You can call me Oracle (or Li).
Queer, brown, not a minor, occasional not safe fw content. Alive but gay...or rather, genderfluid and abrosexual. Bad at remembering to tag things. Please do not follow me if you're not 18+ (or if you're racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.) This blog gets very negative towards T*ny St*rk and D*an W*nchester. @sneakygirlinej is my Grishaverse sideblog. @sneakyboymerlin is not my Merlin sideblog, but you should follow it anyway.
so, this is a very random...i guess i'd call it a costume design challenge more than a character design challenge. entirely self-inflicted, though i'd be curious to know if anyone has had a similar idea.
basically, i re-read Sleepless Domain recently and was thinking about revamping/redrawing my oc. and then i was scrolling tvtropes and saw that apparently Cube mentioned the idea of a foundationist-run private school called Founder's Blessing. i toyed with idea of making my oc from there for about 2 seconds before discarding it for multiple reasons including "i would have to develop the uniform and lore based of essentially nothing!"
but even after discarding the idea for my oc, the thought of designing a uniform for Founder's Blessing wouldn't leave, so i pulled out my sketchbook and..uh...
i now have a potential uniform design for a school that has had no actual relevance in the story thus far.
rambling about my design choices under the cut:
the only things i really had to go on were this page showing a foundationist, Cube saying "their uniforms are pretty rad" and the fact that they're a religious boarding school, which made me inclined to lean in the direction of them having a more regal/formal/buttoned-up look than Future's Promise (as opposed to a more casual one, which could be its own type of "pretty rad"). for that reason, i opted for a waistcoat to give a more "fancy" feel, and then spruced it up by making the buttons resemble a marching band jacket. that also adds a hint of a military feel to the uniform, which felt appropriate. (i also think a marching band uniform makes a great potential base for a magical girl uniform, so...again, appropriate.)
i then played around with various ways to wear it, summer vs winter sleeves, options for lower garments, that sort of thing. i decided i liked what i had - a good overall look with plenty of room to play around to showcase an individual's personality.
finally, since the Future's Promise uniform has a blazer but no waistcoat, i decided to add a bit of contrast by leaving the Founder's Blessing as having a waistcoat with no blazer. however, i was still thinking about a potential outer layer, and i wanted to work in that alchemical sun symbol (seen on the foundationist) in a way that was a bit less subtle than the ascot pin. eventually i landed on the idea of a capelet using it as the clasp, with the idea that this is something that's worn for more formal occasions (award ceremonies, representing the school, maybe religious ceremonies) as opposed to day-to-day classes.
the black and gold color scheme came from the foundationist, but i thought it really worked for both the "formal churchy" vibe i was going for and the "pretty rad" vibe specified by Cube. i did feel like i wanted something with a bit more character than a white shirt, but a black shirt limited my options for contrast too much - eventually i settled on the grey shirt because it matched the black in a monochromatic way and the gold in a "silver and gold" way for a unified, elegant color scheme. the cream was initially intended for the capelet to contrast with the rest of the outfit while still matching the monochrome + gold scheme (and giving off a regal + holy feeling), but i ended up liking it more for the skirt and not liking the look of having the skirt and capelet match. so then i ended up playing around with a few colors for the capelet, including other colors from the palette and a few wildcard options (i ended up really liking a slightly-teal blue, but ultimately i just thought black looked the coolest).
the skirt was actually the hardest part for me to design. my original concept was a black plaid skirt (very classic school uniform look), but i thought that might be too complicated for a webcomic design and switched to a single gold stripe/ribbon on a black skirt. but then while looking at references, i got reminded that rue's magical girl form does have a plaid skirt, and i thought the plaid might work after all and tried to design a silver-and-gold plaid over the black. but it still ended up getting quite complicated in a hurry, and i wasn't really loving it either. so i switched back to the stripe idea, but keeping both the gold and silver. i played with various stripe configurations (including going back to a single stripe with one color), but i wasn't loving any of them, and i didn't like leaving the skirt as just plain black because it blended into the vest too much. finally, as a hail mary option, i let go of the black skirt and tried coloring it silver...and i hated having the skirt match the shirt even more than having the skirt match the vest. but then i tried coloring it with the cream from the capelet, and i actually really liked that! (although it did make me want to change the capelet to something else.) after a bit more experimenting confirmed for me that silver shirt, black vest + capelet, and cream skirt was definitely the combination i wanted to go with, i did a bit more playing with stripe patterns on the skirt and found something i was actually happy with.
