originally posted on tumblr, May 11th 2023
assassin's creed x alice madness return au
after 2012, Desmond ends up in a coma instead of dead, and is retrieved by Abstergo. they modify the Animus to allow for memory erasure and try to delete all his time with the brotherhood while maintaining the memory of the sun flare day, and how to possibly regain control of the Eye of Eden.
the erasure is faulty, and causes Desmond to fall into a terrible psychotic break for several years. As symptoms lessen, he starts to be given the indoctrination 101 which immediately sets him off. He can feel something is off, and tries to regain or reawaken his faulty memories while surrounded by templars who are constantly stirring him away from the truth. as he tries to carry on and be a functional person again, he's often overwhelmed by hallucinations and delusions, often throwing him back to not only his ancestor's memories, but his own fragmented ones.
eventually, he slips deeper and deeper and eventually falls down to the little corner of his brain where Clay's construct still lingers, and now he has to guide Desmond through an Animus' blackroom and piecing together his memories while fending off the templar's meddling. of course, not everything goes according to plan, but when does it ever?
bonus points: Desmond never fell into a coma cus Lucy never got stabbened to death (instead she was uncovered and fled back to the templars, and she's desperately trying to help him out and cover his tracks cus she changed her mind in the whole double crossing thing exactly thanks to him and his faith in her and humanity in general), which is what made him crumble after using the Eye.
surprise round points: the hallucination portions are a frankenstein of raw code Animus blocks and lazers, the weird flickery intro to AC1 with the faceless npcs and shit, and bits and pieces from genetic and individual memories, all with a good dose of good ol' human creativity to glue it all together. basically, the vibe is grungy collage of disparaging styles with some healthy techy urban fantasy on top. very dadaism, very y2k liminalcore.
originally posted on tumblr, May 9th 2023
So here I am, gathering references for my Desmond study, as one does, and I reach AC3. I brace myself for impact because I have the original un-mastered version, and I find the remaster flattens the models too much and kinda, plastifies them?? which makes figuring out dimensions hard. So I gotta deal with, a lot of lighting and rendering bullshit instead. Fun all around.
I start the game and get to screenshooting, and I notice Desmond has some drastic pale palms going on. Like, oddly so. I shrug it off for now, but then I notice that Bill Miles also has them. And, Shaun? Some more gameplay in and we reach Haytham and, he has the same stark pale palms situation going on. Ngl, I'm baffled.
Speaking of averages and my own observations, people with pale skin don't get that stark pale palms even when they tan. They get some faint distinction, but it's mostly from a tanning gradient, the undersides of your arms don't get as exposed to sunlight so less tan. Meanwhile people with naturally brown skin do have distinct pale palms that clashes even with their own tanning gradient.
Now, I know for a fact Haytham doesn't have enough melanin in him to have naturally brown skin, that's a white man. He might not burn in the sun but c'mon, this feels too stark. Not only that, but the skintone just, don't match? Their hands are too red undertoned while Haytham's and Desmond's faces are much less so.
So I decide to do some digging. Now, I have no know-how on how to rip assets in games and god forbid, translate them to something like Blender. But I do know that machinimas were big back in the day, and that includes a lot of AC character models being used for gifs and videos and such, so I delve into DA for some model refs. And indeed, I find them, and...
Yeah, that's not the same skintone. And after looking at some other screenshots online, even in game the skintone is very much not a match. So what's up with that?
It turns out that as far as I can tell, Ubi did about three skintones (pale, brown and dark) for each gender, by modifying a base skin texture's levels or smth, thus why the palms are so stark. They used the same skintone for the native npcs, Connor, Haytham, Bill, and Desmond. Likewise, Ziio and Prudence share the same skin texture. Which, royally sucks for reference taking, despite being a fairly common game dev trick to shrink asset production.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere really, I'm simply annoyed. ACR very much whitewashed Desmond, but AC3 did um... something alright.
originally posted on tumblr, May 9th 2023
hellooooo everyone!!! at long last the zines are out and shipped, which means i get to show off my entry! :D
It was wonderful being a part of the contributer team for @dincobbzine , it was full of amazing artists and writers and I hope everyone who got it will enjoy our work, it was made with much love and appreciation <33
originally posted on tumblr, may 7th, 2023
no but listen-
you arrive at the one safe corner in the one last possible safehouse for you and your team before you have to risk it all and jump the border. it's a place dripping with memories, and the first thing you see when you enter it is one of your ancestors. the one that started you down this whole rabbit hole, the one that reintroduced you to a war you made yourself believe was just cultist lies.
