#yapping analytically

[ripowal]

Rendered with Care: Sylvia's Working-Class Roots

Thinking about best girl Sylvia again!

There's not a whole lot the game tells us outright about her background. We know her parents are "good, stout folk" who "started with basically nothing" and "worked hard their whole lives." They instilled that work ethic in her. She put herself through college—multiple years of potion-making education, perhaps some practicum—and arrived in Rafta as a graduate with a degree, a mountain of determination, and apparently zero savings.

But we don't know what her parents actually do for a living, or what kind of work Sylvia was doing to pay her way through school. Those blanks are never filled in directly.

However, there's something interesting about Sylvia the game doesn't particularly draw attention to, but it shows up again and again. She has an unusual, deeply ingrained comfort with things that are gross. Not merely a willingness to deal with unpleasant materials, which could be chalked up to her potions training. It's a total, unselfconscious ease with foul smells, disgusting textures, and biological nastiness that goes beyond what a college education alone would produce, imo.

And once you notice it, it's kind of everywhere.

The Nose That Doesn't Notice

There's Quinn's blind taste tests. Quinn shoves unknown ingredients into Sylvia's mouth (blegh)—slimy, fishy, foul things—and by higher friendship ranks, the narration tells us: "Though her stomach roils, Sylvia smiles through the pain, licks her lips, and asks for more." Quinn calls her "hardcore" and says they shouldn't have underestimated her. And when Quinn hands her a sack of rotting, spoiled ingredients to hurl off their broomstick, Sylvia plunges her hand right in, no hesitation.

Now, sure, Sylvia studied potions for a fantasy pharmacist degree. You'd expect some degree (ha) of desensitization. But all three of the potion rivals she befriends react to a certain… grodiness to her working environment.

Roxanne literally recoils from the raw materials Sylvia pulls from her inventory during their potion-making hangout and she "declines to touch anything." This is a contrast that matters. For Roxanne, a refined demon of taste who nonetheless ran a con operation and has lived rough over the years, these materials are too gross to handle. For Sylvia, they're Tuesday.

This tracks with Corsac's very first visit to the shop, where his opening assessment is that her potions have a "natural funk," an "obvious" stink. Sylvia's response is to joke about buying incense or perfuming the owl. She's not defensive about it. She had no plans to act on it before Corsac mentions it. It's simply the air she breathes.

When Boss Finn tours Sylvia's shop during his Rank 3 scene, she shows him all her ingredients and explains where each one came from. Finn's reaction? "Some of 'em are starting to smell. I guess that discourages loitering?" And Sylvia just... doesn't respond. The conversation moves on. She doesn't acknowledge the smell at all, doesn't laugh it off. It's almost like she genuinely doesn't register it, and she's simply used to other people commenting on it by now.

If you ask me, this goes deeper than professional tolerance, especially given the other potion professionals who demonstrate varying degrees of not-tolerance. This is a woman who doesn't even have the framework for finding this stuff remarkable. She's not powering through disgust. The disgust isn't there for her.

So I'm thinking: if this comfort with the revolting didn't start in college, where did it start?

Touch Gross Stuff, Have a Good Time

There's one line that draws a connection between Sylvia's iron stomach and her family that feels less like a stretch and more like a missing puzzle piece.

It comes during a quiet moment with Roxanne. It's the Week of a Thousand Pyres—a demon holiday—and Roxanne is feeling homesick. Sylvia, trying to relate, shares a memory of her own family traditions:

"We had this holiday tradition where we'd all wear blindfolds and touch gross stuff. Good times . . ."

Roxanne's response is perfect: "I've lived among humans for years, and you still manage to baffle me."

And honestly? Fair. Think about what Sylvia is describing! This isn't "we ate weird food" or "we roughhoused." It's some sort of sensory identification game built around touching things that most people would find repulsive. That's incredibly specific and, based on Roxanne's response, doesn't seem to be a generalized "human thing" in this world. And Sylvia looks back on it with genuine fondness!

On its own, it's a funny throwaway line. But placed alongside everything else—the nose that doesn't notice, the hands that plunge right into rot, the complete absence of squeamishness—it starts to maybe suggest something about the household she grew up in. A household where "gross stuff" was just... around. Where handling unpleasant materials was so ordinary that it became the basis for family games.

The game never tells us what Sylvia's parents did for a living. But it gives us a girl who grew up touching gross stuff for fun, who can't smell her own shop, and whose parents "started with basically nothing" doing physically demanding work.

So here's where I'm gonna make a leap.

Salt-of-the-Earth Folk

What kind of working-class job, in a fantasy setting like this one, would produce a household where the kids grow up handling gross materials like it's nothing?

There are oh-so-many to choose from if we go full medieval, but I think our best-fit answer is: renderers. Tallow collectors! The people who process the parts of the animal that nobody else wants—fat, bone, connective tissue—and turn them into useful materials. Candles. Soap. Lubricants. Binding agents. In a fantasy world with potion-making, I think we can add "base components for alchemical preparations" to that list.

It's the kind of occupation where identifying materials by touch and smell isn't a party trick but rather a professional skill. And turning it into a blindfolded holiday game for the kids? That's exactly the kind of thing working-class fantasy families might do. Make play out of what you have available.

It's honest work. Physically demanding, socially invisible, and not remotely glamorous. The kind of work where you "start with basically nothing" because the barrier to entry is willingness to do what others won't. The kind of work that produces "good, stout folk." Those are Baptiste's words when Sylvia describes her family, and he means it admiringly— probably because he's never had to live it.

Is this confirmed, or even implied anywhere? No. But it fits, and it fits in a way that makes an interesting piece of Sylvia's character click into place, and I like it.

It also creates a thematic throughline I love. Sylvia's parents took raw animal byproducts and processed them into useful goods. Sylvia takes raw magical ingredients—monster parts, slime, malicious fungus, irradiated flora—and processes them into potions. She elevated the family trade. She took the same fundamental skillset of comfort with gross materials and an understanding of how to transform base substances into something valuable, and she applied it through the lens of formal education.

That's what "put herself through college" really means in this context. It's not just paying tuition. It's a working-class kid taking what her family gave her and building something more with it. And based on how Sylvia talks about them, I reckon they're fiercely proud of her.

The College Years: How Sylvia Paid Her Way

So if the parents give us a picture of where Sylvia comes from, the next question is what she was actually doing during college to keep the lights on. The game doesn't spell this out either, but the headcanon I'm now partial to is…

The Early Years: Copyist and Tutor

For the first stretch of college, the most natural fit is a combination of scribing and tutoring. In a half-medieval, half-modern fantasy world where students study thermodynamic principles alongside cauldron technique, there's absolutely a campus economy built around hand-copied texts, transcribed lecture notes, and duplicated formulae. It's solitary, tedious, detail-oriented work that pays by the page. And it has that quintessential broke-student energy: grinding in the library at midnight because you need the coin and you need to study, and copying texts is a way to do both.

The tutoring piece, though, is where Sylvia really shows her hand. Because this woman cannot stop teaching people.

She mentors Corsac through his evolution from total hermit to forming a group who shares his ecological interests. She coaches Roxanne, a literal con artist, toward running a legitimate business. She patiently redirects Baptiste's well-meaning but clueless ideas about investment seminars. She encourages Saffron out of years of self-imposed isolation. She teaches Boss Finn how to be a more ethical businessman after she defeats him. She even helps Quinn work through their deeply complicated feelings about family and connection, one blind taste test at a time. (I harp on this again and again, but Sylvia helps everyone she meets work through some major issue or other that's core to their character and precious few characters even approach doing the same for her. HELP HERRRR.)

This urge to help is a reflex, it's a fundamental part of who Sylvia is! Can you not see her sitting across from struggling classmates and walking them through alchemical concepts until it all clicked? Sylvia was the student who ran informal study groups, who couldn't say no when someone needed help before exams, who probably made half her rent money explaining potion theory to kids who could afford the tuition but didn't have the study skills. And I bet she did it with the same easy empathy she brings to every relationship in the game: patient, a little wry, and genuinely invested in seeing the people around her succeed.

The Later Years: Shop Work and Ingredient Prep

As Sylvia got deeper into her degree and closer to/into her practicum, the work would have shifted toward something more hands-on. Stocking shelves in someone else's apothecary. Manning the counter. Doing the low-level grunt work of sorting, drying, bundling, and storing raw magical ingredients. Cleaning cauldrons. The fantasy equivalent of a pharmacy tech or barista, learning how a shop actually operates by doing the parts of it that nobody notices.

