Sasha Talking In 3 Languages

big family yep LTTM and FP seem to really like playing dominoes

creatures of shape and color

The Architecture of Rain World: Layers of History

A major theme in Rain World's world design that often goes overlooked is the theme of, as James Primate, the level designer, composer and writer calls it, "Layers of History." This is about how the places in the game feel lived-in, and as though they have been built over each other. Here's what he said on the matter as far back as 2014!

The best example of this is Subterranean, the final area of the base game and a climax of the theme. Subterranean is pretty cleanly slpit vertically, there's the modern subway built over the ancient ruins, which are themselves built over the primordial ruins of the depths. Piercing through these layers is Filtration System, a high tech intrusion that cuts through the ground and visibly drills through the ceiling of the depths.

Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets, the friendly local ghost, tells the player of the "bones of forgotten civilisations, heaped like so many sticks," highlighting this theme of layering as one of the first impressions the player gets of Subterranean. Barely minutes later, the player enters the room SB_H02, where the modern train lines crumble away into a cavern filled with older ruins, which themselves are invaded by the head machines seen prior in outskirts and farm arrays, some of which appear to have been installed destructively into the ruins, some breaking through floors.

These layers flow into each other, highlighting each other's decrepit state.

The filtration system, most likely the latest "layer," is always set apart from the spaces around it. At its top, the train tunnels give way to a vast chasm, where filtration system stands as a tower over the trains, while at the bottom in depths, it penetrates the ceiling of the temple, a destructive presence. (it's also a parallel to the way the leg does something similar in memory crypts, subterranean is full of callbacks like that!)

Filtration system is an interesting kind of transition, in that it is much later and more advanced than both of the areas it cuts between. This is a really interesting choice from James! It would be more "natural" to transition smoothly from the caves of upper subterranean to the depths, but by putting filtration system in between, the two are clearly demarcated as separate. The difference in era becomes palpable, the player has truly found something different and strange.

Depths itself is, obviously, the oldest layer not only of subterranean but of the game itself. The architecture of Depths has little to do with the rest of the game around it, it's a clear sign of the forgotten civilisations that our friend Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets showed us, there's not actually that much to say about it itself, it's mostly about how it interacts with the other layers of subterranean.

That said, Subterranean is far from the only case of the theme of layers of history. It's present as soon as the player starts the game!

The very first room of the game, SU_C04, is seemingly a cave. It is below the surface, the shapes of it are distinctly amorphous rather than geometric. (well. kind of, it doesn't do a very good job of hiding the tile grid with its 45 degree angles.)

But let's take a closer look, shall we?

See that ground? it's made of bricks. The entire cave area of outskirts is characterised by this, the "chaotic stone" masonry asset is mixed with brickwork, unlike the surface ruins which are mostly stone. This, seemingly, is an inversion of common sense! The caves are bricks and the buildings are stone. This is not, however, a strange and unique aspect but a recurring motif.

This occurs enough in the game for it to be clearly intentional, but why would materials such as bricks be used in otherwise natural looking terrain?

The answer lies in the "Layers of History" theme. This is in fact, something that happens in real life, and it's called a tell

en.wikipedia.org

Tell (archaeology) - Wikipedia

To be specific, a tell is a kind of mound formed by settlements building over the ruins of previous iterations of themselves. Centuries of rubble and detritus form until a hill grows from the city. Cities such as Troy and Jericho are famous examples. The connections to the layers of history theme are pretty clear here, I think. Cities growing, then dying, then becoming the bedrock of the next city. The ground, then, is made of bricks, because the ground is the rubble of past buildings. The bones of forgotten civilisations, heaped like so many sticks!

i love fantasy hybrids but i wish more people leaned into the body horror potential of it. dragon hybrids with upsettingly human eyes peering out from their otherwise draconic forms. winged hybrids with back muscles incapable of supporting the weight of their limp, atrophied wings. dhampirs with a crooked, painful clash of human and predatory animal teeth competing for space inside their bloodied mouth, inhibiting their bite and making feeding a grotesquely messy affair. ill-proportioned chimeras that haunt the heroes sent to slay them with how much they resemble those they seek to protect from them. monsters who are shunned by their monstrous and human relations alike, their greatest sin being that they didn't win the genetic lottery and now must bear the consequences of their forebears' union for all to see.

