dead-dove-moment

[dead-dove-moment]

Wow.. she’s like the girl of my dreams! 😳 Like literally the exact projection of what I desire most in my life! The perfect girl 😍

#spoilers #utena spoilers

[dead-dove-moment]

made myself one of those deviantart styled stamps for when i'm discussing something totally unrelated and have to physically hold myself back from saying the term witch

#spoilers #umineko spoilers #look. once you understand how magic works it can. have an effect. #reaction images

[dead-dove-moment]

it would’ve been better if one didn’t know

#spoilers #umineko spoilers #thunder and lightning #ano hito

[dead-dove-moment]

theory on how the spacecats grant wishes

First off, let's review what we know about how the magical girl "contract" works:

It depends on the subject's "karma" in the literal sense: the weight of their life on the world's chain of cause and effect.

It activates the subject's ability to use magic, without the process itself requiring the ability to use magic to trigger (cf: spacecats can't use magic).

It requires a wish that defies the world as it would otherwise have been.

The wish is granted as a side effect of the process.

The wish is granted by magic, therefore, by the subject or the magical process triggered by the contract, not by the incubator.

This is the same moment when soul extraction occurs, but we don't know whether solar extraction is necessary to the process, and the soul gem certainly is not.

Let us posit that magic is atemporal, because emotion is atemporal: able, when strong enough, to hurl us into the past in a way that we perceive as merely psychological but is in fact metaphysically somewhat literal (cf the first episode of Star Trek DS9).

Let's also posit that the natural human swings of emotion which correspond to things happening in the world are the causes and effects of "karma": the difference that a person makes in the emotional states of others as a consequence of their lives.

Finally, let's posit that, since magic is atemporal, the cause and the effect are one thing, like the front and back faces of a cube.

We know, from Rebellion Story, that incubator technology includes the ability to create an isolation zone which cuts off a soul from normal spacetime and, as a result, disrupts certain magical processes.

Consider what would happen if the soul of an unenhanced human with strong karma, and a specific emotionally-charged intention, were to be placed in such an isolation field. The soul is left with the magical weight of its future effects, severed from the effects themselves. An intolerably high voltage; the karma demands to come back into balance. But at that moment, the body doesn't exist, only the soul. Without the body's future actions as an outlet, the only path, and thus the path of least resistance, becomes a supernatural one: the wish, the cauldron of the heart.

This would also explain why it has to be a "contract": not because it's require for the wish, but it's required for the soul to bond to the soul gem magitech. Martial magic becomes part of the wish, essentially, because it's part of the intention; the future that is carved by the arc lightning of your karma coming back into equilibrium (in substitution for the future that was hidden behind the insulation layer) includes the expectation of battle, and therefore, your magic "learns" how to use the soul gem just as it "learns" how to use magic that's like what your wish did.

#spoilers #pmmm spoilers #original content

[dead-dove-moment]

reminder that, before she started drinking plum tea, the fuel of the alcoholic nihilism hole which gave Bernkastel her name was a riesling with a high enough sugar content that it'd be classified as a "dessert wine" if it were any sweeter

#spoilers #higurashi spoilers #no I don't care that the manga artist drew it as a red wine #mosel only produces white wine so either the color is a continuity error or the name is #and the name sure as heck isn't

[dead-dove-moment]

#spoilers #pmmm spoilers #utena spoilers #HOMURA EXIT YOUR COFFIN CHALLENGE 2024

[dead-dove-moment]

my brother, who played fallen London for a bit around 2018 and knew absolutely zero of the deep lore, came to precisely this conclusion LOL

Inhuman ✅

Powerful within their own scope ✅

Can't trust a gift from them ✅

Intense about bargains, trades, and debts ✅

Go by false names and titles ✅

Conclusion, the Masters are faeries, probably. At least as far as Caoimhe is concerned.

#Spoilers #fallen london spoilers

[dead-dove-moment]

ep3's gonna be REAL interesting innit

this being the first theory battler has lampshaded and discarded as a joke is making me extremely 👁

#spoilers #umineko spoilers #pochapal watch

[dead-dove-moment]

Utena isn’t answering the doorbell anymore. If Wakaba can’t figure out how to get to her, she’s going to have to figure out who she is without her.

