How Much Gore Before It Needs a Tag · 2:48am Feb 8th, 2016
I’ve got three quick questions:
First, I’m planning on making a Ten Fics That Changed The World post sometime, about ten of the stories that changed MLP fanfiction with Big Concept ideas. So far I’ve got Friendship is Optimal, Fallout Equestria, Past Sins, Cross and Arrow, XCOM-Stardust, Project: Sunflower, Longest Night, Longest Day (Lunaverse), My Little Dashie, and Keepers of Discord. (I’m not including Monster in the Twilight, because it’s a smaller footprint and not as influential.) Anybody got any additional suggestions or feedback?
Second, I’m planning on making a TV Tropes page for Changelings, Love and Lollipops sometime soon, and I was wondering if anybody had any favorite tropes they saw in the fic that they wanted to have listed. Go ahead and put ‘em in the comments, please.
Last, I’m on the last chapter of Buggie and the Beast, and I’m a little concerned that it may need a gore tag. The spot that I’m worried about is somewhat of a spoiler in the section where she’s moulting, so don’t go read below the break unless you want to. Let me know your opinion.
And yes, I have a very weird opinion of what constitutes a romance.
Moulting - Buggy and the Beast
Warning: The following chapter has depictions of changeling moulting in it. Ponies or people of delicate disposition are hereby cautioned to perhaps skip forward at the first sign of goo, and to tread carefully so you don’t get any changeling on you, because it’s the dickens to get washed out. Just remember, if you wake up screaming in the middle of the night or experience feelings of nausea, the management and ownership of this fic hold no responsibility⁽*⁾ for your reaction. So please, read responsibly, and try not to become emotionally unhinged at the sight of any blood, guts, or spoo. We now return you to your scheduled story, already in progress.
(*)Heck, they hold no responsibility for anything else either, so why change?
The two observations turned out to be related. Moving a few newspapers to one side, Beets revealed a changeling who had faded to almost a light lilac shade in nearly every part of her body, including her milky eyes which had almost lost all color. At first, Beets thought she had died, but she gave a little convulsion when he uncovered her eyes.
“Beets,” she gasped. “It’s too early. I don’t have enough love. I w-wrote you a note. The trash needs to be taken out.”
“Stay here.” Beets swallowed a lump the size of a can of creamed corn. “I’ll go get Idiosyncrasy and see if she can—”
“She’ll k-kill me and suck out all of my remaining love,” gasped the changeling. “I might be able to finish moulting. I don’t know. I’m just so cold. You’re supposed to snuggle when I say that, dummy.”
“Sorry.” Beets reached out and picked up the changeling. She felt almost weightless in his magic and as cold as ice when he wrapped his forehooves around her. “You know, if this is just some ploy to suck a little extra love out of me, I’m going to be pissed,” he whispered.
“I wish. Don’t hug so tight.” The trembling changeling started breathing again, with short breaths that smelled of flowers and sweet nectar. “I’m sorry.”
“Dammed straight,” said Beets. “I’ll never be able to find anything around here now. I almost didn’t find you. I don’t want to lose you,” he added. “Not until you pay me back for all the bits you cost me.”
“I owe you a lot more than bits. Set me down. And back up.”
Beets did as he had been requested, kicking away a few of the books he had brought. For the longest time, nothing happened other than the pale changeling shifting positions slightly and her breathing steadying to a rapid in-and-out that seemed entirely too healthy for the trembling and drawn form it was coming from.
Then she doubled over with a sharp cry. “Stay back,” she gasped when Beets moved forward. “Don’t touch!” A second convulsion swept over the pale changeling, along with the sharp crack of sundered chitin. The faintest line of darkness appeared across her back, moving from just over her forehead and down her spine towards her tail in an unstoppable motion that made it seem as if the bug were about to split wide open.
And then she did.