something based on an old headcanon of mine

i know he is ruining outfits with the comfort hoodie

had a tweakout with the groupchat last week. tldr; jeremiah being a reference to paper jekyll sparked the theory of reggie and him being based off of jekyll and hyde which unfortunately makes too much sense

I do wish there were more species under Hymenoptera that produced honey in the sheer abundance that a select few honey bees do so we didn't have to rely on them for the harvesting of honey, or even that just keeping other, native insects in such a way that is beneficial to those species and the wildlife around them was more viable for someone to just Do.

Really, I love the idea of beekeeping conceptually as something that can keep a particular species surviving and actually thriving, but it's only fully ecologically viable in the locations where those species... Are from. Otherwise the honey bees (typically European honey bees, Apis mellifera) will create an imbalance in other ecosystems, outcompeting native bees (and other nectar and pollen feeders!) and spreading diseases to them. They're undeniably important to crops, I'm not saying they're just so horribly bad, I love honeybees the same as any other Hymenopteran, but unfortunately often people feel like honey bees are the only option when that is just not the case.

Unparalleled Innocence - An Angry Analysis (and fanon criticism) by The Conduit

(under cut due to being a long post)

I like to label myself "the #1 UI fan and the only person who really gets them" for… probably obvious reasons at this point. My interpretation of them is wildly different from almost everyone else's "mean gossip girl" interpretation of them, which - frankly, in my and some other people's opinion - results fron fandom misogyny due to gossiping's status as a stereotypically feminine trait. When a character's gender is unconfirmed, people default to referring to a character by masculine terms, and oftentimes get angry when the character in question is revealed to be anything else. (See: Seven Red Suns.) However, due to (misogynistic) stereotypes, the overwhelmingly common fanon interpretation of Unparalleled Innocence is a mean gossip girl, as mentioned prior.

I was not exempt from interpreting them as that until I actually began to look into the way they're treated by canon.

Unparalleled Innocence will be referred to as they/them in this essay, due to chatlog Iterators vagueposting about them using they/them pronouns and due to them lacking official confirmation on gender identity in both vanilla and Downpour.

One of the most significant mentions of UI, at least in the context of this essay, is the Shaded Citadel pearl. At the time of the pearl's writing (1514.008)[1], UI is likely still in construction or has only recently been constructed, placing them very, very close to whenever the mass ascension took place (before 1591.290). Unparalleled Innocence never has a line of dialogue in a single broadcast or broadcast pearl, and their characterization can only be inferred by the way other Iterators talk about and treat them.

UI is excluded from the discussion about Erratic Pulse, quite possibly suggesting alienation or distrust in UI by the local group for one reason or another.[2: Sky Islands 3] (Seven Red Suns is also excluded, but that's a result of them being heavily implied to not be a part of the same local group as the rest of the main cast. See: Citation 3) While discussing the leaking of Five Pebbles' rot, the idea that UI is mean is only a theory of Chasing Wind's (hence: "I suppose"), and not explicit fact.[3]

The most likely conclusion is that Unparalleled Innocence is a closed-off individual who doesn't realize the harm their actions bring to others, and is treated as much meaner by fellow Iterators than they actually are. Based on Gazing Stars' and Secluded Instinct's dialogue, it's entirely possible that UI might have leaked the rot images in a valiant attempt to notify others that Five Pebbles wasn't in a great state. They could've wanted to help to try and redeem whatever poor reputation had led to them being considered potentially mean by CW, but messed it up entirely.

Unparalleled Innocence came close to the sunset of their creators. They were abandoned by the so-called "noble benefactors." They were young, and didn't know how to handle it. This also plays in the favor of the idea that one of Rain World's themes is about empathy and understanding[4] - and in this case, it would be the lack of either.

And the fandom continues to mistreat them, just as they are by their fellow Iterators.

drawpile