A commission I wrote for @cetaceanhandiwork

#spoilers #utena spoilers #wakaba shinohara appreciation station #hello wakaba enjoyers have you read THIS fic yet #self reblog

[dead-dove-moment]

do you think wakaba thought anthy was just another rogue utena fangirl who referred to utena reverentially as “utena-sama”, given that wakaba didn’t know anything about the rose bride system. i used to wonder if it wouldnt stick out to people as weird that anthy was tailing utena around everywhere and referring to herself as utena’s bride but actually knowing the culture at that school wakaba was probably just like “yeah yeah we’re ALL utena’s bride you’re not special.”

#spoilers #utena spoilers #wakaba shinohara appreciation station #I hope in the new decade they meet back up again so they can bury the hatchet on all this nonlethally

[dead-dove-moment]

"The New Planets" — Heaven Will Be Mine

#spoilers #hwbm spoilers #thunder and lightning

[dead-dove-moment]

the thing that's especially fishy about all this to me is that the process we're describing here - which wouldn't work for Asriel but which has conveniently been teed up to work for Ralsei - is a process that Ralsei is actively teaching us to use WRT everyone who's not him

in Undertale, the process of ending a battle peacefully was a new innovation gameplay-wise, and a hallmark of what made it a groundbreaker in the genre. if you don't want to kill, then you have to figure out what else this monster wants, and placate them that way. this would sometimes be a single action, sometimes a chain of actions.

when playing through the game for the first time, this feels exploratory. but the more you play, the more it becomes... hm. "saying all the right things", let's say. doing it because they're what the monster across from you wants to hear, whether or not you mean it.

in Deltarune... we see a game that's much less trusting about the process. the existence of the "Mercy meter" (visible or not) is a game-mechanical capitulation on the topic: an admittance that this is, in a way, simply a second health bar which you attack using a different set of abilities. "I don't care about divine law nor human rights, but this widow is wearing me out." maybe that's okay, in the context of combat? given the choice between physical violence against a stranger vs manipulating a stranger so that we can go our separate ways? I'd do it Ralsei's way too. I don't know if Kris would, but I would.

but that logic goes beyond random encounters, dunnit? and that's when things get complicated. that's a good 60% of what ruined Homura Akemi, I think: replaying the same conversations with the people who used to be her best and only friends, until they're more puzzleboxes on legs. this was the fallen child's most textual character flaw (revealed by how the True Lab home videos imply the child used the prerogatives of human Determination): a tendency to treat people as outcome piñatas when necessary to achieve the "really important" outcomes. the cost is that the more you do it, the less you get to play pretend that these are real people in a real world. the more you do it, the more you can feel the glove on your hand.

if we're being tempted to deal with Ralsei the same way... then shouldn't we be suspicious of that, just as much as we should be suspicious of the duel system that Anthy put so much effort into astroturfing?

once again, I find myself asking myself: what would it look like for Ralsei to get a car?

What are the salient features of Asriel, post-canon, that keep us from "saving" him from life alone in the Underground?

He's soulless (a practical problem),

he'll soon return to being a flower (a practical problem) and would prefer that you think of him like this rather than Flowey (a personal and interpersonal problem), and

he's decided to stay and tend the grave of the fallen child (and this is not really a problem at all; rather, a decision, which the boundary conditions of Undertale require us to respect).

There is a lot of UT post-canon fic out there which treats all these as practical problems. Frisk can just get a soul from somewhere, throw Alphys technobabble or soul arcanobabble at the body issue; get Flowey in therapy; and... also get Flowey in therapy for that last one, because his decision isn't really legitimate, in save-the-goat stories. It's self-harm. Which, personally, is both understandable and missing the point of one of the game's core themes: no matter how many times you restart the story, there are things you can't do; you are not getting a 100% Complete Perfect Pacifist where even Asriel is saved, and it's okay to be wistful about it, but you still need to put down the controller eventually. Getting him to the surface happens a lot in fic, because we all want the goldenest ending, but it could never happen in canon and we just have to live with it. It's thematically potent and I'd lose a lot of respect for Undertale's commitment to its story if you could circumvent it.

