I Have So Many Thoughts About Deli, Colin, Karna And Ariana That I Cannot Put Into A Coherent Sentence

Our ragged, bloodstained girl in red. Flesh stained teeth, earth crusted nails. An animal-girl.

Girlhood knows red. She knows of blood and the hollowing hunger that resides in the pit of stomachs. She knows her way around organs and the fresh scent of danger. Girlhood knows of red eyes, red hands, red tongue licking a full, satisfied smile.

Red waits with the Creature resting on her grandmother’s bed. It lies with one paw over the other. It yawns and sleeps and bares its neck. It waits for inevitability. Fear wears the clothes of love.

“If you cannot eat, you will die. This is the Law.”

Tears swell at the corners of the girl’s eyes. Who are these tears for, my child? Humanity lays at the corners of her eyes. She wipes them with the back of her hand.

Hunger and hunger and hunger grips the girls stomach. Starvation. Instincts. Animal.

She lays the iron weapon into the Creature’s skull.

Red Riding Hood devours her shadow. She rips apart fur, finds the critical spot where the meat comes apart the easiest, where the heart pounds and fades the quickest.

She splits the skull apart, pulling the strings that have tormented her Story many times told. She strays the path and follows her instincts. Animal.

She eats. She eats and drinks and swallows. Bright red. Raw meat. She picks the fur and guts out of her teeth. She wipes her mouth on the collar of her white dress and her hands at her thighs. “My teeth were made to eat you”.

Unrecognisable child. People fear you the way they feared the Big Bad Wolf. What have you done? Predator claws and ears grow from her body. Alien, familiar. Maturity, mortality, humanity, innocence— the blood at the end of girlhood.

“I met death, and Death wants me to live.”

The Ravening War 1.05

When Aesop told the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf to Pinocchio, it really got to me how everyone immediately became protective of him and started snapping at Aesop, defending this abused little boy's right to lie and make mistakes. Those things that are so universally punished in the morals of stories like that. Those things that any person should have a right to do, especially a kid, and especially a kid in a really bad situation.

It really brought home for me how much of Neverafter is about kids misbehaving or disobeying their elders, as kids tend to do, and getting disproportionately punished for it with cruelty. Pinocchio, Red, and even Gerard and Rosamund. Jack, in Timothy's story. And I think it's really heartwarming to see those ideas rejected. No, actually, sometimes you need to lie in order to save someone. No, sometimes, your elders don't know what the hell they're talking about. Sometimes they don't have your best interest at heart. And really, you should be given grace and allowed to make mistakes and learn and grow either way, without being horrifically punished and traumatized for it. Especially as a child.

Idk, something about how viscerally angry it made everyone at the table to see this story preached to a little boy who has suffered more than enough for things that he should've had the right to do in the first place. It felt very beautiful and comforting. What a loving and kind story that is

very amused by whatever the hell is going on between Zac and Brennan this campaign

You bury your child. Distant land, unfamiliar territory within your own homeland, and yet so far from home. You stand at the crown of this insignificant hill, unfit for a princess, your heir, your twin, your friend, your child. And the last time you saw her war-stricken face, you didn't even know it would be your last, and the determination lining the ferocity of revenge and exhaustion in the creases of her eyes, her brilliant intelligence and curiosity lighting a torch down the broad and dark path called Death.

You lay her down in the sickeningly sweet earth, your dwindling people by your side, your queen by your side, your now singular daughter by your side.

“You continue to teach me“ —and the Bulb’s light casts dancing shadows through the trees on a gravestone upon a hill too humble for a King and his family.

And then they sail away from that nameless place, their dearly loved one now lying still, and cold, and so so quiet beneath this land of churning blood and gore and the stink of war in which no tears or love can save her anymore.

Ayda Aguefort 🐦‍🔥

Ame is a child when she first wonders through Grandmother Wren’s cottage. She wakes to the stomps of a fierce rooster, the smell of juk, the chorus of small sounds that builds the cottage.