It was a horrible, splintering noise that sounded like the worst of broken bones and splintered noses. Something glossy green and dripping burst through the changeling’s splitting chitin and spilled out on the newspaper-covered ground as the discarded shell clattered to the ground behind it, tinged in a liquid green goop that smeared across the color comics and the stock reports.
Looking much as a clam without its shell, the slimy creature who had once been a changeling curled up on the newspaper-covered carpet with a keening cry, rolling back and forth while Beet Salad cringed backwards away from it. Beets knew there was some sort of shelling and extraction process involved in moulting, but the abrupt suddenness of the eruption made his heart hammer in terror as he stumbled and fell during his retreat.
The vaguely pony-shaped creature had only a thin translucent membrane as a barrier between her lumpy internal organs spilling out along the ground and the present agonized writhing among the stained newspapers scattering in all directions as she thrashed. He had expected red blood to spray across the floor as the changeling had erupted out of its shell, but this was far, far worse. There was a ruddy tinge to the flailing changeling, mostly covered by the green goo that it seemed to be extruding from its skin, but still obviously blood beneath the skin just the same as what flowed in his own veins. In a way, that made his present distress far worse. Had the changeling been totally alien, he could have managed some sort of psychological distancing from it, but that crimson hue only made Beets more aware of the living, feeling creature in agony on his living room floor.
He could not move. He could only watch and feel his heart tear in half at the sight.
The creature spasming in pain on the newspapers began to fizz and froth as if it were dissolving into the green ichor covering it, with a sharp hissing noise growing while it twisted in place. He did not recognize what was happening until he saw the gooey strands spitting out from its mouth, leaving a foamy residue that climbed up over its legs and torso. It was terrifyingly beautiful in a gruesome way, as if the changeling were some caterpillar spinning its own cocoon out of green paint and goop, and he watched it happen in detached fascination until just moments before the changeling vanished from view, it looked at him with astonishingly-dark teal eyes.
Then she was gone.
The hissing grew quieter once the initial cocoon was closed, but it still twitched and writhed as the creature inside moved. Thankfully, he could not see the naked changeling’s pained expression any more, even though it still grunted and moaned in a suggestive way inside the opaque substance as if she were trying to escape. Over time, the twitching grew slower and less spastic until it smoothed out into slow pulsation like the beating of a huge green heart, and a low green glow began to glimmer out of the darker interior and cast a faint light that lit the inside of his room in eerie shadows.
I will never be able to eat jello salad again.
He remained silent and unmoving until the cocoon likewise stopped its motions, or at least reduced them to a soft rhythmic pulsing like the beating of a giant obscene green heart. It took considerable effort to tear his eyes away from the changeling’s resting spot and look at the hollow frame that had once enclosed her. The pale violet of Rock Royalty hoof shellac had been scoured and faded away from the inside, leaving only a little white dust on the inside of a hollow changeling shell. He moved it quietly to one side and regarded the slow pulsation of green light from the cocoon instead.
She had said something about a note, and after a little searching, he found and opened it.
Beets. If I’m in my cocoon now, there’s nothing you can do. Just keep going to work so nopony gets suspicious and play me a song every once in awhile. I won’t hear it while I’m in there, but maybe I can get a little love in the process.
If I die by running out of love before I’m done, contact you-know-who. They can dispose of the body while you’re at work, and you can pretend I was never here. If I don’t die, you need to be careful. I’ll be hungry and may not be able to keep from eating you right down to the hooves. Just be careful.
Destroy this note, stupid.
--Sultry
I think your list should include Hard Reset and/or The Best Night Ever. I'd lean toward the former for sheer number of references to it in other fics.
The Golden Armor/Riflepony? A lot of people are devoted to those.
I apologize for not reading your work as much as I should have. I think the tag should be added for a reasonable amount of squick that cannot be explained clinically or in medical terms, not to mention if there will be blood not caused by natural or logical consequences. Basically any action that demoralizes, destructs, tortures, or removes sapience from the equation.
