robin @verycoolipromise - Tumblr Blog

stepmother is soooo crazy. like ive been subject to the cruelty of eldritch forces beyond my control (i cannot acknowledge that i am also yet another cog in the mechanisms of the cruelty in my story) i am just a mother trying to protect my daughters (i do not think of my stepdaughter as my child but a jealous girl trying to spite me. the daughters i love i will consume and devour out of rage against the system that hurt them) this world is rotten from the inside out (i will drag everyone down with me to the bottomless depths of my grief and anger). they have forced me to become an archetypical villain to fuel someone elses story (so i have ruptured the fabric of reality to make myself into the ultimate evil in everyones story)

verycoolipromise

this is why i don’t like saying the stepmother is a villain! there ARE no villains in this story, and the stepmother is just another victim of a world beyond her control.

housegoblin

all of the lobo from puss in boots fanarts I’ve made so far

im still obsessed with him help

verycoolipromise

fully thought this was about the neverafter wolf. i rlly need to watch puss in boots huh

united-under-skyfall

isn't it funny how the most fucked up version of ylfa's story she's lived through yet is as awful as it is because of something like kindness, or maybe mercy? the woodsman didn't come. he didn't kill the wolf. i met death and death wants me to live. death wanted me to live so badly it asked something of me i couldn't grant because it would come at death's cost, and the woodsman didn't come and didn't kill death so i won't either, i'll keep waiting, so i refused and i refused and i refused until i couldn't anymore. i saw a caterpillar chasing a butterfly on the way here. i think they were friends once.

squydworm

When Cinderella said “why in every version of the story is my mother dead” and then miss muffet saying “am I always supposed to be scared” I can’t articulate this well but like it’s about STORIES it’s about FATE who we want to be, what the world wants us to be, what the world needs us to be? Do we need to be that too? I don’t even know I love u mr lee mulligan

antlerchrist

something something about muffett becoming a spider against her will and the meaning of puberty turning you into this monstrous unrecognizable thing but ALSO something something muffett meeting ylfa, a girl who has taken ahold of the monster narrative and turned herself spidery. something something about the inherent shared power of girlhood and the intersection of monstrosity and femininity.

gerard giving pib bullshit awful advice/help but it having an real game mechanic which made it be actually helpful is to e most underrated joke to me. just the worst guy (endearingly, i love gerard) going “try hitting it” and it actually helping? yeah that’s comedy gold

#neverafter show #dimension20 neverafter #neverafter #dnd #dimension20 #d20 #dungeons and dragons #prince gerard #puss in boots #pib #brian murphy #zac oyama

sn1ckie

this scene really drives the point that pinocchio is still a child and OUCH

thinkanamelater

Stepmother

totheshallowwater

I’m absolutely reading to much into it but I love looking into the way gender affects Neverafter.

When Emily/Ylfa says “women are either princesses or monsters,” that’s something that’s very real in these fairytales the stories are based on: there’s the stories of perfection that are prizes to be won, and there’s the monsterous girl coming of age to be punished for it. Rosamund was raised to be saved and have no agency in her own life, and Ylfa’s worth shattered in her eyes as soon as she became something not reflective of the innocence young girls are meant to represent. There’s also something to say about the princesses, not royalty, being a faction of their own, and them being the one subjected to the violence of fairy tales in their storytelling.

It’s also Timothy, a caretaker of children, taking on the title of “Mother.” Timothy takes on this role not as a gender association but as a symbol of nurturing. Mother is an intrinsically nurturing title because of the patriarchal idea we have of motherhood, but Timothy takes on the title in coordination with positive displays of masculinity and subverts the idea of womanhood and caring for children being one in the same.

There’s Gerard, who believes that his effort was complete once he had found his wife, and he truly does live her more then most things, even thinking of her in his last moments (no place for princes or princesses.) Gerard cant comprehend his wife’s ideology and believes that if he continues as he is right now as if everything is fine, things will be fixed on their own

I’m having some trouble articulating what I want to say about pinnochio, other then his boyhood and personhood being very connected, and valuable in their own right.

