#I don't think any of this is new

[artbyblastweave]

Recently a post has been doing the rounds about military propaganda in the latest COD, yea yeah, sky’s blue, fork in kitchen, et al et al. This got me thinking about the shooters I actually play, and one thing that strikes me about the multiplayer shooters I play is that a lot of them dodge that same major discourse bullet by expressly grounding themselves in amorality and Kafka-esque dysfunction- a structural fingerwag towards their own content, acting as a paradoxical green-light to enjoy the game with no sense of moral injury. And there’s a big example of one that didn’t do this that kinda winds up with egg on its face as a result. 

To start with, I’m thinking about Team Fortress 2. The original Team Fortress, inasmuch as it’s possible for a game where you shoot each other with real firearms to be apolitical, was fairly apolitical. The soldiers had no markers of identity beyond their arbitrary team affiliation; the fighting was over no discernable real-life resource or point of political tension; the environments were decontextualized labs and facilities. It was platonic violence. 

Team Fortress 2 rolls around. Now that the general novelty of a 3d multiplayer class shooter has eroded, development stalls out on the following aesthetic problem; you can’t have semi-realistic militaristic character models rocket-jumping themselves across the map in the early 2000s. The cartoonishness is too dissonant when you’ve got similar semi-realistic militaristic characters in much more “grounded” games. Eventually they resolve this by taking the other tack, leaning into the cartoonishness, crafting character models so completely bombastic and over the top that no action taken in gameplay, no matter how absurd, will ever feel dissonant. This philosophy extends into the map design; the environments are farcical. Military instillations built mere yards from each other, with paper-thin pretenses of being civilian facilities despite the constant gun battles occurring inside. It’s self parody. And when the game extends to the point of having lore and worldbuilding, the idiocy becomes diegetic. This is a conflict fought on the behalf of idiots, by idiots, over idiot-goals, in spaces designed by idiots. It’s completely amoral, but it’s also contained amorality, since the fighting doesn’t spill out of these Helleresque Designated Pointless Fight Zones- and that leaves the mercs sympathetic enough that you can play them as protagonists in stories that take place “off-the-clock” without a ton of tonal dissonance. I can’t stress enough that the TF2 protagonists are amoral PMCs who work for callous megacorps. In a vacuum, this is not a well-regarded Kind Of Guy around here. There is some implementation of this broad concept that would invite a shitload of discourse that I’ve never seen materialize!

A lot of hero-or-character-based multiplayer games do this, abandoning any pretense of player heroism or productivity in the conceit in a way that shields them from a lot of moral and logical criticisms. Apex Legends and Monday Night Combat are explicitly in-universe bloodsports. Atlas Reactor and Rogue Company are cyberpunk corp-on-corp warfare. Dirty Bomb is about loosely affiliated mercenaries picking over the remains of an evacuated city. I think that Valorant is PMCs in a resource war (Not completely sure on this one.) The never-released Battlecry was expressly tied to actual nation-states, an alternate history where great powers fight wars via singularly-powerful champions instead of via traditional warfare. And in Battleborn the PCs were a hastily-assembled coalition of smaller hastily-assembled coalitions, which means that it makes perfect sense that any combination of these people might be fighting alongside or against each other, at any given time.

Here we see commonalities. Amoral participants. Larger governing bodies delineating clear fight zones centered on specific, if deliberately silly or petty, goals. Most crucially, PCs that are very loosely affiliated with each other, such that you’d see them in different configurations, fight to fight, day to day, as they’re contracted or shuffled around by the powers that be.

You know a game that doesn’t do any of this? Overwatch. 

