#I have googled so many key things about the story and can not find it and it's going to drive me crazy

[continuous-spec]

This morning, I woke up thinking about a fanfic I read probably a decade ago. Throughout the years, I thought back to it here and there. It was a soul-crushing, beautiful short story. And it's stayed with me, obviously. I never commented or left a kudo. Unfortunately, I can not find it for the life of me to leave a comment now.

My point is that even if your fiction, story, or creative endeavor isn't getting attention, that does not mean it's not worth telling or sharing. Someone is reading and absolutely loving it. I promise.

#on writing #on fanficton #on creativity #fanfic #I have googled so many key things about the story and can not find it and it's going to drive me crazy #like I want to yell at the writer how amazing it is now.

[burntoutdaydreamer]

Things That May Be Causing Your Writer's Block- and How to Beat Them

I don't like the term 'Writer's Block' - not because it isn't real, but because the term is so vague that it's useless. Hundreds of issues all get lumped together under this one umbrella, making writer's block seem like this all-powerful boogeyman that's impossible to beat. Worse yet, it leaves people giving and receiving advice that is completely ineffective because people often don't realize they're talking about entirely different issues.

In my experience, the key to beating writer's block is figuring out what the block even is, so I put together a list of Actual Reasons why you may be struggling to write:

(note that any case of writer's block is usually a mix of two or more)

Perfectionism (most common)

What it looks like:

You write one sentence and spend the next hour googling "synonyms for ___"

Write. Erase. Write. Rewrite. Erase.

Should I even start writing this scene when I haven't figured out this one specific detail yet?

I hate everything I write

Cringing while writing

My first draft must be perfect, or else I'm a terrible writer

Things that can help:

Give yourself permission to suck

Keep in mind that nothing you write is going to be perfect, especially your first draft

Think of writing your first/early drafts not as writing, but sketching out a loose foundation to build upon later

People write multiple drafts for a reason: write now, edit later

Stop googling synonyms and save that for editing

Write with a pen to reduce temptation to erase

Embrace leaving blank spaces in your writing when you can't think of the right word, name, or detail

It's okay if your writing sucks. We all suck at some point. Embrace the growth mindset, and focus on getting words on a page

Lack of inspiration (easiest to fix)

What it looks like:

Head empty, no ideas

What do I even write about???

I don't have a plot, I just have an image

Want to write but no story to write

Things that can help:

Google writing prompts

If writing prompts aren't your thing, instead try thinking about what kind of tropes/genres/story elements you would like to try out

Instead of thinking about the story you would like to write, think about the story you would like to read, and write that

It's okay if you don't have a fully fleshed out story idea. Even if it's just an image or a line of dialogue, it's okay to write that. A story may or may not come out of it, but at least you got the creative juices flowing

Stop writing. Step away from your desk and let yourself naturally get inspired. Go for a walk, read a book, travel, play video games, research history, etc. Don't force ideas, but do open up your mind to them

If you're like me, world-building may come more naturally than plotting. Design the world first and let the story come later

Boredom/Understimulation (lost the flow)

What it looks like:

I know I should be writing but uugggghhhh I just can'tttttt

Writing words feels like pulling teeth

I started writing, but then I got bored/distracted

I enjoy the idea of writing, but the actual process makes me want to throw my laptop out the window

Things that can help:

Introduce stimulation: snacks, beverages, gum, music such as lo-fi, blankets, decorate your writing space, get a clickity-clackity keyboard, etc.

Add variety: write in a new location, try a new idea/different story for a day or so, switch up how you write (pen and paper vs. computer) or try voice recording or speech-to-text

Gamify writing: create an arbitrary challenge, such as trying to see how many words you can write in a set time and try to beat your high score

Find a writing buddy or join a writer's group

Give yourself a reward for every writing milestone, even if it's just writing a paragraph

Ask yourself whether this project you're working on is something you really want to be doing, and be honest with your answer

Intimidation/Procrastination (often related to perfectionism, but not always)

What it looks like:

I was feeling really motivated to write, but then I opened my laptop

I don't even know where to start

I love writing, but I can never seem to get started

I'll write tomorrow. I mean next week. Next month? Next month, I swear (doesn't write next month)

Can't find the time or energy

Unreasonable expectations (I should be able to write 10,000 words a day, right????)

Feeling discouraged and wondering why I'm even trying

Things that can help:

Follow the 2 min rule (or the 1 paragraph rule, which works better for me): whenever you sit down to write, tell yourself that you are only going to write for 2 minutes. If you feel like continuing once the 2 mins are up, go for it! Otherwise, stop. Force yourself to start but DO NOT force yourself to continue unless you feel like it. The more often you do this, the easier it will be to get started

Make getting started as easy as possible (i.e. minimize barriers: if getting up to get a notebook is stopping you from getting started, then write in the notes app of your phone)

Commit to a routine that will work for you. Baby steps are important here. Go with something that feels reasonable: every day, every other day, once a week, twice a week, and use cues to help you remember to start. If you chose a set time to write, just make sure that it's a time that feels natural to you- i.e. don't force yourself to writing at 9am every morning if you're not a morning person

Find a friend or a writing buddy you can trust and talk it out or share a piece of work you're proud of. Sometimes we just get a bit bogged down by criticism- either internal or external- and need a few words of encouragement

The Problem's Not You, It's Your Story (or Outline (or Process))

What it looks like:

I have no problems writing other scenes, it's just this scene

I started writing, but now I have no idea where I'm going

I don't think I'm doing this right

What's an outline?

Drowning in documents

This. Doesn't. Make. Sense. How do I get from this plot point to this one?!?!?! (this ColeyDoesThings quote lives in my head rent free cause BOY have I been there)

Things That Can Help:

Go back to the drawing board. Really try to get at the root of why a scene or story isn't working

A part of growing as a writer is learning when to kill your darlings. Sometimes you're trying to force an idea or scene that just doesn't work and you need to let it go

If you don't have an outline, write one

If you have an outline and it isn't working, rewrite it, or look up different ways to structure it

You may be trying to write as a pantser when you're really a plotter or vice versa. Experiment with different writing processes and see what feels most natural

Study story structures, starting with the three act structure. Even if you don't use them, you should know them

Check out Ellen Brock on YouTube. She's a professional novel editor who has a lot of advice on writing strategies for different types of writers

Also check out Savage Books on YouTube (another professional story editor) for advice on story structure and dialogue. Seriously, I cannot recommend this guy enough

Executive Dysfunction, Usually From ADHD/Autism

What it looks like:

Everything in boredom/understimulation

Everything in intimidation/procrastination

You have been diagnosed with and/or have symptoms of ADHD/Autism

Things that can help:

If you haven't already, seek a diagnosis or professional treatment

Hire an ADHD coach or other specialist that can help you work with your brain (I use Shimmer; feel free to DM me for a referral)

Seek out neurodiverse communities for advice and support

Try body doubling! There's lot's of free online body doubling websites out there for you to try. If social anxiety is a barrier, start out with writing streams such as katecavanaughwrites on Twitch

Be aware of any sensory barriers that may be getting in the way of you writing (such as an uncomfortable desk chair, harsh lighting, bad sounds)

And Lastly, Burnout, Depression, or Other Mental Illness

What it looks like:

You have symptoms of burnout or depression

Struggling with all things, not just writing

It's more than a lack of inspiration- the spark is just dead

Things that can help:

Forget writing for now. Focus on healing first.

