Literature / Looming Gaia

The Body of Gaia

Looming Gaia, sometimes also called World of Looming Gaia, is an online fantasy worldbuilding project and literature series created by Alex Greys, AKA The Greys. It takes place on the eponymous planet, which is a living being.

When the people of Gaia launched their first nuclear weapon, it poisoned Gaia horribly. She was furious and split Her singular continent, the Face of Gaia, into eight pieces to separate the warring peoples. This caused massive destruction, and the people of Looming Gaia had to restart their whole civilization. Gaia then used much of Her power to create nymphs, magical beings that attack civilizations that pollute and use too advanced technology that could hurt Gaia further. Poisoned by the nuclear bomb and exhausted from creating the nymphs, Gaia then went to a long rest. But that was a long time ago, and the splitting of the Face of Gaia is now considered a myth, which not everyone believes in. Not even nymphs can combat the new industrial age, and many fear of another massive disaster.

Looming Gaia started out as a webcomic called Fairy Tale Rejects, and its spinoff Freelance Good Guys. The original comics have a quite different stories and lore and are considered their own separate continuities.

Information about the world of Looming Gaia can be found on the Tumblr blog. The stories can be read on Archive of Our Own.

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Provides examples of:

• Adapted Out: In Fairy Tale Rejects, Balthazaar and Feredil have a son named Balthazaar II, who doesn't appear in Looming Gaia since humans and elves can't produce hybrids in this continuity.
• Adopting the Gender Binary: All nymphs have No Biological Sex, but they're referred to by she/her pronouns by default due to their feminine appearance. The only known exception to this is Austerity, a minervae who identifies as male and asked the divine Karenza to give him a masculine body.
• All Trolls Are Different: These trolls are a little over five feet tall and have green skin and tusks, and some also have horns.
• Always Chaotic Evil: While naturally-born peoples have the same kind of complex morality as humans, some monsters, such as arachne and skorpius, have a natural affinity for killing.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: The many peoples of Looming Gaia come in many colors. For example, roshava are red or blue depending on their sex, trolls and goblins are green, and male cecaelia are blue or green while females are purple, red or yellow.
• Amputative Sentencing: In "Pig Bait" it's revealed that Alaine, Glenvar, and Lukas secretly deliver vigilante justice this way behind Evan's back. Alaine is tied to a tree next to a path in the woods wearing jewelry and skimpy clothing, and if anyone tries to steal the jewelry, Lukas and Glenvar jump them and cut off their fingers, and if anyone tries to rape her, they mutilate their genitals.
• And I Must Scream: Spriggans can curse their enemies with "floraspell", which causes thorny vines to grow on their muscles and control their bodies. The victims are conscious the whole time and in constant pain from the thorns, and the spell can keep them alive for hundreds of years.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: In the end of "Evangelites Skip, Matuzans Sway", Lukas and Jelani's abusive mother Moswen dies, with the implication that Lukas poisoned her, and Jelani tells Dr. Asha to send Lukas a thank-you card and a bouquet for his deed.
• Arc Words: "I will fight" in "To Fight the Fog".
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: Cecaelia squint their eyes when they're happy which makes them look like they're angry, and bare their teeth when they're angry, which looks like smiling.
• Beauty to Beast: Melusine, monsters created by the divine Haggomah, seek out beautiful people and trick them into kissing them. Contact with melusine saliva causes Haggomah's Blight, a disease that turns its afflicted progressively uglier. Haggomah created them as a revenge for how she has been bullied for her ugliness.
• Beneath the Earth:
  • Most of Lamai Nation lives in massive underground labyrinths. Any citizens who need sunlight have to go to special sunroof rooms to "worship" the sun every day.
  • In Damijana's sewers under the Shadow Sector live a society of vagrants, who call it the "Gutter Sector".
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Cecaelia are in many ways "alien" compared to other naturally-born peoples of Gaia, including their reproduction: Males fertilize the eggs that the females laid with no sex involved.
• Blind Justice: The minervae named Justice removed her eyes so she couldn't judge people by their appearance, and only sees whether they are good or evil with her magic third eye, immediately killing them if she senses irredeemable evil.
• Born from Plants: Spriggans turn into trees in old age, which grow pods where baby spriggans hatch from.
• Boy Meets Ghoul: Evan, a living human lycanthrope, and Zeffer, a vampiric elf, get together in the first story, bonding over both having a magical affliction that causes them to be shunned by society. Though it doesn't last very long, as Zeffer runs away from Evan.
