AO3: RosemaryRiddel.
Currently into Linked Universe and The Long Dark. Links to fics will be posted here as they come into existence, whenever that may be.
I go by Rose or Riddle (she/her). I'll post and reblog anything from meta analyses & writing resources to some of my own drabbles & fics.
Any important/relevant tags are listed here alongside the headers.
Tags of note:
#riddel's rambles
Meta Analyses, References & Resources
Linked Universe
LU Combat Guides Part 1 & Part 2
-> (Part 1 last updated 2 May 2025. Part 2 last updated 3 May 2025)
BOTW/LU Wild Meta Analyses (#botw combat mechanics meta)
How Wild's magic affects his weapons
Wild's magic in-depth explanation: OG post & follow up info
A list of AO3 fics and short stories posted to tumblr can be found below the keep reading line.
AO3 Fics (#riddel's fics)
Linked Universe
Spoon Theory & the 'Despite Everything' series
In which Wild is still Link of a century ago, even if it takes everyone, including himself, a while to work that out.
A.K.A. My "Wild has ADHD" series
Tear Streaked
Unstoppable force meets immovable object.
Time is going to get passed Wild at all costs, no matter how many uses of his ocarina it takes.
God Shattering Star
Laws of magic, space, and time be damned, Sky is going to kill TOTK Ganondorf no matter what. As a treat.
Twin Stranger
Mid-LU, Wild ends up in Age of Calamity. No one is happy about this.
Completed: 4/4
The Deep Below
Trapped in the depths of the Lakebed Temple as it floods, Time and Wild have to race to escape.
A.K.A. Time passes his CPR refresher course with flying colours.
Complete: 3/3
Sins of the Father
Are to be laid upon the children. Separated from his brothers and taken captive by the Shadow, Wild learns this the hard way.
Complete: 13/13
Word Count: 270k
The Long Road Home
A few months after Time got custody of his younger brothers, the first Kaiju attacked. It took everything he had to keep his tiny family together in the aftermath. But with one single mistake, the screech of metal and an ear-splitting roar, the future they had planned is torn away. Two people can still pilot a Jaeger but the silence that fills the hole where the third should be is deafening.
In progress: 3/?
Affliction: Hypothermia Risk
It's one thing to end up lost in a tundra with the temperatures plummeting and limited shelter on hand. That is something Wild and Twilight have handled before with ease. But it's another thing to be stalked relentlessly by something unknown, something that is very hungry and has its sights set on them both. Now they're stuck in a race against time to either outrun their pursuer or be consumed by the endless cold.
In progress: 5/?
Persona
Dare to Break This Silence
Faced with Dojima's anger over his interference with the serial killer case, Souji makes a drastic decision. It doesn't go well.
In which I make November worse for the Dojima family.
Additional Content from Fics (#deleted scenes)
-> Shield Surfing (got your heart in a headlock, Despite Everything series)
Ficlets (#riddel's fics)
Linked Universe
Phoning a Friend
Warriors watches two version of the Champion play Stop Hitting Yourself.
Inherited Handwriting
Time contemplates the physical manifestations of his future and ends up thinking about the past.
Twin Stranger
TFW you get a time-travelling mentor but he's your alternative timeline self (now completed multi-chapter fic).
you're taller. how fucking dare you.
Wind sees some familiar faces. He's Very Unimpressed.
Braiding Fic (a Twin Stranger continuation)
Age (formerly Champion) and Wild braid each other's hair and talk about boys.
Beamos
In which everyone hates these lil bastards, but no one more than Wild.
Enough random notes that have a written story on them as environmental storytelling, explore the space, get crazier with it.
You move into a house and aw cute, it has the kids height on the walls but you notice there's a three foot difference in height between measurements, you check the date, they're a month apart. The final measurement is on the ceiling. It's dated two days ago.
You're part of a recovery team that have finally found a stranded ship, they were found too late and have all passed a long time ago. They all died of starvation. You enter their storeroom, it's filled with food. In the dining hall you find the tables laden with perfectly fine looking breads, cakes, cured meats, jams, candies. Your medic says all the people sitting at the table didn't eat a Thing.
You wake up in an apocalypse. You can't find anyone at all as you wander the streets but you do hear faint music playing from somewhere. You stumble into a supermarket, to see all the aisles still full, except for the shelf that was full of ear plugs, which look to be the only thing that was looted.
Like there's light, sound, props. Having a street where every house is decimated except for One. Landing on a planet known for having No Water and a plant is growing and you don't know where it could have possibly gotten moisture from but you can't find the citizens Anywhere.