This is where lines like "Working in retail means I usually am the punching bag" land differently. That's not necessarily limited to her recent experience on Rafta. That can be a witch who has stood behind a counter and taken it on the chin from difficult customers, day after day, for not enough money, for years. She arrives on Rafta already knowing how to handle people at a base level because she's been the shopgirl. She's done the customer service. She's smiled through the frustration. The only thing she hasn't done is been the owner—and that's exactly the gap that Oswald's inheritance unexpectedly closed. I imagine she was planning to work her way up to owning her own potion shop one day, and simply didn't think "one day" would come so soon.

And through all of it, she's using a hand-me-down cauldron held together with chewing gum. That detail tossed off casually to Muktuk is such an evocative image of Sylvia's college years. Years of grueling potions education, cobbled together with secondhand equipment, side jobs, and sheer stubbornness. She graduated at the top of her class with that junky cauldron. She didn't need the fancy gear. She has the gumption, the perserverence, and the smarts to succeed without it.

(As an aside, I have another headcanon that Sylvia enjoys baking (for reasons), but I do not think she ever worked in a bakery. I like to imagine it's a hobby and comfort for her, not a source of stress. Something she would've done with her parents, a family bonding experience and a way of saving some coin. After a day of copying formulas for coin, prepping someone else's ingredients, and tutoring students who could barely tell a bezoar from a reef radish, she can pound out the day's frustrations into some dough and have something delicious to share with the people she loves.)

The Whole Picture

Zoom out, and Sylvia's story is about transformation on multiple fronts.

Sylvia transforms magical ingredients into potions. She transforms her inherited debt into a successful business. Oswald was literally transformed into an owl, and the game ends with him on the cusp of transforming back. Multiple enemies are transformed into friends (or more 👀). The whole game is about taking what you've got—however raw, however unpromising—and making the best of it. (Very salt-of-the-earth ethos.)

Sylvia walked into Rafta with a degree, an inherited debt, and the work ethic of a family that processed gross stuff for a living. She didn't have Baptiste's money, or Muktuk's faith, or Robin's fame, or Roxanne's cunning. She had comically large hands, an iron stomach, a nose that couldn't smell its own shop, and the unshakable belief that if she worked hard enough, she could turn this disaster into something worth having.

And she was right. ♥

[ripowal]

The Con and the Corporation: Roxanne and Boss Finn as Parallels and Foils

AKA "I'm trying to finish getting down a lot of the Potionomics character analysis that's been knocking around in my head."

Two Non-Humans Walk Into a Market Economy

Roxanne and Boss Finn are, structurally, the same character. Both are outsiders navigating a human-dominated world. Both begin as antagonists to Sylvia through business rivalry. Both are defeated and humbled. Both are reformed through Sylvia's influence. Both end their arcs directed toward legitimate ends. The game even mirrors their post-defeat trajectories: each moves from antagonist to reluctant dependent to genuine ally, learning from Sylvia while teaching her something in return.

But their surface similarities highlight a deeper divergence in how marginalized people respond to systems that weren't built for them, and what it actually takes to change when your worst traits are also your survival tools.

(rest of big ol' essay below)

The Foundational Split: Image Is Everything vs. Changing Is Losing

At the core of it, we have two lines of dialogue, delivered under similar circumstances, pointing in opposite directions.

Roxanne, explaining why she disguised herself as human to run her potion shop: "First rule of business: Image is everything." She studied human beauty magazines as a girl, absorbed their standards, and used her illusion magic to reshape herself into something the surface world would accept. When the disguise falls, she frames it as a strategic loss, not a liberation. Her cover is blown, and now she has to start over.

Finn, when Sylvia suggests he's too abrasive and could stand to soften up: "Changing for other people's tastes? Usually a losing proposition." He knows people find him scary. He knows that his appearance reads as dangerous and risky. Rather than hiding the teeth, he leans into them. Be the shark. At least then you're the one doing the eating.

Both are survival strategies for non-humans who've (correctly) identified that the world will judge them on sight. But Roxanne's response was to disappear into the system's expectations—to pass, to perform, to become the magazine image she once coveted. Finn's was to weaponize the system's fear of him; to take the dangerous-shark stereotype and make it profitable. Roxanne hid her horns. Finn sharpened his teeth.

The tragedy is that neither strategy lets them simply be. They've both built identities centered around threat assessment. But the specific shape of their armor determines everything about how their arcs unfold.

The Harm They Do: Snake Oil vs. Corporate Stranglehold

Here's where the parallel becomes a foil, and where Potionomics gets genuinely clever about types of mercantile villainy.

Roxanne is the game's first boss encounter, and a relatively easy opponent in mechanical terms. Her business poses no serious structural threat to Sylvia's operation. She's a small-time con artist running a "potion" shop out of charm and illusion magic. When she loses, she loses everything and ends up in Sylvia's basement. In terms of pure business competition, she's not that scary.

But what she's actually doing is horrifying. Mint comes to Sylvia with the warning: a guildmate bought healing potions from Roxanne, and when he tried to use one on an injured colleague, "it didn't do anything at all." Roxanne's "potions" are, by her own cheerful admission, "little more than water and dyes." The bottles are enchanted to look and feel magical, but they contain no actual medicine. She's selling fake health potions to adventurers who go into life-threatening situations. A hero relying on one of Roxanne's potions in a real fight could die.

Roxanne never grapples with this directly. Mint spell out the stakes—"a faulty Health Potion is a big deal, it could have been really bad"—and the game moves on. Roxanne's confession about her fraud is delivered with theatrical flair, as a funny anecdote about her cleverness. She treats her marks as rubes who deserve what they get, right up until the moment empathy blindsides her on the street.

Now contrast Finn. He's the third boss encounter, and a significant difficulty spike. Unlike Roxanne, his threat to Sylvia's business is structural. He doesn't sell fake products. His potions are real. What he does instead is use magical patents to claim exclusive selling rights over entire categories of potions in Rafta, creating an artificial monopoly. Heroes are forced to buy from him at inflated prices. Other vendors can't sell competing products. Baptiste confirms the entire guild is suffering under his stranglehold.

When confronted, Finn's response is a masterclass in corporate deflection: "Have I broken any laws here? I don't actually know the answer to that, but I've got some really good lawyers on retainer. The kind of guys who just love to drag out the proceedings." He doesn't need to be right. He just needs the legal process to be more expensive than anyone can afford to pursue.

So you have two villains: one who is personally dishonest but structurally insignificant, and one who is personally honest (at least about his intentions) but structurally devastating. Roxanne lies to individuals. Finn exploits systems that affect everyone. Roxanne's victims might die from a fake potion. Finn's victims are bled dry by a market they can't escape.

I think of it like the difference between someone selling you a counterfeit EpiPen at a reasonable price and a pharmaceutical corporation selling the real thing at a sky-high markup. Both are evil. Finn's monopoly gouges people and restricts access… but at the end of the day, the potion you bought from him works. You overpaid, and the system that let him charge you is rotten, but you walk into your next fight with actual medicine in your pack. Roxanne sold you something that looks right, feels right, and costs a fair price. But when you reach for it in crisis, it's water. You think you have a life-saving potion in your back pocket. You don't.

Lovely choice, huh?

"Nothing Personal" vs. "Nothing But Personal"

Finn's cruelty is casual and systemic. He visits Sylvia's shop and cheerfully informs her he's going to destroy her business like a neighbor giving you a heads up about road work. There's no individual malice. To Finn, driving Sylvia out of business is just the market working as intended. "Dry your tears and figure out how to work with what you've got." Nothing personal. Sharks eat small fry. That's nature.

Roxanne's cruelty is intimate and surgical. She doesn't attack Sylvia's business strategy or product quality. She attacks her appearance: the bags under her eyes, her exhaustion, her clothes. "I only mean to say you look utterly haggard." Her insults are specifically gendered, targeting Sylvia's failure to perform femininity correctly. When she sizes Sylvia up at the competition, her barbs are about sweat and body odor; the body itself as a site of failure. It's all personal. Every word is a scalpel.

The reasons for this difference track back to their foundational strategies. Finn doesn't need to make it personal because his power operates at a systemic level. He controls the market. Individual feelings are irrelevant to a monopoly. Roxanne has to make it personal because her power operates at an interpersonal level. Her weapons are charm, intimidation, and the ability to find exactly the right insecurity to exploit. She can't patent-troll Sylvia out of existence, so she tries to get inside her head instead.

But there's a deeper layer. Roxanne's appearance-based attacks are personal because appearance is personal to Roxanne. Sylvia gets to be messy and still be legitimate. Roxanne has never had that luxury. The cruelty is an attack, yes, but also a kind of displaced anguish: I had to be perfect, and you get to just... not care?

Finn has no equivalent internal anguish driving his business practices. He predates because the system allows it and because he refuses to be prey. And his arc is better off for not having tragic backstory because it tells us a person can wind up on a bad path without trauma and still deserve understanding, can be shaped by a system and still learn to fight it.

The Crash: Exile vs. Identity Death

Both characters hit rock bottom after losing to Sylvia, but what they lose, how they process it, and how they relate to Sylvia in the aftermath are juxtaposed.

