kaaramel:

softbutchcowboy:

softbutchcowboy:

meh tier: warlocks who make pacts for power

okay tier: warlocks who make pacts out of desperation

good tier: warlocks who make pacts because theyre gay for their patron

great tier: warlocks who dont actually make pacts but their patron is their parent

image transcript because it’s super tiny:

“im gonna make a tiefling warlock whose demon patron is her doting, slightly too overbearing mother

just like. they’re in the middle of a battle and there’s suddenly this dark rumbling, the smell of sulfur and a blast of heat, and with a burst of black smoke a terrifying demon crawls up out of the ground. immediately the demon goes over to the warlock and starts scrubbing dirt from her face, “oh, sweetheart, are you okay? are these all your little friends? i hope you got my last letter, but you know how those carrier pigeons can be when it comes to bridging the planes!” “moM PLEASE”

room-temperature-water:

This is Venus.  She is a snake loving sky/nightwing hybrid with faint mind reading powers.

  Her mom was a skywing princess named Adrenaline, her father a nightwing named Vagabond.  Adrenaline was killed after it was discovered that Venus was her daughter, Vagabond fled from the sky kingdom before he could be captured.  Venus, living with her dad and having nothing else to do, practiced building up an immunity to venom with various venomous snakes she found on her journey with her father.Vagabond discouraged this, but she continued doing it anyways.  By the time she was an adult, she could handle a bite from a dragonbite viper with nothing but a bit of itchiness.  She settled down on the border of the sky and sand kingdom, where she currently lives in a dragonbite viper den, both for safety from dragons hunting her and for her love of the misunderstood snakes.  

The snake she’s holding in the drawing is my interpretation of a dragonbite viper.

jenniferrpovey:

earendil-was-a-mariner:

George R.R. Martin: dragons are huge ferocious beasts who answer to a master
 

Tolkien: dragons are annoying, talking assholes

One interesting thought on this:

Fairy tale dragons? They’re like Smaug. They’re arrogant, talkative, they hoard treasure, they eat virgins. They’re amoral rather than evil, but they are intelligent monsters.

The dragon in Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, the one indirectly responsible for Eustace’s draconic curse is along the same lines.

At that time that is what a dragon was. There was a general consensus in western literature that dragons were, well, that.

In Medieval stories, dragons are to be killed by brave men. Gawain fights “wyrms” – a kind of wingless dragon. St. George slays a dragon. So does Beowulf. So does King Arthur. To be a worthwhile myth hero you have, at some point, to slay a dragon.

Early modern and nineteenth century dragons – we see one counter example – Faustus chariot is drawn by dragons in “Doctor Faustus.” The first really solid “friendly dragon” story is The Reluctant Dragon, which became a 1941 Disney film. That is the first story I can find about a dragon that befriends a human – but it’s friendship, not “human masters dragon.”

The second friendly dragon is E. Nesbit’s “The Last of the Dragons” who decides he’d rather hang out with the princess than fight the prince (the first example of subversion of the dragons eat maidens trope that I can find).

But they’re the minority.

In the 1930s, when Lewis and Tolkien were writing, dragons were the bad guys. The rare exceptions were dragons deciding not to act like dragons.

Then something happened.

That something probably started with a 1948 children’s book called “My Father’s Dragon – about a kid who runs away to Wild Island and rescues a baby dragon. Heard of it? If you’ve studied kid lit, sure, it won a ton of awards. Otherwise…nope, and certainly in Dawn Treader, written in 1950, dragons were still bad.

In the 1960s we start to see a couple more “good” dragons. But it’s almost always the same thing. Dragons are bad, except this one. This is a special dragon.

Then in 1967 John Campbell ran a story in Analog named Weyr Search. Heard of that one? Yup.

It was part of a novel called Dragonsflight, written by Grand Master Anne McCaffrey.

And she completely changed what dragons were.

Anne’s dragons were gentle, genetically engineered protectors who bonded to a human rider at birth and were “mastered” by that rider – the dragons offered instinct, but the reason came from the humans.

Anne McCaffrey was one of the first female authors to write science fiction by women about women – and while she had a number of flaws and was honestly a better worldbuilder than writer she inspired a lot of people.