Overwatch gets 80% of the way to being a superhero universe; it falls short primarily because Blizzard chose not to explicitly market it as such, but it’s got everything short of the purposeful brand designation- powered heroes, super science, codenames, Faceless Hydraesque terrorist groups with shadowy, powered enforcers. There are specific allegiances implied by this; specific policy and interpersonal goals implied by this that aren’t really reflected in six-on-six grudge matches in a smattering of inexplicably depopulated civilian environments. There are roughly half-a-dozen villains associated with Talon, four or five independent villainous mercenaries, and everyone else is a would-be superhero. Why is most of the core roster of the world’s premier superhero team performing some kind of terror attack in London? Why is a woman who murdered a civil rights leader trying to stop them, with the help of two avowed anti-Omnic mercenaries and three Omnics? Why did a cryogenics researcher weaponize her tech and come along for the ride? Why are a dozen envoys from tech conglomerates, grassroots movements, and paramilitary defense forces throwing down over a Gazebo in a charming Greek resort? Fuck if I know. Fuck if the writers know!

So, to round it out, I think that there’s a structural difficulty for multiplayer shooters to stand for something, or advance a philosophy, or whatever. The smart ones embrace this by shielding themselves in ablative nihilism, preemptively deflecting criticism by painting the gameplay as hollow and barbaric, but fun! But Overwatch- Overwatch 2′s tagline is “Get back in the fight.” What Fight? Why? Against Who? Call Of Duty might be a horrific mouthpiece for militarism and imperialism, but when it valorizes the military, it’s at least picking a side! Overwatch is just so strange to me because it’s somehow got the worst of both worlds- it uses these heroic, aspirational language and visuals to hype up a gameplay loop that’s ultimately the exact same kind of cynical, aimless abattoir as the games that are smart enough to explicitly be about amoral paid killers!

#thoughts #meta #I don't think any of this is new #but it occurred to me #video games #media analysis #team fortress 2 #tf2

[raycatzdraws]

LU WIND BUT HE'S A ITTY BITTY HUMMINGBIRD

Slingshot Proficiency!

+bonus doodle drafts

#requests #linked universe #linkeduniverse #lu wind #lu legend #lu sky #post post comments: #Wind agreed to do this but whether he caught the moon pearl or Legend caught him is up to you ajdsfsd #this is for shits and giggles and I know it's kinda ooc 'xD #also it's in reference to the d&d polymorph spell - the hummingbird likely has only one hit point so taking any damage would change him bac #PLEASE DON'T HIT BIRDS IRL #the slingshot being such an important item in Seasons is cool #if I had a nickel for every time I post LU fanart and there ends up being a new LU post that day too - I'd have at least three! #I was thinking that it being a friday near the end of the month that there'd be a chance and LO

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 3: Enveloping Feelings.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 4 (soon))

#poorly drawn mdzs #mdzs #lan wangji #Yungmeng Jiang training arc AU #I wanted to try out a different paneling style for this one - sorry I'm a day late! (there will still be a post tomorrow to keep on track) #The original 3 panel comic idea was fine but the point of this new schedule was to take time to push myself a bit more. #I was taking a look back through some comic artists I felt inspired by #and I really loved how Lynda Barry fills her gutters with patterns and doodles! #Obviously I'm not going as absolutely wild with it as she does but it was a great exercise! #I truly think the gutters are the most important and most overlooked part of any comic. There's lots going on in that space. #It's the same with timeskips. The implied movement between moments that we don't see changes depending on how wide that gap is #You're here for the funny tags so here's some that ties this time talk together: #I think LWJ was thinking about that second note from day 2 but it took him 7 days of hazing to commit it to paper. #I think he sends it a day later and immediately regrets it. Chasing down the messenger and everything. #You know if something actually happened to his brother he would never ever forgive himself for putting the bad vibes out there. #Third time skip was the hardest because there was so many possible flavours of jokes here. Day 8/9 was a personal favourite. #day 14 was also funny (week by week). I think the debate on 'how long does lwj take to catch feelings' is more or less: #'how long does it take for him to arrive at a particular stage of grief and yearning (and awareness of it all) #This is a symphony. There is an act by act structure. Every day he is fighting to keep his old sensibilities. He is losing so badly. #(I'll be returning to the main comic soon but there is more of this AU to come!)

