#tanoraqui

[brawltogethernow]

obligatory ask meme curse: homestuck

Reverse Unpopular Opinion meme

Joke's on you, I'm into that shit. Homestuck was an enormous and entirely positive part of my late teens and to this day there's nothing else like it. Like sometimes you just need to step back and think about how cool Homestuck is. MSPA invented a new format that HS constantly tested the limits of, giving us a comic where some of the panels are looping gifs and some are flash animations and some are fully playable video games. It had more prose than War and Peace by the time it was halfway done. It invented the concept of blackrom. A good third of it was written in a single year-long creativity bender. The fandom was like Inklings For Gay People and is still coughing out published artists. The cast is split 50/50 by gender and also by glasses wearing status just because...math. It wielded recurring motifs and colors and shapes and phraseology like an armory of weapons. At its peak it had a canon to cosplay rate of less than one hour. It contributed very significantly to keeping me sane in high school. Reading it gives you a very specific Homestuck Accent and will haunt you with concepts and imagery forever. Homestuck!

[professorsparklepants]

I’m really enjoying your recent Assassins Creed blogging because it’s teaching me that these games have some sort of plot, which I genuinely didn’t know before. I kinda assumed you (PC) just got sent on a series of one-off assassination gigs in somewhat the way Carmen Sandiego games circa 2000 sent you on a series of object-retrieving gigs, except I guess all in one geographic area & time period per game.

The modern day frame story of assassin's creed is "what if the knights templar were evil and wanted to take over the world using ancient alien technology. and also the ancient aliens genetically engineered humans from monkeys and used them as slaves until Eve (from the bible) led a rebellion." the first couple games also have "what if you were raised in a cult compound and ran away to become a bartender in new york and then got kidnapped by a pharmacutical company that's a front for the knights templar and they used your high concentration of alien dna to force you to live the lives of your ancestors via the torment nexus so they could find and steal alien artifacts for mind control. and you ended up being a genetically engineered key to stopping a solar flare so bad that the last one killed the majority of sentient life on earth 75,000 years ago. and the writers decided that would kill you because they ran out of ideas and the fandom is still mad about it 10 years later."

also featuring historical plots such as "you're a muslim assassin in the third crusade with two boyfriends" and "you're a native american soldier during the american revolution and call the founding fathers racist" and "you're an italian nobleman during the renaissance who fist fights the pope."

[ragesharkbritain]

I’m very 👀 about the version of King Arthur that lives in your head which you mentioned in the tags of that post about living weapons. Would you mind elaborating on that take on the legend?

i mostly think this about the "and future" part of king arthur, and specifically in an urban fantasy setting where people Know the king will/has returned. How many leaders claim they are the reincarnated king arthur? how many actually think theyre arthur vs how many are just using the myth to further themselves? and the living weapon thought comes into play with the question "how are they treating their children?"

An Arthur claimant has two children, a son and a daughter. "Its alright," he thinks to himself, "as long as I know where Modred is I will be fine, and I can always kill him young." A slightly more progressive claimant thinks "Okay, but which one is Mordred?" And he raises his children in that state of blind arrogance. How isolating would it be to be raised with the assumption one day you will kill your father? and if you excel at fighting, if you intuit older languages, if you show signs of being slightly better, if people start to whisper that you are Arthur and not your father...

And what about the child that gets sent away from [insert modern city here], or is entered into the foster system, or was simply raised by a single parent? They go back to modern!Camelot with the expectation of a family, of a place for them, and good work to do, only to return to the assumption they are here to kill their father? To return to a good king, who they do not want to kill, or to return to a bad king, who they must kill?

and if the actual arthur remembers they are King Arthur, what kind of resentment would grow in their heart as they watch men, who are poor men and worse kings, claim to be arthur? As they walk through the slums and ruins of modernity, they think to themselves "None of the claimants are trying to stop this or fix this. What do they think I did? What legacy of mine are they trying to emulate?" And the burden of the myth itself, of the tellings and retellings of it, the expectation of King Arthur of Camelot-- and for Christianity to have changed as well!

