Con Quest

Former Complete Monsters

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSgNR9iblN1C5EX-PHXjb3Q-zQruDXlOR0hZyJkF8zOYgy0QhdkX0WmGKBzDYPp_4PewbC9jcBndgRU/pub

The text after this should be commented-out properly.

Drivethru is definitely one of the cities of all time. Grouchy population, stale food... What a place!

• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Bros of the Hill," a parody of the Periphery Demographic that treats King of the Hill like a massive, complex fantasy series of the sort that tends to get explosive fandom content, with sprawling alternate universes, frequent crossover works, and shipping wars. The shipping wars also almost exclusively involve Hank, and most commonly a fake-war between Hank/Dale and Hank/Bill. This completely ignores the actual canon in that Hank is married to Peggy, Dale is also married to Nancy, and Hank's friendship with Dale or Bill is rocky at best, let alone would he even consider dating them even if marraige and orientation weren't issues. People in this group also tend to treat everything related to King of the Hill as masterworks of the highest quality, even and especially the controversial episodes ("What Makes Bobby Run" in particular), and bring their ironic love to near worship levels.
    • Related to that is King of the Hill: World of Propane, a fictional movie that supposedly managed to become the highest-grossing film of all time and an instant sensation everywhere.

So this is a "speedrun" of the Terraria: Nymph Quest mod. All bosses and Medallions, triple curse.

So this character is pre-made, the only changes are that he starts with the Curse, Super Curse, and Ultra Curse. These items are normally sold for free by the Oread, an NPC you can get in a few ways. But we're not cowards, we're applying the Curses right away. Each curse multiplies enemy stats, money drops, and most importantly spawn rate.

The scariest thing about Dragon is that she's probably the nicest Blossom.
—Trying to remember what inspired that "comment." Invincible spoilers: It was referring to Omni-Man being the "nicest" Viltrumite, and that was the scariest thing about him.

Biome Artists' "secret" is low expectations. It's generally considered, lord forgive me for saying this, mid by general mature fantasy standards. Plot's a pretty standard "fight against the evil empire" of sorts; yeah there's twists with Zelpea being the villain and not some "misguided figure that will turn around" that the story half-ass tries to pass her off as for the very very beginning, but that's it. You can basically predict the exact roles Zoap, Arime, and Zelpea will go through right from the first chapter. The "main" haremettes (basically the primary, secondary, tertiary, and "nonchromatic"-colored ones) might have distinctive traits but none of them are super deep except maybe Alexia, and even Alexia's story is borderline cliche. Let alone the quarternary/quinary-colored ones and especially the West Continental ones, that range from two-dimensional at best to straight-up "joke characters" at worst. (Before anyone says Iris: She's absolutely the exception, not the rule. You expect her to be a lesser character because she's a Quaternary.) The world may seem large and interesting, but it's a "width of an ocean, depth of a puddle" thing, with many of the Regions being similar and almost interexchangable when it comes to their cultures that actually matter and you look past what they export or minor quirks, not helped by the "alliance." It supposedly has over 500 "nations," but you could really boil it down to like seven: The Blossom Kingdom, the Saypant Metropolis, the Green Region, the "progressive"/"united" East Continent Regions (Blue/Red/Yellow/Cyan/Magenta/etc), the "hostile" East Continent Regions at war with the rest, the few "relatively regressive/reclusive" East Continent Regions (and both them and the previous category are changing out of it anyway), and the West Continent Regions.

It's just that it's technically a fantasy world harem, and by those standards it's a breath of fresh air. MC is neither a dense moron nor a fanfiction-level Gary Stu and it's actually believable that he has a bunch of women swarming around him (casual polyamory is common in the setting + Everyone Is Bi + Zoap's a genuinely good person and he has "saved several dogs and cats' lives among other animals" on his record so that's already something that puts him above the average joe). Villains that have interesting personalities and are actual threats and not just fodder to shill MC. Plot twists. Actual attempts at jokes and not "It's funny because we're talking about boobs woahahahaha whaaaaaat (and the occasional shoe-horned meme/reference 'It's funny because I quoted this thing')" oh my god I can't emphasize this enough. To someone fed up with the conventions there it's downright cathartic, the "I hit the main lead because I just like having a walking punching bag" is portrayed as a vile monster instead of the adorable main love interest that MC values above everyone else, and there's loads of things ranging from shows within the story to specific bit characters that poke fun at other pretty meh aspects while BA itself does not do those things. And to someone who isn't fed up or even likes them, the story's still readable as a standalone without treating it as a meta-anything.

Long story short it's why the game had hype to begin with. Water never tried billing it as the next Game of Thrones because it... isn't that.

I like how you used the different biomes to represent the different "sectors" of the world. It fits, especially since Terraria heavily inspired Biome Artists:

• Forest for the Blossom Kingdom.
• A mix of Jungle, Snow, Desert, "Underworld" (ash and lava), etc for the Regions of the East Continents.
• Hallow and Corruption for the West Continent Regions, representing their generally colorful and, half the time, faelike, with the literally-dark looking parts that are also surprisingly chill. (So, unlike Crimson being the Overgrowth, this isn't fitting to the lore, but whatever.)
• Mushroom for the Metropolis, mixed in with Martian tech to represent the futuristic upper class part.
• Crimson for the Overgrowth.

What the hell is that giant tree in the Crimson section?

• The "Crimson section" represents the Overgrowth, a mysterious giant peninsula filled with weird monsters that seemingly defy the story's rules of magic and how their "creatures" work. And yes, the tree actually is to scale, it really is large enough to be visible from space; it's at the dead center of the Overgrowth, but because the place is surrounded by monsters and has a force that pushes out inorganic material while pulling in organic material, even the top researchers haven't figured out what the hell is inside that "tree," or what it's even made of.
  
  Okay the lore is this: Long, long ago there used to just be once sapient race, these humanoids made of cytoplasm so to speak, and the planet was relatively "normal." Then a giant meteor split the moon in two and crashed on the planet, causing a giant cloud of this toxic "moon dust" that left most of the surface uninhabitable. Many of these cell-people took to these specialized magic chamber things underground, in artificial "super biomes" of their creation, and hid out there, with some contact to the outside world and the like. But a large colony did not believe in that and instead went over to one continent on the opposite end of the impact site, where the poison gas was thinned out enough to be relatively harmless. Generations passed, the people who hid out in the flowers over time began to take on the traits of their artificial biome bunker things, becoming these "elemental" or "biome...mental" humanoids who have a strong color scheme. The ones who stayed on that continent on the surface... kind of "evolved," but not really, in to two "neutral races" — the Humans and the Saypants. Saypants are pretty much just Humans in different colors and with a slightly different, edgier vibe — that's not important.
  
  So, the Overgrowth came to be at some point after the initial meteor impact, but everyone was trying to avoid the apocalypse, so they didn't really go over to that part of the West Continent and see exactly how it formed. The closest "safe" spot is still far away and instruments couldn't really detect it. Plus, it formed close to if not in the epicenter of where the meteor hit the planet. Anyway, after some centuries the moon dust cleared up and the whole surface became safe. The [not-Nymphs] emerged from their bunkers, kinda, and started exploring around and growing their biomes over what had been lifeless wasteland. Then, like, everybody looked at that spot and saw that there was this bigass red miasma there. Looking from the sky/space revealed a huge thing that looks somewhat like a tree made of flesh.

• Growing the Beard: The Azure[?] Arc marks the point where the story sheds most of its Early-Installment Weirdness and Slow-Paced Beginning, starts to dig in to its meat by establishing its identity. Key elements like the A- and B-plot system, the gang actively hunting down the Big Four gang members, the Evil Versus Evil Gambit Pileup plotlines involving the Big Four, several recurring characters and locations, and the building myth arc with Zelpea's hunt for the Relics get established. This is also when the Grime Crime members besides Arime herself, Naytileek, and Lithlaun get named and characterized, fleshing them out as the Evil Counterparts to the main group. The webnovel is fairly aware of this, as the final chapter of the Biome Artist Entry Exam Arc was written with a tone that says "Okay, the introduction stuff is finally out of the way, now this is where the story really begins, here's a preview," and then in brief goes over the "central" characters that will be important over the Yellow Moon Saga. (Frida, Lara, and the tertiary-colored future-members, with the exception of Kristen to keep her more of a secret. The "Monochrome Duo" is also left out for similar reasons.)

• Unsure if this would be An Aesop or Central Theme or whatever: It tries to take "Nobody's perfect" and apply it to a technical-Harem Genre setting. Zoap is not written to be an escapist character, and his lovers are absolutely not written to purely be appealing to the audience, all of them being heavily flawed and holding a great deal of negative character traits. One of Zoap's own flaws is his at time obsessive need to do something the best possible way he can, overworking himself and being self-sacrificial to nearly suicidal levels. None of the characters' faults magically go away when they band together [...] By contrast, Zelpea has an obsession with control over others and will not stand for any "lover" other than an absolutely obediant slave of hers. Her true goal is to have the world under her heel with everyone either serving her, acting as her food, or dead. Zelpea preaches a concept of blood purity, despite she herself being "flawed" by her own standards and the standards of the Core Empire: She (and Zoap) were born asthmatic and Zelpea does not have the "complete" sequence that would let her control the Relics indefinitely,

Eh, I'd say Zoap is a Deconstructed Character Archetype of the All-Loving Hero but otherwise literally everybody else on there is a stretch.

WDYM "not like the other nerds"

Dude dislikes crossovers (well, shared universes, most of his works are in entirely separate "universes" so to speak unless they're direct sequels or explicit spinoffs), time travel/time loops, and recycled plotlines, for one thing. And he hates fourth wall breaking/meta narratives outright. There's exceptions but they're pretty rare unless it's a video game that's thin on plot and has good gameplay.

His plots alone also just discourage the former two in general, since he tends to focus on lengthy, continuous story arcs involving huge casts of characters. So adding time travel would make things even more bloated, and when his characters would cross over to other worlds, you're either leaving out 99% of the cast of both works, having a lopsided crossover, or just left with a ton of characters that have nothing to do and/or redundant roles.

I'd say it'd make for a pretty kickass Netflix series at least. And plus I don't think Netflix would be as much of an obstacle with changing or toning down any content... like, how could it "ruin" that?

A couple of ways. Mostly through some dishonest sort of "appealing" that actually just leans on sitcom tropes if anything, and it's all too easy to just "slightly" tweak the story and result in something that's the same sort of thing that it was written to not be.

In particular, we've got a lot of smaller/subtle changes that would throw this headfirst on a "sitcom path:"

• Zoap becoming a typical comedy protagonist idiot.
• The Elements either hating Zoap outright or Zoap hating them.
• Either some sort of Zelpea apologism/trying to tack on traits to make her more "sympathetic" or even "morally gray" OR she becomes cartoonishly evil and loses the things that still make her a complex villain in favor of just being evil for the sake of it.

Also there's the issue that, unless this is on a premium channel or streaming service, there's no way in hell the Elements' default toplessness would be allowed uncensored, and it's extremely unlikely it'd be allowed even if censored to hell and back.

I dunno if the Elements weren't hit with Adaptational Modesty but they were just blurred out to high heavens that would be kinda funny.

Thing is if the uncensored version was exclusive to disc or hell even a subscription to a streaming service, that would be close to "nipple-selling," which Water also hates.

Again he's a rather uncompromising ass in some ways. There's a reason why he has said that he has zero intention to try to get his stuff professionally published in mainstream media, and that if he did, he wouldn't use characters and settings he'd care about, he'd either make up pander-y characters or he'd just use Unviewable (the Butt-Monkey of his works at this point, if such a thing was even possible).

Low-key I find it funny how he's pissing off creeps who keep bugging him about turning it to an embarrassment-fest.

Like seriously I don't understand how you'd even get through the first chapter and think "Oh yeah this is totally all about humiliation and characters getting in to cartoon naked antics and re-creating moments from kid shows (and The Simpsons) I used to like" like... guy is actually trying to make a somewhat serious action adventure. There's also a lot of genuine horror stuff in there too.