finally, i wanted to showcase the variations a bit more (and do some more full-body drawings) by quickly coming up with some characters with different personalities who would wear the uniform in their own way. (they aren't meant to be a team or anything; just some random concepts. that being said, i did consider sigil design to be an important part of designing SD magical girls even when they mostly ended up being covered by the clothing so here's a bonus version with their sigils)
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The unicorn and the wasp is probably one of the most buck fucking wild doctor who episodes ever written: a party in the 1920s, featuring the Doctor, Donna, Agatha Christie, a flapper, a pair of gay lovers, the shady hostess and her husband, and a priest. It plays out like a typical whodunit with murders and poisonings until the climax which reveals that the murderer was the priest, who is secretly the hostess' son because the hostess fucked a mysterious man in India. The priest is also a shape-shifting wasp alien (because the man the hostess fucked in India was also a shape-shifting wasp alien: she knew this and was OK with it) who was acting out murders from Agatha Christie's novels because his mother liked those novels and a magical jewel beamed the plot directly into his brain (he had no other motive). And the flapper was secretly a famous jewel thief who had nothing to do with the murders. And the butler didn't do it
I have a complex relationship with environmentalist sci fi of the “in order to save the Earth we must leave it” stripe.
Like, on the one hand, if we’re proposing a scenario in which we possess both the means and the will to build bubble-dome Edens on the Moon (or whatever), then we’re necessarily proposing a scenario in which we also possess both the means and the will to repair an essentially arbitrary level of environmental damage right here on Earth. Moon gardens are just a needlessly complex solution given the resources that would have to be involved.
On the other hand, I kind of do want to live in a garden on the Moon.
What if the problem is overpopulation? Or would that no longer be environmental sci-fi?
There’s little credible evidence that human overpopulation will ever be a significant concern. The reason it pops up so frequently in ostensibly environmentalist media is that mainstream environmentalism has a history of cozying up with the eugenics movement. Pay attention to exactly which populations are typically identified as the ones that need controlling – you might notice some trends!
Once you fully appreciate the fact that the whole business with fairy food in certain folkloric traditions is generally more about the fairies abusing hospitality law than it is about magic food, a lot of standard tropes about aliens start to look like fairy tale tropes in sci-fi clothing. Like, consider how many standard sci-fi plots boil down to one of:
a. The human protagonist unwittingly transgresses some obscure hospitality law while visiting or trespassing in an alien’s dwelling, and is obliged to pay a weird and disproportionate restitution; or
b. The human protagonist unwittingly fulfills some obscure hospitality law and places an alien in their debt, who proceeds to repay that debt in a weird and disproportionate manner.
You could totally swap “alien” with “elf” and absolutely nothing would change.
Concept: retro-dystopian cyberpunk setting ruled by neo-feudal nobility who employ neurolinguistic programming techniques to secretly embed behaviour-altering triggers in specially crafted images and catchphrases distributed via popular social media platforms.
I’m flattered that people think I’m attempting some sort of commentary here, but this is literally just a long-winded setup for an extremely stupid pun.
(If I were to run this as a tabletop game, they’d always be addressed by their full title, “Meme Lord [blank]”, where [blank] is a punchy one-syllable noun. I bet you can already guess what a couple of those nouns would be.)
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Concept: Star Trek style quasi-utopian deep space drama, except all of the ship’s non-human crew members are really obviously based on particular sci-fi horror tropes.
The chief physician is an amorphous mass of tentacles and teeth that’s infested the entire medical bay, transforming it into a quivering nightmare of meat and viscera. It speaks with a conspicuously posh accent; the human crew members affectionately call it “Doc”.
The head of security is a lurking, probably humanoid something-or-other that’s mostly imperceptible in the visual spectrum, save as a faintly shimmering distortion in the air. Her lack of visibility is treated as a running gag, with the most frequent bits involving a. other crew members not realising she’s in the room until she speaks up, and b. her making reference to various unlikely anatomic features which, of course, the audience cannot see.
The ship’s computer is a blatantly rampant AI that speaks in a chorus of voices. It tends to talk in cryptic, pseudo-religious metaphors which contrast to humorous effect with the mundanity of the topic at hand, and sometimes wanders off on rambling philosophical tangents that require whoever it’s speaking with to remind it to get to the point. You can tell when it’s paying attention to a particular part of the ship because the lighting turns blood red.
The lead science officer is just a huge fucking spider.
(The captain is an apparently ordinary – albeit extremely photogenic – human. We don’t find out what their real deal is until the season finale; what’s revealed firmly establishes them as the freakiest one of the lot!)
There’s something almost darkly hilarious about what might be an equivalent to The Thing being the chief physician, since depending on who got pulled into that mess, it probably is an amazing expert at biology, but going to it for treatment is risky because it is probably not that clean.
If none of those grab you, well, ain’t nothing stopping you from writing up your own!
(There have also been several nominations for the chief engineer to literally just be the xenomorph from Alien, though none in a form I can readily link.)
I need a “humans are space orcs” thing where all sentient species are weird like that, but in their own unique ways
And a lot of them are aware of this (like we are when we make these “humans are space orcs” stories)
Maybe one species enjoys getting bit by something equivalent to mosquitoes. Maybe one actively avoids the hospitable places on their planet because it’s boring without a challenge. You get the gist.
