garden in the void

Fairy Frogmother, watercolor, 2024 (ig/kofi)

✦ 𝕤𝕙𝕒𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕣 ✦

ghost pokemon for spooky season!

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my shop

blood is basically the most normal thing for a sword to hunger for. if a sword gained sentience and started asking me for blood i'd be like yeah i thought you might say that

my sword hungers for gochujang and its a real pain to get the good stuff

The demonic sword grabs my hand tightly preventing me from ever putting it down and fills me with it’s unearthly lust for mashed potatoes and diet cola.

"Look, I need you to listen to me." The blade spoke from its place gripped in the long-de-fleshed bones of its former master. It's blade was steel, polished to a satinlike, workman's finish, with an oddly vibrant red cross-guard and grip that was so shiny that it seemed wet. Along the blade was engraved an abstract twisting coil that ended in a sharp point.

It spoke with the cadence of a used horse peddler.

"No, you're a cursed evil sword, probably thirsty for blood or souls or whatnot." The knight said, idly picking through the coin pouch that once belonged to the sword's master.

"Okay, yes. I am an evilly cursed sword. But I don't feed on blood or souls. But I am fucking starving and need your help."

" What is it then?" The knight sighed. This was not his first encounter with this sort of thing and the novelty had long since worn off. "Bile? Innocence? Fear? Plump Bavarian housefraus? Speak, fiend!"

"Fiend? I'm not even evil. The curse is evil, not me. Go ahead, detect my alignment, I won't even oppose the effort." The blade sounded offended.

The knight obliged, reasoning that he was going to have to take that precaution anyhow, and it was best to do so when the vile thing was most cooperative.

"True Neutral. Who curses a neutral sword? Much less evilly so?"

"Nevermind that. I see you have a bottle of beer there... Oh, two bottles! Oh I think we're gonna be good friends."

The knight raised a brow. "You drink alcohol?"

"No, never touch the stuff. Wouldn't be, ya know, professional-like. Nah, what I need, what I need is for you to take my blade, and just... pop the cap off that. Just pop it right off." The blade then made a "pop" sound with the mouth it didn't have. "Just like that."

"What?" The knight looked confused. Then he looked suspicious. "Is.. is this a kink?"

"What? No!"

The sword paused for two breaths longer than was reasonable.

"Maybe? Look, I feed on the satisfaction produced by that little pop when a cap or cork comes off, all pleasant and refreshing even before you take a drink. That's all I need, and I've been waiting for three centuries down here, conversing with the cranium rats, waitin' for it. Do you know what cranium rats talk about?"

"No?"

"Cheese. Cheese and world domination. They do not care at all for the simple pleasures of opening a cool, refreshing fermented beverage after a long day." The sword whispered, as if trying to hide his dealings from prying ears. "Tell ya what. If you give me that, I will improve my capacity to cause harm by a roughly 3 in 20 chance and do extra cold damage in your hand. That's a good deal right there."

The knight paused. The sword wasn't evil. It was powerful. And while all magic had its costs, sometimes those costs were just plain stupid. If faeries would make shoes in exchange for cream then why wouldn't a sword exchange power for a little ritual?

"Heck, you talked me into it. I'll even throw in detecting poisons! No extra charge. Just use me to crack into a cold one."

"What is it with you and opening beers? What kind of cursed sword feeds on removing caps and corks?"

"That's my curse!"

"How's that a curse?"

"I used to be a bottle opener!"

Swordtember - WINGS

Barbie and the magic of Altaria ☁

swordtember day 2: floral

убачыла гэты трэнд і адразу ўсе думкі пра мінскі герб

miku from minsk, belarus!

more Barbies 💫

can you keep a secret ✨

some Barbie art ✨

I unfortunately bring you nothing of substance if not this random Twilight I drew

fairy-type pokémon 𐦍༘⋆⊹⟡

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my shop | mobile wallpapers

but what if friendship...WASNT magic

How To Find A Sea Unicorn (reupload)

The Harry Potter universe screwed itself right out the gate by combining the softest of soft magic systems with setting the entire thing in a school for teaching the protagonist how magic worked, and rather than having to establish hard rules on a soft magic system so it could let the magic school do its job, it split the difference by making Harry such a terrible student that neither he nor the audience ever learns anything about how magic actually works. Hermione does his homework for him. He cheats off Snape’s old textbook. He starts and ends the series with the same spell because it’s poetic and also because to do anything else would’ve required letting him actually learn or grow.

