Hi everyone! Iâm ValleyShrike, or Shrike for short. I am an adult, though my true age shall remain a secret.
I tend to overthink a bit when posting, so I wonât post much original stuff unless I think I have something good to say. I do reblog a lot though!
To my followers: You are all so dear to me. Iâm so glad you like my stuff enough to follow me and I hope I continue to entertain you all!
To everyone whoâs liked/reblogged my stuff: THANK YOU! And to any lurkers out there, I appreciate you as well. Even if I have no clue who you are.
Stuff youâll find here: Posts regarding whatever fandom Iâve been swept into lately, currently itâs Vampires SMP (VSMP) and Project Hail Mary (PHM). Iâll also be reblogging my sibling @mandragora-metalloidal âs stuff, and maybe someday Iâll have the courage to post some of my original writing.
Taglist:Â
#METAL NO (Posts that Metal should NOT look at! Spoilers abound! Block this tag!)
#discourse (fandom discourse. Messy stuff, tagâs here for those who want to filter it out)
#reblog (reblogs of other peopleâs stuff)
#artrb (art reblogs)
#writingrb (writing reblogs. Includes stories, analysis, head canons, textposts etc.)
#other peopleâs writing tips (what it says on the tin, basically stuff Iâve saved for personal reference)
#asks (answers to any asks I get)
#metal writes stuff (my siblingâs writing)
#vsmp (my VSMP-related posts)
#phm (my PHM-related posts)
#shrikechirps (My rambles that are not related to anything in particular)
#shrikewrites (my writing, original or fan content)
AO3 has recently seen a wave of comments claiming to be made by the "AO3 Trust & Safety team", notifying you that your account has been restricted. These claims are not true. These comments are not being made by real AO3 volunteers and your account has not been restricted.
AO3 volunteers, including the Policy & Abuse committee, will never communicate with you through comments on your work. All important communications from AO3 will be sent through the email associated with your account. More general announcements will be posted on our official social media accounts or published as news posts on AO3 or OTW.org.
If you receive one of these comments, do not click on any of the links in it, reply to it, or interact with it in any way. The links in these comments lead to sites asking you to verify your identity by providing payment information. This is a common credit card scam. AO3 does not ever ask users to provide payment information, and the Policy & Abuse committee will never comment on your works asking you to "complete an identity verification process".
If you encounter one of these comments or believe your account has been compromised, please view the instructions under the cut!
We suggest that you review your account to verify that you're using a unique and secure password. Check out the advice from our Policy & Abuse committee on Protecting Your AO3 Account and Keeping Your Account Secure.
If you believe your AO3 account has been compromised for any reason (i.e. you received an email that your username changed), you can change or reset your password to ensure control of your account. Changing your password will automatically log you out of all sessions on all devices. You can find the option to change your password in your Preferences.
If you encounter one of these comments on your own work or someone else's, please report them to the Policy & Abuse committee. To do so:
Select the "Thread" button on the scammer's comment. This will take you to the specific comment page.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Policy Questions & Abuse Reports.
In the "Brief summary of Terms of Service violation" field, enter "Spambot".
In the "Description of the content you are reporting" field, enter "This is a spambot, their username is USERNAME."
Reporting in this fashion helps us auto-sort your report so that it can be handled as soon as a Policy & Abuse volunteer is available. To help us address reports about these types of bots as fast as possible, please only submit one report per account, and don't include multiple accounts in the same report.
We also encourage you to share this post and help spread the word about how to protect yourself from scammers and reduce spam on AO3.
For more information about spambots on AO3, you can review our News Post on the topic.
wait a second this is my Tumblr i can say whatever I want :0
Ok uh so basically, Abolish Veylocke. This character is very very important to me, you see, which is funny because I watched Owens POV and didn't know who the fuck Abolish was until episode... hm, 7?
Yeah, he did a good job of slipping into the background.
When I saw Abolish and told my fellow Owen POV watcher (irl) that I was gonna watch Abolish's POV, she ALSO had no idea who he was
Then I watched his POV and was like "huh, he really doesnt do much- WAIT WHAT?"
Its even a bit funny since Owen finds out about the organization stuff in the finale but my friend was shocked because Abolish just fades so well that everything about him was a huge shock
Good job, AbolishRegret, you were told not to be a sweat and you faded into non existence until you burnt down the entire fucking forest, pat pat
Itâs so funny how good he is at that. Like, he was just completely irrelevant and then BAM! Forest is gone, heâs got infinite silver, he cuts off the covenâs food and kills Shelby and goes after Scott in the span of like five minutes, and suddenly ALL THE VAMPIRES are talking about how much of a threat this guy is.
The way necromancy works is this: Everything in your body â meat, bones, skin, blood â has something like a memory. They remember, in their own way, what itâs like to be alive. Skin remembers the sun. Bones remember what shape theyâre supposed to be in. Muscle memory is more than just an idiom.