Seek professional help

If you feel like it, use writing as a way to explore your feelings. It can take the form of journaling, poetry, an abstract reflection of your thoughts, narrative essays, or exploring what you're feeling through your fictional characters. The last two helped me rediscover my love of writing after I thought years of depression had killed it for good. Just don't force yourself to do so, and stop if it takes you to a darker place instead of feeling cathartic

#writing #creative writing #writer problems #writing advice #writing community #writing a book #writing problems #novel writing #on writing #writing tips #writing help #writers on tumblr #writers block #female writers #writers of tumblr #writers blog #adhd writer

[appleblueberry-pie]

About Yanderes

Content Warning, obviously.

I keep seeing the same issue come up onto my timeline, so I'll speak on it once more.

If you simply search up on Google for the definition of what a Yandere is, it states, "A character, usually a girl, who has an obsessive and possessive side in regards to their crush, ready to use violent and murderous means to maintain an exclusive bond."

Can someone please tell me, what is so......difficult, for lack of a better word, about writing about someone who "is ready to use violent and murderous means to maintain an exclusive bond"?

If you keep scrolling to find more definitions of what a yandere is, you'll find a common theme amongst most.

"A yandere is a character, most often female and in anime, who become violently possessive of a love interest." Dictionary.com

"A person who will go to near-extreme to extreme lengths to be in or deepen a desired relationship, weather it be romantic, platonic, familial, etc." Urban Dictionary

"A yandere is a Japanese archetype used to define a character whose love, admiration, and devotion is so strong that it is expressed as an excessive obsession and..." The Dere Types Wiki

Some key words I would like to point out are crush, love interest, desired relationship, love, devotion.

The thing is, so, so, so, so, so, sooooo many people title the characters that they are writing for as a Yandere, but the behavior of said character is anything but what a Yandere actually is. I just read a short drabble of a Yandere character, and the only thing that happened in the story that stuck with me was straight up rape, sexual assault, force feeding and such. It was pretty disturbing and I definitely know that those are traits that a Yandere would ABSOLUTELY NOT have. There are different types of dere's. And I think people are used to calling everything that isn't the normal way a character behaves as Yandere tendencies.

Holding someone hostage and raping them isn't Yandere tendencies.

Killing a person and having no remorse for that person your character was a supposed Yandere for is not Yandere tendencies.

Killing a person and then your character mentioning if they can't have them, no one can and probably preserving a piece of them to cherish forever is some form of Yandere tendencies.

If you are going to write about Yandere's please check the definition before you write anything down. Because every time I see the word Yandere in front of a character's name, I expect to see them cherish the ground the reader walks on. Kill anyone who gets in their way of having the reader. Loving the reader. Wanting the reader. Wanting to please the reader. Wanting the reader so bad that they can't fucking breathe or live without them. This character should feel like they might fucking DIE without the reader. It's supposed to be a sick love story. But you're missing the love story part.

Please please please please please do your research. I'm very tired of reading about rape and abuse when it's not supposed to be that.

#yandere #yandere x reader #yandere x you #yandere character #reader #across the spiderverse #jjk #astv #jujutsu kaisen x reader #yandere atsv #yandere jjk #yandere geto suguru #yandere gojo satoru #yandere jjk smut #yandere imagines #yandere x darling #yandere oc x reader #yandere headcanons #tumblr #writers on tumblr #love stories

[stemmmm]

Stem's Thoughts on Harvest Moon 64

(that other title's too long so i'm cutting it down now)

Harvest Moon 64 opens on a scene of your character walking around the street, speaking to everyone in the village who’s come to the event. You quickly piece together that this event in question is actually your grandfather’s funeral, the same grandfather who’s farm you’re about to take over. This little scene beautifully sets up both the tone of the game, and immediately shows the player that this iteration is far more focused on the story and characters. HM64 tells a story about the lives of many people in a small, dying town. It is a story about life, and it is a story about death.

A short disclaimer before we dig in: I played this game before the idea to write these essays cropped up, and have not replayed it since then, so this will be mostly vibes. I will try to do my research to make sure I’m not straight up lying though. (Also all of the images in this one are from google because I don't have a means of getting images from my N64 other than photographing the tv screen and I'm not doing that.)

What’s new!

HM64, also called Harvest Moon 2 by HMGB2 and nothing else I’ve ever seen, is the direct sequel to HM SNES. It’s not a sequel in the usual way sequels are, where you’re continuing where you left off with the same character, but in that every main character is the descendant of their equivalent in the previous game. It’s not important to the story, in fact if you don’t already know this, you probably wouldn’t notice anything past some similarities. I played this game before I tried out SNES and it still took me a minute, plus having it directly pointed out to me to get it. Maybe I’m oblivious, who knows. 

Gameplay-wise, this iteration is home of a few series firsts: For one, your house can be upgraded to have a kitchen! You can't cook though, only collect recipes. You can also get a greenhouse where you can grow crops year-round. Sheep are introduced as barn animals that produce wool. You receive a fishing rod you can use whenever you want, but as far as I understand, the timing is nigh impossible unless you’re playing on a CRT (I am not, and never managed to catch a single fish). There’s a mine you can access in winter for something to do while you can’t grow crops (there are fall crops, but not winter) where you can find about two key items and garbage otherwise. Tool upgrades are no longer done by magic, but by leveling them up through use! Which I think is very neat and feels very natural, like you’ve just become more proficient with them as a farmer through practice. Characters can now come to visit you on the farm at random times, for either special story events or just to say hi! Your farmer can get sick from working too hard in bad weather, just like your animals, and there’s now medicine for that, just like your animals. And there’s inventory menus that I'll discuss at better length later.

What’s the same is… Most things in a basic sense. You’re on a farm with a dog, planting crops, raising livestock. You can make friends with folks in town by talking to them and giving them gifts. The livestock mechanics, as far as I could see and as far as I’ve been able to understand from online forums, are exactly the same as they were in SNES, the exception being there’s no wild beasts that can kill your animals but they’ll still get sick if they aren’t fenced overnight– and they’re not going to eat any grass unless they’re out overnight anyways.

As for your farm, you’re set up with the usual: a small house, a barn, coop, and fodder silo, a wood bin to store debris cleared off your farm, and a big messy field that you have to clean up before you can properly use it. It starts with three new additions though; a doghouse, a bowl that you can feed your dog with by putting edible items in there, and a mailbox that you’ll occasionally receive letters and notices in! They’re small additions, but very, very charming. The one thing that’s been removed is the toolshed, now replaced by a tiny toolbox by your house.

The world outside your farm is like an enhanced version of the SNES map. Imagine the town and forest now have one or two extra sections tacked onto them, one in the town for some extra housing, and a couple in the forest to let you explore the mountain more and get you deeper into the woods. The mountain still has a cave in it (this time with Harvest Sprites, who have been removed from your farm) and a summit you can climb to for certain events, but it has been upgraded with little wild animals that wander around and can be picked up and shown to people for a few friendship points, if they like the animal. (This applies to your dog too, there’s a well known exploit to max out Karen’s friendship in one day by repeatedly showing it to her in the bar where time is stopped.) The crossroads zone is also expanded by having three new areas you can travel to– the ranch that you buy animals at, a vineyard that’s more of a story-area, and a beach that mostly comes into play for a couple of summer festivals! 

On the visual side, this game is the series’ first venture into the new frontier of 3d graphics… kind of. The artstyle is made of isometric 3D models that are rendered into flat sprites and then projected onto the TV as if that’s not what’s happening. The game even lets you turn your farm around in 3D to face different directions, but it’s locked to only let you play in specific angles. Changing the direction made me forget where everything was and get lost on my own tiny farm, so I never touched that mechanic.