• Caligula's Horse: A Matuzan queen once declared a cat to be the heir to her throne. She died soon after, and the kingdom was ruled by a cat for three days, until it was usurped by one of the queen's children.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: Fae people can't say anything that they know isn't true. They can, however, twist the truth using Exact Words. For instance, you can see someone dead and ask a fae with a knife if they stabbed them, but if they actually slit their throat instead of stabbing, they can say no.
• Changeling Tale: Changelings are a type of monster created by the divine Allmother that takes the form of a normal-looking child, which constantly cries without sleep and is always hungry, while the real child is taken away to be raised by Allmother and her followers. She only sends changelings to replace the children of abusive and neglectful parents to ensure that they never want to have children again.
• Classical Cyclops: They are a type of monster, large, unintelligent and short-tempered, created by Krozlaug, the divine of industry, to help with mining. There are only a handful of them left on Looming Gaia.
• Cold Iron: All fae, magical animals, and some monsters are weak to iron, as it negates their magic abilities. Gaians that learn magic also gain a weakness to it.
• Conjoined Twins:
  • Gorgons normally don't have the "snake hair" they're typically depicted with in media, unless they're medusa, a special kind of gorgons with multiple small conjoined siblings attached on their heads.
  • The divines Laseya and Rashel are a pair of conjoined roshava twins. Roshava are more likely to give birth to twins than single births, making conjoined twins more common than in other people.
• Cruel Mercy: In "Red Orchid" the Freelance Good Guys find Orchid, who sexually assaulted Isaac and tried to feed him to an anthousai, pinned to a tree and being eaten by western greenworms, and decide to leave her there to suffer a long death instead of killing her.
• Cursed with Awesome: Lycanthropy is generally considered a curse, as uncontrollably turning into a bloodthirsty monster is obviously a bad thing. However, lycanthropes grow muscle mass dramatically, and any diseases they have are likely to get better or disappear completely. Evan, who was a frail and sickly child, intentionally contacted lycanthropy to improve his health, and ended up tall and beefy.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to Fairy Tale Rejects, which had a lot more jokes and less serious tone then the literature series.
• Death by Adaptation: In the Freelance Good Guys comics, Alaine's parents are alive, but in Looming Gaia Sebastian died of illness and Rene drank herself to death afterwards.
• Deity of Human Origin: Any person with a soul can be granted divinity by Gaia.
• Disability Immunity:
  • Deaf children are immune to the undines' mind-controlling song.
  • Crystal fiends, abusers of pyre dust, suffer symptoms such as hallucinations, mood swings, sores on skin, tooth decay, and even spontaneous combustion. However, they are immune to vampires, as any vampire trying to drink from them will instantly burst to flames and die.
  • Goblins are magically forced to obey any command given by someone who uses their full name, but only if they hear the command. Some goblins stab themselves in the ears in order to escape slavery. The commanding can also be done by an experienced telepath, though.
• Disguised in Drag: Homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death in Evangeline Kingdom. Gay men are known to disguise as women known as "miss Marys" ("merry" meaning gay men) to be able to live with their boyfriends.
• Education Mama: Like many kids in the Empire of Damijana, Jeimos was raised by such parents. They made them learn teleportation due to it being the most complex kind of magic despite Jeimos being more interested in transmutation, and also made them take robotics classes, piano lessons, and classes for twelve different languages.
• Elves Versus Dwarves: The Zareen Empire, which was founded by dworfs, used to keep elves as slaves, until they were replaced by automatons. The freed elf slaves then went to found the Empire of Damijana and are now a real threat to Zareen.
• Eternal Love:
  • Salina and Marina are two divines who have been friends, lovers, family, and anything in between in their eternal lives.
  • Okatogg and Hulushka, the Divines of Battle, fell in love and ruled the Bormek Commonwealth together for centuries, and they're still a couple long after the kingdom's fall.
  • The ancient minervae Prudence and Austerity have been married for thousands of years.
  • Morgause, who has extended her life by eating souls for thousands of years, and the divine Reaper were married once. However, Morgause was horribly abusive to him, even killing him multiple times, and Reaper eventually escaped her.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Skorpius reproduce by injecting females of other species with their venom, which causes them to grow a red egg in the womb that eventually kills the mother.
