Hey, can I ask a slightly awkward question about Finch and Ellie? I’m honestly not super knowledgeable about this topic and I don’t want to accidentally write or assume something incorrect.
I think I may have worded my questions weirdly before, so I’ll try to be clearer: have they already gone through any kind of transition, or is that something you leave open to interpretation? I mainly need to understand the characters properly so I don’t mess things up if I ever write them in my own ideas.
And honestly, I probably have a bit of a messy background with this topic. I’m from Russia, and sex education there is pretty lacking, plus I personally went through a phase in my childhood where I thought about transitioning, but it wasn’t really about actual gender identity in a clear way. So I might sound clumsy or not use the right terms.
If you don’t feel comfortable answering, that’s totally okay. And sorry if I already asked anything weird or awkward before
I hate English.
it's ok! it's honestly always good to ask.
finch and ellie are both on HRT, and finch has had top surgery. whether they've had additional surgeries is open to interpretation for now. I may make a decision later but for now it's up to the whims of the interpreter.
I'd like to know exactly what specific things will change in the Dreamswap remake? And also if any changes will be made to the story of some characters.
P.S.: I love your drawings :3
most of the stories are mid-revision (as in like… I'm still trying to figure out what's different about them) but here are some notable differences:
the gender balancing, naturally
their fatal flaws names are their canon names now (blue's nickname is still blue of course)
the spirit of the tree is not a physical character who directly interacted with any other characters (arthur's and miles's parents did not ever directly interact with this spirit, miles and arthur were taken by its followers)
arthur's age when he met ani has been changed to 20 instead of. whatever it was before (ani was one of the first people he met while learning how to travel between universes, before he even started JR, which helps to explain why he was there by himself, and explains his lack of awareness and lack of ability to help them and also makes it like. less weird tbh)
crystal doesn't have amnesia
everything in crystal's backstory regarding 'fake' emotions or being physically controlled was all removed
arthur and miles were not immortal and more or less regular humans before consuming the fruit from the tree (at least I think this is a change)
all details regarding spirit-borne guardians (arthur, nightmare, dark, jet, essentially dreamtale au connected people) and how only people born with special qualifications can survive eating the tree fruit has been removed
most of the characters are ambiguously queer now in terms of orientation (mostly talking about miles who exclusively liked men before but like. that was back when every character was a man so it didn't matter) every character who was acespec before is still acespec now though
bunny is 15 and randy is somewhere between 45 and 60
besides them everyone else's ages are 'ambiguously young' for now (somewhere amid their 20s and 30s) because the older I get the more I keep wanting to change them lol (except arthur and miles, theirs are the same because they are immortal)
miles and arthur's pointed ears were removed (they did not last long and I never really liked them)
basically everything related to the tcu is gone (to some degree, magic types remain but they like. function differently)
JR intervenes in small scale crimes WAY less (why did they intervene randomly so much)
ellie's underground home city was… very likely not wiped out by one single person undertale style, I'm thinking maybe it was attacked by an army of robots or enhanced people from the surface (think futuristic apocalypse world where some people have been driven to live underground; I'm cooking something with this)
the JD definitely needs to be more than 30 people (30????)
anyway I'm getting into hypotheticals moreso than official changes but you get the idea
I think vicky's backstory needs to be worked on the most, especially whether or not she has powers and where they came from; there's just lots of stuff that has been ambiguous for ages and needs specification
oh yeah I should mention that some of the characters actually had their (theoretical) nationalities changed. originally miles and arthur were hispanic; this was because of the og dreamtale's spanish origin and my human designs of those characters. since miles's and arthur's designs are no longer directly connected to those, I decided to change them. (nevin and drew originated from the same source and are hispanic as well, so it seemed acceptable. this is what happens when you have multiple separate sets of characters who all evolved from the same fandom lol) that said:
miles is filipino now
arthur is malaysian
crystal is south asian (I do not remember what she was before)
hacker is korean american (the only one who actually comes from a real life based world lmao)
finch is west asian (was just labeled mixed before)
for clarity's sake, here is a list of everyone's pronouns:
miles - he/him (edit: he/they)
vicky - she/her
ellie - she/her
arthur - he/him
blue - he/him
crystal - she/they
randy - he/him
hacker - he/him
bunny - she/they
ani - they/she
halo ky 👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻 i wonder if there's any information abt corrupted ds nightmare 😞😞😞
I was going to say there isn't but then I remembered where he came from. full disclosure everything related to radiance/corruption lore has aged like milk but let's pretend it's something else and less unhinged. corrupted ds nightmare is an invention of the ds nightmare (miles) x regular nightmare (secret oc codename is dusk) branch, basically contagious evil tree magic turns ds nightmare's magic evil or whatever
there's not much, just like, dusk could enter his dreams and do telepathy or whatever and annoy him. pretending unfortunate encounters wasn't nearly as terrible as it was, there was this sequel draft that never got finished and it's definitely going to stay that way. it was kind of like the kagehara cinematic universe but before that and utmv
(art from 2021)
mostly I think the radiance corruption lore is unhinged at best and makes no sense at worst is because the idea that ds dream is trying to eradicate all corrupted magic on sight because for some reason he immediately thinks this new kind of magic that he's never encountered before is causing negative emotions just feels like… fake. or something that maybe he used to believe as a kid until he realized that it was a religious stigma from his universe. it doesn't really make sense that he'd continue to cling to a myth when he literally needed to defy his religion in order to become all-powerful. basically, at some point the literal universe of dreamswap stopped governing the universe without question and stopped having answers that nobody could possibly prove.
there was this trend in utmv worlds that they'd be like "yep yeah this is just how the world works, there is a tree that governs all the emotions among all living things in the entire extended multiverse" or "this is where all universes are born" or "there is exactly one outcode who does this job" or "yeah atlas is real" etc. jokes aside, they were essentially very rule and tradition oriented, which doesn't really have much substance when you consider the infinite possibilities of working in a multiverse setting.