Due to the dramatic artstyle shift– not only being in 3D but also presented at a 45 degree angle, the game becomes a fair bit harder to play than either of its 2D predecessors. The controls are just a little clunky, and the bizarre shape of the N64 controller really doesn’t help. This makes the tedium of farming a little irritating to do, since it requires pretty precise inputs done over and over for every extra thing you’re trying to grow. Fortunately, you're not on the hook to ship everything before 5PM comes around like in SNES, so you get to move a little bit slower. The fickle farming experience also gets a little help from the new inventory menu that can be accessed anywhere and any time. It has multiple inventory slots for both tools and items, each type having a dedicated section so there’s no need to prioritize carrying tools versus turnips. Unfortunately, this actually ends up being a little more cumbersome than useful, as the menu takes a little longer than is comfortable to open and is pretty clunky to use. I mostly avoided it unless I was bringing gifts to people. But the addition of an inventory opens up the opportunity for something else which defines this entire game...

Key items– a set of unique, unsellable items –are most frequently found in random, secret places around the farm and town, and they give you a reason to scour every inch of the place. They can also be given to you by NPCs when you gain relationships with them, which is convenient because their entire purpose is to help you get even better relationships with each of them, and maybe even unlock little stories with characters. For example, there’s a music box you can dig up in your field that can be given to any of the girls for a decently sized relationship bump. There’s also an old weathervane in the shape of a chicken that you can find in the little mine. If you give it to Rick, he’ll tell you that it was a precious thing that belonged to his grandmother as a cute scene to deepen the town’s lore and connect it to the first game. Key items quickly become the most important and sought after things in the game because they act as a vessel to deliver that which the game is all about: stories.

Lots of people in a little town

The narrative premise is exceedingly simple: you need to fix up your grandfather’s ruined farm and make a new life for yourself in this town within a certain amount of time, just like its predecessors. Except, this game is a lot bigger than either of them, and it didn’t fill all the extra space with new things to grow on your farm. In my entry on the SNES game, I mentioned that the introspective style of writing turned the repetitive farming gameplay into something more like meditation on things going on in the town. This game takes that idea and runs with it! The town in this game may only be slightly bigger than it was before, but it has a lot more people in it, and every single one of them has a lot more to say, more to do, more festivals to go to, and more story events to take part in. There's even a new photo album that fills in with images for reaching special events or succeeding at certain festivals! Your given goal may be to successfully revitalize your farm, but that rapidly stops being the reason why you want to play. Farming is only a means to further the narrative of the town.

Story events are no longer a reward for reaching the highest heart level with a girl, but instead something that happens naturally in the world as you make better friends with people, or if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. The world doesn’t only consist of you living it and things happening to you. Instead, you end up being a fly on the wall to other people’s conversations and life events, and you get to see how those events change the people around you. People will begin to say different things, go different places, live different lives without your input at all– often much better lives, as everyone in the town is pretty deeply troubled, whether they seem like it or not.

There’s an added depth, too. While the characters in this series have always been defined by their conflicts (in the first game, every big cutscene with each girl was exclusively about their major life conflicts), this game takes it further in multiple ways. Characters have conflicts with their families: you as the player have a conflict with your parents who can take you home if you fail to farm well, Lillia and Basil have conflict over their marriage and the fact that Basil leaves for half the year, and Karen’s family situation is…. A lot. Then, there are characters at conflict with things much more nebulous, like the Mayor who tells you that the town is going to die out but he can’t find any way to save it, or like the young boy Kent who wants to be a farmer just like you, but through a series of events is forced to learn that life isn’t so simple, people can’t just do whatever they would like, and it takes very hard work to get to do the things you dream of. And then there are conflicts that aren’t even necessarily conflicts unless they run into your long-term plans.

Instead of only having a bunch of girls in town who exist only as your prospective marriage candidates, there are also five boys in the town who will marry those girls instead of you, if given the chance. Like in SNES, there are 5 levels of hearts that the girls can have for you. Unlike SNES, each one of these hearts has a corresponding event you can have with the girl where there’s a chance of her liking you more afterwards, if you say the right things. In addition to that though, there are just as many events coming from the other side of the story, rival events that trigger if you happen to be good friends with the boys.

My favorite story by far is that of Harris the mailman who falls in love with the librarian, Maria, from just seeing her handwriting on the outside of all the letters that she would write. I frequently saw him in the bar at the end of the day and he would tell me the woes of his love, saying that he just needed to work up the courage to finally speak to her. Then one day, I happened to be outside of the library when he and Maria met face to face and she handed over a letter addressed to him. No longer did he sit in the bar forlorn every night, instead all he would do was excitedly tell me about Maria, and then when I visited the library, Maria would tell me about Harris!

While I’m on the subject of these characters, I think it’s worth going in a little more depth on who these people are past the grandchildren of the characters from the last game. See, you may be familiar with names like Karen and Kai and Gray, etc., etc. from a little recently remade game called Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, which is a modern version of Friends of Mineral Town on the GameBoy Advance, which is a port of Back to Nature on the PlayStation. These are not those characters. At all. While the basic elements of these characters are intact– Popuri is cute and childish, Ann is a workaholic, Maria is shy and a little oblivious –nothing else is the same. They all work different jobs and marry different people than they are paired with in later entries, and in my humble opinion, it all works WAY better in this game, probably because of the fact that these characters were designed for this specific context!

As an example, Popuri’s exasperated mother, Lillia, runs the flower shop and Popuri was named by her father, Basil, who loves plants. She’s childish and sweet and loves flowers, but can also be a complete brat. She eventually marries Gray, Ann’s brother, who lives on the ranch run by his father, Doug, who struggles to understand his children. Gray is an angry young man who seems to have a particular dislike for you, but you don’t learn why until you discover he was a promising young jockey until he got a bad injury and had to give up the sport.

Am I gushing a bit and letting the game design part fall to the wayside? Sure probably, but I can only gush because the game does a brilliant job of making a cast of characters who, while simple on their own, have interconnected lives that come together to give every one of them so much more depth than they would have otherwise. It all builds a narrative, and while narrative design is definitely something different than game design on its own, this game is far more about the narrative so it’s impossible to not focus on.

The problems

The trouble with these events is that I nearly missed the chance to see that letter be exchanged. You have some control over the progression of the events, because you have to be decent friends with the boys in order for them to trigger at all, but unlike the girls who have a handy visual signal of how much they like you, the boys have no such thing, so you can’t really know if a new event is ready to fire off. There’s no way of knowing where or when they’ll happen either unless you look it up, and even then you have to get lucky because sometimes they just don’t trigger when you want them to. I had a lovely moment in my game where I managed to accidentally catch a cold from working too hard in the snow and lost a day to being bedridden, followed by the New Years celebration which takes a day away from you, then followed by Kai and Karen’s wedding– something that I had missed multiple events for and therefore had no idea was coming, which also took a day from me. After that three day chain of no work, I think I was extremely lucky my animals didn’t get sick and die. 

This chain of events led directly to me never speaking to Gray again, even though he was the boy I was most interested in, because I wanted to marry Popuri and there was too much risk of him getting to her before I could. The reason why I didn’t go into more detail about the relationship between those two when I was talking about them earlier is because I straight up don’t know it, I couldn’t risk giving them a chance to get together.

The thing is, even if I hadn’t forced Gray and Popuri’s cutscenes to stop, I still wouldn’t actually know what their relationship is like, because I have not beaten this game. I know what the ending entails and I can reasonably expect I probably would not have gotten an excellent one, but I’m sure it still would have been fine. I stopped playing the game entirely before I even managed to get married. Why? Because I couldn’t get any of Popuri’s heart events to trigger. I had her hearts maxed out and had a blue feather ready to go in my pocket, so I could turn on the game and marry her right away anytime I wanted to. But I wanted to trigger the little events, even if they’re just a couple seconds of some pixels talking to me on a screen. They’re cute. And it made me sad that I couldn’t see them for some imperceptible reason. So I stopped playing and didn’t pick the game back up.

