Hey there! I’m planning on making update posts and other such things about the hypnosisnakerotica work a thing now, since as we all know Twitter is collapsing. I still post on DeviantArt, but I consider my website the main place to find my stuff, so why not communicate on here? To that end you can look up and see in the menu that when you hover over Romance/Erotica (Hypnosis/Snakes) there’s a new section for Updates. Any posts related to that will be found there. I don’t really have a way to totally separate those updates from the rest so–
Hey! If you somehow happen to be someone following this site, and don’t want to see this stuff, I’ll start placing any CCC-related posts in the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos category and have a page for those updates, and then another category for all other works. Bear with me as I try to find a way to make it possible for people to see updates to things I make.
On that note, I’m planning on making a weekly(?) email newsletter that sums up any posts I make, has other bits of info and silliness and things related to romance/erotica I’m writing, and just in general lets people keep up with what I’m doing without having to be on Twitter, or my Discord, or donate to my Sponsus (donate! donate!! help me fund more art and videos and projects!!!) or what have you. Maybe I’ll even try to see if the RSS feed on this site is even working still.
Anyway, enough going on about bookkeeping. For those who follow on my Twitter or DeviantArt you’ll know I spent the last 3 1/2 months running a tournament among my romance/erotica characters. We know the big winner, but how did everyone else fare? Let’s take a look! Results are based on total votes, but I also include average vote scores and average percentage, so you can make your own call!
With 18 votes, 9 vote average, and 30.75% average, Dr. Emma Fara comes in 16th place
The mad scientist Dr. Fara tried to show overwhelming power with a series of hypnotic experiments and inky void tentacles, but she couldn’t win against the popularity of snakes and was eliminated round one with the fewest votes and vote average. She didn’t take this lying down and spent the rest of the tournament plotting revenge. She’s only had one story before this, but it’s the start of a series that will finally see a continuation this year, so perhaps her popularity will rise. Or not! She can be cruel.
With 20 votes, 10 vote average, and 23.75% average, Erada Lielayn comes in 15th place
The witch Erada brought her transformation potions to the matches, but they failed to transform her matches to a victory! Honestly: makes sense. TF isn’t a focus of mine so I’m not likely to draw as many TF fans as snakes. She is the only character previously without art to have appeared in two stories, though. Despite having a couple votes more than Dr. Fara, her percentage was much lower. This could be due to her facing an opponent with a much higher ranking (more on them later), or it could just be due to a fluctuating number of voters. Well, we might see more of her at some point.
With 25 votes, 12.5 vote average, and 34.25% average, Amaru comes in 14th place
As powerful as Amaru’s magic is, as enchanting as her hypnotic abilities are, and as horny as she is, Amaru couldn’t succeed against her opponents. Honestly: this is the one I was most surprised by. I don’t want to say disappointed, but I really ended up enjoying writing Amaru and her wild sales pitching of her powers and definitely wanna write her more. I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising, given she had two strong opponents, though I didn’t expect Ageul to do so well to be honest. I gotta get more art of Amaru using her transformations, but I’ll definitely be writing more of her, as she is a favorite of mine, at least.
With 29 votes, 14.5 vote average, and 35.75% average, Hilja Kallas comes in 13th place
Hilja’s kind methods with her hypnotic powers weren’t enough to win against the lamias she faced, one of whom was her mentor and the other of whom was a villain. Of all the characters who lost in round one, Hilja is the one to have the most writing associated with her, having appeared in… I think four microstories now? She’s one who was originally written as a one-shot and got expanded into a full character later on. I like her, she’s cute and comfy and I wanna just cuddle with her on a couch and assure her everything’s all right, but her series of stories are probably over now, so I’m not sure when she’ll appear again.
That’s everyone who lost in Losers Round One. They lost to snakes. Amaru is the only one also associated with snakes, but again, she faced two popular characters. In a reshuffle perhaps she’d have gone further.
I originally envisioned the tournament lasting two months. It started for Hypnovember, a week or so after some acquaintances ran their own character tournaments, and I thought: I could do it for Hypnovember, and go the insane extra mile and write almost 150,000 words to accompany it!!! I didn’t think that number specifically but that’s where it ended up!
Two months was based on the thought that I could do three matches per week. Not only did that amount to too much work on a tight schedule, but I think fewer people exist on the weekends, and those matches didn’t get as many votes. Could just be a coincidence. Things didn’t go as planned, though, because December was The Worst Month Of My Life.