Roxanne loses her cover. Her demon form is revealed, her fraud exposed, and she's forced to abandon the identity she'd constructed. But she still has her skills, her confidence, and her sense of self. She moves into Sylvia's basement and, crucially, she does this whether Sylvia wants her there or not. "Sincere apologies, but it's a done deal. I moved my things in overnight." No matter which dialogue option the player picks—"Forget it!" or "Knock yourself out"—the result is the same. Roxanne has already broken in and set up shop. She frames this as taking Sylvia up on her "offer" of help, which Sylvia barely remembers making. It's charming, it's funny, and it is also, flatly, breaking and entering followed by a unilateral redefinition of their relationship. Roxanne's first post-defeat move is to take someone else's space without asking. (Roxanne, I love you, girlie, but you gotta stop doing crimes.)

Finn, by contrast, loses his identity. His entire self-concept is built on winning, on being the apex predator. When Sylvia beats him, the framework collapses. "Didn't I put in the work? Didn't I visualize success? I deserved to come out on top." His venture capitalist friends abandon him instantly and he doesn't even blame them, because his own worldview says they're right to do so. The system he adhered to worked exactly as designed. He just ended up on the wrong side of it.

Interestingly, Finn doesn't impose himself on Sylvia. He wallows on the beach, wailing loudly enough to scare the fish, until Salt and Pepper ask Sylvia to deal with him. He waits for Sylvia to extend the hand because he literally cannot parse why she would help him. His worldview has no category for it. Much later, after she's spent real time mentoring him, his immediate reaction when she says she's taught him everything she can is: "You're abandoning me? And after you stuck around long enough to learn all my weaknesses, too. Guess feeding time's over, and you stripped me clean." He retroactively assumes exploitation because exploitation is the only framework he has for sustained attention from another person.

The result of identity death is a genuine existential crisis. "So what do I even care about, besides money? What am I good at?" Potions were "just another sprocket" to keep him afloat, and pep talks were the same deal. Everything filters through market logic, and he can't find substance underneath it. "I'm just a bunch of hot air in the form of a sexy, sophisticated shark-man." (Ego still intact to some degree.😂)

The contrast in their collapses mirrors the contrast in their strategies. Roxanne, who built her identity around control, responds to defeat by immediately seizing control of a new space, even if it's someone else's basement. Finn, who built his identity around winning, responds to defeat by losing direction entirely. Roxanne's crisis is about circumstance: she needs new resources, new territory, a new hustle. Finn's crisis is about substance: he needs a reason to get up in the morning that isn't "because I'm a winner." Roxanne has always known who she is; she just couldn't show it. Finn has never had to ask before, because winning answered the question for him.

The Reform: Reining In vs. Redirecting

Roxanne's reformation is about internal change. She has to develop capacities she genuinely lacked: empathy, moral reasoning, the ability to value people as more than marks. The baldness-elixir scene is the turning point. Standing in front of a former victim, she suddenly imagines their positions reversed, and the feeling is so alien she describes it with revulsion: "I felt... empathy." She doesn't act on it heroically (she lies and flees), but she doesn't take the money either. The moral muscle is new, and she's not sure she likes having it, lol.

Her growth is measured in restraint: choosing not to blackmail the exam proctor, choosing not to fleece the old mark, choosing to earn her business license legitimately even though she finds the process absurd. This is hard for her. Roxanne describes the straight and narrow as aggravating, and she jokes that "it's much easier to be wicked when [Sylvia's] not around." The temptation never goes away. The appearance policing never fully stops. She just gets better at catching herself. "Sorry. Old habits," she says, after getting another dig in at Sylvia.

Roxanne has to rein in the horses. She has to learn to not use power she has.

Finn's reformation is about redirection. He doesn't develop new capacities so much as discover a new application for old ones. The phone scam scene is his turning point. A stranger tries to con Sylvia with a broken phone, and Finn instantly reads the grift, identifies the forensic evidence (the crack pattern), and intimidates the scammer into fleeing. He did exactly what he's always done: read the situation, identify threat, deploy force. The only difference is allegiance.

His later insight crystallizes: "I can be confrontational. Aggressive. Intimidating. More often than not in my life, that's made me the bad guy. But it's good and useful when I use all that to look out for the little guy." He becomes a vendor advocate using his knowledge of predatory business tactics (which he perfected) to protect the people he used to exploit.

Finn doesn't rein in the horses. He steers them in a different direction.

This is why Roxanne's endpoint is "the satisfaction of having power over someone and not needing to use or abuse it." A statement about restraint, about the cultivation of moral strength through not acting. And Finn's endpoint is "I like the feeling of punching up." A statement about action, about redirecting existing strength toward better fights.

The Residue: What Doesn't Change

Both arcs are honest about their limits. Neither character is fully "fixed."

Roxanne's appearance policing softens but never disappears. Even in her most emotionally vulnerable moments, she can't resist the dig: "I mean, I must care for you a great deal if I'm able to overlook so very many shortcomings." Sylvia, who has learned to expect this, responds with a knowing "There it is." It's become a rhythm between them, affection expressed through the only idiom Roxanne has fully mastered, which is the language of aesthetic judgment. The internalized misogyny isn't gone. It's just been domesticated into something closer to teasing, a reflex she now recognizes and sometimes apologizes for without being able to fully stop.

Finn's market-logic brain never fully rewires either. His advocacy is still for-profit: "Oh, it will be [lucrative]. I've recently learned a thing or two about running a successful business." He still thinks in terms of profit first, good second. He still frames relationships through competitive metaphors: "usually can't have two apex predators in one place." When Sylvia ponders "harnessing [his] talents for good," Finn's honest response is that he'd "rather prioritize 'for profit' and consider 'for good' an optional bonus." The goodness is still incidental to the hustle.

But there's a difference in what the residue means, even if it's not as stark as it first appears. Roxanne's lingering appearance-policing is a scar, the trace of a wound that shaped her entire personality, a reflex born from genuine suffering that she's slowly, imperfectly learning to recognize. Finn's lingering profit-brain isn't quite a scar in the same way, but it's not neutral wiring either. It's a paradigm; a way of seeing the world that was built and reinforced over years of operating in a system that prejudged him as dangerous and rewarded economic aggression. You don't unlearn a worldview overnight just because you've found a better use for it. Finn's market logic is as ingrained as Roxanne's beauty-standard enforcement, even if it was forged by different pressures. The advocacy is real, but the old operating system is still running underneath, and paradigms of that depth take time to fully overwrite, if ever.

Sylvia as the Common Variable

One last parallel worth noting: both Roxanne and Finn explicitly credit Sylvia with their reformation, and both are slightly baffled by why she bothered.

Roxanne: "You saw me at my most vulnerable, Sylvia. My most petty! And you extended a hand."

Finn: "I appreciate that you came around when I was low. Still weird to me that you didn't gloat much."

But Sylvia's role in their arcs is more active than a simple "showed up and was kind" framing would suggest. She teaches them. Literally. Roxanne's study sessions, her business license prep, the flash cards; Sylvia is investing real time and effort into helping Roxanne go legitimate. And the dialogue options throughout both arcs are frequently moral choices: the player can guide Sylvia to tell Roxanne "you're better than this, blackmail is cheating," or to push Finn away from "sabotaging legitimate businesses." Sylvia doesn't just model decency by being decent. She actively calls out bad behavior, offers alternative frameworks, and holds the line on what she thinks is right.

What makes it work is that the moral guidance comes packaged with practical help and genuine investment. Sylvia isn't lecturing from a position of superiority. She's teaching Roxanne business administration while also suggesting that maybe blackmail isn't the answer. She's showing Finn her shop floor and sales technique while also steering him away from cutthroat instincts. The moral dimension is woven into the business mentorship, not imposed on top of it. That's why neither of them gets defensive the way they would with a pure sermon. Sylvia has earned the right to push back because she's also the person helping them move forward.

Roxanne names this explicitly: "More than once, when faced with a moral conundrum, I've found myself asking... what would Sylvia think?" That's not the passive influence of ambient kindness. That's the result of sustained, active engagement from someone who cared enough to both help and challenge.

Why Both

Finn's redemption was added in the Masterwork release, and it's addition does crucial work for the game's thesis and helps it earn that Masterwork designation (but really, the voice acting!!!).

With only Roxanne, redemption risks reading as exceptional, something she earned by being uniquely sympathetic, or uniquely connected to Sylvia, or uniquely deserving. You could walk away thinking: well, Roxanne was redeemable because she was wounded, because she had a tragic backstory, because underneath it all… etc etc.

Adding Finn says: No, the guy with no tragic excuse gets the same shot. Redemption isn't exclusive. It's not a reward for having suffered enough. It's available to anyone willing to do the work.

