#utterly delightful

Would they present themselves as a couple or would they pretend to just be a royal guard with his king (for drama purposes)

I'm sorry it took me a second to answer this but I need you to understand how much I am thinking about it. I went so overboard.

no colored meta knight because I went too hard with dedede so sorry LMAO. but yes I think that dedede does a lot of Obligatory Holiday Hosting and that 100% includes new years. he throws a lot of parties but this is one of the fancier ones. and I think that before they get married, like literally until the day they get married it isn't technically public knowledge that they're together.

"it must run in the family" "i thought jason was adopted" "...yessss you're right" peak comedy

The Dinobots(team not species) of the Aligned continuity are cut to pieces and stitched back in a way that changed their alt modes into beasts in a continuity where Dinobots are also a natural subspecies of Beastformers. How does it feel, to be made something new. Do they have new instincts, or did Shockwave only change their bodies? Do they feel uncanny to other Beasts, or do they slip in undetected? Does every transformation pull their cogs unnaturally, knowing that they were never meant to be a Beast? Can they feel every cut as they move, never sure if their next step will lead to their body falling apart? I don't know, and I am FASCINATED.

i recently started another bg3 file (crazy for me (not)) with some friends and during character creation we decided to base all our tav's on characters that we had played together in a previous oneshot of the avatar: the last airbender tabletop rpg; these are them, put into bg3!

now the bit is to pretend that it's all a bg3/atla crossover: we hail from baldur's--i mean republic city, we're all benders (which is made a lot more fun by elemental cantrip mods!), and we're sick with a bad case of the pentapox. mindflayers? you mean pentapusses?? our dream visitors are all images of avatars of the past... like whatever's causing them wants to appear trustworthy.

i personally think it's also been made more fun by intentionally choosing not to class as way of the four elements monks, instead getting our "bending" spells from mods and interpreting other existing spells as manipulation of our elements (for example, hold person is quite clearly a bloodbending technique, and enhance jump is just earthbended ground giving you a boost), and then our classes reflect our character's personalities--i play a druid because my character was originally from the swamp and very unwise in societal situations, closer to animals and spirits than her fellow humans. it makes for a super engaging and creative playing experience, and i can't wait to get on and play more when our schedules line up again.

bonus: i dredged up the old sketches i had of two of these characters in the actual atla oneshot from a couple years back :) one is landscape and one is portrait so they'll probably format weird, they're under the read more :)

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske

Book 2 of The Last Binding trilogy

Genre: Fantasy, Romance Page Count: 388 Start to Finish: 5/12/25 to 5/23/25 Rating: 5/5

Summary:

Magic! Murder! Shipboard romance!

Maud Blyth has always longed for adventure. She expected plenty of it when she volunteered to serve as an old lady’s companion on an ocean liner, in order to help her beloved older brother unravel a magical conspiracy that began generations ago.

What she didn’t expect was for the old lady in question to turn up dead on the first day of the voyage. Now she has to deal with a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and the lovely, dangerously outrageous Violet Debenham, who’s also returning home to England. Violet is everything that Maud has been trained to distrust yet can’t help but desire: a magician, an actress, and a magnet for scandal.

Surrounded by the open sea and a ship full of suspects, Maud and Violet must first drop the masks that they’ve both learned to wear before they can unmask a murderer and somehow get their hands on a magical object worth killing for—without ending up dead in the water themselves.

Review:

Oh Marske, what a beautiful world you've created! I love the murder mystery of this one, and following Maud in this was an absolute delight.

I loved that the porn pamphlets made another appearance. They make for such a fun and unexpected historic throughline. You can tell just how much love and care went into the queerness of these novels. It doesn't feel like it exists just as a vehicle for titilation, these characters and their relationships feel so real and raw and grounded.

I really liked the offhand mention of Cradlespeak and I can't help but draw parallels to Polari. "Cradlespeak was a common pastime of magical children, though not a standardized tongue" (pg 175). Yes, it is in the context of something done by children, but the wider implications throughout the book of it being used to either sus out who might be a magician or the times it's used for Violet to say something to Lord Hawthorn without being overheard just can't help but bring Polari to my mind.

All of the metaphor around the secretive society of magicians and all of their various ways to exist unseen honestly parallels so well to the queer experience and I'm obsessed with it.