Can't really give any input on the world-changers; I think you hit the nail on the head, and I have a poor sense of scope in these matters anyway.
As for the preview, you're definitely skirting the edge of a Gore tag, but I think you might be able to get away with a warning in the relevant chapter. Still, the exposed viscera and horrific imagery definitely deserve some kind of preliminary advisory.
You can make your own TVTropes pages? Then again, a fic with a nine-hundred-fifty upvotes is noteworthy, so I guess you're allowed.
Find out which Doctor Whooves story came first. That should make the list.
How could you forget about Jetfire's It's A Dangerous Business?
I defy you to name another fic — at least, one written so early on in our fandom — that has the same level of world-building. What could be more "Big Concept" than traveling hundreds of miles beyond Equestria and gaining minor superpowers? Not to mention, it had a generous amount of inter-personal conflict and friendshipping among AJ, RD and Rarity.
About the above passage: it definitely qualifies for the gore tag, though almost entirely due to the visible organs thing. Without that, it only really qualifies as weird and gross, not quite gory.
3739830
I've made wiki pages for movie reviews before, it can't be that different. It's pretty straight forward WYSIWYG plug and play. Like a forum post, you don't even need to know XHTML to do anything special. Speaking of which, I really should go over those books on computer forensics, dreamweaver, and launching your business on the web. I'm pretty sure the information was outdated when I bought the books, but probably less relevant.
At least some mention should be made about The Conversion Bureau's politically-charged effect after it's original author abandoned it and the folks who picked it up after... Well, let's just say I can't say much nice beyond admiring the craft, but abhorring the message and how the individual in question acts in comments, etc.
Overall, its not quite at the gore tag, but could be making do with a warning bit, or a way to skip with a find option after for the break.
3739844
I second this idea. Magnificent story.
Also, what about Life and Times of a Winning Pony?
WRT top ten list:
If you are to judge them by the impact they have had in other artistic mediums, I wonder if a good heuristic would be "Is there still fan art being produced with concepts and themes from those stories, and can someone who has never read those stories recognise them at a glance?"
Fallout: Equestria: 'nuff said
My Little Dashie: draw a picture of filly Dash next to a human and everyone will know what it refers to
Allegrezza: First codified the whole Octavia/Vinyl Scratch relationship. Also gave us red-eyed Vinyl.
Cupcakes: Show a picture of a slightly angry, straight-maned Pinkamena, and everyone starts looking for the knives.
Past Sins: Nyx certainly is recognisable and still shows up on occasion in various pieces of art.
Background Pony: Lyra in a hoodie.
3739805 and 3739844 mentioned some excellent fics, but I wonder how much of a lasting impact they had and how many themes and concepts today still come from those stories? Granted, the above should be taken with a liberal dose of salt; you could probably poke more holes in it than a lace doily under a rivet gun...
I would have to point out Five Score Divided by Four as an influential fanfic. It got big enough and inspired enough people to write spin offs or side fictions or whatnot that FIMFiction actually made a rule saying that any Five Score verse fiction needs to be either completed or a minimum of 30 000 words long before you're allowed to post it to this site.
I also think that you can't talk about influential fictions without giving a mention to Cupcakes. Everybody knows about Cupcakes, even if they haven't read it. Even in completely unrelated contexts, just the word 'cupcakes' alone is enough to send shivers down brony spines. I don't know if it was the first grimdark fiction for MLP, but it is certainly the most famous of them. A dark fiction may not seem like a big, world changing thing now, but that's at least in part because Cupcakes steeped the fandom in grimdark years ago when it came out.
Night's Favored Child by Municipal Engines, possibly.
Eternal by Device Heretic.
The arguable start of the popular Displaced movement, The Rise of Darth Vulcan (yeah, sue me).