Giving redemption arcs to two antagonists creates a pattern that adds up to more than the sum of the individual cases. Because the result isn't only two better people. It's a better town. The reformed shark and the reformed con artist don't simply stop doing harm. They become load-bearing members of the community they once exploited. That's Potionomics' thesis about kindness and community building elevated!

The path from A to B may be as individual as the damage that made the journey necessary, but I'm really glad they both got to make the trip.

(P.S: an addendum comparison)

[ripowal]

Quinn's Pokémon Team

Morgrem

Morgrem is the "Devious Pokémon." Dark/Fairy, gangly, with a bang covering one eye like a moody scene kid who never grew out of it. The design is inspired by goths, emos, and the Redcap, a murderous goblin from English folklore. It's kind of Quinn's whole first impression, lol. The Violet pokedex entry says "Morgrem prefers dirty tactics, like ambushing, because it doesn't have confidence in its brawn," and that's Quinn's approach: pranks and misdirection over direct confrontation, with Sylvia deployed as their muscle when things might get physical. The ability Prankster gives priority to status moves, which is Quinn's haggling philosophy made mechanical; their entire card set is built around cards like Plant the Seed, Fuel to the Fire, and Compound Interest, and their entire social life is built around an ongoing prank war with Salt and Pepper and, initially, trying to slowly prank Sylvia into questioning her sanity.

Gulpin

"Virtually all of Gulpin's body is its stomach," and Quinn do be a-gulpin. They eat any ingredient you hand them, and their custom order list is a progression of increasingly dangerous consumption: antivenom so they can eat poisonous things, ice tonics for brain freeze from too many frozen desserts, and finally radiation tonics for ingredients "that happen to have been marinating in radiation for a few years. Bottoms up?" The ability Liquid Ooze damages anyone who tries to drain Gulpin's HP, which is Quinn's prickliness in mechanical form: try to extract emotional energy before they're ready and it costs you. ("Boxer, please see her out.") The hidden ability Gluttony aligns with Quinn's general attitude around food, like at the ice cream shop: "I'm just going to get one of everything." Or the fact that they've eaten so many free chocolate samples they've been banned from four different chocolatiers.

Murkrow

Murkrow's design is explicitly based on witchcraft imagery. The feather crest resembles a pointed hat, the beak a hooked nose, and the tail the bristles of a broom. Its silhouette IS Quinn hovering above Rafta on their broomstick. The behavioral match locks it in: Murkrow "loses the attacker by leading it down dark mountain trails, and sometimes it does this to travelers as a mean-spirited prank." Quinn's pranks lead people astray in their own heads, e.g. moving a garden gnome one inch per day until the owner's sanity erodes. The hidden ability Prankster appears here for the second time on Quinn's team after Morgrem, which is thematic reinforcement that Quinn's entire identity is built around acting first with non-damaging disruption.

Foongus

Foongus is a mimic pokemon that disguises itself as a poke ball to lure people in, then blasts them with poisonous spores. Quinn's beloved pet Boxer is a mimic, making Foongus one of the pokemon equivalents of his species. The Scarlet pokedex entry deepens the connection to Quinn even further: "the spores released from this pokemon's hands are highly poisonous, but when thoroughly dried, the spores can be used as stomach medicine." Poisonous in raw form, medicinal when properly processed—that's Quinn's entire ingredient business. Selling dangerous monster parts and strange foodstuffs that become safe and useful once a skilled potion-maker transforms them.

Scovillain

Scovillain is a Grass/Fire type—a literal spicy pepper that's also on fire—and it bridges both halves of Quinn's heritage: the agricultural family business and the arson. Quinn's parents grew "jalapeno grigio grapes for this awful spicy wine," and when Quinn escaped, they torched the vineyard… and later set fires at the Heroes' Guild as well. The two-headed design intentionally evokes the theatrical comedy and tragedy masks, with the green and red heads representing Thalia and Melpomene respectively. Quinn lives between those two masks as well; their pranks are hilarious, but their backstory is harrowing.

Espeon

Espeon has a red gem embedded in its forehead that glows when it channels psychic energy and darkens when exhausted, which is a visual 1:1 with Quinn's crystal ball. Both are using environmental data in their psionics: Espeon predicts by "reading air currents," while Quinn describes their clairvoyance as telemetry that relies on associations between items, places, and people. Also, Espeon is a cat-like pokemon, which is Quinn's emotional register: aloof, misanthropic, but secretly cuddly when they trust you.

On their terms.

Shop Pet: Gimmighoul (Bonus)

Sylvia has her Owl, and Quinn has their Boxer. Gimmighoul is a ghost born inside a treasure chest. They can't very well NOT have a Gimmighoul, considering it's Boxer and commerce rolled into one!

Lots of fun pokemon in Quinn's back pocket! #potionomics pokemon teams for everybody else. (🌞 btw, I’m also running a small Potionomics summer art/fic exchange! signups open June 17 → [LINK])

[ripowal]

A Quinn question I cannot stop turning over

Okay so I've been thinking about how Quinn's powers work mechanically vs how the game frames their arc, and I'm hoping someone more Quinn-versed than me has a reading that makes this click, because I keep getting stuck and this has been bugging me for a while (aka about 1.5 years).

So I entreat the Quinn lovers to help me understand!

The Solid Pitch

Quinn's whole shop runs on a very specific promise. The moment they pitch Sylvia on the ingredient-feeding mechanic, they say:

"My clairvoyance lets me hone in on specific ingredients. Meaning, if you give me something good… I'll be able to find more of it. And then I can start offering that ingredient for sale in my shop. You miss out on the instant gratification. But you get guaranteed access to the ingredient in the future."

That's a confident sales offer: a guaranteed restock, no hedging.

The Sudden Mystery

But in the Rank 4 scene, Quinn eats squid vine in front of Sylvia and says:

"I'm curious what sort of vision it might give me."

If the power is "eat object, see origin, source more of object"—which is the explicit pitch—then the vision squid vine gives them is not a mystery. It's the whole job. They should know exactly what kind of vision it'll be: something that helps them locate more squid vine. That's the whole service they told Sylvia they offer.

And then the vision happens, and it's a woman tending a garden. And Quinn's response is to dismiss it: "Nothing worth seeing." "This was a waste of time." So… the vision doesn't help them source more squid vine?

The Late Revelation

Then at Rank 10, there's the culmination of their emotional arc:

"'Clairvoyance' is sort of a catch-all term. It covers a range of abilities. I'm thinking my deal is, more accurately, telemetry. It relies on associations between an item and a place… or person… I eat squid vine, I see the merperson who harvested it."

The core of the scene is Quinn figuring out how their abilities work. They propose telemetry as a theory, then they test it on grapes from their parents' vineyard.

And it's a well-constructed scene! It's the payoff for Sylvia spending weeks chip, chip, chipping away at Quinn's acerbic exterior, weathering all the threats and stalker jokes and "ugh, fine, you can stick around" energy. Her patience and kindness finally earn her a seat at the actual emotional core of someone who works very hard to keep people out.

Where I Get Stuck

But I keep tripping on the epistemology. Because Quinn has been running a business on the principle that eating an object shows them its origin. That IS telemetry. That IS the associative principle. There isn't a hidden layer underneath it that "telemetry" reveals. So how is Quinn meaningfully discovering something they've been commercially exploiting since before Sylvia showed up?

It just doesn't make sense to me that a person who doesn't know how their powers work would tell you "if you let me eat that ingredient I'll find more for you", nor that a person who sets up their business around "if you let me eat that ingredient I'll find more for you" doesn't know how their powers work.

Where I've Landed (Unsatisfyingly)

My best guesses at this point involve it being a disconnect/seam between the writing and gameplay:

1) The game needs the mechanic to be legible from day one (because you're feeding Quinn ingredients constantly as a core loop) and the character arc needs a revelation at the high ranks (because that's how relationship arcs work), and those two requirements are pulling in opposite directions. So the game just asks you to hold them both at once.

2) Quinn's visions are unreliable but the game doesn't want the player to feed Quinn an ingredient and have a risk you can't buy it from them the next day, so mechanically the game guarantees you an ingredient restock while narratively the visions are spotty. Except Quinn doesn't say they're spotty until later, which means Quinn's intro is meta that supersedes the story and, again, the game just asks you to hold them both at once.

But I don't want that to be the answer! I want there to be a reading that makes all three scenes work simultaneously and I just haven't found it. So:

Halp!

Does anyone have a take that resolves this? Am I missing something in the dialogue that bridges the gap? I'd genuinely love to be wrong about this because I'd rather it all cohere than not.

(And if the answer is "yeah it's a limitation of the game vs narrative"… fine, I guess I can live with that. But I want to make sure I'm not missing something first.)

