Adversity

2020 reference

Adversity is the main protagonist for the web-comic, Deviate, and has a planned debut in the book arc, The Classics.

## Visual Description

Adversity is a brightly colored monkey with a solid white tail, and gray, black, red, orange and white patterns along their body. They have bright brown eyes and flat teeth.

## Behavior

Prior to Adversity meeting Curiosity in the land of Media, they caused quite a trouble in their area first. (source)

Adversity's species can live up to groups of 50, and Adversity lives in their home village. There's other populations around of different species, but since Adversity doesn't stray too far from home (at first) a lot of their acquaintances are red shanked doucs like them! (source)

## Design

Adversity was designed by Teelia Pelletier in 2015 as a minor villain.

Adversity later become major with a revamp and further development in 2016, and their comic began April 11th, 2017. They are a fluffy, red shanked douc monkey with scarlet legs, a white belly, cheeks, tail and mane, orange temples, and a gray body with a black shoulders, head, and hands. They have flat teeth, and their tail is nearly completely nonfunctional. They wield a long staff with solidified magic spiraling up the shaft with a black crystal filling the core, and expanding as an orb at the end later in the series, which grants them powerful magic.

# Trivia:

- In one of the streams where she created the illustrations for Stars of the Silver Screen, Teelia Pelletier answered a comment that was asking if her series had any canon ships. Some of them were ships already known to the public like Radio x Pictures , Signal x Audio and Film x Frequency; but one of the other ships she confirmed was canon or that at last was canon at some point inside the world of SHAM was Curiosity x Adversity (a ship she had made some videos about on the past). It is also worth of notice that while it seems that the two may have a few good moments together, the nature of their relationship seems to be …… complicated, for a lack of a better word, taking into consideration all the animations and artworks Teelia has released about them. It is currently unknown any more details about their relationship.

* In Teelia’s main YouTube channel (Ladyteelia) and in her secondary channel (Teelia Pelletier) exists some animations about this ship. There’s two specifically that catches one’s attention that may explain why Adversity hadn’t made an appearance so far in the first four books (besides a possible cameo as a character called emulator). The first animation is from the song of the band Mother Mother “Ghosting” that shows the two monkeys having something going on in their relationship, which eventually develops into an argument and Curiosity dissolving away while mumbling the line “and you don’t need me” of the song, making adversity make an expression of guilt and regret. The second one is part of a video of multiple storyboards and was made with a rock cover of the song “Happy together”, in this animation it is actually shown an adversity that is pretty obsessed with the queen’s artifact and also the holder of it (Curi), the later doesn’t seem too enjoy their advances and prefers to ignore them, which leds in the end with the foreign mage exploiting and having a confrontation with the spider monkey, some other things happen too but at the end Adversity made the grave mistake of crossing the last mage of Media and in their final confrontation he throws them over a cliff (supossedly)…. But not before taking their Staff away from their owner. In both animations it is implied heavily that the relationship between the two ended in bad terms, but the reasons of why diverge.
* Since as of now the fifth book has not been published, it may be theorized that Overcoming Adversity may shed some more light on the history shared between Curiosity and Adversity. Specially since the comic Deviate (which serves as a spin-off of the arc of the classics and focuses on adversity) it’s still on chapter one.

- It was revealed way over 2015-2016 that Adversity was going to be one of the main antagonists of book five.

- According to a small website that Teelia created as a small introduction to her series SHAM to people interested in knowing more about the general aspects of Media and the Books (where you could also find the synopsis of the books of the arc of the classics, including overcoming adversity and Beyond the Shadow of Doubt, besides one for the main hiatus), Adversity has hated Video since the she-cat was an unverified kitten, which brings a lot of questions to mind. One theory that could explain this sudden revelation is by taking into consideration that Curiosity was revealed to have deleted many of Video’s memories of her youth, so it’s possible that the two did meet before but the Maine coon forgot about it thanks to the spider monkey’s interference; however, it is still unknown the reason for the red shanked douc’s hate for the she-cat on the first place.

* It may be a possibility that they may hate her because her father’s great hostility against mages, or maybe out of jealousy of Curiosity’s prior closeness to her (since in a written post in Teelia’s toyhouse called “Caution of curiosity” it was given a glimpse of how it was the relationship between Video and Curiosity back when she was still a kitten, which was very positive and showed how the spider monkey doted on the Maine coon but felt that he had to distance himself from her in order to protect her from people “like them”, with this referring to Adversity). Of course, this is only speculation until the fifth book comes out.