First, I think it might be a good idea to look for origin points on common background ponies or common character reinterpretations because those have more impact on the fandom as a whole than something like Fallout Equestria which is fairly self-contained. Cupcakes Pinkamena is an obvious example of the latter because of the way it spills into other things, but the former category is both more important and harder for me to pin down because I am not sure I can really point to a conclusive definition point for ponies like Lyra and Derpy who have become fixtures in the fandom, but they are almost as significant as the canon characters at this point so their definition is really far more critical than basically anything else.
As for the story snippet, you definitely need a gore tag for the mangled mess you made of biology there.
Seriously, that was painfully wrong and I was cringing most of the way through it so I'm going to give you some quick pointers to fix that mess.
First, the blood has to be red. Hemoglobin is just to much more efficient than anything else for transporting oxygen to be replaced in the complex cardiovascular and respiratory systems a large creature like a changeling must have in order to survive and especially fly. Of course, this point is rather academic because there will be no bleeding in this process because the body cannot afford to loose unnecessary resources in a process as demanding as this.
Second, the soft skin under the molted exoskeleton is not transparent. Yes it is usually visually distinct from the final shell, but it is still a full skin with all the pigments that will be in the final shell so it will not be transparent unless the final creature is transparent which changelings very clearly are not.
Third, the split will almost certainly form down the back allowing the changeling to push her body up through it using their legs. The only arthropods that don't do this are usually things like crabs that have major shell plates which they have to work around, but changelings do not appear to have anything like this so I would expect them to molt upwards instead of downwards.
Fourth, there will be no cocoon. Those are only formed by a handful of arthropods, and even they only form them for radical transformations like the change from a caterpillar to a butterfly which completely reshapes the body. Normal growth or restoration of worn/damaged body parts is just a relatively simple molt, and the changeling is not undergoing metamorphosis so that is all that would happen here.
Fifth, this may be answered before that snippet, but why is she molting in the first place? Molting is usually done to allow growth so the malnutrition you mentioned would most likely make her body wait on molting unless there was some pressing reason it had to be done right then.
I'll wholly suggest The Conversion Bureau, writ-large. And not just because I write in it myself. Some writers are better than others, but they all have their own interesting spin on things. I'd have to suggest Cloudhammer's 'First Contact', Chatoyance's, 'The Big Respawn' and Anonsi's 'Yellowstone'.
... By that same token, Midnight Shadow's done a fantastic cyberpunk turn with 'Out and About in the Equestrian Kingdom'.
I'd also like to suggest 'The Things Tavi Says', which, while a recent fic by Short Skirts And Explosions, details synesthesia in a fascinating way.
Two more. One, ABagOfVicodin's 'Therapist Visit', which is a great turn on Luna adapting to things.
Two, Raugos, with his series about Luna's bat pony guards, Hammer and Anvil. Great backstory for those two, wrapped in their own past and reasonings, twined around Luna as both her friends and foils in a world a thousand years gone for all three of them.
Let's not forget about Andrew Joshua Talon's story "Progress"... how many folks headcanons about Luna (from her famous abacus to her gaming habits and even her awkwardness with modern things) was influenced by this (sadly incomplete) story?
Also Loyal2Luna's Dr. Whooves stories or her Mass Effect stories are great too.
On another note, as someone who helps to edit Arad's Stardust related stories, great to see it in your list!
My top ten "works that changed the fandom" would be Fallout Equestria; Progress; Cupcakes; My Little Dashie; Past Sins; Pony POV series; Cross and Arrow; Winning pony stories; Killer Rarityverse and either your Traveling Tutor or your Lamina and Pumpernickel stories
As for a Gore tag, reading the selection, maybe a warning either on the cover of the story or at the beginning of the specific chapter. Just a "hey if you are sensitive towards insects or snakes molting maybe don't read the chapter" would probably suffice
3739844
I'd say two things : One, it didn't really change the fandom, and two, most of the worldbuilding is just Lord of the Rings. The Pronghorns are the most original thing in there, but the others are Pony Rohan and Pony Lothlorien. This gets much more overt in the sequel where there are literal elven names used for similar characters.