"Dummy Takes"

"And no 'Biome Artist is UPOIC4' because I know that's what everyone will say."

• I've once seen someone try to claim that Arime is "actually cis-coded" while Zelpea is "trans-coded."
  • Honest-to-god, and again especially with the "Yellow Moon Saga-only" bit, you could kind of make a case for Zelpea given the whole "renaming from Carol to Zelpea" thing (granted it was to reflect her heiratage which is a different thing altogether), even though Water had confirmed that Zelpea was more akin to her giving herself an edgy username than any actual name change. Other stuff like her asshole old-fashioned parents and her Relic use/that she technically transforms by the finale in a process involving a lot of colors could kind of be read as pieces of a (poorly-handled, at that) trans narrative if you're really drunk and reaching.
    
    But yeah, Arime "being cis" or "written as such" whatever that means is just flat-out dumb.
• Basically any Zelpea apologism, but the most common and annoying is "Oh well her parents are assholes and she just snapped/she got corrupted by power and being put in leadership." Like. Nothing indicates that Zelpea is
  • "Arime caused the Incineration because she had Zelpea dead to rights in the Metropolis but knocked her out instead of snapping her neck." And the retort is usually "Oh yeah? Well Zoap caused the Incineration by saving Zelpea's life when the castle chunk fell on her in the first chapter." and not... you know, "Zelpea caused the Incineration because she was the one who actually used the deadly rainbow Relic fire and destroyed the Capital City with it."
    • This is also very obviously just digging for an excuse to bash Arime. "Arime could have killed Zelpea in the head lock moment" yeah literally every Element had Zelpea "dead to rights" in at least one point. Remember when Zelpea was forced to a hotel room with them? With no Relic? They could have teamed up against her and killed her right there, and she couldn't raise a finger. Arime herself even points this out. Their words to Zelpea make it very obvious that if she tried anything whatsoever,

Anyone else think that the dynamic between Vince, Tania, and Sonata is a little like Ed, Edd, and Eddy (respectively)? Just that Vince has a more clear head than Ed.

I'd say it's more like Vince is Edd, and Tania is if you replaced Ed with an Edd that was ultra serious about nature and defeating a monster and getting the other two off their asses. But yeah Sonata is absolutely the "Eddy" of the group. Just replace money with dates.

Water himself also compared them to the main trio of She-Ra, which he swears is a coincidence, as he thought of the story beats before he started watching it: They got a swordswoman, an archer as the guy of the group, and someone who uses magic as her primary means of attack. The archer is the only one without magic powers, the swordswoman originally came from the villain's faction but defected after finding the truth about them, and the mage is in some way tied to

Bruh I'm sorry but if you diss Nymph Quest just for being a "waifu mod" yet like Calamity is hypocritical. Like I'd say the two mods by themselves (this is ignoring the prose fanfiction, but like, you have to be actively looking for the fanfic. It's not like the mod gives a direct link to it and includes the R-rated scenes copied and pasted straight in as a random line of dialogue from the Guide. Just a brief mention that the mod is an adaptation of the general "Zenith Nymph" series, and you have to actually Google that, and the mod itself has a warning that it's NSFW) about as equally sexualized. I mean, NQ has one "sexy boss" in the form of the Dye Goddess, a hidden boss that you'd have to go out of your way to see, and the rest of the "nude characters" are all 16-bit sprites of . Calamity meanwhile has the Brimstone Elemental, Anahita, and the Cloud Elemental (the latter's original design was really hornybait, her revised design )

I haven't actually seen too much of this group shit on NQ for that reason. It's mostly the writing, how the Oread comes off as 2edgy4you, or how hellishly difficult the Jungle is in the early game despite the mod supposedly trying to flatten the Early Game Hell curve.

"I don't like how the Oread NPC has too much dialogue and the mod is trying to get us to like her and everything" — first of all most of her dialogue is the hints on how to get the Petals. It's her equivalent of the Guide's Hints or the Tavernkeep's exposition on the Old One's Army. You can just use the wiki, in fact it's arguably easier since you can just look up recommended Petal progression order

Granted she is annoying as shit I will give her that. But in a manner that's easily ignorable.

Relatively speaking Biome Artists has more in common with Adventure Time and Steven Universe than it does with Monster Musume or To Love Ru and I really fucking wish more people knew this going in.

...

BA (at least Part I) is actually like a really weird inversion of Steven Universe in some aspects:

• Yellow and blue heroes against a pink villain.
• A group of humans are the ones driving the main plot forward and threatening the living area of the colorful humanoids.
• The colorful humanoids are often accused of being "filler characters." We actually have people wishing to focus on the humans instead.
• Colorful humanoids are plant people with the occasional mineral motifs instead of mineral people with the occasional plant motifs.
• MC would have forgiven the main villain if she had actually apologized and tried to ammend, but she doesn't.
• There's a not-too-uncommon dynamic of giant people taking orders from smaller characters, but it's not a heiarchy like the Homeworld caste system. Henna to Kat is the most obvious. (Although Kat's pretty damn tall.)
• Having actual characters named (er, codenamed in BA's case) "Pearl" and "Peridot" is one of the most obvious bits. Technically "amethyst" if you count Lara's training under Pearl where she says, once, that that was her codename.

"Flaws:"

• No "proper" Rot battle. I don't care if it's "subversive" or Water confirms that the Elements would have defeated Rot "regardless," it's anticlimactic
• Chart/Metro Arc was actually a bore for the big finale of the Yellow Moon Saga. It had the least "new" love interests introduced (and don't say that it's to set up up the Grime Crime, because literally all of the Yellow Moon Saga did that, there wasn't a single arc that didn't name drop and give personality traits to at least two of them), the aformentioned Rot bait and switch, and hammered you in the head with "Metro bad" and "Zelpea bad." And this is coming from someone who liked the Zelpea chapters — of the Blue Moon Saga, when she had powerful weapons and cyborgs/Dragon on her side to make her more interesting. Zelpea with just the Relics alone and very little of her gang "set up" is a really boring antagonist (I also disliked the final battles with her and preferred the leadup when the Biome Artist Global was fighting the whole might of the Blossom Kingdom army, but this isn't as bad as the Chart/Metro Arc). The one part I liked was the big showdown with the Grime Crime that was teased way back at the beginning, but that was followed up with the Zelpea battle which was just a bore. The Blue Moon Saga was a phenominal improvement, but if it wasn't I would have dropped reading the story entirely, it really has this feeling of "That's it? That's the big story-turning arc that's the end of the first half of the 'first part?'"
• Too many characters are defined by couples/groups they're in. I understand that making 100 independant characters is a huge task, so there's a lot of pair offs and whatnot that are meant to bounce off each other to
• Water's formula of "Take whoever of the 'newest' Elements had the least character development from the last arc, team her/them with Zoap(+Arime when she finally joins) and the new Elements, and put them on the A-plot while everyone else has either has 'the' B-plot or 'a' B-plot" (for example, the Biome Artist Entry Exam puts a bit more focus in Cassandra and Bethany than Lana (Alexia gets a lot of focus too but she's basically the main [Not-Nymph]), then comes the Azure Arc where Lana is the only one of the original four to go along with Zoap and the newcomers) is a double-edged sword that ends up stabbing the story hard later on. It's an interesting idea, but in execution it mostly leads to characters getting shoved to the sidelines right as they get interesting, and this happens over and over. So it's frustrating. Zoap and Arime are of course the exceptions but that's another problem, they're not as interesting of a main duo as Vince/Sonata/Tania were as a main trio. V/S/T managed to carry Zenith Nymph since it leaned harder on being goofy and getting you in the mood of bouncing around characters, and their dynamic was much better. Plus they didn't spend a good chunk of the story split up (yes, Tania wasn't around at all in the first arcs and had her separate B-plot before meeting anyone after, but compared to the time it takes Arime to join, Tania progresses at a lightning speed).
• The Green Region, the Capital City but also just the country in general, oh my lord the giant forest civilization was an already idea at first but I got sick of that place so fast. Look, I'm fine with character-based stories set in one "city" location, but not when one of the main hooks is that it has over 100 countries and the main characters will be going through all of them (in that half of the world, anyway). For every A-plot that had some of the Elements venturing to a cool new exotic location we cut back to at least one part of them doing stupid slice of life shit in that damn city and talking to some of the story's most annoying side characters. To put this in perspective, my favorite parts of the story were the lategame arcs in each Saga when the Elements all go somewhere at once (meaning nobody is left behind in the Capital and so there is no b-plot) and the first arcs of the Blue Moon Saga since Arime travelling the world meant that the screentime focus had to change the formula a little and have Zoap's gang mostly in new areas... which meant no storylines in Green at all. I groaned when Arime made it to the Green Region, and things got worse when there was a

Homer

• Biggest problem is the Big Four. Yeah the group fighting Kat's cult/gang/etc was pretty interesting but after the Yellow Moon Saga, oh my god the other three gangs (and even Kat's when they started doing stuff from rehab) overstayed their welcome and got annoying. It's not even that I wanted more focus on Zelpea and stuff, it's just that it became really obvious Water had no idea what he wanted to do with them
• Also I did not like how long it took Arime to join the group.

No, while the Big Four groups are mostly just some sort of loose theme (various "types" of horror, various "types" of science fiction, vehicles/mecha, and swordfigthing/martial arts), the Blossom Kingdom goes a bit deeper than that. So, Biome Artists is trying to be an "alternative" to harem works by trying to show genuinely positive and healthy relationships, giving the "haremettes" (term used very loosely) fleshed out lives that don't revolve around the main lead, burning the Madonna-Whore Complex to the ground, no sexpest groping creeper jokes, no glamorized slave stuff, etc. Yes, the Elements are assholes, but they soon develop in to better people; they are contrasted by Zelpea's group, as villains are usually written to be foils to the heroes. (I'll admit, again, the Big Four aren't. They honestly are "filler villains" just because I thought it would be boring if the majority of the story was "Elements versus Blossom Kingdom" and feel stagnant. It'd help make the Blossom Kingdom feel more relevant if there were less of them and every confrontation moved the plot along in some way.) Zelpea's gang as a whole represents the sort of thing Biome Artists isn't, and each one does so in a different way. Lemme try to explain:

Dragon is my abstract way of mocking the whole Babies Make Everything Better. The writing I tend to see here and there of having kids being the ultimate goal, when stories kinda skim the line of sexism by having an assload of its women characters seem to be concerned with being mothers first and foremost compared to their male counterparts. So uh, here, Zelpea gets an engineered "clone" of sorts made with her cells and Zoap's cells; for all intents and purposes, Dragon is Zoap and Zelpea's "daughter," but she's a horriffic freak of nature and one of the creepiest characters in the entire story (although not really of her fault, she's nice when Zelpea isn't electrocuting her to do shit). She has a warped perception on family because, yeah, she's "raised" by fucking Zelpea.

[Groper] is the sexpest character, you know, the one whose main character trait is "grabs boobs every ten seconds despite and especially if the person protests." You can tell from her having one of the most brutal deaths in the entire story that I hate characters like this a lot. The easy way to "deconstruct" this is to, you know, portray that as less of a goofy character quirk and not "Awww, but they're also heroic look at the good side" but by actually portraying that action as sexual harassment. Her being initially billed as an Element before getting the "honor" of being the only character who is permanently kicked out of them was planned from the start, and intentional; that yeah, consent can be revoked, and even the Elements accepting someone in doesn't just give a person free reign to do as they wish. I wanted her to slowly devolve from trying to plaster herself as quirky and "Oh the groping isn't a big deal" to being a legit creep. "Mineta slowly turns in to Hisoka" was the sort of vibe I wanted to shoot for.

Anis is more meta than the above two. She's not representative of a story trope or a character type, she's the obnoxious, toxic fan. The person

I'll admit, I didn't have as concrete of a plan for Neon or

Zelpea's the most obvious of them.

