also? also???
perpetually sick and tired of "wizard hubrisss!!!!".
just like 'ambition is evil!', 'magic is evil!', 'pride is evil!'. it's so anti-intellectual, lazy, boring, and conservative.
fantasy species (part 1)
just some things i'd like to do with classic standard fantasy species:
elves
i've loved elves since childhood and am super tired of the rampant "it's cool to hate elves" zeitgeist in fantasy culture since the 2010s... maybe earlier?
- heights vary within human standards but also above it. elves can be kinda short, they can be extremely tall.
- elves aren't 'slender' by default. sizes and shapes vary as much as humans. maybe even more because like... elves.
- do not look like humans with pointy ears. very noticeably not human. something to make them look alien: enormous irises like da2 elves?, strange body anatomy ratios?, sculpted-looking faces? there's so much that can be done. (oh also skintones range all over the place. personally i'd like to stretch beyond human tones into things like metallic shimmers, powdery overlays of random colours, various textures and gradients, all sorts of stuff)
- long-lived. patient to a fault, at least by shorter-lived species standards.
- androgynous: as in there wouldn't be much visual variance based on gender ideas and stuff. let's assume they've been exposed to/taken up understandings of gender that we humans have/experiment with/let's just talk about it in human terms: elves generally would lean more what we'd call 'feminine' aesthetically, regardless of gender expression or anything, BUt obviously there are exceptions. Culturally? gender binary is silly and blurry as hell.
- nature-oriented in that practicality and sustainability would be tantamount to most elf cultures. reducing your footprint. i'm not thinking 'omg trees are great', i'm more thinking 'let's make sure our agriculture and infastructure lasts with minimal waste/impact on surrounding land. would not be into expansion. contained civilizations. long-lived = thinking about and planning for the future.
- extremely practical. practicality is a virtue.
- aesthetics are important
- delighted and intrigued with ingenuity. i originally was going to write this point to be about human creativity and ingenuity, but i think it'd just make it something valued in general.
- i feel like elves should be beautiful. like, that can veer into terrifying, upsetting, unnerving, as well as more warm positive beauty, but yeah. like... like an art installation... like an elf might not be appealing to you specifically but there's no denying the artfulness of them, y'know?
elf-dwarve-relations
- no animosity towards each other, species-wise.
- ideas of tension between them arose from humans assuming these two species are opposite of each other and thus MUST hate each other.
- they'd appreciate each others' ability to plan/think/see long-term.
i gotta say, another peeve of mine that's just been increasing over the decades is having mages/magic in fantasy works be inevitably evil.
mage societies? evil. cultures where magic is accessible and everyone can do it/partake in it? evil, corrupt, decadent. setting up a corrupt place where the elite rule with an iron fist? obviously the elite are mages and use magic to do so because everyone everywhere is obsessed with the words 'power corrupts' and turns their brains off afterwards.
it's lazy, it's boring, sets magic (and thus imagination, creativity, progress) up as inevitably negative and something to eliminate in favour of stone-age regression.
i'm just so sick and tired the constant decision to make out-of-touch/richfuck/evilmcevil societies mega-magicky(thus tech-advanced).
#there's a longer layered conversation here but i'm way too sleepy to get into it#something something fear of progress/technology vs backlash to progression#the idea ingrained socially so deep so as to be seen as normal#also? power does not inevitably corrupt#i love talking about the relationships between power vs people but this ain't it chief#fantasy#fantasy talk#ramblings#it's bad writing#if anything evil mcevil societies would be super controlling and limiting on magic#would absolutely outlaw it and hunt it down#make people easier to control
also, just so we're clear and i feel it needs to be stated because i don't see this stance anywhere save one or two people other than myself:
fuck the gods
fuck fantasy gods. fuck gods in fantasy.
there's a whole multi-layered conversation there to be had, but i'll leave it at the simple and extremely reductionist "i personally dislike fantasy gods".
bam-monsterhospital reblogged
Here’s Kurk—who I made as a super minimal character to pad out Wren’s life during the 4th era but got attached, and whose name I got from a generator and is so generic sounding it’s fun so I ran with it.