The ones on your list I agree with :
Fallout Equestria
Past Sins
My Little Dashie
These 3 are the fics basically everyone has heard of. The others on that list tend to occupy niches of 'First in their class' or 'Great in their class' but I suppose I'd wonder if you mean 'Changed fandom fanfiction' versus fandom writ large. I suppose Cross and Arrow could contend only because it managed to lay out the Male 6 names that most people have stuck with, but otherwise I find it hard to say it influenced much in terms of writing or anything else, because the Male 6 are just the Mane 6 with penises. There's nothing different about them otherwise, in that story. It could have been Twilight meets alternate Mane 6 who are lesbians and the story is unchanged.
Optimal, Stardust, Sunflower, and Keepers are the 4 I'd consider Good Stories on that list. The other 4 + the Lunaverse I think all have strong cases of 'popular because first' - except perhaps MLD, which while not great literature, does exactly what it sets out to do very, very well. It's pure wish fulfillment and totally a good example of tradecraft there, if not great literature. The others...eh. If they came out now I'd wager they'd get little attention save perhaps FO:E, but I have a hard time giving that one much credit because it's just 'Fallout, with Ponies' without really seizing on the 'ponies' part of it in any way.
Compare Stardust, which is Xcom re-imagined, but makes Twilight integral to the entire storyline. Now, of the 4 I cited as good? I'd say only the Optimalverse is one I've seen launch a bunch of sub-fanfics. The others are great stories, but what did they change, exactly?
For other changers, if the goal is 'Fanfiction impact', then I'd argue Conversion Bureau, Five Score, and much as I hate to say it, that story about the Rainbow Lich Baron Xonte which was the first Displaced Story - I hate Displaced but its going on 2 years now and can still tag the feature box.
For ones that fit 'Great stories' :
Sunny Skies All Day Long - One of the first good 'Celestia doing normal pony stuff' fics, and consistently one of the top 10 stories of all time on the site.
Anthropology - Hey, its the story that took Lyra & Humans to 11. S'even got a song it inspired.
Hard Reset - Hey, Time Loops as a thing done right.
There's plenty of others, but I guess the big question is 'What is the criteria for inclusion?' here. SS&E probably belongs in there somewhere, as does either Bad Horse or Horse Voice.
AestheticB's Immortal Game, Visiden's Upheaval series, Warren Hutch's Earth & Sky, Darth Link's Families, xTGSx's Ascend, Wanderer D's Empty Room, Moguera's Savage Skies series...
And most of those are only the heavy series on my complete list. There's loads of oneshots and short runs that were fun, plus loads that simply died for whatever reason.
I'd also bring up the apparently controversial series (not the stories themselves so much as the author) by Reality Check.
And The Night is Passing by Cynewulf.
Most of the fics your quoting are goodfics that changed the fandom (though I would argue strongly that My Little Dashie is not). However, for better or worse, there are plenty of badfics that had profound influence: people have already mentioned Cupcakes, I would also include Rainbow Factory and Xenophilia.
Rainbow Factory, is, of course, almost as influential as Cupcakes, whereas Xenophilia is the genre codifer for all those 'human goes to Equestria and gets pony harem' fics. It is also responsible for popularising the concept of herds in the fandom.
Additionally, you may wish to consider Malideus and The Rise of Darth Vulcan. These fics are the origin point of the wretched LOHAV and Displaced craze that has plagued the site ever since.
As much as I thoroughly enjoyed just about every fic on that list, I'd have to agree with several of the others in this thread that several of them don't really have that fandom-changing impact. Stardust and Sunflower are two of my favourite fics on the site, but I don't think either belongs on the list of 'influential' fics. Friendship is Optimal is a little closer, but still not quite.
If I was going to write a list...