Early-Installment Weirdness.

• His "elemental system" in general, before the "Final" Lore Rewrite of Zenith Nymph and Biome Artists definitely codified it and served as the standard used even in completely unrelated works: [Oof I'm thinking of cutting most, if not all, of this, especially after making a separate RG section.]
  • The first proper incarnation^note There were loose prototype ideas floating around, starting with what was basically a bizarre and elaborate Ed, Edd n Eddy fanfic/"game mod idea" for Mis-Edventures was in 361 Striking Degrees, which was also the oddest. There were just the twelve primary/secondary/tertiary color types forming "element classes," with Striker Black's "psychic" being the Element No. 5 (or, thirteen), and all the other 348 Degrees having "elements" given unique names but were supposed to function as identical Palette Swaps of the Main Twelve. The "white faction" was exclusive to the Big Bad, Icesky, and was ice; the whole point was that she was supposed to run counter to all thirteen of the "element categories," so those categories all placed an emphasis on warmth and energy that is not seen in future incarnations (and, indeed, with ice/cold being added to the "main" group as opposed to being villain-exclusive, it's hard to do). Cyan also represented a "soap" or "bubble" element; it took until the reveal of Ice Pikmin in Pikmin 4 to finally convince Water, who had very loosely been using the Pikmin types as inspiration for what color is what, to make "ice" both a mainstay and the cyan one.
  • Run: .GIFocalypse codified a few things, but still had some weirdness. In the original version, Paint was still rose and Meat was still violet; the rewrite was the first time Water swapped them, which stuck ever since. The "raw energy/psychic" and "ghostly"/"ice" elements of sorts were black and white respectively, instead of cerise/fucshia or aqua/sea green. Similar to 361 Striking Degrees, they were still considered the "outgroup" elements, and their respective users were faced near the end before .GIFfany herself. Black and white being "outgroup elements" actually did carry on to the "Final" Lore Rewrite, but what they represented was different. Run: .GIFocalypse is also to date the only of any sort of "Elements incarnation" where the main color-coded elemental group are all the villains (specifically the Quirky Miniboss Squad), as opposed to heroic outright, with Biome Artists and to a lesser extent Zenith Nymph [hrm, on second thought I might switch that around, my plans are that on average more future-Elements are heroic near the start, while the future-Naked Empire gang would probably be villainous. At the very least I still want Fridginy, Impetua, and Arborea to start off with villainous-ish roles, while of their BA counterparts only Impetua's — "Maria" — will be antagonistic] having a couple start out as mildly antagonistic but second fiddle in terms of evilness to the main villains. More Weirdness for .GIFocalypse on the .GIFfany Army series (not relating to Water's elemental system) can be seen in its own section.
  • [LOL this is outdated; Pikmin 4 changed the color of poison so I'm just swapping the old poison color, magenta (because of the Dweevils), with a color on the scale that's close enough to how it is in 4 — currently going with the color I originally used for ecto/ghosty stuff] While magenta was always associated with poison^note Part of this was from a "Pikmin over anything else" rule he had [...] the exception was the pre-361 iterations, which were just loose plans, that had "purple" or a darker violet represent poison, while pink represented wind, and "magenta" wasn't really considered in this mix, the associated environment was a cave system in 361 and .GIFocalypse, rather than the swamp of Zenith Nymph and Biome Artists. Swamps were associated with azure/the sound element; they still are to a degree, but a more specialized and fantastic "sound sound" or "sound swamp" or even "music pool" or something of the sorts; back in .GIFocalypse Prototype, Dean Sonia's area was the mundane Everglades swamp.
  • Zenith Nymph's Adventures, specifically the "Final" Lore Rewrite, is what codified his elemental system and set it in stone for Biome Artists, its spinoffs, and various unrelated side projects like the elements in Unviewable. Prior to said rewrite,
  • Since the "Final" Lore Rewrite was based on revealed information on Pikmin 4 and the Last 100 Days drawing series began before that information was dropped, it was on the eve of the end of the Weirdness and had some itself. This was the final of any of Water's
    • For the drawing series itself: Several drawings in the first half would use saturation and lightness values of 25 or 75, before Water decided to have all the chromatic Pikmin have their primary colors only use saturation and lightness values of 50 or 100, mostly to have a single coherant total "rainbow"
• The Unviewable Panties of Ishiko-Chan: In short, while 3 feels more like a direct sequel to 2, 2 feels like an entirely new adventure from what was set up in 1.
  • The first installment, especially the prose story version, leaned far harder on being an outright parody that ran on Rule of Funny. While Water had always planned for continuity to slip in, he did not want to abandon the original storyline from the even goofier "prototype draft" about the Red Empire, leading to the whole first installment being a very weird "transition" from the initial shitpost idea to his more serious, deconstructive take that it would become. By 2, the transformation was complete, and the story had abandoned the outright goofy aspects even as it kept up appearances of being a pure shitpost.
  • 1 is the only installment of the three to not involve the Distant Land, meaning that its locals such as the Elves (except for the Stinger, which shows the Distant King being "born" but in flower form), various Monsters, and the established settings are not involved at all. The Slimes and their upgraded Spirit forms only get cameoes. Since both 2 and 3 heavily involve the Distant Land while the "main setting" of 1, the Red Empire, is never really visited again (aside from going in to its sunken remains), it makes the first game stand out that much more from either following one. Even with the change of setting aside, the Distant Land is far more fleshed out than the Red Empire, with the former being a mapped out world with distinct geography, while the latter boiled down to "big city with certain specific buildings that the heroes go to to fight the Arc Villain" and had little in the way of deeper lore given by NPCs or Story Breadcrumbs. This is to the point where the Distant Land could be seen as the main location for the entire trilogy — hence, its absense in 1 standing out.
  • The Mysterious Rival's only role was to show up once to get the plot moving by giving Taro a Curb-Stomp Battle and then he disappears until near the very end. He was originally conceived as a parody of What Happened to the Mouse?, and while his greater role was thought of while 1 was being written, the prose story and the game stick with the original idea behind his joke. Him showing up in 2 at all is meant to be surprising, since it happens so late, but then he becomes deeply integrated for the rest of the series. He basically ends up being the sort of "mysterious powerful enemy" character he was originally written to parody.
  • The first installment is the only one with no branching timelines, although this was completely planned in advance.
• Zenith Nymph series:
  • Vince was originally a Featureless Protagonist, The Ghost in some of the shitpost strips, and when he was "seen," he had on a full set of Shroomite Armor.
  • Tania's outfit went through several changes until her first proper appearance in Romancing settled on something that would be a "standard" (except not really, she changes costumes as the story goes on, both matching the season a given Book takes place in and generally wearing less and less as she gets closer to the Nymphs), with a skirt made of flower petals. Her two consistencies were the vines around her limbs and neck and being perpetually topless.
  • Teasers is entirely about Sonata trying to get a rise from walking around naked, and not getting too much of a reaction until Tania, her one actual crush, tells her to put something on, leaving her stunned speechless. This is completely at odds with how the town sees nudity afterwards: Nobody cares or points out that the Nymphs are naked all the time, Sonata does not want to try to shock people, and while Tania does tell her to put on clothes at one point, it's a one-time instance out of frustration and Vince manages to convince her not to do that.
  • Prior to the "'Final' Lore Rewrite" in response to taking inspiration from Pikmin 4 once more information was known about it:
    • The Nymph Variant types were rearranged around from how they would be.
    • The Ocean was originally the Blue Nymph biome, [...] DeepWater would later firmly set it so that the "Blue Nymphs" were associated specifically with freshwater areas (in part from a comment in Pikmin 3 Deluxe confirming that Blue Pikmin are specifically freshwater),
  • Nymph Quest itself fell under this by updates. The earliest plans for it were a more general content mod, and Water was spitballing ideas he had while trying to learn how to make Terraria mods. Because he initially almost only worked on Pre-Hardmode content^note then he started Hardmode content once he felt he designed enough Pre-Hardmode content to be considered "enough" for the final mod, and the same for Hardermode; he did of course go back and added more things through all of progression, but this was how the development started, and explains why the Weirdness is mostly limited to Pre-Hardmode, this meant that Pre-Hardmode would have signs of some systems and mechanics that were abandoned later. The Sand Power and Snow Power in particular are like Pre-Hardmode counterparts of the Souls, crafting material dropped related to their respective biome, and were part of a system of "upgrading" Boreal Wood or Cacti. This wound up being abandoned as Water thought that enemies and a slew of items were too much to work with and that he preferred the former, with the items mainly being quality of life (Ecto Caller for more convenient Graveyard setups)/gimmicks (the Curses, buffing the strength and spawnrate of enemies but also increasing money payout almost exponentially) or weapon drops from powerful enemies or bosses. As a result, upon entering Hardmode, the whole crafting meta drops and the mod becomes more akin to one that is heavily combat-focused.
• Biome Artists?: Again as usual for this I'm guessing what I'll write differently from the beginning and then in future chapters, but I'm pretty sure there will be at least some EIW in this. (Likely not this exact thing though.) The Biome Artist Entry Exam Arc is considerably different from everything afterwards. Especially once Arime finally joins the gang, reading the chapters after that and then reading the first five chapters feel almost like a completely different story.
  • The Regions themselves, or rather the areas of them seen in the given chapters, were much more mundane. The Blue Region was "just" a forest-y area with a lot of lakes and blue plants (lacking any signs of underwater cities), the Red Region was "just" rocky and had lava rivers and feiry plants with a lot of tourist attraction buildings there (which is one of the more oddball ones, but its lava rivers are tamer than the several active volcanos seen going off and the structures inside lava seen later on), and perhaps the most glaringly, the Yellow Region as it was glimpsed at back in the Biome Artist Entry Exam Arc is almost completely different from how it is seen later on when it becomes a major location the heroes come back to. What is shown of the Yellow Region at first is a town that happens to be on a more mountainous area than the Green Region towns, and with a yellow palette, but otherwise would not look out of place as a standard mountain area. It's not until later that the "liquid volt" from NeedsMoreDeepWater's Terraria expansion was backported in and other things like the sprawling geysers of the Blue Region or the crazy lava rivers of the Red. Even the Green Region geographically became Denser and Wackier, with things such as forests of giant trees and the Wood Labyrinths being introduced, when prior to that it was suggested that the Green Region is noteworthy because it's the most "mundane" and "normal Earthlike" of all Regions besides the two Neutral Nations (the Blossom Kingdom and Saypant Metropolis, although the former was established over what was once considered "Green" territory), with its only oddity being that its Capital City is set inside of a colossal tree. Rather than retconning the "original Regions," it was explained that what was seen in the first arc was simply a tamer area within that Region, given that the Regions are the size of countries and are appropriately diverse. Relatedly, the Red Region was also more "volcanos and lava" and less "pure fire"-themed, as cities in the Red Region were visited they became less and less themed around lava specifically and more of abstract feiry plants, to help other regions with similar heat and flame themes stand out more.
