catsvrsdogscatswin

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

Aside from the tragic lack of Owlbear Cub content overall (though maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?) one thing I'm slightly surprised no one in the BG3 fandom is talking about is the whole Baby Creatures What Are Raised By Other Species Start Acting Like Those Species thing that happens with domestic/rescued animals a lot. (Granted, I don't know a lot about how domesticate-able owlbears are, but still.)

Kittens raised solely alongside dogs will try to bark, and a lot of birds infamously imprint on the first creature they see, species be damned. While the whole animal-speaking thing probably muddies the water a bit, once you've taken it into your camp, the owlbear cub is generally mostly raised by Scratch.

So, hear me out for your consideration of adorable things: the owlbear cub ends up behaving like a dog.

Full-on tries to bark with a beak, and unsurprisingly fails. It doesn't really have a tail, but tries to wag it anyway. Splays front paws and wiggles butt in air while holding eye contact to invite play. Licks faces to show appreciation. Enjoys fetch.

It only gets funnier the bigger the owlbear gets, because by the end of the game you have a rampaging murderbeast the size of a cart who acts like a Golden Retriever.

#BG3 #baldur's gate 3 #Owlbear cub

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

guess who's back with a new art style and still obsessing over the transfer its ME every time arya says some utterly wack shit that turns out to be absolutely right this is what I imagine. poor rex. characters belong rightfully to @catsvrsdogscatswin I just enjoy making shit posts of them

#sometimes their knowledge of pop culture lines up and sometimes it doesn't #she paraphrases Monty Python in the upcoming chapter and he's like 'genuinely Arya what the fuck' #because for her it's just a quote and for him she's talking absolutely unhinged nonsense out of nowhere #the relieved understanding that'll hit Rex when she finally admits to the isekai thing will add like ten years to his lifespan

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

My mutuals have been chattering about BG3 recently, and after paging through a few walkthroughs -and as a disclaimer, I still know almost NOTHING about D&D lore as a whole- I have been struck by the increasingly strong urge to write a RWBY crossover fanfic.

Because, like, the whole shtick with BG3's intro/plot hook is that the astral-plane-traveling bad guys have kidnapped a number of people and shoved transformative tadpoles into their brains, but the player character crashed their ship and now we all have to find a cure for the malfunctioning but still parasitic and dangerous tadpoles in our heads.

And the thing is, that could so easily include someone from RWBY. The ship passed by during its wild flight and yoinked somebody/some people out of the dimension of Remnant, because reasons, and now the RWBY character(s) have to deal with the BG3 plot. It's really tempting because flinging literally any of the RWBY main cast (I'm thinking at the current point in the timeline) into the original party would be such a delicious culture clash.

They hate/don't trust gods on principle, so dealing with Shadowheart/Gale/Lae'zel's religious issues would be a delight to witness and probably involve at least attempted deicide. The fundamental aspect of being a Huntsman/Huntress is continuously risking your life to protect strangers, so Karlach/Astarion/Wyll would get no further than "I'm sad because abuse/mistreatment/manipulation :(" before weapons would be drawn and a hitlist planned in beautiful detail. The Grove would be saved in record time because defending villages is, again, literally in the Huntsman/Huntress job description.

And even on the RWBY folks' end, it'd be fun to mess with because what do you mean magic is a super common normal thing? What do you mean trained warriors can't soak up hits due to their personal spiritual forcefield? What do you mean there are species beyond human and human-with-one-animal-feature walking around? What do you mean you guys don't have high-tech guns? What do you mean your world isn't overrun by perpetual hordes of monsters?

The plot bunny is itching at my brain.

#RWBY #baldur's gate 3 #BG3

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

Underutilized bit in LOTR, I feel, is how deeply out of his depth Boromir is within the Fellowship.

