Research Books

I've looked at many books about different people from around the world. I want to do my best to portray them in my stories. 

But there's something that's bugged me about them, and I finally realized what it was. Most of these books discuss different cultures in such a dry, distant way. It feels like they're reporting a different species. And it feels like they always miss the heart of the culture they're supposed to be studying. 

For example. I picked up what was essentially a small textbook about the American Indians of Yosemite. And it had tons of details about their clothes and their food and stuff. But there was absolutely nothing about what they were like as people.

How can "researchers" learn so much about a culture and then report on those people as if they were observing the rock-collection habits of penguins in Antarctica? I assume that it has to do with scientists being trained not to get attached to the things they study. 

But how can you ever hope to understand something if you only ever look at it coldly from the outside?

(Obligatory zoo photo)

Metal Bending

This is building off of a previous post about renaming the "Magic-Folk." They're now called Aevenn. It got too complicated to weave this topic into that post, so I'll discuss it more here.

For a long time, I've been thinking of creating a new race of Aevenn. I have the earth magic people, but their magic is mostly rock. And it never sat right with me how metal magic was included with rock magic. After all, rock and metal are extremely different chemically. It always seemed odd that they were lumped together in some elemental systems. 

I've been fretting over this for both the Aevenn, and also the earth dragons. I've already drawn and organized all of my dragon species, and I don't even have any ideas for another design of dragon. Unless I just made it similar to the existing earth dragons. 

And since I never wanted to design a metal dragon, it held me back from making a metal race of Aevenn. But also, you don't usually find big chunks of metal out in the world. It always seems to be in veins, or nuggets. It's not nearly as plentiful as rock. So maybe there are just fewer of the metal people. 

Anyway, I finally made a race of metal people. I don't know if I'll ever do the same with dragons, and it will probably continue to bug me about whether or not I should.

And on a different part of that same topic, what about storm magic? I have the storm dragons that can spit lightning. But some of them can also work with the wind too. Wind and lightning certainly go together with the theme of storms, but again they are very different from each other.

So I also wonder if I should split the storm dragon into two species - one for wind and one for lightning. 

(I doubt I'll make lightning humans though)

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

Okay, I just watched the last episode, and now I have to rethink the whole post. Which is hard because I'm crying.

I'll return tomorrow (because it's late and I have to work tomorrow. I'm the kind of adult that stays up late and watches cartoons that make me cry)


Okay, I'm back! I want to write this before I watch any Youtube videos that analyze the show. Also, I've only seen this show once, so I may have missed a few things. I need to watch it again.

So, Nicole recommended a series to me: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts


Spoilers

I love Kipo. She's one of those characters that can make friends even with the must unlikely people. Like Steven Universe, or even Natsume Takashi.
I always like characters like that. Steven and Kipo show us that violence never solves the problem.
Plus, she's a jaguar. Since my animals is a clouded leopard, we match XD. Her jaguar arms are awesome.

 

 Also, we share a birthday!

I also love Wolf.
She had me crying some, but that's not why I was crying last night TT^TT

Kipo and Wolf are two of my favorites. Along with the character I'll discuss at the end.

As you may have gathered, there are very few romances in fiction that I like. And I have this really strange (and probably really annoying) way of laughing very hard when I'm watching a romance that I think is cute. Fortunately this has always been when I'm alone, so no one has had to witness it. But Benson and Troy triggered that.
I'll share an embarrassing moment. During the show, Kipo says that she likes Benson. And he says that he's gay. I started laughing so hard that someone literally looked into my room to ask what was happening. All I could do was gasp, "I'm watching cartoons!" Why was I laughing so hard? Because that same thing happened to me! Except it took me several years to find out XD

Benson also really has Kipo's back. He goes so above and beyond to get Wolf to forgive Kipo for keeping that secret in season 1. I was really confused when the TheaOtters said that Benson was a coward. I mean, look at how he's first introduced!

I really like Lio and Song too. And their whole family's relationship.
Seeing Lio mind-controlled is the worst :(   It's bad for Song too, but we don't know that it's her for the first chunk of the series, so it doesn't hurt as much. 

It's interesting seeing Kipo protect her dad. Part of me thinks "Dad, you're supposed to protect your daughter!" But Scarlemagne was trying to take him apart. And he wouldn't have had any trouble doing so. The other part of me is like, "Yeah, Kipo! Protect your dad!"

