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Reading "Wuthering Heights" for reasons (*cough* Limbus Company *cough*) and thinking about Nelly's perspective on Heathcliff growing up.
*Slight Wuthering Heights spoilers*
Nelly, seeing Heathcliff regularly getting beaten by Hindley for circumstances outside of his control: "Heathcliff seems to be managing well enough, I'm sure he's fine. He barely even cries."
Narrator: "And we would all soon find that that was absolutely not the case."
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MAJOR SPOILERS FOR LOSTBELT 6 FINALE
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Do you think that Oberon is still falling?
I mean there isn't an exit to the void, and if time doesn't really exist there, then doesn't that mean...
The entire time we have him summoned, some version of him is still falling through the void? That in the back of his mind, he knows he will never truly be able to escape the trap of his own creation?
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Narrative Weight and Desensitization to Death
Thinking about the end of Destiny 2: Forsaken, and an interesting trend that I've noticed concerning the treatment of death in certain media.
What is it about certain games dancing around the concept of taking a life?
A problem with a lot of poor storytelling in games is the inability to give any serious narrative weight to character death, ESPECIALLY if the player character is indirectly or directly responsible. One of the things I'd like to argue in this little essay is how the mitigation of any responsibility is detrimental as a whole, and that the argument for the infantization of the playing audience is ultimately a weak one.
Warning: Discussion of serious topics including death, murder, and executions.
So let's talk about the ending of Destiny 2: Forsaken as an example. For those who don't know the plot of Forsaken, I will quickly review it with minimal spoilers.
Forsaken is a DLC of the mainline of Destiny 2 which follows the player (known as the Guardian), on a quest for revenge after a man by the name of Uldren Sov kills someone that the Guardian had gotten to know fairly well over the course of the game. Hunting down the forces that Uldren has accumulated around himself, you eventually come before the man himself, who reveals that he has been manipulated by an entity disguised as his assumed deceased sister. But he is still responsible for his actions, and as the entity is defeated, the Guardian goes to kill him with a single shot to the head.
Or at least, that's what you would think, right?
Instead, out of nowhere, an NPC that you have been speaking to for a majority of the questline appears out of thin air and essentially agrees to fire their gun at the same time as you. The question I have is: why?
Why was this considered necessary? To understand why this decision was made, we have to go to the mitigation of psychological trauma in firing squads. Or why firing squads exist in the first place on a psychological level.
Firing squads reduce the psychological trauma of each individual by dispersing responsibility. Essentially, by having every person fire at once, it is uncertain who was responsible for ending the life of the person on the other side. There are also cases of blanks being loaded into the majority of the guns to make it difficult to tell who is responsible. As an individual, you can delude yourself into believing you have no responsibility.
By providing the NPC at the end of Forsaken, Destiny attempts to protect the player from the actions of the story following through... which ultimately makes the ending of the story fall flat. Forsaken is a story of revenge, and I think ultimately its futility. Uldren is dead at the end of the day, but what does that really mean? People are still dead, and your mad crusade has not made them live again. It is your revenge, so it is—it should be—your responsibility to see it through. But with the ending as it is, you can ultimately dust your hands off of any responsibility, and thus the narrative weight of the character's decisions is barely felt.
We see this mitigation of any sort of responsibility everywhere. The refusal to have player characters be responsible for deaths, refusing to develop the person on the other end of a narratively heavy death, the lack of any real consequences for decisions... and that point is the most serious of all.
Lack of responsibility for your actions is not a trait you should foster, yet we see it everywhere. Writers choose to infantize their audiences by pulling punches as conceivably (and inconceivably) as possible, preferring to remove any narrative weight of death rather than shock the person on the other end of the controller. But as a result, this only worsens the desensitization to death by adding another layer of dispersed responsibility to the already existing disconnect between player and character.
This isn't always the case, of course. There are games that aren't attempting to tell a serious story, so they choose to keep it light-hearted. But for a game that is trying to tell a story with heavier topics, it's a cop-out to tell the audience that there are no consequences to their actions.
We have grown afraid of hurting our audience. But in telling a painful, sorrowful story, to reach a person's heart is often to hurt them. For if we can hurt them in this fictional moment, perhaps one day when the danger and pain is real they will know sorrow and know that they too can survive
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*Showering*
Wait a second.
Undead Unluck is just Minecraft fans but evil.
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Upon popular request (@reblog-runecel), the crack version of an old post of mine.
Years after the BO is destroyed, a strange group forms with an even stranger set of individuals.
The "Fuck Alcohol" support group consists of detective Shinichi Kudo, various former or current members of intelligence agencies, a strawberry blond girl significantly younger than the rest of the group, an entire family tree, a magician (?), and some other equally strange cast of characters.
Some common group activities during meetups include:
Smashing bottles of alcohol
Yelling curses (?) at alcohol
Drinking alcohol
Crying about alcohol
Settling alcohol on fire
Detective Kudo has a particular fondness for breaking gin bottles. The larger, the better. It reached a point where meetings now have a set budget. Actually, I was wrong. The gin burned, smashed, and cursed at makes up most of the budget.