And by that I don't mean that he's the weakest or the stupidest or any of that, but rather that –against all appearances– he is the sole member of the Fellowship who is a Regular Normal Human, and he would have such a shocker slowly figuring all that out over the course of their journey. I mean:

Age. Legolas and Gimli wouldn't surprise him, since the lifespan of elves and dwarves seems commonly known to be way longer than humans, but Gandalf? The hobbits? None of these ages work as advertised and when he goes down to sit and commiserate with Aragorn about being the only Men in the company and how weird this all must be for them both Aragorn has to cough into his fist and mutter "Eighty-seven." "WHAT?!" (Yes, I know that Gondor keeps records of their Númenórean ancestors and said ancestors' extended lifespans, but consider this: the blood has thinned so much in Gondor that practically nobody lives longer than regular humans nowadays, and Boromir is canonically the jock in a family of scholars. He had to look up what/where Rivendell was after he got Faramir's Prophecy Dream, for god's sake.)

Bilbo. The entire Fellowship except Boromir has a personal relationship with Bilbo, and Boromir has neither seen nor heard of this creature in his life. Everyone else is starting off this quest with significant background knowledge of Bilbo's life and The Hobbit, whether having been told by Bilbo himself or having had family members personally involved at the time it occurred, and Boromir, again, has no clue what they're all on about.

Moria. Dwarves presumably have some built-in sensory adaptions for living underground, elf eye physics are bullshit, hobbits are stated to be far more comfortable/better navigating underground than most races, Gandalf is an Istar, and Aragorn has been hunting and tracking in various ungodly locations for most of his eighty-seven years. This means that, once again, Boromir is the only Normal Person trying to Normally Navigate a mostly-pitch-black cave system while everyone else side-eyes him for bumping into walls all the time.

Elves can sleep with their eyes open. This is admittedly not the most common thing among the Fellowship, but please imagine Boromir, still struggling to understand the fact that he's surrounded by nonhuman beings who have no shared concept of the passing of time, rolling over at 2AM to see Legolas bluescreening contentedly up at the sky, and then everyone acts like he's the weird one when he starts freaking out about it because all of them are used to traveling with/know more about elves than he does.

Even just remembering stuff off the top of my head, Boromir must have had such a weird time adjusting to being the only normal human being among the Fellowship before he, y'know. Died.

(Plus I can totally imagine Merry and Pippin giving him shit for "Well, if you're the only normal one amongst nearly a dozen people, then that's not very 'normal', is it? Maybe Men are the odd ones out and everybody else is normal.")

#LOTR #lord of the rings #Boromir

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

Except ghira is almost definitely coming back in vacuo

Plus, given what they’ve shown us about ghira I don’t get how they expect us to believe he’s “taking care of things”

Also there’s how the show goes out of its way to show us specifically the SDCs mistreatment of Faunus, directly connecting it to Adam and illia, and visiting an SDC mine that’s basically a Faunus grave, only for that to all go nowhere and the SDC getting destroyed by Salem anyways

No, yeah, that's why I said the White Fang thing has not been addressed again yet. Ghira and the Menagerie militia and presumably a fair number of deradicalized White Fang peeps will almost certainly show up in V10 –but we haven't seen that yet, and we don't technically know if they'll be there, or how far the show will address them. Maybe it'll be a "And also we're here!" nanomention, maybe it'll be more complex than that. Who can say.

The SDC thing is, I think, another example of sloppily tied knots. The show can't not mention Faunus and how they're treated, considering the SDC's cruel practices were the meat of most of the White Fang's arguments, but at the same time, they can't afford to give it more than a surface mention because the eye of focus is decidedly on Atlas and the teetering moral compasses of various folks in V7-8.

#RWBY

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

The thing is it hasn’t exactly ended, not entirely at least, the atlas arc took more time to demonstrate the kingdoms racism and its intricacies then all the volumes prior, even tho it ultimately didn’t go anywhere since atlas fell anyways leading to yet another dead end

If we're talking about the general inclusion of racism (Faunusism?) in RWBY, then yes, they are still at least trying to maintain its presence as a thing that happens on Remnant. Which (from a writing perspective) is good, because dismissing racism from your story entirely after you're done with the peaceful-vs-nonpeaceful-resistance metaphor just makes it obvious that you included fantasy racism for that reason and that reason only. Which is not a particularly good look.