We are given single disconnected data points that smack of hard magic systems - individual magic words with static, concrete consequences and limitations, Accio not working on living creatures, etc - and the implication that, elsewhere in the universe, smarter people than Harry are capable of developing new spells. This implies that there is a system of rules at play here. Mispronouncing a spell or changing the associated wand movement can cause it to have a different effect, meaning the words have power on their own. Is there a language of magic? Well, yes, and it’s Latin, but like - is there a reason these sounds produce these effects? In other systems magic is the language of dragons, or the true names of the souls of the elements and creatures of the world. No such explanation is given here. Spells misfire or are miscast by incompetent wizards or broken wands, resulting in intriguing consequences outside the typical spell parameters, implying an intriguing fluidity to magic that is belied by literally everything we’re officially shown or told. Before going to hogwarts, Harry causes inexplicable phenomena (vanishing glass, uncuttable hair, the world generally warping in small ways to help him out) that is heavily implied to be the result of his magic because what else could it be, but after going to Hogwarts we never see this sort of wild magic again, which is a shame, because it seems like it could’ve been useful.

The magic system of Harry Potter is “if the plot needs a spell, artifact, potion, creature or magical doohicky to exist, it does, and if the plot needs it to NOT exist, it does not.” This is not a magic system because its rules are entirely Doylist, and any possible Watsonian rule systems are purposefully obfuscated to avoid the dreaded Worldbuilding More Than The Surface. One book needs time travel, so now there’s time magic. Later books can’t have time travel, so all the time magic is destroyed. All of it. One book needs luck magic so Harry can waltz through five layers of plot difficulty at once, and this game-breaker is never brought up before or after. Potion-brewing is discussed, but how were all these spells and artifacts created in the first place? Who laid down these restrictive rules on what they can and can’t do? Why can’t our heroes or their teachers make new ones that are more useful? None of these questions can be answered because to do so would require worldbuilding any internal rules, which this story does only when the plot needs those rules to exist.

The magical worldbuilding in Harry Potter is almost literally paper thin. It exists only to produce a surface aesthetic. If you ask a single question about how and why it functions the way it does, you punch through that paper-thin layer and see the needs of the plot laid bare behind it. This is not inherently bad. There are plenty of soft-logic stories that fully commit to the bit. The problem is that Harry Potter is a soft magic system with pretensions of hard-system grandeur. Instead of just owning up to the fact that magic is fickle and does what the plot needs, it seems to say “there ARE rules, and everybody else in the world knows them, but you, the audience surrogate outsider to the system, will never be told what they are.” And Harry is such an incurious, agencyless lump in his own narrative that he never tries to learn or improve. He has no desire to learn how his own magic system works, treating homework as an obligation to fob off on his smart friend while he dicks around playing quidditch and coasting on his magical trust fund. This handily saves the story from ever having to build the hard magic system it insists exists, and instead lets it populate the world with magical creatures and artifacts and potions and an implied population of very interesting, very smart people dealing with how all that stuff actually works while we hang out in Harry’s back pocket watching him complain that his magical school has the audacity to try and make him learn magic.

Blue has also directed me to a relevant clip where Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matthew Mercer discuss this very question. The internal logic of the Harry Potter universe is nonexistant. That’s not inherently a bad thing for a magical setting, but in this case I’m willing to be mean about it. I’ll put up with a lot from a story as long as it commits to the bit, but when the story and author try and convince the audience that the hard complicated worldbuilding is totally actually there and even was there all along, despite all observable evidence, that just makes the whole thing seem insecure and embarrassing. I’m not mad that Harry Potter’s magic system makes no sense, I’m just mad it keeps lying to me about it.

magic froggy :)