• Facial Markings: The chiefs and chieftesses of the ancient Boanningwad elves, and in the present day the rulers of the Empire of Damijana, get red dots tattooed under their eyes and on their eyelids. If their people overthrow them, they have the tattoos removed by burning, blinding them in the process.
• Family Theme Naming: Ginger and her kids Tomato and Cinnamon are all named after something edible and red, to match with how they all have ginger hair.
• Fantastic Drug: Looming Gaia has its own drugs. Most of them have relatively mundane places of origin and effects, but there's also a couple more fantastic ones, such as pyre crystals, which grow in pyriad corpses and that are made into dust that red elves can swallow to get high, and blue-eye shrooms, which cause a random magical effect on whoever eats them.
• Fantastic Racism: Pretty much every society on Gaia has some form of this. Some notable examples:
  • Modern Lindists and the Evangeline Kingdom think humans are the superior species and consider enslaving fae and gaians okay.
  • Only gaians have full rights in Etios Nation. Commoners are considered second-class and fae aren't allowed in the kingdom at all.
  • Commoners are rampantly discriminated against in Mogdir Kingdom due to their lack of magical ability.
  • Only red elves can legally own property in Damijana.
  • The Sovereign of Aquaria is leading a genocide against all non-aquatic peoples. He also considers cecaelia superior over sirenes.
  • Satyrs are discriminated against everywhere due to their infamous hormone fluctuations and rowdy behavior. And even among satyrs themselves, Archtops are discriminated against due to them having more animalistic-looking faces than other satyrs. Fauns are also often mistaken for satyrs and given the same treatment.
  • And Gaia forbid if you're a monster. Many kingdoms will straight-up kill you on sight. Only Mogdir Kingdom and the Seelie and Unseelie Courts have limited rights for some monsters.
  • Commoners are not allowed at all in the Seelie Court, gaians are barely tolerated, and faerys have to mostly keep to their own districts. Kobolds are at the absolute bottom of the kingdom's hierarchy, not allowed to leave their slumbs before dark, and the only species that can legally be publicly executed by being fed alive to pigs.
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • "Hob", short for "hobgoblin" began as a slur for goblins, but is now used for all fae. It's casually used in Evangeline Kingdom where fae are enslaved, but in Mogdir Kingdom, saying it will get you a lashing.
  • Minotaurs are derogatorily called "gravelmouths" due to their bovine heads making it difficult for them to speak many languages.
  • "Ironblood" for commoners (non-magical peoples with iron in their blood) used by any magic-using species who don't have iron in their blood, as iron repels magic.
• Fashion-Based Relationship Cue:
  • Married Evangelite women wear headscarves. Married Evangelite men are expected to grow moustaches, but it's not as much of a hard rule.
  • Male gnomes wear green hats when they're single, red hats when they're married, and blue hats if they're widowed.
  • Some centaurs, and sometimes non-centaurs marrying them (such as the ogre divine Okatogg), traditionally get matching facial tattoos when they marry.
  • Roach has a fish hook on his nose because it's a symbol of marriage in Ekkos.
• Fauns and Satyrs: They are separate species in this setting. The most notable differences are that satyrs have goat-like horns, are poor magic users and are physically stronger, while fauns have antlers, are better magic users, and are physically weaker. In-universe, they are often mistaken for each other.
• Fictional Flag: All of the Great Kingdoms have their own flags:
  • Folkvar Kingdom's flag has a skull on a red background.
  • Matuzu Kingdom's flag has an elephant and the sun on orange.
  • Lamai Nation's flag has a snake and a pyramid on yellow.
  • Yerim-Mor Kingdom's has a peacock on green.
  • Zareen Empire's has a shield with an eye on it on teal.
  • Evangeline Kingdom's has two swords on dark blue.
  • Mogdir Kingdom's has a candle and moon symbols on purple.
  • Etios Nation's has a minotaur head on pink.
  • Bormek Commonwealth's has a key on brown.
  • The Empire of Damijana's has a gear and a tree on grey.
  • The Seelie Court's has a green eye on white.
  • The Unseelie Court's has an orange eye on black.
  • The Aquarian Alliance's has a sirene holding a sword on light blue.
  • The flag of Uekoro, a Matuzan city, is mentioned in "Knowledge and Power": Yellow setsiki (a kind of monkey) motifs against a colorful striped background.