I’m going to drop the mood a bit here and talk about what happened during this tournament. Warning, this section discusses death. If that distresses you too much to read, please feel free to skip ahead to where I go over more tournament results.
See, last year was kind of a disaster, from my family getting Covid in January to my mom breaking her foot in March. My dad had cancer. They took it out late 2021 and were gonna start chemo in January. When he got Covid. Okay, well after that they started the chemo and everything was on schedule, he got super weak from it but that’s to be expected.
He never really got better, though. He had good days and bad days but it was generally a downward trend. I believe in October he couldn’t get out of bed without assistance, and finally he wanted to go to the hospital to be checked out. He eventually went to a rehab place, but he kept declining. We found out he had pretty late stage liver cirrhosis, wasn’t a candidate for a transplant, and while they kept trying to build his strength back up told us in November–after I’d started the tournament–that there was nothing they could do, and he’d probably only have a few weeks to live.
This was, of course, distressing, but given the downward trend of the year we’d worried about it for so long I kind of just expected it. I kept going with the tournament, it was fun and I kind of consider this my job anyway. I missed a lot of days and took days off from it because I’d go spend time with my dad at the rehab place. This was all in November, so what about December?
My mom had prior surgery scheduled for the end of November to clear out a blocked artery. A few days after my dad was returning home where we’d keep him comfortable, and my mom expected to be back to normal after a couple days and could be here for him. Well! That didn’t happen. It took her weeks to get her strength back (and really she’s still kind of rough now). I’m the only other one living here, so I was looking after my dad most days. He was never one to bother people, though, I’d help him move in the bed and get him something to eat or drink. My brother and other family would come by regularly to help.
Cleaning him was the absolute worst and I will not discuss it further.
Eventually my mom came back home, still not at great strength but just to be with my dad. While my dad doesn’t like to be a bother, my mom is the sort who likes everything to be perfect and will be a bother to make sure nothing bothers someone. That meant she would overtax herself often, and I had to make sure she didn’t. All through this I still worked on the tournament. On one hand I could work more because I stayed at home, but I’m sure you can expect I was very distracted.
My dad was pretty responsive for the most part, he was tired a lot but would talk and acknowledge everyone and move in the bed. In the second half of December though he declined, and he became less responsive, until he couldn’t really say anything anymore. He groaned, and we did what we could to make him comfortable based on that. On December 22nd, he passed away with me, my mom, and my brother next to him.
To be honest, it was more of a relief than a grief. I had time to go through the grief. I had more relief that he was out of the pain and we could start moving on. We had the funeral on the 29th, and on midnight New Year’s Day I called 911 because my mom was incoherent and unresponsive.
yeah things are still kind of rough around here
We’re working on getting my mom better. Dealing with her hasn’t been nearly as bad as my dad, even when she is here (she’s been at a rehab center for the most part), she has plenty of good days it’s just sometimes she hits a hard bottom and we really don’t entirely know why, there are several possible issues and I won’t go into them for the sake of medical privacy, we’re just hoping these issues can be fixed and she won’t just drop like this every month. All the while I spent most of my time writing the tournament. Now that it’s over I’m looking to have time to organize, so bear with me if it takes me a bit to start writing again.
Serious life disaster discussion time is over. Let’s look at more character results, it’ll be fun!
With 35 votes, 11.7 vote average, and 27.2% average, Vil Garrido comes in 12th place
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Vil had a lower vote average and percentage than half the bottom four! This is not the last time you’ll see weird numbers. That said, Vil’s lower averages may be as a result of going against both finalists, first Lila and then Jb. They won against Hilja despite a lower average than her. This is just one reason I went with total vote score, although we’ll see problems with it later. Vil is kind of a tough character for me to think of what to do with, because they’re kind of inspired by me (non-binary writer shut-in), but I’m not a dom so it seems weird to think of things for them. I do like the idea of coming up with some works by them, or works about works by them and how their writing hypnotizes people, but they’re mostly made as a supporting character for Hilja (despite winning over her).