The way necromancy works is that the caster puts a little bit of their willpower into a corpse to order it to remember how it functioned in life and obey. This is easiest to do with bones, which are easy to trick, and becomes increasingly difficult the more of the original body remains.
To reanimate a full body to your command, you have to have a lot of willpower.
The necromancer checked the map. She checked the map again. She squinted up at the stars, lips moving silently. Then, taking the lantern off its hook, she peered over the side of the little sailboat.
There wasn't much to see. The sea was dark and still as glass, except where the lanternlight turned a patch of seawater a yellowish-green. A tiny fish flitted into the gleam, attracted to the light, and then vanished into the murk again.
The necromancer chewed the inside of her cheek. She sat down again, the boat bobbing gently with the movement, and checked the map one more time. Then she opened the little wooden case on the floor of the boat, which unfolded into a neat arrangement of drawers.
There were. Things. In the drawers. Some wriggled. Others twitched little beetly legs into the night air. A few of them made noises, which ran together into a squeaky, wheezy squeal of horror.
The necromancer twiddled her fingers over the display as she considered her options. Then she grabbed a few of the twitching, wriggling things, held them in her palm and squeezed her hand into a fist as tightly as she could with a squelching noise.
She opened her hand to inspect her work. She breathed the spell into it, and then, holding her hand over the edge of the boat, dropped the spell into the sea.
And that seemed to be it. She sat back in the boat and closed the little wooden case. After a moment she started looking over the map again.
There were a lot of handwritten notes on the map. Each one was connected to a mark and some coordinates; some of them said, "Storm 1457," or "Struck a rock 1483." Others said "Total failure," or âCompletely dissolved.â
The note the necromancer seemed most interested in was the one that read, âBattle of Salzstein, 1501.â
The necromancer checked the map. She checked the map again. She squinted up at the stars, lips moving silently, and then she was suddenly thrown down to the floor of the boat as though a giant, invisible hand had crushed her.
Her mouth opened in a noiseless scream.
Two minds were fighting for control of the corpse; on one side was the mind of the caster, and on the other was the memories of bones, of flesh, of skin, trying to drive the caster out.
The weight of that mind was incredible.
Sweat poured off the necromancerâs brow; darkness whorled across her vision. Then slowly, every movement a bone-breaking agony, she pushed herself onto her hands and knees, lungs straining.
The trick was that this mind knew how to obey.
The necromancer stood, wobbled, steadied herself and poured her willpower into the sea. She tried to make hers the full willpower the thing had obeyed in life, the will of the wind, of the sea, of the rigging and the wheel.
Because of course it had been alive. In a sense, they were all alive. Sailors talked of them like they were alive, gave them names, called them âshe.â
Sailors knew they were alive.
It was the cessation of that life that interested her.
The necromancer reached out with her power, seized the mind in her hands and pulled, blood and foam flecking out the corners of her mouth as she ground her teeth together with the titanic effort and ordered it to obey.
The sea roiled, hundreds of tons of water moving fast as something deep below boiled to the surface.
A bowsprit sprouted from the water. Then a wood-rotted figurehead of a mermaid. Then inch by inch, yard by yard, the huge barnacle-encrusted bulk of silt-stained timber rose out of the deep, seawater streaming out of every gunport.
For a moment the warship hung in the air like a monstrous fish held by the gills by a colossal fisherman. It dropped into the sea; the little rowboat lurched in its wake.
The necromancer released the spell. Then she threw up, and passed out.
âââ
Later, once she had woken up, gathered together the tackle box, the lantern, the map and had scrabbled aboard, the necromancer inspected the undead ship.
There was a hole in the hull where a magazine charge had exploded. This was, admittedly, fine. Undead men could walk with a hole in their bellies; an undead ship could sail with one as well.
Really, she thought, despite the discomfort the spell had worked masterfully.
It was a perfect start.
She unfolded the map on the soggy floor of the quarterdeck, sucked the end of a pen, and next to the last marker wrote âTotal success.â Then her finger began to trace down the page to the next.
And the undead ship â unbidden and obedient â shifted its sails and began to move south.
I understand the urge to find a new popular ship for V!Scott in the wake of... all that. But like, is it necessary? Does his character NEED someone to ship him with?
This isn't to say shipping is bad. I love a lot of V!Scott ships and I absolutely encourage people to enjoy themselves. But I've been seeing a lot of people talk about it like something that has to happen, as if we can't engage with the series or V!Scott's character without a romantic ship. And I barely see anyone talk about his relationship to Shelby and Drift anymore. It's not just one thing, it's a bunch of compounding things that are rubbing me the wrong way.