And changed our view of dragons as a fantasy trope.

Since then most fantasy writers that include dragons have them as friendly and willing to be ridden by humans. Even the “good” dragons in the DragonLance novels.

In other words: In the space between Tolkein and Martin, who’s first short story collection was published in 1976, almost a decade after Weyr Search Anne McCaffrey turned dragons on their head.

Daenerys’ dragons owe more in their lineage to Ramoth than they do to Grendel, the dragon slain by Beowulf.

(In other words, literary evolution is fascinating).

feynites:

quousque:

curlicuecal:

chamomile-geode:

don’t know if this is as ~deep~ as i think it is, but by all of gaston’s own personal standards of identity/values, the beast is a better man than he is: brawnier, bigger, fightier, & of course every last inch of him’s covered in hair

ohmigod, it’s true though!  the beast was basically gaston, and the ticked off fairy turned him into the purest manifestation of his toxic ideals to make him learn to be less of an ass

…..now I really wanna see the version of the movie where instead of dying, the curse passes from the beast to gaston!

except gaston doesn’t have a swag ass castle to sulk in, so he’s out running around the countryside, hiding in forests and stuff, alternately terrorizing the populace and being hunted. it’s a turnabout of his “peerless hunter” backstory– he is now both the monster and the prey.

untillllll he, idk, meets some humble woodcutter(?) that takes him in when he’s wounded or offers him shelter in a storm? and etc, etc, LIFE LESSONS, toxic masculinity slowly vanquished.  (ooh, or maybe it should be like–a flower seller or herbalist or some feminine-coded profession he would have devalued to really set up a foil.)

also the gaston-beast needs antlers.  terrifying claw-hooked sprawling antlers.  antlers for all of his decorating.

BRUH

So if the curse is transmittable, is there a way to – rather than breaking the curse with true love- transfer it to some other asshole who happens to be nearby? Because that would kind of explain why the enchantress decided to go knocking on the doors of dickish eleven-year-old princes on stormy nights, and also why she seemed to look hideous until she suddenly transformed and then ‘cursed’ Adam. Maybe the enchantress was also a beast, and maybe there are two ways to ‘get rid’ of the curse. One is to have true love break it, but the other is to just sort of pass it on to someone the curse decides is worse than you are.

And the curse, rather than seeing ‘ah well he’s just a kid’ and not taking, instead went ‘oh he’s a kid – so his dickishness is also the fault of his caretakers’ and then applied itself to the entire damn castle.

Enchantress was probably like ‘…uh, oops? Oh well lol not my problem anymore’ and skipped off, after feeling juuust bad enough to tell Adam about the True Love option. But not the transfer one because what if he comes after her and the curse decides that after a week of beastification, he’s less of an asshole than she is now? Not risking it.

So Beast and Belle hook up and Beast thinks it’s the True Love cure, but in actuality he gets cured after the fight with Gaston because the curse decides ‘welp this guy is DEFINITELY a bigger asshole’ and that’s why the timing is kind of… odd Belle really does love him, though, but maybe the shift back is supposed to be more gradual with a love cure, because true love really does linger more in gradual adjustments and quiet moments than in grand displays. It’s a slower process (the time limit was really just the enchantress trying to make sure that the prince would hurry up and go that route for curing himself, and not waste time trying to track her down – it’s total bullshit, she’s a con artist, that’s what got her into this mess in the first place).

The slow cure is what happens with Gaston, instead of getting a declaration and then a magical girl transformation sequence back into his sporty lumberjack self, he just, bit by bit, starts to look more Gaston-y again. It spreads out from the eyes. His fur starts to get a bit thinner, his claws start to soften, his teeth no longer fill up his mouth like a packet of razors. At first he thinks it’s just because he has a place to stay and access to, like, brushes and warm water and stuff like that. But then he wakes up one morning and his antlers are shedding, and he can definitely see more of his old face than he used to.