[fuckspn]

imo one of supernatural's greatest weaknesses is what i'm going to call its locational homogeneity. like. obviously this is largely a side effect of filming a show set all over the united states in the same small area of canada for 15 years but there's just a certain sameness to every location and every episode that's uncanny at best and breaks immersion at worst. they should have gone all in on southern gothic horror and spooky old northeastern coastal towns and rural midwestern isolation and instead it's just episode after episode of identical suburbs with arbitrary location titles slapped over them. the seasons never change. the weather is always mild, never with extreme enough temperature or precipitation to require a change from the standard jacket-over-flannel-over-tee costuming even when we see snow on the ground. this episode is set in the summer in idaho. no, wait, it's set in the winter in kentucky. this episode is set in the summerfallwinterspring in kansachusettohiowa. sam and dean travel all over the country and yet stay completely still. supernatural shows us a massive world and it does not turn and absolutely no one lives in it.

#help i'm seeing the matrix #the greatest hits #this brought to you by me watching the first 1 1/2 episodes of season 2 #*15 #and looking at the big new-build canadian suburban neighborhood standing in for a small town in kansas #and going 'that looks like lisa braeden's neighborhood from season fucking 3. i don't think it is but they look so alike' #and suddenly being struck by the horrific realization that EVERY town sam and dean visit looks like that #you can't tell any of it apart it's all the fucking same!!!

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

#selfie bee #me telling a coworker who I have been working with for 4 months and whose name I do not know about my toenails #i'm sorry Tobias (?? Paul ??) it was the only topic I could come up with after I already told you about the big bird I saw in 8th grade #FRIENDS how are you!! :) how has the new year been so far!! #did you have a lot of snow on christmas! #we did and it was really fun! I had a very bad cold so I just watched the snow from inside but that was good too c: #do you have any plans for the new year? #i always have lot and most of the time I do not do any of them but planning is fun #this year I REALLY want to watch all of Star Trek ヽ(´∇｀)ﾉ #I would also love to learn how to make a handstand #imagine if you could just make yourself upside down #but it is a far away dream because honestly I am not very good at being usual side up most of the time either #but I will try probably at least 2 times to learn it ( ᐛ ) #maybe I'll finally finish that website! #new years are good and fun #it's wild to think about how much daily life has changed since last year but I feel just the same :) #who knows what this year will bring! #I hope I don't hit a pheasant with my car #I almost hit a pheasant with my car last year and the pheasant made direct eye contact #I wonder how he is doing today #since that moment I think about pheasants a lot #I knew they were real but I had never seen one #just to know they are out there is a mystical feeling #right know it is raining so all the pheasants might be wet #get dry soon pheasants!! #I don't think I've ever seen a wet bird either #I don't know what do do with all these birds thoughts #also thank you for the person who asked about my skirt!! ( ˊᵕˋ )♡.°⑅ #I've finished it and its really really bad #but I love it

[egophiliac]

they're baaaaaack

#art #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland spoilers #twisted wonderland episode 6 spoilers #twisted wonderland book 6 spoilers #<- are we still tagging those? i don't know where en is #tagging basically just because it's college ortho #anyway HOLY CRAP THEY'RE BACK #TSUMSUTE 2: THE STACKENING #the disappointment at the lack of episode 7 news is tempered by my glee at the return of the most delightfully stupid event of all time #sometimes i think about how the characters were canonically visited by tiny stackable toy versions of themselves from another dimension #twice now! #it doesn't get any better than this #eyes #itty bitty little ominous eyes #look i know it's going to just be more charming shenanigans until the tsums abruptly ascend back to heaven(?) until they're needed again #but if they decided to do like. a tsum slasher flick parody. i would lose my entire goddamn mind #that's why we have fanart i guess

[co-dependance]

I’ve seen people talk about the main theme of the owl house being acceptance, and I think they’re completely right about that. But I haven’t really seen anyone look at the sub themes depicted in the show around the acceptance theme.

Specifically how the owl house is really advocating for child autonomy. Specifically in the ways of discipline, showing that communicating and talking with children ends up being a lot more beneficial and effective than punishing them.