...And maybe to outsiders, it is a bizarre use of time, but to the members... it means more than what words (or alcohol destruction) can say.
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MAJOR LOSTBELT 6 SPOILERS
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Lostbelt 6 reminds me of a Shel Silverstein poem called "The Unicorn", perhaps due to the floods that occur in both.
In the poem, it is basically a retelling of Noah's Ark, in which Noah is is commanded by the Lord to build the Ark and fill it with two of each animal, especially the unicorns. He finishes the Ark just in time, as the rain signaling the start of the flood has begun.
But as he counts the animals onboard after finishing the loading, Noah realizes there's one animal (or rather, two of the same animal) missing from the boat—the carefree unicorns, who ignored his instructions to get on, still too busy playing in the woods.
Even as the rain begins to pour, the unicorns continue playing in the rain, ignoring the impending danger for a moment of blissful enjoyment.
All the animals onboard begin to grow nervous as the door to the Ark remains open and the boat begins to shake, and Noah makes the decision to disembark without the unicorns.
The unicorns, finally realizing the ship is departing without them, begin to cry, and are swept away by the flood, thus explaining why there are no unicorns in the world.
...
This, of course, brings into the mind Lostbelt 6's First Mistake. The fairies that slacked on their most critical duty which led to the great divergence in history.
But it should also bring into mind the story of Chaldea and Fairy Britain.
Chaldea attempts to rescue the fairies of Britain again and again, but it because of their very natures that they cannot be saved—or rather, they do not want to be saved.
The Fairies of Britain do not seem to comprehend that their own whims will lead them to destruction. Pursuing them endlessly, they cannot see the writing on the wall until it is far, far too late.
Playing in the rain, yet crying for help as the water reaches above their necks...
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Being very normal about Man Off The Moon
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MASSIVE SDR2 SPOILERS
Things that surprise me: that no one somehow found out that the world was virtual. After the first chapter, I think you'd be able to conclude that there is something reality-adjacent about Jabberwock.
But I'm thinking about if there was any way possible to break the software from the inside. Breaking objects to see if you can find invincible objects? Throwing all the books on the library onto the floor and seeing if they clip into each other? Testing particle handling by messing with the sand on the beach? Trying to glitch out entity AI by doing illogical actions or trying to get them to issue conflicting commands by causing chaos at the farm?
All at once?
How much can the supercomputer handle? How much of a nuisance would you be?
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So Dante speaks through the acceleration of the ticking of the clock, right? And also when agitated, ticks faster? So crazy take—what if the ticking of the clock is the equivalent of breathing for Dante?
I'm just thinking about an incident where something locks the movement of the clock hands, so Dante can't speak. The Sinners think that's the only issue... except Dante collapses scrabbling at the throat, instinctively reaching to free from a chokehold. Except there isn't anyone there. The Sinners realize Dante can't rewind either, so they have to finish the battle as quickly as possible.
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Started playing Limbus Company recently, and had an idea for a really interesting MHA crossover.
Limbus Company (MHA Edition) is a controversial group that can go even into the most dangerous of situations... but doesn't quite make the bar for "good" PR, given the group's composition, attitudes, and the impalpability of a group that relies heavily on killing and being killed to function. But if horrors and monsters are abound, the Company stays in business.
The MHA plotline ends up entangling with the Company when All Might and Naomasa suspect that the "head" of the Company, Dante, may be a victim of All For One.
Dante is a (formerly?) Quirkless individual who used to be a normal individual... until one day they woke up with a mysterious clock head and no clear memories of who they used to be.
They discover that with the mysterious clock head (and the disappearance of their old head) comes with a new Quirk... they think.
Dante discovers that they can rewind injuries and restore a select group of individuals from even beyond death, albeit with immense amounts of pain. The catch? The individuals all have to be Quirkless.
These individuals form the Limbus Company, with mysterious (actual) head Vergilius and bus driver Charon.
Normally, All Might would have no opportunity to interact with, let alone investigate Dante's circumstances. But an opportunity has appeared.
Due to the recent Nomu surge, and their tendency to have little hesitation on turning humans into paste, Limbus Company is called in to help assist with the overflow, though admittedly out of sight of the public.
With Izuku as a formerly Quirkless individual, now seeking to be a hero, I think it would be fascinating to explore the Company. Even in MHA, the Limbus Company would have a wildly different take on the world than the often heavily sanitized world of heroes.
It might also be fascinating to explore if some of the members of the Company are victims of Quirk experimentation (Gregor).
...I wonder if Izuku would still fall into the category of Quirkless?
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MAJOR LOSTBELT 5.1 SPOILERS
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When the Master of Chaldea sees the face of the Man from Chaldea, it is the face of an utter stranger. They are sure they've never seen the Man in their life.
And yet, something cracks within them when the Man speaks, and his voice is utterly devoid of something.