I don’t remember how close I was to the end of the game, I know I was at least in year 2, but I don’t even remember how much longer the game is after that. Probably a good amount. I had definitely gotten most of the events you could get at this point, since multiple other characters had gotten married, and the farming wasn’t something I really enjoyed so I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little bored by this point, but I wasn’t frustrated with the general mechanics of the game. The days were long enough, but not too long, that I had just enough time to go anywhere I wanted and do what I needed before night came. I could still talk to characters and go to festivals and play minigames. But I didn’t want to, because the game wasn’t doing what it seemed like it was supposed to for some arbitrary reason and that frustrated me enough to make me stop. When the fun of a game is found more in experiencing special events rather than anything else, the player feels cheated out of their good time when those events are too hard to find or can be missed outright, and that’s exactly what I experienced.

Parting Thoughts

The ending, according to what I've read, is very similar to the SNES endings, in that you’ll get different results based on all of the different things you’ve done. Whether you’re married, how many crops you shipped, how many animals you have, how well liked you are by the town… I imagine it’s not quite the victory lap that SNES’s ending was with its little cutscenes, since apparently all you get are comments on how well you performed by various people in the town, but it still seems nice and rewarding! At least like more of a reward than whatever the hell GB1 was trying to do. It seems like a perfectly good ending that it would be nice to see myself someday.

Despite all my troubles with this game, I believe HM64 is still the best one out there– at least that I’ve played yet. The events are plentiful and the content is meaty. The repetitive day to day dialogue still has the simple breath of life that SNES did, that manages to make the most out of a small amount. Don’t get me wrong, this game came out in 1999, I’m giving it a lot of praise but the characters still repeat the same line to you every day, and they still freeze in place until you leave the room. It’s revolutionary, but this is comparing it to a game on the literal Super Nintendo. Absolutely pick up this game to try it out, but keep those expectations tempered. That said, I never picked up this game nor knew a thing about it until I was well into my 20’s, but the moment I started playing, it hit me with a wave of nostalgia as if I’d known this game my whole life. At least to me, the look and feel of the game were like coming home to a childhood I never had.

 Will I pick up this game again with the intent to beat it? Maybe! Hard to say for sure when I’m trying to play decades worth of games and write about them at a comprehensive level. What I do know is that this is exactly what I want more farming games to be. It’s a game that has thoughts about life, and about death, both good and bad. And I think this is the perfect context to share those thoughts.

#hm posting #harvest moon #story of seasons #harvest moon 64 #hm64 #m.txt

[hoeratius]

okay, asking this question is maybe the dumbest i've ever felt bc it feels like there should be a straightforward, obvious answer here, but every time i've tried to look it up, i've found nothing but pages upon pages of what feels like people talking in circles and only serving to make me more confused in the end. since you're the most knowledgable person i follow when it comes to the Classics, i figured this might be a good place to ask and maybe get an actual answer? (that being said, it's fine if you don't want to/don't have the time to answer this! obviously!!)

where can i read about the older greek myths? as in pre-trojan war. mostly, i'm interested in theseus but also just pre-trojan war stories in general. i know not everything got the iliad/odyssey treatment and there's probably not any surviving text to point at in a lot of cases, but there must've been something. every time i try to look up where to read about the history of theseus, i'm being directed to a bunch of modern retellings, but google has gotten so bad as a search engine, i literally cannot find anything about the origins of this thing everybody's retelling

from what i understand, theseus was sort of everywhere sticking his nose in everything at all times, so i'm not asking for a comprehensive timeline of his whackass life and everything he ever appeared in or anything, but if you could point me in the direction of anything about him--actual plays or academic texts, anything like that--that's more credible than, like, a self-published, self-described "bold new reimagining" with a stock image of a dude in party city roman cosplay as the cover, it would be MUCH appreciated 😭

(again, sorry about how... basic this question is i guess lol? i'm very new to classics in general and still pretty ignorant about everything, so it's EXTREMELY likely that this is a very dumb question with a very obvious answer, but thank you regardless!)

Hello! What an exciting ask (and apologies for my excited and maybe incoherent answer)!

Since you seem to be most interested in Theseus, I’ll use him as an example but much of this can be applied to other Greek heroes/myths/stories more generally.

As you noted, few get the Iliad/Odyssey treatment. In fact, even Achilles and Odysseus don’t, considering the Iliad spans only 7 weeks or so, and the Odyssey misses out on Odysseus’s actions before and during the Trojan War, and after he came home – and he did a lot after he came home. So where to go to find all the other stories that happened?

Some things to keep in mind:

Writers assumed their audience was familiar with the hero’s greatest deeds already

The big boys – Achilles, Odysseus, Theseus, Perseus, Heracles, Oedipus – had their stories shared in many formats. Think of the Parthenon metopes, which show Theseus’s key deeds in sculpture, or vases, hymns, public performances, bedtime stories, etc. People would encounter these often enough that the outlines of these heroes’ stories were known to them from a young age.

One of the Metopes of the Parthenon, showing (probably) Athena and Theseus.

As a result, ancient texts never show the entire story; they select the moment they want to tell and focus in on that. Hence the Iliad focuses on Achilles’s wrath, the Odyssey emphasises his homecoming, and the Argonautica tells the story of the Golden Fleece. Similarly, tragedies will choose a meaningful moment: not all of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s struggles, but his return home in the Agamemnon, or the events that lead directly to Pentheus’s dismemberment in the Bakchai.

So finding one text that will give you a useful overview will be hard!

These heroes are often also connected to so many other famous characters, that sometimes they show up as a side character in their stories, so it depends on which stories capture your interest most.

Pre-Homeric texts are few and far between

But this is not to say there aren’t pre-Trojan-War myths!

There are loads! Anything with Heracles or Theseus is pre-Iliadic, and others, like the house of Pelops, link more to the Trojan War but are also separate from it. Plus, there is Hesiod’s Theogony (roughly contemporary with Homer), which tells of the births of the gods and goes all the way back to the start of the universe.

The Ovid situation

Many Greek texts are lost, and we’ve only got allusions to this or that part of the myth in the existing fragments, etc. etc. So how do we still know so much about so many of these stories?

Enter my fave: Ovid.

Far later than Homer (1st century versus 8th century BC), but with access to all the Greek texts and them some, he wrote a lot of fairly comprehensive stories. These include the Heroides, letters written from the perspective of female characters trying to connect to their male lovers, with letter 10 coming from Ariadne to Theseus, and Metamorphoses 8 with parts of Theseus’s story.

If you’re looking for a high-level overview of what was what in ancient myth, starting with the Metamorphoses will give you all the big boys and many of the smaller ones.

Theseus specifically:

I must admit that Theseus is not my strong suit, but sources I’m familiar with that I would recommend:

Hippolytus, by Euripides and Phaedra by Seneca: these both tell of Theseus’s second wife Phaedra falling for his son Hippolytus and causing his death

Catullus 64: A lament from Ariadne after Theseus has abandoned her on Naxos

Metamorphoses 8, 12, by Ovid: Snippets of Theseus’s life, incl the Minotaur

Ones I’m not as familiar with but might be up your street:

Life of Theseus, Plutarch: a historian/scholar’s biography. He had them in pairs, where he compared the two; Theseus is linked to Romulus

The Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodus: Follows Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece; Theseus is one of his heroes

Oedipus at Colonnus, Sophocles: apparently Theseus is a major side character here but I don’t remember!

There is also The King must Die by Mary Renault, a modern retelling from the ‘80s that blew me away. The only book set in ancient Greece I’ve ever read that doesn’t shy away from how alien their culture and values are to us today and doesn’t try to sugarcoat things.

