#mythpunk

If these films, shows, books, aesthetics, anime, and magnificently dysfunctional fathers and daughters have ever rearranged your brain chemistry:

You may belong in Raptoræm.

ARC applications are now open. Apply through the direct link below:

Or

You're Not Worth My Good Vocabulary

mincing twat

daft apeth

charmless ringworm

feckless jobbernowl

tedious rattlepate

bleeding clotpole

babbling poltroon

pompous windbag

sanctimonious gobshite

pudding-brained pillock

parish-certified numpty

jello-brained jabbernowl

drool-faced poltroon

knuckle dragging bellend

intellectual grave robber

rank faced pissant

simpering little putz

self-satisfied bottom feeder

malignant little turnip

mewling sack of boiled turds

miserably bland tofu who warrants no analysis

ARC APPLICATIONS ARE NOW OPEN

Public applications for the Raptoraem ARC team are officially open.

An ARC—or Advance Reader Copy—is a free pre-release edition of a book sent to selected readers before publication. ARC readers get early access to the story, the chance to enter Raptoraem before the wider public, and an opportunity to support its launch through honest reviews, recommendations, and word of mouth.

For an independent author, that early support is invaluable. ARC readers help a new book build visibility, credibility, and momentum before it enters the wild.

For readers, it means becoming part of the book’s earliest circle—and helping the right stories find their audience.Please note that submitting an application does not guarantee acceptance.

Places are limited, and every application will be reviewed before the final ARC team is selected.Members of the Contraband Network receive first priority.

If you would like priority consideration:

1. Join the Contraband Network.

2. Use the same email address when completing your ARC application.

3. In the space provided on the application, leave me a note confirming that you are a Contraband Network member so I can match your submissions.

ENTER THE CONTRABAND NETWORK:

www.raptoraemofficial.com/#network

APPLY FOR THE RAPTORAEM ARC TEAM:

https://forms.gle/y35cC4wwmmkCkKcF8

Mordiger × Vira star in Angela Carter’s tragically suppressed tenth story: a cautionary romance proving that no crown, however phallically loaded or chock-full of unresolved sovereignty metaphors, should be entrusted to a woman whose fingers can crush masonry.

Mordiger wakes up inside “Once in a Lifetime.”

And yet, if you traveled back there, you could probably still understand each other. Granted, there would be accents to contend with, slang flying past in both directions, and the small problem of explaining why you keep saying bestie, slay and weird and asking where you can charge your phone.

But you could communicate with startling fluency.

The Victorian era ended in 1901. That’s 125 years ago: distant enough to feel embalmed in the contemporary imagination; yet the English spoken then was fundamentally our present, modern-day English. The grammar is ours. Most ordinary vocabulary is ours. You could arrive in Dickensian London dressed like an escaped lunatic, ask "Where the fuck am I?!" and receive an answer you understood.

Worse, you could string together the following sentence:

“Okay, dude, your girlfriend’s clueless. Let’s take a photo of the dinosaur, find somewhere comfy, and get brunch. I’ve got a hangover.”

-and the average Victorian would fully understand that sentence, however profoundly cursed if linguistically plausible.

It's patently unfair that we divide history into sealed rooms: Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, modern etc. Real human lives overlap. An elderly Victorian might have known someone who remembered the 1780s. That person might have known someone born around 1700.

Three handshakes, and you’d be nearly back at the Great Fire of London.

They seldom ever go “ew” or “gross” or even “for god’s sake.”

Instead, most have one very specific, idiosyncratic verbal tic that functions as the thesis statement for their whole shtick. It’s the single-word signifier that telegraphs not only revulsion, but their whole villainous aesthetic.

“Unacceptable,” says the fastidious Lawful Evil villain, for whom the universe is a collection of loose ends that must be tied.

“Tch,” spits the anime-adjacent rogue with a tragic backstory, as if the mere existence of morals is a personal imposition.

"Improper," sneers the aristocratic tyrant, whose entire worldview is built on inherited systems of conduct.

“Inefficient,” clicks the corporate-dystopia baddie, for whom all humanity is a drag on productivity.

Each one is a one-word autobiography. Each one tells you exactly what drives them, and what, to them, is the ultimate sin.

And that’s the secret sauce. A good villain isn’t just evil; they’re a slave to a very specific, often warped, philosophical principle. They have a non-negotiable aesthetic. They aren’t so much breaking rules as they are enforcing their own with terrifying consistency. Their disgust is the compass that points to their obsession.

And you, the hero, aren’t just Stopping Them from doing a Bad Thing. You are, by your very existence, a walking, talking, Unacceptable/Tch/improper/Inefficient affront to everything they believe in.

Mordiger, to me, is spiritually a “Tfu” man.

This owes largely to Raptoraem being a port city that doubles as a multilingual crossroads. It has a history of occupation bureaucracy, immigrant household cadences, gutter slang rubbing shoulders with formal state language, and a spicy dash of old continental contempt.

All of which gives Mordiger a lot to spit at.

“Tfu.”

Short, sharp, clicky. A little expulsion of air, the kind you make when you see an inkblot on fresh parchment.

Mordiger:

Looking at the Synod's latest hypocrisy: “tfu.”

Vira purrs something outrageous and he’s pretending not to enjoy it: “tfu~”

Watching someone misuse an expensive weapon or waste good whiskey: “tfu.”

Seeing a man talk to Stryx like she’s a child: “....tfuuu.”

Mordiger is a creature of intense, almost aesthetic disgust. He hates artifice. He hates wasted effort. He hates incompetence masquerading as ceremony.

He has also seen far too much of all the above to waste grammar on it. Why waste a full sentence on a fraud? A single, wet little particle of multigenerational revulsion will do.

Ironically, he doesn’t even know he does it.

It’s a tell. A crack in the steel of his composure. And it’s the only crack he allows.

(Stryx, meanwhile, has an entire lexicography of his 'tfu's recorded. She knows the micro-grades between a standard tfu, a disappointed tfu, an amused tfu, and the dreaded, drawn-out, prelude-to-violence Tfffffuuuuuu.)

(Also the special Tfu~ he reserves only for her, which basically means ‘I find you preposterous but also I am helplessly fond of you. Against my will’.)

Vira: "I'm from a grounded military thriller."

Aurea: "I'm from a prestige political period piece."

Tristan: "I'm from a coming of age drama."

Shryke: "I escaped a psychological survival horror."

Meanwhile...

Mordiger: "I've rebuilt a city out of scrap metal, economic theory, generational trauma, and my own terrible coping mechanisms."