Snippet Saturday

Snippet Saturday

from Kingdom of Bumalia

"...you and I share a different relationship. You have given me a job that… I want to fulfill as best as I can; however, that entails working closely with you and being sure anything you do doesn’t affect what I have to do.” She paused. “Think of it this way, it’s true people my age don’t view you as a major authority, we see you as someone we can relate to and with that comes a level of dismissal.”

Leigh looked off. “So my words will never hold against you? That seems to be true for everyone around me; if not this, then it’s my age and if not my age, it’s my standing.”

Cassie’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t want to be rude, but can I say something?”

“Go ahead.”

“You keep up such a bright smile, but have feelings like this. I think it’s completely fine that you’re sometimes upset or hurt by the words of others. I feel you should embrace those feelings and grow from them, because that hurt you’re feeling is a part of who you are.”

He looked back at her. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve heard tales of you being bested in battle or screamed at for an inability to work and yet in those moments your smile never wavered. This shows those problems don’t phase you, but these do. Working to remedy these problems should be at the forefront. Above all else, you should think, how am I going to make myself feel better?”

Leigh’s eyes watched her face intently, so much so that Cassie had to avoid his gaze. She reached to adjust her book below her and when she looked back up Leigh was sitting upright again.

“How do you have such wise words?”

“Because I have lived my life instilled with fear from an early age. My nature dictates I am very fearful of anything that comes my way and instead of allowing it to control me, I found a way to cope with it. Writing, reading, drawing and painting; anything expressive has helped me to mitigate my feelings and develop a fondness for what I do now.”

Leigh then looked to the top of her head. “I always forget what you are because you hide your bunny ears. However, maybe that bias should be avoided and I should learn this look of yours.”

So, I had these sitting in my gallery and decided to share what they were related to :D

Here's the link to the original Picrew and the artist who made it.

So, this is related to my story titled Kingdom of Bumalia (if you wanna know more check this out!) where all of the inhabitants are kind of anthropomorphic.

The main groups are Birds, Insects, sea mammals and land mammals.

Birds are only royals so they don't have "common" forms. There's only three living birds in my story anyways and they're all related to the royal family.

Next are insects. There're more of them, but it's still common for there to only be royals. In this case, there's only one main insect and that's the cousin of the next-in-line (1st pic).

Common traits: Narrow green eyes, wings, [which the picrew didn't have :( ], dark hair, and royals.

Next is Aquatics and they're common folk along with everyone else below this point.

Usually aquatics are gentle and carefree with the traits that all their hair is blonde and their eyea blue due to being underwater most the time.

They can exist on land, but they usually don't have normal legs looking like these mfs for the most part.

These were some of the common folk I made.

Common traits: curly, bleached blonde hair and blue eyes. They usually have dry skin from being on the surface for too long.

For land mammals, these are pretty much the low class citizens who work coin bag to coin bag.

There's a lot of land mammals in the story, but with the options I had, I couldn't make them exactly to my liking. So, I made these guys who came out perfectly!

Common traits: having nothing in common. Most land mammals look different from species to species. Unlike every other species where everything is uniform.

It makes me happy to see this as someone who writes a TON of fantasy. I think another way to look at this is to say that you can't be racist to a dog and to apply that to your story. Most people feel it's inhumane to put a human in a cage, but not a dog.

The best way that I avoid this is to think how are my species related. One really specific example is a story where my characters are suppose to be "born by typical human means, but because of when they were born they ended up with special powers lol." I call these guys blood borns and always refer to them as a different species.

I've never even considered referring to them as a race because they're too different from "normal" humans in my story to be considered one.

Funnily enough, because of that, that story isn't my metaphor for racism despite having a plot close to it. The one that is has all the creatures under the same species, but they have differences between them and are put in a caste system referred to as 'classes' that order their importance and the whole plot is that their system is flawed assuming that [superior race] x [anyone else] isn't a true blood. When the caste system simply states that anyone who has two of the same blood type is a true blood.

I just think it's easier for people to use races because in our own world that's how it's used. We treat different "races" as whole other beings, which is really ridiculous.

Fantasy """races"""

We should stop calling fantasy races that. Normalize calling them "species" or "kinds" or "kin", or just anything other than "race".

A "race" is a matter of non-meaningful differences like skincolor and maybe average penis length. There is no evidence that different races are more intelligent etc which can't be explained by differences in opportunity or culture.

A """race""" is not living four times as long, and also they can read people's minds, and they are an anthropomorphic cat, and get +1 to DC saving throws against fire because why not, and have completely different origins to other """races""", also they're genetically predisposed to mindless lawful neutral rampages. That's something else.

High elves and dark elves and wood elves could probably be considered races of each other (if all any stat differences are due to culture or magic, not blood). But not in relation to humans.

I'm just saying; when Tolkien established the concept of fantasy races the word "race" meant something very different than it does now. Not to accuse Tolkien of anything, I have no idea what his stance on that matter was, but still.

Having an entire intelligent species that is inherently evil is one thing, but calling that a """race""", and especially if it gets used as a metaphor for actual races or racism, is another entirely.

