#mok thoughts

The fact people in the desert villiage speak anything our characters can parse easily is a miracle given the Forbidden Lands haven't been regularly visited by the rest of the continent in "thousands of years". I'm willing to bet the main squad can understand enough to go back and forth expressly because they're all big enough nerds to know whatever base language was around when contact was cut off and everyone is daisy chaining communications till things are hashed out.

The fact the little boy you have with you doesnt seem to struggle as much I'm putting down to "hes had a couple years with the commission at this point".

Now. Add that kinda separation on top of not having the same anatomy to speak with, and probably just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, and you get the WudWud linguist.

And they are a linguist. They say so themselves.

But they come off a certain way because they're trying to convey meaning and tone quite a bit outside their usual scope.

Are we meant to put literally any thought into them outside of "quest giver in funny hat with fun speech quirks"? Probably not.

but the last piece i did of two figures dancing, i purposely made the foreground figure have more complex patterns, they’re gold, they’re dense enough in some places to look solid. The background figure is more muted and simple, but the motif i went with for it is straight lines and circles resembling eyes-- its watching and learning. The straight line patterns are present in the foreground character as well. It’s also supporting the foreground character, symbolizing someone watching from the back because they aren’t used to being bold. Which is why its colored like that, while the foreground character sparkles. One is going with the flow like water, and one is used to shining in the fore.

But the pose implies that the background figure is controlling the pace, because its the one supporting the other’s weight. There are splashes of gold in the background figure, though they aren’t as pronounced. There are blueish cool tones in the golden figure implying some trepidation/reserve there as well.

The caption is lyrics from “Love me Better” by Love thy Brother, which i imagine being the golden figure speaking to the other. Desiring to draw it out of the passive role it possibly resigns itself to out of a desire to be seen as proper or unattached. The foreground character has drawn it into a dance its learning from and observing in action, while a few shades of the golden character rub off on it.

Not to get in my own head a bit about it, but my overall drive for this piece was thinking about how people can be made of complicated parts that grow more complex the more we allow ourselves to grow. To shine.

People just flat missed the point of Hunters, huh? The narrative purpose we're given for why our little characters are zooming around doing things.

Hunters are, to my understanding, essentially if you took a biologist and gave them a gun specifically to be used if something goes terribly wrong. They're a living electric fence between monsters starting shit and humans. They work with the rest of the guild to figure out the why's and the hows so humans and monsters don't step on each others toes. And they hunt monsters when toe stepping is happening.

Sure the vibe most players get is "i got this game to go kill 50000 monsters and look cool" and yeah i mean fair. The game lets you do that. But the point is not going out of your way to follow something home and beat it to death just because.

IDK I might just be in the minority that's super hype that there's rules. There's safeguards. There's ethical considerations in universe to what you're doing.

I like that your stated mission is go figure out what this big bad monster over there is and put a stop to it, but only because it killed people. It's base existence isn't a problem we're solving, we're dealing with the danger issue. Which becomes even more important to handle when our organization finds out hey, there's people here! It is now very much more an us problem than it already was.

At which point Protag shrugs and suggests asking their mom, since she’s got a really big garden that’s growing super well.

Cut to Arven awkwardly having tea and thanking everything holy that he paid attention in Languages enough to understand when she jumps into Galarian on a word she doesn’t know in Paldaen. Protag is telling their mom about the herbs and their journey to find them, and even excitedly telling her about what the herbs did for Mabosstiff. Arven tries not to feel weird about the feelings that well up when she gives him a genuinely sympathetic look and apologizes that he had to go through that alone for so long. After he chokes out the ‘thank you’ in response, Protag rounds back to growing the herbs-- they could help people AND pokemon. And they should, which is why Arven is wary of, like, asking a commercial source for help. He’s not stupid, he knows the herbs would be skwovet’d away for who knows how long until they’re fully studied. And yeah, they should be studied, but he feels... like he should be involved. Some part of him wonders if its his parent’s influence in him, wanting a stake in finding out the why of it. Some part of it is his desire to make food that’s good for everyone. Right now, though, there’s not enough of the herbs to do much with anyway. Thus why they’re there.