  • The Green Region Capital was barely mentioned, only glimpsed at at the very beginning during Alexia's exposition lecture to a group of students. Chapter 1 would then go to the Blossom Kingdom and mostly be set there, and while most of 2 takes place at the Capital, it's not explored in much detail and only the testing site is seen. Once Test 6 happens and the Elements have to venture to the Blue Region, the Capital is not seen again until the end of Chapter 5 when the Elements build their home near it. This is very odd since later arcs would have a Two Lines, No Waiting (or more) plot with at least one of them typically centered on the Capital, and said Capital would be one of the most recurring locations in the entire story, with its own established set of recurring businesses and characters, all so that Zelpea burning the entire place to the ground and killing most of said characters near the end of Part I would have that much more of an impact.
  • Related to the Two Lines, No Waiting nature, that was completely absent — the first arc had the five Elements-at-the-time spend the whole plot sticking together, with the closest thing to "parallel plotlines" being one short scene showing what the Grime Crime was doing, one short scene on Zelpea, and one short scene setting up Kat's gang being relevant. The story's usual habit of having the Elements split up in to squads and take on missions was absent, although this had a story justification in that the only "Elements" at the time were all taking the Entry Exam, which usually requires people to stick together (the Solo Trial test being the big exception, but even then, these are short blurbs each character gets that are resolved halfway through the chapter. Later arcs would have complex subplots given to squads that could last an entire chapter or span multiple chapters).
  • The sexual nature of the story was considerably tamer. The first chapter lacked fanservice other than the standard Dualitan dressing code involving toplessness, which the story (deliberately) doesn't sexualize or even draw attention to. In the second chapter, fanservice with the Elements at the time was limited to a very brief scene in the beginning where Alexia tries to seduce Zoap in to letting her freeload off of him a little longer before they take the Entry Exam, then there's a scene with the Grime Crime at the end where Arime sleeps with Naytileek. It's not until the big four-way Relationship Upgrade between Alexia, Cassandra, Lana, and Bethany that any of those four are sexualized at all (and Zoap making it five-way in the same chapter, also where he starts to get sexualized), and not until after the arc that the story falls in to its usual format of "Chapter's first half-to-three fourths is a narrative, then after things cool down it goes to a sex comedy where the Elements get in to wacky hijinks at home" (Chapter 3 had elements of that where the test in the Exam, capturing a "test villain," was completed quickly, and then the rest of the chapter was mainly devoted to the five's hookup). The first few chapters also had a Running Gag of a Sexy Discretion Shot using cuts to something highly suggestive implied to represent the "discretion shot material," but it was abandoned after Water got tired of it.
  • The first chapters were significantly longer. Part of this was because Water did not want the Entry Exam to fall under Arc Fatigue, so he wanted it to be done in just four chapters tops... which resulted in the chapters themselves being somewhat meaty, as the arc was still planned out to cover several things and have a "One chapter per region" system, but said things turned out to take a higher word count to cover than Water planned. Whether or not Water succeeded in avoiding Arc Fatigue is also highly debatable.
  • Aside from Zoap liking shields and Arime liking swords, the Weapon Specialization/Weapon-Based Characterization of the Elements wasn't really established yet, or at the very least the Elements were looser with what weapons they would bring in to battle:
    • The initial quintet used vines as ropes/whips a lot, and that seemed to be their unified weapon at the starting arc. After the Entry Exam Arc finished and Water planned out the smaller details more, the Elements settled to their own more distinctive weapons, although vine ropes were still always their "emergency" last-second move if they need quick thinking.
    • When Frida shows up as Lana's personalized test in the Entry Exam, she points a gun at her, and fights a little bit with this gun during their dual. To date, this is the only time Frida — or most of the Elements, for that matter — has used a firearm. Lana is also relatively nonchalant about having a gun pointed at her face, being more concerned with the fact that one of her teenagehood wronging-victims is confronting her directly as part of the Entry Exam, which was supposed to highlight how badass Biome Artists are in that they can casually shrug off a gun threat. Later chapters would make it very clear that while Biome Artists are Immune to Bullets normally, specialized weapons from other elite Biome Artists can still hurt like hell, and Frida technically outranked Lana at the time, so by all means Lana should have been scared shitless at the gun. Crossing in to more explainable Character Development, the Elements as a whole lean away from guns as those become Zelpea's main weapon, and they try to avoid having too much in common with her.
  • The Biome Artist Entry Exam Arc completely lacks any Element house shenanigans. For either their original home in Part I, or their new home after Zelpea burns their old home as part of the fire that destroyed the Green Capital. While there's story justification in that their home wasn't built yet, instead they were either living in their original houses or just on the verge of moving out and hoping they would pass the Entry Exam so they could afford a good house, it's still jarring given that the Elements building up their home as they expand in number is just outright not a thing at all until the end of the fifth chapter. They stay at hotel rooms during the Exam (again, story reasons, all Examiners stay at hotels during Tests 7-10 as they're set across different Regions) and completely lack the theme of the Elements trying to live casually despite having small/cramped housing.
  • [This is another "Could go either way" thing:] The Entry Exam Arc implied that the portion of the population that become Biome Artists is slightly larger than it would be established as in the following arcs. It seems fairly common that people would pass a given Entry Exam — they're held four times a year, the entry requirement is not too high (to try to minimize poverty being an issue), and while the first several tests weed out droves, there's still hundreds left even by the "final four" major tests. While the main heroes struggle with their final test and take all of the alloted twenty days they are given for it (while everyone else around them has either long passed within the first three days or failed right away in something that wasn't time-based, leaving the Elements as the last people for weeks who are still taking that particular Exam), this is considered [...] Later on,
  • [Very likely, not even sure if this is EIW since this is planned to be the exception and not the rule from the get-go] In the first chapter, during Zoap and Arime's fight in the caslte outskirts, Zoap accidentally ends up grabbing Arime's shorts and pulling them down, being flustered at the sight of her bare rear (while Arime doesn't really care, and later finds his flustering amusing). This is the only Accidental Pervert moment in the entire series,
• The precursor to what he would eventually call his "Miscellaneous Shitposts/Misc. Edventures" was the SBIG series. Compared to Misc, they ran much harder on Stylistic Suck and were written to almost Troll Fic levels, being typo-filled crack works inspired by the likes of Half-Life: Full Life Consequences. They have their own Weirdness both compared to Misc and within themselves. Eventually Water decided to erase the mispellings
  • The initial Sweet Jade and Hella John was his first major visual work, and it was in stark contrast with almost everything after. It was a Cut and Paste Comic, when Water would make a point in avoiding copying and pasting aside from his own self-insert character (the joke being that said character was more poorly-done than anyone else, even by the MS Paint scribble standards). Water also admitted that at the time he only drew nude characters (Homer Simpson, "Bank Robber," and someone who was basically a prototype to [??? Maybe Karen Hino for one character, probably another]) from the front as he was not sure if he wanted to risk showing rear ends or if the MSPA Forums would even allow it; suffice to say, Water would later end up
• Misc retroactively began with The Hair Idealization, which at the time was meant to be more of its own thing and not part of a greater series. It ran harder on Rule of Funny and had many elements of it unexplained — with Leonard's being the Only Sane Man (having an Only Sane Man, at least to the degree of someone aware of the overall weirdness, was something that won't happen until later) implying that the Big Bang world was "normal" but all of a sudden the Perfect Hair Forever side and various other things just popped in to existence one day. Later stories would dive in to actual worldbuilding and confirm that the Misc Edventures series was always like that.
• Bobby Hill Gets Hit by a Car:
  • The original first chapter published in 2018
  • Even after the revision, the first few chapters had much more of a fast and loose screwball comedy vibe, similar to the Misc Edventures series. After the Sage of Light Arc, the series dipped much harder in to Mind Screw and outright horror elements, which were at most only vaguely hinted at, and the story ended up becoming a darker "harem deconstruction(/reconstruction)" than Water's sister projects such as Biome Artists or Zenith Nymph.
• Roy:
  • The initial scrapped draft came off as entirely different.
    • There were a whopping 666 demons in the Kabus Legion, and while most of them were bit-characters, they still consisted of seventy-four "demon captains" that would all be released and have their own chapter. [...] Water eventually decided to keep Biome Artists as "the" story with an absurd number of romance partners (and other, much smaller stories like Centisword), and to shift that away from Roy entirely as the latter had more than enough to make it stand out premise-wise anyway. A similar thing happened with Blessed, Unfortunately, that rewrite heavily downplaying Karen's Literal Split Personality abilities and making it more of a straight-up one-on-one romance between her and Carlson,
    • An alternate universe was involved, with foil versions of the main characters from that universe having their own adventures, titled Joy after its lead and Roy's foil. This was put in limbo [maybe:] before being dropped entirely due to, like the larger demon count, Water finding it to be too much to juggle, and wanting the "large group of characters" to mostly be limited to Biome Artists to concentrate on that better.
  • The Prologue of even the final version of the story had darker undertones and a bleaker atmosphere, mostly due to the main leads being much more underpowered than they would be^note it was just the four humans, all of whom were newbies with magic; and the only demon in the gang was Daygelz, who was traumatized by the Starter Villain Hyumultahs. The Order of Chaos as a whole came off as genuinely threatening, [...] After Hyumultahs' defeat, the Sins being unsealed and all joining the group at once, and the four humans taking a level in badass, the tone lightens up considerably and becomes a Denser and Wackier sitcom-like setting, feeling less like "Biome Artists-Prototype set in a place closer to Normal Earth" and getting its own identity.
• Run: .GIFocalypse, out of the ".GIFfany Army" series, especially before its rewrite codified some things:
  • While the series as a whole never shies away from having the title .GIFfany Army provide fanservice, the original Prototype version had much more crass and out of place moments. The copies, particularly Dean/Professor Rose, would on rare occasion openly flirt with Soos and propose having "multiple players" with regards to the other Prior Players. The rewrite and subsequent fics tone up the Ship Tease with them and Soos, but moreso through awkward moments that are not intentional on their part, and not direct flirting.
  • [This is mostly transplanted from what's on the actual page for what currently exists ] For something related to just the first few chapters of the original story: The jokes were far more out-there and meme-y, with things like the videogame store clerk pulling a shotgun out on .GIFfany
  • The Mystery Shack gang captured the AIs in a vacuum pack that Ford invented on the fly, which had a screen that let the group talk to any captive AIs. Most commonly, Rose was there to give exposition about the upcoming dean/professor, and the previously-captured dean/professors would give some lines as well. Water wound up seriously disliking this story element and removed it entirely in the rewrite, complete with a Discontinuity Nod where Mabel remarks that such a thing would be silly, and the copies instead go through varrying degrees of Defeat Means Friendship and stay with the group in Rebooted. Future works with the characters still have no such pack.
  • .EXE was handled completely differently from how she would be in future appearances. She was named Eve at the time, and her confrontation was in a "bonus" chapter set after a four-year Time Skip. Her schtick was that she lived out in a sort of Pocket Dimension and tried antagonizing the world from there. She was also a loner, in direct contrast to her having an army that is supposedly equal and opposite to .GIFfany's own might.