With 50 votes, 16.7 vote average, and 46.2% average, Maestra comes in 11th place
As a monster, Maestra won against the regular human, but she lost against the snakes. I’ve heard from people who don’t like spiders that she’s nevertheless cute, so that’s good. She kind of walks a fine line between scary and comforting. She also shows my preferences for spider folk, as she’s more integrated with the spider features than a lot I see, who look more like a person sitting on top of a spider. Fun fact, one reason this tournament has to be super non-canon is because she and Mira grew acquainted and took tea together, but I’m going to write a story later about Mira meeting her! This is one case where the result had to be determined by vote count and percent average, as you’ll see right now…
With 50 votes, 16.7 vote average, and 46.3% average, Anne Koizumi comes in 10th place
Yeah so Anne has almost the exact same score as Maestra in EVERY category. Literally only difference was a .1% average. Wild. Anne went against two semifinalists fairly early on and only secured victory against Amaru, so I think it’s a safe bet to say she could have had a much higher score in a shuffled bracket. We’ll certainly see more of her–she may be a villain someday. Until then she’ll be a queen in many hearts, as well as the minds of those she gets to look at her for long enough. I need to get more outfits for her, the kimono is great but her sister literally designs fashion, she should have more. Also, when coming up with last names for everyone I remembered that in the east the order is usually surname-given name, but since I am writing in English I decided it would be easier to be consistent.
With 56 votes, 18.7 vote average, and 41% average, Persnakety comes in 9th place
As you can see, this is another case of lower percentage, but at least the vote average is higher. Persnakety managed to win against the mad scientist, but he lost to the blue snakes, one naga and one a fellow snake. Persnakety really was created from a joke, as his name is, and there’s not a whole lot of room for a friendly snake who only hypnotizes to help, especially when the writer prefers lamias, but he’s still fun to write. He mostly only has side roles, though. Although I think it’d be really funny to get art of him with a couple other snakes to be the Ed and Eddy to his Edd.
That’s half the characters so far. So, I talked about the chaos of my life while writing the tournament, but what did I think about writing the tournament itself? Well, it was exhausting. I almost did an entire NaNoWriMo (write a 50,000 word novel in one month (November)) for three months in a row. I enjoyed it, but I honestly don’t think I’ll do something like that again.
At least, I won’t without some help. Alone I’d have to like, do one match a week to handle it, and make it last over half a year. I have had the idea of getting other folks’ lamias and nagas and having a lamia/naga tournament, but if I ever organize something like that, I’m putting a team together. I’d get one or two other writers to help me with that workload, and since I’m already going that extra mile, an artist or two to draw scenes for it. Just go all-out, even more than I did for this, but have a team to help carry the load.
Don’t expect that anytime soon. I’ve got lots of work to do that’s more important. More on that later in this post.
When I started the tournament I didn’t plan to include Dr. Fara, Alya, or Erada. Instead I had Belle and Wren, and the third spot was going to be Top as a joke, but then I decided whoever went against Top would get an unfair advantage. I was also torn on including Dragovoir, but ultimately already had trouble reaching 16 slots. Eventually I decided whoever went against Belle and Wren would also have an unfair advantage and realized I had a few characters in microstories I could put up, so I sketched out art for them a few days before the tournament began. I was also afraid competitors going against them would be at an unfair advantage due to them having doodly art, but then Alya did really well so who knows.
I’ve said before that I really had no idea who would win in all the round one matches, but I had a pretty good idea the final match would be the first match, and I was right about that. I had the idea from early on that if that happened I’d introduce Jewelyn and Jb’s past, but didn’t have the idea for a corrupt Lila until much closer to the end. I also had a backup plan to follow up on the threads I was laying, where if Jb had lost to Ageul in the semifinals Darmenzi would have turned her back to Jewelyn as punishment and subsequently Belle would have interviewed her. And if Mira had won against Lila… uhhh… I didn’t have a backup plan for that. It was kind of a gamble setting up the tournament to end a certain way.
Dr. Fara’s side plot was done on a whim, but that one didn’t rely on any particular results and I could play around with any outcome, so it was fun to come up with stuff on the fly for her.
By the way, posting the tournament actually rivaled the work of writing it. I posted it on Twitter and DeviantArt, and that included art, so that included linking to all the artists with all the art I posted, and it could take me an hour to finish it all. Posting in more than one place is exhausting, and I really started wanting to hire an assistant to do all that for me. Everyone give me lots of money so I can hire an assistant.