Protag’s mom suggests a climate controlled greenhouse-- partially to simulate the environment each herb was found in, and partially to keep out wild pokemon to keep more titans from growing. Unfortunately, the greenhouse at the academy is full and it’s not like Arven has a place outside there where he can be to keep an eye on things. So she suggests they build it in the back garden of their house and Arven will “just have to visit to keep up with things”. Protag offers to split their room with him while they set up, so they don’t have to flying taxi back and forth every day--though they still can when normal classes are in progress.

First day there, though, Arven sleeps on the couch. Under a cozy blanket that smells like lavender, with a stomach full of home cooked food. Mabosstiff is curled up against the couch with his head on his paws, snoozing away. First break he spends there, he has his own bed and Protag’s mom knows what kind of foods he likes. The herbs are growing well, but somehow he’s more focused on the house, rather than the greenhouse. Mabosstiff has claimed the skwovet plush as his own, though he does begrudgingly share with Protag’s starter on occasion. By the time the herbs are ready to be harvested and studied, he’s a regular fixture. Spends holidays and weekends there, when not catching up on studies. His half of the room has his signature yellow aesthetic. There are bookcases of old notebooks Protag brought him from his parent’s lab--nothing about the crater per se, but things that had been moved down there and left behind. Copies of personal pokemon observations. Formula books with notes in the margins, an old journal that mentions getting a maschiff that bonded with baby Arven. Journals about him. He keeps them at the house so he can focus on school-- and so, if he reads them and gets worked up, he’ll know someone will hear him cry and snap him out of it.

There’s a point where a ‘family’ picture is being taken. He’s pulled in by Protag and their mom, insisting he and his pokemon count as family-- why wouldn’t he be in the photo? I think he’d probably be trying very hard not to cry, at least until the picture was taken.

like legit everyone should have a place to live and food and warmth/cooling and stuff. but also like. i would like a placard saying "this bitch crippled, do not get pissed when they park by the door just because they also forgot their cane today, be cool". i want a check every month and the general understanding that i should not be expected to pour blood sweat and tears into a system that i physically cannot survive interfacing with for extended periods.

Because it's hard to know how to act when your whole everything suddenly doesn't have much to go on outside of vague impressions of feelings about things you don't remember.

Which, honestly, is probably why humans in Kilima just kinda do whatever. Majiri probably just assume humans are Like that until it occurs to some scholar that there's probably just as much psychological distress in a human as a Majiri having memory loss and displacement. Which I feel soon becomes the standard assumption for interacting with humans for people in the know-- assume you're talking to the most barely keeping it together person possible and go from there.

Which is also probably why humans integrating into Palian society are given so much leeway re: knowing customs etc. Because a lot of trauma and stress responses would quickly get wrapped into "that's just how humans are".

I imagine if memory came back, it'd be very disjointed in how it did so--if it ever does and it isn't your brain trying desperately to make shit up to feel normal.

Imagine being a human and having super strong aversions to things and not knowing why, but after like 3 years you get a super strong nightmare about some terrible thing that happened and you're faced with "am i remembering, or am i processing my current emotions?"

Like i know my character Mo would be deeply uncomfortable being called a fire kind and wouldn't know why being likened to a wildfire for their passion makes a pit form in their stomach-- until a campfire gets out of hand in the woods and they freeze for a second before flashing back to orange skies and raining ash. People crying as everything they've ever known is destroyed, huddling in a field and trying to keep children calm. Because they're heavily based on me and I get a very specific way about wildfires because the western half of the USA and Canada just kinda goes up in flames literally every year and its a gamble if you'll need to flee your home any given week in the summer.

But we also don't know if the missing memories are amnesia or just... you were 3d printed and imprinted with enough knowledge to be an adult that wouldn't starve to death instantly.

Which means our characters could be having wild flashbacks and weird sense memories creep up on them out of nowhere, or experience frustration that there's legitimately nothing to remember.

Superman will know precisely as much as he let's himself pay attention to while not focused on something else. Or more accurately he will politely not mention anything you haven't said to him directly, because his mother would have taught him that overhearing things with superhearing is like overhearing someone gossiping. And would act accordingly.

Spiderman meanwhile, on average, will not do a single fact check unless he thinks googling ur hero name would have funny results. Just lie to him. He'll assume it's part of the bit. So long as its not going to get someone hurt or killed, he'll probably find it funny when/if he finds out.

Thought brought about by discussing Batman v Superman and my bf telling me Snyder insisted ol Batsy somehow didn't have a Kent compendium in a file folder somewhere. Like no, no its batman. He'd know.