The most obvious example comes with the collector, where instead of talking to him, King’s dad punished the kid by putting him in essentially time out, for the actions of his siblings. Which he would’ve learned if he had talked to the collector. And then following that, every interaction before talking with Luz, has the collector being used or placated in some way instead of being treated like an actual child due to the amount of power he has. The titan trappers revering him as some sort of god, Belos manipulating him, and even king attempting to appease the collector, instead of really talking to him. Though for king it’s a bit more understandable. Even so, the show showcases the collector’s change only after he’s talked to like a person, and then shown why his views were wrong.

Luz, who’s the main focus of the show, has her character arc and journey centered around being punished for her not fitting in at school. And while, yes, some of Luz’s antics that were shown seemed to be legitimately dangerous, the real solution would’ve been to talk with her and teach her about safety and why bringing wild animals and fireworks into a school building is dangerous. It should have also been that Luz should be able to talk and negotiate with her teacher about what would be acceptable for her projects with her endless creativity. The solution was not to essentially punish Luz for being creative, and what that only did was make her feel worse about herself and more isolated from the people she thought would be on her side. And then we were shown in thanks to them and for the future, Camilla’s growth into understanding that not talking to Luz about this, and essentially forcing her into normality, was not the way to go about things.

And we see this theme again, with Willow forced into the abomination track because her parent’s thought that was what was best for her, until she was able to showcase her skills and switch to what she was actually good at. Alador realizing he missed a lot of Amity’s growth by not talking to her, and then making it up to Amity by letting her set the boundaries and reestablishing their relationship. Odalia being controlling and not listening to her children which lead to actively harming their social development, until she was confronted and then shut out. Belos manipulating Hunter, isolating him, and abusing him, not even listening to what he had to say. And all of these situations were made better and more bearable when they were given the chance to take charge and be heard.

All this, in an attempt to showcase that children can be vulnerable and malleable, but they are also smart and understanding. And instead of deciding what a child needs, it’s important to communicate with the child instead, asking what they need and listening to what they’re saying. And implementing that by guiding and supporting them, not attempting to control them to what someone else thinks is right.

Children are smart and observant, they just need to be taught how to communicate, and viewed and thought of as actual human beings.

In a way, the owl house is attempting to advocate for it’s audience, and that’s beautiful.

#the owl house #toh #toh spoilers #toh season finale #luz nozeda #toh hunter #willow park #amity blight #child autonomy #honestly i think it's a really important thing to be taught to everyone at every age #Children are seen as dumb and it's disheartening because they're not #they're open to new ideas and possibilities and not yet stifled by their own learned w-orld veiw #and they don't know everything so that's why they need to be taught #refusing to teach them ultimately takes away any chance of growth #no kid is a lost cause #and kids can understand when something is wrong #ignoring them looses the chance for the kid to learn how to understand and indepen-dently come up with a solution later #toh meta

[zecoritheweirdone]

hehehehehhooo,, decided to draw some hermits as the mystery skulls animated gang!! why? uhhh mostly just 'cause.

special thanks to the ibaaf server for helping me pick the roles! gem is vivi,, false is arthur,, pearl is lewis,, and etho is mystery!!

better pic of pearl under the cut, where you can how lazy i am,,ms ksmsksjs

#my art #hermitcraft #mystery skulls animated #falsesymmetry #geminitay #ethoslab #pearlescentmoon #falsesymmetry fanart #geminitay fanart #ethoslab fanart #pearlecentmoon fanart #this wasn't supposed to have this much effort put into it. and then it took five hours. #chose etho's role first cuz i really like the kitsune etho headcanon #(yes his collar has a maple leaf on it) #and the lil deadbeats are a bunch of lil tillys!! #we also gave roles to some of the other characters. bdubs is shiromori and cub is reverb/???/possession guy #sorry guys; you're antagonists now 😔 #actually i don't think cub would mind this #also i refuse to think any harder about what bdubs being shiromori means. they're both plants okay. #it was either this or joel #or that one sock monster guy from season six #joe and cleo are duet and chloe respectively. joe as duet fits. cleo as chloe does not but also no one else really fits chloe anyway so idc #no more wanting an undead boyfriend.... THEY are the undead boyfriend now. #i think we had uncle lance as iskall??? still not too sure #they both have beards tho. that's something #oh!! also rendog is galaham bc i said so. #anyway. please watch msa it's so so good. #(or watch hermitcraft if you haven't already. a new season started a while back it's the perfect time to join) #not sure if i'll draw more of this;; this is less an au and more just me being silly #but i hope y'all like it regardless!!

