mwanawavitabu

[mwanawavitabu]

Listening to the Fallout 4 soundtrack and.... LYNDA FUCKING CARTER?!?!?

[mwanawavitabu]

i think i may have some issues

[mwanawavitabu]

I think my favourite of the traditional vampiric weaknesses – albeit not one which appears in every source – is "being exceptionally flammable". Don't get me wrong, the textual justifications which are offered for it in modern fiction are often fascinating: "fire is the embodiment of purification and vampires are the embodiment of corruption"; "fire is the light of civilisation and vampires are cursed forever to lurk beyond the campfire's circle" – these are all fun ideas to play with. However, this does not change the fact that your sexy vampire getting poked with a burning stick and immediately going up like a trashbag full of gasoline is in fact extremely funny.

[mwanawavitabu]

How Bethesda fixed Vampires without realizing it

So there's a LOT of takes on vampires across media, and most of them are radically different from each other. The Elder Scrolls series has an interesting version that I haven't seen anywhere else, that incidentally fixes a bunch of lore issues with vampires, and yet Bethesda hasn't ever really leaned into any of that.

So, the issue with vampires in large RPGs like Elder Scrolls games, D&D, etc, is that a world where various elements of character building are supposed to be balanced, vampires are heavy on the upside and light on meaningful drawbacks. So in Oblivion, Bethesda completely reworked their vampires, coming at it with a blank slate:

Vampirism is a 4-stage affliction, with each stage increasing the numerous benefits of being a vampire as well as the middling drawbacks. Stage 4 brings with it all humanoid NPCs recognizing you as a ravenous monster and attacking you, basically wrecking the game. And, this is the unique part, you reduce stages by drinking blood. Being a vampire is LESSENED by doing the most vampiric thing out there, it actively makes you weaker.

And this is great. From a gameplay perspective, you vanish below ground to kill zombies/robots/whatever, and you grow stronger as the dungeon goes on. But if you don't rush through it, or if it's large, you surface having ignored your hunger for several days and have to do a whole second quest to sneak into town at night and drink blood, where the only reward is to engage with the game again. It's a drawback in the gameplay sense rather than the stats sense. And it lets game designers throw the player against weak vampires in town early on, and face dungeons full of max-bloodlust monsters later once the player knows how things work.

Meanwhile, from a lore perspective this is also great. Suddenly, it's not that vampires have to be evil, it's that they have a choice. A good person who flees their family to hide in a cave is going to starve, turning into a ravenous, uncontrolled, extremely strong monster. Someone who's comfortable sneaking around town drinking blood, meanwhile? They never lose control. They walk in the sun. They're perfectly human. Or as human as anyone can be while the blood of their neighbors flows in their veins.

And Bethesda doesn't DO ANYTHING with this. People you talk to in-game just treat it as "all vampires are evil, why would you expect anything else", when they've created a world where vampire morality is so much more interesting. The few vampires who exist in civilization that you're not supposed to kill don't really discuss their condition at all. And there's plenty of evil vampires choosing to live in caves running societies of vampires, when that makes no sense compared to basically any other way of life they could set up.

Bethesda games are a masterful disaster, in this as in everything else.

[mwanawavitabu]

may have found the funniest possible thing ever in this essay on medieval sex laws im reading hold on

[mwanawavitabu]

why aren't u on testosterone answer quick

im stuck in the maze

[mwanawavitabu]

Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

[mwanawavitabu]

[mwanawavitabu]

My anthro professor has three forbidden words for his essays: problematic, interesting, and large. Point being they’re all filler words, he wants you to just skip straight to why it’s interesting or why it’s problematic. But anyway, any time I disagree with him in class I say to him “mm, interesting, but largely problematic.”

[mwanawavitabu]

[mwanawavitabu]

growing up I always wanted to be poorly understood by science

[mwanawavitabu]

If you’ve tried to reach out to me in the last 7-8 years and I didn’t get back to you I’m medicated now and I’ll be reaching out to you shortly

[mwanawavitabu]

Things Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days is About:

a cult

growing up (in a cult)

toxic found family

toxic work culture

discovering who you really are (and how frightening that can be)

how adults are weird and kind of useless a lot of the time, even the ones that are decent to you and want to help you

the existential horror of being a Nobody, being a kid surrounded by useless adults, and just being alive in general

ice cream

[mwanawavitabu]

Not what I expected coming from John Green

[mwanawavitabu]

hi. did you know australia has a fairywren species called the superb fairywren

and another species called the splendid fairywren

...and one called the lovely fairywren

[mwanawavitabu]

i hate to be that guy, but the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality are ontologically pure concepts that can be rigidly defined if we simply police our language enough (our english language, because of course) is—i cannot stress this enough—a total waste of time. you may as well spend your afternoons teaching a brick how to swim

[mwanawavitabu]

This is so real