[ripowal]

Guilty Pleasures, Serious Character Work

A little burnt out on creative writing after the Valentine's prompt event, so that translates to some more beefy character analysis! Woo!

Introduction: The Art of "Vapid" Hobbies

One of the most common pitfalls in character writing is trying to make everyone aspirational. Characters get hobbies that signal depth and culture. The result, paradoxically, is flatness. Everyone becomes an advertisement for good taste and self-improvement. The writers understood, though, that a character’s leisure time doesn’t need to be admirable to be revealing.

When Sylvia hangs out with Finn, Luna, and Roxanne, the activities they share with her—reality TV, celebrity gossip, and people-watching—are the kind that people sheepishly refer to as “guilty pleasures.” They’re widely dismissed as shallow, voyeuristic, a waste of time. And the game never tries to rebrand them as something loftier than what they are. Finn’s shows are described as “uniformly trashy.” Luna buys “every gossip rag on offer.” Roxanne judges strangers from a bench. None of it is sanitized, and thank goodness.

Because beneath the surface, each of these hobbies is a direct extension of the character’s professional skills and worldview. They aren’t guilty pleasures so much as guilty fluencies, arenas where the characters feel most themselves.

And it's where the character writing shines.

(Essay incoming, look out below!)

Finn and Reality TV: The Shark Who Studies the Tank

On the Surface

Finn’s reality TV habit is presented with zero pretension. He's described as watching “strangers navigate mundane problems with maximum drama and minimum self-awareness” while he “cackles, jeers, and hoots.” His preferred programming spans merfolk behaving badly and cutthroat real estate agents. When pressed on whether these shows are scripted, his defense is totally sincere:

It’s gotta be real. No writer could make this stuff up!

He saves episodes to binge with Sylvia (even veering toward home improvement shows in acknowledgment of her taste). He knows the characters, the conflicts, the histories, and he spares no detail catching her up to speed. He's not just leaving reality TV on in the background, he's a student of it.

What It Tells Us About Him

Finn’s entire character arc is built on gamesmanship. He enters the story as an antagonist running patent trolls and manipulating Rafta’s potion market. He intimidates through social pressure, reads people’s weaknesses, and deploys charm as a tactical weapon. His eventual redemption doesn’t erase these skills, but redirects them. By the end of his arc, he’s become a vendor advocate, someone who “out-cons the conmen” and takes “a bite out of predatory business practices.” As he tells Sylvia:

This town is swimming with talent. People like you and all your friends. But who’s looking out for your interests? Who’s keeping those predatory lenders at bay? Who’s stepping in when the landlord gets greedy?

Reality TV is the perfect leisure activity for Finn because it is, at its core, a spectator sport for social strategy. Those programs are built on alliance-making, bluffing, betrayal, reading the room, and emotional manipulation. They're presented as entertainment, but they employ the exact toolkit Finn uses professionally. When he watches a competitive real estate show full of shark-like agents, it’s not escapism. It’s studying game tape.

There’s a telling moment where Sylvia “finds it hard to root for them” because “they’re all a bit . . . shark-ish.” Finn’s response—“I know, right? Sounds like you get the appeal”—isn’t embarrassed by the comparison. He is those people, or was, and watching them is a way of staying fluent in the language of hustle without having to hurt anyone.

The Professional Connection

The scene where Finn catches a street scammer mid-con is one of his best character moments. He clocks the crack pattern on a supposedly “dropped” phone, identifies the scam instantly, and explains the mechanics to Sylvia with the easy fluency of someone who has lived this world:

If it had broken in the fall, you’d get cracks radiating out from a corner. But his screen showed a central point of impact. My guess is he hit it with a hammer.

His eye for deception is finely tuned, and reality TV is how he keeps that edge sharp. The shows reward the same kind of reading that Finn does in his advocacy work: spotting when someone is performing confidence they don’t have, identifying who’s lying and who’s being lied to, understanding why people fold under pressure and what it takes to make them hold firm. That he does it while cackling on the couch with Sylvia makes it all the more endearing.

Luna and Celebrity Gossip: The Publicist Who Never Clocks Out

On the Surface

Luna’s gossip habit is presented as utterly gleeful. She “skips the whole way to the newsstand,” buys every publication available, and reads the best bits aloud while giggling. She follows famous people “as if they were characters in an ongoing drama put on just for her.” She knows the convoluted dynasties, the fraught interpersonal histories, and she patiently explains all of it to Sylvia with additional notes.

Truth is stranger than fiction. And desperately in need of footnotes!

We track Sylvia’s evolving relationship with this hobby across multiple visits. She starts out not recognizing the names, then begins to follow along, then starts gasping and guffawing at the right moments, and finally takes turns reading bombshells aloud. Luna’s delight at Sylvia’s conversion is charmingly complimentary:

I knew you’d get hooked on this stuff. Because you’ve got discerning taste!

What It Tells Us About Her

Luna is a marketer-publicist. That's more than her job; it’s the lens she uses to understand the world. When Sylvia asks whether royalty even needs publicists, Luna delivers what might be the most incisive and impassioned speech in her arc:

Do they ever! I mean, if you think about it, their authority sort of relies on selling people a certain image. Noble bloodlines . . . grace, taste, and wisdom . . . a self-evident right to rule. Royals are constantly selling a narrative!

And when that narrative fails:

Well, that’s when her subjects start asking uncomfortable questions about the line of succession. Some of them might even go a little coup-coup, if you know what I mean.

("Coup-coup" is such a great a pun and made me actually laugh out loud when playing.) Celebrity gossip is Luna’s professional training disguised as recreation. Every gossip magazine is a case study in narrative control.

Who’s managing their image successfully, who’s losing the thread, what stories leaked and why, which scandals were manufactured and which are spiraling. That's exactly the work she does every day for her clients. She monitors public conversation, understands what people talk about and how they talk about it, and makes strategic decisions about what to reveal, what to suppress, and when to leak.

The relationship-route gossip hangout makes this explicit. Luna leaks a story about herself dating Sylvia to the gossip rags as a deliberate publicity move:

So! Juicy! I confess I leaked the info, but I thought a minor scandal would be good for your brand.

The audacity of this moth! lol Luna can't fully separate her personal life from her professional instincts, and the gossip magazines are where those two worlds overlap most naturally. She reads them not to turn off her brain, but to engage it the way a chess player studies famous matches.

The Personal Dimension

There’s a deeper layer here, too. Luna is a character defined by anxiety about her own narrative. She cares sooo much about what her parents think. She frets about how her career looks from the outside. She has 85 siblings, many of them doctors and lawyers, and she’s acutely aware that “marketer-publicist” doesn’t carry the same instant prestige. Her parents “still don’t get what a marketer-publicist does,” but when she lands a princess as a client, “they wrapped their heads around that super quick.”

Celebrity gossip is a space where Luna sees, in real time, how reputation is currency, and how fragile it can be. For someone who wants to be perceived as successful, these magazines are both a comfort and a cautionary tale. They show exactly how quickly opinion can turn.

Roxanne and People-Watching: The Con Artist Who’s Always Working

On the Surface

Roxanne’s people-watching hangout is the most immediately entertaining of the three, because she reframes the activity before it even begins. She takes Sylvia to a bench in the plaza, lays down a towel, and starts doing suggestive yoga poses in front of a growing crowd of admirers.

You see? I promised the best people-watching around, and I’d say I delivered.

Followed by the kicker:

Oh, but you might want to wipe that drool from your chin . . .

That's pure Roxanne, turning the gaze back on the gazer, making herself the spectacle, ensuring that any observation is done on her terms. In the relationship-route variant, she turns it into a romantic statement while holding Sylvia’s hand in public:

“When you gaze into the crowd, the crowd gazes back. And I’m glad for them to see me here, with you.”

What It Tells Us About Her

The early sessions are where the real depth first emerges. Stated plainly:

She provides a running commentary . . . noting how people walk, how they interact with others, the state of their garments and fingernails. She makes big assumptions based on the smallest details. Sylvia realizes this is what it looks like when a con artist is sizing up a mark.

Roxanne’s own framing confirms:

It’s like gem appraisal but with people. Look close, and it’s easy to spot the flaws . . .

People-watching, for Roxanne, is not a leisure activity. It’s a survival skill, developed out of necessity during years of running cons to stay ahead of crushing debt. Her backstory reveals a woman who “fell prey to the biggest con of them all: credit,” found herself in “deep, dangerous, demoralizing debt,” and turned to hustling because she saw no legitimate path forward. She ran pyramid schemes, read fortunes while picking pockets, played cards, counterfeited, and practiced “a bit of light blackmail.”

Every one of those cons requires you to read a stranger quickly and accurately. You need to know, within seconds, whether someone is naive or savvy, wealthy or faking it, confident or covering insecurity. You need to gauge their vulnerabilities. When Roxanne sits on that bench and dissects passersby, she’s running the same mental processes that once kept her fed and out of jail. The fact that she can do it so casually shows how deeply ingrained these skills are.