With 65 votes, 16.25 vote average, and 45.8% average, Revasa comes in 8th place
Ah, and here we get an instance where vote going by vote average would be a problem. Revasa won against Persnakety in their match, but she has a lower vote average. She also has a lower vote average and percentage than Anne and Maestra. She had a weak showing against nagas and lamias, but proved strong against humans and her own kind. She wasn’t interested in winning, though–she just wanted to eat Wren. I was actually going to let her succeed if she had won against Ageul, but she lost that match and was eliminated from the tournament. I did have an idea for a full short story focusing on her, but as I thought about it more I realized it would work much better as a video. That’s something I’d like to get produced at some point, but it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of money, so it’ll also take a lot of time. (Seriously, all money donated to me right now goes towards those types of projects. If you want to see grander projects produced, donate to my Sponsus!)
With 72 votes, 18 vote average, and 43.5% average, Enna Koizumi comes in 7th place
Enna was kind of a surprise success, nearly making it to the semifinals despite not being very focused on hypnosis. She also doesn’t have a lot of art without her sister due to that. She also has a lower percentage than her sister, and Maestra, and Revasa, and lower vote average than Persnakety! She ended up interviewed by Belle a lot for some reason, a lot of matches seemed to fit discussion from her, and she was a friendly face around the stadium. She won up until she had to face the two finalists. She doesn’t appear in solo stuff a lot, and she makes things hard for me by giving characters new outfits that I then have to get art of made!!
With 74 votes, 18.5 vote average, and 60.1% average, Alya Slacen comes in 6th place
Alya was a real surprise for me, having appeared in only one story and having art I drew. I suppose she did go up against two snakes first, though, but she lost to semifinalists, so that’s still really good. That said I do like how her art turned out a lot and in writing her came to enjoy her a lot and want to write her more and really want to get real art of her. Of course, she ended up a switch and replaced Wren later on, so I did get to write more of her. She’s a really fun and flirty character who doesn’t pay attention to consequences and just has fun, but she’s not serious about it, which is kind of unique among my lamias since Anne treats herself so seriously. She is going to appear more in the other mad scientist dating stories as Dr. Fara’s assistant, but I’m definitely thinking of expanding her role into her own things. Anyway, who could fifth place be? Surprise!
With 76 votes, 19 vote average, and 50.9% average, Dragovoir comes in 5th place
I don’t even. You can’t even blame this on the vote total, because in all three stats, Dragovoir performed better than Enna, despite losing to her in the first round and not advancing as far as her! I’m starting to think these statistics are bunk!! I really don’t know how she got so high, to be honest, I guess after she lost to Enna the training Enna gave her helped her out tremendously. Dragovoir is the odd character out, being the only fan character, and I almost didn’t include her. I’ve actually considered her inclusion in a different project I’ve been working on, but she mostly exists for some fun Pokemon character shenanigans–there are several Trainer designs I’ve thought about placing her with in art, but haven’t had any particular hypnosis writing projects I’ve considered for her.
We’re down to the semifinalists! Before we get to them, I want to talk about what I’ll be working on probably for this whole year.
After I get some housekeeping done, like working on the email newsletter and stuff I talked about, maybe looking into other social media sites, I’m going to hunker down and get work on that Jb story done. There are six chapters, and I’ve finished 1 1/2. I’ve let the tournament take up too much time. Between chapters I might work on some microstories, I have several really fun ideas I want to write as well as the mad scientist dating series, but most of my time will be focused on the Jb story.
That said, next month I’m heavily considering opening commissions. I lost my job at the start of September and I hadn’t really planned on going this long without looking for a job or doing something, so I’m gonna have to get on that. Of course, taking commissions will take away from time working on the Jb story, but the alternative is a job that will take away even more time and result in the expected completion time going from ten weeks to thirty weeks. I’ll probably open commissions to donators on my Sponsus first before making them more public.
At some point this year I hope to finish the Jb story, ten or thirty weeks, after which I’ll focus a while back on Lamia Pathsways. My goal has been five segments of that per short story I finish, but since the Jb story is six chapters I count that as six so I’m going to aim to finish thirty segments of Lamia Pathsways after the Jb story.
I can’t really imagine getting more than that done this year unless I suddenly start getting a thousand dollars on Sponsus every month. However, I do have side projects to do–I kind of feel I NEED to get that Lila video done, and I’m going to get a video editor as soon as I get around to it to get it done. I have more video ideas, one with Revasa and one maybe with Mira, although each one into problems, the Mira one more production-related and the Revasa one more just going to take a lot more money.