• Fictional Zodiac: Sylvanists believe that which star sign a child is born under dictates what they will grow up to be, and the exact signs vary by region. In Red Tundra, some of the known signs are the Boar, which means that they will be a warrior, the Whopper (Whale), a sailor, the Elga (Caribou), a caribou farmer, the Grupphund (Wolf), a hunter, and the Falika (Falcon) a traveller (such as a driver or scout).
• Floating Continent: Alqamah, the Ethereal City, was turned into a floating, constantly moving city by minervae to hide it from Mankind's Disgrace.
• Forced Addiction: The Sovereign of Aquaria attaches greenbrite-consuming parasitic hankerleeches on the brains of his enemies, which gives them a terrible addiction to the pods of greenbrite mushrooms with rather unpleasant hallucinogenic effects.
• Foreign Queasine: Many cultures around Looming Gaia eat food that many other people would find repulsive. For example:
  • The gorgons of the Lamai Nation are known to cannibalize their dead relatives. They also drink Gruju, a drink made from maggots, and eat boiled snakes and fried frogs.
  • Many troll cultures eat feces on special occasions, both animals' and their own.
  • Many midlanders eat animal brains, despite them often containing prion diseases.
  • Brodfesk from Folkvar Kingdom is raw fish and cheese between two pieces of bread, whose strong smell turns many away.
  • Mogdir Kingdom's population eats a lot of grubs and giant caterpillars, and make milk and cheese out of their silk.
  • The Damijani have Gosopli, an alcoholic drink made of extremely hot peppers that only red elves can safely drink. For others, it causes gastroinsestinal damage.
  • Seelie Court's fairy cookies are nowadays made of sugar, but in the past, ground up bones of fallen soldiers were used instead.
  • A good bit of Unseelie food contains blood, both of animals and people. There's also their cooked stray dog and Asinte, pasta that tastes like ash.
  • Zareenite cuisine is so full of chemicals and preservatives that one will quickly lose their appetite.
• Forged Message: In "A Mage in the Making", Itchy writes a rude and lewd letter to his wife Ginger addressed from "Mistur Oshun" in an attempt to make her hate him. She isn't fooled for a second.
• Fungi Are Plants: In this universe, mushrooms are considered to be plants, and there's even mushroom limniads (plant nymphs).
• Genius Loci: Looming Gaia herself is a living planet. She created all the different people that live on Her, and is hurt by pollution and industrialization.
• Giant Spider: Silkbeasts are large spider-like beasts that ensnare and feed on anything that bleeds.
• Gigantic Adults, Tiny Babies: Newborn cecaelia are small gelatinous blobs that could fit in a palm, while adult cecaelia are about seven feet long on average.
• Girls with Moustaches: Female dworfs are capable of growing thick facial hair due to the cold climate of their original homeland.
• Glowing Flora: Candleroot is a magical glowing plant that is used as a light source. It can also be used to make glowing candlewine.
• Heir Club for Men:
  • Evangeline Kingdom can typically only be ruled by men. The only way a woman can become the ruler is if she's the wife of a king who is dead and has no living male heirs.
  • The Sovereign of Aquaria has decreed that only male cecaelia may rule the Alliance.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: While most species can't produce hybrids, demons can have children with any people with souls (except for nymphs). This includes gnomes, who are several times smaller than them, though it's very rare.
• I Know Your True Name: Goblins all have a three-word name that they know from birth, and if someone who's not a goblin addresses them by their full birth name and tells them to do something, the goblin is magically forced to obey that command. Thus, goblins must keep their full names secret to avoid being enslaved.
• Immortal Breaker: The Divine Executioner, a golden scythe wielded by Mankind's Discrace, is the only known weapon capable of permanently killing a divine. Divines normally resurrect within a year if they're killed, but the Executioner completely destroys their soul.
• Immortal Procreation Clause:
  • When people are granted divinity, they become immortal (able to die, but with Resurrective Immortality), but they also become unable to have natural children. But they can use their divine powers to create soulless monsters which may or may not be sapient.
  • Nymphs aren't really immortal, but they don't age and are harder to kill than normal people. They are also sexless and unable to reproduce.
• Immortal Ruler:
  • The Seelie Court has always been ruled by Titania, an ancient immortal divine.
  • The Unseelie Court's ruler Morgause isn't immortal the same way, but has been using stolen souls to keep herself alive for thousands of years.
  • The now destroyed Bormek Commonwealth was ruled by Okatogg and Hulushka, the Divines of Battle, for centuries.
