Squirm for me

"Duchess" © Dmitry Khuzin, accessed at his ArtStation here

[This is the first of what I'm calling the fairy tale hags. I was inspired by a conversation with @strawberry-crocodile, where she pointed out that the hags in PF2e's Monster Core were all inspired by evil women in children's media. The sea hag got even more like Ursula than previously, the sweet hag is clearly the witch from Hansel and Gretel, the iron hag is inspired by Mother Gothel in Tangled, and the cuckoo hag is Paizo's take on the Other Mother. My own take is the beldam, if you're interested. So I started spitballing with fairy tale archetypes and Disney villains, and came up with four hags to match (and @abominationimperatrix contributed an idea for a skelm, who's also going to appear in this project).

First off, the brood hag, who I really wish I could call a cuckoo hag. She's inspired by the various wicked stepmothers and stepdaughters in fairy tales, which literalize intergenerational conflict and the creeping realization in a young person's life that their family doesn't always want what's best for them. The Brothers Grimm took a lot of wicked parents and siblings and made them "step" as part of their nuclear family propaganda, which expanded that fear to fathers as well. Is this new woman you're marrying a suitable match? Will her child from a previous marriage be a suitable heir? Although there's plenty of wicked stepfamily in Disney between The Evil Queen in Snow White and Lady Tremaine and her daughters in Cinderella, my primary inspiration was from a non-Disney fairy tale movie. Jack Frost is a Russian film which appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and is genuinely delightful. Malfushka is probably my favorite wicked stepsister on film. She wants precious stones, damnit! Stones!

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Brood Hag CR 3 NE Monstrous Humanoid This woman is subtly inhuman—her lips are an odd color, her eyes bulge, and her skin is the texture of parchment. She wears the finery of a noble.

Brood hags are social kleptoparasites. Unlike most hags, which lair far from human society, brood hags make themselves part of it. They intrude upon wealthy families through bluster and bullying, often claiming to be a long-lost cousin or imposing themselves as a marriage candidate. Once ensconced in a family, they live the high life, demanding an outsize share of resources to pamper themselves and forcing others to serve them. They are skilled at slander and psychological warfare, denigrating their possible rivals for an inheritance and gaslighting others into seeing their behavior as perfectly reasonable. And if all else fails, they kill their opposition and stage it as an accident, or frame another family member who asks too many questions. Like many other hags, brood hags have a taste for human flesh, but they disguise these anthropophagous feasts through cookery (although they would much rather order someone else to do the cooking).

The stare of a brood hag saps the will of whoever they gaze upon, allowing them to get away with audacious behavior with little protest. Brood hags prefer to have other people fight for them, but they can defend themselves with mind-altering magic. Their teeth are surprisingly sharp, but their bite is more dangerous for being able to transmit overwhelming negative emotions. Those killed by this lethal hate appear to have died of heart attack or stroke—which the brood hags can emphasize by smoothing out the wounds they inflict through magic.

Brood hags are somewhat unusual as far as hags go. Sages and hags alike speculate that they are a mutation of the normal process of hag reproduction; something between an ordinary changeling and a “true” hag. A brood hag can interbreed with humans and only have daughters, and her daughters are full brood hags themselves rather than changelings. Thus, a brood hag can marry into a family, raise her daughters as members of her coven, and then the wicked stepmother and her stepdaughters can siphon away all its resources, potentially for generations. Brood hags seek to marry up, and after a carefully positioned generation or two, a brood hag can even become royalty, with grim consequences for entire nations.

Brood hags look almost, but not quite, human. Most of them are able to pass themselves off as being merely ugly by human standards, but roughly one in ten of them have features of striking beauty. Brood hags are vain as a rule, and augment their appearances with makeup, fine clothes and jewelry.

I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I'm feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.

All the book really does is [I'm pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I've read no more than 5 pages] "discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help."

But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I'm compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it's saved my life at least a few times now.

This shit is so fucking embarrassing. This woman is 30. This shit is so common and never ceases to piss me off.

Everyone's willing to say "sex work is work" but no one's willing to understand what the fuck that actually means. It's not just "sex work is a legitimate form of labor, leasing your body to men is little different than leasing your body to a company," like that's part of it but the fucking important part is that it's fucking WORK. Its a GRIND it's a fucking HUSTLE!!!!

"Hey, Gen Z, we're gonna relabel vacations into something else now and tell you how you really should be wary of taking vacation because it might impact your financial future."

the idea that failure is an individual failing and not the oppressions of a broken system.