Scaramouche, Scaramouche

So I was taking Aerionn the b'elfy holy/protadin punklet through the beginning Pandaria quests last night, and the following occurred to me:

As much as I love the Hozen and I seriously want to hug all of them, I kind of wish they were more developed. I also kind of wish they were more like the original Monkey King. Like Sun Wukong. Not with the UBERHAXX necessarily, but the general attitude and cleverness and most of all identity. The Hozen have some solid foundations, but their cultural identity and their culture fullstop isn't fleshed out as much as it could be.

The little bits and pieces that we get about their culture are neat--how and when and why you get a double name, their hilarious poetry, their linguistic quirks...yeah there's some deeply, DEEPLY facepalm-worthy gaffes and stereotypes to be found, but homework WAS done. It doesn't quite make up for the *GROAN* moments completely, but it's there?

And that just makes me want MORE dammit. XD I'm not sure how much development the Jinyu got, as I am FAR AND AWAY NOWHERE NEAR PANDARIA with my Allyside characters (the highest-level one is Eveynna, Stormwinder-Theramoran pally extraordinaire and queen of the epic !Newfie accent, at 30), but yeah. I do wish we'd gotten more. Compared to the amount of work done with the Pandaren, it's like an Ensure pudding cup next to creme brulee.

I know that not everything can be put into a game, and that Pandaria is light-years better than Cata with regard to the completeness of questlines (even if a lot of the storytelling is still execrable...the stuff dealing with the Pandaren and Jinyu and Hozen and Mogu and Co. alone is fantastic but the second practically any named mainstream NPC besides Anduin gets into things, everything spirals rapidly down the flush-hole), but...yeah. When you put one up against the other you get wistful. (Well...you do if you're me. :B)

I'm probably going to end up fiddling around and expanding upon a lot when I get to writing about Pandaria. Because well that is what I do. If something feels too spare and I'm still hungry I make more snack food.

And also it will feature AU!Garrosh not being made of fail, and a distinct lack of stupidness with legacy characters. :D

So I *cough*procured*cough* some digital copies of various tie-in novels and comics and et cetera and so forth on night during a fit of insomnia and boredom. Haven't managed to read much of Knaak's malarkey beyond a few sentences (the cadence of his writing is just irritating as almighty fuck to me, like every sentence is like "s/he was an adjective, adjective noun" and it reminds me of this goofy song my sister and I sang as kids: "oh in the dark, dark woods you find a dark, dark house and in the dark, dark house you find a dark, dark room" etc. and it ends with finding a ghost in a dark, dark box, but my sister tended to put the box with the ghost inside of fifteen or so MORE prior dark, dark boxes--or as many dark, dark boxes as she could get away with before my dad flipped out and demanded we knock it off) but I did manage to read some of it!

HERE I SHALL YAMMER ABOUT THE THINGS I READ! This isn't really a review asmuch as a bunch of impressions and random piles of bollocks. I'll cover the manga/manhwa and comics in this entry; books come next.

Needless to say ZOMG SPOILERS


( words, pictures, and funky text formatting! )

I'll be gettin' into the actual novels in my next post.

You are probably pretty damn Canadian if:

-You are writing AU!not-so-damn-stupid!Garrosh Hellscream explaining just WTF he was doing with the Evel Knievel dirigible shit...

...And you write him as saying he was "trying to deke that damn dragon out, keep it away from the rest of the zeppelins" and then realize that you've written an Orc explaining that he was trying to deke something out and that you didn't even think twice about using "deke" even though Orcs probably don't say "deke" and chances are a bunch of your readers won't know WTF that word even means anyway. lawl.

In conclusion, nonstupid punkass Garrosh is fun to write because he does things like almost Leeroy a zeppelin into a mountain in effort to deke a dragon out so it doesn't eat the rest of his troops. And hey if the Alliance sees him being a a raging badass deke-master or their airship pwns the dragon too, so much the better.

Also I've had too much caffeine.

ETA: Uh wow lol maybe I should explain the Canuck-ese--'deke' is abbreviated from 'decoy', and it's hockeyslang. XD Deke (out) = feinting, faking someone out.

If anyone ever questions why the heck I monkey around with backstories in WoW so much and ignore big chunks of canon and expanded universe stuff and etc. etc. etc.?

This sort of business would be why.

( ranty ranty ranty *pirouette* *jazz hands!* )

hay look guise i wrote moar

TITLE: Came in From the Wilderness
FANDOM: WoW
PEOPLE: Ishandarr and Leilandra, Ishan's ex-boss, and other assorted badass adventurers.
PAIRING: Ishan+Andra. D'aww.
RATING: R; violence and creepy mindmunch, even if only in dreams. I'm not even kidding. XD;
SUMMARY: There are a few reliable cures for nightmares; Andra has a pretty fair repertoire, which Ishan very much appreciates.
WARNINGS: There are disturbing somewhat violent mental-badtouch nightmares (I DON'T EVEN - IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE CUTE BUT THEN) and there is brainmunchy.
NOTES: The cute. I esplod. XD I have no idea how this pairing happened but it's freakin' cute so I NO CURR. XD This fic kind of goes cute/WTF/cute like an oreo whose centre is made of pure demented, :D; Also, I want to kick Ner'zhul. Wheee~

Beware plummeting typos. Continuity may not be as depicted on box. Do not fold, spindle or apply Frostmourne to face. Andra belongs to Kyl, so any errors in depiction happened because my neurons were doing the chooga somewhere else. XD

LOOK THE COLOURFUL FONTS ARE BACK

( a creature void of form )

For mullenkamp, who asked for stuff about Eirlys. lol 200 words again. XD;

Out in the garden, the moonlight made the night-blooming flowers luminous. Amidst the shadows of leaves, fireflies drifted, emerald-green. At the centre of the circle, robed in blue and guarded by the light of four candles, the Priestess stood.