The Progression Tells a Story

The variant friendship/relationship routes do something subtle here. In early visits, Roxanne is actively sizing up marks; the narration is clear on that point. In a later visit, she “seems less interested in finding a mark and more in simply passing the time.” By the final friend variant, “they’re supposed to be watching strangers, but they find themselves lost in conversation, talking about everything and yet nothing in particular.” Roxanne’s conclusion:

“Turns out you’re the most interesting person on this island. And I have a front-row seat.”

It's an entire mini-arc embedded within a single hangout type! Roxanne starts out executing a professional, predatory scan of the crowd, and gradually, through her relationship with Sylvia, allows it to become gentler. She doesn’t stop exercising the skill, but stops weaponizing it. The survival skill becomes a social one.

When Sylvia tries her hand at reading strangers, Roxanne’s says:

“I’m not sure you have a con artist’s eye. But your imagination is highly entertaining.”

Affectionate and honest. Roxanne knows the difference between reading people for fun and reading them because your next meal depends on it. That distinction is baked into her character, and the hobby keeps it visible without belaboring it.

The Common Thread: Watching as a Form of Intelligence

What ties these three hobbies together is observation of social performances. All three characters are, in their professional lives, experts at reading people. Finn reads scammers and predatory business practices. Luna reads public narratives and audience sentiment. Roxanne reads marks. Their “vapid” hobbies are the off-duty versions of their core competencies.

There’s also a shared quality of voyeurism that the devs didn't shy away from. And all three characters enjoy thier voyeurism without guilt or apology, which tracks perfectly with who they are. Finn is brash and shameless (or incorrigble, as Sylvia puts it). Luna is enthusiastic to the nth degree. Roxanne frames everything as a performance she’s in control of. None of them would ever use the phrase “guilty pleasure,” and that's a part of what makes them compelling.

Postscript: The Pure Fun Of It

Also, these three absolutely hang out together, and that sounds like a blast.

Because all three of them are, at their core, people who process the world verbally, who perform their intelligence out loud. Put the three of them at a table and you’d never get a word in edgewise, and you wouldn’t want to. Fundamentally, the venn diagram of their hobbies is having strong opinions about other people's choices. This is a group of that's constitutionally incapable of minding their own business, and they’d absolutely thrive in each other’s company. Gossip, celebrity or otherwise, would be the natural lingua franca for the trio. And that's what elevates good character writing above competence! It’s not enough for each character to be interesting in isolation. They need to suggest a world that continues when you’re not looking, friendships that exist outside the player’s gaze, conversations that happen offscreen, dynamics that don’t require Sylvia’s presence to function. The “guilty pleasure” hobbies do this beautifully. They tell us who the characters are when they’re not trying to impress anyone, and in doing so, they let us imagine how those unguarded selves would collide.

So I guess these three hanging out is another fic I desperately want to write now…

[ripowal]

What Does the Shark Say?

Merfolk Sign Language and Worldbuilding

I wanted to ramble about the merfolk sign language in my Guppy Diplomacy fic! I had a blast thinking about the linguistics of it and considering shark biology, underwater acoustics, real-world diving culture, and one very specific jewelry-making scene from the game.

Start With the Animal

The argument for merfolk sign language begins and ends with one fact: sharks don't vocalize.

Sharks are one of the only major vertebrate groups that produce essentially no intentional sound. Dolphins have their whistles. Whales sing across ocean basins. Even fish grunt and pop using their swim bladders. Sharks are silent (apart from a few specific species that click their teeth or bark air).

What they do instead is communicate with their bodies. A shark's communicative toolkit is entirely somatic (gah I have to talk about the idea of magic/spellcasting as an evolutionary pressure in this fantasy world someday. I mean, somatic components? hellooo!). The arched back signals aggression, the lowered pectoral fins indicate submission, the exaggerated swimming patterns establish territorial boundaries, the jaw gape serves as a threat display. Their social information travels through posture, movement, and proximity—not sound.

They also receive information through channels humans don't have. The lateral line system detects pressure changes in the water, letting a shark sense movement and current shifts. The ampullae of Lorenzini—the electroreceptive organs—detect the faint bioelectric fields produced by other living things. A shark senses your heartbeat before it sees you.

So the baseline is an animal that talks with its body, listens with its skin, and has never* made a sound on purpose in its entire evolutionary history. That's the shark merfolk biological inheritance. That's what I want the worldbuilding to grow from.

Scale It Up to a Person

Finn isn't a shark. He's a "sexy, sophisticated shark-man." He runs a business, negotiates deals, delivers motivational pep talks, watches reality TV, makes fish puns, and has an existential crisis about his life's purpose. He's a sapient being, not an animal.

A real shark doesn't need a complex language. Its communicative needs—threat, territory, mating interest—are well served by body posture. But Finn needs to argue about contract terms. He needs to express doubt, irony, tenderness, regret. He needs the full bandwidth of a complex language.

When you take a creature whose entire communicative heritage is gestural and somatic, give it human intelligence and the need for abstract expression, and ask what kind of language it develops… the answer isn't acoustic. It's physical. Body language scales up into a full language the same way human vocalizations scaled up from primate calls into syntax and grammar. The medium was already there. The cognitive complexity just gave it somewhere to grow.

What the Game Already Implies

The source material never names a merfolk sign language. But it does something interesting: it consistently characterizes Finn as someone who deploys communication outside of speech.

Finn explains that sharks have electroreception, the ability to pick up information from bioelectric fields. He uses this to read people's emotional states, to sense whether he scares someone "a little… or a lot." This isn't a party trick. It's a fundamental part of how he experiences other people.

At the carnival, the captions describe his body language with unusual precision: the "casual lean" against the stall that's actually blocking the worker's only exit, the way he leans in close and speaks low. Sylvia can't hear what he says. She doesn't need to. His posture tells the whole story. The game is showing us a character who communicates as much through his body as through his words—and in this scene, his body is doing the real work.

In one friend variant of the aquarium hangout, a shark emerges from the gloom and its dark eyes fix on Finn. The dialogue reads: "Finn says nothing. / … / Welp! Ready to head back when you are." That loaded silence—the ellipsis, the abrupt redirect—suggests something passed between them that Sylvia couldn't perceive. It's a moment of recognition or communion that exists on a channel she doesn't have access to. (It's so mysterious! I wanna know what's going on there!)

Then there's the jewelry-making hangout. The captions note that "his large hands are surprisingly gentle as he strings beads and teeth in an alternating pattern." Finn has freaking meathook hands, and the game goes out of its way to tell you they're capable of delicate, precise, dexterous work (on top of the "surprise! scary tough guy shark makes jewelry!" flavor). He threads tiny beads and shark teeth into intricate patterns. Those are hands that can sign.

It's easy to overlook because the scene is about the emotional gesture. He's making an anklet with his grandmother's teeth (hrrk). But the physical observation matters! A gestural language requires fine motor precision, and Finn has it in spades.

The Physics

My core argument for merfolk sign language is biological and cultural: sharks communicate with their bodies, so shark-people would develop a body-based language even though they're clearly capable of (eloquent, menacing) speech. The underwater acoustics don't have to do the heavy lifting. But they do validate the choice, and they're interesting in their own right.

Spoken language underwater faces several physics problems. Sound couples poorly from air to water. When you vocalize, the compression waves in the air pocket around your mouth mostly reflect off the air-water boundary instead of propagating outward. Underwater, bone conduction replaces ear-based hearing, and listening with your skull nixes your ability to localize where a sound is coming from. Water's nonlinear acoustic properties distort frequency content, meaning what you produce and what gets received aren't the same. At depth, the effects compound, warped by pressure.

None of this means a fantasy species couldn't evolve underwater vocalization. Dolphins and whales obviously did. But it's worth noting that their vocalizations are produced through specialized biological mechanisms completely unlike a human larynx. They evolved purpose-built hardware. A shark-person underwater is more likely to work with the hardware the shark provides: body, fins, electroreception.

Meanwhile, real-world divers use hand signals as their primary underwater communication method. And here's the detail that sealed it for me: deaf divers who use full sign language hold conversations underwater, discussing what they're seeing in real time, while hearing divers are limited to a few dozen tactical signals and have to save everything else for the surface. A full gestural language doesn't just work underwater, it's better underwater than speech. The concept isn't speculative.

Designing the Language

Once the premise is established—shark-people communicate with their bodies, the physics supports it, the game already implies it if you squint—the design question becomes: what does the language actually look like? (lotta punctuation stacked in that sentence, don't look too closely, lol)

Human sign languages run on two primary channels: hand shape and facial expression. ASL grammar lives in the eyebrows, the mouth, the tilt of the head. These are elegant, fully expressive languages. But they're built for a human body.