I want to see a bunch of aliens (+humans) sitting around a table talking about how their own species is a bunch of freaks
The thing about "humans are space orcs" is it was originally conceived of as a response to science fiction tropes in which every alien species had its own special thing except humans, whose special thing was either Most Generic, Most Adaptable, or Most Je Ne Sais Quoi. Like, in a lot of science fiction, Klingons are Honorable Warriors, Vulcans are Logical Scientists, Romulans are Cunning Strategists, and humans are all of the above in a way that leaves us slightly less good than any of them at their shtick but better overall and able to triumph because of our lack of specialization and the assumption that we are, somehow, just destined to be the best. See this scene from Enterprise for what I'm talking about. There's a similar scene in Mass Effect where Mordin talks about how humans are more variable and adaptable and less predictable than all the other races in that setting, which is super annoying if you know anything about how much our species is defined by the genetic bottleneck we suffered during the Ice Age -- the generic bottleneck that has left us all so genetically similar to each other that we can do crazy things like donate blood and organs to each other, things other species can't tolerate.
@prokopetz proposed that humans ought to get something special of our own that isn't just "We are the bestest and specialist in some generic way that feels like a vague and unsettling metaphor for American superiority and manifest destiny amidst all the other cultures of the world," and settled on space orcs because "Pursuit predators with freakish endurance" was the ecological niche we occupied during our own evolutionary history up until we started doing the civilization thing. The assumption from the start was that every other sci-fi or fantasy species would each be freaks in their own way, and the point of humans are space orcs was to let us be our own sort of freak, too.
People who expanded on the humans are space orcs stories immediately turned it into a reason to write little stories where humans are the biggest freaks or the only freaks and we are, in fact, the specialest most manifest destinyest je ne sais quoi-laden metaphors for the superiority of American culture over all the other cultures of the world. I hate it I hate it I hate it.
Which is to say you've reinvented the point of humans are space orcs from first principles. That's pretty cool.
I think my mistake was failing to appreciate just how readily "humans have exceptionally high cardiovascular endurance due to our real-world evolutionary history as specialised persistence predators" could be twisted around into "humans have superior Will to Power", which is the other problematic special niche humans have historically been assigned in popular science fiction.
someone tell me if I am wrong for thinking a study defining "non-swedish" (study in sweden) as "having at least one foreign born parent" is ridiculous. we're still talking about a person born and raised in sweden. "foreign born parent" is also quite a vague demographic to begin with - that's just anyone born in another country. that country could be neighboring or halfway across the world. study is crime-related
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Okay but as an ambulatory wheelchair user I loved how Rian Johnson portrayed Simone. He didn't have her be miraculously healed, but had her learn to live and deal with her chronic pain.
Abled people really don't understand how big that is. Like just having an ambulatory wheelchair user is big!!! (I cackled at the scene where she gets out of her chair and someone says it's a miracle and she just goes "I can walk, it just hurts.") But also having her angry that she's in constant pain and trying anything to feel better is so realistic. A lot of disabled people, especially newly disabled people, fall into the idea that they need to be "cured" and that they need to get back to "normal".
Having her accept her disability and making her learn how to still do the thing she loves while still having chronic pain is amazing! Like, the idea that you can continue living after becoming disabled is so rarely shown! Like believe it or not, disabled people can lead fulfilling and happy lives doing things we love!
Reading the dev notes for Mina the Hollower has been a pretty stark reminder to consider the practical reasons for creative decisions. I was all "okay, but what are we really saying by making the protagonist a mouse", and then the devs are like "yeah, the main reason she's a mouse is because GBC-style sprites are tiny and her bigass ears make it easy for the player to tell which direction she's facing".
(To be 100% clear, I'm not saying that there's no symbolism in play there. The initial episode in which Mina breaks Thorne's siege on Lionel's manor is blatantly playing with both Androcles and the Lion and The Lion and the Mouse, which are often conflated in popular culture into a composite tale in which a mouse pulls a thorn from a lion's paw – the characters' names alone make that much obvious! It's just very funny that the decision to make her a mouse came first for completely unrelated reasons.)
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The Rani's Thing is that she's an evil scientist (specifically a biochemist). Her backstory is that she was run off Gallifrey due to her unethical experiments.
She's not just the master but a girl or a generic evil woman. Her Thing is evil biochemistry. Stop saying any vaguely evil woman is the Rani.
Saw a conversation about Arcee from Transformers a while back where someone suggested that bcos Arcee's Thing is being the Girl Transformer they can slap her name on basically any girl character and people will accept it.
Feel like a similar thing perhaps going on w the Rani!! Her defining trait is not being the Doctor's token female adversary. She has a thing!! She's not the girl one, she's the evil scientist one.
The OG Wu-can't-make-tea truther @oracleofdiscord - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