• For Water's stories as a whole:
  • Saying that they're in a Shared Universe. Unless a story is explicitely a direct spinoff/sequel/prequel/etc to another one, they are in entirely different universes, with their own rules of magic and own lores. Asking things like why Ernest Carlson doesn't simply oneshot the Blood King won't go over too well. Water dislikes crossovers in general, and hates the idea of all of his stories needing to be in the same world in the event that he stops liking one of them (which has happened a lot).
  • The word "human" is capitalized, but only in the context of his Terraria mods and Biome Artists, and nowhere else. Both of these are the only worlds of his that use capitalization when referring to races.
  • Go ahead and call any of his stories purely porn and be told that not only do they all have plots, but several have their share of darker moments and every one of them prioritizes its story over sex. And saying all of his work is purely fanservice-focused is wrong too, as Water has made a few (only a few however, and mostly in his earlier years of writing) completely non-sexy works. Movie Day (of his fanfiction) and Go With the Flao (of his original works) in particular are 100% all-ages, and the majority of his fanworks aren't above a PG-13 level in terms of content.

• .GIFfany Army series: Don't claim that Monika or Senpai are .GIFfany copies/derivatives as a serious part of the lore. Nothing in Water's .GIFfany Army series implies this, not even one-off joke lines. The closest thing is the theory that the bizarre otherworld of Bobby Hill Gets Hit by a Car is made entirely of .GIFfany AIs with wiped or corrupted memory that have been assigned to mimic countless characters, but this is not
• Zenith Nymph:
  • Red/Fire Nymphs are in no way connected to the Brimstone Elemental, beyond extremely loose inspiration. Don't try to call them ripoffs of the Brimstone Elemental either, they really just have red skin, a fire theme, and a lack of clothes in common, which are common traits among demon characters meant to be attractive. Most of them don't even live in the Underworld (another common misconception about them)^note The exceptions are essentially people who moved over, often treated like migrants or refugees; especially large Oread cities in the Underworld are melting pots with Nymphs from many different biomes, even frigid ones; their "home biomes" are instead Magma Lakes/Volcanic Pools, and it is very crucial to the lore that the Oreads actually claim the Underworld as their home biome. The lore goes as far as making two "feiry" elemental enemies that do not resemble the Brimstone Elemental at all to try to alleviate this (Flare Elementals look like molten counterparts to Granite Elementals, and Magma Elementals resemble hulking suits of burning armor, looking more like the Earth Elemental if anything). As a whole, Calamity is not part of Zenith Nymph's lore at all, and so any "connection" between the two is purely seen
  • Nymphs are not actually "older" Pikmin. Water has joked about connecting the two species a lot,

• The Unviewable Panties of Ishiko-Chan Trilogy:
  • The best case scenario for calling the series a ripoff of Doki Doki Literature Club! in UPOIC circles is being bombarded with the "DAN SALVATO INVENTED ANIME!" meme. The two have very little in common apart from riffing on anime genres, Unviewable going for a Stylistic Suck surreal MS Paint style, loading with Black Comedy, being a jab at isekai stories [...] Even saying that they mock the general archetypes isn't accurate,
  • Never confuse the Chess Club members with each other. They are nearly Palette Swaps of one-another in the first installment, but even then, there's only six and they have fairly distinctive personalities/roles. They Diverge visually in the second game, and even more in the third; by the third installment, no two Chess Club members look alike at all, and none of them are in any real Dividual status to the point of being confused for one-another.
  • Insisting that any of Water's other works are related to Unviewable or a Stealth Sequel to it won't go over well unless it is crystal clear that you are joking. The reason being is that Water, to a far greater degree than most of his other works, put his foot down in that he is done with
• Roy:
  • "Kabus" is not a surname; demon legions and angel hosts have a system where they refer to an individual within a legion/host by the name of that group first, acting as a pseudo-poly group surname, then the name of the person. They also traditionally do not have last names. "Kabus Daygelz's" name is just "Daygelz,"
  • Confusing the "Sins" with their respective mothers. Lesuif is not Lucifer; the latter is one of the former's mothers, and they are of course two completely different characters.
• Biome Artists series: This was copied and pasted from the archive of the "general trope lists" Notepad file, then some adjustments were given. I might add more to it, and then add those additions to the Notepad file before cutting this:
  • Calling the story isekai. Isekai refers to the genre of being Trapped in Another World; Zoap hails from the same world that the action takes place.
  • Claiming that the series is a ripoff of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You based soley on Zoap/Arime befriending 100 [not-Nymphs] is a death sentence that would get fans of either series to team up and roast you alive. Biome Artists is not a gag series (and relatively darker), set in a Constructed World that regularly deals with a consistent magic system, and the polyamory does not form the basis of the entire premise. Even saying that the main lead has "100 girlfriends" is innacurate; there's 101 counting Arime (or Zoap, seeing Arime as the protagonist), [I'm still super iffy about this one, if it'd happen in Part II or even after the second Saga once the Grime Crime is merged with the original group:] it explodes to 501 in Part II, and they're not comitted "girlfriends" as they are more along the lines of Friends with Benefits that Zoap and Arime just really like, with Arime being stated to be Zoap's only "full" romantic interest. [I actually do predict this will happen given the manga seems pretty successful, and we all fucking know what happens with any successful series ever:] Even as "100+ girlfriends" became its own subgenre and 100 Girlfriends was copied aplenty, it's still frowned upon to say that Biome Artists is "Just another ripoff in the subgenre," because of the number of things it has to set itself apart.
  • Saying that the series is just "Terraria fanfiction with the names changed" or, worse, "Terraria porn." It is true that the Elements are direct expies of the Nymph Army, but all of them were original characters to begin with; there is no direct parallel to any of Terraria's actual characters. Zoap kind of fills in for Tania/the Dryad's role but his personality is so different from hers that this barely even counts. The webnovel as a whole tries to be as distinct from Zenith Nymph as possible, and it has even less in common with vanilla Terraria, to the point where it truly is its own thing rather than being a cheap nameswap knockoff. Similarly, Zelpea and Edna were both inspired by .GIFfany,^note Specifically, the way Water wound up portraying her in his Crack Fic centered on her, where she was the Big Bad. Edna is essentially the positive traits she had in that story, taking on the role of an entertainment supercenter host and how at least one incarnation of her reforms and becomes someone who protects Soos out of genuine atonement; Zelpea is closer to how .GIFfany was in canon and her traits in .GIFocalypse as the Big Bad, with a heavy emphasis on trying to control her target (Zoap/Soos), having a motif with a certain shade of pink, and using electrical powers but neither can be considered a direct copy of her.
  • Zoap's name is never written as "Soap," and mispelling it will cause the full pain of a Relic-lightning zap delivered upon the mispeller. Arime's name is also not spelled Arine; an easy way to remember is that it's a corruption of the word "grime," hence the name of her crime gang. Zelpea, not Zelpe, Zelpa, or especially Zelpee. Hedge, not Hege. Alexia, not Alexa.
  • "Non-Royals" cannot touch Relics with "just" a glove or by wrapping some thin cloth around them. Simply putting a thin layer of inorganic magic is not enough to protect a person from the vaporizing effect; it has to be something airtight. Otherwise, defense magic alone could prevent someone from being killed by them. Jokes about how the Dualites should wear armor because they deal with something that can kill on "direct skin contact" will have this firmly pointed out, as the very first chapter states this. Fanworks should also not describe "Non-Royals" simply wearing a glove to hold a Relic. Even relatively "basic" devices to contain Relics, like Dottie's dome, are designed such to not let anything through. Also, Non-Royals cannot use Biome Arts on Relics to lift them telekinetically, either; they can't just have them be lifted indirectly as they would still suffer an indirect attack due to how Biome Arts work. The reason why Zelpea is able to lift them telekinetically is because what she is doing is actually an extention of the People Arts, manipulating the "condensed cells" that make up the Relics since they are akin to weird crystalized cell clumps/organic molecules or something along those lines.
  • Half-hybrids between races are frowned upon, since it's outright stated multiple times that two members of different races cannot reproduce with one-another. This is actually why Zelpea hates Zoap's relationship with the other Elements, or at least more than she would [...] Unless the fanwork is explicitely an AU where that is possible (which is generally seen as fine among the fans, even if this is the only change to the setting), don't mention biological Babies Ever After between Zoap and the other Elements, or between any couple that is of members of different races, as it's not how the setting works.
  • Never under any circumstances refer to Arime as "futa." She is a transwoman, and not intersex. At absolute best, you'll get eyerolled for being an uncreative troll. At worst, you'll be accused of innacurately reducing her character to a fetish and offensive objectification. In a similar vein, Arime being trans is not a "headcanon," "implied," or even reduced to Word of God, but it's directly and clearly stated as early as the second chapter and in multiple instances sprinkled through the story, to the point where it's pretty much impossible to miss.
  • On the topic of the Elements as LGBT persons, do not try to claim that the Grime Crime (or, opening even more corrections, the pre-Grime Crime members in the Yellow Moon Saga) getting involved with Zoap is a "conversion" narrative or that he is meant to be the "real" boyfriend. Everyone Is Bi applies to the Elements (and the setting as a whole^note Word of God confirms that even Zelpea is bi, albeit heavily in denial) and the signs that Naytileek and especially Arime are also attracted to some men have been planted since the first handful of chapters. Nothing implies that Zoap suddenly made them realize they were in to men, and Arime did not exactly leave Naytileek and the others just because of Zoap, but she left because many of them attacked the Elements behind her back. While the Elements are a giant "poly-group," only some of the groupings within the team are outright romantic (at the moment, it's heavily implied that they would become a "true" 102-some in the distant future). Arime is Zoap's only current romantic interest, while there are several WLW relationships within them that are treated seriously, with Zoap just being a more casual fling among them and not the other way around.
  • Theories that Dualite is "normal Earth" after an apocalypse are increasingly frowned upon. While there was the Cataclysm in the distant past before the Core Empire era, the author's notes from Chapter 1 even before the Cataclysm was elaborated upon explicitely joss the theory that Dualite "was our world, but then nuclear war blasted people back to the middle ages, except with magic." And no, it was not normal Earth "before" the evolution of the [cell-people basically]; the Cataclysm was the only "apocalypse" in the setting. Citing that Unviewable did a similar After the End Earth All Along twist will not help your case, since Biome Artists tries to distance itself from Unviewable pretty far, not recycling story beats included.
  • Zoap is a Green Regional. Yes, every other member of the Elements hails from the country/Region of their own type — Alexia being another Green Regional, Lara being a Magenta Regional, etc — but Zoap is the exception, he was not born in the Blossom Kingdom and was never a full-fledged citizen despite having a temporary job under Zelpea there. The fact that the story opens up with him working under Zelpea and Zelpea being shown to have manipulated him over the years, and flashbacks with the two mostly showing them in the Wintry Kingdom (that would become the Blossom Kingdom once Zelpea discovers her royal blood ties) plays a large part in confusing things, as does the general pattern of the other Elements hailing from their Regions despite the setting being one where travel across the world is fairly common for all races. Saying that Zoap was born in the Wintry/Blossom Kingdom is innacurate. And saying that he's from the Core Empire is even worse — the Core Empire was a nation of the past, having fallen apart over a century ago with the Saypant Metropolis and Blossom Kingdom being what it sort of turned in to.
  • While Arime and Zoap were always meant to be foils and oppose each other in many ways, don't treat them as literal opposites in everything, or claim that Arime is shallow because her entire character is nothing but "Do the opposite of Zoap." Arime is more fleshed out than that, and part of their dynamic stems from how the two have more in common than they seem to. This also goes for every other Element with their Grime Crime foil (Alexia and Naytileek, Edna and Lithlaun, etc), but with Zoap and Arime being the main duo of the story, it's considered a bigger mistake to do this to the two of them.
  • A more minor annoyance that still pops up is calling Naytileek a "yandere." Her general mannerisms might give her the vibe of one — her cheery and upbeat mood even when threatening others and her over-protective attitude against anyone who tries to fight Arime — but she doesn't really fit the widely-accepted definition of a "yandere." She's completely okay with Arime sleeping with whoever, legitimately cares for her friends (to the point of pleading with the Elements to take her instead of them when they take hold of a pair of Grime Crime members), and her relationships with the Grime Crime and the Elements post-Heel–Face Turn are fairly healthy and not at all possessive. She is absolutely a Violently Protective Girlfriend (virtually all of the Elements are to various degrees of "violent," even Zoap can be a Violently Protective Boyfriend when he feels that the Elements are facing some threat that they couldn't easily curb-stomp), but a yandere is a threat to the target of obsession and said obsess-ie's loved ones, which can't be said for Naytileek. This also goes for Edna to a degree, made worse by .GIFfany (who actually does qualify as a yandere) being stated as a major inspiration of her, but with Naytileek it happens more often due to her antagonistic role for the Yellow Moon Saga.
  • There is no such thing as "The East Continent." There is a West Continent, and there are multiple continents in the eastern hemisphere collectively referred to as the "East Continents," but there is no single continent over on the east side that has that term.
  • Go ahead and call the Elements hypocrites for "easily forgiving" the likes of Maria, Jasmine, the Grime Crime, and others that start as antagonists or outright enemies and eventually end up being a part of their group, while not "forgiving" [Crimson Groper]. Prepare to be told that the Elements have universally beaten the former villains in some way first and weren't happy with them, and slowly accept them after they have genuinely turned around and tried making ammends. Zoap of all people even tells Maria to her face that he hates her while she's trying to reform^note It was in a very uncertain tone and mostly brought on because he was empathetic of the various people she verbally abused, but Zoap saying that he hates anybody is still a huge deal. [Groper] on the other hand not only never apologized, but when called out on her behavior doubled down more and more. It's noteworthy that she was the one who got physically violent with the Elements first (as in, hitting them with an entire wave of water strong enough to destroy the motel room they were staying in), as this has some times been spun around to frame it as the Elements attacking her "just" for slapping Frida on the butt unwarranted.
  • Never claim that the Elements are "actually 16." This is a lie started by a notorious sex-negative bad actor who was trying to discredit the story by saying all harem/poly works involve teenagers or younger, and spread among circles who have not read it and took it as immediate fact. The Elements are 25 on average by the beginning^note 26 in the Blue Moon Saga as that is exactly one year after the Yellow Moon Saga, 27 at the start of Part II since that is also one year after the Blue Moon Saga, , all of them are drawn unmistakably looking like adults, and the idea that this is just a number slapped on them to save face has been thoroughly debunked with a timeline analysis that does not just make it plausable that the characters actually are in their twenties, but show that the story itself would make no sense if they were "really" highschool teens or younger. An uninformed person asking about their ages to be sure is fine, but treating this "age" as a fact is not.

