Latest Posts by ca1ypso0 - Page 3

my first drawings of 2025

Sketch is done ✨

Herald viktor from my jayvik avatar au 🤭

So here are some facts about him;

In here his hair is chopped off because jayce had braided it for him when he was healing and viktor didn’t like how it reminded him of jayce and in a fit of rage he cut it off (but he keeps the blanket smh)

He doesn’t need to use his queue anymore that’s why it’s tied up, when he becomes machine herald well…he chops it off

He carries the songcords of his followers tied to his cane because why not

Jayce: omg dude we were so drunk last night! (had 1 mimosa)

Viktor: yeah (was sober)

Danny doodles! After not posting art for ages I thought I’d upload some doodles of the lil guy

doodles :b

god's infinite tits has made its way into my vocabulary thank you jin ily

same coin different side

glowing green eyes

Haunted Waves

surprise :]

??????

fresh midnight Question for you:

are there any TAU worldbuilding elements or character facts or whatnot that you wanted to include in the book, but ended up cutting? or alternatively, have any specific story elements you have a burning desire to talk about?

Hm! Some thoughts on queer stuff! Which is ambiently in the text but not so much defined.

I was interested in writing a world with multiple competing theories of queerness, none of which are "perfect" -- in the sense that none of these societies have managed genuine queer liberation (i.e., everyone has the freedom to be who and love however they want). They're not necessarily awful, though some definitely are, but none of it's ideal.

The dominant queer culture originates in the Immaculate Empire and gives us "hermit" and "widow" -- pretty binary terms for a specific variety of desire, often linked with a kind of gender performance. There is no similar term for bi/pansexuality, at least not in the common parlance, so if you're, say, a cis bisexual woman, you'd still be described as a widow, were you engaging in widow-like conduct. The understanding and room for transness is highly dependent on where you are; some states have done that particular brand of evil thing where they see providing trans care as a way to enforce state power, because it's a way to police the binary and deviations from it.

Outside the empire, we get the legacy of downworld "third gender" -- which is actually a catch-all term for queerness. It also...doesn't have any further distinctions. They lump the entirety together in this one category -- which is itself somewhat binarist, as it distinguishes "cishet" from "not that," even though it's on a different axis. So if it's particularly important to you to be perceived in a more specific way, welp! Good luck!! This might actually be pretty chill in a world where authoritarian powers weren't keen on destroying your existence. Unfortunately!

I also have thoughts abt the ways different character relate to these systems of identity and meaning; like Sunai is pretty comfortable swimming between them and has a more fluid sense of self, while Veyadi cleaves more to "hermit" as a term, even though he has a somewhat complicated relationship with it. Jin has latched onto "third gender" even though they're not as bound up in downworld culture as say, Oyu, who is from a downworld caravan, third gender, and presents in a distinctly hermit-like way. And Imaru is the ur-lesbian! Widow supreme! Next question!

I just finished TAU and I loved it! The fact that the empire has AI that isn't corrupted is super interesting and makes me wonder what makes them special. I know you probably can't say much about it, so I can't wait to hopefully learn more about them in the next book.

Maybe something you can talk about: while it seems common for salvagers to travel from city to city, what about the average non-salvager? In addition, is there much immigration between the Harbor and the Empire? Is there a formal system of citizenship within the cities/nations?

OH HEY GLAD TO HAVE INDULGED YOU and i can answer a number of these questions! the absence of corruption in the empire is something i will indeed hold my tongue about though :P

travel between city-states is extremely uncommon, and is generally only done by professionals or folks experiencing some manner of duress. alternatively, a number of downworld caravans still exist and travel through the wilds between city-states as a matter of course.

there is little in the way of immigration between harbor states and the empire, though it certainly happens now and again -- there are even post-harbor aigatan communities within the empire! immigration away from the empire is most uncommon, as the empire is in many ways the most civilized place on the downworld, in terms of technological sophistication and access to resources. or at least, that's how it's been for the past few generations. things are getting a bit, uh...unreliable.

citizenship as a system used to vary more when more AIs were actively in charge of their city-states. now folks more commonly have either harbor or imperial citizenship, with a large number of people having neither, officially speaking.

Perhaps you will appreciate this: I dreamed about reading the sequel to TAU and in it they encountered the grave of someone who had been in a romantic relationship with an AI god. The AI god was unnamed; the person was only known as the Spinmaster. I will not ask you to confirm/deny the trend of naming oneself after a laundry machine in order to court a giant robot.

oh my god i'm THRILLED

i will neither confirm nor deny the details but i WILL say book 2 is replete with fun new characters (and their fun new identity problems) who have fun new relationships with AIs (as well as fun new AI/AI relationships -- it's extremely yuri up in here rn, which i mean in the star-on-star-to-black-hole sense of the word)

I return from my bg3 stupor with a fresh 2 am question:

was the TAU story and world a concept you were baking for a long time until you had a chance to write it, or was it a more recent creation?