Before I get to what will be the longest part of my post, just a couple little things to comment on.
The show has some weird stuff that I could do without, but the rest made it well worth it.
I guess they never found a cure for the "cured mutes." I always assumed they'd be able to get Yumyan and the others back, so I didn't really mourn them properly. So we definitely get a lot more bittersweet to the ending.
We also never found out where the mutes originally came from.
It was also never really explained why Doctor Emilia attacked Kipo's burrow. I guess she was just looking for Kipo to destroy her?
I love how much faith Jamack has that Kipo is going to rescue him and the other prisoners from the doctor.
Okay, I know the narwhals are a parody. But it's really strange to see a buff narwhal.
I'm not sure how all the little bits of old technology still work. Like Benson's tape deck. I had some cassettes of the Harry Potter books from when I was kid and they just degraded over a decade. Let alone 200 years. But little stuff like that isn't as important to me as characters.
Dude, Song spent months with a hand covered in gold. How?
Also, when we first met Fun Gus, he had bones hidden in him. Wouldn't that hint that he'll end up digesting Emilia?
And Emilia is a very bad scientist. Even Lio and Song point it out. She's giving poor Hugo three formulas a day. How does she expect to figure out what triggers the mutation when there are literally thousands of formulas he's taken? 

Where is Mandu's family? Pigs keep their babies close when they're little (random thought from an animal nerd).  

And another animal nerd thought - baby Hugo makes chimpanzee noises. Wrong primate XD  (Everyone uses chimp noises for monkey noises though @_@ )

Dave's story of the fan war felt really weird. Benson became the last of his people because of a fan? Are we supposed to take that story literally?

Why does Wolf let Kipo call her Wolf? She hates wolves! 

I like all the ways they introduce the "KIPO" logo at the beginning of each episode. 

I love how they draw the night sky.


And now on to the main thing. Did you see it coming?
Scarlemagne.
Oooh, I love that name. I'll probably switch between the names Scarlemagne and Hugo, to fit the context. 

I love how his theme song is so menacing at first. But then it also has the gentler versions, for when he's younger (And also at the end).

He only appears once in the first seven episodes. Though we hear plenty of rumors about him.
When we found out that Lio knew Scarlemagne, I knew that he was going to have some sort of tragic backstory.
I also knew that I would fall for it. After all, I am a huge sucker for animal-like people. Especially if they have tragic backstories. And this sort of backstory in particular gets to me (It dates all the way back to the first Pokemon movie.)
I also understand why a non-human might want to destroy humans, considering what bad humans are capable of.

That being said, I fell for his backstory far harder than I expected.
After all, there's a family of mandrills at the zoo. I've been watching the baby mandrill grow up. He's so entertaining. And such a little stinker!
Here he is, being goofy

And now he has a baby sister too!
Mandrills are also a really good animals if you want something intimidating. They're the largest monkey in the world. I've never been close to one, and it's hard to judge sizes of animals from a distance. But I would not want a mandrill angry at me! Look at these fangs! These are from the dad mandrill at the zoo.

And Scarlemagne is far larger than this guy. He's like the size of a gorilla. Probably bigger, actually. 

His design seems like Beast, from the Beauty and the Beast animated movie. Did they do that on purpose? Because I think his voice actor is the same guy that did Beast in the live action version. Either way, the voice actor does an awesome job. The crazy laughs, the threats, the different tones, and of course the sweet little Hugo.

Young Hugo was so precious. He immediately reminded me of Paddington from the movies XD 

In the piano song he plays for himself, he says he can't play music because he might get found out. But he keeps playing anyway. I guess he's caught up in his fantasy and forgets where he is. And as he says, he's very bored. Of course he is. A smart little guy locked in a room and having to hide his smarts from all but two people. His song about not playing the piano gets him caught.

And it's true - Lio didn't even try to find Hugo when they ran. I get it. Lio has a new baby, and those parental instincts are strong. But it's still so sad. I like to think that Song was going to go back for him. Except she obviously wasn't able to. 

How old was Hugo supposed to be then? If he were an ordinary mandrill, he'd be about four or five. But he turned into a mute. So who knows?

Kipo, thank you so much for hugging Scarlemagne after hearing his story. I also wanted to hug him.

I bristled a bit when Scarlemagne called out against zoos. But he has no way of knowing that zoos are an attempt to protect injured or endangered animals. And maybe the zoo at Las Vistas wasn't one of the good zoos. 

When Scarlemagne tried to flee the stadium and got knocked out, I was relieved when Lio went back for him. He wasn't going to make the same mistake twice, even after everything Scarlamagne did. Go Lio!