I'm sorry, I'm just kinda over the "graffiti on the wall to show the bad guy is around". That's not environmental storytelling that's just normal story. Show me I'm in the villains territory by the rain suddenly cutting out above me as I'm driving, even though it's meant to be raining all night. I park the car and step out, and realise the constellations are Wrong, until I see they're Not constellations, they're the blinking lights of a massive ship-
I Will stop now because everytime I go to write a sentence it devolves into another prompt but I'm just saying we have a Lot of senses, engage them, show me the Environment in environmental storytelling.
whumpee completely shutting down after getting rescued. caretaker is panicking and hoping they’re not catatonic or comatose, but whumpee’s just been through too much in such a short amount of time and they can’t handle anything else — they let their brain shut down and their body go limp. it’s not like they have any control over their situation anyways, so why pretend like their actions can affect anything?
conversely, also consider caretaker desperately trying to get whumpee to answer or at least look at them, getting more and more stressed as all they receive is a half-lidded, lifeless stare
and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.
Nothing like browsing hurt/comfort on ao3 to really drive home that no one fucking knows how hypothermia works. Jesus guys. Get it together. Don't make me do a psa. It'll be embarrassing for everyone.
If you're getting the bulk of your emergency preparedness from archive of our own or heaven forbid Tumblr dot com on the world wide web, the problem is several steps upstream. I can't help you much with that one. But I can make a helpful critique on writing effective whump because that's what we're here for! Should hypothermia be your plot agent of choice you should recognize that the true horror and tragedy is that you have more time than you think you do and all your mistakes are easily fixable but you can't do a damn thing about them.
Give your character with agency and control issues hypothermia. They will have nightmares about the slow paralysis and lethargy of cold until the day they die. The physical and mental symptoms creep in by degrees that you can easily monitor and recognize but are powerless to stop. The dissolution of initiative and the loss of rationality is terrifying when it happens and it's actually worse after warming up because you can remember being dead certain that striping out of your clothes in the snow was the right thing to do.
The psychology of the situation is as close as reality can get to the frog boiling experiment, where everything slowly gets worse and worse and the only thing that could stop it is getting out of the scenario and since that's an impossibility there's nothing that can solve anything. Bash your whumpee with utter hopelessness while giving them nerve damage, buy one get one style.
If you must get nitpickety about the physics and medical details, hypothermia is when the human body can not maintain internal temperature warmer than the surrounding environment. Homeostasis is maintained by - wait no, too many big words. Drink water, eat food, body needs to keep the guts warm. Food and water are the fuel to keep the guts warm. Guts are 90(ish) degrees, air is usually cooler than that and you can go hypothermic in weather as warm as 60 if you haven't been drinking or eating. The water drinking part is more important than the eating part. Hypothermia at 60 is not gonna be the same as hypothermia in below freezing weather. The nerve damage part is from the equivalent of freezer burn happening in living flesh, so that won't happen if the ambient air temp is above freezing, niether will the frostbite or gangrene. You also dont need to be hypothermic for frostbite to occur on skin and extremities since your core can be perfectly toasty while your toes freeze solid, but it does tend to happen together.
As for your rescuer/caretaker/comfortgiver. This shit is fucking terrifying. The whole cuddle for warmth thing can be actively dangerous since you are also a human being with guts that need to stay warm and a finite amount of body heat to donate. If you're still out in the cold, cuddling with a person sized ice pack is a good way to end up with 2 person sized ice packs. Even if you are in a safe place to get them warm, ouch, frostbite hurts and it only starts hurting when you warm up enough to not be numb, so you can save your person and then forcibly subject them to creeping searing pain that you cannot soothe.
Not to mention the heart attacks. A rush of cold blood from the extremities back to the heart can be enough to cause the cardiac muscle to go wtf and freak out. (Super scientific terminology right there for ya) What would cause a sudden rush of cold blood like that? A bruise. Even a little one. Your patient also happens to be numb, disoriented, and clumsy at the moment. Good luck. Pray for decent baseline cardiac health.
So here's the thing. I dont actually care if the whump is accurate. I want it to be interesting. Go sort through your blorbos for the one who would have the worst time in the above situations. Fly my scarabs. I want those characters tired and chilled, wet and weather beaten. Get after it. On to thermodynamically improbable scenarios we go!
From an allegorical standpoint, being numb means it is really easy to hurt yourself. Go get a hold of your repression princess who shrugs everything off because they're fine guys and have them burn the shit out of their hands trying to warm up. Numb fingers and fire is not a great combo. Numb fingers and boiling water is also not great. All sorts of juicy parallels to be drawn.
Fun tidbit about frostbite specifically, when you freeze a body part the water in that body part expands into nasty little ice crystals that tear up the cell walls and organ tissues. That's where the damage comes from. Once its frozen though, its not as if the ice crystals can do anything else, but if things thaw and refreeze without medical attention or time to heal in between, that's how you lose fingers. The water refreezes into crystals and then there are more more sharp edges on the inside of cells and tissues. Meat turns to goo, meat that is goo doesn't do anything but rot and that's gangrene. Point being, if you're going to warm someone up, make sure you can keep them warm. This is where you put fun metaphors about backsliding and relapses.
Like most situations, everything can be made worse by being drunk. Alcohol acts as a vasodialator and opens up all the capillaries which will bleed heat. Do not get drunk and take a nap in a snowberm, you only feel sweaty and warm, you ain't. Legions of homeless alcoholics have discovered this the hard way.