And if you’re looking for more heroes: Wikipedia is your friend!

The Classics-related pages are pretty reliable, and they often mention the main sources per character.  

I hope this gets you started but please do hit me up with more questions, I always love diving into these things!

#tagamemnon #classics #asks #theseus

[applejuicefruit]

Can you write something with neymar where reader is from LA and is visiting ney. Then reader gets homesick and becomes a bit distant, but then ney realizes that she is homesick and comforsts reader.

I really loved your other writings so i had to request this one❤️❤️ 

Hii! Thank you for requesting this! I didn’t know if you wanted Neymar to be in Brazil or in Paris in this story 🥲 I hope you don’t mind reader’s visiting him Paris.

I really hope you like this ❤️

ps: i remember when i went to london all by myself when i was 16 and i stayed there for a month and i remember telling my friends i was missing home in italy and they just ignored me :) nostalgia is real people !!!

City of Angels

Los Angeles. Your safe place. Your safe heaven. Your home.

You thought no place on Earth could ever compete with your hometown. You had the hills, the beaches, museums and millions of people visiting every year. It was your home.

You lived in a nice cozy apartment on the Hills. It was small but it was everything you ever dreamed of. Every morning you woke up with the beautiful Los Angeles sun coming through your window, the Hollywood sign in background. It was perfect. Your life was perfect.

Also because you were dating famous football player Neymar. Honestly you had no idea of who he was before you googled him. Being a Los Angeles Dodgers fan meant that you knew nothing about football or soccer as you call it to make Neymar mad.

You met in LA, that’s why you are so thankful for this city. You were both attending the same party and the moment your eyes met you knew it was game over. He introduced himself to you and waited for your surprised reaction that never came. It took you a whole week before finding out who he really was. He always loved this side of you. He dated so many people who wanted him only for fame and money, but with you things were different, you were so pure and kind and not affected by fame or popularity. Probably because that was the normality in LA.

You were getting ready for going to the airport, ready to leave the City of Angeles behind and spend the next two months in Paris with your boyfriend Neymar. You were so excited to see him again but honestly you couldn’t stop but feeling a little sad leaving this city behind. You let a few tears fall while watching the Hollywood sign from your bedroom. Then you closed all the suitcases and left for for the airport.

Almost 9 hours of flight after and you landed in Paris. Neymar couldn’t come and get you because he was practicing that day so he sent one of drivers to come and get you.

The moment you left the airport shock hit you. The sky was so grey you couldn’t even see the clouds, it was raining and it was freezing cold. You weren’t ready for this.

You smiled at his driver and got into the car while you were watching the view from your passenger side.

“Why everything seems so boring?” you asked yourself hoping Ney’s driver didn’t hear you. But he was too focused on the road to even pay attention to you.

Once you’ve arrived, the driver helped you into Ney’s apartment and then left. Neymar gave you his spare keys when he was in Los Angeles visiting you.

His apartment was huge.

Literally huge. It took you almost 20 minutes to visit every room. His apartment included an indoor pool and gym, five bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, a theatre room, a playroom, a large kitchen and a living room with the amazing view of the eiffel tower.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad” you hoped.

You were sitting on the couch watching some weird french movie that you couldn’t even understand when Neymar appeared in the living room.

“You already got yourself comfortable I see” he said coming behind you and kissing your head

“Ney!!” you jumped on his arms the moment you saw him

“Did you miss me angel?” he asked kissing you while he hold you by your ass

“Very much” you replied between kisses

“There are so many things I want to show you” he told you. And so it was. For he first two days he didn’t have practice so he showed you around Paris. It was nice actually. A bit cold but it was good. You loved the museums, the architecture, the churches.

But after the first week passed nostalgia hit you hard. You started missing the sun and the warm of your beautiful city.

One morning depression hit you really bad. You woke up and it was raining so much you couldn’t even go outside and get breakfast. So you stayed at home, sat on the couch with a fluffy blanked around your body watching the rain coming down from the window.

You couldn’t help but let a few tears fall. You’ve never been so nostalgic, but here you are.

You were so stressed that you didn’t even hear Neymar coming out from the bathroom, freshly showered. He was wearing a black t-shirt and some sport pants.

“Meu amor?” he gently approached you, slightly worried when he saw you crying “are you okay?”

“Yes…” you said wiping a few tears from your face

“Sure…” he sat next to you “care to tell me what’s going on?”

“It’s silly…”

“If you’re crying it’s not silly”

“I just-I miss home…” you said letting more tears fall

“What-what you mean?” he asked you a bit worried “you don’t like it here?”

“It’s not that…it’s just-it’s just that I miss Los Angeles so much…I’ve never been this nostalgic I don’t know what has gotten into me, I’m sorry”

“No baby, don’t be sorry, it’s completely normal” he said hugging you “you’ve never been away from home this much, it’s normal feeling a bit sad”

“I know I just wished I didn’t cry…”

“You can cry all you want with me” he said kissing your forehead

“Thank you babe…I really needed it”

“Of course meu amor…you know what? I don’t have any match next week…what if we go back to Los Angeles for a couple of days? Ah? You can show me that crazy fast food you can’t stop talking about!”

“You mean In N Out?” you asked while your eyes were completely shining

“Yes that one”

“Are you sure? I know you love Paris…and it’s your free week…”

“I’m happy as long as you are. And clearly you’re feeling a little bit distressed now…nothing would make me happy than to go back in Los Angeles with you amor”

“I love you so much Ney!” you said wrapping your arms around his neck and kissing him while he held your hips

“I love you too baby, so fucking much…” he whispered while you kept kissing.

You couldn’t ask for more. In the end, your life was really perfect.

#neymar one shot #neymar smut #neymar angst #neymar fluff #neymarjrxreader #neymar x reader #neymarjr x reader #neymar #neymar junior #neymar imagines #neymar imagine #psg #paris saint germain #world cup #footballers x reader #football fan #football imagine #brazil

[theshadowbendersblog]

*Big One Piece Spoiler ahead*

I'm currently watching this show which aired in 1982 and ran for like a year, called "Mysterious Cities of Gold". It's quite an old series and very hard to find. Over the past couple of years many fans tried to upload it on various sites all over the internet but for some reason or the other, the show was taken out only a few weeks or a couple of months after the show was uploaded. Even if you try to google the show, most of the sites will tell you it was only one season but in reality it was 4 seasons. If anyone is up for it, I can provide links if it's still available. I was lucky enough to have been able to download all 4 seasons of it.

The show is interesting because it has so many similarities with one piece and i think Oda took some inspiration from it because

1. Back when the first season aired, Oda was probably just a kid

2. It even aired on Japanese television soon after, with the name "Taiyou no ko Estaban" (son of the sun Estaban)

The show is about the protagonist Estaban who lives in Barcelona, somewhat parallel to Luffy. Estaban can also command the sun and make skies clear even during the strongest of storms or rainfalls.

There are 3 more characters who run parallel with some op characters, Zia, an Incan girl who can read old and rare Incan texts and thus the Spanish govt. was always after her and in several instances they kidnapped her to find out what the incan scripts said about the cities of gold (El Dorado). She's parallel to Robin's character. There's a guy named Tao who's a descendant of an old advanced civilization called Mu who were known as the people of the Sun. They were famous for harvesting and using the power of the sun and they were technologically advanced (again somewhat parallel to the ancient advanced civilization in op). He's just like Usopp, good at fixing things and very crafty. In fact it was him who first provided the team with their first ship called Solaris. It had solar panels instead of sails and it had the power to run the ship 100 times faster than a normal ship running on sails. And just like Going merry, it got destroyed in an event. The second mode of transport they got was not a ship but a plane that looks like a bird.