I was more talking about the White Fang and their plotline/place in RWBY specifically: the organization imploded internally due to Adam's deranged poor leadership, and then just kind of... fell off everyone's radars. More important stuff to focus on now, dontcha know. We're implicitly assured that Ghira and his new militia are taking care of things and then never/have yet to address the White Fang again.

I will say that was probably the neatest/kindest way for CRWBY to cut it out of the story, since, again, I'm pretty sure they only realized "oh, wait, this needs a lot more nuance than we're able to give it" after the White Fang and Faunus racism had been firmly established in the series, so they had to scramble to tie it up in a way that didn't make everything worse.

#RWBY

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

I liked your analysis of RWBY being a deconstruction, but it kinda makes me wonder why the white fang arc was played problematical straight.

The white fang stopped using only nonviolent methods and that led them down a dark path to eventually being villains into Blake and ghira show them the light so the “good Faunus” save humans from the bad ones and somehow “prove themselves”

It’s a plot that’s been done before a lot and RWBY seems to take some of the worst parts of bad civil rights plots

The White Fang plot was... well, it was a lot of things. I'm not sure why it was included to begin with, but either way, racism (even and perhaps especially fantasy racism) is such a nuanced thing that it needs to be the main focus in order to be treated/taken apart/discussed properly. It can't be a D-plot and it struggles as a C-plot. B and A-plots are the ideal place to have it, because then you can avoid glossing over or trivializing the complexities involved.

And I think CRWBY realized that only after they'd committed to having the White Fang be a background thing, and since they couldn't afford to refocus the series, they just kind of pushed through it as quickly as they could. Hence why a lot of its plot points were tied up sloppily and the entire thing ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

#RWBY

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

https://www.tumblr.com/catsvrsdogscatswin/738535501443842048

While your point stands well, I think there's also a multitude of other elements at play as well.

Someone once noted that a big issue is how people tend to analyze media...or rather, how they DON'T analyze it. There's a very strong anti-analytical mentality present in fandom that leans heavily towards the mentality that "if it doesn't explicitly explain and say what's going on, then nothing is happening at all".

RWBY does a lot of showing and telling, but a good chunk of the time it's not super explicit about it, or does it in a way that's highly unconventional. A lot of body language, framing of scenes, comparison of narrative structure, attention to detail, etc. But to a lot of people, they literally do not make any effort to understand what's going on unless someone else basically tells them what is going on, or the story itself spoonfeeds everything for them to regurgitate as if it's their own idea all along.

Like that one criticism about the Dust subplot being obtuse, because the story doesn't explicitly connect the dots for them, despite the fact that its setup is really obvious in hindsight:

Dust is introduced as very valuable, and also highly explosive.

Roman is established as stealing them for his own profits, but them implicitly being strongarmed by Cinder into using the Dust for something else.

Roman is taking increasingly bigger risks with Atlesian equipment and Dust, and Blake and co. finds it odd because he's also affiliating with the White Fang.

They find out that he's using bombs alongside the White Fang and Atlesian Paladins.

Really, all of the pieces are pretty much right in front of them, but because of the way they approach media, they don't think to connect the dots and basically act as if it's incomprehensible due to their own ignorance and lack of willingness to engage with the story. It's just such a passive and unthinking way of dealing with media.

Then there's also the fact that they just constantly take everything at face value, even when it's blatantly clear that there are numerous inconsistencies in the characters' recollections and statements. This is pretty much Unreliable Narrator: The Series, and yet people just outright don't seem to get that.

Exactly! If you pay close attention and are used to analyzing things, there are plenty of moments that lead up to a retroactive "aha!" moment when the plot twists or the character arcs start going in deconstructive directions. But if you're not (and occasionally even if you are, and just miss a step) then it feels like it comes out of nowhere and then everybody gets mad.

Oh, I could write a whole thesis about how RWBY's cues are almost always subtle and how it both helps and hurts the show, because on the one hand that means they can be sneaky with their plot twists, but on the other... well, if you aren't clear enough about some things, the fans won't pick it up, and you don't want that to happen often in your show. It's a happy medium that RWBY doesn't always quite manage to nail.

