next week's Pantheon SMP episode was recorded today (some of the cast are away next week) so looks like we've got another round of vague tweets and- oh. oh no. ohhhhhh dear. we've been Episode 3-ed again.
this textpost is evergreen. I've used it many times. and yet, it's never been more applicable than it is with the Feather Holders (Pyro is included separately because he does, in fact, know a damn thing)
ok. Yeah. I did like his first episode. Ok. Yeah. I did create an entire slideshow to pitch the smp to my friend who doesn’t even like Minecraft YouTube that much. Yeah she said she’d consider. And yeah,
"I am actually still questioning why Apollo chose me. And I think I... understand the reasoning"
or, a needlessly long theory about pan!Drift and the cliffhanger text at the end of episode 1. Major spoilers for her pov if it wasn't obvious
I kept thinking back to the end of Drift's ep 1
"it's nice to see you again, drift" on its own is such a vague line. The tone can literally be anything depending on the inflection, but this is a wall of text so we get nothing.
But the more I think about it, the more I believe that this is from Apollo. We've seen other gods contact their champions directly (i.e. Apo, and I've heard Scott but haven't seen the clip) and is overall just the most obvious answer. I don't think anyone other than the 12 gods and their champions has access to the tournament. So that's it, case closed, Apollo's talking to Drift.
Except he had to go and say "again". And from the way the story's been framed, I highly doubt Apollo and Drift sat down for a nice chat before the game started. Which means at some point during Drift's life, she came into contact with Apollo (at least in some way, godly appearances are always weird and differ between myths).
There's also the line I quoted at the top from Drift's conversation with Cleo, Shelby, and Abolish, with the full thing being:
Drift: "I am actually still questioning why Apollo chose me. And I think I... understand the reasoning, but I'm just choosing to believe it's because I'm super amazing and charming."
Shelby: "Oh. And so what do you think is the actual reasoning that you're not choosing?"
Drift: "Don't worry about it."
Obviously this line could be referring to how Apollo's associated with medicine and Drift's skilled with plants and medicine, but then why would Drift be so cagey about answering Shelby's question, especially when she already told Shelby earlier about her skills?
The main conclusion I've come to is that Apollo and Drift had some important interaction during Drift's lifetime, and that interaction eventually led Apollo to choose Drift as his champion.
My more speculative side of my brain is telling me this has something to do with Apollo's association with plague. Drift continuously mentions the deadliness of plants and that plants can be dangerous if you know what you're doing. Drift could've failed to save her people with her medicine and died to some sort of plague, or maybe even helped spread the plague, but because of whatever interaction happened between the two, Apollo decided to take Drift and immediately put her in the tournament (based on Pyro's "you came here quick then" comment).
cc!Drift also likes playing characters that contradict themselves. When talking about building her character for The Flight, Drift said she chose Earth as the magic and then made a character who wasn't grounded and had no sense of stability. I can very much see pan!Drift being of the same vein, a happy-go-lucky character on the surface, wanting to ignore the fact that everyone will have to kill each other, who caused mass destruction in her previous life.
tldr; pan!Drift interacted with Apollo when she was alive, and now Apollo's going to make it everyone's problem
So I just completely scrapped my Owen drawing I was working on yesterday, which is fine because I already had this one stewing in my mind for a couple days.
This was my reference:
And because Drift is a bit more peppy than this statue is, I wanted to make a wider smile, which was kind of difficult, but I got the shading right after I looked up images of marble statues that are smiling lol. Here’s the sketch:
For some reason, my gold ink is a bit thicker than my silver ink, so I had to get a palette out and mix it with a little bit of water. That got it flowing enough to not make me want to chuck all of my pen nibs in the bin lol
I got a bit lazy, so at the bottom I let there be less definition in the form and I just used the ink dropper to put ink directly on the paper.
As I was inking, I realized the face looks really similar to my Pearl illustration, so I’m having some same face syndrome in my realism style, unfortunately. I’ll have to do more studies to get around that, but I’m still happy with the work I did here today!
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