Welcome to The Swamp™

rough sketch of some zelda and midna outfit designs for a pic I'm working on!

I. Character Names

this was interesting due to the parallel it has with the frenzied flame. the latter seems to seek a return to 'oneness', but is also notable for being destructive to spirits. meanwhile, the ancestor spirits apparently also assimilate multitudes into a whole while still preserving, rather than destroying, those spirits.

the contrast between their epithets in JP highlights how they view themselves. morgott remains an 'abomination', identifying with being something worthy of scorn, while mohg rejects that, emphasizing his parents' role in abandoning him. this is also linked to the tenets of his dynasty and its focus on a loving mother figure(who loves through harm, no less).

thought it was cool the way 'noble rot' reaffirms the knights' willingness to become infected with rot in service of malenia.

those are very different names! aurelia and aureliette both mean 'golden', which gives you the sense of them belonging to some family that lived under the golden order. but clara/clarice means 'bright' or 'clear', which, to me at least, sooner makes me think of the stars/sky, and would be more in line with their apparent gravesite in the ancestral home of the sorcerers. of course, stars can also be seen as golden so :p

a point in favor of the 'seluvis was pidia's puppet' theory. still don't subscribe to it personally, but worth wondering why he'd have a name with such connotations. even as ranni's servant, it seems a role taken on willingly. same for a preceptor, i'd think.

II. Place Names

did raya lucaria start as a place of religious significance and shift towards an academic institution over time? or was it once a place of worship for liurnians before the sorcerers came down out of the mountaintops? neat little implication that gets lost in translation.

III. Armor & Weapons

hilarious to think everyone notices how angry, sad, and miserable rogier is and just doesn't give a shit lol

so the nox were not just being punished with exile, but being actively eradicated by the greater will. there are a few instances of explicit intent ascribed to the greater will, and this one is most interesting to me bc it implies that it DOES (or once did) care what is going on in this world.

this makes a small difference and goes a bit further to explain things like why the lazuli conspectus is still permitted in raya lucaria in spite of being heretical, or why they still hang rennala's portrait. if they decided she had never been that great, it'd be weird to still revere her contributions to sorcery.

it might be worth highlighting a few ways the asuras could share traits with okina, or be used for one's own bolstering of his character for fics or RP. asuras are described as being driven by 'envy, ambition, and hostility'. that constant jealousy led Indra, king of the gods, to expel the asura from their original home among the gods, and the asura have fought endlessly to regain access to this divine realm. sounds familiar...

Whoa, very different story being told between these two, if true.

IV. Spirit Ashes

both named banished knights were dubbed 'wings of the storm king' rather than just 'of the storm'. which begs some questions! did they serve the storm lord before their defeat by godfrey(the banished knight set *does* mention 'territorial losses'), and were banished after that? were they given grace in spite of being enemies of the golden order, because how else did they live from the reign of the storm king til morgott's rule of leyndell during the shattering? and did morgott take an interest in them specifically due to them surviving a fight against the father who abandoned him, a kind of centuries later 'lol fuck you dad'?

Equiping an armor tutorial

If you have any good ones for people, add them!

Do you have unglazed baked tile floors, bricks, or those windows with a bunch of stacked tiles or baked unglazed pipe stacked in them to fill them up and let a breeze through? Are they in the SHADE? GET THEM WET. Yes it will dry up pretty quickly in the heat but you can sit near or against them. As terracotta or unglazed clay dries off very slowly it will cool the air around it.

If you can, get the top of your head wet. Air across wet hair has a cooling effect.

Unglazed clay pots, flowerpots, and even canvas bags can be soaked with water, set in the shade with good airflow, and used to try to keep some things cooler, like bottles of water or packages of food.

You can take turns using a fan, a big palm frond, or whatever you have to fan each other or an elder or baby to keep them cooler. Doing it in shifts means no one gets too tired or too hot. You will all be very cranky because of the heat, but it is harder on the sick, the elderly, or children and infants. Watch them closely!! They can overheat so much faster.