The metaphor doesn't work because in real life all races are the same in ability (except for shit like +1 to cow juice digestion or -15 to not combusting in the sun like a vampire).

But racists don't know that or choose not to, they believe some races are better than others and there's a genocide-or-be-replaced situation when there just isn't. Racists often hurt their own race if it means hurting a different race because they believe it's that or their race will cease to exist, like how you might sacrifice a bunch of Gondorians to defeat Mordor, but since that isn't going to happen in real life they are actually just hurting themselves and others for no reason.

The irrationality of racism is crucial for all allegories of it because it's more likely to convince evil people to not be racist than the moral argument.

If in your setting """races""" are as different as they often are in fantasy, you have created a world where replacement theory can actually happen and where there could be some strictly practical arguments for racist policies like paternalism or even genocide which aren't completely imaginary.

Speciesism is also an interesting and valuable concept to explore, since unlike racism it may be practical but still unmoral (being distrusting of or genociding Tolkien or 40k orcs is still genocide but, like, they're orcs. Mindflayers even more so, they can literally only exist by parasitizing and torturing other intelligent species, it's the lesser of two evils). But sometimes speciesism might not be practical either. There is never a reason to discriminate against hobbits, they're just perfect little guys. They just wanna hang out and maybe sell cheap produce, without them the price of turnips will skyrocket! But speciesism should definitely be kept separate from race.

The words we use change how we think to some extent. Especially when in so many settings the "human" ""race"" is invariably Just White People™, then people will start thinking of all non-white races with the same brain pathways we use to conceptualize Orcs and Klingons. They become part of the same "other" as POC, which probably isn't going to improve the othering situation.

I've seen friends of mine (not racists) slip up and say "Humans" when they actually just mean "Europeans" in the context of talking about actual IRL history which is a mistake writers should probably stop priming our brains to make.

Could you imagine if all our crime media did the same thing and made people associate criminals with people of color??? oh wait

So, a while ago I figured out that video games can kind of answer what kind of struggles you face in your actual life.

When I realized this, I was playing Hatsune Miku and noticed I'm decent at most the hard and extreme songs, but I refuse to play them unless I can get a perfect chain on them. It's so bad, that even Cantarella's extreme and extra-extreme is unplayed despite me being able to play both of them. Like, I can learn pretty much all the songs, but if there's even one part I can't play, I won't play it at all.

That told me, just like in real life, I'm scared of failure even if I'll do 99% well on it. If it's not 100% (perfect) then I will just leave it until I rot and die.

I really hate that I'm like this.

But, on a less painful note, I also noticed that in games like The Legend of Zelda, I'm cheap as hell and will wait until the very last second before spending my rupees. Aka, in the older games, I would wait until my counter was max before buying potions or upgrades of items.

In the later games, I would avoid spending at all until I got the wallet upgrades and even then scarcely would I spend my money.

I think what that is relates more to me being perpetually broke irl. I'm scarce with my money because I know I should keep as much as I can for... whatever I may need.

Also, a not so good bonus is that I will play through most the Zelda games without potions or other healing items (like I usually play hero mode first if I can). Even in games where I have a potion in my inventory, I just won't use it when Link's health is low rip me in A Link To The Past. I think that means even irl I will destroy myself before even thinking about asking for help, which is obviously a terrible way to live :)

So... I did it!

Here's some proof of concepts for some of the mini-games 👏👏

A lot of them were either too similar to games that are already out, so there wasn't a reason to make a concept; or the idea is a little to grandiose that there's no way I can get it down with my art skill presently 😅

Either way, I'm really happy about how these turned out!

So let me explain them all in a bit more detail!

Ankara

His minigame is suppose to be a management sim where the main objective is matching the traits of his next client to whoever shows up in front of you. In this example, I used an idol who's likely just debuted and is extremely popular already. The traits for Ankara's next client are exactly that, so he'd get a pass!

On the webpage, I compared this game to things such as Papers, Please.

Just to keep in tune with his actual business, I feel most of the clients would end up being famous singers, actors/actresses, and other media personalities 📺

Akuma

Akuma is my little devil and in his mini-game it's meant to be a series of a dungeon crawler where each level has a different objective.

For ex. The 1st level would be a simple maze where you collect fire to increase the little "energy 🔥" meter there.

The 2nd level would be using the fire in easy battles.

The 3rd would be some mixture of the two

And the 4th would be a final boss fight using all that you learned in the levels before!

I also thought about adding skins and such and it'd be fun to have them in each of the levels locked behind challenges and other collectables.

Akihiko

Besides him being one of the baby bois of the series, I really didn't know what to do with him until I thought of this!

It's a little hard to explain since I don't normally play games like this, but it's essentially a search for various artifacts.

The best I could compare it too is The Grand Underground from Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.

Though, as you can see, my note about him giving you little facts is something I'd love to do. I always love learning about useless facts from games so why not have this be the section where it happens!

Brayleigh

He's my rocker boy and the reference for this pose is actually this image because Seonghwa living his dream as a rockstar is just hsiweofndkssbfjrr for my heart.