Estaban was saved by a Spanish govt. navigator when he was just a baby. Ten years before the current timeline, the navigator named Mendoza (somewhat parallel to Shanks, since he uses one handed sword techniques and saved Estaban in the sea just like shanks saved kid Luffy) spotted a wrecked ship on a stormy night and the only survivors were Estaban and his father. The man hands Estaban over to Mendoza and then he was washed away. Ever since, Mendoza had been keeping an eye on Estaban. Estaban's father also handed Estaban a medallion on his neck that turns out to be one of the 2 keys to open 7 cities of gold that is scattered all around the world.

The story goes like this, many years ago there existed 2 advanced civilizations, Mu and Atlantis. They fought a huge war against each other over power resources. Alas they ended up destroying each other. Later some survivors of the Mu empire built 7 cities of gold all around the world where they hid tonnes of gold and several ancient technologies for the betterment of the world, and handed down 2 medallions to 2 generations of families. And as time passed, the medallions kept getting passed on among certain families and one ended up with Estaban and the other ended up with Zia. The high priest of the first city of gold (turns out he was estaban's father) said that the advanced civilization was so powerful and so technologically advanced that the survivors of the Mu empire knew that any adult who gets their hands on these powerful resources and tonnes of gold, would surely get greedy and fall to the bad side. And if the adults started fighting for these powerful technologies, they would end up using these advanced technologies again to destroy the world.

This is where it gets important for guessing what one piece could be. The high priest said the cities of gold and the keys to their doors were wished to have fallen into the hands of kids, because a child's innocence and wonder would never let the advanced technologies be used for bad purposes, like greed for power and war.

We are now aware of how there existed an ancient advanced civilization in one piece too, that created cool robots like the one in Egghead island. And to think the robot is so advanced that even a man like Dr. Vegapunk couldn't get it activated or figure out what fuel does it run on.

What if, one piece is a child's toy? A toy that children of the 800 years old ancient civilization built and played with!! This is something Oda could do, a gag ! And he simply doesn't do gags, he makes things so silly, yet so meaningful. Where, if this theory is taken into account, and we consider that the one piece is indeed a toy that the children of the ancient advanced civilization played with, at the same time it could also turn out that the toy itself was so advanced that it was like a powerful technology for the normal humankind.

To support my theory even further, back when Roger and his crew visited Laugh-tale and figured out what one piece is, Roger laughed and even said something close to "I came at a wrong time, this is not my time to reveal or use the one piece". It's something that people are so serious about that they wanna turn the whole world down. But only someone with the innocence of a child can actually use the one piece, since no adult can value a toy as much as a child can. Which is why if recalled, op has always shown how boys like Luffy, Chopper, Usopp and the boys from Punk hazard are so fascinated with robots and cool mechanical machineries. And the term "man's romance" is always stressed at times like these.

If anyone has seen Ben 10 alien force and recalls that one episode where a mysterious cube shaped alien technology was mimicking anyone who attacked it, like Gwen, Kevin, their powers, and even transformed into every one of Ben's aliens and it seemed like a totally destructive and advanced weapon. But it turns out, it was just a child's toy from some higher dimension and the child's mother later came to earth and picked up the toy, saying that her kid had dropped the toy somewhere back when they came to the lower dimension on the earth, for a family picnic. Or to hang out or something like that.

I feel this little Ben 10 alien force scene is a coincidental yet strong correspondence with the theory i have proposed above. In short what I'm guessing is, there's a huge chance that in a story like one piece where Oda likes to just mess around like what children would like the most, with cartoonish art style and funny gags, where he not only shows us serious stuff, but never fails to make us laugh with his cartoonish composition of manga panels and the over all story, the one piece could very well be just a toy, like a robot or some sort of weapon or a machinery, which to normal humankind, would look like a powerful weapon and the adults will surely try to obtain it for their selfish desires. Whereas, only a child's innocence could make the utmost use of it.

#one piece #monkey d. luffy #cat burglar nami #roronoa zoro #black leg sanji #tony tony chopper #nico robin #franky one piece #soul king brook #god usopp #jimbei #anime and manga #one piece manga #mysterious cities of gold

[cleolinda]

Samsara (Guerlain, 1989 EdP & 2023 EdT)

A sandalwood overdose embellished by ylang-ylang and jasmine. Samsara is the first woody women's fragrance in perfumery. It is constructed over a beautifully crafted sandalwood, used for the first time in these quantities in perfumery. (Guerlain.com)

From Eau de Tati, the back story:

Jean-Paul Guerlain created Samsara in 1985 for Decia de Powell, the woman he loved and who wore the fragrance for four years before it was launched. Jean-Paul took the opportunity to create the perfume for her, as she could not find a perfume that appealed to her. She liked jasmine and sandalwood, in particular, and these were the raw materials on which Samsara was based.

It seems that Gérard Anthony co-created the fragrance, but Guerlain has always loved a good legend. Whether the Sanskrit word "saṃsāra" ("the concept of rebirth and 'cyclicality of all life, matter, existence'") suits the fragrance as a name is a lengthy discussion I'll leave to others.

On the face of it, Samsara is another Guerlain journey into orientalism (stop that!); it's a classic example of loud 1980s fragrance (outdated); it's a benchmark in the Western perfume industry's use of sandalwood (notable). I wanted to write up this one purely because I already had it on hand: when I say "1989," I mean, my mom gave me an eau de parfum sample in 1989. I would have been about ten years old, and I loved collecting little sample vials that gave me too many headaches to actually use—just to keep in my little treasure boxes full of costume jewelry and tumbled rocks and skeleton keys. Apparently I was a magpie, or maybe a dragon. There's only about five molecules left, but as it turns out, that is more than enough.

I also ordered a fresh decant of the current formulation from the Perfumed Court—all they had was the eau de toilette, not the EdP, so this is not a one-to-one comparison. Instead, we have, on one hand, the most aged a Samsara can get, saved since its debut year, and on the other, the lightest, freshest iteration possible. It's lovely, that new EdT. But it's not what I expected at all. A couple of years ago I managed to uncork the 1989 Samsara, and all I got was this incredible note of mingled sandalwood and jasmine—just the richest, smoothest, deepest thing you've ever smelled. But the new one, from my notes: "BUBBLEGUM??"

Powdery fresh floral, rose? Like a living flower that happens to be powdery, not a cosmetic. Very very fresh and outdoorsy, like a garden. The vague idea of sandalwood underneath. Something a bit sweeter coming out, maybe vanilla jasmine. Very light, very easy to wear. Airy, breezy. Sheer.

And then, ten minutes in, bubblegum came out. Motherfucking bubblegum. I had to look up what the old-fashioned Bazooka Joe-type flavor is, because it's not that—there's no tiny twang of clove or wintergreen hiding behind the fruits and vanilla. This is straight-up Juicy Fruit gum. Which involves banana, pineapple, and maybe peach, for a flavor "resembling jackfruit." Now, apparently jackfruit contains "banana oil," aka isoamyl acetate, so I went and googled it on a hunch: yes, it’s in ylang ylang too. Combine that with Samsara's actual peach note (although it smells fresher than the lactone in Mitsouko) and vanilla—

Basenotes.com: Green notes, peach, ylang ylang, bergamot, lemon, iris and orris, violet, jasmine, rose, narcissus, sandalwood, tonka, amber, musk, and vanilla.

—and you've got a powdery-nectar sandalwood bubblegum. It's so good. Two birthdays ago, I got myself a wide-ranging set of essential oils, just so I could see what things smell like individually; the night after I tried Samsara, I started messing around with them, and it's 10,000% the ylang that's bringing the strange fruity note. I rarely if ever see anyone mention the ylang-ylang in Samsara—they always talk about how strong the jasmine is, but I SWEAR TO YOU that this is what it does on me. In fact, twenty minutes in, Bubble Ylang was mostly what I was smelling.

