Latest Posts by rainwvalker - Page 4

unrestrained summer fun

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if you want the rewards of finding a new favorite song then you have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of listening to unfamiliar music

So what you’re telling me is Plats all have ADHD? :D

Is "get through life by going with the flow, with minimal effort. just letting everything happen" a common mentality of platinum caste, or is it just Mathis Quigley being Mathis Quigley?

Plats have a hard time with long-term plans and goals. It seems almost clinical, like their brains have difficulty conceptualising the future. Matty mentioned it once, that it was “hard to think” about his relatively shorter lifespan.

Quigley seems to have spun this into disregard for others and a desire to avoid conflicts. Vienne, on the other hand, seemed bolstered by it. It made her seem braver and more selfless since she couldn’t really *feel* her own mortality. And overall, Plats seem a little more cheerful for it, a little more likeable. Helps their reputation as a “blessed” people.

Whole thing is creepy. 

How do you feel about the fact that Book 1 of Unsounded written in prose would be like one or maybe two books/volumes and take much less time? I often think about stuff like that as a comic artist :o

It’s true, but it would be a different beast. Stories are so dependent on the medium. Think about how they change between books and film, between film and tv, between comics and novels! Watchmen the comic and Watchmen the film are related, but they’re third cousins at best. Are the ATLA comics really a seamless transition from the show? Does FFVII the OG game really feel like it came before Advent Children? I am sorry I only have Boomer examples

Unsounded in prose would lose all the sight gags; the moments of surprise or awe when you load a new page to see a new creature or location or sudden story turn. Reactions that are told with a heart-wrenching facial expression would instead have to be limned in words.

And words are great, words are super powerful, but words do their own thing and have their own strengths. You can paint scenes far more powerfully with words than you can with comic art, because with them, you’re painting on the infinite canvas of the reader’s imagination. But at the same time, you’re losing specificity and some potential impact. Well-done art affects us deeply. We’re drawn to it. We want to see faces.

Anyway, this has actually really been on my mind the last few nights because I’ve been listening to The Neverending Story, which I’d never read before, but I’ve always really enjoyed the movie. And though the plots are basically the same, they are SO different to me! I dislike Bastian so much in the book, and like Atreyu so much more. It was totally opposite for me in the movie. And it’s all to do with the actors.

So I don’t know, Anon, it doesn’t bug me that yes, the plot of the Unsounded could be told faster in prose, in books. Because a work is more than its plot. Webcomics in particular are this crazy modern format that let us communicate like this in-between every page. We have memes and in-jokes and can speculate on mysteries and dream and hope about upcoming pages. It’s cool!

Novels can do this too, of course, and serial fiction has been a thing for centuries. Webcomics are a pretty neat evolution of that.

Anyway, I forgot my point.

At what point did you decide you wanted to take your RP setting and assortment of characters, and turn them into a fully fleshed out story? Was it something you had in mind all along, or was there a turning point? If so, how did you start the process of taking loose concepts and fleshing them out into the super detailed world of unsounded?

It’s complicated!

Long, long ago, I was working on a fantasy novel called Tanners. It took place in Alderode, starred a group of thieves, assassins, and social outcasts, concerned a war between rival gangs, and was not great. I was still in my early twenties and impressively stupid.

A couple years later, my friends and I were in need of a new setting for our RP after we fell out with the owner of the place we’d played in previously. I sat down and wrote out Sharteshane, which existed in the same universe (and borrowed a few details) from Tanners.

I’d already pulled Duane, Sette, and Murkoph from Tanners for the purposes of RP in the older game, and started developing Bastion to be my main in a new game in this new setting. It worked well. My friends and I had a lot of fun there over the years, and the setting and characters all just became increasingly more rich and detailed as the stories spun on.

All good things must come to an end though, and RP eventually did. Afterwards, I needed a new project, and webcomics were really taking off. I wanted to do one too! I went back and looked at Tanners (which I still loved even though it was dumb), looked at RP, and decided that the latter could save the former. I took cool things I’d discovered and developed in the game, like Duane and Sette’s chemistry and the Black Tongues, and decided to work them into something entirely new but familiar. It would lean heavily on things that were and are important to me, like highly dysfunctional families, the irreconcilable evils of human institutions, and sad boys beating each other up.