[revvethasmythh]

it's so funny to me that caleb and veth really did just trade off the job of intensely pining for the other at like the halfway point of the campaign. like, imo, nott in the early days did not behave in any real romantic or even romance-adjacent ways toward him--I imagine it would be very hard to even think in that way when you hate what you look like so much, have such low self-esteem, and are actively lying about your entire past, including a secret husband. caleb, on the other hand, is kind of diving directly back into the sort of relationship he had with astrid and eadwulf. very close, very intimate, we-huddled-for-warmth-together-and-oops-it-led-to-something-else sort of thing. he is the one who expresses that he's fine with it if people think he and nott are romantically together when they're talking to keg. nott is the one who pushes back on that. he calls her his life partner. unknowingly, he compares his feelings for nott to nott's feelings for yeza. his behavior only really starts to change after he finds out about veth's husband because suddenly all of that other stuff is rendered inappropriate in retrospect. but even then he compliments her to yeza over dinner in the most awkward of ways, he admits to being jealous, he calls yeza "a lucky man" to have her, he stares at veth and yeza closed bedroom door for far too long, he creates an entire arcane tower with room for her family just so she'll stay with him. in general, his behavior is not, um, totally and completely platonic about it, you know?

like, veth's feelings for caleb are canonical and therefore indisputable in their existence, but caleb in the early days was not that dissimilar to how veth was acting near the end of the campaign. it really paints a picture of "right person, wrong time" in the way things just didn't line up for them. or, as veth would say: "in another world, maybe"

#i am actually thinking about this because my widobrave 2 poll had so many moments on it that caleb initiated #and i often see it remarked that people think widobrave is entirely one-sided and caleb only treats her as platonic or familial #which. my real answer is that it's just complicated and i don't think he'd ever admit to any romantic feelings being there #but i also. uh. i wouldn't call it platonic or familial. there is some holy fourth dimension that this relationship exists in istg #impossible to explain but it is NOT entirely platonic nor all that familial imo as it stands in canon #this is like. ONE piece of the meta I was trying to figure out how to phrase earlier today. bottom line of it was: #I don't think the caleb/veth romance is entirely one-sided but also it is so so complicated #their relationship changes SO many times. SO much. that's why it's so frustrating that fandom is stuck in episode 13 re: their dynamic #SO MUCH ABOUT THE DYNAMIC CHANGES AFTER EPISODE 13 #even sam reigel himself on talks said there was no reason their relationship wouldn't change/evolve after that #and it did change! it really really did! #widobrave #the mighty nein #caleb widogast #veth brenatto #critical role #inaugurating the new url with a widobrave post. as it should be

[deikyrio]

Nightmare meowscles???

#fortnitemares #fortnite #meowscles #meowscles fortnite #I don't think fortnite was ever part of my top games #but GOD i LOVE some of their designs #like omg why he so fineee #I haven't even played it in like 4 years #does anyone know if the new seasons are any good? #dunno why #furry #furry art

[junkanimate]

I let the brain worms crawl around, so here's an art dump

#lego ninjago #ninjago dragons rising #cole brookstone #ninjago geo #lostshipping #nya smith #lloyd montgomery garmadon #ninjago #my art #everytime new episodes come out I watched them and I'm just an emotional mess for the whole week #okay first I'm a strong beliver that Cole got hurt when he first arrived at the land of lost things #so at first he stays because he needs to rest/heal #and then he discovers about the hoarder so he decides to stay to protect the finders #and in the meantime you know geo andc ole discover that they kinda like each other #I don't think this vision of the events is any way shape and form controversial #you knon when you watch a character and you just start to cry? #this is me with half the cast #BUT ESPECIALLY COLE AND GEO #my fave actually got a boyfriend I'm emotional