Outside the circle, an enormous raven sat on the grass.

"I wasn't expecting you," Eirlys said, "but you're welcome all the same. I trust you know how to behave yourself; I know all your dramatics are exactly that."

The raven stared at Eirlys as if she'd grown antlers.

Eirlys crouched and arched a brow. "What are you giving me that look for? You know me, and you know my people. You know what we gave to you. I've been telling you this for several nights now. My invitation still stands."

Very deliberately, the raven stepped into the circle. He eyed Eirlys a moment more, then spread his wings, flapped, lifted off. In a flurry of shed feathers he settled on her shoulder.

"Very Edgar Allen Poe of you," Eirlys said after a pause. "I assume those are for me?"

of course. it's the least i can give.

"You still sound laryngitic, Host-of-Many. It's rather a good thing I always make enough tea to offer all three of you..."

AT LONG LAST, WRITING though it's really cathartic and kind of sad and I kind of cried all over writing it.

hi.

TITLE: Believe (I'm Ascending)
FANDOM: Warcraft III/World of Warcraft
PEOPLE: Dion, Aer, and one epic badass crusader.
PAIRING: N/A
RATING: 14A.
SUMMARY: Hope springs eternal. Dion helps Aer say goodbye to someone.
WARNINGS: Oh gods, I got the weeps writing this and I make no promises that other people won't. Character death, and Aer being a pile of wibble.
NOTES: This jumped up and bit me when I was reading this questline. When I first read about it, I cried my eyes out, and I still tear up. I found out that it's a very meaningful bunch of missions to Aer recently. To me, it is as well, though I have not played it through yet. I took some creative liberties, so it's not exactly canonical to the letter, but this is how it happened in one timeline.

As the quest is a memorial, so is this writing. It kind of wrote itself. XD;

This is for everyone who's gone before me. Sarah, Iva, all you guys - I love you.

( no black and white in the blue. )

I needed to write some cute XD;

TITLE: After, in the Dark
FANDOM: Warcraft III/World of Warcraft
PEOPLE: A couple of punkassed knights.
PAIRING: implied/aftermath of m/m, Arthas/Ishan.
RATING: 14A because Ishan's got a bit of a dirty mind.
SUMMARY: After the battle at Icecrown and a startling discovery, Ishandarr's distracted and bemused by the experience of sharing a bed with a living breathing Arthas.
WARNINGS: There's some reference to the weirdness of their past relationship. Though it was never non-consensual it was a bit wonky. Please note, though, that Ishan was always on the less-vanilla side of things. XD That wasn't as a result of being Mr. Spooky McDeathknight. That's just Ishan not being vanilla.
NOTES: Ishan isn't the only partner Arthas had amongst the knights, of course, but he may be the most longcat of them. *cough* This is set WAAAAY after the prior fic. You can probably guess what happened to Arthas just from what's going on here. Redemption and rebuilding mean a lot more than a sacrifice of life, after all, and it's the nature of the light to forgive. tl;dr I am horrible and like making antagonists atone and Kyl does too. XD This is the Arthas in her head. He occasionally crashes on my sofa and is a smartass.

Yyyep, I'm still dicking about with font colours. XD

( when you dream, what do you dream about? )

Watch me pretend I'm a discount Mark Danielewski LOL TYPOGRAPHY.

TITLE: Life and death and death
FANDOM: Warcraft/WoW
PEOPLE: A dead(?) Blood Elf, and the creepy voice in his head.
WARNINGS: I'm going to be an ass with typography. XD Also, creepy. Inspired by Kyl's much spookier offering.

( wake up, wake up, don't be afraid. )

"What's the point in hiding from the fact that we're not infallible beings?"

Thaeron looked back over his shoulder with a faint scowl.

"And who, exactly, set the rule that says we MUST be? Honestly, trying to be perfect is a fools' errand. Trying to live up to every expectation is condemning yourself to the immense desire to go bop your head against a wall. These are not goals that ANYONE can reach. Try to, and all you do is bind yourself more and more to unhappiness. Inevitable unhappiness. The harder we try to be perfect, the less we'll manage it, too. We'll keep on making mistakes - and make more and more as we keep on trying to attain this impossible goal, this shining nebulous dream..."

He snorted.

"We can never always be everything expected of us, you know. No one can. Not even the one who put us here. Not ever. All of us will, at some point in time, sneeze tea out our noses. We will fall up the stairs, lose patience with word puzzles and people, snap at those people, and sometimes be selfish - which isn't always a bad thing, but I digress." A gesture. "Look, we can be just as much blinkered by our hopes and fears as can any human, elf, fae, youma, drow or nu. And you know? The sooner we learn to go 'well, that's just how it is to be a created being - I fouled up this time and I'll make amends and avoid that situation next time' the better."

He was starting to pace a bit now and his voice rose a bit. Not in anger, but - well, when he was passionate about something, it showed.

( iha shaariputra ruupam shuunyataa shuunyataiva ruupam )