On the other hand, PIB I feel like is very seperate from a regular gender binary since he’s a fuckjng trickster spirit, but that on it’s own is very interesting to me

marytoppins

All of the book owners (so far) are the fictional authors of fictional fables and stories.

Mother Goose collection has Cinderella, Master cat or Puss in Boots, the sleeping beauty in the wood, little red riding hood, the fairy (all written for Louis the XIV in the 1690’s appx… the Grimm brothers are more relevant retelling sod the stories for an 1800’s Germany

Scherezade from 1001 Arabian nights started as one thousand nights and evolved to what is is now known as titular and story content wise. Having the ebony horse, the thief and the merchant, the adventures of Sinbad the sailor, and Aladdin and the lamp.

An interesting tidbit if the most famous stories from the collection (Aladdin and the Genie, Sinbad the sailor and Ali baba and the 40 thieves) they were either independent and added in later editions or added for the French publication in the 1830’s

And Aesops fables are from Ancient Greece and contain the basis for all fairy tales and fables such as the tortoise and the hare, the boy who cried wolf, the lion and the mouse, and others.

All of these story tellers also share things in common, all of them are either historically (Aesop) or designed to be (Mother Goose and Scherezade) people who are not wealthy, do not hold a position of power but wants to help the future.

Aesop was a Greek Slave who wanted to document the oral stories being told amongst the common folk and to also make commentary on the politics happening as well. With the commentary being seen as moral lessons for the children to grow and learn with.

Scherezade is the extremely learnéd daughter of the Vizier who agreed to me the next bride for the king to stop him from killing all the virgin wives he had. She constantly gets him to postpone her execution with the fables and changes his mind so he doesn’t assume all women will cheat immediately after sleeping with him. Giving the reader an idea of what knowledge can do.

Mother Goose is supposed to be a village woman who met a goose who laid golden eggs for her and eventually spun tales for the children of the village, entertaining and imparting lessons to them.

They all have some aspect of their stories that undermines their influence on change as well. For Aesop is is his state of slavery, for Scherezade it is volunteering to try and avoid death as long as humanly possible, and for Mother Goose it is the witch connotations that came about.

All of these coincidences and similarity paints a beautiful picture of humanity and imparting knowledge to the youth reading them but to have them all be relevant? WHY BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN! WHY?!?!?!?!?!!?! WHY ARE ALL OF THESE SIMILARITIES APPARANT?!?!!? WHAT IS THE REASON?!?!!? WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE?!?!!?

(Hi I am a Double Major in Psychology and History currently on a national scholarship research program, I just did a research paper on how popular media in each time reflects the politics of the time, meaning I did a LOT of digging into 1001 Arabian nights in terms of Orientalism, Mother Goose fables for the return of theatre (because of pantomime and an evolving comedia del arte) and Aesop was recent boredom research. Please message with questions if present!)

skeletonthecreator

i need gerard as a human prince to look so incredibly mediocre. like yes with all the big game hes talking about how he was so handsome it would be funny if he was the opposite but i need him to just be the normalest guy of all time. deep in my soul. do you understand me.

the scene where timothy shakes ylfa and cries you’re not a monster you’re a good kid jack you’re not a monster whoooo boy ally always plays the silliest little characters that just emotionally devastate me

#like i feel like it was kinda meant to be funny??#but my god #neverafter #neverafter show #dimension20 #d20 #dimension20 neverafter #timothee goose #mother goose #ally beardsley #dnd #dungeons and dragons

applelimeade

BEFORE // AFTER

It’s a crime that Ylfa and Rosamund didn’t get an update, but maybe we’ll see them next time?

dykesynthezoid

There’s several fairytales that involve cannibalism, but there’s one in particular called The Juniper Tree where an evil stepmother kills her stepson and prepares him in a stew; similar to what the Wicked Queen in Snow White was attempting to do had she not been thwarted by her Hunter. Basically there’s absolutely existing stories Brennan was drawing on with that reveal, especially given that Neverafter’s Stepmother seems to be an amalgamation of all the evil stepmothers.