#wukodork

Haha i did both

It's out of the corner of his eye that he sees Dorian go down. Dorian, who was too close to the damned dragon. Cyrrith knows, logically, that they can't fall back. That this dragon has been harming civilians and Inquisition agents alike. But the urge to call for a retreat is so strong it almost escapes his lips. Cyrrith doesn't though, he fires off an explosive arrow at the dragon and sprints for where Dorian fell.

Cyrrith nearly jumps out of his skin as a spectral Dorian rises from Dorian's supine form. It charges right into battle, spells firing away. Cyrrith shakes his head as if to clear it and continues his rush over to Dorian. He uncorks a healing potion and pours it into Dorian's mouth.

Nothing happens.

"What?" Cyrrith shakes Dorian, like that will make it take effect. "Come on, come back to me Dorian." The dragon roars and Cyrrith flinches. He really hopes its a death knell. Cyrrith ducks his head, dropping his bow so he can cradle Dorian's face. The ground shakes with a thud. His heart pounds with it, looking up to see the ghost of Dorian disappear while the dragon dies. Cyrrith uncorks another healing potion and forces Dorian to swallow it.

There's a long moment of terror when he fears that the potion won't work. But Dorian's silver eyes open, hazy with pain. "There you are vhenan. Can you sit up for me?" Dorian groans in pain, pushing himself up as best he can. "Tell me what hurts, and be specific."

Dorian rests his back against a large rock. "Everything."

He grins when Cyrrith frowns at him. "That is not specific."

Dorian offers his head towards Cyrrith and Cyrrith bumps their foreheads together. "Think my thigh got cut. Besides that everything feels bruised."

"You know I'll be checking when we get back to camp?"

"I'd expect nothing less my dear." Dorian replies while Cyrrith moves his robes out of the way. He hisses when Cyrrith touches his thigh. "You're an evil man."

Cyrrith's brow furrows, "you need stitches."

"Pfft, you can't possibly—sweet Maker do not prod at it to prove your point!" He swats at Cyrrith who only has a finger extended towards the injury. "Please tell me you're not going to stitch me up here."

Cyrrith glances up at him, then around at the area. They're too exposed. "I'll just clean and wrap it for now. But if you start feeling lightheaded you need to tell me immediately." When Dorian acquiesces Cyrrith douses his thigh with clean water. He binds Dorian's leg with bandages, checking the tightness thrice before nodding. "Can you stand?"

"I can try," Dorian admits. "Help me up though."

"Here, lean on me. I can carry you." Cyrrith smiles as he slings one of Dorian's arms over his shoulders and stands. Dorian drops all his weight against him. "You know I can pick you up."

"Cyrrith Lavellan don't you dare. That would be far too embarrassing."

Cyrrith grins and bonks their heads together again. "It's a long walk back to camp. If you want The Iron Bull can carry you." His voice suddenly gets low and earnest in Dorian's ear. "I just don't want to see you in pain ma vhenan."

You’re welcome! It is a bit of work, but I’m glad it’s motivating/encouraging for people! I hope it helps people get excited about their writing and characters!

9. What would a nightmare tailored to their worst fears look like?

I think tailored to Andrea's worst fears... would look something like a bird cage. Poked and prodded from all sides through the bars, made to sing on demand; can't escape, but can't get away from everything reaching inside. A constant state of performance, stress, and terror. Your feathers are falling out.

16. What kind of demon would be most successful in tempting them? What offer would it have given them?

Easy answer, I've thought about this one! Desire demon would be the most successful in tempting them because that is what they repress the most. The offer? Power. Security. I can't say freedom because freedom is subjective; for Andrea, that would look like getting to a place of prestige within the Crows where they are untouchable... which isn't realistic. But being made a Talon is a good offer. (Later this does change. But that's spoilers!)

what if i did both

so, yeah, the thing about comics peter/gamora is... yeah, if you’re coming in to the comics as a newbie fan from the mcu (which in the case of cosmic anything is originally how i came in years ago), what you’re going to find is that the dynamic between those two characters in the source material is nothing like what it is onscreen. in annihilation and the 2008 gotg run, peter made some vaguely flirtatious comments gamora’s way a couple of times, sure, but he kind of just... does that sometimes. they’re sort of — coworkers brought together by convenience (and, arguably, being in love with the same dude lol) who do, eventually, become friends. they fight... kind of a lot, but they do develop an understanding.

a ship between peter and gamora in 616 continuity doesn’t come completely out of nowhere, i don’t think; there is some basis for it (especially if you go with the angle that they got closer when rich was “dead”; there’s a partially-written fic buried somewhere in the depths of my hard drive dealing with this very concept, and maybe one of these days i’ll finish it. maybe). but they developed it in a weird way, one that felt it was at least vaguely trying to impose the mcu on the comics, and when you look at the history of the characters, it doesn’t quite work in the way that it’s written. it could have, if more care had been taken with the writing and there’d been more attention to continuity as a whole, but that’s not what we ended up getting.

so, yeah, in short, i was a huge starmora shipper when i was primarily into the mcu because i liked a lot about the dynamic that was in the movies, but now that my interests have shifted to be more comics-focused, i’ve cooled on it quite a bit, because in the comics, it’s totally different.

and the thing is that... when you get into the source material, it’s pretty explicitly canon to me that peter quill’s soulmate is rich rider and vice versa. like, i came into these comics with absolutely zero agenda, and by the end of annihilation alone, i was like, “yep, they’re in love, that’s extremely gay.” that only got cemented in my mind the more i read, and then by the end of thanos imperative when they have a freaking joint monument? there is no heterosexual explanation for this.