Foreshadowing

• Last Dryad:
• Biome Artists, taken from the original trope list and modified:
  • Alexia's opening narration talks about how the Core Empire cared nothing about Non-Neutrals and they had plans to destroy their environments and use the resulting resources to expand their own castles and fortresses. This is exactly what Zelpea, a descendant of the Core Empire's royal blood, wants to do with her own powers. She tries to destroy as much as she can and use the scorched grounds as a base to drop parts of a planet-spanning fortress down. She does not use what she destroys as the resources however, instead using the Relic powers (which technically are resources from the biomes given that they were made from the energy of the dead that used to inhabit them) to generate bricks out of thin air.
  • In the Biome Artist Entry Exam, everyone is given a test where they must find a way to go across a large distance in a relatively short period of time. The main gang has trouble deciding if the best course of action is to go by land, air, sea, or underground, with each of the [Not-Nymphs] coming up with a different solution, until they rely on Zoap as a tie-breaker. Zoap tries to Take a Third Option and come up with some fifth method that they would all like, but he soon caves and firmly picks one of the choices — Cassandra's, to go by the sea. This is hinting that this is not going to be the story where the heroes can easily Take a Third Option when presented with a choice; the "choice" in question here is a rather minor thing, but in later arcs the group occasionally faces with heavier decisions, are forced to take one, and then live with the consequences. This does not happen all the time, but it is fairly often.
  • The Entry Exam sets up Bethany as being Brilliant, but Lazy. While she bemoans the Written Test, she is still the first of the future-Elements to finish it, and she's one of the first people taking the Exam period to do. For the final test, Atbash outright says that she scored highest of the group of five, and while Bethany herself speculates that this is because of all the physical tests, Atbash would say a few days later (but on the same chapter) that the Written Test is actually the most important part and is what really dictates a good chunk of the final score. [...] With all of this in mind, once the chips get down and Bethany starts piecing together how to fix a giant machine, it doesn't come out of nowhere.
  • During "Turning to a Life of Grime," when Princess Zelpea activates a teleporter linking to some odd foggy[? Might not have the Overgrowth have a lot of "fog"] area, both Kat and Hedge (watching from a security camera) seem to recognize the fog immediately, although everyone else is confused. Kat just gets on her knees and makes an "X" with her arm seemingly in a symbol of worship, while Hedges tries to rush off and fight the thing. It's revealed in the next chapter that the being is from the Overgrowth, and that Hedge, Kat, and Zelpea had all been there before. In a more meta sense, "Pass or Fail" ends with a brief glimpse at the Overgrowth with no context, specifically describing its unique fog. So once the fog comes up, those who still remember it mentioned in the glimpse would put two and two together just before the Last Tomb jumps out.
  • When Alexia and Zoap are discussing where to live in the first chapter after their "banishment" from the Blossom Kingdom, Alexia brings up living with Zoap's brother. Zoap suddenly gets uncharacteristically angry at this, and bitterly says "He's taken enough money from the poor and homeless, he doesn't need anything from me on top of that." Alexia drops the subject, but it's made pretty clear that Zoap does not like this guy, and a strong hint is given as to why. Several chapters later, he finally appears and turns out to be as sleazy as Zoap implies he is,
  • Alexia shows concern over Zoap's severed arm, but Zoap reassures her, saying that he could get a new arm grown in no time even if they don't find the arm to reattach it. He then jokes saying that he could probably even get a full new body cloned from the arm, if he found it. Alexia dismisses this as science fiction, and Zoap wasn't being serious to begin with, but this is exactly what ends up happening. The arm itself appears much later at the end of the ["Azure"] Arc, in a research facility. It takes until the Blue Moon Saga before it's engineered in to what would eventually become Dragon, who introduces herself to Zoap by telling him she's his severed arm.
  • The end of Part I, specifically Zelpea's ultimate fate of being hit with a Lightning Strike from Zoap while she still has residual Relic dust in her, and the lightning accidentally making the dust overcharge and explode, has been hinted at since the first chapters:
    • Zoap's very name. It's one letter away from "Zap," and him zapping Zelpea is the final act of combat in all of Part I. [Oh fuck another thing I actually didn't think of, until right now. As described on the Characters/ sheet, the "Zoap = Zap" thing was unintentional] His surname is also Bloodblade; Zelpea impales herself in the heart with the Sword of the Center in order to gain use of its power in spite of having an incomplete magic energy battery, soaking it with blood. So, "zap the blood blade" — technically Arime is the one who zaps the blade with a Lightning Strike, but Zoap strikes Zelpea where the blade used to have been.
    • When Zoap discusses the ethics of killing Zelpea with Dottie, Dottie remarks that she'd "Love to see Zelpea's tyranny come to an end with a fantastic, colorful show of fireworks... the fireworks would have be planted in her body for that to happen." The Relics each blow up one by one, each a (slightly) different color, meaning that Zelpea does technically go off in a series of colorful fireworks. Just not in the way she was picturing. It is also explained much earlier that Zelpea overusing the Relics would make her explode.
  • One of Atbash's lessons during her test to the future-Elements is that you "Can't wind a fight just by getting angry."

So I had a dream that the 1.4.5 update also gave the Bestiary like in-game cartoon drawings of the entity in the Bestiary in question. Now, there's 540 at the least and will very likely be a few more in 1.4.5 (I don't know if there's any confirmed new enemies/critters/etc) so there's no way in hell this would be implimented in the game. And I'm sure as fuck not going to even try to put this in my mod. (Well, bad MS Paint sketches are a maybe.)

In the dream, the sprites for the entry were still there, but they were in this "stage" area that you could customize the appearance of, the annoying thing was that it shifted colors in a gradient from neon green to neon violet to neon red, apparently representing the Purity, Corruption, and Crimson. But like, the colors were really bright. It looked ugly to me, and that's saying something (mostly because the gradients somehow didn't include blue despite going from green to violet I think. Like, it went green, to red, to violet, then reversed that, and just grays in-between).

RULE #1: NYMPHS DO NOT WEAR CLOTHES. PERIOD.
—Common motto among Nymphs and a Running Gag throughout this mod and the Zenith Nymph's Adventures series overall.

Terraria: Nymph Quest is a Game Mod of Terraria by NeedsMoreDeepWater, loosely based on Water's Zenith Nymph's Adventures stories. Specifically, it is a very loose, toned down adaptation of Romancing the Last Dryad with parts of True King Slime Attack! mixed in as well.

Its story is this: The world of Terraria is made of some relatively smallish continents containing big cities, generally one continent for a race (Human, Elf, Dwarf, ), and millions of small and isolated islands referred to as the Nature Islands. The Nature Islands are home to Nymph societies — speaking loosely. Nymphs are

The mod is notorious for having an absolute assload of enemies in it.

