i’m sick of doom-and-gloom, 2edgy4u urban fantasies with angsty Chosen Ones™ and constant hard darkness and entirely too many werewolves. so here’s a list of kinder urban fantasy things:
• pharmacies run by faeries who can tell what you need with a single touch and who are tipped with dollar coins and drawstring pouches of sugar (don’t worry, they have human employees to handle the iron supplements)
• dryads who tend to the parks and sidewalk trees and have the ability to purify little patches of air for asthmatics who have difficulty breathing in the polluted city air
• tiny water sprites living in public fountains who use the coins people make wishes with to buy thimblefuls of coffee– once they’ve granted the wish to the best of their ability, of course
• sphinxes who guard libraries and only ask riddles at the level each passing person is capable of answering
• and werewolves too, I suppose, but they don’t sit around angsting all day about being monsters because there’s a monthly bus service that takes them to special parks just outside the city where they can spend the night running around and roughhousing without hurting anyone. they also get the next two days following the full moon off from work since wolfing is very tiring.
because while cities can be hard, dark, unfriendly places, they’re also vibrant and bright and full of all kinds of wonderful people
Tag: stories
SKETCHES!! Some guy and his big doggy monster! I promise I will post stuff more frequentlyyyy
Looking up Scottish mythological creatures and
Wulver: a werewolf in Shetland, that is said to have had the body of a man with a wolf’s head. It was reported to have left fish on the windowsills of poor families.
That is the nicest Werewolf legend I’ve ever heard of.
Now I wish I could draw because I’d love to draw this.
i triedshetland, where mermaids are evil and werewolves fight poverty
I love when people find this post again, this is a wholesome werewolf post.
You know what I want?
Space mythology.
Saints of the starship and angels that take their true form as nebulae, great and fiery amorphous beings that speak the will of the Universe
Nymphs of asteroid fields and planetary rings, sylphs that fly in the tails of comets and solar wind, the gods of the galactic core
Demons that dwell in black holes and eat the hearts of dying stars, spirits of galactic battles that cause engines and shields to fail when you get too close to their graves
Ghost ships, long MIA, drifting in dark space, an inaccessible monument to those lost
Demigods, Herculean beings forged in solar fire surviving alone and unshielded in the vacuum, on an icy rock so far from a star as to never see its light
Heroes and saints ascending to their gods by dissolving into starlight and void
Just…Space mythology.
YES YES YES
So basically all these separate posts are kind of combining into my head into this one epic fantasy series with mermaids and knights and dragons and pirates
where all the relevant characters are lesbians.
I’m putting together a book of all the short comics I’ve drawn over the past year to have for sale at my spring conventions! Not sure what the title will be yet, but the uniting themes of all the stories seem to be Girls and Magic.
I drew this selkie comic really fast and it bounced all around tumblr which was cool, but the messy lettering and simple coloring bugged me so I cleaned it up a bit.
This is one of my favorite things ever. I will always reblog.
See, this is what happens when you let the selkie come to you rather than stealing her skin like a huge asshole.
The Frog Prince: a fairy tale where “no means no, and I will throw you against a wall if you keep pressing the issue” is the way to break a curse.
The Village Dragon
Nearly every non-magical village, town, or city has at least one resident dragon. Frankly, it is just good civic business. Come winter, the local dragon can be hired to clean out snow and ice with its fiery breath, and come times of invading knights and rowdy adventurers, the creature’s claws and teeth make short work of any enemy.
Magic attracts magic, so in a village scarce with monsters or the undead, having a dragon around can help bring in the energies that assist in keeping life in the Netherworld so comfortable. In this manner, dragons and their lairs provide anchors, drawing in and concentrating everything from storm energy to stone and earth powers.
Tourism helps boost local economies immensely, and monsters travel all across the Netherworld to meet specific dragons, trading gems and gold for discarded scales, to ask advice, and to hear historical accounts.
Now, one might wonder what the dragons could possibly get out of this arrangement. Treasure (as mentioned) and attention.
Dragon hoards serve as bank reserves for a community, giving them a standard for their economy and a base for trade with other communities. Many individuals bank with dragons directly as well, adding their personal and family wealth to the creature’s hoard with the assurance there is hardly a safer place to store money.
For all their brooding bluster and bluff, most dragons love attention.