#RWBY

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

I've had this thought swirling in the back of my head for a while, but it's finally congealed enough that I think I can make a coherent pitch, which is: I think RWBY's problems with the more vitriolic part of its fanbase partially stems from the fact that RWBY is a deconstruction that doesn't advertise it's a deconstruction.

RWBY's status as a deconstruction is pretty textbook. It takes apart standard fantasy, shounen, and anime tropes in order to analyze them and their deeper meaning and then reassembles them in new and interesting ways for the plot/characters/series. Thing is, it never says that outright in promotional material, which can lead to later outrage in fans.

See, unless their way of discovering new shows is to close their eyes and stab their finger at random, most people tend to choose series to watch/read based on expectations. Maybe a friend said they'll like it because it has [insert thing], maybe they read the summary and were intrigued, maybe they thought the poster/cover art was cool, whatever. These small pieces of information are generally enough for people to make a snap-judgment of the style and genre of the series, which they can then gauge against their personal tastes and decide whether or not they want to try.

Most of the time, this works just fine. Well-written deconstructions also generally give the viewers some warning/buildup before they take a hard swerve. See Madoka Magica: the magical girl paradigm is shaded by the possibility of death as soon as we're introduced to it, then there's an onscreen death with blood, and then a few episodes later we eventually realize the Faustian bargain of it all. Even innocent viewers who stumbled into watching it, unaware of the show's reputation, would go "Oh, wait, this is not going in the direction magical girl shows usually go" by a third of the way through.

The thing is, with RWBY, this does not happen unless you're paying a lot of attention and/or looking for it. And neither the cover art nor the summary nor, I believe, the fanbase gives a lot of warning about the swerves ahead.

In fact, RWBY initially bills itself as a pretty standard shounen anime. The main protagonist is hinted to have Special Powers and gets into the Magic Monster-Hunting School in the first episode, and the first two-and-a-half seasons are taken up by her and her friends' superhero-esque slice-of-life shenanigans as they thwart robberies and terrorist attacks and gear up for a tournament arc against the looming background of a larger conspiracy.

Then in the last half of the third season the villains' entire Rube Goldberg machine of a scheme snaps into completion and the plot twists so hard the entire genre takes a hard right. If you're used to character analysis and common anime tropes, this is not completely a surprise -up until this point, RWBY's character arcs and plot have been subtly traveling in non-traditional directions that hint of greater flexibility in genre treatment ahead- but if you're not... well.

Thing is, people watching RWBY up until this point have signed up for pretty standard shounen and they've been getting it, but the third season's ending smashes that all to bits. From then on out in RWBY, it's like they ordered fries and suddenly got a hamburger. It might be delicious; but it's not what they asked for, what they wanted, or what they paid for, and they are, justifiably, displeased.

So when the reasonable people either adjusted their expectations or sighed, shook their heads, and clicked back out (perhaps with a grumble and a scowl), the unreasonable people dug their heels in and began insisting that everybody was Getting The Show/Character Wrong and that CRWBY is ruining it, because the fact that RWBY's method of deconstruction is to put standard tropes in a blender and then arrange what's left in deceptive patterns means that said unreasonable viewers can scan the bare surface and argue that all the stereotypical stuff is clearly still under there, somewhere.

So they're continually trying to drag RWBY back to the tracks of a typical shounen anime series (it's closest relative), which creates a dissonance between the show they're watching and the show they think they're watching. They're trying to turn the hamburger back into fries, basically, except that doesn't work and just frustrates everyone involved, because you're trying to make RWBY into something that it's not. Hence, this attitude probably starting/fueling some of the more contentious statements in the fandom, i.e.:

"Ironwood was right the whole time" (in most action movies and shounen anime, allied military leaders are trustworthy beyond reproach)

"Adam's character was wasted" (we all know how much shounen loves their powerful warrior antiheroes)

"Ruby and the others are in the wrong about [insert thing]/or for doing [insert thing], and this is bad writing!" (shounen protagonists don't usually make more than One Very Big Mistake over the course of their entire careers, which is usually fixed/overcome/redeemed via an appropriately rigorous training arc)

And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with shounen tropes or shounen anime. They're wonderful storytelling devices in their own way and their own time: but if you want standard by-the-book shounen without any new and interesting concoctions, then RWBY is definitely not the show for you. And most people don't find that out until it's too late.