Merfolk have more channels available. They have hands, yes, but they also have a tail, fins, three-dimensional positioning between you and your conversation partner, and the capacity for humming and clicking. A language designed for these people would use all of it. So the merfolk sign language in Guppy Diplomacy works on a layered system: hands carry vocabulary, tail and fins carry grammar and tone, and humming and clicking provide emotional color underneath.

The tail-grammar is the piece I'm most interested in, because it's what makes this a merfolk language rather than a relocated human sign language. Grammar encoded in a body part that humans don't have means this system could only belong to these people.

The practical design details matter too. Signs need to work in murky/dark water, which means they tend toward clear, compact gestures—"flat palm turning outward, fingers together" rather than intricate finger-spelling. Touch-based signing pressed to the body extends the system to zero-visibility environments, which is critical for the deep ocean where light doesn't penetrate. And electroreception solves the attention problem. With diving, you have to physically tap your buddy to say "look at me." A shark can sense that someone is trying to communicate before they even see the signs.

Plenty of Fish in the Sea

Ultimately, this is a shark merfolk language. The body shapes the language, and a different body would shape a different one. Cetacean merfolk would have something acoustically rich that shark merfolk can't reproduce (whale folk telegram service? they'll bellow your message to their hub location and pass it on!). A cephalopod civilization would have—I don't even know. Extremely elaborate, multi-arm signs? Chromatic grammar? Mantis shrimp having a visual dimension that other merfolk literally can't perceive? Eel merfolk communicating via sinuous interpretive dance? lol

It's just so fun to think about…

[ripowal]

I'm seizing the power to yap about my favorite Potionomics characters! Feeling the need to present my thoughts exclusively in the form of fully-realized fanfiction exploring their arcs and themes was a self-imposed limitation!

So I want to talk about Saffron, the first character I truly fell for when playing the game. There's so much going on beneath that serene, gorgeous, forest-witch exterior. She presents herself as this chill, wise carpenter who lives in the woods and teaches Sylvia breathing exercises, and yes, that's part of who she is. But it's also a mask—or more accurately, it's armor she built over twenty years to survive carrying grief she never fully processed.

Her backstory contains a really sharp critique of how systems chew up idealistic young people and spit them out disillusioned. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Backstory

So here's the thing about Saffron: she was a hero. Like, a genuine hero. She was part of the adventuring party that came to Rafta twenty years ago to take down Witch-Queen Maven. We learn sooo much about Rafta's history through conversation with Saffron.

Her party was basically her family. During the battle with the kraken, Saffron was injured badly enough that she couldn't continue with the group when they pushed forward to confront Maven. (There's an unstated-yet-clear implication that this is how she lost her arm.) So they left her in what was then just a tiny settlement, recruited a local guide (young Robin), and went off to finish the mission.

She never saw any of them again.

Twenty years. She's been carrying that for twenty years. She's the sole survivor of a found family, left behind because of injuries she couldn't control, and she's spent two decades living alone in the forest trying to make peace with that.

The Military Parallel

Saffron's story feels like commentary on something very real: young people getting recruited into the military-industrial complex with promises of glory and purpose, forming these incredibly deep bonds with the people beside them, and then slowly realizing the cause they were fighting for was... maybe not what they were told.

When Saffron talks about the mission to Rafta, she says:

"Maven had taken a barren island and infused it with magic. The guild, and the royals and aristocrats it serves, wanted access to this place—to its resources. She refused to barter with them. So they found a reason to move against her."

And:

"They told us we were defending our home. In hindsight, I think we were only invading someone else's."

Oof, that's a lot. She's describing classic colonial justification: claiming a defensive war when it's actually about resource extraction. The Heroes Guild and the aristocracy wanted what Maven had built, and when she wouldn't play ball, they manufactured a reason to take it by force.

But clearly the game isn't saying Maven was some innocent victim. She's described as a tyrant, and multiple characters reference how deeply her magical experiments warped the ecology of Rafta. During Sylvia's face-off with her in the potion competition, Maven straight-up says: "In my prime, I could have reduced you to a smear of smoldering ash with a wave of my hand. I could have forced the crowd to tear you to pieces while chanting my name!" And we know she's been secretly mind-controlling Robin like a puppet for twenty years. That's not nothing! Maven clearly was dangerous, clearly did have the power to do terrible things.

But that's kind of the point, right? The threat Maven truly posed and the threat the Guild claimed she posed weren't the same thing. There were no captives to liberate, no monster army to stop. Only a powerful woman who wouldn't share her resources with people who felt entitled to them.

This is what makes Saffron's guilt so layered. She lost everyone she loved on a mission she now believes was morally compromised. But does that mean her friends died for nothing? Does questioning the cause dishonor their sacrifice? These are the kinds of questions that haunt real veterans, and Saffron's been wrestling with them for two decades without anyone to talk to about it.

The bonds she formed were real. The family she found was real. And she lost them in service of something she's not sure she can defend anymore.

Mindfulness As Armor And Avoidance

Saffron is constantly teaching Sylvia about meditation, breathing exercises, being present in the moment. She says things like "mindfulness makes you master of your own mental domain" and frames haggling as "almost soothing." Her whole vibe is calm.

But then she also says this: "So that's my secret. For all my talk about tranquility... I'm actually a big, hot mess."

GIRL. I KNOW.

Her philosophy isn't fake. She clearly does believe in presence and mindfulness. But it's also doing double duty as a way to avoid dealing with her past. She literally tells Sylvia: "I'm simply more interested in what's in front of me than what's behind." That's not pure wisdom, that's avoidance with a meditation cushion.

The hangout where she teaches Sylvia to meditate is so revealing. They sit together, knees touching, and Saffron admits she can't actually clear her mind when there's someone she cares about right in front of her. Her techniques work better in isolation. The whole system breaks down when genuine connection threatens to get through.

Mindfulness was a tool that worked until the cost of safety exceeded the cost of vulnerability.

The Beach Scene

At Rank 5 where Saffron and Sylvia go to the beach, they encounter the kraken skull from the battle twenty years ago, just sitting there in the shallows.

And Saffron cannot look away from it.

She says: "I'd forgotten they just left that thing there. I keep thinking someone will remove it."

The townspeople treat this skull as a monument to a heroic victory. But for Saffron, it's the marker of the worst day of her life. It's where she got hurt badly enough that she couldn't go with her family. It's the last place she saw them.

She completely shuts down. When Sylvia tries to engage, Saffron just says she needs to go home, that she knows when she's going to be "poor company." Twenty years of careful emotional management, and one look at that skull and she's right back in it.

Why She Lives In The Woods

Saffron's whole lifestyle makes so much more sense once you know her history. She chose isolation deliberately. She built a life in the forest where she can materially help people—she makes bridges, sells wood, does carpentry work—without having to be close to them, without being emotionally vulnerable to anyone.

And her relationship with the trees? It goes deep. She can communicate with them, or at least read them in some druidic way. She thanks them when she takes sap. She talks about how they're constantly communicating with each other about environmental hazards.

Trees are safe. They grow slowly, live long, and don't suddenly leave you. In the "Plant a Seed" hangout, she kisses an acorn before planting it and tells Sylvia the sapling will be their shared responsibility. She can love trees without the risk of losing them the way she lost her party—or how she will lose Sylvia one day when Saffron inevitably outlives her.

The forest is her family.

The Fear Of Getting Close Again

Saffron's romance arc (or friendship arc, if you go that route) is basically about her terror of letting someone in again.

At Rank 7, she admits to Sylvia: "When we're together, I... I feel something stirring inside of me. A part of me that's been sleeping for a very long time has started to awaken. And that frightens me, Sylvia."

Later, at Rank 9, she says: "And if I'm overprotective at times... or if I ever seem like I'm trying to push you away... I hope you'll at least know where I'm coming from. Not a place of callousness. Quite the opposite."

She's not cold because she doesn't care! She's distant because she cares so much and she's terrified of losing someone she loves again.

Her max relationship potion quest is called "Stop and Smell the Potions" and it's about Saffron needing reassurance that Sylvia will let her set the pace. She needs control over her emotional exposure to feel safe. That's such a real trauma response.

The Photoglyph Scene (I'm Not Crying, You're Crying)

At Rank 10, Saffron does something she's never done in twenty years: she shows Sylvia a photoglyph of her adventuring party.

She says she's been carrying it all this time but could barely look at it herself, let alone show anyone else. And then she names them—Loran with his tusks in a book, Sugar mugging for the camera, Shaylie's fierce eyes, Silky the father figure who thought only of keeping them safe. A few other unnamed party members, among them a gnome-like figure and a merfolk.

And she commits to something new: "I'll share their stories. It's better than locking them away. It might hurt, sometimes. But I know, now, that I don't have to be alone with that hurt."