• Immortals Fear Death: Overlord Morgause has been extending her life by stealing souls for thousands of years, and as a monster, she knows she won't have an afterlife and is terrified of simply ceasing to exist, which has only gotten worse with time. Many other monsters are at peace with their situation with no fear of eternal retribution for their actions.
• Incapable of Disobeying:
  • Goblins are forced to obey any order given to them by someone who uses their full name, which makes them very easy to enslave.
  • Since fae can't tell lies, they also can't give empty promises, and are always magically forced to do what they promised to do, unless they somehow forget about it, such as by excessive drinking. (Another reason why it sucks to be a goblin: They never forget anything)
• Kraken and Leviathan:
  • Krakens are a very rare species of giant octopus-like sea creatures. They attack ships because they mistake them for whales.
  • There's also floeback whales, monsters created by the divines Salina and Marina that look like giant whales with icebergs on top.
• Late Pregnancy Realization: Calamity gave birth to Itchy without even knowing she was pregnant. She just went to work one day complaining of stomach pains and gave birth in the toilet.
• List of Transgressions: When the Freelance Good Guys try to arrest Itchy in "Dirty Animal", Evan tells him that “In the last year alone, [he's] committed fifty-three counts of public intoxication, forty counts of disturbing the peace, twenty-five counts of petty theft, nineteen counts of prostitution, twelve counts of assault, two counts of burglary, and one count of bestiality.” When they encounter him again five years later, Evan adds "three counts of assault and one count of horse theft.”
• Loads and Loads of Races: There's fifteen main peoples, ten types of nymphs, a few species of sapient monsters, and a couple now extinct peoples.
• Long-Lived: Some peoples have much longer lifespan than humans. The longest-lived race (not including nymphs and other immortal beings) is cecaelia, which can live up to 1500 years.
• Loser Deity: Some divines have ended up as total losers who get nobody’s respect, with the biggest examples being Erasmos and Krozlaug.
  • In his mortal life, Erasmos was rejected by everyone because of his ugly face, lecherous personality, and diseases contracted from prostitutes. Upon being granted divinity, he created Succubi and Incubi to be his glorified sex slaves, but once he ended up unable to satisfy all of them, they all cursed him with even more diseases and escaped. The demons preying on people to feed on sex and multiplying only soured his reputation, leading to him spending his eternal life hidden alone in his temple and spending his rare offerings given out of pity on prostitutes.
  • Krozlaug forged cyclops monsters and sold them to mines, but the monsters ended up hard to control, causing deaths and property damage. Krozlaug lost all his fortune buying himself out of prison, and is still homeless and largely forgotten centuries later.
• Mage Species: Fae (elves, goblins, gnomes, sirenes, cecaelia, and nymphs) are all naturally capable of magic.
• Magic Mushroom: Blue-eyes, mushrooms found in Umory-Ond's badlands, cause a random magical effect on whoever eats them. They are illegal worldwide due to their dangerous unpredictability, but some people are addicted to them for it.
• Man-Eating Plant: Greedy greens are beasts found in Umory-Ond that resemble trees and eat animals and people.
• Monster Is a Mommy: In "Six Lessons", it turns out that the wolf that the Freelance Good Guys have been hired to kill has cubs, which leads to the crew deciding to transport them far away instead.
• Multiboobage: Roshava have four arms, and four pectoral muscles to support them. Naturally, this means that roshava women have four breasts.
• Never Bring a Friend to an Audition: This is the backstory of Janella Vokz, the "prettiest troll on Gaia". As a teenager, she went to support her elven friend auditioning for a commercial, not wanting to audition herself because trolls are widely seen as ugly and she believed she didn't have the face for television. But the director saw her unusually humanlike and pretty looks and urged her to try, and she ended up getting the part. This launched her a long career as one of Gaia's most famous actresses, and she had a bad fallout with her friend soon after.
• Nom de Mom: Many elves traditionally take their mothers' last names.
• Non-Heteronormative Society: In Matuzu Kingdom, bisexuality is considered the norm, and it's considered weird if someone claims to be completely straight.
• Non-Human Non-Binary:
  • All medusa gorgons are referred to with "they/them" pronouns, both because they're all intersex and because of their conjoined siblings.
  • Some monsters are sexless and have no concept of gender, such as cyclopes, spriggans, and melusine.
• Non-Human Undead: Any fae (elves, goblins, gnomes, sirenes, cecaelia, sprights, and nymphs) can be turned into vampires, and people of any species can be raised as ghosts or zombies.