#RWBY #fandom #wonder how much hate I'm going to get for this one #ho-hum #Getting frustrated when a show doesn't perform to your expectations is normal and natural but that's no reason to be a dick about it

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

Summary: There is an inevitable truth regarding the end of all monster-hunters, although Father Alexander Anderson had long forgotten –or perhaps dismissed– it in his hubris.

When death comes for them, it comes with teeth.

Surely the best way to celebrate the joys of the holiday is to write a story about a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation for everyone involved.

#Hellsing #Andercard #Alucard (Hellsing) #Alexander Anderson

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

Okay, so, I am fully thumbtacks-and-stringin' here, but-

I forget which post or poster, but I saw a very interesting take recently, the general thrust of which was that Miguel's logic is full of holes: if Miles being an anomaly means that he's not a Spider-Person, then a Spider-Person's canon events don't apply to him: and if he is a Spider-Person, then he's not an anomaly, etc. Likewise, the black hole o' doom in Pavitr's universe explicitly/implicitly matches up with what RIPeter (original blond Spidey for Miles' universe) told Kingpin and his minions, that their collider was unstable and would create a black hole under Brooklyn and that's bad, actually. It is also worth noting that them creating an experiment that would have a very similar result to Spot's uncontrolled tampering with the collider in Pavitr's dimension is completely canon in Earth 1610.

This being so, I have to wonder if Miguel's entire goal –preserving canon events so that entire dimensions aren't destroyed– isn't based on a tragically comedic massive misunderstanding.

Assuming the fact that there's an Alchemax in every dimension –it seems plausible, and it especially seems plausible in the doomed-universe-that-the-double-he-replaced-lives-in, given Miguel's comic run of being involved with them– it's entire possible that the destroyed dimension's Alchemax created some horrible collider experiment that then went off without interference, because the guy who was supposed to be/become the local Spider-Person was dead and the guy who replaced him was busy enjoying his doppelgänger's civilian identity. And then Alchemax's hubristic scientific nonsense blew up the whole dimension because Spidey wasn't there to stop them and that's what happens when you fuck around with quantum physics without OSHA regulations, guys.

But Miguel wouldn't know that. He and Peter would be the only survivors because dimensional shenaniganery. And Miguel had messed with the canon first, so conclusion obvious, right? When you attempt to write your own narrative, the real story autocorrects with a vengeance. Maybe even his attempts to research the problem with Lyla would pop up tantalizingly misleading results like "according to this probability calculator, there is a 99.9% chance this happened because the local Spider wasn't there and you chose to replace him but didn't perform his role" and once again, from Miguel's perspective the conclusion would be obvious. Canon does not like to be fucked with.

And also, like. You can't blame the guy for not crash-testing that shit. "Oh yeah this entire dimension turned itself inside-out and everybody in it died a horrific and potentially excruciating death. We should try to experiment, maybe induce similar conditions to see what caused it-" FUCK NO. A significant amount of Miguel's aggression is pretty clearly based on the fact that he does not want this to happen again. Which, very fair. Something like 7 billion people dead, you don't wanna try a rerun. Nobody's going to try and test the veracity of that.

But if he's wrong though. Oh, boy, if he's wrong, though.

IDK I just think it would be very interesting if the message Miguel insists on trying to carry in ATSV of "you can't have both cakes and eat them too" is then finished out in Beyond the Spiderverse by "Actually, you need to try to reach for both, because if you're satisfied by crumbs then you won't get anything."

#ATSV #across the spiderverse spoilers #miguel o'hara

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

I just finished TMS and man... Gotta be in the top 5 fics I've ever read, if not the best (and it's not even done!) I was wondering if there was a discord or forum or something similar to discuss it? It's definitely inspired some writing ideas of my own.