Also, what I mean by "diff appearances" is the fact that I'm so bad of an artist that Leigh never looks the same when I draw him... Ever. His hair is always different each time, so I just made that apart of his personality.

He's the type to always have his hair dyed a bubblegum pink and have it cut short one time, then up in a ponytail the next. It'd be nice to see him dressed differently to match the theme of whatever song is being played as well.

Oh, yeah, the game. It's a simple rhythm game that's based off of one of my favorite childhood video games SpongeBob Squarepants: Lights, Camera, Pants.

In the story, Leigh can play almost every instrument and writes his own music, so each level would be you "learning" how to play a different instrument. Starting with the easiest (and his favorite) the acoustic guitar!

Koto

Koto is another baby boi and he actually writes fiction stories based on non-fiction stories he hears from others.

So, I wanted to be sure that part of his writing process was in the mini-game, to essentially show people how it feels when you're drafting a story (fun fact! For anyone who's curious, Koto is both a planner and pantser).

So, the idea of the game is a little unrefined, but the jist is Koto is tasked with getting the non-fiction items he needs to build his story. His adventures may take him to a hospital, a car garage, a school, and even a giant hotel.

In these locations, the player aids Koto in finding whatever items he needs to make his story. Once he's obtained them, it's up to the player to arrange the story properly so Koto can have his final product!

I think next time I'll talk about extra things I wanted to add like collectables, extra stories, decorative items, different outfits, character customization, and events for the bois!

But, until then. Thanks for reading~

🍂

Here again after my usual hiatus this time though it was because of real world shit, aka setting appointments to get my teeth removed yay but I wanted to post something.

So, just today (or yesterday it's 2am for me) I finished a page on my website about an idea I got about a game idea. This is pretty common for me, but I wanted to share it here in case anyone was interested :D

Anyways, here's a little preview and you can read the full thing here if you want.

I was also considering making proofs of concepts about some of the mini-games I talked about and other collectables, but who know if I'll get around to that with all the other ideas I have in my head.

Either way, that's the post~

🍂

Words into Potions: a month-long writing challenge!

We're excited to announce Moon + Seraph's newest event...

Words into Potions (or, WIP!)

Join us this March 1st - 31st for a month-long writing challenge, where any and all types of writing goals are welcome! Use our event to draft a whole novel, outline a new WIP, finish a short story, or accomplish anything writing-related!

We have lots of exciting freebies to help you along the journey!

Track your milestones on a free, downloadable map

Collect digital writing-themed badges

When you reach your goal, randomly pull 1 of 12 digital tarot-inspired cards

Plus, to celebrate our birthday and the event finale on March 31st, we encourage you to post an introduction of your WIP(s) and a wrap-up of all the progress you made. Tag us and we'll reblog your post!

Optionally, join our Discord server to get more out of the Words into Potions writing challenge!

(Learn more about the server here.)

Earn special Discord roles by doing writing sprints

Participate in a weekly writing marathon, where we collectively try to reach a larger goal

Weekly WIP question trades, where we talk about each other's stories and encourage each other to keep writing

Share links to any progress updates you post on Tumblr in our dedicated event promotion channel, and we'll reblog them here

For a sneak peek at our free rewards and more details, read on below!

If you're going to participate or just want to help spread the word, please give this post a reblog! It's very hard for posts to be seen on Tumblr right now, and we really, really want this to find as many writers as possible.

Take a peek at a small section of our milestone map!

As you journey to your writing goal in March, you can also journey through a forest and collect different ingredients from mythical characters, creatures, and locations! Our map milestones are percentage based, which means they'll work for any goal you choose. Whether it's words, pages, hours, or anything else!

This is a super high-res file, so you'll be able to set it as your desktop wallpaper, zoom-in on all the details, and even print it as a poster! (We'll share more details on our printing recommendations when we release the full map mid-February.)

Here's 3 of our 38 writing badges, designed just for this event!

When we get closer to March we'll release a full list of our badges for you to reference and download throughout the month, or if you're in our Discord server, we'll have an automated system for you to claim your badges!

We encourage you to share the badges you earn on Tumblr, along with your progress! Please @ us in your posts if you do, so we can reblog and encourage you!

Reach your goal, and randomly pull 1 of 12 digital, tarot-inspired cards!

These are digital, downloadable cards that you can share on Tumblr, set as a phone lock-screen, and even print! We'll have size options for different desktop/phone wallpapers, as well as some dark mode versions! (Printing recommendations to come!)

Things to Know:

Words into Potions begins on March 1st 2024 and ends on March 31st 2024.

This event is geared toward original fiction writers, but all are welcome to participate.

Our Discord server is 18+ only, with no exceptions.

Our milestone map is free for personal use, but under no circumstances are you allowed to use it for commercial use (any situation in which you profit, financially or otherwise). You may not modify it in any way that obscures the Moon + Seraph watermark, and you may not claim that you created it.

Our writing badges are also free for personal use, but not commercial use, and you can't claim that you created them.

Our tarot-inspired card rewards are also free for personal use, but not for commercial use, and you can't claim that you created them.

Have questions? Send us an ask!

We're very excited about this writing challenge, so we're more than happy to answer any questions you have!