That's the breakthrough. Not that she stops grieving, not that she "gets over it," but that she stops carrying it alone. She lets someone else know her family, even if only through her memories of them.

In the romance path, she says: "I adore you, Sylvia. And if I'm ever strong, it's because my adoration has made me strong." (😭) And then there's this incredibly sweet moment where she admits she hasn't had "a proper make-out session" in decades and asks if Sylvia thinks she'll be rusty.

After all that heaviness, the game lets her be a little goofy and nervous and hopeful. It's good. She deserves it.

Okay But She's Also Just Really Cool Though???

I've been going pretty hard on the trauma analysis, so let me take a moment to appreciate that Saffron is also just... extremely cool?

First of all: she makes her own ice cream. The woman has opinions about the freezing points of various magical creature milks. That's the kind of worldbuilding detail I absolutely live for. (So moths, walruses and merfolk are sapient, but cow-folk are something you milk?!)

And then there's the whiskey. She has a secret recipe for tree sap whiskey that Sugar the Scallywag taught her, and she guards it closely. She only shares it with Sylvia after a time because apparently homemade forest liquor is a milestone.

She also casually mentions having TATTOOS. Multiple! When Sylvia asks about them, Saffron just says "I guess you'll just have to keep your eyes peeled" with this coy energy that's so good. This serene forest meditation lady has secret tattoos and she's not telling you where they are. She also tests out tattoo designs on trees first, which is delightful.

Oh, and she built an entire FLEET OF SHIPS. Just casually, to keep her skills sharp. When Sylvia expresses surprise that she's building a whole galleon from scratch, Saffron just shrugs and says "every carpenter should build a fleet every now and then." MA'AM. That's not a normal hobby! That's an entire shipyard's worth of work and she treats it like routine maintenance!

She scales buildings like a mountain goat. When she fixes Sylvia's leaky roof, she just... exits through the window and scrambles up the exterior. She patches the roof with "simple tools on her person" and "a minor druidic cantrip or two" and mentions it should hold for "oh, maybe a decade or two." She's sooooo competent.

The hangout where they scream in a secluded grove! She has a designated screaming spot in the forest where she goes to vent! That's such good self-care honestly. She knows she needs to let it out sometimes and she found a place where no one can hear her. (In the romance version, they end up making out instead of screaming, which is a different kind of stress relief I suppose.)

And look, I know I'm just listing things at this point, but she also learned all her repair skills from watching Silky the Swordmaster mess things up. She says he was "all thumbs" and "often forgot his own strength" and would "break two things while fixing one." She learned by watching him fail and then showing him "what a bit of finesse could do." There's something so sweet about that memory, with this four-armed moth dad figure who tried so hard and kept breaking stuff, and young Saffron gently taking over the repair work. It's a tiny window into what her found family was actually like, and it's lovely.

She's just... she contains multitudes. Makes her own artisanal ice cream and has secret tattoos and builds ships for fun and can talk to trees and has a designated forest screaming spot. I love her.

What Makes Her Work So Well

I think what I love about Saffron is that she's not just "traumatized character learns to love again." She's that, but she's also a commentary on systems that use idealistic young people, on the moral complexity of being part of something you later question, on the specific grief of being the one who survived.

Her contradictions make her compelling:

She preaches living in the present but is haunted by the past

She values tranquility but carries unprocessed grief

She helps others but keeps them at arm's length

She fled civilization for solitude but clearly craves connection

She won't talk about her heroic past but carries her party's photo everywhere

Even her humor is doing work. When Sylvia asks how old she is, she deflects with "Never ask a witch her age" and you think it's just haha cute joke. But she's also deflecting because her age is tied to how long she's been alone, how long it's been since she lost everyone.

The game could have made her backstory simpler. Heroic party, tragic loss, sad survivor. But by adding the layer of moral doubt—by having Saffron question whether the mission was righteous at all—it becomes something more layered and interesting. She can't comfort herself with "they died for a good cause" because she's not sure they did. She can only say "they died for each other" and hope that's enough.

Final Thoughts

The writing takes her trauma seriously, both the immediate loss and the slower, harder work of questioning everything you believed in while still honoring the bonds you formed.

She's a critique of colonial military adventure wrapped in a cozy fantasy game about brewing potions and haggling with customers. She's a meditation on how coping mechanisms can become prisons. And she's a love story about choosing to be brave enough to let someone in after years of convincing yourself you were better off alone.

When she tells Sylvia "Here's the thing about being scared, though. It gives you the opportunity to be brave"—that's not just advice. That's Saffron's whole arc in one line. She's been scared for two decades. And finally, she's choosing to be brave instead.

Love doesn't erase grief. They cohabit.

[ripowal]

Baptiste's Pokémon Team

Roserade

Roserade is based on a combination of a bouquet of roses and a mysterious patron of a masquerade ball; a classic noble event where attendants hide their identities. Baptiste is a noble performing the role of approachable guildmaster, constantly masking his aristocratic background ("I'm trying to downplay all that. You know. To help me fit in"). Flowers are his favorite gift category, and his custom potion order "Taking Life by the Thorns" is about growing prize-winning roses. Roserade's practically his personal brand.

The Diamond pokedex entry says it "attracts prey with a sweet aroma, then downs it with thorny whips hidden in its arms," which is Baptiste's signature charm concealing a sharp mind running calculations about guild politics and corporate reform: "Captivate your audience forthwith."

Sinistea

Sinistea is a spectral creature living inside a teacup, and Baptiste's tea scene is one of his most telling character moments. He serves Sylvia tea that's clearly astringent and cheap: "I notice you haven't touched yours in a few minutes, and I feel we should drink it down quickly… before it melts my good porcelain!" A nobleman whose refined tastes haven't quite adjusted to frontier-quality supplies. Sinistea comes in two forms—Phony Form and Antique Form—and you can't tell the difference without checking the bottom of the cup. Is Baptiste the genuine article, a noble with real commitment to reform? Or a well-meaning counterfeit, a rich kid playing at populism?

The Shield pokedex says Sinistea "will only allow a Trainer it trusts to sample it," and Baptiste shares his real concerns—about morale, about corporate pressure, about his own inadequacy—only with Sylvia. The tea is terrible, but sharing it is an offering of trust.

Popplio

Popplio is an enthusiastic performer whose attempts at entertaining don't always land. Baptiste's morale-boosting efforts are deeply sincere and deeply awkward: his potion order "Don't Drop the Ball" is about learning to juggle while tending bar, "A Song of Icy Fire" is a red-hot slushie described as "an acquired taste," and he does karaoke and ventriloquism for fun. He's a performer at heart… for an audience that isn't sure whether to applaud or cringe. But like Popplio—whose final evolution is the most elegant starter of its generation—Baptiste's earnestness eventually wins people over.

Minccino

Minccino's White pokedex entry says "these Pokémon prefer a tidy habitat. They are always sweeping and tidying up, using their tails as brooms." Baptiste is always tidying, physically and organizationally. He tracks hero stats, manages expeditions, administers quests, keeps the bar stocked, and personally greets every visitor. He runs the guild the way Minccino runs a den: everything has a place, everything gets attended to. He's a fastidious noble on the frontier, polishing trophies to shine, serving fine porcelain even when the tea is terrible, tending roses at a guildhall where scorpions end up in his shoes; not just clean, but anxious about cleanliness as a form of maintaining standards in a place that keeps testing them.

Gallade

Gallade is "a master of courtesy and swordsmanship" according to the Diamond pokedex. A knight who fights out of duty to protect, which is Baptiste working hard to uplift a frontier guild outpost. Gallade evolves from a male Kirlia using a Dawn Stone, making evolution a deliberate choice to become a protector. Baptiste could have taken a cushy made-up job back home, but instead chose the frontier post where the guild needed real work, and that choice defines him. The move Charm is the thematic anchor: it sharply lowers the opponent's Attack by making them less willing to fight, and charm is "Baptiste's whole thing." The heroes prank him relentlessly—scorpions in his shoes, rotten fruit, shaving cream—and he responds with unfailing graciousness.

Cherubi

Baptiste is a "fledgling barkeep" constantly experimenting with mixed drinks, making Cherubi the garnish dropped into the glass with a flourish. The most literal pick on this team, and it earns its spot through that simplicity. The Sun/Moon pokedex adds that "Cherubi is often the target of bird Pokémon because its small appendage is rich with nutrients." Considering the heroes prank him constantly, his family dismisses Rafta as a money pit, and Quinn rakes him over the coals in negotiations… Well, he's a sweetheart that everyone takes a bite out of, but the nutrients he provides—morale, structure, reform—keep the whole guild ecosystem running!

I love how Baptiste's team came together! #potionomics pokemon teams for everybody else. (🌞 btw, I’m also running a small Potionomics summer art/fic exchange! signups open June 17 → [LINK])