Are you new to tumblr? (Generally speaking, when someone's account or sideblog is completely blank -like, no profile pic no liked posts no posted posts- it's a sign that they're a bot.)

If you aren't a bot, though, thank you very much! There is in fact a Discord channel, which is technically meant for chatting about the fic and/or giving said chat access to beta links for early chapters, but is actually extremely quiet because I categorically cannot keep up a line of communication. Also, as of right now I have no new chapters beyond what's already published.

Still, if you are interested (and not a bot), I could give you the link?

#RWBY #TMS #TMS RWBY #fanfic

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

COMING BACK TO THIS ACTUALLY BECAUSE LIKE-

Look at where we start from!

Look at this stereotypical fairytale! He just rescued her from a tower and they fell and love and it's sappy and cliche and predictable, but they're happy!

And then he gets sick and dies and she goes a little bonkers trying to petition the gods to resurrect him, because being trapped in a tower for most of your life means your emotional control is shit when you lose a loved one, who knew.

But then -just like Alucard!- she gives in to anger and despair at her lowest nadir, because that's easier than admitting that she made a mistake or facing the emotional devastation caused by her hurt and grief. You know what, if gods won't bring her beloved back to life because of their stupid "respecting the delicate balance between life and death" rules, she'll MAKE them give him back! Surely lashing out at divine beings won't go badly for her!

Needless to say, it goes badly for her.

And then do you know what the gods do, when humanity re-evolves centuries later? They fucking resurrect Ozma. They tell him that a calamity has befallen the world and they'd like to see if the new humanity deserves redemption, so if he could get the new population to work together in harmony and then call the gods back, that'd be great. He'll have to reincarnate into new bodies and merge his consciousness into each host, because this'll take him a while and they don't want him to be alone. Also, if he fails to unite humanity by the time he's called them back, they'll just nuke the entire planet -for real, this time. Ozma politely declines and asks to go back to the afterlife to join Salem: when he hears that she's still alive, though, he goes "SIGN ME THE FUCK UP" without waiting for more details.

And do you know what? Despite the warning signs, despite the gods explicitly telling him that the Salem he loved is gone, Ozma ignores it all and homes in on her like a magnet.

And they still recognize each other! Even after Ozma is literally an Entirely Different Person and Salem's been corrupted by the Unholy Monster Goop, they still know each other on sight. They still love each other! They even start a family!

Ozma wants to unite humanity, so Salem suggests they play gods, since they're both functionally immortal and have magic unlike anything the second wave of humanity has ever seen. This goes great until Ozma notices how ruthless she's become and tries to explain to her why he wants to unite humanity: she reacts with disgust, because why bother trying to redeem these humans? Humanity isn't redeemable. She would know: after all she's seen, shouldn't she know?

Ozma then realizes that maybe the Salem he loved is gone, and tries to sneak out of the castle with their kids. This goes badly enough that all four kids die and Salem deliberately kills her husband -the man she defied the gods for, the man she gave up everything for, the man she loved past all sense or reason- with a blast of fire to his face. I'm talking kicks-him-over-on-his-back, stomps-foot-on-his-chest-and-magic-flamethrower-to-the-face-from-her-hand. It is vengeful.

And so it goes, for god knows how long afterwards: Ozma and all his hosts are trying to protect and unite humanity while Salem is trying to divide and destroy them. But the thing is, Salem can never quite shake her ties to their past: because, like Alucard, she's calcified in her moment of grief and rage and hurt and anger. No matter how much she acts otherwise, she can't move on from it.

And while Ozma is still trying to live up to his duty as a protector, he has -by nature of his own curse- been changing this entire time. Each new host gives him a new perspective: he's blessed by the gods, sure, but isn't this also a curse in its own way? To constantly become someone new, to create someone with each finished incarnation that isn't the host but also isn't fully Ozma anymore.

How much of Oscar, his current host, is going to be left when they're done merging? How many more times is Ozma going to have to reincarnate before it's over and he can finally lay both himself and Salem to rest?