GET LOW! If your house has a cellar and it is safe to be in (like, ventilated and escapable in an emergency), get down into it or put at least the high risk or elderly and babies in it. The earth will keep it cooler down there than anywhere else.

CROSSBREEZE. If you open a window or door at one corner of the house, then do the same at an opposite corner, this will draw air through the house. Dampened lightweight cloth in the window or doorway or damp mosquito netting will cool that air as it flows.

If you normally sleep upstairs, now you do not. Get everybody down on mattresses or just on the ground, on the ground floor. Upper stories or rooftops are often no place to be in a time like this. Even laying there with your eyes shut will give you rest if not sleep. It will help.

Dampened cloth hung up in the windows, doorways, breezeways, will help cool you off. Spray a fine mist over mosquito netting around beds.

If you have linen, or even cotton or hemp cloths but linen works amazingly for this, dampen it and put it over people's heads (like a nun's wimple or a sari, face clear) or shoulders, or over part of a baby's bed (never leave a baby unattended in this kind of weather or when you put drapey stuff by their bed like this) Again, it's evaporation that will cool you off a little.

Stay in the shade as much as you can. It is silly because it is obvious but stay in the shade.

The hottest part of the day will be the afternoon. Do not do anything physical or outdoors if you can avoid it during that time. If you must, --and jobs I know have no pity but this is a time when they will get you killed so you might have to risk losing your job, but keep your life, I am not kidding, you can drop dead out there- If you must go out, do so in the earliest morning hours or just before dawn. This is the best time and it will be the coolest then.

Like I try to be nice about this but I have seen SO many fucking people being like "lol yeah ace/aro discourse was one thing" and that is deliberate erasure of real and important queer history in service of dodging blame on the parties that did this who, for the most part, never fucking apologized or owned up to it, or, in the case of a few blogs I still see going around, clearly still stand by all of it and just hope you don't point that out, and ofc, no one ever fucking does.

I can't offer forgiveness or absolution to everyone, but you don't need me to forgive you to forgive yourself and move on, and I do think most of the people who got caught up in it have more than earned moving on.

However, what I want is for everyone to stop downplaying it. Don't call it stupid infighting, don't go "ace stuff was one thing but this with trans men is too far" don't claim it didn't leave tumblr or the internet, own how bad it was. If you were there you know, and your history is valuable, so even when it sucks please be honest about what happened. This part of queer history should not be forgotten, and especially not for the people who never really changed and have an interest in making sure everyone thinks this was just some silly infighting.

That's what I ask, do right by us, don't let us be erased again.

Especially because when you forget, when you downplay it, you downplay what's happened with truscum shit, with biphobia, and now with trans masc exclusion. You downplay it and you disguise that it's the same people saying the same things about a new group. I found out about the rise in trans man/masc exclusion because I saw someone saying that trans men are collateral damage secondary to the real targets of transphobia, trans women, and I immediately knew the person saying it was a shithead I should NEVER trust because that is exactly what they said about bi and ace and aro people. Word for word.

You do those who were hurt a disservice when you downplay what happened, but you also make our spaces less safe because if we pretend what happened didn't we can't stop it when it starts again.

Still experimental

Kids don't WANT to be in adult spaces. They're not going to be LOOKING for adult spaces.

Forcing adults to provide their IDs to access their own spaces is bullshit because any kid who is ACTUALLY determined to get into that space will know how to get in far better than any of the rest of us. Because I for one no longer remember how to torrent, don't remember what sites are proxy sites anymore, don't know how to game the online system or anything anymore. All the things that I was doing when I was 14 in order to get around my school's firewalls so I could play flash games or go on anime messageboards every damn week in the 00's.

If a kid wants in, guaranteed they'll know how to do so faster and better than the rest of us normie internet users.

Kids.

It really is not that hard to swipe your dad's driving license or your mum's passport to use for online activities, much like how impulsive kids have been using their credit/debit cards to purchase microtransactions since the dawn of purchase-driven online social gaming spaces.

This was the first thing that came to my mind when all of this online age-verification discussion came up, and I can't imagine it hasn't been brought up in these serious legal discussions.