Do you find it easy or hard to build out new story concepts? Like, do you need to sit on them a while until they feel right, or does it just come pouring out of you from the start? Or a secret, third thing?

Just anything about your personal creation process!

lol hi it might not surprise you to learn that i am also steeping in bg3 (i am still stumbling around act 1! i'm not allowed to play until i hit daily sequel writing quota, which is healthy, i'm sure, but does mean i am somewhat behind just about everyone i know who is also playing :P)

(my first Tav is an enormous nb tiefling bard named Faretheewell who is, imo, perfect. very beautiful. very kind. definitely does drag. lying a lot, but mostly just for funsies. has turned astarion into their little purse dog.)

ANYWAY, TO THE ACTUAL QUESTION:

TAU's an interesting case because it was cannibalized from a couple different ongoing projects into something entirely new.

The characters had been floating around in different iterations since about 2013, and their final forms in Archive are quite distinct from the original seed! Imagine Sunai as an exiled diplomat who got involuntarily apprenticed to a cursed king/the last magician in the world; imagine Veyadi as a disowned god-child tasked with murdering the last magician! I'm still probably going to use that world somewhere so I'll mum about it now (it's the one I call "grandma heist.")

((imo that's why you should always yoink characters you like from whatever source you enjoy, be it your own or something else -- they will inevitably change in their new context, often so substantially that they are nigh unrecognizable.))

The story concept also originated in 2013: "Pacific Rim, but the mechs are built out of the kaiju, and pilots must have survived being poisoned by those kaiju." The addition of strange and upsetting AIs of divine power was somewhat inherited from the story Sunai and Adi came from, where divinity was fraught, fractured, and hungry.

Here's a funny. In 2017 I thought TAU would be a nice, simple, clean project. However. I know some folks who turn out gloriously clean first drafts. I AM NOT ONE OF THEM. My brain is a hazardous work environment, very non-OSHA compliant. Basically I do a lot of thought work in the drafting, so the drafts are consequently messy, and there are a LOT of changes from concept to actual workable manuscript.

Which I suppose is to say that story concepts nest in my brain quite often when it is healthy. The frequency with which I land on new and interesting story thoughts is actually a pretty good indicator of how well I am doing ambiently! Right now I'm storing up a lot of them, some of which I am fairly rabid about -- nearly as rabid as I am about Archive, which is the real indicator of a project that is ready to transition from Thought to Work. They are described here as "apocalypse magicians" and other such things. There's one that's going to be kind of an argument with Lovecraftian unknowability via desconstruction of Enlightenment epistemologies + queer identity destruction, and another that's going to be the Le Carré approach to espionage + magic as divinity meets public service + interplanetary empires intruding on your bumfuck planet offering the solution to climate change might still be bad actually. (I want to write that last with my wife and we are making SUCH GOOD FUCKING SHIPS FOR IT.)

How to summarize this? 1) find a story notion/concept about which i can obsess, 2) actually start writing it, 3) mess up spectacularly for a few drafts, 4) finally whittle together something more or less correct, 5) that's my editor's problem now!!

Pinterest, my savior. The brainrot for The Archive Undying is so severe, but there is so little fanart I've taken extreme measures.

having spoilery thoughts about The Archive Undying in the context of that post that someday the queer couple that says "let's fuck it all and run away together!" should actually do it:

Sunai and Veyadi don't actually run away but I do think that's what emotionally/ethically happened in the last quarter or so of the book?

Sunai's initial motivation was to prevent the totalitarian state from getting to keep an enforcer mecha to oppress his home city. Made perfect sense. Despite the emotional upheavals and betrayals and murders, that kept being true pretty much up until the Maw eats him. We learn that the Passenger trying to help him do this is the same entity that has caused Corruption aka the deaths of AIs who became tyrants.

And there's a whole ethical quandary there bc the AIs who died were tyrants and Iterate Fractal ate people and there should be some force that can stop even gods. But also the Passenger killed these AI in ways that led to the deaths of millions of people and left their corpses as weapons that could be used by the Harbor and left their remnants as hungry scavengers who kill people.

And so as various characters align with/against the Passenger I am just lost on how I should feel. It's cause is noble in abstract! It's methods cause great suffering! It's unclear why the Passenger cares about killing the Maw at this point given that it is no longer controlling a large group of people. Perhaps it is just that Sunai asks and Veyadi asks and Ruhi asks and the Passenger always answers when people ask because that is it's purpose.

And then Sunai is one with the Maw, who is a remnant of Iterate Fractal and that larger plot goes out the window. His friends want to separate them or mercy kill him or kill the Maw with him as collateral damage. He can't be separated from the Maw, who had always wanted him as their conscience and thus horribly abused him his whole life. Veyadi, on realizing that they can't be separated decides he wants to protect Sunai more than he wants to kill the Maw. They fight the Passenger and Ruhi, who remains laser fixated on the larger cause.