• Non-Standard Character Design: The creator is redesigning the Great Rulers to give them more over-the-top designs compared to the other characters to show how they are out of touch with the common folk. The sketch for Morgause has been described as looking like an 80s cartoon villain, and Queen Indiga has a poofy dress with a massive neck ruff and a giant feather on her head.
• No One Could Survive That!: In "Nymph's Hollow", when the Freelance Good Guys try to kill a cyclops that gets caught in a rockslide, Glenvar remarks "Nothin’ could survive that!" when Isaac asks if it's dead, only for the cyclops to emerge unscathed.
• Obviously Evil: Overlord Morgause of the Unseelie Court dresses in black and red, dramatically shouts everything she says, practices cannibalism, drinks elf blood, and is amused by death and carnage. Literally everything about her screams "evil", so it's no surprise that she also steals souls from her subjects to extend her life, abused her divine ex-husband and killed him multiple times, raises zombies to fight or have orgies for her entertainment, and keeps endangered sprights imprisoned and tries to force them to breed.
• The Older Immortal: Looming Gaia has around 6,000 years of recorded history, and some divines were born much earlier than others. According to the timeline, the oldest listed divine, Reaper, and the youngest, Laseya and Rashel, have nearly 4,000 years of age difference. And of course, they're all much younger than the Celestials and Gaia herself.
• One-Gender Race:
  • Nymphs have No Biological Sex and cannot reproduce, but they are all created with a feminine appearance and are referred to by she/her pronouns by default. They can be female-to-male transgender or nonbinary, however.
  • All arachne are female. They reproduce by mating with male silkbeasts.
  • All skorpius are male. They reproduce by kidnapping women and impregnating them with their venom.
• Our Dark Elves Are Different: Drau are portrayed as a species separate from elves, being monsters created by the elven divine Titania. They have dark grey skin and white hair, and naturally specialize in necromancy. Being monsters, they have no souls and thus can't feel love or experience an afterlife, and are capable of telling lies, unlike elves.
• Our Dragons Are Different: What counts as a dragon in this world varies depending on who you ask. Mostly they're agreed to be any large reptile, though some of them are actually amphibians or not very large, and some consider crocodiles and sharks dragons. Dragons can look very different (just compare a sky-donkey with a kite dragon) and some are magical and some aren't.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Dworfs (spelled with an O to separate them from people with dwarfism) are short and bearded like you'd expect, but with gray or gold skin. They are believed to be the first people to discover metalworking.
• Our Elves Are Different: They are the androgynous pointy-eared fantasy type. They can naturally communicate with animals, with the exception of red elves, who instead have resistance to fire and iron. Drau (based on drow/dark elves) aren't elves, but monsters created by Titania.
• Our Fairies Are Different: "Faery" is the name given to all monsters created by Titania. They include:
  • Drau, resembling gray-skinned elves. They are specialized in necromancy and are blinded by sunlight.
  • Adhene, winged people the size of human children. They are considered the most "perfect" of Titania's creations and thus look down on other faerys.
  • Pixies, resembling small winged goblins, with childish and illogical personalities.
  • Kobolds, green, misshapen and unintelligent creatures which are looked down upon by other peoples.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: Gnomes are five to eight inches tall and known for their ability to enchant animals. Typically only males wear the iconic cone hats.
• Our Goblins Are Different: They're a sapient race, green, bald, four to five and a half feet tall, and not any more mischievous than any other people. They have a few quirks, though: They never forget anything they learn, they get sick if they eat meat, and if someone who's not a goblin says their full birth name and commands them to do something, they're forced to obey that command.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Sirenes are a species quite similar to typical mermaids, but mermaids themselves are the name given to human girls cursed by undines. Mermaids take aquatic form when their hair gets wet, and are brainwashed to do the undine's bidding.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: Minotaurs are a type of gaians (peoples that aren't inherently magical, but can learn it). Minotaurs have trouble speaking other peoples' languages due to their unusual mouth shape. Females produce nutritious milk.
• Our Nymphs Are Different: Nymphs are magical, femininine beings created by Gaia, the spirit of the planet itself, to protect Her from pollution and industrialisation. They come in ten types: Hydriads (water), Isanae (frost), Pyriads (fire), Oreads (land), Aurae (air), Limniads (plant), Faunae (beast), Maenads (soul), Dryads (wood), and Pleiadae (star). They are classified as fae due to their natural magic ability, but they don't age and can't naturally reproduce.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampirism is a magical affliction can only affect adult fae. Vampires retain their souls and personality, but as they require the blood of people to stay alive, the majority of them turn to violence out of desperation to survive.