(Incidentally, this feels to me like it stems from the same ideas as making "* I have places to be" the wrong answer, a giving-in to Frisk's self-sacrificing, self-disregarding nature which must be corrected. Sometimes, you have to let people live and make their own decisions, outside the boundaries of the story's frame. Your perspective only goes so far.)

...now, fluffier, more sympathetically-traumatized Asriel, on the other hand...!

Ralsei's woes in Deltarune are very visibly the same kind of isolation as what Asriel's dealing with at the end of Undertale, but a) it's worse (a whole lifetime of waiting in a very deliberately empty, lifeless, three-screen-long kingdom) and b) he's stuck there for purely practical reasons. Darkners can't enter the Light World without becoming objects. He never made a decision to be here.

It's not something we can technobabble our way out of right now, but we're only in Chapter 2, right? We can save him, in a way we can't save Asriel: the deadlock we can't resolve has been removed; we don't really have to think about his preferences any more, because the preferences that kept us from helping him and left him stuck in the Underground I mean Dark World are just gone.

His issues are also much more obvious from the get-go, and seem designed to be something we talk him out of – not Asriel's decision to stay by his lost friend's grave, with a weight of meaning and feeling behind it, but hero worship, subservience, religious dedication to the Prophecy and self-image issues, all clear and visible dysfunctions. Giving Asriel therapy has left the realm of fanfiction and wish fulfillment and become part of canon... and the real disagreements we had with UT!Asriel over what he was and meant and deserved have become simple roadblocks for DR!Asriel whoops I mean Ralsei, things we have to help him through. Practical problems where the solution is friendship speech + therapy.

To make a slightly heavy-handed comparison, Ralsei saying we exist to serve Lightners and gratefully referring to himself as Kris's lackey is Anthy saying I'm the Rose Bride because I like it. It's the kind of reason we're inclined to reflexively overrule without working to deal with it at its root. Ralsei is Asriel, minus the irreconcilable and bittersweet parts, someone whose objections to being helped have either been removed or simplified down until we can feel good about disabusing him of them. He's our wish fulfillment in the way that candy on trees might be Susie's and a city of shining lights might be Noelle's and Giant Arcade Consoles might be Berdly's: an Asriel you can help, who you can make go to therapy and deal with the problems that keep him from caring for himself; who'll shut up, comply and let himself be saved.

...so the fact that Kris – whose personal issues are opaque, complex, and frustrating; who appears to be actively hiding parts of their life and motives from us; who clearly doesn't want our help or an improved social life at the expense of their agency – finds him so distasteful might not just be because he's a parody of their brother or Secretly Evil or whatever. If Ralsei is "the kid they're supposed to be" it's not just his fluff and horns!

#spoilers #deltarune spoilers #undertale spoilers #and in passing: #pmmm spoilers #utena spoilers #LONG post #but couldn't find a good place to cut it

[dead-dove-moment]

umineko the musical sneak peek

#spoilers #umineko spoilers #wait this game still works? I thought it went offline or smth #anyway #LOL

[dead-dove-moment]

goat that you are. I read all the way until the detective has solved the case and is about to give the answer. then I go back and solve the mystery myself, so that, with full knowledge of the who and how and why dunnits, I can proclaim that a witch did it with magic and close the book before the detective can contradict me

Every time i read a locked room mystery book when it gets to the murder i say it was magic and close the book. This is to prove i understood umineko.

#spoilers #umineko spoilers #[simpsons man holding up a sign that says ''this is a joke'']

[dead-dove-moment]

cranky because kanon managed to slip out of his imposed self-mold at the very end and you didn't, aren't you beatrice

#spoilers #umineko spoilers #pochapal watch #just imagine what they'll make of ep2 fourth twilight #created in a lab to solve umineko

[dead-dove-moment]

(source)

#spoilers #umineko spoilers #umineko #memes

[dead-dove-moment]

I see your stairs reference and raise you: a bunch of other pointless references.

#spoilers #utena spoilers #homestuck at the beginning of a tag