And look at how Salem initially treats Oscar. This is not Ozma, this is not him, this is just his latest host. Oscar is recent enough to the process that Ozma is still a voice in the back of his head, not his inner monologue. Salem knows this and acknowledges this. It's obvious. She's known Ozma for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, and this is not him.

But for a significant portion of this conversation, Salem is still talking to Ozma, treating Oscar like a radio receiver or a telephone line.

"So small, this new host of yours." I know you're in there.

"The lies come out of you so easily... like-minded souls, indeed." You lied to me, you lied to me, how could you, do you know what I gave up for you-

And then later, when Salem is decidedly not as composed as the above scene, she forgets the host entirely. Despite Oscar being the one fronting the entire time the duo interact with Salem, all she can see is Ozma.

Again, Ozma hasn't even spoken to her this whole time.

Oscar's been in the driver's seat the whole way down: in fact, the only time Ozma even talks when Salem is present is to telepathically tell Oscar not to panic, that he's going to be okay, just as they're regaining consciousness from being kidnapped. Otherwise, Ozma's silence is deafening.

Props to her VA for the delivery of this line, because the frustration and barely-checked rage that have both been seething for centuries is palpable.

I burned the world for you, I destroyed myself for you, I corrupted myself for you; and that would've been fine, but then you came back. I was cursed with immortality that has broken my mind with the despair of eternity trying to raise you from the dead, but then you came back on your own. I tried to raise a family with you, I loved you again, but you betrayed me and I killed you but then you came back again, making a mockery of all my sacrifices, everything I gave up to try and bring you back myself.

How could you. How dare you. Why are you still haunting me like this. Why can't you give up. Why won't you stop coming back. I loved you once, but I want nothing more than to see you dead now.

Anyway I just think their story is neat and again, if I was a lot cleverer than I am, I'd find a way to make it into an Andercard fic.

Ramble post because I’m thinking of Alucard and Anderson again but like…

If I was a lot cleverer than I am I’d write an Andercard story using Salem and Ozma from RWBY somehow. It’s been fluttering in the back of my head ever since V6C3 because their relationship can be so Andercard-coded if you let it, and the only thing that’s stopping me is how heavily Ozma and Salem are tied to their series and how difficult that makes lifting their themes/doing an AU.

But still. It’s the “devotion that corrupts” of it all. It’s the whole “In the name of the divine or demonic, a monster’s still a monster in the end” that Salem and Ozma inadvertently end up acting out with the series as their stage. 

It’s Salem acting out against the gods and the world to bring Oz back, only for the gods to smite him and give her the vilest punishment that they can: immortality. It’s Oz turning his back on the afterlife without a second thought if it means he can see Salem again. It’s Oz agreeing to become an existence that reincarnates into the back of people’s minds and consumes them, all in the name of being the gods’ instrument, because it will get him back to Salem.

It’s Salem and Oz recognizing each other when he comes back on sight, even when Oz is in a different body and Salem has been altered irrevocably by the Grimm pools. It’s how Salem’s love made her into the monster she is and how that love transmutes seamlessly to eternal and undying hatred after Oz turns his back on her. It’s how Salem is still so stuck in the past she hisses his name, the first name he had, even thousands of years later and after all the countless bodies and faces and names he’s worn in between, like she can’t see anyone else.

I love you so much that it will shape the world. I love you so much the gods will never forgive me for it. We will love each other and it will destroy us both. Our love will leave only inhuman monsters behind and we will not stop or hesitate because we care too much to do so.

#Hellsing #RWBY #Andercard

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

you know... with everyone who's a fan of Anderson... I need to ask...

#maybe...? #I'm Catholic but ex-Catholic #I don't believe but I never got de-baptized so like. technically I still count as a member of the religion #So I guess it depends if the “member of the faithful” response outweighs the “heretic” response

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

Holy shit! That is! A lot!!!

So anyway, have some amateur doodles of a shitty human pyramid to commemorate this most momentous occasion.

My Two Minutes Silence fic is much better than my doodling and you can find it HERE.

(And if you have any of your own doodles to add to the pile, please @ me or tag TMS RWBY or something of that nature so I can help spread it to a wider audience.)

