elitetrick
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Weekly Update - 285 - 8/25/25
🕑 Added 2025-08-25 20:05:28 +0000 UTCWaited until the absolute last minute to send in my personal information so they wouldn't delete my account here. I seriously considered just letting them delete it for awhile, ngl, because it's not like I make a ton of money from Patreon and I can't say if risking identity theft is worth it. But... eh. Over the past 7 years I've accumulated a huge stockpile of art and blathering here on this website, and I kinda like how it's organized, it's been slowly growing the past few years, and it'd be a shame to throw it all out for something that's as worthless as my identity. Besides, Patreon assures me that my personal information is securely stored and that it will never be sold or shared, and they'd never possibly lie or be wrong about such a serious topic.
Anyway.
I'm taking this week off from comics. It's time for a recovery week. I'll still be drawing and working on GS: TTRPG stuff, just not holding myself to a deadline until next week.
Ramble:
Today's Ramble has nothing to do with God Slayers or Solipsus. But it is about a nerdy fantasy topic some of y'all might be mildly interested in maybe.
It's about Fae.
Why? I'll be honest, the Fae as a concept has never really interested me before, but I can't stop thinking about them lately. And I guess maybe that's why I find the topic so interesting all of a sudden: I've had a recent shift in perspective that has opened up an entire world of possibilities that was previously invisible to me.
And before I continue I just want to reiterate (largely because I don't ramble as often as I used to so some of y'all might not know) that my Rambles are raw and unfiltered thoughts manifested into words that I vomit out into the internet so I can stop obsessively ruminating over things. I know I use hyperbole sometimes to try and support my points, and I know my opinions can be totally wrong, too.
Rant:
I've always thought of the Fae as they have been broadly depicted in media: fanciful, flitting, flying forest fairies that live in trees and sit on toadstools and warn adventurers to stay out of their groves and play silly tricks on anyone stepping into their mushroom circles. The stories I grew up with that had Fae in them always depicted them as either side characters, minor obstacles, moral guides, or convenient but especially annoying narrators, but nothing with any actual substance to . If they didn't fall into any of those categories, then the Fae were depicted as something that was SO STRANGE it was UNKNOWABLE, which might sound neat on the surface, momentarily, but give it any more thought and it's honestly boring AF. Seems like it's just an excuse for the author to avoid having to think about it too hard. "I can't explain to you what the Fae are because they are beyond human understanding." Yeah, sure, great. As a reader I love being told I'm too dumb to wrap my head around a concept the author has allegedly come up with. Let's not try and kid ourselves that stories aren't somehow written by humans, and that humans need to be able to understand such concepts in order to write them, and anything written that's allegedly "beyond our understanding" hasn't actually been written at all. And YEAH I'M LOOKING AT YOU, FROM SOFTWARE, WITH YOUR ALLEGEDLY SOoO0Oo0O DEEP AND RICH LORE. Turns out lore gets pretty damn deep when you do the bare minimum amount of work to seed "hints" all over the place and let everyone else fill in all the gaps with their own imaginations. A cute little writing trick that admittedly has proven success, BUT I DIGRESS. Point being, I got used to the idea that everything that might have once made the Fae interesting to me has been dumbed down and distilled down and whatever's left in the pot doesn't even have any flavor. So I never gave the Fae a second thought before because there were so many other topics that were way more interesting to me.
So WTF even do:
Now, before I go any further, I'm not saying that Fae have never been done right. There are TONS of stories and TTRPG systems centered around Fae that people love dearly. But because of the broad strokes they were painted with in most of the stories -I- was told as a kid, the fact that Fae are so broadly stupidified for mass media consumption, I never developed any interest in the concept of them at all, and today as my brain explodes with the infinite possibilities of spirits unbound by the limitations of a physical dimension, I feel like I've missed out on exploring a really rich and interesting side of mythology, one that I'm only now rediscovering for the first time. So I'm talking about it now just in case any of you might have grown up feeling the same way about Fae that I did. I might very well be the last one to the party in this regard, but maybe my experience of late can help open your mind as well, who knows?
So, where did this all come from? Well, when my friends started work on a World of Darkness inspired urban fantasy LARP system they wanna make for some of our local crews, they wanted to include playable Fae alongside the ideas they had for werewolves and vampires and mages and hunters and such, but they had just a big ? under the category because they weren't even sure where to start and they were thinking of cutting it altogether. Initially, I had demons on the brain, and I was all about demons, and figuring out how to work demons into the setting. But my idea for demons got shot down, largely because of what the existence of demons implicitly implies about the existence of angels and gods as well, which changes the entire scope of the setting, forces it to define something like a pantheon, a universal structure, etc etc, so that didn't really fit very well... But like... then it occurred to me: what is really the difference between demons and fae? Suddenly my brain saw this blank canvas under Fae and started running wild because, given the opportunity to design something like the Fae from the ground up with no restrictions and infinite possibilities, I couldn't help but wonder what would that look like?
So WTF even IS?
As I usually do when approaching the design for such a thing, I examined the origins of such mythos to see where to start. Broadly, across history since ancient civilization and across many human cultures worldwide, people have always labelled "thing we don't understand" as either a fairy, spirit, or demon. Folklore is often just that: here is a concept we find odd or have no good explanation for, therefore we came up with a story for why it must be a spirit/demon/fairy. This includes everything from cosmic events and natural disasters to the simple uncanniness of some abandoned tools left in a forest or the reason someone misplaced a key.
Combined with some ideas from Animism, or the idea that basically everything has a spirit or soul, and I think I finally had an explanation for what Fae are. Essentially, they could be anything. The simplicity spirits, but they could be the spirits of every plant, every tree, every rock, every iPhone, every dream anyone has ever forgotten, every unexplained phenomenon or every concept. As they could be the spirits of anything, they could also be the spirits of the gaps in everything or the spirits of the potential for things not yet conceived. They could have infinite forms and shapes. In essence, the Fae are the rawest, purest form of creativity given a shape and made into a category of characters. Everything from a Hag, to a Fairy, to a kitsune to youkai, from animal spirit to tree spirit to spirit of time to spirit of stasis to spirit of dreams to spirit of halitosis, everything, every type of spirit limited only by the imagination can potentially fall under this classification of Fae. However, as my friend rightly pointed out, not everything should be PLAYABLE, necessarily. For reasons apparently initially obvious to everyone but me, granted I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to actually willingly choose to be a poo sprite. Chalk it up to my idealistic naivete, perhaps.
And... well, there's a lot more to it than that, because coming up with the concept for what Fae are is only the first of many steps, and there's certain tropes that need to be touched on for something that's called "Fae" to fit with player expectations... such as how they are famously mischievous tricksters and WHY that's a thing. Or why there's a broad perception of them as forest guardians, even if they aren't, necessarily, guardians of any forest. And I do think I came up with a decent explanation for it that makes sense from both human and non-human perspectives... but this Ramble has already gotten way too long and I'm tired of typing. So... effectively... for anyone who bothered reading all this, I feel like I just wasted your time telling you WHY I'm thinking about this and then holding back on any of the substantive ideas I think I've come up with, which were the whole point of this Ramble in the first place. Sorry.
Maybe I'll continue talking about this next week, if anyone wants that, or maybe I'll get bored and move onto something else. I am an artist, please god forgive me.
10 days until Silksong as well.
Comments
Scott Swickard
Youβd be surprised. At least I learn some new words! βDetritusβ. π
Trick
Somehow I doubt anyone is learning much from my cast-off brain detritus, lol.
Scott Swickard
You write so well, I now feel smarter! β€οΈ