It all came together pretty quickly once I decided to do it. I had the pieces and I knew the themes. It all plugged together with minimal stress.

While most of Unsounded’s big concepts were devised specifically for the comic - pymary, the khert, senet beasts, the First World, Cresce - you can still see the seam between RP content and Tanners content if you know where to look. That seam is where a lot of the plot and conflict happen. Alderode and Ssaelism are almost purely Tanners. Sharteshane and Gefendur are purely RP. Duane and Murkoph are Tanners and Sette and Bastion are RP.

And I really like this. Because Duane slowly making his way towards home feels like me making my way home from RP to Tanners. Tanners was a place of naivete, ignorance, comfortable tropes. RP was a place of worldliness, experience-building, chaos. Duane and I are heading home, but we won’t recognise it, and it won’t recognise us.

Anyway, many of the (what probably seem like neurotic) details in Unsounded come from years of me DMing that RP game. If you know anything about DMing, you know you have to be able to pretty quickly conjure up answers to all kinds of player questions, and be able to write and world-build in real-time as you play. After ten years of writing and refereeing Sharteshane, though, I didn’t want to spend excessive time there in Unsounded. That’s why the story barely touches the place, and we’ve spent most of our time in Cresce and Alderode.

Well now you and Anon have me rereading Ch14 and I've noticed that... Lemuel is much kinder than Duane! Sometimes it feels like Duane is mostly kind when it's convenient, whereas Lemuel looks out for others even outside of his immediate sphere. Heck, just one example: Duane heard how Lem had to strangle someone to death and... didn't even blink twice! I know they're at war, but that seemed so cold. I don't know! tl;dr They're great characters that make me think :)

It’s an interesting observation! I think that Lemuel and Duane are both very kind, but they are also pretty masculine. And at the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, it doesn’t seem that masculinity generally allows a man to easily give voice to his concerns and emotions. So Duane wouldn’t hear that Lemuel had to strangle a foeman to desperately save himself, and then turn around to Lem and ask if he was doing okay. He wouldn’t even do it in private. Likewise Lemuel wouldn’t ask Duane how he was doing after his travails at the Academy and his scary stint in Fachlyne. They just weren’t raised to talk to each other that way. Blame it on them mostly not having a mother, or on their grandpa being a hardass or on Alderode generally expecting men to be so emotionally opaque - but it’s not how these boys communicate with each other

But it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other or don’t do kindnesses for one another. Duane worked very hard to get himself transferred to the same Order as Lemuel. Duane’s very presence is in fact a great show of concern for his brother’s welfare. Seeking him out to fight alongside him in that first battle in ch14 was an act of kindness and concern. After the vliegeng falls from the sky, Lemuel goes into the chapel with Duane to be with him because he knew how nervous the whole thing had made him. The Adeliers may not *say* the right things to each other, but they are *there* for each other.

There were some other more subtle relationship dynamics at play in that chapter as well. In a sense, Lemuel’s ability to show concern for others was a privilege he could afford because he wasn’t an officer. Duane was, and didn’t feel he could show too much compassion because that’s a vulnerability. His charges would respect him less and have less confidence in their own roles if he wasn’t always a paragon of authority and strength to them. So he was always very concerned with their physical welfare, but showing concern for their emotional welfare was off the table.

(you see this learned pattern perfectly repeat fifteen years later with him and Sette)

You also see the brick wall between them in chapter 7 after their stickfight. Duane nudges a brick out of it and invites Lemuel to tell him why he’s been acting weird, but Lemuel does not budge. And Duane does not insist. Just like he never followed up with him in the army. Lemuel breaks down and bawls in his arms one night and Duane looks totally lost, defaulting back to how he would comfort him when he was a little boy. Lemuel holds on to his asploded comrade’s tooth and Duane just yells at him to burn it. Lemuel hacks up a giant boar in the wake of another comrade’s death and Duane continues on with his duties. Lemuel sets a cart of war prisoners on fire and Duane decides not to ever think about it again for fifteen years.