A vampire who really, really enjoyed when Wren would bring back his jobs while the blood was fresh or they weren’t quite…gone yet. They had a thing going for almost a decade around 4e 50, but Wren wanting to travel and Kurk being a homebody ultimately led them to separating. He also has a stack of magelight and candlelight tomes for any new seeing visitors since he doesn’t need to, well, see. No current god affiliation, too busy with everything else to think about it (and he prefers it that way)
Imperative to note he also talks kind of like a surfer/frat bro
-Please do not reupload, edit, or use.-
bam-monsterhospital reblogged
Research for a video game and a comic book.
what initially wrangled me in, as well as what keeps me attached to morrowind is the extensive amount of bugpunk going on.
a world that teeters between damp giant twisting fungi-topia and ashen windswept dust-beaten that-volcano-is-eldritch land just... felt so wonderfully fantastical when I first got into it. It was so far removed from eurowank medieval fantasy and exactly what i wanted from fantasy: other worlds. And then you get to the bugs.
The giant bugs everywhere. But more importantly, the thought put into how much that would effect people living there. The main livestock is bugs. The work animals are bugs. Travel is by bug. Bug food, Bug materials, Armour and clothing made from chitin, ground down bits and bobs, pieces worked into leather-like materials. Everything is bugs. Bugs feature in the art, the aesthetics. Bug lamps, bug perfume, bug architecture, giant ancient arthropod hollowed out to be the hub of a city. BUGS.
that’s what i want in fantasy. if anyone can point me in the nearest bugpunk direction, please do, i’ve been swamped with white euro christian bullshit for far too long and long for actual creativity.
bam-monsterhospital reblogged
lily-orchard
Anonymous asked:
So apparently your abuser got a big up her ass about you describing Elethyn's story accurately, saying that it wasn't about submitting to white authority
In the wake of the backlash to the racist coding in Exploring Azeroth: Kalimdor, WoW's CDev said that WoW's races were not based off real world cultures.
It was one of the most comically bad lies Blizzard ever told, especially in the wake of an expansion where their aggressively Native coded chieftain mutilated his body as a sign of friendship to a white boy and betrays his own people for that white boy's benefit.
Racism and racist coding in fantasy is so dug in deep that some people just accept its tropes as fundamentals of the genre. Fantasy has had good and evil fall between racial lines as far back as Tolkien. It's so dug in deep most people don't even think about it.
D&D took decades to clue in to the fact that having the Drow be always Neutral Evil was a terrible idea. Warcraft from 3 onward tried to remove that trope, but certain writers kept trying to wedge it back in with the Orcs, Forsaken and Zandalari and actually did that after Metzen left.
Fantasy as a whole is stuck in a mire of "White Humans and Human Adjacent People Good, Everything Else Evil." And then when you have an evil coded race, one stands out as "one of the good ones" by pledging their loyalty to one of the "good races", usually the humans. Humans are often racist in these stories, but it's always framed as a problem with individual racists, not a systemic issue, and also the humans have layers upon layers of justifications for their racism handed to them by the narrative.
And if you're someone who is an uncritical fan of fantasy as a genre, you don't question these tropes. You reinforce them and you don't think there's anything wrong with them. You become another Christie Golden, another JK Rowling.
There's a story of WoW's early development where a lot of the writers liked the idea of playable Scourge because they thought it would be cool to have an "evil" race. This was a time when Frozen Throne was still in development and Metzen had to keep telling them that the Forsaken aren't the Scourge and they aren't evil.
Think about that. The writers didn't just try to include it because that's what fantasy is, they actively thought it would be cool to have it and had to be blocked by the lead writer.
What happen the moment Chris Metzen left?
Dark skinned races, explicitly non-white coded races, and undead all get the same treatment in fantasy. This shit is all over the genre, and "fantasy fans" are like weebs when it comes to uncritical consumption of awful fantasy tropes.
This is why I can't call myself a "fantasy fan" because the only fantasy I like are the ones that are completely unlike what fantasy is usually like.
bam-monsterhospital reblogged
Dragon and Flame For CD Challenge !