#milo winter

[nemfrog]

The boys and the frogs. The Aesop for Children with Pictures. 1919. Illustrated by Milo Winter.

Internet Archive

[rrlawrentian]

Aaaaand comments are locked. We did it gang! They locked the most recent post. Aside from “Worldbuilding post delay🤒” and individual artists introductions posts in July last year, EVERY SINGLE publicly accessible post has had the comments disabled. So much for transparency!

Edit: Here is Elrose’s explanation for however much that’s worth. She deleted the March 31st edit.

[thescopioarchives]

elrose has finally responded to an ask on her tumblr asking about whether or not she is attached to milo/age of scorpius and the eta for refunds. tldr: milo still has not processed them and the deadline is coming up to june now. to quote @/seoulmama filed with the FTC to get ahead of the curb on this.

here it lists that milo doesnt want to promise a date when hes been missing deadlines and failing. but the issue is that he is missing the deadlines he set. this is a deadline he cannot miss and must be working on asap. this is also the pattern of behavior he has done on all of his "business" from the dragon roleplay website for in game currency, to his deviantart, to his tarot card readings, to his spirit animal assigning (quick aside: i dont think is how spirit animals work?).

i asked this last night anonymously because i mainly use tumblr for roleplay and i dont want to cross pollinate for obvious reasons.

[novella-november]

Whatever decisions you make as an indie author, just know you probably can't fail as badly as Milo Winter and The Age of Scorpius, as long as you do extremely basic care as an author:

Don't take preorders on a book you haven't finished writing yet.

Don't announce a publishing date for a book you haven't finished writing yet.

If you accept preorders on a book you haven't finished writing yet, keep those funds in an untouched account so you can do refunds immediately if you don't meet your stated publishing date because you haven't finished your first draft (let alone the final, edited draft)

First drafts are not final drafts.

Don't publish unedited first drafts after lying about having a famous editor working on your story.

Make sure your plot, characters, and worldbuilding mesh and make sense in the narrative.

Make sure you're not misspelling your own character's names and settings.

The story you wrote when you were twelve is probably not up to your current quality as a writer when you're 20. Keep that original story somewhere safe, but if you're going to publish it for money, you're gonna wanna rebuild it from the ground up so its up to par.

Make sure you are actually doing multiple drafts and edits after you finish your first draft!

Make sure you have editors!

Make sure you take feedback from beta readers!

[getvalentined]

HEY WAIT ALSO

If Chase is Mathias Merek's grandson (which he is)

And Mathias Merek's wife looked just like Kaia (which she did)

Why is Chase white? Why is Narah white?

Why is Atlas white??

EDITING TO ADD: People keep asking in the comments about Kaia looking like Mari, since apparently in the official art she doesn't, so here is a reminder that Chase and Kaia being indistinguishable from Mathias and Mari Merek was explicitly used within the narrative, to the point that Chase trying to keep Avia from getting murked instead of Kaia almost got everyone killed.

The phrases used to describe Chase's resemblance to Mathias are strictly visual:

"Chase looks identical to the guy that put the sword down there in the first place." (Atlas, chapter 33) "…Chase is a spitting image of Mathias, our grandfather." (Narah, chapter 35)

This indicates that Kaia's resemblance to Mari must also follow the same standard, or else the monster would not have confused them with the Mereks. If they just needed a Spirit Walker, Narah could have done it. Hell, Narah could have done the whole thing on her own since she has all three archpowers, she could have just activated those two and been done with it! But no, they needed Chase, because he physically looks like Mathias, and apparently also needed Kaia, which means Kaia must look like Mari.

I understand there is apparently a single picture of the two of them wherein Mathias has black hair and red eyes and Mari is a blonde-haired white woman. That's fascinating with regard to what it implies about Milo's earlier concept for the storyline, but that's not what the published version of the book says, either directly or indirectly. Okay so none of that is true, Mari is ambiguously brown and has curly hair and her face in profile is almost identical to Kaia's. Mathias does look like Rieka, though, so I'll keep the point that a previous version of Mathias looked like Rieka, and the corresponding version of Mari was a white woman, but the "final" versions mentioned in the published book have to look like Chase and Kaia, or else the big Compulsive Heterosexuality Will Save Us All scene in the cave couldn't have happened.