No, I don’t think the issue is one of a lack of kindness. It’s not knowing how to express his (frankly quite severe) concern for his brother in a socially acceptable way. Duane would have done anything for Lemuel, would have died for him happily, but he didn’t have the emotional tools to do what Lemuel really, truly needed.

Last night the discord server started up the subject of Always Sunny and inserting Frank Reynolds into the comic so I put on my apron and dished this Fast Food Burger of a Meme out in like 10 minutes, you’re welcome Unsounded Discord Server, you’re very welcome

This is for you, Rainwalker! You asked for it, baby!

The road infrastructure in Sharteshane must be appalling, good thing Rilursa can always count on GEICO Roadside Pickup :)

So people of Unsounded Discord started discussing who qualifies as a magical girl in the comic and they were coming up with bad ideas like “Mikaila“. They were all obviously wrong, so I decided to take the matter in my own hands. I am so sorry.

*forms an emotional bond with the cool stick I found on a hike*

Re: Vienne, the world tends to be very forgiving of brilliant yet neglectful geniuses who spend their days buried productively in their Great Works and leave the care of their children and families largely to others, provided that they are male. The female ones, not so much. Kasslyne isn't all that different from our own universe in that sense.

Yep.

One thing I wish I’d stressed more in her story and hadn’t left presumed, was the marriage itself. Vienne didn’t particularly *want* to be married to anyone, but that’s not a choice she was allowed. She was happy enough with Mathis but would have been content to remain alone with her work and her business.

Likewise she never particularly wanted children. When she actually became pregnant, she was assaulted by almost overwhelming approval from everyone around her. All of a sudden they stopped making her feel like a freak, and she felt like she’d become the woman that the entire village had all her life expected her to become. This resulted in a lot of emotional pressure to keep the baby. That’s not something Mathis could ever understand. He had his own pressures for sure and she did all she could to help him with those, but he never gave a second thought to hers.

I relate a lot to Vienne. I knew by the age of ten that I never wanted kids or a spouse because nothing was more important to me than art. But even as a relatively privileged girl Vienne didn’t get to make that same decision. Still, she made it work as best she could. And while she was not a superhero able to be a perfect wife and perfect mother and a perfectly self-actualised human being making her art and fighting for her country, she never gave up the dream.

[Edits of azula without makeup]

She was 14 man

I didn't think Duane was so misogenistic ;_; since he, in the end, tolerated his daughter learning pymary.

I think we’re fooling ourselves a bit if we don’t acknowledge he’s something of a misogynist. The challenge with Duane and with many of the characters in our cast is that they are inescapably marked by the cultures they grew up in. Just as we ALL are. We ALL have biases within us that we have to acknowledge and consciously overcome. There is no pure and unblemished person. It’s not possible in this bitch of a world.

Duane relenting that night and agreeing to teach Mikaila pymary was a battle - fought and successfully won - against his own misogyny. It was a good thing. But it was not a moment when a light switch flipped and he was suddenly a paragon of gender equality. He’ll keep struggling daily with his biases the same way we all do.

Everyone around you has biases. You can write people off because of them, or you learn to love in spite of them and help them understand more and grow. I do this with Duane the same way I have to do it with my dad and a lot of other people in my life. It’s the most difficult thing.

What do Crescian and Aldish nationalists see as the end-goal of their war? I imagine Alds want to spread the dammakhert as far south as possible and maybe abolish the monarchy and Crescians want to destroy the dammakhert and Ssaelism.

It’s varied over the centuries, but you have listed the major angles that have driven them both in the past.

At present, Cresce is ostensibly in a defensive position, claiming that Alderode struck first and is occupying one of their bordertowns. Alderode claims that it is merely retaliating for Cresce sending spies and militants (surveyors) over the border, and that it will take a piece of Cresce into itself to send a message.

The Aldish deep state has other reasons for its international aggression however, just as Cresce probably is hiding something itself. This’ll all come out in the next few chapters.

