FANTASTIC question!

Hi :D Thank you for asking !

12: A song you feel should be higher up

Most things are as expected but just in relation to other songs on the albums I'm surprised Flight of the Ravens (Brothers of Metal) and Spider Silk (Nightwish) were not higher up - The Day of.... somehow ranked higher than Spider Silk which Unlike way more and thus should have listened to more often 🤔 But who knows.

19: Is your most streamed song of your favorite artist your favorite of them?

Sort of yes - my favorite (at least from the new album) is currently hovering between 1589 and Sinners of the Seven Seas but my "favorite" song is hard to pinpoint anyway. But I'm not unhappy with it at all it's a banger.

25: Favorite lyric from song #100

That just happens to be one of the few without lyrics but I will post it for when you want to feel mysterious

My #99 has lyrics though and my favorite has to be

"And if you think you're doing well/ Maybe that means you're one of them/ Are you the hunter/ Or the lion?"

I started learning in 2018, but it's been on and off. I did four semesters of intensive language class at my university and spent half a year on Erasmus in Turku.

I'm ashamed to admit but my Finnish has really not improved for a year or so. I was pretty decent when I was actually in the country, but then I went to Sweden and haven't really studied since then. I can still write some basic stuff and understand a lot of what Finnish Tumblr posts about but if I want to be fluent and actually read books (which was my original goal) I need to study more.

What is a line you have written that you feel didn’t get the recognition it should have, what fic is it from and why did you like it? - 🦋

It’s actually a line from Part 2 of To Love A Dragon! No one mentioned it and I’m honestly surprised. It’s one of Rhaenerys’ lines and one I think about all the time.

“I do not believe in the kind of divinity spoken by snakes”

I thought this was such an interesting line because while Rhaenerys comes from a family known to have prophetic dreams, she does not believe that Eadred actually had some prophetic vision.

Also, dragons and snakes are serpentine creatures, both of which are considered signs of the devil by the church (it’s well known in those days pagans/polytheists were considered devil worshippers and barbarians). So having Rhaenerys, a dragon lord who follows a polytheistic religion, compare Abbot Eadred to a snake, a long standing symbol of Lucifer/Satan, was her way of both insulting him and calling him out on his own hypocrisy.

That's a good catch, I wanted to talk about that anyway. So I assume you're referring to the names I tag them with sometimes, Zacharias von Wolfenstedt and Matthis von Halberg. Matthis and Zacharias are probably as close to birth names as you'll get considering phonetic shifts. They're the names they used the longest, primarily during the time in the Army, and still use in more serious or intimate settings. (Sasha still calls Milo "Matti" sometimes, which nobody else is allowed to do, even Attila.)

If you know how last names worked back then, you also know they weren't really fixed, just an easy identifier and could change if the community thought it necessary.

Both their last names are place monikers, pointing to a place of origin and on the surface it does not make sense why that would be different if they're brothers. The thing is, they're not blood-related and even if they were they look so different people wouldn't have believed it.

Both of them used the moniker von Halberg when they joined their first crusade and after they'd been turned. Halberg is a peak in the Saar region of Germany, which is the place Milo usually claimed he comes from (he really doesn't know for sure). Sasha was actually given the name von Wolfenstedt by others. Wolfenstedt translates to "wolf's place" or "lair". After being turned, Sasha very quickly made a name for himself by being a ruthless and effective strategist as well as being a skilled fighter.

People said he was so good at being a werewolf because he was in fact raised by wolves. Which was absolutely a racist jab, but Sasha's approach was always that no tool is too low as long as it was effective. And also that people leave you alone if they're sufficiently scared of you. By the time the army splintered, Zacharias von Wolfenstedt was more of a bogeyman than a real person. In modern day, Sasha and Milo mostly use the same last name, because it makes paperwork easier.