you're in good terms with your team but they aren't friends yet. you trust them to watch your back but not to see you be vulnerable. you're tired after three weeks of your life are lost inside someone else's memories, three weeks of isolation where you're either spending time with long-dead people or having to decide between resting and spending time with people just as tired as you are.
you and the team settle in, and they all seem to flock as far away from the statues as possible while still making good use of the chamber's space. you though? you make your corner right at the foot of Altair's statue. it's only right, right? who else would? it's ominous and overbearing but, you know the guy better than anyone else possibly could. he's not just some legend, he's also the asshole you relived as and watched find redemption and save his order from itself. he's greater than life, but he's also a long estranged uncle with lots of stories from his youth to share.
you chat up the team, make what little small talk you can manage, get work done. then you run out of things to say and do, and you stand in front of this legendary asshole who's probably the crux of a lot of very conflicting and complex feelings, and you crack a joke. just a little thing to lighten up the mood for yourself, an inside joke only you and him would get. hell, you can even imagine the baffled eye-roll the statue would give if it could. and in comes someone to spoil your one moment of vulnerability, disguised through terrible comedy as it may be. who wouldn't snap back over it?
and don't even get me started about how Des is the one canonically brown person in that team.
originally posted on tumblr, May 2nd 2023
desclay fix-it au, GO!
as Desmond gets booted out of the Animus Island before he's deleted alongside it, he's sent into the blackroom and the genetic memory datastream. However, the fragments he finds in the simulation are no longer related to his own memories, but someone else's.
the animus sends him back to his partition, but he finds himself in an unfamiliar Animus Island, fresh and sunny. he can leave yes, but the message he finds makes him stay. as he tries to find the way out, he finds himself reliving the memories of another, and a spark of hope appears. maybe it's not too late to make things right.
slowly but surely, he relives those fragmented memories, failing and falling but getting back up, determined to see this through. as the new path opens up before him, he makes sure to carry all that with him as he wakes up. for a while he wonders if he did it, or if he managed anything at all, until he feels a small voice in the back of his head and for once he doesn't feel dread about hearing things.
as he recovers from a week-long coma on a cabin near the Grand Temple, him and Clay grow a routine and system for the whole two-people-in-one-body situation, but it becomes more manageable once Desmond twist Bill's arm about carrying the Apple himself. it's his burden after all, and everytime his ancestors left it on someone else's hands, it always ended in tragedy. he's not committing the same mistakes.
thanks to the illusion projection of the Apple, Desmond and Clay manage to interact physically again, though it takes some getting used to and stealth so others don't find out. having someone's cyber ghost in your head is quite a stretch to explain after all. having Clay around is sure a boon however, and as they figure out a safeguard for whatever Juno is planning, they also do their own research on how to find Clay a new body, or create it.
eventually December 21th hits, but Juno wasn't counting on two minds using the Eye at the same time. Desmond and Clay end up together in the Grey, but the bonus of it all is that there is still a way out, though they need to bide their time. As Elijah gains control of the Koh-i-Noor and removes Juno from the equation, the way for them through the Grey to the right temple is clear, and through the Fountain of Youth technology, they manage to recreate their bodies and return to the living.
an early retirement isn't quite in the horizon for them, though, as they unite with Elijah and need to figure out how to raise a kid while continuing to destroy pieces of eden and remaining temples.
originally posted on tumblr, Apr 26 2023
enjoy this inside joke from my dnd group.
we have an npc (he’s a de-horned unicorn demigod (long story don’t worry about it)) who had to be benched for being a drama queen, and then everything went south. so i put him on a sylvanian travel case for ease of carry <3
originally posted on tumblr, april 24rd, 2023
today’s lessons are:
i don’t think i need to explain the significance of seeing living beings in this DLC. if lore serves, the Lost Archive happens entirely in “raw code”, in what we can only assume is the human mind experiencing being inside a computer’s head. “no simulations, no environments”. to say that the brutalist aesthetic works like a charm to convey the dryness and inhospitability of such an experience is an understatement. but, as Desmond’s Journey in the ACR main story shows, when memory impressions escape into the code, they begin to make a more tangible appearance in the landscape, and affect the user’s experience.
now, given the DLC is not technically portraying a human mind experiencing code, but an artificially intelligent construct based off a human being’s experiences and thought patterns, itself experiencing said human’s memories… things are gonna get whacky. so i thought i’d make a quick study on when said impressions make a presence. i might do other posts on game mechanics being used to portray stuff like weather patterns, and of course the sceneries and furniture sets, but i thought organic life contrasts against the overall setting of the game and thus leave more of a mark.