• 11th-Hour Superpower: During the Diamond Lord and Gaia boss fights, the Terrarian is gifted with
• 20 Bear Asses: Many of the quests to get Petals boil down to this, simply gathering several items and "trading" them at Trade Stations (it's the same process as crafting and treated as such internally, but story-wise ).
• Animation Bump:
  • The Diamond Lord might be the size of the player, but she has very smooth and detailed animations on account of having far more sprites than the average enemy, benefitting her status as the standard Final Boss of the mod.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Master Mode is made significantly more managable through a number of changes:
    • All bosses (except for the ones that dropped mounts) drop a useful accessory, as with the Expert Mode bosses. This is meant to be a way to make up for the
• Big Bad: That would be the Diamond Lord, a powerful, 10,000 year-old Oread crime boss that
• Bleached Underpants: While the mod is still a fair bit spicier than the vanilla game, it's tame compared to the prose fanfiction it is based on. Said fics include R-rated bouts that can get [I'm trying to imply that it still isn't full-blown porn. It's not, trust me.] [...] Nymph Quest by contrast stick to a more PG-13-esque level, with at best the romance being implied (the Oread with unseen Nymph Variants) or unrequited (the Oread's crush on the Dryad is now entirely one-sided and at most she is only Teased with the Terrarian),
• Boss Rush:
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • Defeating the Cosmic Projection mostly just grants cosmetic items.
• Compressed Adaptation:
  • The original prose fanfics covered just about every square inch of the "main" Nature Island (that represents the explored world in-game) and had several other Nature Islands as well. Since addition additional "islands" to one in-game world is beyond Tmodloader capabilities and Water lacks the skills to introduce the multitude of biomes in-game, the mod instead opts for compressing everything down to an "in-game" Terraria world.
  • Instead of longer story arcs of properly meeting and befriending groups of Nymphs, a new "crafting" station known as the Trading Station is introduced, which is explained as a magic teleporter system similar to Pylons that
• Defeat Means Friendship: Some Nymphs will join the Terrarian (symbolized by giving them their Petal) after being bested in combat:
  • The Force Nymph rep — General Impetua — is also the pilot of the Terra Tank, and she will join after the Tank's initial incarnation is destroyed.
• Early Game Hell: While the mod as a whole is meant to try to avoid or tone this down in the game by having a number of features that make pre-boss exploration better (low-level items accessable right off the bat, traps being nerfed considerably), there are still some aspects that are made more difficult thanks to other changes:
  • The Jungle goes from "rough" to downright nightmarish. Both the surface and underground now have worm enemies that were added specifically to avoid camping in block boxes, and strong enemies roam around. Crocodiles will heavily encourage players to drain all bodies of water present on the surface, while the underground has [...] This is even reflected by the lore; Nymphs of all types except Dryads hate the Jungle, while it's mainly because of their ties to the Dryads,
• Easter Egg:
  • Shimmering paintings normally doesn't do anything, but there are two exceptions: "The 54th Day" will produce an altered "Classic" version where the Oread's hair is extended so that it covers her rear, and
  • While one of the Oread's common quotes is the usual "RULE #1: NYMPHS DO NOT WEAR CLOTHES. PERIOD," all NPCs have a much lower chance at saying this, and the Dryad has an even lower chance than them.
  • Some special seed combinations add new changes [This is assuming that none of these are special combinations, eg the vampire one. I don't really want to "alter" a combination that is already "special." EDIT: Hang on there's gonna be a "Skyblock" seed too? Is that an addition to the seven present seeds (I assume Get Fixed Boi doesn't count since that would just be enabling all the prior seeds together, and that that's what the icon on that teaser image represents, with the "vanilla" icon being to clear all seeds or something) or is it something separate? ...I'm dying to know what happens if you mix Skyblock with Don't Dig Up. Or hell, how Skyblock would work in general, since unlike Minecraft (Stronghold for reaching the End aside) Terraria is extremely dependant on there being specific structures and collectables around the world that you explore and collect.]
  • Some paintings themselves are fairly hidden:
    • Killing a Cosmic Monolith, already a tall order by itself, has a 1% chance to drop the 7th Heaven painting,
    • "You See, Bobby? Slowwwww..." is a recreation of Hank Hill's face
• Elemental Embodiment:
  • Nymphs are weird versions of
  • Undines apparently exist, but the only known one is a likely-non-canon appearance of DeepWater's self-insert, so it's not clear if this is an established Terrarian race [I actually might just include "normal" undine enemies just because I like elemental stuff].
• Hand Wave:
  • It's explained that the in-game Terraria island actually does contain most of the Natural Biomes, or at least the "saturated-colored" ones, but the Oread NPC's comments when asking her about gathering Petals has her explain that they're far north/south of where the player explores.
• Harder Than Hard: In addition to Expert and Master, a new "fourth" difficulty is added in the form of Savage Mode, which is used by consuming the Forbidden Fruit on a Master world. The Forbidden Fruit also works on a Legendary world, which creates the "Ultimate" difficulty, which is just Savage Mode with the stat boost from For the Worthy's difficulty bump. Savage Mode makes bosses significantly harder, but allows for unique crafting material that
• Ms. Fanservice: While the mod is significantly Tamer and Chaster than the fanfics that they are loosely based on, two characters still carry a bulk of the
  • The Oread NPC's dialogue is overwhelmingly flirty, and she's the one managing a quest that involves having a large number of nude Cute Monster Girl allies. Several paintings of her in various poses can be found throughout the mod, with an exceptionally large one being the reward for
  • The Dye Goddess, on account of being giant, is not drawn in the limited 48x48 pixels of the NPCs but instead has a full, detailed sprite similar to the Empress of Light. Unlike the Empress of Light,
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: One of the new Jungle enemies is a Crocodile [I'm still not quite sure what stage of progression this would be in, likely Pre-Hardmode?], a fairly powerful (by Pre-Hardmode surface standards) enemy that spawns in large-enough bodies of water
• No Fair Cheating:
  • "Medallion checks" are not based on having the actual Medallion item, but instead they are switches that only check from their requirements. This means that a player cannot get a Medallion from one world and bring it to another, most obviously being to just start Savage Mode, go to a Classic Mode world, and using the free Medallion to drop the requirement by one. The Nature Medallion just flat-out will not work in non-Savage worlds. By proxy, this also means that the Medallions themselves are junk "trophy items" that have no actual purpose, and they can be trashed with no consequence to the game's progression.
• Purposefully Overpowered:
• Self-Deprecation: Water's Author Avatar, DeepWater the Undine, is an NPC that spawns after beating the Dye Goddess. Unlike literally every other NPC, he's extremely weak at only having one hit point, literally everybody hates him (even the Princess internally "likes" him, but her dialogue is Damned by Faint Praise), and he only sells overpriced meme paintings (about half related to Hank Hill) and other cosmetics.
• Shout-Out:
  • Plenty to the Pikmin series:
    • The Onion Staffs/Mound Staff are the most obvious references, as they are onion-looking items that summon a "Carrot Ant" minion that looks similar to a Pikmin. Not only are they weapons that resemble a Pikmin's Onion and spawn carrot-like creatures, but the lime variant is a mound that resembles a Lumikoll [Glow Pikmin are chartreuse/lime, not green, I will die on this hill mostly because it fits the "color system" I already had in place].
  • Several of the paintings are references to/loose recreations of various fanart, usually of Terraria itself:
  • The Red Brick Car mount is lifted directly from The Simpsons: Road Rage and, by proxy, The Simpsons Hit & Run, with its exact appearance being based on the more detailed design in the latter. [I hope this is possible, even with workarounds:] It even averts Ambidextrious Sprite to make sure that the wheels match the colors
  • The Curses are confirmed by Water to be inspired directly by the Curse badges from Paper Mario Dark Star Edition. They have similar effects of changing health bar and damage number colors while equipped,
  • Like Super Paper Mario, there is a "Duel of 100"
• Superboss: Several. The Diamond Lord is the "official" Final Boss of the mod, yet there are a few side options and bosses that are harder than her. Most are tied to a Medallion,
  • The intended "ultimate challenge" is obtained from having five Medallions, which means completing at least five (four on Savage Mode, since starting Savage Mode gives a Medallion for free), and entering the Cosmic Room in the Space layer. Within is the Cosmic Projection,
• Take That!?
  • One of the new tips added is "Master Mode now has weapons and accessories, so you have an actual reason to check it out!" This is a jab at the contested nature of Master Mode, as in the original game it was mostly just Expert Mode with some stat boosts.
  • It is possible to craft something called a "Non-Fungus Totem," a blatant reference to NFTs. This Joke Item is one of the very few items that by default has the poo-brown rarity, is crafted by using an obscene amount of wood of most types (in reference to the environmental harm), and has no actual purpose in-game. When holding it,
  • A couple of jabs were thrown at the infamous Frontier mod:
• Underground Monkey:

• Base Character:
  • The Oread NPC is the largest, thanks to her prominance in the mod. Players tend to either think she's an enjoyable and humorous sidekick and like the useful quality-of-life items she sells, along with the large amount of advice she gives for completing the titular Nymph Quest. She is also thought of as avoiding a common trap in modded "waifu" characters by subverting the typical personality associated with that, by being crass, somewhat rude, and only showing "affection" to the Terrarian by means of very forward teasing that come off less as an infatuated crush and more on deliberately leading them on. Other players find her an annoying spotlight-taker^note Blind playthroughs without the wiki would likely rely on her dialogue to find the Petals, meaning talking to her a lot, and this is without counting the, well, aformentioned quality-of-life items. Since the other NPCs of the mod either only sell rather niche items, are joke characters, are obtained late, or some combination of the three, this means that she by far gets more focus than any of the others and believe that her crass personality isn't really that much better than the usual shy and submissive "waifu" character since it's still just a pure Author Appeal addition, it's just that she falls under Water's possible personal tastes instead. Middle ground with this naked woman is practically nonexistent.
• Base Broke:
  • The large number of Lunatic Cultist-esque "human-sized" bosses is polarizing. Some like the quick pacing and emphasis on hitting smaller targets,
  • The degree that the Nurse was nerfed. While her cost is reduced, which is a godscend considering the high health boost, she now has a day-long cooldown and
  • Players are divided over whether "Curse runs" are a genuinely interesting challenge run or just tedious Fake Difficulty and to be ignored at all cost. There's a small third camp that believes that a "challenge item" that boosts enemy spawn rate at all times would be interesting by itself if it did not come with stat inflation on top of that, especially considering that the stat inflation stacks with difficulty, meaning that just the regular plain Curse can lead to extreme enemy swarming on Master/Savage. (Water has said that the Curses were mainly balanced around Classic Mode and that he tested them with Expert, Master, or Savage comparatively less; )
  • The mod's general incompatibility with the secret seeds. Especially Not the bees, as the already-contentious buff to Jungle enemies mean that a whole "Jungle world" is extremely difficult to start out in. Some cut Water slack for this, as the initial plans of the mod date back to before the secret seeds were a thing, and in fact many Terraria mods were around before the seeds were implimented; modders are not obligated to have content mods be balanced with every single seed combination in mind,
• Bad Person: The Diamond Lord, [formerly known as Lindsey but even by Tom the Dark Lord standards it's kinda nonsensical to name a 10,000 year-old character that. It'd still be an alias though, as like a Mythology Gag], is a ruthless crime boss-turned-tyrant who wants to rule all of Terraria. Conspiring with Cthulhu
• Demonic Spiders:
  • While Crocodiles only spawn on the surface Jungle near water,
  • Of the Nymph Variants, Clear[?] Nymphs are among the most dangerous. The biggest stems from their sprites being transparent, invisible apart from outlines, making them harder to spot than most of the other Variants. This would normally make them Goddamned Bats, except they also hit like trucks (100 damage on Classic world, meaning they could oneshot a starting character), [...] Thankfully, they have very strict spawn requirements — only on glass in the cavern layer, and fairly rare if water isn't around (and they do not initially spawn at all in vanilla/Pre-1.[???] worlds as glass never spawns naturally, at least not without some other mod that makes it so). Unthankfully, the world gen makes a few "natural glass pits" that tend to also be generated near water, meaning that they will be around. And they're always a threat up until Post-Mist/Dust Duo; Hardmode gives them an extremely dangerous and also hard to see ranged attack, and in Hardermode, their attacks home in. This in addition to the boosts that all Nymph enemies get on Hardmode/Post-Plantera/Hardermode/Post-[???] even on Classic.
  • The Hardermode equivalent to the Dungeon's post-Plantera nightmares are the Ocean depths getting stormed with some of the hands-down strongest enemies in the entire game since defeating the Dust and Mist Nymphs. But even among them, the Mermaids are incredibly dangerous.
• Mem:
  • RULE #1: NYMPHS DO NOT WEAR CLOTHES. PERIOD.
  • "Nymph Folio," after Fiend Folio, a mod that has a similar emphasis on adding several enemies and has been said by DeepWater to be an inspiration to this mod.
  • With the number of "player-sized" bosses, in large part thanks to the Key Holders inflating that number, this mod has been considered to be attempting to be to "Cultist bosses" what Calamity is to "Worm bosses."
  • "Quantitty over quality!" [...] Later made official on Water's Twitter
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • Overlapping with Zenith Nymph in general, a small section of people in to the mod/Water's extended Terraria fanverse have taken the Running Gag of "Rule #1: Nymphs do not wear clothes. Period" to mean it's part of the fanon, or should be part of the fanon, that the Nymphs will forcibly strip any citizen of their own kind and anyone who migrates to their Nature Islands. This has even lead to at least one idea of a "private practicing textile" or a "textile-exhibitionist" who tries to wear clothes in secret. In reality, the "rule" was never meant to be this literal. The Nature Islands are fanonically [I honestly do not know how to refer to a fanwork's own "canon" like that] clothing-optional, meaning people, Nymphs included, can wear clothes, and most people don't judge them for it. The "rule" just means that the ones that don't want to — which is the majority, but not all — will refuse to get dressed. In-universe it's meant to be more of a solidarity chant and one of the few things uniting all Variants except non-rebel Dryads when an invader, usually the Elves, orders them to Please Put Some Clothes On. It is not meant to be something to shout as a prelude for forced stipping. Water has spoken out against this, as he hates fanservice that revolves around humiliation and said that interpreting the "rule" this way is the exact opposite of what it was meant to be. (A symbol of pride and confidence.) The prose stories make this more obvious, as not only do the main heroes never take clothes off anybody, but Sonata eventually ends up spelling out what it actually means:
    Sonata:
  • The whole Zenith Nymph series was meant to be a (lighthearted) deconstruction of Cute Monstergirl-centric works, by portraying the "monster girl land" (the Nature Islands, in this case) as a genuinely threatening Death World . [...] A large part of this came from the general direction of the entire thing going Lighter and Softer back in the prose fanfics, with Water deciding to move the darker themes and more serious villains firmly at its original work "successor" Biome Artists^note Which doesn't have the Death World problem going on — in that setting, just about all of the nonhuman races have integrated pretty well with humanity, and most of the dark content comes from villains who are clearly in the minority of the world at large, or the isolated Overgrowth. and by having Zenith Nymph, at worst, use Black Comedy.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • This even goes for the loading tips. Some of them are implied to be written by Diamond Lord [Probably not named Lindsey] herself,
    "The gemstones... do not... belong... to you..."^note In the prose fanworks, messing with any of her gemstones, especially her Diamonds, is one of the easiest ways to piss her off. And that's saying a lot.
    "Most Oreads are neutral, living in distant cities in Hell you cannot reach. Those that aren't answer to a certain crime lord you better respect."
• The Scrappy... teeters on an NPC version of Low-Tier Letdown: DeepWater the Undine is largely disliked for both gameplay and story-reasons. While he's meant to be a Self-Deprecation joke character Hated by All in-universe, some think that the "hated by every NPC" joke is taken a bit too far since having him around anybody (except the Princess) lowers NPC happiness and raises prices. This means needing to secure and isolate him in a home away from others, which means going through the trouble of building another whole house just for a joke character. In terms of his own character, he's a jerkass on par with the Angler, and far less useful, charging a lot just for meme paintings and the like. The biggest upside to him is that he sells the Brine Death, a legitimately useful
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • One Water has mentioned on Twitter but is not said about in-game: Collecting all Nymph Petals (except the Dryad and Oread ones) in Pre-Hardmode. While possible, this is fairly tedious thanks to a number of Petals requiring materials that would be hard to obtain,
  • Despite the mod openly saying that it is not balanced around secret seeds at all^note several changes originally unique to "For the Worthy" seeds were adapted over on to Master Mode to make Master Mode more unique (although extra difficult/frustrating aspects, like the Prime Cannon destroying blocks, were left exclusive to For the Worthy),
  • "All Oread Dialogue," meaning to open up every single possible text box as something the Oread can say — this includes both her default responses when spoken to and the "Nymphs" hint button. This is actually supremely difficult despite sounding like a pure meme run, as a number of her dialogue prompts have narrow triggers based on being "in-between" different Petals in the titular Nymph Quest. This challenge would mean getting every single Petal while also talking to the Oread in-between, and tricks are needed to be used to avoid permanently missing a given text line and dealing with "branching" paths based on collecting Petals in a certain order. It also requires getting the Non-Fungus Totem, which means grinding for an obscene amount of various plants.