[oshaskell]

downtime with your CO

#capvers #caphavers #IDK don't look at me #gonna talk here so i don't have to make a new post: #I watched Brief Encounter (1945) yesterday and All of Us Strangers (2023) today and I think it broke me a little bit #that may be at fault for this. in any case im happy to draw something again. it's been a rough couple weeks!! #and now for blog archival purposes: #art entry #bbc ghosts #the captain #lieutenant havers

[daisy-mooon]

"I want Annabeth to be blonde :(" then pick up a PJO book and read it you dumb fuck

#pjo fans stop being weird about black annabeth challenge IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #first off annabeths race isnt important to her story. annabeth could be any race. her skin colour doesnt actually impact her. her hair does #now im not blonde but im a white girl so let me explain why some pjo fans need to stfu. i have grade 9s. im called stupid for my appearance #im not insulted bc im white or bc i have blue eyes or brown hair. im insulted bc women are judged on their appearance. im insulted bc SEXIS #annabeth isnt really called dumb for being blonde. shes called dumb bc shes female. and ppl are more likely to stereotype women than men #this is especially true for black women! whatever sexism white women get is always horrifically multiplied for poc women #black hair frequently gets called unprofessional untidy unhygienic etc. its VERY likely that show annabeth has been called dumb for her hai #does this make the casting “accurate”? no. but castings don't have to be accurate. they have to ADD to the character. #annabeth being black ADDS to her character because it showcases how women (esp black women) are devalued for their appearance #movie annabeth wasnt bad for having brown hair or white hair she was a bad adaptation bc she was ooc #i just think its ironic that a core aspect of annabeth was being judged for her looks. and now show annabeth is getting judged for her look #like. you guys really missed the point here. #anyways disagree all you want but book annabeth is still blonde. no one is erasing her. theres a new PJO book w blonde annabeth SEPTEMBER 2 #GO READ CHALICE OF THE GODS IF U WANT BLONDE ANNABETH OMG! adaptions and source material can be separate and coexist! #rant over sorry #pjo #percy jackson #annabeth chase #pjo show #percy jackson and the olympians #the lightning thief #discourse #shitpost #percy jackson show #pjo discourse #riordanverse

[sysig]

So much experimenting to be done, where to even start (Patreon)

#Doodles #Handplates #UT #Fellplates #Gaster #Papyrus #Sans #Mostly silliness :) Mostly :) #It's still fun to draw these two Gasters next to each other hehe ♪ Even interacting! #They're more similar than I think either of them would admit haha - ''No clearly we have very different ideals'' sure but you're both Gaster #I like the idea of classic being So Annoyed at any iteration of himself thinking positively towards humans haha #I mean it would probably hurt - that's a big piece of his trauma! - but on the surface it's just Ugh I can't believe this -.ó #I feel like they'd have a lot more common ground when it comes to their experiments tho - not a perfect Venn Diagram but enough! #Maybe even just different enough to offer a new perspective - enough to give them new ideas! Uh oh that's never a good thing lol #I do love Fell!Gaster just so pleased to be having a conversation haha so smiley - classic still not smiling but interested! #Cute face <3 #It was after making the Toriel comic that the thought Really occurred to me - like obviously I saw so I knew they were still in the gowns #But it took a bit for that to strike me as odd since I mean that's just what they wear! That's normal! For Handplates anyway #He talks a lot about isolating whatever it is in Monsters that Make Them Like That - what does that entail #Gaster no seriously what are you doing to them don't just smile actually reply #And as much as I like the boys being a bit more Fell-ish I've always been of the opinion that no matter what they're brothers! #They love each other <3 And in Fellplates they'd have to rely on each other even more than regular Underfell #If anything would cause some codependency it's the Handplates setup - no matter what version you throw at it! #They're still both delicate little things - they need each other to survive ♥ If Gaster is sometimes kind to them well... #Similar to Mercyplates but Not Quite hmmmm #At least sometimes doing cute and harmless things tho! Studies how they react to flowers and teaches them to make chains hehe ♪ #There's also that Underfell thing of Sans calling UF!Papyrus ''Boss'' rather than ''Bro'' yeah? Doodling ideas around that haha #An opportunity to teach! Sans only came away with the basics tho it probably annoys Gaster lol #The idea of them doing cute harmless little things and /that/ being what gets under his skin hehehehe #And ending with a Babybones! :D Surely he'd have no problem being attached since they're meant to be good...? Surely