Memory 1, THE END IS ONLY THE BEGINNING:
the animus island. rip bestie, you’ll be dearly remembered. though the overall layout of the island is the same as the one in ACR’s main story, it’s missing the overcast sky, the blue tinge saturation, and quite a bit of decay from the blocks of brutalist cement piercing the island or floating about. it’s also sliiiightly smaller, so one can imagine this is what it looked like before the coding of the blackroom got all wonked up.
flowers at Clay’s funeral. ngl it’s still a punch to the stomach. still, what’s a funeral without some flowers? a few bouquets by the headstone and a garland, they got the basics covered at least.
roots inside grave path. as you delve through the pathway of the grave plot, you can spot a few stray roots and some leaves poking from a rift in the ground above. it really sells the imagery, for better or worse.
flock of pigeons. ah yes, good trusty pigeons, always there to let you know when there’s a soft haystack just out of sight, or in what direction to aim your leap of faith. not the last we’ll see of them, but their first appearance so early and in such an inhospital setting sure breaks a bit of the tension from the earlier scene. brings you back to simpler, easier times, i suppose. a measure of safety if you will.
Memory 3, ABSTERGO:
garden courtyard. given the setting and the possible european location of the memory, it’s likely to stand for an inner courtyard in an assassin hideout. the cozy warm lighting and overall layout also gives that sense, and it’s a stark contrast for the following office maze hallway you’re sent into when Harold addresses Clay.
Memory 5, BLEEDING EFFECT:
flock of pigeons. i know right, what a place for them to show up again. feel like they (read Juno) are mocking you more than anything. nothing else to be seen when it comes to living things in this memory, to no one’s surprise. i have my own theories on why they are here to begin with, but maybe another day.
Memory 7, THE END OF THE LINE:
second garden courtyard. i think it’s quite safe to say this is the code representation of the animus island. not just because of the overall layout but it’s clearly timed to be soon after Clay Prime is on the out bus and uploading the construct into the animus.
seagulls. are you teary-eyed? i sure am. it’s all poetic and shit but, i love that it’s a reassurance that even if he falls, he won’t fall far. seagulls are a sign of land nearby after all, so yeah, back to the start we go~!
originally posted on tumblr, mar 26th, 2023
this is it. this is what you're about to read, yipee hurray! i'm about to rawdog this pustule of a man on a table, and i'm dissecting why he's such a tentative yet counterproductive evolutionary reaction to a shitty situation that ends up causing more problems than it fixes. yknow, like a pustule.
this is gonna be long and rough (honestly the innuendos just write themselves don't they)
also if you haven't already, I'd recommend checking out my previous Daniel and Lucy posts for further context as i'll bring back stuff from them in here. call it a series what the heck.
now, onto the Billiam!
originally posted on tumblr, Mar 19th 2023
i can and will complain about the horrid treatment Desmond and Clay got in the games, but i certainly will NEVER forgive ubisoft for how dirty they did Daniel.
that man is brimming with potential. we had two comics showing how he was used as a tool by the templars, how all of his life was informed and affected by what they did to him as a child. how he was left on the side of the road without clothes or a name to him, bereft of support and answers to his hallucinations, which led him down a turbulent and traumatic life. how the one community and support he found, the same one that gave him a direction and goals and a sense of belonging was violently ripped away from him because in the end, even that was just a lie, another illusion. everything he worked for for years in the brotherhood, meant nothing, was nothing, because the templars caused him to burn that bridge and the moat and the castle all in one stab of a blade. and now, he has no choice but to throw it in with the people who ruined any and all chances he ever had of a normal or stable life. they are the ones with the animus and the drugs that he needs to continue to exist, much less function somewhat normally. he has no other choice but to surrender himself as a tool, and he's always desperate to prove himself useful because he knows that once he's not, he'll be discarded again, and that will be a fate worse than death for him. if the brotherhood doesn't get him, then the drugs and the violent outbursts caused by the hallucinations will.
he was - is - a perfect foil for Desmond, who has been treated as a pawn, by the assassins and the templars and the isu, he's just the right person to be at the right place at the right time, thanks to a sprawling line of causality that leads him solely to it. he was a tool before he was even born, the community he was born in treated him as such too and so he left. he condemned himself to an isolated and dangerous life to attempt to be a person and find self-actualization, and look how that turned out. sure he chose to stay with the brotherhood and help, but in the end was that really his choice or did the calculations just compute his willingness to it? did he ever have a choice at all or was it all just numbers on a tally of probability?