So Arthur in my head exists solely as a weapon. They have no family that loves them and no place to turn to once their father finally fears them enough to kill them, they emerge into a different world. Its the same city-- but no one knows who they are. People still flinch when Arthur come near, but everyone flinches these days. Arthur start to make connections. Other people on the street help them find soup kitchens and food pantries. Arthur starts to make friends. Other people help them realize what their father did to them wasn't right. Arthur start to look at the city. Other people talk about the old days and the new days and how the City should be run. About lifting people up and bringing back the city council. About homes and clean water and food on the table. Arthur starts to think about being King.

[thelordofgifs]

I actually argue pretty firmly that Nerdanel is more obscure than Tar-Ancalimë.

1. Nerdanel is a Silmarillion-ONLY character whereas Tar-Ancalimë is in the LotR Annals and thus knowable to anyone with those popular books.

2. Nerdanel is a much more significant character in Silm than Tar-Ancalimë is in LotR or even just the Timeline of Númenor. But if I had to explain either to a Tolkien layperson, say, someone who’d only seen the movies, I feel confident that “Aragorn’s great-great-etc grandmother, the first ruling queen of Númenor, the empire that fell into being just Gondor” would seem a clearer connection to the plot and characters than, “the wife of the elf who invented the Palantirs and whose star symbol can be seen on the magic door into Moria.”

(Admittedly, I personally haven’t been factoring obscurity into my votes so much is “how much is this person my blorbo”, but that’s also because almost every single person in this contest has been completely unknown to my Tolkien layperson roommate, and thus fine.)

Some very well-reasoned propaganda, thank you!

[rattyjol]

👀

From an abandoned WIP where Elli comes to visit Athos:

The air was chilly, a light dusting of snow had fallen to freshen the grubby layers pushed to the sides of the pavement, and in her borrowed hat, scarf, and padded coat, Elli stood out not a whit. Elliot, similarly bundled, she'd hoisted up onto her shoulders, and was giving lessons in spycraft. "The trick," she said, holding up a didactic finger, "is to look like you know where you're going. If you're skulking about all hunched up, looking over your shoulder—" this she imitated, to demonstrate, and Elliot giggled "—then you'll stick out like a sore thumb. But if you look confident, no one will look twice. Works like a charm." "I'm not certain I should be letting you teach him this," Ethan said, a few paces back where he and Terrence were strolling after them, but there was a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Elli hadn't adjusted to the beard yet, but really it wasn't bad. "Nonsense, these are important life skills. What if he wants to skip class?" "Now I'm certain."

[black-cat-showdown]

As the end of the entry poll draws near, I feel a little like I should apologize for all but crashing your competition like an uninvited wedding guest…but I love my cat and I’m very competitive, so I’m not honestly very sorry? This is hands-down the funnest thing for which I’ve ever used my online friends and “influence.”

I am, however VERY GRATEFUL for the graciously granted chance to compete! I completely would’ve understood if you just had Penny represent Blorbos From My Floor everywhere—not only is she a lovely-looking cat, but she did win that initial poll about it! So thank you so much for this opportunity!

I’ll see you at the close of the poll…

You're very welcome!! I was honestly down to make a preliminary bracket for all the other cats either way but also yours got 4 submissions and a movie that is totally 100% real so i couldn't just not include her lmao

And she won by a huge margin too!! So she deserves her place all the more :]

We'll see her on the battlefield in a few days o7

[sindar-princeling]

Question about the LotR newsletter: are you going to include lines from the timeline in the Annals about things we don’t see happen in the book but do have dates for (from said timeline)? Eg, the assaults on Lothlórien and other northern lands? I for one would much appreciate the full picture!

I’m very excited for Shit to Get Real tomorrow!

I was considering it, but eventually I decided to include just the book fragments - that's what I've been doing from the start and I wanted to keep it consistent (with one exception, but I'll keep it secret for now 😌)

[tossawary]

MDZS Role Swap: Jiang Clan Wen Qing, ft. Zidian, for @tanoraqui.