They don't know the Man's face, yet it somehow is familiar. And yet...
Yet...
...what is this feeling of utter revulsion? This flare of violent, irrational rage?
You don't belong in that body, they want to say. That body is not yours.
But the words get trapped in their throat, and he leaves.
And though they somehow hate him in the brief moments of his presence...
...there is a remembered pain like no other in watching him leave.
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Does Toji still have the storage curse? Yes.
Does Geto try to yoink it from him? Absolutely.
I have this mental image of Maki, after figuring out he keeps the curse in his stomach, immediately gut punching him to get him to cough it up so she can check if he's hiding the inverted spear of heaven in there.
It's not in there, but you want to know who's there? Geto and Gojo, laughing their asses off.
Jujutsu Kaisen Age Swap AU, featuring absolute gremlin Toji.
Underaged mercenary who still does jobs to support his unhealthy habits, he lives outside of the Zenin clan with a sort of weird mentorship by Maki who visits sometimes to see if he hasn't gotten himself killed yet.
Collides with Geto and Gojo on a job, in which they attempt to murder each other and almost succeed, except they tie since they are still babies and Maki.
The strongest duo think that's the last they'll see of him... and then they start seeing him everywhere. At the supermarket. At the bar they'd gone to on a dare. At a random hot spring. Gojo keeps trying to get into beef with not-on-the-job Toji as Geto watches with exhaustion in the distance.
...Toji has the inverted spear of heaven hidden somewhere. Maki knows he has it. But every time she tries to find it, usually by ransacking his apartment, it's never there. If anyone finds out he has it, he'll probably get hunted down and killed.
Also he keeps whipping it out to stab Gojo, but that's a minor issue at most.
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So I was listening to a recap of Disney's new movie: Wish, and I had a sudden realization.
"Monarch of island takes the strongest wishes of their citizens from them, causing them to forget their dreams"
If you replace the wishes with Visions, and the dreams with ambitions...
Is it... is this Inazuma?
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Jujutsu Kaisen Age Swap AU, featuring absolute gremlin Toji.
Underaged mercenary who still does jobs to support his unhealthy habits, he lives outside of the Zenin clan with a sort of weird mentorship by Maki who visits sometimes to see if he hasn't gotten himself killed yet.
Collides with Geto and Gojo on a job, in which they attempt to murder each other and almost succeed, except they tie since they are still babies and Maki.
The strongest duo think that's the last they'll see of him... and then they start seeing him everywhere. At the supermarket. At the bar they'd gone to on a dare. At a random hot spring. Gojo keeps trying to get into beef with not-on-the-job Toji as Geto watches with exhaustion in the distance.
...Toji has the inverted spear of heaven hidden somewhere. Maki knows he has it. But every time she tries to find it, usually by ransacking his apartment, it's never there. If anyone finds out he has it, he'll probably get hunted down and killed.
Also he keeps whipping it out to stab Gojo, but that's a minor issue at most.
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I, prior to starting FGO, would've had my mind blown to get the opportunity to meet Odysseus.
I just think he's really cool, and it's somewhat a little disappointing we don't get to summon him with more of his Odyssey qualities.
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Thinking about the idealistic homies that justify and triple down on their worst decisions
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Beast of Calamity AU
Thinking about my Genshin Impact AU where I throw a massive calamity monster that tries to destroy the world every 500 years into a world that already seems to really, really want to kill everyone.
Disclaimer: Lore may not be 100% accurate, and the AU is based on some theories I have based on the lore I know. Heavy speculation on Celestia, the Heavenly Principles, the Tsarista, and the Abyss.
The Beast of Calamity is a massive shadowy serpent that attempts to annihilate all sentient life from Teyvat every 500 years, with the last instance of the Beast emerging approximately 500 years from the start of Genshin. Defying all elemental alignments, it is a creature that can absorb the energy and life of the world before it, and expel it in a devastating blast. In every instance it has appeared, it has attempted to kill everything before it, and only through the desperate efforts of the people of the era that it has been slain time and time again. But it has been 500 years, and the Calamity that accompanied its arrival has left deep scars upon the world.
In a world that needs unity, why does the Tsarista seek to weaken the nations around her? For she knows that the Beast seeks to finish the job it started 500 years ago... and that she will slay it for the tragedy it caused.
...Except, that can't be right either, right?
Amidst a desperate sibling's journey to be reunited with their other half, a being watches from afar. Celestia's hound, it has served the Heavenly Principles for millennia as yet another chain to bind the hands of the Seven. The Tsarista's plan is not hidden from the eyes of Celestia... but those who enforce the Heavenly Principles are not concerned.
The Hound knows that 500 years is approaching. It has been planning for this moment since the very moment it awoke in a world that did not seem to remember it. The goal from the start has not changed. Playing the hound, it will break free of its chains and seek the truth. A shadow serpent shall seek the heavens and shatter the sky.
Or: there's a traveler named Becal who once went by Skirk.
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