And that's the point where the pair of them decide to leave and they leave. Sure, the Passenger might be the only force capable of protecting humans from tyrant AIs. But they no longer care about that compared to the fight to live and get to be together. They imprison it and Ruhi (and, if I understand correctly, entomb Ruhi alive in eternal torment??) to prevent it from ever trying to kill them again. They survive together. The End.

And, well. The gays sure did run away from their problems together for once! but boy howdy was I unsure of how to feel about that final arc.

I'm a sucker for playlists and am wondering if you have one for The Archive Undying?

I mostly listen to OSTs when writing (lyrics distract!!) so I can share that I listened to a lot of:

the Anthem OST (really wish i'd had any interest in this game bc the aesthetic is in so many ways pitch perfect for Archive)

Jack de Quidt's work for the Divine Cycle of Friends at the Table, particularly counter/WEIGHT

a bunch of battle map music from Fire Emblem: Three Houses for mech fights

various music from Mushishi

folks have also sent me music that reminds them of the book and I really have to make a playlist out of all that bc 1) i love it, thank you, 2) their taste is generally fantastic and i would like to incentivize ppl to feed me more

(the playlist i built for the Archive sequel is kind of an exception to the rule! i do have more songs to share bc lol some of them have taken on multiple meanings, and by this i am terribly pleased.)

It seems sunai is that good at handjobs

fresh Silly question for you, if you'd like one:

what animals would TAU characters be?

Lucky you, wife and I had the daemon debate years ago and have OPINIONS:

Sunai is a mongoose. Reasonably cute looking but actually extremely adept at very specific violence. Action twink at it again to keep the colony safe.

Veyadi is a raccoon -- hear me out!! Too clever! To the point that he is a constant problem for himself and others! LITTLE KING TRASHMOUTH. HE'S GAY.

Jin is the largest and most regrettable parrot. Has figured out how to open doors and we are all suffering for it.

Imaru is the coolest person on deck because she probably is legitimately like, a wolf -- but the kind that's on the verge of domesticating itself.

Gonna do a few more under a cut bc they're not really spoilers, but they take up more room later in the book, so if you want to go in cleaner! Avoid! I just want to talk about them! You're welcome!

Ruhi is a police dog. A dog, with all the positive prosocial instincts that come with being a dog, but unfortunately also a cop.

Madam Wei is a swan. I often compare her to some kind of terrifying raptor bird, but I think swan fits better overall bc of how she seems elegant from a distance but up close is just the most frightening thing in the pond.

The Maw is one of those poor rhesus monkeys raised in a lab with terry cloth mothers.

The passenger is a robot.

And because my wife would not help me finish this list until I added her other blorbo: Ueda is a scrungly old lioness who is still not dead, much to her own surprise as much as anyone else's.

i said i was legally obligated to make memes and i meant it

the beginning

the archive undying is a book that was made so precisely for me to enjoy and i know this because i tried to tell my best friend about it and i literally couldn’t because they kept being like “that’s exactly what i thought you’d say that’s exactly what i thought you’d say” over every single word starting from the title

ok alright i've got one:

tenbeasts! is there a, ah, list of them? or is more of a "i'll name one when i want one" thing? or any associated spicy lil tidbits?

THERE IS IN FACT A LIST. Kept for my own reference, though often misplaced. Some slots are immutable and others are still open to revision!

Basics: There are ten divine beasts, though the number and exact animals are somewhat up for debate depending on who you ask and where they're from -- e.g., downworld apocrypha might say that there are in fact only nine, or that the number varies between eons. Overall analogous to the Chinese zodiac.

The tenbeasts are chimeric combinations of the divine beasts in the most common roster, so there are five distinct types that Iterate Fractal, er, mass-produced, so to speak.

The divine beasts:

Peacock

Serpent

Salamander

Carp

Cat

Monkey

Fox

Bat

Ox

??? varies too much btwn my lists to say with certainty. Moth? Bear? Deer? I'll decide at some point. (OR MAYBE I WON'T!!)

The tenbeasts derived from them:

Sentinel-fowl (peacock + serpent) [canon]

Dragon-children (salamander + carp) [canon]

Company-cat (cat + monkey) [canon]

[Winged fox] (fox + bat) [probably pretty canon]

??? some kind of ox-forward beast of burden (ox + ???) [working on it]

girl best friends are always like this. you don't see each other for five years, and then they are feeding you to their new bestie The Machine 😒

i bring more memes

starting to think it’d be easier to keep track of the friends who haven’t killed sunai rather than the ones who have at this point

a peace offering

i still have The Archive Undying brainrot but i'm currently too restless to make, like, real art about it. so here's another sketch dump. bonus lil sunai enjoying an oversized winter gear coat :D