thinking that they're getting the true Black Waters of American Imperialism.
Companies claim trademarks over cartoon characters all the time, and license those trademarks on food, clothing, toys, and more (remember Popeye candy cigarettes?).
Indeed, Hearst Holdings claims a trademark over Popeye in many traditional categories, like cartoons, amusement parks, ads and clothes. They're also in the midst of applying for a Popeye NFT trademark (lol).
Does that mean you can't use Popeye in any of those ways? Nope! All you need to do is prominently mention that your use of Popeye is unofficial, not associated with Hearst, and dispel any chance of confusion. A unanimous Supreme Court decision (in Dastar) affirm your right to do so. You can also use Popeye in the title of your unauthorized Popeye comic, thanks to a case called Rogers v Grimaldi.
This all applies to Tintin, too – a big deal, given that Tintin is managed by a notorious copyright bully who delights in cruelly terrorizing fan artists. Tintin is joined in the public domain by Buck Rogers, another old-timey character whose owners are scumbag rent-seekers.
Congress buried the public domain alive in 1976, and dumped a load of gravel over its grave in 1998, but miraculously, we've managed to exhume the PD, and it has been revived and is showing signs of rude health.
2024 saw the blockbuster film adaptation of Wicked, based on the public domain Oz books. It also saw the publication of James, a celebrated retelling of Twain's Huck Finn from the perspective of Huck's enslaved sidekick.
This is completely normal. It's how art was made since time immemorial. The 40 year experiment in life without a public domain is at an end, and not a minute too soon.
You can piece together a complete-as-possible list of 2025's public domain (including the Marx Brothers' Cocoanuts, Disney's Skeleton Dance, and Del Ruth's Gold Diggers of Broadway) here:
People are mad that Netflix is doing everything gay now...if it was true why would they make Dorian and Basil brothers??? And I thought that they would let them be gay toghether as it supposed to be. Not brothers. They definitly weren't like brothers. Their relation was so gay that even my gramdma noticed it. Read the book Netflix!!
Varney the Vampire, Chapter 31: An Uncomfortably Gothic Interlude
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It is night, and Sir Francis Varney sits up alone in his house, awaiting the arrival of a mysterious visitor. So as not to keep the reader in suspense, he graciously monologues out loud about who his mysterious visitor is, why they're visiting, and how he feels about it. His mysterious guest visits him once a year at midnight to extract an unspecified form of payment from him, apparently because he owes them a life debt of some kind. He dreads these visits even though he ought to have nothing to fear from this person, and has often thought about killing them but has never been able to bring himself to do it.
The clock strikes...eleven. He's gotten the time wrong, and now he has an entire extra hour to kill. He then proceeds to get super fidgety. He paces. He monologues some more. He tries to distract himself thinking of other things, but his mind keeps going back to the impending meeting. Eventually, he gets so worked up with anxiety that he nearly faints.
He checks his watch. It's been 15 minutes.
Finally, in order to kill time, he sits down and reads a lovely, and by lovely I mean very boring, story out of a book.
The story includes cousin incest.
*Sigh* Here we go.
It is a dark and windy night, and a family are sitting around a fire in their big old mansion. There's an old couple, and two beautiful young maidens who look totally different; you see, one has black hair and the other has brown hair. There's also a bunch of other people, mostly servants who aren't allowed to sit near the fire.
The old woman of the couple, a Mrs. Bradley, remarks how it was two years ago on a night just like this one that her dear son Henry left them. We learn that the brown-haired girl is her daughter, and the black-haired one her niece.
The narrative pauses to tell us why Henry left. It turns out his father tried to marry him to a girl he didn't want to marry; when he refused, his father told him he could comply or leave. So he left.
Oh yes and the reason he didn't want to marry that girl is HE WAS IN LOVE WITH THE BLACK-HAIRED GIRL, HIS COUSIN.
Back in the present, a mysterious stranger arrives. He has a giant beard and a lot of coats on, and says he's with the army. He asks if the family has any relatives in the force; they say no, but bring up their dear missing son Henry. The father expresses his regret that he behaved the way he did.
Just then, the family dog runs up to the stranger and greets him enthusiastically, and the family realize he is none other than Henry in disguise! They all happily embrace and make up with each other, and Henry marries his cousin and they live happily ever after.
Varney looks up from his heartwarming incest tale to find it's 5 minutes to 12. Just then, there is a knock at the door.
[cries] This chapter started so strong. We get our first really good look at meow meow Varney, including a glimpse of one of his several mutually exclusive tragic backstories. He proceeds to behave extremely relatably (who hasn't been there while waiting for an important appointment or meeting?) while also giving me fuel for headcanoning him as ADHD (Time blindness! Fidgeting! Rymer literally calls it "the fidgets"!). And then we're bait and switched into another nothing story chapter.
And - listen. The worst part of this story is not the incest. The worst part is that it's incredibly goddamn boring. The pacing is glacial; I cut from my summary whole pages of dialogue between the family and the servants, talking about the weather, Henry, the advanced age of Mrs. Bradley, and an old woman living nearby who gave birth to twins (and then lost them both to prophetic dreams). The flashback scene of Henry getting kicked out is unnecessarily long and meandering, with an excessive amount of unnecessary explanation and telling-not-showing.
Listen. Let me give you an idea of the amount of pointless waffling there is.
"It is now two years since he was here last," said the old man,
"This night two years was the night on which he left."
"This night two years?"
"Yes."
"It was this night two years," said one of the servant men, "because old Dame Poutlet had twins on that night."
"A memorable circumstance."
The story's entire plot consists of the family waiting for Henry to return, and him doing so. The rest is filler. Not even the incest was enough to make it interesting.
[puts on my Literary Analysis Hat] And do you know why? This story is aping the tropes of gothic literature while lacking any of the themes that make those tropes relevant to the genre. It is an empty story with nothing to say, but by God it will say nothing on a dark and stormy night, in a crumbling old manor haunted by the ghosts of the past, and also there's an incestuous relationship. Because the thing is that the incest is completely irrelevant. You could edit out the fact that the girl is Henry's cousin and NOTHING about the story would remotely change. Including, crucially, the part at the end where the two of them are happily married and no one comments on the fact that they're first cousins. Why is it even here? Because it's Gothicâ„¢. Form without substance, for a trope for which substance is everything. In this story, the controlling patriarchal father has a change of heart, the wayward son comes home unharmed and makes up with his family, the cousins get married and live happily ever after, and the ghosts and omens aren't relevant to the plot. It's a thin Gothic coat of paint on an utterly banal, saccharine story about a homecoming, scrubbed clean of all dark themes, but not of the literal incest for some reason.
Also, did the author seriously have to call the son "Henry"? Way to be confusing!
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