#erazonpo3

🎃 Happy Halloween! 🎃

Art fight attack against @erazonpo3's Phoenicis!

i see i have a brand

i think the failure of the fandom as a whole to come up with sixty million OC disciples of zhan tiri is a gigantic dropped ball because come on. come onnnnnnn. i mean i know i’m preaching to the choir here but other than, like, my 8 scion OCs, alphecca, and hemlock’s striga i don’t... think i’ve seen any disciple OCs? but like canonically there are supposed to be a bunch, and it’s basically a perfect opportunity to introduce “eccentric magical villain” into fanworks in a naturalistic way

like there is so much potential here and i don’t understand why people aren’t running wild with it, especially with how much this fandom loves to go nuts with the whole angst-generating villains thing

instead of doing the proposing at the same time thing they do the not proposing at the same time thing. forever.

he Absolutely is. i admittedly have not done a lot of thinking about the lorbs because they won’t be relevant until blooms and sings but frankly their canon lore just... fits, so i’m keeping it intact in all the essentials. 

i think lizardos is probably quite a local god, with worship being centered around terapi island + the lorb communities scattered around the coasts of aberdinon and bayangor + in antares. he was probably horb the lorb’s patron with all that that implies about his brand of magic; very volatile and liable to backfire in unpredictable ways. 

humans probably tend not to take him very seriously but a well-trained lorb warlock is not someone to trifle with. also he’s responsible for the pompoen fruit for sure.

O - Choose a song at random, which OTP does it remind you of

era i’m sorry but you sent this right as i started tailspinning rapidly back into Wonderland Hell so the only thing in my head is... that so like

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dInHF1Iilzo

screams

but It’s Okay We Can Make This Sort Of Relevant To The Question because wonderland is like. the standard by which i measure Characters Who Are Metaphors For Mental Illness which according to chris is what zhan tiri is, insofar as she’s a representation of cass’s intrusive thoughts / bad brain and like

it’s not a direct 1:1 comparison (because wonderland takes place. In alice’s brain) but speaking in those terms, canon ziti wants what wonderland’s hatter has; because hatter manages to both have a coherent characterization of her own and be a much more clear metaphor for alice’s depression, proving that you Can Have Both 

like hatter is simultaneously everything alice wishes she could be (competent! in charge! confident! successful!) and all her self hatred and self destructive impulses which is why the trajectory of her character is polished, put-together villain -> absolute feral wreck and also why the last beat between her and alice is alice reaching out to help her, because the whole point is that the first step toward recovery is being kind to yourself. and then in the final number hatter-the-character has been defeated but hatter-the-concept is shown as a still a prominent component of alice’s psyche, but no longer one that overshadows everything else but rather integrated with the whole because Alice Is Recovering and has (a) reconnected with her support network and (b) developed the skills to break the destructive thought patterns and cope with the bad feelings hatter represented—

anyway like that’s the thing, with wonderland; the entire story is built to be a narrative about alice’s recovery and so everything about the metaphor of hatter’s character Being Alice’s Depression just... works. it fits. it’s clear and well-executed and everything ties off in a way that makes sense and is emotionally satisfying and like... demonstrates a basic awareness that Depression Does Not Vanish Overnight When You Slay The Demon

and i think ultimately that gets at what’s missing in the zhan tiri as cassandra’s bad brain angle, because... i know this horse is already dead but so much of it happens off screen and the narrative is structured around rapunzel, not cass, and in the same arc where we have this character who is ostensibly a representation of cass’s intrusive thoughts or whatever, cass herself is incredibly opaque and we don’t get a glimpse into what she’s actually thinking until once a handmaiden and then she’s opaque again for like the bulk of plus est en vous, except for when she’s shouting at and/or crying on rapunzel. 

and i don’t think that works. i don’t think you can have character A as a metaphor for the mental illness of character B when both characters are off screen for most of the character development and character B’s thoughts are intentionally hidden from the audience. maybe you could make it work by putting the focus on character B’s support network trying to figure out how to... help, but season three doesn’t do that either: cass’s ostensible support network pretty much just sits around twiddling their thumbs waiting for her to show up again. 

moreover when character A is a literal evil demon who latched on to character B to pursue her own goal in which character B is a mere pawn, and then character A is defeated and killed and then everything’s gravy... that’s not how bad brain works. you can’t slay the demon to cure your depression. you can’t atomize your intrusive thoughts and trauma. and that’s a critical weakness in the metaphor and would continue to be its achilles heel even if cass were given central focus in the narrative of season three, because at the end of the day zhan tiri is a malevolent opponent who can be killed and then forgotten about but mental illness isn’t like that and there’s no... good way for rta, as a series, to have navigated that dissonance between the literal text and the metaphorical subtext given the tools it had to hand. 

*deep breath*

I didn’t realise the whole musical was on youtube omg I’ll have to check it out later, but anyway I stan these villain bffs

that’s the may 12 recording! (and imo the best one available, and the only one that isn’t in previews) but the april 2 recording is also on youtube

(there’s also a video from march 23 which is neat bc it’s early previews but that one is not on youtube)