#moth wizard

He's my OC living in my post-apocalyptic fantasy setting :3

Lately I'm being more unapologetically annoying about him and it's paying off so I'm not stopping. Gonna infect everyone with my little guys. (Unless you really don't wanna in which case you can block the tags "Moth Wizard" and "Toothy reruns" and never have to hear about them again.) If you'd be interested in a little ramble:

The titular Moth Wizard is an autistic Jewish wizard hundreds of years in the future. He specializes in controlling moths and his wizard staff is basically a rusty pipe with a light bulb at the end. He goes about his life trying to help people where he can with his powers (which are more useful than one might think), usually ending up aiding in some hero's epic quest.

The reason they don't have names is particularly because I suck at names and most of my characters don't have proper names, but mostly because I'm undecided on their cultural backgrounds which of course inform what kind of names they'd probably have. And I take that decision very seriously, especially with less conventionally likeable characters like Pathetic Woman 1, in order to minimize playing into stereotypes or otherwise ending up with an offensive portrayal. And I'm having trouble making up my mind what would really be good for them.

With Pathetic Woman 1 especially, I need to make sure she's not the only representation any group gets. You'd think this means I could just make her Jewish like everyone else, but the issue then is that I cannot imagine her particularly observant. She would be very loosely connected to her Jewishness, if at all. And this would make her the only Jewish character (so far) who isn't very observant, which means it's still a problem.

Hi sorry this took a while, keeping it within a reasonable length and on topic was a challenge but I'm really happy with how it turned out and it was a lot of fun! Thank you for the ask!!

5 Moth Wizard Facts:

1. The General Setting

Moth Wizard takes place hundreds of years in the future and the setting is a mix of optimism, dreams to help me cope with the present, and justification for the post-apocalyptic fantasy aesthetic. This includes "mildly utopian" settlements being common globally, prehistoric dinosaurs roaming the Earth, and a lot of overgrown ruins of the modern world. The rotting corpse of capitalism itself. One day all the concrete will be dust and even plastic will learn to decay, but we will still be here, building something better.

2. A Precious "Detail"

The most important (to me and to the characters) and self-indulgent piece of dreaming a better future is not actually going to be plot relevant much. The Third Temple stands in Jerusalem. Despite everything, after more than two thousand years of persecution in exile, the Jews survived, made it home, and thrived. Opinions differ on whether to finish painting your house.

3. The Apocalypse

If it's "post-apocalyptic" there must have been an apocalypse to be post. Looking at what's become of the world in recent years I'd say it's already started in our time. Ours will hopefully somehow change course but theirs didn't. Things only escalated until the flames burned out. And the world would never see such horrors again. But importantly, it was not worth it. Billions of people died, countless ecosystems destroyed and species lost, many large parts of the world rendered uninhabitable to most life. It didn't have to go this way. A rainbow above the ashes. This was not justice. Everything we built in the ruins was built in spite of what happened.

4. Magic

The magic system is designed such that, in theory, anyone could use it to do almost anything. In practice, it requires a very specific mindset, focus, and (if one wants to do it with any consistency and accuracy) a lot of practice. The most important factor, in what actually happens when attempting to do magic, is expectation. Trying to cast a fireball will never result in ice cubes, but it can result in nothing happening except embarrassment of the caster, if they are not fully convinced that they will, in fact, cast a fireball. Even considering what to do in case a spell fails can cause the spell to fail. This is why most wizards tend to specialize, really knowing what your Thing is and that it always works really helps make it always work.

5. Moth Wizard in the Narrative

The titular Moth Wizard himself is an autistic Jew and his role in the story, as I plan to tell it, doesn't easily fit into categories like "protagonist". Moth Wizard is supposed to be sort of like an anthology. A collection of almost unrelated stories, which, if analyzed in isolation and purely as a series of events rather than a specific narrative, would each have different main characters. The thing they would have in common is that Moth Wizard would be there as a side character, someone helping the protagonist with their goal. But the way I plan to tell these stories with clear main characters is following Moth Wizard's perspective. But not entirely taking his perspective either. It is not a story we see through his eyes. You can think of it like a nature documentary, with David Attenborough following the side character life of this peculiar moth... wizard.