The longer you stay there, the more detached you become from your life in our world, while the longer you stay in our world after coming back, the more detached you become from the fantasy world.

In Peter Pan, the longer the Darling children stay in Neverland, the less they remember their old life in London or their parents. Michael even comes to believe that Wendy really is his mother. Yet after they go home, and when the Lost Boys come with them and are adopted by their parents, the boys gradually stop believing in Peter Pan and Neverland, as if it was all just a fantasy game they used to play. Only Wendy really remembers both worlds as real places, but even she starts to to think less and less of her parents in Neverland, until she finally decides it's time to go home to them, and when she grows up, her memories of Peter become less clear than her daughter Jane's dreams of him are before she even meets him in person.

Maybe C.S. Lewis drew some inspiration from J.M. Barrie, because the same is true for Narnia. When the Pevensie siblings become the rulers of Narnia and grow to adulthood there, they come to remember their life in England as if it were just a dream. And the same is true in reverse when they come back to England and become children again: their minds revert to childhood just like their bodies, they forget how to do things they learned as adults in Narnia, and their memories of Narnia become more like a dream too. This is what leads to Susan's fate in The Last Battle: while the others choose to keep believing in Narnia (though it probably isn't always easy for them to do), Susan eventually comes to think it was just childhood make-believe.

Come to think of it, in the Alice books, Alice is more detached from her home as she wanders through Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land than you might expect a little girl to be. In the few times she thinks of her home, her thought is usually that she doesn't want to go back – either because she's lost her sense of identity or because she wants to have more adventures – and the only "family member" she ever misses is her cat. Though of course, she's dreaming, and in dreams you don't always think or feel the same way you would in real life.

All these stories are very interesting to compare to The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy's entire goal is to get back home and she never stops thinking of her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.

there's so much potential to integrate it with the fantasy elements too.

you could do exposure therapy, for example, with the help of illusions. imagine someone is deathly afraid of dragons because of a childhood incident, but they really want to overcome this phobia.

the therapist could conjure up illusions, working from a small abstract dragon to a big realistic one, and help the client progressively become more relaxed around the illusion dragon before they meet a real one.

or imagine a character is grieving a dead loved one, and they never got closure from this person. maybe they wanted to tell this person something and never got the chance to. or maybe the person is not dead, but it's best to sever that tie instead of trying to talk to them again.

in this scenario, the therapist could shapeshift into the person the client wants to talk to, and give the client a bit of closure.

mind reading could be practiced with the client's consent, so that the therapist could tap into blocked memories or an incident that the client is too traumatized to talk about.

White Drawf 39

Continuing the DnD 3D-print house project! 🏠✨ Let’s dive into Bevel and make those shapes smooth and magical.

PS: English isn’t my native language, but I see it as an adventure – just like DnD! I’ll get better over time, so you’re basically watching me ‘level up’ in real time.

On special request from @galacticnightsky123, I wanted to go into more depth on my world building sources and inspirations than the replies section allows. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to elaborate!

When I was world-building for Twilight Tides, I knew what tone I was going for in the story. I wanted a really young YA that borders on middle grade for this concept, a slightly more-grown up version of Barbie: A Mermaid Tale or The Little Mermaid (1989). This world needed to feel fun and have feminine appeal, the kind that where a girl might read it and want to live in the Undersea. I wanted to add some additional esoteric, ethereal elements such as in Kingdom Hearts. These major directions shifted me in the direction of how I wanted to handle the magical peoples of the Undersea.

I knew also that I wanted to make the magical world have a lot of different cultures and groups for our protagonists to explore. Mainly this was to service the wonder of the Undersea and to add nuance to our "representative" characters of the mermaid world.

The first thing I do when world-building a fantasy race/culture or creature is I look up some general lore about the group. For example, with the mermaids I looked to Hans Christian Andersen's original story, older mermaid myths, and the stories that inspired him like the legend of Undine and the Melusina. From these, I was able to learn the lay of the land and then modify as I felt was fit.

For example, with the Selkies, I combined the general Irish myths with some of the imagery regarding the Inuit seal goddess Sedna, using the name of her realm for their lost island. However, I also chose to change them from a seal-coat as the source of their transformation to a talisman to suit my preferred aesthetics. That's also where the blue and silver hair came in!

The mermaids were a little more by-the-book for pop culture, with their music magic, traditional appearance, and penchant for tragic relationships with humans. Some innovations, like the culture being matriarchal, derived from the overwhelming tendency for the characters of this species in folklore and fiction to be female, as well as my finding the terms "merfolk" and similar to be a bit clunky. So it worked better for "mermaid" to be the default and from there, for the culture to be primarily matriarchal.

The sea-dragons took inspiration from a couple different sources, and are tied to the more Kingdom Hearts elements of the story. I was primarily inspired by Elizabeth Lim's The Dragon's Promise, Axie Oh's The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, and the Vidyahara of Honkai Star Rail.

The Oceanids are the group that has the least to do with the mythological inspiration they were named for. A starting source of inspiration was Te Fiti as depicted in Moana, which in turn gave the idea for a dualistic spirit of the water with a lava and life-giving connotations. The dualism and the vengeance motif also overlapped with the usual folklore regarding water spirits, making it an interesting inspiration to work with.

All of these groups started with a root in various mythologies across the world, and by taking inspirations from different places and twisting them to my thematic/aesthetic preferences, I feel I've made something really interesting here, and I hope you all will agree.

A final note on some of the original questions goes to aging and lifespan. The mermaids have the initial development of a normal human (maturity in 18 years) but live for 300, as per Andersen's original text. Selkies are about the same.

Oceanids are a little more difficult to gauge, especially as they are so rare in the world of the Undersea, but they age more slowly and have a lifespan past 500, I'd say.

Dragons are hypothetically immortal, resembling LOTR elves in how they age and live, but circumstances have killed them off pretty much at this point. Living forever does mean that people develop a grudge or two, I suppose.