#RWBY #TMS RWBY #Two Minutes Silence RWBY

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

Binged Nocturne yesterday, so here are my spoilery thoughts on the matter, in no particular order:

Watching this season was certainly an experience. Neither I nor my sibling have any knowledge of the Castlevania games beyond "there's a guy named Alucard who kills his dad multiple(?) times and also Belmonts are the player characters probably," so it's not like we were expecting anything, but there were a lot of "oh wouldn't it be funny if" or "I bet they'll do X" moments BUT THEN THEY ACTUALLY DID. "Why don't we continue this conversation somewhere more comfortable?" (Oh lol he's gonna fuck that priest.) *smashcut to Orlox and Mizrak naked in a bed together* (OH WAIT WHAT?!!?!)

"There's an underground secret passage to the abbey." (Uh yeah and how do YOU know that? 'I bet she fucked that old man.' Pfff I bet she did. 'I bet he's Maria's dad.' Ehhhh I mean maybe? Bit far-fetched.) "But then we wouldn't have had Maria!" (*unified unholy gibbon screeching*)

(I'm not saying this series is bad, I'm just going to be a little disappointed if absolutely nobody from the original series gets even mentioned.) *Alucard shows up at the very last second* (Oh we are winning this season! 'We are WINNING!')

Orlox served astronomical levels of cunt and I hope he continues to hang around being a nebulous problem for everybody else for the rest of the series. And then go be evil and gay somewhere else at the end, like Striga and Morana.

While I respect the power move of Drolta's heel-less platforms and the environmental storytelling of "ooh wow look how vampires can balance effortlessly on floating heels like it's nothing" personally speaking it did look a bit. weird. Like just give her stilettos, man.

Drolta was otherwise an absolute delight to watch for every moment of her time onscreen and her character design was absolute peak. Every outfit and hairstyle was immaculate.

Maybe this is just me having read up on her a lot, but having Erzebet Bathory be mixed with the Egyptian goddess Sekmet was... jarring. She was a Hungarian noble and had absolutely fuck-all to do with anything further south than the European frontier of the Ottoman Empire, so even the "drank a goddess's blood and got possessed a little bit" still feels cobbled-together and forced.

Personally speaking, I think it would've served the writer's "dread vampire Messiah come to swallow the sun and usher in a new age of blood and doom" purpose if they had EITHER the vampire Erzebet Bathory who committed all of her (mostly mythical/exaggerated) serial killing crimes and then some, OR an ancient vampiress infected by drinking a goddess's blood. You either pull the cachet of an infamous vampire-tangential historical figure or make up a story about a vampire being consumed by and becoming a channel for something more powerful than even them out of whole cloth, but please don't do both. Especially when both versions originally had nothing to do with each other.

We all none of us deserve Eduoard. I hope he gets to transform into something more human-looking by the end of the series (so he doesn't get mobbed) and then go home to his nameless boyfriend and live happily ever after. Maybe after kicking the Abbot's teeth in, since he deserves it.

Speaking of which, this was Annette's season. Richter may have had his name on the tin but this season was for her and she killed it. Absolutely stole the show, man.

I love the way her summoning was animated and find her realistic for both her age and her time period in terms of enthusiasm for revolution and a tendency to act with emotion rather than thought, but Maria was just kinda... also here. Presumably she'll have more to do next season.

#Castlevania Nocturne #Castlevania Nocturne spoilers #Castlevania spoilers #spoilers

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

Summary: There were theological differences between the falls of Icarus and Lucifer, but right now, Father Anderson felt disturbingly like both.

Or, Alucard's original form is giving his nemesis certain problems.

To the best of my memory, @loadinghellsing and @anderseeds were the (inadvertent) main culprits behind this idea, which was "Wouldn't it be fucking hilarious if Anderson saw Vladcard for the first time and just got KOed by all the gay thoughts he'd been avoiding for however long it was?"

I have done my best to ensure that yes; yes, it would be hilarious.

#Hellsing #Andercard #Alexander Anderson #Alucard (Hellsing) #Sorry if I didn't ask permission but I wasn't sure who I'd be asking permission to