I understand that the point of radiance corruption lore is that they instinctively hate each other and try to either destroy the other or turn the other into one of their own, but why. if only a select number of people in each universe (that has a tree in the first place, which is extraordinarily rare) are even allowed to bear this power without imploding, why does it even have the instinct to spread? what does radiance or corruption have to gain from trying to multiply itself if it doesn't even want to spread to regular people, and under normal circumstances, wouldn't even encounter any other spirits who could bear it at all? isn't that kind of a strange for a power so incredibly exclusive? why do characters who are immortal act like they're 22!!
sorry rant over, summary of the story is that ds nightmare magically gets evil magic and his boyfriend in this branch is literally a horrible person
Hello ky! So sorry to pester about this question, i understand it might be annoying but, will..will u ever be adding the other two members of the squad?
Says one of the ten Randy fans in existence
I did say I wasn’t going to make any others in the holographic set, and then I made more anyway, so the answer is probably yes, eventually. but as you’re saying, randy and bunny are not as popular and I think most people don’t recognize bunny’s new design yet, so it may take a while.
Aaaaaa I have several questions, this could be a long one.
So, while I was looking at some of your Dreamswap/Fatal Flaws posts, you mentioned something about focusing more on Dreamswap (I don't remember the exact words, so I might say something wrong, sorry) But that's what I was wondering, does the story of Miles and Arthur still remain the same, in parts? They aren't exactly "adored" figures of positivity and negativity, whatever they were. Are they just two "normal" little people? Is all that religiosity still there, and does that magic tree no longer exist? Could you mix the Fatal storylines with Dreamswap a bit? Like, they live in a village, but they have separate families (if I'm not mistaken, in FF Miles had a father, right?) and they were friends, blah blah. I don't remember what I was going to ask anymore. sorry if my message is too confusing, I don't know how to explain myself. 🥀
Bye, goodnight, I love your art Kai.
it's all good, I'll try to explain as best I can:
to that effect, dreamswap and fatal flaws still need to stay separate, just because they have completely different lore. dreamswap has a story of miles and arthur being raised in a religious environment, a tree that harbors immense power, and their eventual immortality and universe traveling. fatal flaws has a story about discrimination in which miles and arthur's village got destroyed, the religious elements were mostly removed, and they're not immortal and there's no universe traveling. they're like, the same characters, while having fundamentally different backstories. think of fatal flaws and dreamswap being AUs of each other; by now that's basically what they are.
before I started focusing on other things, I was actually trying to come up with a more detailed backstory for them. I was writing something and I'd like to share it sometime, but since it's not complete and it's still kind of a mess of text, here is a basic overview of arthur and miles's dreamswap backstory here without over-explaining it:
the tree spirit and the tree itself are seen as one, and are worshiped as a god. they refer to her as the Mother Spirit
the tree, although it harbors immense power, did not do anything to hurt anyone. the tree is worshiped by its followers in an organized religion that has existed long before arthur and miles were born
arthur and miles are ordinary humans who were chosen to be what's called the Keepers of the Tree. it is considered to be a huge honor and is a very desirable position. arthur was well liked for being a perfect poster child and miles was ultimately not liked for being a curious troublemaker
their parents uh. ✨mysteriously went missing✨ when they were infants. they were raised by the church's main scholar and bookkeeper, but he was mostly just their teacher
arthur and miles secretly learn what power the tree holds, since it's not supposed to be public knowledge
eventually this leads to miles giving an apple to kevin. arthur and miles fight more and more before arthur eats all of the apples (minus the other one miles took for himself) and starts a new ideology. they both acquire powerful magic. I still need to figure out how exactly these events happen though
that said yeah, their backstories are very different between the two stories and overlapping them would probably not work. it's one of the main reasons I came back to ds, because I was really interested in the lore of that version.
Question, are the old dreamtale ref sheets from five years ago still somewhere on this blog or were they deleted? I’m trying to educate my friend about the dreamswap of Christmas past but I can’t find them :(. Also I miss Eris severely, how has that agender rat bastard been doing?
hi there, the ancient dreamswap refs can be found in the #dsarchive tag on my blog, in addition to a bunch of other antiquated info. the old refs (plus some other drawings) were moved there so that they would stop being used instead of updated references, lol.
the ship kids……… damn I haven't paid attention to them in AGES 🤣
edit: also now that I think about it I just noticed that this says five years ago and not 10 years ago and it also says dreamtale and not dreamswap so now I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing 🥲 which ones are you talking about
Will you continue updating the story of "Fatal Flaws"? Or have you abandoned it and only update "Dreamswap"? Are they two independent stories, or is "Fatal Flaws" an older version of "Dreamswap"? To be honest, I really like the "Red" Ellie in "Fatal Flaws." (Actually, I like every version of Ellie.)
Sorry for asking so many questions...
it's ok! tbh I returned to dreamswap because I missed it, and I felt like fatal flaws wasn't quite capturing the vibe I wanted. fatal flaws will very likely end up evolving again when I return to it.
they are technically independent from each other (they have completely different settings, but the same characters), but they share a lot of features and some character designs from fatal flaws got pulled over into this new version of dreamswap. they will probably continue to swap ideas with each other, lol.
also, red ellie's outfit can be used in dreamswap too!