Daniel is the worst case scenario Desmond could have ended up as. A man used and abused to the point where he has no choice but to make his peace with the role that was decided for him. he's Desmond's shadow of the soul as it were. they are both just playing their roles and they both are more aware of it than most people could ever be. Desmond said it himself.
"It just keeps happening over and over."
"What does?"
"Everything..."
and to further expand on on the narrative foils, Daniel and Clay also are mirrors of each other. Both stepping stones on the grand scheme of things, ultimately disposable but never dismissable. But while Daniel became a victim of the Animus and his need for it to function, wanting to ditch it but unable to, Clay had no choice but to surrender himself to it in order to see his duty to the bitter end. Daniel can barely handle existing in the real world anymore, and Clay had to leave it to continue existing in the simulation. Neither ever wanted his, but they both needed to do it to make something, anything, of themselves and the pain that was inflicted upon them.
worst of all, the game seems aware of all that!! even setting the last mission's confrontation in the Animus chamber in Italy, the place and machine connecting the three men together. Desmond having to use the Animus as a barrier between himself and Daniel, the thing that doomed both Daniel and Clay being his one protection at the time... it was all setup so beautifully for a poignant meaningful scene between those two, maybe even a proper boss fight--!
but what do we get? an absurdly deus ex machina bleeding effect that turns Daniel into another chase assassination. No fighting back, no words, no discussion or debate. Not even a fucking confession cutscene. It's disgraceful, it's pathetic, and it's so, so offensive to your audience and the story you're writing.
originally posted on tumblr, Feb 15 2023
“You have fine tastes, don’t you, córeczko?”
@cerbin-aen-feainn asked me for Calanthe holding baby Pavetta, and if I don’t post it then I’ll just keep fussing with it until it’s not a sketch anymore, so here we are!
The idea of Calanthe using polish terms of endearments is by @bookcalanthedaily
originally posted on tumblr, May 3rd 2023
commission for @bookcalanthedaily thank you sm!! <3
just two grandmas having a good time, as they deserve
originally posted on tumblr, May 30th 2023
commission for @windflowerofskellige of their Foltest design and baby Arabella. thank you so so much!! <3
originally posted on tumblr, Jun 20th 2023
commission for @realkaijuhavecurves for a cutey tabby kitty. thank you so much for your request, it was a blast! >w<
originally posted on tumblr, Jun 22 2023
commission for the bestie @mt07131 of her Iveani and @cerbin-aen-feainn’s Lin. always lovely to draw them uwu <33
originally posted on tumblr, Jul 27th 2023
commission for @robin-in-the-library of beloved Angelo Poliziano and kitty Telemacus! thank you so so much for the lovely comm!! <3
originally posted on tumblr, Jul 28th 2023
commission for @windflowerofskellige of their Radovid design and @cerbin-aen-feainn’s Stella. thank you so much for the wonderful comm!! <3
originally posted on tumblr, Aug 3rd 2023
commission for @blastflight of Skadala Flintlock! thank you so much for the wonderful comm, this dwarf lady was a joy to draw!! <3
originally posted on tumblr, Aug 24th 2023
Icon commission for the wonderful @hcdragoncat!! thank you so much, it was wonderful drawing your boy! :D
originally posted on tumblr, Sep 3rd 2023
Another icon commission for @hcdragoncat!! thank you so
much, Phoen is such a lovely fellow! :D
originally posted on tumblr, Sep 26th 2023
commission for @windflowerofskellige of their Radovid as a bebe and Philippa. thank you so much for the comm!! <3
originally posted on tumblr, Sep 26th 2023
Once again, an icon comm for @hcdragoncat!! thank you so much for this, your lad Abyss was so much fun to nail down! :D
originally posted on tumblr, Nov 3rd 2023
commission for @ohnoanalien for their Celestial Fusion AU! thank you so much for the comm, it was a blast!! :DD
originally posted on tumblr, Nov 29th 2023
commission for @vvitchdokter of their oc Viatrix in her human form and getting a, not so good first meeting with Geralt. thank you so so much for the comm, it was a blast!! :D
originally posted on tumblr, Dec 12th 2023
commission for @bookcalanthedaily of Pavetta and her two oc Calanthe children, Ceran and Coram! thank you so so much for the comm, always a pleasure <33