Past Sins, FO: E, Cross and Arrow, and My Little Dashie are all definites; I don't know whether "Longest Night, Longest Day" was the first (or at least the first popular) alternate mane six, but if it is it certainly belongs.
The good old trio of horror - Cupcakes, Rainbow Factory, and Conversion Bureau - these three have definitely impacted the fandom whether we'd like them to or not, and you can see references to all of them cropping up with solid regularity to this day. I'd try to cheat and mash these into a single line of the top ten if I could.
Rise of Darth Vulcan - again, love it or hate it, even though it wasn't the first 'Displaced'-style fic (and the author thoroughly refutes its inclusion in that category), it sparked that movement, which still continues to this day.
Anthropology - again, not sure if this was the point which truly cemented Lyra with the human obsession she's so solidly associated with these days, but it's the first one most people can think of.
Xenophilia - This I think is the only one in mine that hasn't been mentioned previously. I'll admit I joined long after it was finished, so I can't prove that it was the first for these, but as far as I'm aware this was the beginning of quite a few things which have continued to be referenced and expanded on down the line - Careful examination of herd dynamics and pony psychology, especially as it compares to human; pony martial arts, and Lyra as a master of same; and serious long-term consequences of a human in Equestria.
Flitter - One of, if not the, first really solid "Not all changelings were part of the swarm" fics. I mean, honestly, don't know exactly how much this would have changed the fandom - let's face it, if this one didn't do it, another fic would have - but...
That's coming close to the end of the list that I can think of off the top of my head... looking through the other suggestions in the topic I'd probably agree with "Eternal", possibly "Life and Times of a Winning Pony", "Progress"...
And of course, if you don't mind stretching the allowable medium a little bit, Friendship is Witchcraft. :) Nobody can deny the impact the memes from that have had on the fandom...
There's probably way more than ten fics. You'll want to weigh things like popularity, influence, and definitely not quality, because most of them suck. :V That aside, as influential fics go, Background Pony? And I'd second just about everything people have suggested so far.
I wonder if things like Twilight Sparkle Earns The Feature Box would qualify as stories which fed the metafiction flames.
3740771
I seem to recall Twilight Earns the Feature Box being the culmination of the meta-fic trend, though that may be because the rule against meta-fics came about shortly after it hit the feature box. Unless my aging memory is failing me. Which is entirely possible.
What were we talking about, again?
I'll admit that I haven't been here long, but I would suggest Xenophilia for your list. Because it's a 100,000 word human in Equestria clopfic with 100,000 views from 2011. No other story in that category would even get close to those numbers today. Even if it is a partial fantasy fulfillment fic it does it extremely well and the world building is fantastic, so much so that it has inspired sequels and side stories aplenty, plus the entire human in Equestria genre (probably).
, will the final list have links to the stories?
Also Cupcakes, because for all the shit it gets it was at least disturbing the first time I read it and it inspired a whole genre, without this story there probably wouldn't be a dark/gore tag on fimfiction.
Other than that I would like to thank you for giving me a list of landmark stories to read
Honestly, adding a gore tag would be a bad thing down the road if this is the only thing that warrants it. Many people will outright ignore a story tagged under gore, so it would probably be better to add a warning in the chapter title.
I'd say that The Life and Times of a Winning Pony is probably too low-concept for the list, unless there's some evidence that it actually kicked off the "background ponies doing things too adult for the show" genre, which I really, really doubt it did.
3741520 It was probably already in the works for some time, but it does feel like the metafiction rule was specifically created just to make sure that that nothing like that particular story ever happened again. You could say that it had a significant influence on the genre by killing it off entirely, at least on FIMFiction.
3739817 3739827 3739885 3739994 3742847
Ok, I've redone the section of Buggy and the Beast in question and linked in you five commenters. I used the suggestions to add red blood to the mix, but I'm holding with the translucent skin for horror value and 'cocoon' for artistic license (because it's a word that immediately brings a certain definition to mind, although the changeling in question will *not* emerge as a butterfly).