Idk, I'm not sure how to articulate what I'm noticing without someone having a bad interpretation. It just feels like people have reduced Scott to the Gay Ship Character and forgotten all the women. Maybe this is just a me thing and I just need to follow better fans.
someone sent me an anon ask about rocky meeting eva and i tried to post it not once but twice and tumblr ate it both times so now im just regular posting it here
i think ryland would grow to understand strattâs choice with time, and even thank her logic of it because it led to his meeting of rocky, but i dont think heâd ever really forgive her for what she did to him
(Ryland had to prep rocky before they touched down to meet Stratt so he wouldnt charge her at first sight)
Drift is really good at detecting lies, including white lies (especially white lies). While she won't confront the liar in front of everyone, she will pull them off to the side later if she's worried and convince them to tell her the truth through Kind Words and/or blackmail.
-đŽ
Ooh yeah I like that, Drift would be good at reading people even if she isn't the best at actually being social
Someday you will find me
Caught beneath the landslide
In a champagne supernova in the sky
Champagne Supernova - Oasis
_______________
I'm posting my PHM fanarts rather backwards haha but this was the first one I drew back in May right after I saw the movie and I remembered being overwhelmed with feelings after it was done. (I was also so happy they put my fav Oasis song in the PHM trailers, it suits the story so well T_T)
It's been a long time since a movie has hit so many checkmarks for me in terms of story, themes, and the inner astronomy nerd in me. I've watched Ryan Gosling since his Notebook/Crazy Stupid Love days, but Drive was when I started to truly become a fan and he's honestly been on a generational run since then, PHM is no exception.
__________
(Small/large prints are also available on my etsy â¤ď¸)
thereâs a thing I think about sometimes when Iâm writing that I call âthe rabies conditionâ
by which I mean: there are no contraindications to getting the rabies vaccine for post-exposure prophylaxis.
every other vaccine usually has a few contraindications like âdonât take this if youâre allergic to itâ or âif youâre pregnant discuss the risks and benefits with your doctorâ or âdonât give to children below age 6Ⲡor something, but not the rabies vaccine. if youâve been exposed to rabies, there is literally no medical reason that can justify not getting the rabies vaccineâyou can be deadly allergic to literally every single ingredient and the correct decision is still to administer the vaccine, because if you donât, youâre 100% guaranteed to die of rabies. even the life-threatening allergies are a step up in survival rate (especially since anaphylaxis is something that can be managed, even if there are risks associated with it)
which is to say, the rabies condition: if a character has been âexposed to rabiesâ, aka, in some impending absolute worst-case scenario, like the apocalypse or some death curse or the destruction of their entire city via demons or whatever, then that character has to take action and the consequences and risks no longer matter, because literally any other outcome would be better, and 1% chance of survival is still better than 0%. that doesnât make those actions necessarily good, the same way that injecting yourself with something you know youâre deadly allergic not a good thing to do, but itâs still better than dying horrifically of rabies. desperate times and desperate measures etc
and then, after your characterâs prevented some horrible thing by doing some almost equally bad thing, they should absolutely experience the consequences of those choices.
I see your socially awkward Louis and I raise you fiercely protective to the point of being a Problem Louis.
Louis that blacklists a merchant for giving Oakhurst the leftovers because they "aren't worth it". He also tells every ally of Oakhurst to do the same.
Louis that doesn't hesitate to call someone out in the middle of the town square if he hears them saying something mean about another, even if it's just petty childhood squabbles.
Louis that almost certainly decked somebody at some point for implying that someone he cared about was a loser.
Louis that only accepts the best from his citizens because he truly believes they have the potential for greatness and he'll be damned if he lets anyone have any ammunition on them to say they aren't enough.
This one is targeting posts with ao3 links, and itâs creating AI-generated comments to pose as someone whos read your fic and totally wants to draw something for it
I went to this blog, and their actual blog is empty but their likes are public, and theyâre leaving near-identical comments at break-neck speeds on any other posts with ao3 links where
~2 minutes between each of the comments above, and an endless slew of them, all extremely ChatGPT-intoned.
If you see this or any other puppet account show up doing this, block and report.
My take Abolish in the Vampires SMP finale is that his organization is about good vampires and humans teaming up to deal with evil vampires. For the organization to function, it must have humans and vampires at its core.
The Veylockes are committed to being the human half of that pact. Part of their commitment is not to turn, or at least not turn voluntarily.
Of course plenty of humans are turned against their will. Considering how many generations the Veylockes have been fighting vampires, there are almost certainly some Veylockes who ARE vampires. Abolish was in a truly messed-up situation in Oakhurst, and if he'd chosen vampirism to get everyone out, he wouldn't have been ostracized.
But it does mean that choosing a life as a vampire is a big sacrifice for Abolish. Being a human that stands with vampires is a big part of his identity. If he turned, he would no longer be the human standing up for the needs of humans both against and alongside vampires. He would no longer truly be a Veylocke. It was a lot to ask of him.
It's a reason that, in the heat of the moment, he let Legundo die. Maybe he would have made a different choice if everything hadn't been happening at once, and particularly if Legundo hadn't been so determined to die. But it wasn't just because he didn't want to fill out paperwork. It was the nature of the paperwork and what it implied about him.