[afanficof-theageofscorpius]

i interrupt our regularly scheduled shitposting to remind everyone that there's a scorpio character in AoS (chapter 16) that has dead animal summoning magic or whatever the fuck

which isn't backed up by the power list posted to the patreon

(vía my old post)

idk, maybe he inherited that power from his Leo parent, right? but does he still have transfiguration material shapeshifting powers?

can anyone check if that makes sense? because my head hurts just looking at this

(vía @rrlawrentian post)

i bring this up because ttrpgs have some of the densest, hard magic systems imaginable to the point rules lawyering is an age long running joke

(vía @rrlawrentian post)

Milo can't even explain the fucking magic system in his book and keeps contradicting himself LOL because i know for a fact there's another power list screenshot that's different from the one i posted

[ageofscorpinions]

My terrible penmanship returns as I continue my annotation of Age of Scorpius. We're up to the second chapter, and I am shocked at how early the narrative starts sniping at Avia for no damn reason. She's genuinely just an older sister—I see so much of myself in her, it's really rough knowing what Milo intended for her, and how much worse it gets as the book goes on.

One thing that strikes me particularly hard going back over this chapter with a fine-toothed comb is how Avia is shown being genuinely interested in Rieka's endeavors, and she's still belittled and vilified for not being interested the right way. When Rieka said "I found it," Avia immediately knew she was talking about the arch. When Rieka pointed out where it was and explained what made it special, Avia engaged directly, saying she'd never been out that far and thus wouldn't have seen it, and then admitting that they all look so alike to her that she wouldn't have noticed the difference anyway, indicating that Rieka is the only person who could have found the damn thing. This is a show of support. She teases her about it a bit after and puts it aside in favor of Ceremony preparation, but she was engaging with her sister sincerely here!

Milo literally wrote Avia being supportive in a way that jives with her characterization as a somewhat abrasive older sister, but Rieka intimates that Avia doesn't care and isn't interested as soon as the exchange is over because wasn't as excited as Rieka believes Rowan would have been. Avia was interested, but she's more focused on the impending Ceremony—which she had to delay by a year, putting her entire life on hold, in order to be there to assure that Rieka was able to integrate into adult society safely. The exact same Ceremony which Rowan literally left the house to attend without waiting for Rieka to get home. Of course, it's fine that Rowan prioritized The Ceremony over Rieka. He favors Rieka in literally everything and always has, so his absence is fine, his priorities are fine, whatever he does is fine because the next time he sees Rieka he'll tell her how perfect and wonderful she is and that's all that matters.

Avia is the one that has to keep track of time, she's the one that stayed behind and waited to even start getting ready until Rieka was home safe rather than either of their parents—even though Rowan is barely ever around anyway, so him leaving first is just intentionally limiting the amount of time they can interact like a family, seemingly for the express purpose of forcing Avia to be the most responsible adult in this entire fucking household.

Avia works a physically demanding job full-time at nineteen years old and is basically responsible for parenting her barely-younger sister when she's not at work, so she sleeps in when she can; this is a character flaw, it's something to criticize, it's something wrong with her. Meanwhile, Rieka can't even be fucked to read single a note her mother left detailing the plan for the day, and that's just Rieka! That's normal and fine! Avia is the problem here for making her feel bad about it!

Avia is apparently so intrinsically bad that their parents had to get fireproof furniture on the chance that she ever lost her temper, because just having her around is dangerous on account of her being an Aries. Rieka, meanwhile, lives in the fucking TETANUS KNIFE ROOM and that just shows how she's a badass genius who is better than everyone else.

Milo literally wrote this! He made the characters act this way! He made Avia a sincere, snarky, protective older sister who openly cares about Rieka despite the risks involved, and then had everyone around her act like this! I don't know what (presumably) Asia Winter did to Milo, but he needs some professional help to unpack it, because this is really fucked up.

[plasticfangtastic]

On the topic of things that should make sense in this book i got a question: what would you do to make this story actually feel like a dystopia?

I would make it so the govertment has mandated and violently enforced birth control rules with harsh penalties that scare the population into submission, have it where work places, institutions and hospitals routinely check their female employees, students, patients (and only the female employees just so i can make sense Rieka line about being made a breeder) then have it where celibacy is good and sex out of marriage is illegal.

Any child being conceive will have to be done with approval and only within wedlock and abortion is highly encouraged in order to weed out undesirable zodiac signs so everybody only raises kids welcome in their respective state so no scorpion is born societal for a reason.

Heck i might go grimdark and have forced abortions be a common thing if women get caught lacking.