His woodsy herbalist ‘friend’ doesn’t really say anything. He’s heard of curses and things, and he doesn’t like to pry – he’s just the sort who sees a need and tries to help with it. In the end, it’s really not Gaston’s looks (in either form) that when him over. It his skill, either, because Gaston can’t really hunt much without risking being seen and having to leave and possibly getting his herbalist in trouble for housing a monster. It’s just his company. Talks by the fire. Quiet mornings spent side by side. Sheer boredom, and a begrudging sense of indebtedness, have Gaston asking about his host’s tasks, and then offering to help with them. He’s insufferable about it at first, of course. But after a while he finds that he likes the scent of herbs, and that gathering is as interesting as hunting, and he even paws carefully through a few of the herbalist’s notebooks.

Being trapped gives him a somewhat better appreciation for books, though he still never loves them.

At night he can venture outside, just so long as the moon isn’t too bright. He takes to sitting on the roof, and looking up at the stars, and remembers… it was his mother who taught him how to read the stars. In case he ever got lost. His father died when he was fairly young, and Gaston had done his best to try and make up the difference. And he had done; he’d been a good hunter, he’d kept the village fed through a lot of cold winters, but he’d never quite been able to escape the sense that he needed to absolutely make certain that he was following the right script. That there was something about him that didn’t… that wasn’t what his father would have wanted. Or his mother, either. He had a long list of things that made a man worthwhile, and maybe that was part of the reason why he had set his eyes on the one woman in the village who refused to give him the time of day.

Because that list included marriage and a house full of children, not quiet nights in a tavern, looking for too long at the woodcutter’s arms.

But even if he had never really wanted Belle, he had been angry enough at not winning her, too. Even if the script never really made him happy, he still wanted to follow it. Wanted to be the kind of man who could. The man who killed every beast and conquered every challenge.

He can’t go back to that life, now. It’s not even an option anymore.

The knowledge is an unexpected – but very visceral – relief.

The next morning, Gaston is about a foot shorter, and the cleft in his chin is back.

It’s more than a year, though, before he looks human enough to ‘arrive’ at the little village near to where his herbalist lives. He introduces himself as a friend of the healer’s family, an old friend who used share correspondence with him, who’s come looking for work. The townsfolk find him to be a quiet man, burly but skilled, and more boisterous if you can get a few drinks into him. Though, he avoids the tavern more often than not. Some folks talk about him and his herbalist, living out in that little house all by themselves; but Gaston’s skills quiet most tongues, and the way his eyes sometimes catch the firelight, and his teeth seem just a little too sharp, manage to quiet others.

Years pass. It is, funnily enough, only when Gaston looks almost entirely himself – though still different from how he used to – that trouble really comes, with the mayor’s son, who decides on a dare to vandalize the herbalist’s door and destroy some of his best plants.

Gason is only meaning to make the boy pay for the damages, when he goes and finds him out in the fields. But he’s barely had time to get impatient with the brat’s sneering – seventeen, god, he had nearly forgotten how insufferable he was at that age, too – when he feels a weight leave him. A weight he has grown so accustomed to, that he had long forgotten it wasn’t supposed to be there.

There are no witnesses to the change that happens in the field, though later, many people in the village will whisper that a werewolf must have savaged the mayor’s son. All Gaston can do is offer the boy some advice, before he flees in howling terror:

Find kindness, first.

cryptiboy:

stalker-among-the-stars:

my-little-ninja:

supermah:

supermah:

in superman adventures #19, there’s a villain named multi-face who can convincingly disguise himself as anyone, even tricking dna tests and x-ray vision. Superman initially can’t stop him

and the only reason he gets caught is because multiface decides to disguise himself as, of all people, CLARK KENT i’m screaming

why do villains always mess up so badly

Clark Kent attending Bruce Wayne’s yacht party where Bruce told Clark to wear his clothes and……

Ta-Da!

Sard borken

calling the people at the party Bruce’s “fake friends” as if he’s Bruce’s only real friend and he’s low key jealous

kitvinslakte:

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:

phoenixfire-thewizardgoddess:

Concept: a dragon that tries to sleep on top of it’s friends and family every night bc they’re it’s greatest treasure

where r the rest of the notes, this is Important

Imagine being tailed everywhere by a poorly concealed dragon, following you cause it doesn’t want to be separated from its treasure but also wants to give you the freedom to live your own life. Just like going grocery shopping and a 2 story tall dragon tries to hide behind a lamppost.