I never run out of projects to do! All I need is time and money, which are unfortunately mutually exclusive. Also in some cases I need cooperation, but anyway. That’s the general plan for this year. Now let’s wrap this up with the final four!
With 86 votes, 21.5 vote average, and 48.25% average, Mira comes in 4th place
I know what you’re thinking: Mira won against Ageul! She was in the winning side of the semifinals! Shouldn’t she be in 3rd place? Well, you’ll see. Mira faced strong contenders in every match and came quite far. She was one of my two initial lamia characters, and may have even been made before Lila. She was made to be the jungle lamia who took people without consent, and that’s the way she likes it, though she’s oddly polite about it. I have a fairly major story planned for her in the future, and as mentioned an idea for a video with her, although I’m not sure what to do about voice actor. She also refused to make predictions for other matches throughout the tournament.
With 134 votes, 22.3 vote average, and 55.7% average, Ageul Vodá comes in 3rd place
Here’s the thing. Logic told me that Ageul should be in 4th place. Yet every metric put her higher than Mira. I couldn’t argue with that! Besides which they did actually tie in their match, so it’s fine. 48 more votes is also quite impressive, even if she did participate in two more matches than Mira. I did not realize so many of my readers were slime fans. Ageul was one of those characters initially meant to be one-shot, like Hilja, but I got an idea to reuse her in another setting and that led to full character status. Sadly, great as she is, I don’t get too many ideas for her. Someone help me work out a recipe to replicate slime, in like, the bathtub or something, that’d help me come up with ideas.
With 184 votes, 36.8 vote average, and 73.5% average, Lila Pachis comes in 2nd place
Of course Lila comes in this placement, she reached the final match but lost. After her first victory against Jb, her matches followed the pattern of a song until Mira gave her a proper challenge. She grew nervous at her chance of victory, though, and she made a deal with Darmenzi, which corrupted her into evil sexiness. Lila was my first lamia alongside Mira, who was made for a story about a lamia disguised as human revealing to her partner her true form, and how their relationship works through it. I wanted someone cute and shy and playful and nervous but who could be alluring. When I got her art I had been planning to plan out her sheet, but then Astron suddenly opened for commissions after a long time and I absolutely jumped at the chance for the perfect first art of her, and I scrambled to get references together after I got a spot. The video I’ve been trying to produce for far too long now stars her, and I have another story idea starring her as well. If I can ever get things together to have a visual novel produced the first one will star her. I have ideas for it, I just need proof of concept videos done before I start dumping money into that massive project. Someday, though.
With 205 votes, 29.3 vote average, and 64.4% average, Jb comes in 1st place
I’ve been giving vote total flak this whole time, but here’s the thing. Jb won. That’s a fact. She beat Lila when it really counted and won the tournament. She came in first place. Yet total vote count is the only measurement that shows this. Lila has higher averages. That’s the main reason I went with vote total, even though it’s possible she only has more than Lila because she was in two more matches than her. Jb may have lost her first match, but she swept the losers bracket and got turned back into Jewelyn as a result. As I was planning that part of the tournament I knew immediately how I would introduce her, with showing Jewelyn’s art and then telling her story as if from a storybook. Sadly for Jewelyn she had the fewest votes in the poll, so she is firmly Jb now, especially having won the tournament. Jb is, admittedly, created almost entirely from my desire to utilize a character outfit/design from another media property, where the character, for some terrible reason, is listed as 16 years old. You know what you do when you run into a minor situation? You take that design and use it for your own character, then have that character win a tournament so now they’re way more relevant than that other character and YOU win! Hahahahaha!
Also, the secret that Jb was human was made clear all along. Lila, Mira, Anne, Enna, Alya, Veda–they all have four-letter names. Jb and Jewelyn isn’t four letters! Ageul doesn’t count because she’s a slime. And uhh Vil doesn’t count because they’re a vampire. And Dragovoir doesn’t count because she’s a Pokemon. Maybe “clear” is the wrong word.
That’s the final tournament results! If you read this long, thanks for sticking with me. You may have learned some special information. I don’t really have a good way to end this because I’ve gone over everything already, so I’ll just say for now: So long, and thanks for all the snakes.
Duth Olec's Cuckoo Cosmos 