river

i'm finally getting caught up on cr4 e31 and man. the clear influences of the player's real life culture in their characters (and in the worldbuilding in brennan's case) is amazing and adds such a richness. like thaisha is so clearly influenced by like. black american folk culture Especially with the orcish revolutionaries. idk if liam is irish but he's at least running with a lot of the irish american working class stuff brennan injected into the world in terms of the hal and the culture of the round. and azune's whole bit about not having anyone to speak his native language to and his disconnect to his own identity (diaspora narrative). i Love when real world cultures are reflected in fiction it's so good.

Hundreds of years in the future, Occtis' death gets the Saint Sebastian treatment, by which I mean there's piles and piles of uncomfortably horny artwork about it. The most famous is a giant oil painting featuring Ethrand, unbuttoned shirt hanging open, holding a suspiciously phallic knife to the chest of Occtis, who is fully nude here, arching up towards him with an expression that might be pained and might be orgasmic, and with a noticable lack of any of the blood or viscera that was actually present. Aranessa is in the background, not so much restrained by the ghouls as pawed at, supposedly horrified but clearly fujoing out.