Ame is a child when she falls in love with magic, the scent of it, the purity and the heart that lives at the core of it. Magic, the ability to connect with the earth, to provide for the animals and the trees, for the Spirits and honour their works. To help humans with sickness and mending.

The humanity in magic, the spinning of life to vow service to all that breathes on Umora.

Yet Ame is still a child as other children scowl at her, throw piercing gazes and words, “you’re a witch!” and see nothing but body, a little girl disconnected from the flesh of their own, a witch, nothing but a witch, an orphan, a stranger, a child. All but human.

But Ame had never thought herself anything other than human.

Ame, a child that never was, never could be, and forever will be.

She is a child when she is given to Grandmother Wren. Unwanted, strange child. She is a child when she is othered by the other children. Witch and apprentice, and still a child.

Ame never experiences childhood. She knows the wonders of magic and medicine, of healing and earth. But she never experiences the wonders of friendship, of connections in childhood. Ame never experiences the wonders of playing make belief, the warm hug after a heated argument, the small secrets shared in childhood.

But Ame is a child when finds more to her little family. A wizard, a witch and a wild one. Each child with a deep and profound sadness etched into the core of their beings and yet all too young to form the words to it.

Ame is still a child when she waves goodbye to her best and most True Friend. Tears wet her cheeks and the summer falls to her feet in a sweet breeze and a distant memory unforgotten. Ame is a child when she whispers her final goodnight to her brother, her True Friend, without and fully knowing so. She wakes up to the smell of moss and nothing but moss. She finds the cottage all too quiet.

Ame gains more than childhood during one summer and looses more than it when it is over. She finds fellowship and family in two True Friends. A secret and bond in childhood that cannot be simply broken. A thread that stretches across over water and mountains that no matter how far they are, they know they have a piece of themselves, of a simpler yet complicated summer in childhood somewhere across the lands. A small shard of childhood, of their true humanities stuck in memory of the scent of honey and magic and fur, a time long ago.

AAAA THIS PERSON GETS IT

so Aelwyn was totally in love with Penelope right?

now just imagine. you see the girl you are in love with after getting arrested, mere days before you will be tortured for months on end (not knowing that it isn't even her) and you maybe think it will all be ok and it might work out because she hasn't been caught.

now you get kidnapped and lose a full year of your memory. to your knowledge, it's been a few days since you were arrested. you find out that was a lie.

you finally return home after being tortured for a year, and losing both your parents, and find out the girl you loved is dead. you never got to say goodbye and the last time you saw her was a lie.

and that she would rather die than see you again.

worlds beyond number is sooo good!

It’s kinda crazy that the events at the last few episodes of FHSY were glossed over (this is a very badly written ramble about how The Bad Kids are probably incredibly traumatised after sophomore year and it isn’t addressed much, or kind of at all)

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Thinking about how The Bad Kids walked into the Forest of The Nightmare King after weeks of travelling, the constant threat that came with sleeping, being vulnerable in foreign lands and people, and that one of their best friends was kidnapped and only just retrieved with her months-of-tortured and previously evil sister a day or two ago.

And then they get to a skeleton-scattered temple of a forgotten god, their friend is violently murdered by a unicorn in front of their eyes, they do a whole bunch of drugs and after, on top of all of that, are tortured by their worst fears come to life?

Then The Bad Kids go on to face a colossal king— no, a god, AFTER having to shake off and give into their deepest fears with their war torn friends and family by their side, all for a school project worth 60% of their grade.

If Kristen Applebees had not hit that Nat 20 (tbf it had to have happened exactly that way but still), the fight would have spun out a very different way

The finale of FHSY fails narratively to address just the insane amount of emotional, mental and physical torture these children went through and because of the amount of real life time between seasons sophomore and junior year, I think we skipped over addressing that these kids are probably very traumatised