If I'm reading this page correctly, it's the next morning and Ruffles is coming to wake Duane up. I'm curious if Duane was self-aware in the khert during the night or if he was stuck in his memories the whole time?

You read it correctly. I wanted to try doing a page with just sound effects and no dialogue, I’m glad it reads okay <3

Duane was stuck in memories all night. In the script I had a cut-away to him in the khert really mired in his worse days to hammer home the darkness of his present state, but it got chopped. I think at this point we’ve got the idea anyway :)

my personal curse is the knowledge that I function best with rigid structure and strict routine but am almost totally incapable of independently establishing or maintaining that structure and routine

Nobody cares about My DnD stuff but here I am, posting about it again...

I name all of my DnD sessions, because whatever, that’s just what I do. Please enjoy (or don’t) the sessions that my players have played so far:

1) The Hook

Named because it was the hook of the story and also because the city they were in was called The Hook. Pretty simple. The Monk ripped out one guy’s throat.

2) A Serious Sea Side-Quest

They got attacked by a sea serpent. That’s it.

3) We’re All Rogues Today

They all broke into a house. The Rogue’s kinda the party-leader so there’s a lot of that.

4) Community (college)

They were supposed to go to college. They broke into more houses instead. Rogue’s idea again. The Monk suggested they just kidnap the target, but she was outvoted.

5) We’re Stopping a Coup…I Guess

It had nothing to do with why they were there but they ended up stopping it anyway. This is also the session where they split the party. Three ways. The Bard almost died. 

6) Let’s NOT Insult the All-Powerful Sea Dragon

The Rogue insulted the all-powerful Sea Dragon. In his defense, the Monk did it first, although it was accidental. He did it on purpose. This is also the session when the Ranger was introduced to the party.

7) There Was Bound to be Pirates

This is a mainly sea-based campaign, so…yeah. Pirates. And they burned down a ship, so that happened. And everyone almost died.

8) The Mimic and the Lost Child

Exactly like it sounds like. The Monk nearly beat up a 7 year old stowaway. She also got swallowed by said mimic. It was fun.

And as for the next session…I have the name but can’t say because one of my players follows me and I can’t spoil it for her. If anyone is interested, I might post about it after it’s done. If anyone isn’t interested, I might post about it anyway. 

Hello Ashley! Returned to an old story of mine and trying to rebuild large parts of the plot that didn't satisfy me. I figure it's best to detail all the major story beats before I fill in all the icing around them. From chapter 1 to chapter 15 (so we're not considering spoilers!), what major story beats would you say you finalized first? Was it hard deciding which little bits needed to come up and when, even after you had scripted the major steps?

–You’re definitely on the right track, I also used that method. I had a beginning and an end point for the first book, then looked backwards from there, mapping the major beats in each chapter. It’s also personally important for me to know the WHY of everything. I need a Why for everything I write and do, I find it motivating.

So it’s been a while and my memory is foggy, but I believe the broad outline was like:> Duane & Sette have misadventures that help them understand each other. Why do they need to understand each other? Because they are lonely, broken people and the goal is to better them.> They make it to her cousin’s along with the macguffin, which results in a climax, but macguffin escapes. What is the why of the macguffin? The macguffin isn’t just an antagonist; it’s all antagonism. It is the ultimate macguffin, and is motivated by the misery and misdeeds in the story itself.> They chase the macguffin and wind up isolated in a situation that forces out the best of Sette and the worst of Duane, with disastrous consequences. Why is the worst of Duane important to see? Because if there’s hope for the worst of us, despair is only an excuse. Why is the best of Sette important to see? Because it’s not so very Best, and she needs to see all the room she has to get better.> They reunite with the macguffin for another battle.