• I will actually be quite annoyed if this happens; anyway this is mostly based off of that weird loose concept art sketch of Terraria 2 Redigit posted so there is some reasoning behind this and isn't just "well Minecraft's world is flat so would Terraria's." Also I do not like the idea of fantasy worlds having "edges" or "ending" in general: Nymph Quest treats the world of Terraria as a full round planet, with the "in-game world" just being one island of millions, [...] Terraria 2 would introduce the idea that the world has an edge,
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the very early stages of designing the mod, Water had toyed with there being town NPCs for each Variant, back when the plan was for there to "only" be one hundred of them. When he learned of the NPC cap [no thanks to the wiki on this by the way, like even the page for enemy spawning doesn't mention this IIRC] and how segments of worm enemies count towards this cap as well, he realized that such a thing would be impossible without a major rework [...] Water publically posted the code for two very rough prototypes of them, going by "color number," one for the [still haven't decided what the violet-fuchsia biome/"element" would be] Nymph, and one for the Force/Fuchsia Nymph.
    • Following this system, all of the Nymphs would have a chance of being named for their "Naked Empire" member in the fanfics (such as Igniss for the Fire Nymph, Aquafla for the Water Nymph, etc), or named from their Run: .GIFocalypse-parallel (Rose for the Deep Wood Nymph, Natalie for the Wind Nymph, etc).
    • Their purpose was a "charm" system that, similarly, was scrapped extremely early in to development.
• Word of God:
  • Respawns are not canon to the Nymph Quest lore. When the Guide dies to summon the Wall of Flesh, he stays dead, the respawn that gives advice in Hardmode and makes a comment about his "predecessor" bursting in to flames is non-canon,

Bold are vanilla bosses.

Pre-Hardmode

• (False) King Slime
• Terra Tank (& General Impetua)
• Eye of Cthulhu
• Sealed Mammoth
• Grand Elder Wood(?) (& Arborea?)
• Eater of Worlds or Brain of Cthulhu'
• Scorpiron
• Queen Bee
• Skeletron
• Deerclops
• Dryad Incapacitation Unit
• Wall of Flesh

Hardmode

• (False) Queen Slime (Gelatin) or (False) Queen Slime (Chocolate)
• Lunatic Cultist
• Solar Pillar, Vortex Pillar, Nebula Pillar, and Stardust Pillar
• Moon Lord

Hardermode/Post-Moon Lord

• X AI
• Fountaya
• Hom Trio (Homette, )
• Fallacy
• Sawflame
• Pants
• True King Slime
• Diamond Lord
• Dead Lander Diamond Lord ("Final Boss")

Minibosses

Pre-Hardmode:

• THE ULTIMATE HYDRA OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION (Joke boss)
• Dart Trap Lord

Hardmode:

Hardermode:

• Nest Nymph
• Fury Nymph

Event Bosses

Superbosses

• Dye Goddess
• Woodsman (Final boss of the Boss Rush)
• Dryad and Oread
• Nature's Wrath, Gaia ("True Final Boss")
• Home-J (Joke/hidden superboss)
• Cosmic Projection (Ultimate Challenge, needs 4/7 of the Medallions to access; intended to be the absolute last and hardest of the superbosses)

• On second thought switching between shooting mode and a sword/melee mode might actually be a bad idea. Players might just have the option to do both melee and ranged attacks by default, with different buttons, and won't push a button to switch them.

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• Adjustable Censorship:
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first game, Eden 10, was a side-scroller as opposed to the standard top-down action adventure the series would establish later, with a pseudo-Metroidvania-esque progression system and world that slowly opens up with upgrades and encourages backtracking. The fanservice was also significantly tamer and not the main point at the time, with it being just one of three types of aesthetic collectables (in addition to new title screens and ). Eight out of ten of the dates' images only go as far as what amounts of swimwear, and of the two whose images are bare, Censor Steam or Godiva Hair is used to cover up even bare rear ends^note This is because Bart wasn't actually sure . The plot was also darker, more non-romancable and non-enemy characters appeared as NPCs, and there was no option to toggle the main character or their date's gender initially (in the original release, you could only be a man with the ten available people you date being women). Starting with Eden 100, the series would firmly become more 2D Zelda-like and less of a Metroidvania,

• Development Hell: The fourth game. After Eden 1,000 ended with a Cliffhanger, a new installment^note Teased as Eden 2,000, taking a break from the "powers of ten" theme

He has the opposite problem. He... takes criticism a bit too much to heart, which can be a real double-edged sword. In the beginning, the two most common complaints were that the game was too short, and that for what was teased as light pinups of your potential monster dates, what you see is too little, with even bare butts being covered in the two images where it's relevant. At a distant third were people asking where the hot monster men were. Wellllll... something of a monkey's paw came from all three of those,

...

Thermonuclear take but Ten was actually better than Hundred or Thousand. And this is coming from someone who prefers top-down games to side-scrollers and generally likes larger games overall.

The part I think is least controversial is that I think it has the best story by far. It was a genuinely interesting little one-man project and struck a good balance between raising enough questions to cause intrigue at the larger world while answering enough questions to feel satisfying. The bosses were fun and actually felt threatening, and the plot was better on account of taking itself seriously and having few if any reference jokes or fourth wall humor. Plus, it was originally going to be a standalone title, so there was no big theory Sequel Hook

He is completely off the wall, but in the harmless sort of "Don't trust mountains because they're really aliens" way, not in the harmful "Don't trust these various races because they're really aliens and the racists against them have a point so donate to them" way.

Comment

Since nobody's talking about this I will: I like how for this game, the Witcher clips, etc, he very minimally blurred just the nipples and censored nothing else of the nudity. But the other clips of the games get solid black bars on schoolgirl pantyshots and even "clothed" swimsuit closeups and such. And the infamous Shit Pile gets black barred too.

You can tell it's because he thinks hiding nudity in general is dumb so he just did the bare minimum to try to make YouTube happy but he legit doesn't like fanservice works that play around with age limits and skirt the line if not go over it. And he spared us the sight of the pile of shit. Geyser is very based.

"En estos momentos, su dinero puede estar en el lugar equivocado. Tráigalo a Davivienda."^Translation In these moments, your money can be in the wrong place. Bring it to Davivienda
—Tagline

The ads from this campaign starts with an everyday situation and then introduce an element that is out of place or incongrous with said situation.

In these moments, your tropes could be in the wrong place:

• Exact Words: This ad starts with a biker going to a garage to check on his car's new paint job. He requested flames in the design, only to find out they painted llamas all over it^Explanation The Spanish word for flame and llama is the same.
• The Last of These Is Not Like the Others: This ad has a Dirty Old Man flip through the pages of a porno magazine at a library. He ogles at the models as he keeps flipping until he sees the last model, to which he utters a distressed "mijita..." and puts the magazine away.

Sigh, I've been reading it but for the longest time I've had one foot out the door. I even went on a long break at one point. Like, it's interesting, "harem" works are my guilty pleasure (that is if they have actual stories (not just "completely invincible god-emperor enslaves the world isn't that awesome") and this one does), and it's nice seeing one of a series I'm semi-familiar with (I haven't played every Zelda game so it references a few bits I'm unfamiliar with but it's mostly Ocarina-centric and I have played that one 100%). And to its credit, there are a lot of genuinely interesting ideas. I'm interested in seeing what role Zelda, Impa, Ganondorf, and the Gorons are going to play; what kind of powers and abilities are going to crop up; the idea of Link forming a team with Saria, Ruto, and Nabooru; and the plot about the rebel extremist group and how that will play off.

Unfortunately, the canon characters are shafted pretty hard (Ruto especially is written out of major arcs or story progression chapters when it would be fitting to have her there to like... cement an "everyone is here" vibe. And honestly I was curious about Ruto being involved and that was one of the reasons why I started reading it. I am partial to technically-naked characters. Then she starts dressing like a Gerudo. Boo). In place a lot of the focus is on original characters that are... way too trope-y for my tastes. With archetypes like the ditz, the pranksters, [...] There's also The Writer's Barely Disguised Fetish of child-having, oh my goodness, half the time a character

There's also a Show, Don't Tell problem. This sounds like a nitpick, and it might be, I'll admit, but like... it happens a lot. When a character does something the narrative will go on and explain how the person doing the thing feels or how someone reacting to it feels. To paint a picture of what I mean, there'd be something like "Hank was then quick to get the burgers on the plate. Peggy watched intently. She had known that Hank did not like his meat well-done, but rare, but was surprised to see that he was tending a bit faster than usual. Was something going on? Was he still bothered by the words Cotton said?" I don't want to use this term but I can't think of any nicer way to put this, but it sort of feels like the story is underestimating the readers' intelligence by spelling out everything rather than letting the reader come to their own conclusions. Again, it sounds like a nitpick, but even since I started noticing it I have noticed it happen multiple times a chapter and getting excessive really fast. I don't feel like checking back in previous chapters to see how much of it I missed them.

Robot Devil: You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry! (I know that's not the same thing as what I described but the general thing is there.)

I guess one noteworthy positive (compared to "tropey harem works," I know this would go without saying for most other genres... though romcoms are probably an exception) is that, at least by where I'm at, there's no direct sexpest character. The sort of character whose main joke is "Hey I harass other people! I'm a Peeing Tom! I have no respect for boundaries whatsoever! That's the entire joke! Aren't I funny?" There are some moments where like the occasional nameless side character will be sorta creepy regarding Link, and of course that includes fantasizing about having his children when they've just met,

When Chapter 4 is Out (9/22)

• Adaptational Badass: Millennium in general has been buffed from their Ultimate Crconikals counterparts, who were already on average stronger than their canon selves and managed to put up more of a fight.
  • [Other stuff.]
  • Jan [Super-Reflexes that are already mentioned]. With his robotic arm, he is even more of a threat, and has a legitimate, lengthy fight against Alucard and the familiarized Anderson
• Ascended Extra: [Other stuff]
  • In Ulumate, Anderson was eaten by Alucard in the first chapter and only got a brief mention in Alucard's familiar lineup in Chapter 4 before getting actually killed via blast by Jan's robotic arm holy nuke along with the rest of Alucard's army. In Ultimate, he's summoned as Alucard's own personal "trump card," gets several lines as he banters with Alucard, and both of them team up to try fighting the supremely buffed Jan together.
• Darker and Edgier??? Downplayed. The rewrite is relatively serious compared to the rapid-fire, screwball, innacurate
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Robo-Arm Jan is the definite sign that the Millennium in this version are not going to be fodderized by Alucard, [...]