[genericpuff]

vent post

#and before anyone who hates my shit says “yeah because you ARE a loser way to have self awareness for once” #i promise you this would be me with or without the LO fandom LMAO #anxiety is a hell of a thing #and as much as i internally guilt myself into thinking it would be better if i just shut up and hid away forever #i also know that's the trauma speaking because the adults around me always told me to shut up #and even as an adult i still encounter people who talk over me and make me feel like i'm not allowed to be outspoken #but the pen is mightier than the sword and all those years i've spent being spoken over i've been honing my penmanship #i have fun talking about the things i talk about and i don't have any less right than anyone else to do it #i am cringe and i am free #self post #vent post #altho on another note i do wanna make time this week to go find new series to read #too many of my favorites have turned to shit and it's taken its toll #i KNOW there are better comics out there that are genuinely well made #i already have a few that i'm reading that i love but i need to balance out the good with the bad more lol #i just need to take the time to go find good stuff instead of pouring so much of my attention into the bullshit that doesn't deserve my tim #i think both things can be true #i can have a lot of fun dissecting and writing about series i don't like #while also nourishing myself with good works that restore my faith in this medium #“perfectly balanced as all things should be”

[egophiliac]

Have you heard of the "Crowley is Malleus' dad" theory going around? Where Prince Levan (or whatever his name is) didn't actually die and just went out to get some milk and is now known as Dire Crowley, the silly man? The implications of that theory is absolutely hilarious when you think about it

hold on, we can figure this out, we just need LISTS

PROS THAT CROWLEY IS SECRETLY REVAAN/LEVAN/LAVERNE/WHATEVER:

unspecified fae of some kind, with similar coloring to Mal

the animal masks are apparently a Briar Valley thing

has some kind of big blackmailable secret that was alluded to in episode 4, and then as far as I know never brought up again

(unless this was just Azul bullshitting, which is extremely possible)

based on Diablo, which...maybe means something?

has canonically worn Dad Shorts

CONS:

(gestures to Crowley's entire personality)

NO LISTEN Revaan was the guy they sent off on diplomatic missions and to take care of delicate political situations, and...look, I love this dweeb, but would you trust Crowley to be in charge of negotiating your war treaties

despite my brain insisting on reading his name as "Raven", Revaan's title does imply that he was also a dragon (or super into longan berries, I'm not ruling that out)

currently unclear why Lilia "my closest friend Revaan...he is no longer with us...I used to make fun of him for being kind of a priss about eating jerky..." Vanrouge has somehow not noticed or said anything

Malleus' Aloof Anime ~Aristocrat~ vibe had to come from somewhere, and by all accounts it was NOT his mom's side of the family

???:

turns into a bird in the opening, I don't know if that means anything but it's kinda cool, I guess

all that aside, if Malleus and Yuu are any indication, then the Draconias have...questionable taste in their social choices. so anything is possible!

#art #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland spoilers #twisted wonderland episode 7 spoilers #twisted wonderland book 7 spoilers #disclaimer that this is half joke and half speculation so like. please take it in good spirits and don't yell at me #right now i'm leaning away from crowley being revaan because i think the evidence is currently circumstantial at best #but who knows what the future will bring! #man. whenever i consciously remember that crowley is diablo it also reminds me #that his name is supposed to be pronounced like dear and not like the word dire #which always fucks me up a little bit. this is the worst thing about him bar none. #damnit crowley #anyway every time a new part comes out i rewatch the opening just in case there turns out to be any more foreshadowing #(there never is) #(but that ONE really quick bit where you can see overblot azul means i always have to look) #which is to say i have been carefully reanalyzing all the crowley bits and i have reached the conclusion #that i still have no idea what is going on with him #he may be the world's biggest mastermind or the world's biggest idiot and these are not mutually exclusive #(this is a strictly pro-crowley post btw) #(i'm allowed to make fun of him because i love him dire-ly)