The idea of him being a nymph (born adolescent, from a tree) makes so much sense but is that mutually exclusive with being gentry? Cuz like Io’s former grove has a gentry matriarch and wouldn’t that gentry also be a nymph? Or something related?

I’m having so much fun digging my teeth into this worldbuilding like I’m about to start drawing diagrams

Gentry typically do not normally spawn in the way in Virgil, Linda and Durant do, or the way Collie and Mimi do in Seedlings. what's usually happening when a fae spontaneously arises like this is that the surrounding ambient magic has become so dense in that spot that it coalesces into a fae

Gentry are so powerful, even as children, that its very hard for enough of this magic to coalesce to spawn one. not impossible, but very rare. Mother is able to create powerful children herself, so its not quite the same thing thats happening to spawned children.

Gentry are one of the few fae that can mostly only reproduce through tab a slot b sexual reproduction, and gentry with periods only have them 1-2 times a year (every 28-30 weeks)

Kissa is Gentry, but her spouse Ama was a nymph, so half their children are gentry who were born by Kissa and the other half are nymphs spawned by proximity. then the next generation spawns more and more nymph proximity children, while the gentry reproduce much slower, so Io and Briar's generation (Briar is Kissa and Ama's great granddaughter) is mostly nymphs

yeah, and he knew elliot was nonbinary before they came out, and both were gleaned from significant distance.

when a persons pronouns dont match up with their closeted gender identity, or theyre deliberately using pronouns that upset them most fae are Extremely Weirded Out by this. they perceive as the human somehow, inexplicably, bafflingly, granting the fae the ability to lie about their gender and pronouns. like some kind of bizarre godparent gift and for seemingly no reason. they react like the trans person in question has performed some kind of devastating magic spell on them

so obviously this is all filtered through a lot of metaphor and intensification but it was interesting to explore the gc-adjacent as a sort of close knit group who will close ranks on vulnerable members at the expense of legality. there are a lot of groups like this in appalachia (moonshiners, queer folks, people of color) and im sure other places (appalachia just rolls with advantage because geography, you can hide oh so much in the woods)

Sorry if this is something you have posted before and I missed it.

alright yall we're finally talkin about ghouls

so over the course of laoft ive developed what i call a 'field guide' for my own use, which i occasionally make art for and post.

for purposes of organization (doylist, for me, and watsonian, as the idea of this guidebook is that its a local textbook of wickhills public school system) theyre separated into categories by similar traits.

(second doylist reason was parsing out how 'genetic' inheritance and/or reproduction work if your parents are, say, a pixie and a 12ft troll but thats a separate rant)

Doppelgangers fall under the heading of Ghouls - fae are born from natural events, objects, or features, and ghouls are born from death.

a 'basic' (for lack of a better term) ghoul can be born from the (usually surprising or violent or both, but not always) death of any human or fae, and other more specific kinds are born from specific deaths. Doppelgangers are born from stillborn identical twins

i only have a few entries under the ghoul heading and this was the first time we really saw one but i have been thinking about throwing in a Hidebehind or Leftunder (death of a person who was lost, above or below ground respectively) or a Blackeyed Child (death of a preadolascent or adolescent) the next time i introduce a new character to the group and need to cause problems for plot reasons

more doppelganger facts

doppelgangers are true shapeshifters (as opposed to pooka, who are limited shapeshifters with only two forms) - they can look like any human, any fae, and are identical down to smell and hair follicle placement.

if you look at them while theyre shapeshifted to look like you, it puts an absolutely NASTY bad luck curse on you, (hence the summary - in folklore, you just straight up die, but im probably not gonna go that hard because it seems seriously op in my player balance /silly)

Greta definitely knows Virgil is -

[gotta do a whole aside for this, what we would call trans but in the late 1800s greta was probably using either the h-slur at worst, 'sexual invert' as an okay-ish option or 'androgyne' at best, all of which she would have understood as mostly synonymous (or at least a very big overlap of venn diagram) with 'homosexual'. Virgil's not going to recognize any of these words as either polite or familiar, and neither is most of my audience, so im just going to skirt it]

-Trans, because greta is going to assume she's a woman and have no problem, say, climbing the river for a bath with her, which Virgil will also not recognize as weird, at which point it will become immediately obvious

its more complex than that - a green man is a nymph, just a subtype, and its a species name not a gender. briar is as close to a cis woman as the fae really have, and is a just generally a woman - also being a green man is irrelevant to her gender because its not a gendered term to the fae