At the end of season 2, I kept thinking that Kipo would work on befriending Scarlemagne. So when season 3 started, I was shocked to find that he'd been kept in an empty little glass box for months. They didn't even give him a piano! Not until a lot later, anyway.
Yeah, yeah, I know. He'd just tried to kill everyone and broke Kipo's trust and everything. 

But his prison is shockingly similar to the little box he was kept in as a kid - when he was forced to run on the treadmill. And he slept alone, curled up on the floor. They'd better bring him blankets or something at night (A great twist that Emilia ended up in that box, if only briefly. Though I was surprised that no one else protested that Scarlamagne suddenly had free reign when the box was destroyed). 

He didn't even care at first whether or not he got "the cure."

My favorite part was when he wasn't really evil anymore, but he was still such a little a**hole. Breaking everyone's stuff, and running away with that crazy laugh of his.
(It's like Regina, from Once Upon a Time, where she wasn't the villain anymore but she was still a snarky jerk) Anyway, I love it!
And it's even better because Scarlemagne couldn't stand up to a little kitten. I guess he can't handle crying children.

So I liked him more and more through season 3.
During the last episode when he said farewell, I got super upset. I kept telling myself that they'd save him at the last minute, or something.
But they didn't. And he sacrificed himself to save his baby sister.
And that's why I was crying.

And I get it. As a storyteller, I really get it. After all, I killed one of my favorite characters in the story I'm working on. I had to.
But I still wanted little Hugo to have a happier ending TT^TT

I just watched that scene again to help me write this post. And I'm crying even harder this time around. Oh jeez.
Okay, I've gone through a couple tissues, and now I'm ready to edit this. Now that I'm all emotional again.

Magical Flowering Trees

The mage temple first appeared in one of my oldest stories. That particular story was the first one ever set in either of my worlds. Over the years, almost everything about it has changed. Except one thing. From the beginning, the temple was surrounded by a grove of plum trees. And when they all flowered, it was like walking through pink clouds.

When I reloacted the temple, I started to question that. After all, plum trees are not native to that area. They weren't native to the original location either. But that original location was in a forest. Trees wouldn't be too conspicuous there. The temple's new location is largely tree-free. I immediately thought that there should be a funny story behind the trees. It never really occurred to me until this moment that I could actually get rid of the trees, but I like the idea of giving them a strange origin story XD After all, there's gotta be a lot of strange tales in the history of that mage temple.

English is Weird

Another video about words

Shiny Pokémon Again

Okay, gonna do another frivolous video game post about shiny Pokémon! None of these are recent. It just took me this long to write about it.

Not long after I found my shiny Vullaby, I found two more shiny g-max Pokémon. I don’t remember if they were on my raids, or if they were from online raids.
Carnelian the Bonsly, and Rosso the Solrock

Then a nightmare. I came across a shiny gmax Machamp in an online raid. And I failed to catch it. I was so angry taht they only gave you one Pokeball to catch it. It was so easy to lose a shiny.
So I went to Let’s Go Eevee with the intent of chain shiny hunting a shiny Machop.
And a shiny Onix appeared before I even got started. I named her Riju, from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I had been playing earlier.

And I finally found my shiny Machop. I named him Daruk – also a character from Breath of the Wild. (Though I had to give up on a shiny Charmander along the way! I already had one, so I let it go).

A buddy at work said he wanted a shiny Nidoran M. Since he helped me with some trade evolutions, I tried to shiny hunt one for him on Let’;s Go Eevee. I didn’t find one. But I did find a shiny Rattata! I named her Sweetpea.

I continued trying to hint for that shiny Nidoran, with no luck (I even gave up on two more shiny Rattata TT^TT)
Then as I was exploring the Pokémon Mansion, I went around a corner and practically stepped on a wild Pokémon. The moment the enouncter music started, I noticed a couple sparkles appearing from around the corner and realized what I must have. A shiny Raticate! I named her Bailey.