As for the bit about having more time than you think you do, hypothermia and associated motor skill loss can definitely creep up on you if you aren't familiar with the progression, but it is a progressive problem. Your hands will get stiff and the way you measure how cold you're getting is to touch your thumb to your fingers. Thumb to pinky will be the first to go and as you lose range of motion in your hands it will progress to ring finger. When you can't make your thumb meet your index finger that's the sign that you need to drop whatever you're doing and go get warm because if it gets much worse you won't be able to use your hands. Not having use of your hands make the whole 'getting out of the cold and getting warm' bit that much harder.
Thinking that stripping is a good idea is probably the last idea you will ever have, because that's the point where your body gives up on conserving heat and it all gets dumped back into the extremities. Or at least we think that's what happens, people don't survive that shit often enough for us to actually check.
And to add on and give you another way to torture your characters: Pick the one who is most miserable when they have to sit still and wait. Now give them moderate to severe hypothermia.
OP already explained that a rush of cold blood from the extremities to the heart can cause a heart attack, and you know what else can cause the blood to rush back? Moving. Literally just moving. If your character is found outside acting confused, breathing slowly, shivering or worse, not shivering anymore and all they want is to walk back to where it's warm? Sucks to be them. Every second they do anything but lay down (on a sled, a rescue blanket, a damn tree log, whatever the rescuer has or finds) and don't move a single muscle and just let themselves be transported to safety is a second more for their body to decide that If We Are Moving, We Need Warm Feet And Hands Too, and send that cold blood away from the extremities back to the heart and give itself a heart attack from the cold shock.
So. Sorry whumpee no. 3 but no matter how much you hate getting taken care of or saved or how much trauma you have from someone dragging you around or being unable to move – if you want to survive, you will. not. move. a single muscle.
(Also for the rescuers, if they absolutely have to transport whumpee up or down a hill or stairs or any other incline, they need to keep their body as horizontal as possible, do not make it easier for the body to rush blood up or down the body – even if that means that whumpee who hates touch or physical proximity now needs to be lifted by several people. And if horizontal is really not possible, the rescuers absolutely have to keep whumpee's head above the heart, don't let that cold leg blood fall down towards the heart, the head is the highest point at all times – even if that means that whumpee who has trust issues from the seventh circle of hell and half an aneurysm at the thought of not being able to control everything at all times now needs to be transported head-first and thus can't see ahead where they are going.)
Based off of my SOA magic system that should probably post, because yesterday was my birthday, these are basically my truest fave tropes
When heartbreak/grief affects a character's magic
Magic backfiring often having the same effects as a gun backfiring
When the stress and trauma is genuinely killing the character
The variance of scars caused by magic. Necrotic scars from dark magic. Colorful scars from haphazard spellcasting. Lighting scars that refuse to fade. Leathery skin from overuse of fire magic. Discolored fingertips, foggy eyes, rapidly graying hair, gimme gimme gimme
Nose bleeds from overuse? A class. But what about... tinnitus, blurred vision, dizzying, loss of appetite, weight loss, tingling/numbness, loss of balance, paling skin, weakened immune systems, muscular pain, oh I could go on
Soldiers collapsing mid battle from using their magic too much
Squad mates holding up their comrade so that they can keep casting magic, despite their weakness and inability to stand for themselves
Watching magic trace through someone's veins before it conjures into reality
Sometimes trying to explain my anxiety to someone else just makes me feel more insane.
Like yes I am indeed aware that my brain believing with its whole damned chest that I'm somehow ruining every single friendship I have is irrational. Yes I know my friends love me and want to be around me, but ma'am try telling my head that.
Who came up with anxiety anyway? I just want to talk.
Comfort tropes because I suck at comfort and need practice
Post whump
Content: comfort, Post captivity, bruises, lashing out, PTSD
Whumpee wrapped up in a blanket with a cup of hot chocolate. "Aren't you going to drink that?" "No. I think I'll just... sit here with it."
Hugs. Whumpee numbly walking into caretaker's outstretched arms and squeezing their eyes shut as the arms gently embrace them.
Waking up with a nightmare and patting the comforter, slapping the bed, walking around touching every wall, every piece of furniture, reminding themselves of where they are. Not there, not anymore.
Dyeing their hair after being forced to leave it down, tangled, uncut, for months in captivity.
Watching bruises fade from red and purple to green and yellow. Green becomes whumpee's favorite color, because they never got to see it when whumpers was in control of them---bruises were always fresh. It's a symbol that the pain is there, but it's going. And it will heal, just like the bruises.
Maybe they lost their whole friend group because their friends couldn't handle what happened to them. And now they're making new friends in caretaker's friend group. People that understand and don't mind.
Whumpee lashing out at caretaker and then sobbing/throwing a fit in the bathroom over it. "I ruined it!" When they come out, shoulders hunched, ready for everything to blow up in their face, caretaker is just on the phone with their own friend, calmed down, alright. "I'm getting you a punching bag, whumpee. Try that next time, okay?"