At the same time, the fresh EdT was really, really powdery—you see iris there in not one but two levels of the note pyramid, and orris is just iris root. The classic Guerlains use the ionones of iris and violet a lot; they're in the house accord, the Guerlinade, which I may also try to get a sample of. But the powder is so much stronger in Samsara than I expected. I was promised a sandalwood overdose, and I'm sitting here with Juicy Fruit floating over a bed of irises—like the row of cool dark purple ones we had lining our driveway when I was a kid—at the half-hour mark. According to my notes, I didn't really get ~sandalwood until an hour-twenty, and even that was still blurring into the ylang-ylang. (Apparently these two notes are really compatible; it's the only thing same combination I liked in Chanel No. 5.) That said, it's lovely and sweet and easygoing if you APPLY SPARINGLY. Of the three Guerlains I've tried, this one was by far the easiest to wear.

Which is wild, because supposedly, Samsara is A Sandalwood Bomb, a true big-hair fume of the '80s that will choke you out of a room. And yet, I didn't even get the sandalwood clearly until more than an hour in. There's two reasons for this, I discovered:

One is that I microdose perfume. I always point this out because I want you to understand that if you apply more fragrance than I do, you are not going to get the tame results I do. If you spray Tyrannosaurus Rex all over yourself, there is nothing god or mortal can do for you. I used two swipes of the Samsara sample wand on my left wrist—and it did project a good bit, but it was comfortable. If I'd done the same on my right wrist to balance it out, I would have considered myself good to go for a perfume-appropriate occasion. Maybe if you didn't deploy FIVE SPRAYS you wouldn’t be choking on it, idk idk.

The other reason is that the current formulation of Samsara uses Australian sandalwood—whereas the original used a much richer Indian variety. I was surprised to discover that Samsara has always been formulated as a meeting of natural and synthetic sandalwoods, though. But the current version has a newer synthetic: Javanol. And the thing about Javanol is that some people can't smell it. And I may be one of them. Because there is no reason "an overdose of sandalwood" should smell this modest to me, in the same perfume that is shouting white floral, unless I physically cannot perceive its loudest component. But I'm smelling some sandalwood; that must be the natural oil.

For more on Javanol, I turn to a fragrance I haven't actually tried yet: Escentric Molecules' Molecule 04. Javanol is, in fact, that molecule. The product website explains, it's a synthetic that

retains the radiance and endurance of natural sandalwood, but is sheer and transparent like no sandalwood in nature. “What I love about Javanol is its almost psychedelic freshness,” says [creator] Geza Schoen. “It smells as if liquid metallic grapefruit peel were poured over a bed of velvety cream-coloured roses.” Javanol is like Iso E Super, the molecule in Escentric Molecules 01, in some ways. Like Iso E Super, it comes and goes. The person wearing it loses the ability to smell it after a short while, only to re-connect with it later.

Well, "it comes and goes" may be why I'm not smelling as much sandalwood in Samsara as advertised, I guess—maybe I’m not totally anosmic to Javanol? The company that makes it, Givaudan, says that the aromachemical has

a rich, natural, creamy sandalwood note like beta santanol combined with  some rosy nuances. It can also be used at very low dosage (below 0.1%)  to bring richness and creaminess to all types of accords. With its exceptional low threshold, Javanol™ is approximately 8 times more effective in wash tests than the most powerful sandalwood product. [...] In the quest for the perfect Indian Sandalwood, Javanol™ is probably the most versatile note with its power, radiance, woodiness and rosiness, blending perfectly with flowers.

Javanol blends so perfectly with ylang and jasmine, in fact, that I can hardly distinguish it through most of Samsara's lifespan on my skin (I appreciate a good olfactory chimera, so that's fine). I can also see why you'd reformulate Samsara, already famous for its Godzilla-sized projection, with the biggest, loudest synthetic sandalwood on the market. But the thing is, the Beast of Givaudan wasn't created until 1996. Javanol may be what Guerlain has paired with Australian sandalwood nowadays, but my original sample was made with [probably a mix of synthetics including] Givaudan's Sandalore and the good stuff—20% (!) Mysore sandalwood.

Mysore Sandalwood Oil is a trademarked perfume oil extracted from the Santalum album variety of sandalwood tree (also known as a "royal tree") in the Mysore district of Karnataka, India. The tree species is said to be one of the best varieties in the world. (Wikipedia, the most concise explainer)

It's also the most expensive. But while I'm sure reformulations are a cost-cutting measure, sandalwood sustainability has also become a huge issue; I'm happy with synthetics if it helps the cause. The Australian sandalwood used in the current Samsara seems to be a popular and less-threatened natural option; it's also in two other fragrances I'm trying at the moment, Le Labo's Santal 33 and Tom Ford's Santal Blush. But it's like the difference between tulle and velvet. You can still use it beautifully, but there is a smoothness and a weight that's missing. People say that Mysore sandalwood is "creamy," even sweet, and it is, but not in a dairy or dessert way; it's legitimately this kind of olfactory texture that's so good. By contrast, the scent of Australian sandalwood feels a little harsh in the top of my nose, full of wood grain and pencil shavings, but also lighter. And yet it blends just as well with the notes of the new Samsara, just in different ways.

As for the old—Mysore and Sandalore® were what greeted me when I uncapped my vintage, 34-year-old sample:

oh my god. ohhhhh my gooooood.

That big sweet fruity ylang-ylang immediately bounced right out—how had I only smelled jasmine in the vial before? I'll stop here and tell you a little bit about ylang-ylang, which is not the note I was expecting to go on about, but here we are:

When you hear about "white florals," they're generally talking about jasmine, gardenia, tuberose (you'll remember this one from HYPNOTIC POISON), lily, lily of the valley—and ylang ylang, even though the latter is a showy yellow flower. I truly don't know how to describe the White Floral if you're not familiar with it, especially since I've never perceived any funky "animalic" indole notes. It's just good to me, very rich, very perfumy, and apparently it does, in an aromatherapy context, have a slightly sedative effect; this may be why people talk about "narcotic" white florals. Ylang-ylang takes the woozy richness of jasmine and, uniquely, adds that fruity, slightly spicy, banana-esque note; I'd love to look for the differences between white florals as I try out more fragrances. With Samsara(s), the jasmine doesn't seem distinct to me, serving instead to support the ylang-ylang, and maybe this is why I only smelled jasmine in the vial: it's my skin chemistry, once again, that's playing favorites.

You know what else my skin apparently loves? Expensive vintage sandalwood. The original Samsara skipped straight to the 1:20 mark and—speaking of narcotics—hit me like a tranquilizer dart. I just curled up on my bed and held my wrist to my nose for about an hour. I was like a cat on the 'nip. My God. I had some hand-me-down incense sticks from the '70s when I was a teenager, and I have been chasing that sandalwood high for three decades. This is it. The blanket of iris, the bergamot blast other reviewers talk about (I only got it the third time I wore the EdT), the supporting cast of notes—barely there. Just the gold.

For about two hours, it was amazing. Then, gradually, Samsara grew more and more overpowering, like a rogue science project slowly ballooning out of control. I ended up wiping it off with a little jojoba oil—not washing it off (DON'T WASTE IT!!), but reducing the amount I had on. There's only about two drops, thick as maple syrup, left in that vial, and that's fine.

Meanwhile, every time I wear the current eau de toilette, it disappears after about three hours.