That same work buddy told me about a Facebook/Discord group that does shiny Pokémon giveaways. I joined, wanting to get that shiny Gmax Machamp (at the time there was no way to add Gmax to a regular Pokémon, and I was still determined to regain that one I lost). People found a fascinating bug in the games that let you find chains of shinies in the raid dens. I ended up joining several and catching a baunch:
Charjabug-Brix
Hattrem-Maple (for the witch in the Zelda oracle games)
Lampent-Kalahari (watching an Africa documentary that day)
Heatmor-Gobi (watching an Africa documentary that day)
Alcremie-Kirimi (after a character in Ouran High School Host Club)
Drakloak-Dundee (Watching Crocodile Dundee that day)
Turtonator-Darius (I’d been reading FMA earlier)
Hakamo-o-Aurelian (I’d been reading FMA earlier)
Espeon-Izumi (I’d been reading FMA earlier)
Sylveon-Orinoco
Pikachu-Tanji
Eevee-Anza
Machamp-Bruce (A name I’d had in mind for a while)
Togekiss-Alderaan (watching Star Wars that day)
Golisopod-Yavin (watching Star Wars that day)

Several of them were Gmax, including that sought-after Machamp!
After I finally got that g-max Machamp, I stopped joining the raids. Shiny Pokémon aren't as exciting when they're too easy to get. I punished myself by drawing all of them. That's a good motivation to stop catching easy shinies. (And of course, not long after this, they released the option to gmax normal Pokémon. So I could have made Daruk a G-max after all. Ah well) I still get the urge to shiny hunt a Vulpix or Squirtle on Let's Go Eevee. I tried for a Vulpix recently, but no luck. Maybe some day. I caught a surplus of shinies this year, so maybe it's good to wait.

Character Theme Songs

Now there are many songs I relate to. But sometimes I'll see somone compare a song to a character from a movie or series. I've always thought it was fascinating. After all, I love both music and good characters. But for some reason, I almost never find songs that remind me of specific characters.

For an example of linking a song to a character, there's the trailer to that horribly depressing Wolverine Movie, "Logan." The first time I saw that trailer the song struck me. And when I listened to it again, it really does strike Logan as he is in that movie.
(Linking the trailer here) (Sorry, random aside. When I first saw the trailer, I went, "Hey Logan and the Professor are going on an adventure together! Cool!" NO IT WASN'T )

As a matter of fact, there's only one song that ever stuck me as fitting a character.
The song is "Lemon Tree," by Peter, Pauil, and Mary (I wrote a post about them a little while ago).
And the character is Kvothe, from "The Name of the Wind."
Even so, the song feels like a silly comparison (after all, Kvothe has gone through far more than this song shows). Despite that, I still think of it as his song. 

And it may not be a specific character, but there's one episode of Steven Universe that really made a song pop into my head. It's the episode where Steven and Eyeball are stuck in the bubble together. 

The song I associate with that is "Space Oddity."

Actually, I found a couple other songs that relate to my own characters.
For example, Stronger Than You, for Fern. I totally want her to sing that while she's kicking butt during a fight. I have no idea who she'd be fighting that would fit that song though. Hmm.
(I love this song so freaking much)

And then Evva fits with "It's Over, isn't It?"
At least she does at the end of the story.

Hey, why are both of those songs from Steven Universe?

I should dig through my music and see if I can find any other song connections. At least for my own characters, if nothing else. (Except my computer problems persist - mostly with my music and photos. So I'll have to wait until I get those fixed. TT^TT )

The Tragedy:

When you write a poem on a scrap of paper an put it in your pocket.
And then days later, you put on pants that have just gone through the wash and find a little hardened pebble of paper that was once a poem.

Sumatran Tiger

Words

An interesting video about words!

Don't Take Blue Sky for Granted

This actually happened a few weeks ago, on Spetember 9th. I've been having trouble with photos on my computer, so I couldn't post it until now. (Let's hope my photos are fixed now! ) Anyway, due to a crazy thunder storm in the middle of the summer (unheard of around here) a bunch of forest fires started across California. MAny were small, but some went out of control. Mismanaging forests, drought from climate change, and crazy storms from climate change all combined to burn our forests and homes. It lead to weeks of awful air quality. Though there weren't any fires really close to my house, there were some days where the smoke was so bad that it was like a heavy fog. And then one day, the day never came.

This is a photo my mom took which shows the color of the sky (though it's a bit blurry). This is from the middle of the day. It got darker until noon. Then it got a little bit lighter in the afternoon, but we never saw sun or clouds or anything. These are a couple photos I took in the morning, at work. The picture of the sky does not capture it at all - my camera automatically adjusted to the light.

But here's a photo I took of the wolves - again, in the late morning - which shows how dark it was.

It was so freaky. People were walking around with flashlights. Apparently the fog was holding all of the smoke up above, which is how it covered the sun (Ironically, the air quality was not too bad on this day). Luckily the next day, the sun was back. OR at least, the sky wasn't orange. -shudders-