Easy-peasy. But now let’s flesh out that first step and mark out the milestones:

engage and fight the wand’ring root, introducing their respective characters in very broad strokes

encounter the RBB, enter the crypt, still in-character, but each gradually starts to crack. Duane goes super violent, Sette shows fear

fight each other at the waystation, Duane’s veneer of civility is fully shattered by admitting he’s a closet cannibal with control issues, Sette’s veneer of roguishness is shattered by admitting she’s scared of failing her da

True selves semi-revealed, Sette has an adventure in town, starts trouble, leads to…

Duane battling Quigley, coming face to face with Alderode

Sette sneaks Duane over the border, enters his memories

By seeing who Duane truly was, Sette fully understands who he is now

During their fight the next day in the toyshop, Duane fully understands what Sette needs of him (he doesn’t fully understand who she is, he’s not as insightful as she is)

And bam, that’s how I outline. It’s a pretty simple structure when you lay it out like that, but then you start adding in B and C plots, two dozen secondary characters, and it becomes deceptively complex!

Otherwise yeah, figuring out where to move the plot forward, where to cut away to other storylines (and how much to devote to them), where to pause and meander for character building - that’s all the most difficult stuff. Most of us can sit around and write cute dialog or character studies all day - fanfiction is FULL of amateur writers who can do this marvellously - but the BEST and most successful writers are able to tell an engaging narrative with lots of moving parts and suspenseful story turns. Maybe they get panned because their prose isn’t elegant or maybe their characters are hackneyed - but they still sell mountains of books because they know how to keep readers turning pages by structuring a suspenseful story.

Good luck with that, ‘cause it’s the hardest part! And personally, I have particular considerations I have to make that you probably don’t have to in prose, particularly prose meant to be read all at once. I need to try and make each page at least mildly engaging and end on a hook wherever I can, since there’s no guarantee the reader is going to come back to progress the story in two days :D

Does cresce have any sub-nationalities and ethnicitys, or did the state convince people they're all the same?

–The three main groups are the Jarlans, Northern Crescians, and the Kusmen in the south. Their differences are minor in the modern era, enduring only in traditional songs and some of the stories surrounding the Victori. Our Captain Toma is from the Sava family who are part of an agrarian folk called the Klipou. They get teased for being rural and slow on the uptake, but are a very upstanding and honest people.

If Unsounded was prose I would play up these subgroups much more heavily. The Sonories are North Crescian, as was the legendary Crescia, while General Bell’s people are Jarlans. When Crescia was consolidating her power and uniting the country, the Jarlan river people were her fiercest critics, so much so that Crescia was afraid if she went through with her ultimate goal of dissolving the monarchy that the Jarlan leadership would seize control upon her death and run Cresce into the ground. Peace came a few generations later when Crescia’s descendants made a pact with the Jarlans, establishing the capital and the royal palace on a massive man-made lake along their holy river’s course.

This stuff is all ancient history now but some weirdos like Bell hang on to it, and a few old school Crescians doggedly perpetuate stereotypes. It’s not a driving motivation for Bell, but it adds a little texture to his distaste for Queen Sonorie.

Did you actively design Cresce and Alderode to be opposites of each other or did they sort of evolve that way as you were writing the comic?

They were designed to be foils. Can’t have a story without conflict! However I didn’t design one to be markedly or obviously “better” or more just than the other. They both have their problems. I’m not extraordinarily interested in the fight between them, because neither are ideologically pure. You can’t honestly cheer for either side. If you DO, that’s fine, but there is plenty of space and reason to dislike them both.

I’m more interested in the citizens of each place and how they deal with each other on an individual level, and how people in general are able to live in a world where no one is ideologically pure; where almost all institutions are self-serving and wicked. That’s a big theme in Unsounded. All group endeavours are rotten, or become rotten. Trust individuals, but never institutions.

This will all carry through to Alderode. There is no “right” caste. There is no “right” religion between the Ssaelit and Gefendur. There are good people, good intentions, and good days all carried along by a river of time and entropy. That’s life.

Toph and Matty for best blind children in western weeb media

Her breath is nature’s sigh, she’s watching over you. 

Spring is here and Hejkal sings forest songs for you ♥

Thank you for asking, BizzAnon! And thanks for answering, Ashley~ Me eyeballs shall live another day~

From what I can make out on a first lookin’:

First pole: “Fret not my children … for there is little…”

Second pole: “Be done in this world but… Think and fixate on the *illegible*” 

Third pole: “Your I N G N (or V?) V (or U?) I V Y H T S… Brought…”

Fourth pole: “For they are not your…”

Fifth pole: “…A O E D E R H … U A U R”

*edit*

AC on the Discord deciphered the third pole as “Your ingenuity has brought,” which is delightfully ominous. Thanks, AC!