• Pegasus: They are a beast species. Some worship them as gods, others use them as beasts of burden. Their soft feathers are used to make luxury textiles.
• Pig Man: The now extinct race of hogmen had the appearance of bipedal pigs.
• Polar Bears and Penguins: There are penguins on both the north and south poles of Looming Gaia, and polar bears in the north. Justified, as Gaia created members of many species all over the planet.
• Pregnant Badass: Glenvar's mother Oggsa was leading a battalion on the day she gave birth to him.
• Puppet King: Chieftess Serafeen of Damijana is barely more than a mouthpiece for The Council, which actually controls everything in Damijana behind the scenes.
• Repetitive Name: Since the most common first names in the Evangeline Kingdom are Evan and Angeline, and the royal family's last name is Evangeline, the kingdom has had several kings and queens named Evan Evangeline and Angeline Evangeline.
• Resurrective Immortality: When the Spirit of Gaia grants someone divinity, that person stops aging, but can still be killed. They resurrect an year later after Gaia has made a new body for them. Unless they were killed with the Divine Executioner, of course.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Poffles are deliberately designed as more cutesy than other creatures in Looming Gaia. They are monsters made by Miliko, the Divine of Vanity, and resemble small round two-legged dogs. They're cute and harmless, but also very stupid, loud, and impossible to train. Some people love them and keep them as pets, while others, including Miliko himself, hate them.
• Roc Birds: The Roc is a giant bird found in the Serkel desert, known for terrorizing the livestock. They can be tamed and used as tools of war.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Titan rats are rats around the size of small dogs found in Umory-Ond. Pixies use them as mounts and beasts of burden, others keep them as pets, and some eat them.
• Royal Brat:
  • The teenage ruler of Matuzu, Prince Marghan, is very eager to be king and enjoys the privileges, but barely handles any of the responsibilities, leaving his mother to clean up his messes.
  • King Oberon's daughter Tristabella is very much spoiled and used to getting anything she wants. So much that the birth of her little brother made her so jealous that she has tried to kill him many times.
  • Prince Hestal Folkvar claims to be an experienced veteran despite being born to a life of privilege and never actually being in battle like his father. He's very elitist and even had his first wife assasinated after he found out that she used to be a prostitute. Word of God has confirmed that if he found out about Sygbarne, he would get furious at his parents, not for locking her up all her life, but for birthing a mentally disabled child in the first place, and would want her dead.
• Royally Screwed Up: Pretty much any royal family.
  • When King Gultopp Folkvar found out that his newborn daughter Sygbarne was mentally disabled, he told everyone that she was stillborn and locked her up, hiring every possible quack doctor in an attempt to cure her condition while hiding her existence from the rest of the world, continuing it well into her adulthood. His son Prince Hestal also had his wife assasinated because he was embarrassed of her history as a prostitute.
  • Queen Indiga Evangeline may or may not have murdered her husband.
  • King Oberon Mogdir not only constantly cheats on his wife, but has convinced his people that she's insane and Wrongfully Committed her to a mental hospital. As a result, she has tried several times to have him assassinated. Oberon also severely neglects his children, and his youngest daughter has attempted to murder her younger brother multiple times out of jealousy.
  • The Sovereign of Aquaria made his brother, Mr. Ocean, a medical prisoner and tested a biological weapon on him, attaching a parasitic hankerleech on his brain, which gave him an intense, life-ruining addiction to greenbrite.
• Running Gag:
  • Evan telling his crewmen not to do something and then proceeding to do that thing himself.
  • In "Chains of Melody", whenever Alaine sings a song, very often the last line doesn't rhyme and the listeners call her out on it.
  • In "Ratbone Throne", a Freelance Good Guy saying "shit" when Evan is around, and correcting themselves to "waste".
• Scorpion People: Skorpius are monsters forged by Mankind's Disgrace that resemble giant scorpions with a humanoid upper body.
• Side Bet: In "Troubled Tides", when Alaine tells the Freelance Good Guys that Roach is a divine, Skel exclaims "I knew it!" and tells Balthazaar to pay him.