They love being admired for their size and wisdom, they adore having their scales polished and delight in showing off their magical abilities. By setting up their homes in largely non-magical communities, they instantly become “the big show” of the region. Everyone visits often, usually with food to share.
With their incredibly long lives, dragons watch generation after generation enter the world, prosper, and then find peace. The dragon can add new chapters to stories and relive past memories as family friends.
Interacting with dragons is easy as long as you follow a few simple rules: know you cannot hurt it, and if you try, it will eat you, and it will hurt tremendously the entire time. Bring snacks to share (any will do) and offer it some piece of news about your life, local gossip, or bring a story you’ve thought up.
You know, I really love all those ‘Earth is Space Australia’ ideas and humans as the super tough, super unflappable space badasses who can smile in the face of any danger and who will pet absolutely anything that mostly isn’t toxic and sits still long enough. I adore them. However, sometimes I do wonder … do aliens have phobias?
Because I can’t help thinking that somewhere in this future universe there’s the one human who went to space because spaceships are relatively sterile environments and therefore in space there are less bugs*. And then one day a guest comes onto the ship and their multilegged pet comes slithering out from under their fashionable collar and suddenly from the back of the shuttle bay there’s this high-pitched, hysterical screaming. And the alien crew turn around and there is their human, their badass, amazingly tough human, the one who managed to survive with half her leg torn off that one time long enough to make it back to medbay, the one who bluffed space pirates for a full half-cycle without so much as a quiver, the one who had to be forcibly restrained from petting the nine-foot slavering hregallar on Threlanix because apparently they were ‘adorable babies’ … that human, their human, is suddenly clinging to the ceiling in blatant defiance of the ship’s artificial gravity and wailing her head off in absolute terror over a pathetic little xhilitin. The tiny, stupidly harmless insects that about sixteen species keep as pets because their jewelled carapaces are lovely and decorative and they’re so dumb and harmless that they’ll cheerfully sit on your hat as an ornament from here until infinity.
So the mildly shellshocked aliens try and calm their human down and they get her to medbay and they’re asking ‘are the xhilitin on Earth dangerous?’, which, probably, apparently everything on Earth is deadly, but none of it has ever terrified their human before, and their absolutely mortified human is going ‘no, well yes, some of them are, that’s not the point, it doesn’t matter if they’re dangerous or not, I just don’t fucking like them, okay, please never let one aboard ship again, i will love you forever and fight off a hundred pirates for you if you just keep the creepy leggy little fuckers the hell away from me, i’m so fucking serious right now, i am begging you’.
And she is absolutely deadly serious, and it makes no sense whatsoever, but suddenly the entire crew are 100% for never, ever letting xhilitin aboard the ship again. Because, well. She would fight off a hundred pirates for them, she has fought off a hundred pirates for them, she’s dragged herself back with half her leg torn off that one time after saving Lehm and Ehletol from the nine-foot slavering beasties she still thinks are adorable. There is no rational reason in the universe for her to be afraid of xhilitin, but it doesn’t matter, because she is, and that means this ship is suddenly a no-insect zone from now until forever.
Because hey, okay, humans are tough, humans are insane, humans come from Space Australia, but sometimes humans come with a couple of odd little quirks, sometimes they’re randomly terrified of ridiculously harmless things, and that’s okay. That’s okay. That just means that sometimes aliens get a chance to look out for their humans in return.
* please allow me my comforting illusions and do not inform me of how unsterile and full of bugs spaceships really are, okay, this is future sci-fi land where spaceships are clean and free of creepy crawlies and nobody needs to have nightmares
send me a pairing + a trope and i’ll make a graphic: anon said, anya/dimitri private investigators
dimitri did not want an assistant. he has a partner- vlad. but vlad think he might retire soon and they also needed an assistant to take notes and help organize the files. which wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t hired anya. anya, the beautiful annoyance who insists on tagging along – and solving – most of their cases. anya, who keeps dimitri on his toes with her quick wit. anya, who somehow wiggled into their lives and became something like indispensable. anya, who has the red hair and the paris necklace of the missing daughter from their latest case, who may be the missing girl they’ve been hired to find. anya, who may be destined for something greater than private investigation- something greater than dimitri, he thinks. // 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8
saratogaroad 