She's molting because of the damage to her exoskelleton. Changelings *have* to have both endo- and exoskeletons or they'd collapse into a puddle while transformed into ponies unless it was a *whole* body transformation, which is a little excessive (skin only seems more logical). I use the rough rule of thumb that changelings are physically as strong as unicorns, have as much flight power as a small and very young pegasus (without transforming), and have as much magic as a young earth pony (seriously, three spells: Crash Landing, Levitation, and Mind Control in rare situations) Even transformed, they can't match the 'normal' abilities of the type of pony they have changed into without a whole lot 'o loving to fuel their fire. (which is why six ordinary mares from Ponyville kicked so many of their tushes.)
So. Better? Worse?
3752275
I suppose they(changelings) would need an endo-skeleton in order to hit jaekelopterus sizes above the water (on land) even if their outer covering has marshmallow or gelatin scales (butterfly wings have scales). But, I'm not entirely sure (or certain) how that would work. I recently saw a tree fic with 'dryads' and I know termites have a secondary organism that processes the nutrients they need to survive from what they consume, so maybe the changelings aren't parasitic per-say(spelling or correct word would be great) but are actually hosts for parasitic organisms that drive their actions (Chrysalis crown looks like enoki mushrooms to me for instance, and the changelings all look partially eaten with all the holes on their bodies, and I believe fungi have scales as well). I'm not sure if anyone else has explored these possibilities before. I really haven't read as many changeling fics as I would like that aren't of the 'would it matter' variety.
I wonder if the scales could be thought of as bitmap or or retinal display.
3752331 Hm. A parasite that covers a pony and controls their actions. You know, that could make a really creepy changeling story.
3752275 Well, it's a lot better, but it still fails biology in a rather obvious way with the cocoon even if you can kinda justify the translucency, especially because his mind will be able to fill in the missing information from it not being properly transparent. Also, many arthropods eat their cast off exoskeleton after a molt to reclaim the minerals in it to help strengthen their new exoskeleton.
As for the damage, I'm going to need more information there. Odds are good she would wait on molting until she had the resources to do it safely, or at the very least limit herself to a partial molt because molting is enormously demanding, but it would depend on the details of the damage. That said, there is really not much in the way of limits on what can be regenerated in a molt because any arthropod which molts throughout its entire life (which changelings must do) can regenerate lost limbs over a series of molts.
As for the transformation itself, I always assumed that was more like the holograms and force fields of the holodeck from Star Trek with some extra bits to trick magical probes because that is far easier than actually physically changing the body, especially because you only need the physical components of the disguise to be functional when something is actually touching it.
3752275
She's an emotional parasite with attributes of both insects and mammals. You're definitely allowed a little artistic license with the biology.
In any case, it looks fine to me. Horrific, yes, but enjoyably and intriguingly horrific.
3752275
I actually liked the the green blood version better for two reasons. One, it adds a nice alien vibe and two, it gives a possible reasoning for the necessity of love. Perhaps the magic in love is needed to facilitate the transportation of oxygen and nutrients despite the green blood being entirely unsuitable otherwise. When a changeling runs out of love completely, all of its cells would shut down from lack of oxygen.
3752544 This hits you quite well, with that inhuman and yet relatable. that kinda approach is most assuredly on the mark here. You have a kind of Fly approach for the horror, you know, the first viewing. and I think you hit that just about as close to the head as anyone can.
3752808
Thank you, though I've never seen the Fly. Most of this stuff just pops into my head.
3752275
3753099
I dont know why it replied to you (Lord Sergal), guess i clicked wrong (and no offense intended), but i meant more to the original reply (from Georg), and yeah, both examples before and after are good. I just got that sorta nice mix of inhuman vibe of a different outlook, and something that has little issue in that it has to take.
3753164
None taken, I just thought you were one of the people that read my Age of Iron short story.