but enough about my history; the thing is that rich and peter know and understand each other pretty much better than anyone else, you see an insane amount of mutual trust and respect, and they work beautifully together. they met when they were both in one of the darkest places of their respective lives (rich had just watched a whole civilization die and had gotten an impossible responsibility and a crazy amount of power put on his shoulders, peter had turned himself in to the nova corps and spent time in the kyln after a choice he’d made had killed over 250,000 people, and he felt so much guilt about it that he didn’t feel he was worthy of being called star-lord anymore), and they... lifted each other up and inspired each other. became better people just by knowing each other, and grew together like that.

and their bond is so deep that the word “love” has literally been used on-panel twice, by peter and rich both. that’s... about as canon as it gets, barring marvel just explicitly making it canon. but even if you don’t want to read it as romantic, it’s literally canon that these two characters are critically important to each other.

YES.  That IS the question.

Sorry for the facetious answer, but we really really don’t know.  As far as we can tell they wouldn’t have any kind of visual or audial arts, given that they don’t use sight or hearing for communication, and their senses of taste and smell also seem to be fairly limited by human standards beyond what it takes to interface with other creatures’ minds.  They also don’t apparently make noise, and navigate through tactile echolocation (#29). So that rules out music, visual art, and a lot of what we humans would consider “culture.”  Not only that, but we never really see yeerks who aren’t in the military, and we rarely ever see them outside of strategic-planning or combat situations.

We know that they have a language that can be at least kind of conveyed through human mouths (#17) and andalite thought-speak (MM1), even if Rachel estimates that the human-controllers are probably approximating a lot of words and sounds.  We know that yeerks have complex computer interfaces that allow them to digest large amounts of information (HBC) for all that they’re probably not “reading” in the sense we think of reading with words on a page or books on tape.  They could be using a Braille-like system, or taking advantage of their parasitic abilities to create artificial intelligences that they can then “infest” and take “memories” from.

There’s also the fascinating detail that they die in order to spawn.  Teeechnically, a species can’t have “culture” at all unless it transmits information from generation to generation within single groups.  So, it’s possible (and crazy to think about): yeerks could’ve had no culture at all before Seerow came along.  It’s a remote possibility, given how far they come in the next 40-odd years, but if all the yeerks in a naturally occurring yeerk pool were constantly smushing themselves into balls, dying, and producing new yeerks that had no way to communicate with the now-dead older generation…  Maybe yeerks need computers like the kind Seerow offered in order to exist as cultural beings.  If they do go from having zero culture and zero communication to being The Yeerk Empire in about 15 years, then boy howdy is Ax off-base when he says that humans advance faster than the universe average.

Assuming that the yeerks did have culture before Seerow (maybe they communicate through half-generations?) we can speculate about human-like forms of culture that might work with their lived experience.  A couple ideas:

Dance.  For yeerks this’d probably mostly take the form of synchronized swimming, but given that they swim in pretty tight clusters and there are usually hundreds of thousands of them in any given yeerk pool… might be pretty cool.

Competitive sports.  I’m thinking yeerks could have races, swimming obstacle courses, attempts to see who can control a gedd the fastest, and other demonstrations of physical skill.

Games.  If yeerks are anything like ketrans, then they might really enjoy MMORPG-like simulations using their computer-brains.  Plus, these could double as training tools, similar to the way the U.S. military uses video games right now.

Changing hosts over several yeerks.  This could be the form of a game or puzzle or training exercise, and to be clear it’s UNETHICAL AS FUCK, but Yeerk 1 could leave a skill or quirk or neurosis in a single host’s brain that Yeerk 2 finds and builds upon, and then maybe Yeerk 3 tries to force the response to go extinct while Yeerk 4 alters the host’s brain chemistry in order to create a conditionalized response for the training… So on and so forth.  They could build on each other’s work in order to pool their intelligence toward altering a single human or hork-bajir AND I DIDN’T SAY IT WAS MORAL JUST THAT IT WOULD BE FUN FOR EVIL YEERKS TO DO TO PASS THE TIME.

Competing with sensory intensity.  For yeerks new to humans’ music perception, andalites’ panoptic vision, hork-bajir’s trigonometric skill, or taxxons’ probably-out-of-this-world sense of taste, I could totally see bro-like contests with yeerks drinking hot sauce or blasting heavy metal or otherwise proving their toughness through masochism.

Sun worship.  This one is hinted at a teensy bit in the books, when controllers greet each other with “may the kandrona shine and enrich you” (#2, #41, #53) or variations on that phrase.  Since the yeerks take their energy directly from their sun, or else bottle up the energy of their sun in portable kandrona generators, it might make sense that they have a deeply spiritual connection to the sun and its rays.

 “has hollytuft or sorrelstripe literally ever spoken. who the hell is...”

Leafshade is apparently has the cat that fostered Twigbranch for a mom and I'm sick annoyed that the potential sisters have never interacted as adults

Lilyheart!

Aaaaah Tamara

Aww, how exciting someone else knows who she is!   I had or (maybe still have?  my storage bins are black holes) both versions of Tamara and the horses and a video I watched obsessively.  I’ve been thinking I wanted to get the entire Princess Gwenevere line now and started with replacing a childhood Tamara, because even if she is somewhere in the depths in my mom’s basement, I know she’s lost all her extra pieces.  

Aw yeah, that was super fun! I’d like to redo it at some point, it was for a class and the clipping masks in Illustrator got angry at me for no good reason. The doggo was inspired by this lovely pup!