BizzAnon: Rainwalker on the Discord is trying to read all the little text on the boards around Tirna's shrine on the cover page of the first chapter. Any chance you could throw up a high-res zoom of it and spare a reader's eyeballs?

It’s a MOSSbuik :D

@glassshard

Face to face with a 90 year old turtle

🎥: Nicholas Breaux

Why doesn’t the church just bless the whole ass ocean?? Wouldn’t that like through the water cycle get rid of all vampires eventually ???

adhd is having super amplified introspection yet zero self-awareness or decision making skills. i literally never stop overthinking absolutely everything but if you ask me how i am? i dont know. am i enjoying myself? i dont know. my opinion? i dont know. my favorite? i dont know. am i lying? i dont know. do i want this? i dont know. trust my gut feeling? it changes every second. which of these is better? i cant breathe. just pick one? eating glass would hurt less

Those who approach the New Testament solely through English translations face a serious linguistic obstacle to apprehending what these writings say about justice. In most English translations, the word ‘justice’ occurs relatively infrequently. It is no surprise, then, that most English-speaking people think the New Testament does not say much about justice; the Bibles they read do not say much about justice. English translations are in this way different from translations into Latin, French, Spanish, German, Dutch — and for all I know, most languages. The basic issue is well known among translators and commentators. Plato’s Republic, as we all know, is about justice. The Greek noun in Plato’s text that is standardly translated as 'justice’ is 'dikaiosune;’ the adjective standardly translated as 'just’ is 'dikaios.’ This same dik-stem occurs around three hundred times in the New Testament, in a wide variety of grammatical variants. To the person who comes to English translations of the New Testament fresh from reading and translating classical Greek, it comes as a surprise to discover that though some of those occurrences are translated with grammatical variants on our word 'just,’ the great bulk of dik-stem words are translated with grammatical variants on our word 'right.’ The noun, for example, is usually translated as 'righteousness,’ not as 'justice.’ In English, we have the word 'just’ and its grammatical variants coming from the Latin iustitia, and the word 'right’ and its grammatical variants coming from the Old English recht. Almost all our translators have decided to translate the great bulk of dik-stem words in the New Testament with grammatical variants on the latter — just the opposite of the decision made by most translators of classical Greek. I will give just two examples of the point. The fourth of the beatitudes of Jesus, as recorded in the fifth chapter of Matthew, reads, in the New Revised Standard Version, 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.’ The word translated as 'righteousness’ is 'dikaiosune.’ And the eighth beatitude, in the same translation, reads 'Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ The Greek word translated as 'righteousness’ is 'dikaiosune.’ Apparently, the translators were not struck by the oddity of someone being persecuted because he is righteous. My own reading of human affairs is that righteous people are either admired or ignored, not persecuted; people who pursue justice are the ones who get in trouble. It goes almost without saying that the meaning and connotations of 'righteousness’ are very different in present-day idiomatic English from those of 'justice.’ 'Righteousness’ names primarily if not exclusively a certain trait of personal character. … The word in present-day idiomatic English carries a negative connotation. In everyday speech one seldom any more describes someone as righteous; if one does, the suggestion is that he is self-righteous. 'Justice,’ by contrast, refers to an interpersonal situation; justice is present when persons are related to each other in a certain way. … When one takes in hand a list of all the occurrences of dik-stem words in the Greek New Testament, and then opens up almost any English translation of the New Testament and reads in one sitting all the translations of these words, a certain pattern emerges: unless the notion of legal judgment is so prominent in the context as virtually to force a translation in terms of justice, the translators will prefer to speak of righteousness. Why are they so reluctant to have the New Testament writers speak of primary justice? Why do they prefer that the gospel of Jesus Christ be the good news of the righteousness of God rather than the good news of the justice of God? Why do they prefer that Jesus call his followers to righteousness rather than to justice?

Nicholas Wolsterstorff (via chamerionwrites)