• Small Parent, Huge Child: One of Sovereign's children was born with extreme gigantism due to his mother sabotaging her egg cycle in protest of being kidnapped and forced to bear Sovereign's offspring. The child grew larger than both his parents when he was still a small child, and Sovereign banished him when he couldn't fit in the nursery. He is now known as Mr. Kraken due to being often mistaken for one due to his massive size, and protects a deepwater tribe from a real kraken that's been prophesied to attack them one day.
• Snake People: Gorgons are portrayed as more snake-like than humanlike in this series. They have snake tails instead of legs, scaled hairless skin, forked tongues, slit pupils, and fangs.
• Solid Gold Poop: Cecaelia expel cecaelia oil from their cloacas, which is rather valuable as it can be used as waterproof ink, alchemy ingredient, specialized fuel, and even a fancy sauce.
• The Soulless: The monsters created by divines don't have souls, as only Gaia Herself can create them. This means that they can't feel love (romantic or familial), don't have passion for creating or experiencing art, and have no afterlife. Because of this, no matter how sapient or intelligent they are, most Great Kingdoms grant them no rights and some even kill all monsters on sight. However, it's possible for a souled person to transfer their soul to a monster, like Karenza did with Isaac.
• Spider People: Arachne are monsters with spider-like abdomens and humanoid torsos that feed on people and live in a symbiotic relationship with silkbeasts, beasts that look like giant spiders. They were created by the divine Morganya by combining a silkbeast and a vampire in hopes that Gaia would revoke her divinity for creating such a horrific creature.
• Sssssnake Talk: Gorgons enunciate heavily on “S” and “Z” sounds due to their forked tongues.
• Standard Fantasy Races: It has your typical races such as humans and elves, but also some more obscure ones like cecaelia (aquatic people with tentacles from Asian and Native American mythologies) and new ones like roshava (four-armed humanoids)
• Stop Worshipping Me: The divines Salina and Marina created the floeback whales to hide in them from their obsessive cultish followers.
• Subverted Rhyme Every Time: When Alaine is singing her song near the end of "Chains of Melody":
  I am Alaine Fontaine of Laraine,
  And my heart has been unchained,
  I’m free from the sea, to be what I’ll be,
  Albeit a little…crazy!”
• Succubi and Incubi: They are monsters that appear to lonely people offering them sex. If the person agrees, the demon will appear every night demanding more sex, and if the person ever says no, the demon will curse them. They were originally created by the divine Erasmos to be his sex slaves, but they escaped and cursed him with disease.
• Token Good Teammate: Monarch Roz Yerim-Mor is Looming Gaia's only decent current world leader. While he has his flaws, he tries his hardest to rebuild his impoverished kingdom and goes teaching magic to the poor in disguise to help them against Disgrace's forces. Given the rest of the High Rulers consist of racists, cheaters, slavers, abusers, genocidal warlords (and one former genocidal warlord who does nothing to atone for her past and tries to sweep her crimes under the rug), religious zealots, rulers who benefit from their people's suffering, a massive ableist who keeps his mentally disabled daughter locked up, a stupid and irresponsible teenager, a guy who got his wife sent to mental hospital for calling him out for cheating on her, and one who straight up has random people kidnapped and tortured to power her secret space program, it's easy to call him a saint.
• Truly Single Parent:
  • Scylli is an intersex cecaelia capable of both laying eggs and fertilizing them, making him able to have children all by himself.
  • Divines are capable of creating sapient monsters with their divine powers. Whether they consider the monsters their family depends on the divine.
• Unicorn: The rarest animal species in Looming Gaia due to poaching. They look and act quite different from the typical fantasy unicorns though, with their skull heads and ability to rot anything their horn touches.
• Water-Triggered Change: Mermaids, who are human girls cursed by undines, take on their aquatic form when their hair gets wet.
• Weird World, Weird Food: Hunting and eating animals is mostly illegal in Mogdir Kingdom, except for insects, due to a local belief that they have no brains and thus can't feel pain. A good sum of the kingdom's cuisine consists of insects. They also have a giant caterpillar called "pitter" which produces edible silk that is used as a milk substitute.
• Wheel of Pain: Kelvingyard, Evangeline Kingdom's largest slave yard, has a giant wheel that slaves are randomly chosen to push for several hours a day to generate electricity for the town outside.
• You Monster!: When Isaac sees all the people that Disgrace keeps imprisoned in the Wretched Forge, he calls him "A wicked, evil, monster with no soul". Which is ironic because he's a literal monster himself.