I wish I'd been able to get a current EdP sample to compare the two formulations directly. But you know what? I still enjoy the iris-forward, sandalwood-backward Samsara. It's easy to wear and it doesn't overstay its welcome, which is a good thing for someone with fragrance sensitivities (me). As much as I love the smooth golden Mysore aspect, I'd rather have the option to reapply than be trapped with the Sandalwood That Ate 1989.

Perfume discussion masterpost

#perfume #perfume discussion #perfume: guerlain #the beast of givaudan #note: sandalwood #note: ylang ylang #note: iris #note: white florals #note: javanol #long post

[aguacerotropical]

tell me about vnc. the existence of your google doc full of references intrigues me (<- guy who has been studying vampire media for a While now). what is it about this manga series that compels you so. and what is it like, tonally. it does not look like horror but perhaps it is

oh DAMN now that’s a question that’s a bit hard to answer. Sorry for the huge almost-essay. It is my fave series after all.

First off, please start with the manga: https://thecasestudyofvanitas.com/ The pacing and tone is better. Newer chapters can be found on MangaUp and the raws are in some people's blogs. Just DM me.

Now, I don’t want to give too much away, although if you checked out my doc, there’s already a lot of spoilers and theories there. (There will also be a blog for references soon).

The manga is essentially a memoir, presented as a “case study” of Vanitas, a man who wavers between vampirism and humanity. He, we are told in the first issue, has been killed by the author, Noé, after, it is implied, turning into something not-human. Noé is a vampire and coded to be gay. Vanitas is heavily coded to be bi and queer gender-wise. They are both obsessed with each other to a degree that is unhealthy, fascinating, and not very straight.

(and there are many other queer characters, including nonbinary vampires and canon sapphic vampire couples who are key players in the series. It is weaved into the narrative).

The manga diverges from other stories in the fact the vampires do not need blood to survive and are more like reinforced humans. But there is an illness that creates uncontrollable bloodlust and results in beheading of its victims by other vampires. The cause is the main mystery. Vanitas, one of our two protagonists, is a vampire doctor who saves vampires from this disease with the help of Noé. So that’s a huge inversion of traditional tales right there, since most of them are about killing vampires, not saving them.

but while it inverts it in that sense, it follows up with almost every iteration of vampirism, including extremely fucking obscure references. Like, do you know what a Kresnick is? (if you do, i am in awe of you!)

And like my fantastic mutual @neversetyoufree (link) highlighted recently, there is the presence of vampirism as most of its past versions: disease, objects of prejudice, racist aristocrats preying on others, queerness, corruption of natural death, sexual assault, eroticism, psychic vampirism etc.

The neat thing about all these references is that they are well-thought out and woven into the tale. It isn’t BSD where it’s just There without any deeper meaning.

With regards to the tone, I wouldn’t say it’s quite straight up horror, but it does have many horror elements, as can be seen in the themes above. Like there’s various civil wars, characters have been abandoned and/or lost someone in horrific deaths, etc.

I guess it’s mostly presented as a tragedy. There’s exploration of griefs in all its forms.

And it is very very campy. It gets very silly and comedic sometimes, in between the fucked up parts of course. Tbh, that put me off at first, but I grew to adore it.

Personally, I find the queerness, the campiness, the takes on vampirism, the rabbit holes caused by obscure references, and (mostly, because I too lost someone) the explorations on grief to have been the parts that got its claws into me and never let go.

If you are interested in delving into it, please read the manga first. The anime is good, but it leans more into comedy, which is fine, but I think you would enjoy the manga’s tone more. The pacing is also much better. Newer chapters are on MangaUp, and there are blogs here that provide the raws.

Sorry for the essay, it is my favorite series! Hope you pick it up and enjoy the nonsense and chill fandom around it!

#vnc #vanitas no carte #the case study of vanitas

[terresdebrume]

Story time: when I got my first full employment contract with the current school last year, the guy making our timetables was an incompetent. As in, it was the Friday before classes started again, several teachers were still meant to teach three classes at the same time, and he point blank refused to work on the thing anymore.

So, since we did need timetables and nobody was doing anything, I said "gimme some time", opened google sheets, pushed my sleeves up, and managed to have something functional by mid-Sunday. The Big Boss, who was visiting at the time, asked me to be in charge of that for the school year.

Months pass, we had way too many versions of the timetables because the school pretty much doubled numbers through the year, and also (key element) I butted heads with the admin team several times over things they asked that were either not possible or stupid, but which HQ wanted anyway bc they refuse to realize that Cambodia is not Singapore and we sometimes can't do the exact same things they do.

Anyway, a little after the middle of the year, this guy H suddenly appears at one of the meetings. I go 'can I ask why he's here?' and I'm told he's here to 'help'. From that moment on, I did not receive a single scrape of information about timetables. Decisions were made without consulting or informing me, meetings happened that I wasn't even aware of, etc.

At this point you may realize, as I did, that I was subtly pushed out. I made the passive aggressive decision not to notice this, which led to probably more stress than I should have taken on...but still, I kept it up, until a couple months into this year, when the then-Principal told me that since they couldn't have 2 people in charge of timetables, they would have to go with H.

Now, I was quite bitter about the way we'd gotten there, but considering I'd been seriously considering handing in my 'resignation' from that responsibility, I ended up feeling more relieved than anything else. (Also, because I'm not perfect, I have to admit there was a bit of schadenfreude when H's first attempts at making timetables without considering what the teachers wanted gave him noticeable backlash.) In the meantime, H continues to make himself essential to the school in an attempt to become Head of Secondary, and is put in charge of organizing progress reports and Parents/Teachers conferences.

Fast forward a couple months: H did not become Head of Secondary, because he point blank refused to work with one of the teachers in the department. He is still in charge of timetabling & reports & PTCs organization, and is (not unfairly) expecting a big bonus for his performance last year. Problem: H's husband has to move to Paris for his job, and H intends to follow him before the end of the year, aka before the intended end of his contract. Consequently: H does not get a bonus.

H is not happy (which to be fair: he's right there) and decides to hasten his departure to Immediately, then is convinced to come back with what I have to assume is significant incentive. H is still leaving as soon as possible, though, and has to find a replacement for his responsibilities. So, who does he ask to pick up the torch?

To which my response was of course a polite but firm

NAH

#Matt has a life #Shit from work #The fucking audacity #10n

[ideahat-universe]

Good Design, Bad Design: ARG edition!

Don't worry, it's just a framing device. Lets talk about a Good ARG and a Bad ARG.

Good Design

Shipwrecked 64 is one of the better examples of a ARG done extremely well but what really sets it apart in my mind is the fact that it's a real game.

A lot of indie games make game play a means to an end, most of it benefits more from being watched than played.

A meta of overcharging people to play chapters of a game where each chapter is a little under 2 hours and the game play is just put key in keyhole and run from thing has really crippled the entertainment the genre can offer.

Not so for Shipwrecked 64. You're expected to learn and even write down many things to find the answers needed to progress.

Learn a little bit about music, remember numbers and colors when they appear to you, watch the videos that show up, Read the notes made by stumbler, utilize a fan made cipher to decode Beaver-scratch (or decode the method yourself!), dabbled in the phonetic alphabet, oh and a bit of some googling.

The game can be a punishing experience for streamers who expect to knock this game out in an afternoon. Because of that though it can be fun to play blind. In fact it's very fun to play blind and the scares are edited fairly well as the the jump part of scare utilizes a very surreal screen tearing effect, meanwhile the game tries to come up with ways to sneak up on you to make the jumps really sudden.

It's very good. Sure Poppy's Playtime is a more cinematic experience, and the latest Freddy Game wasn't that bad either but there's something about a really well rounded experience that lives beyond its expectations.

UrbanSpook is. Well, UrbanSpook is a TV dinner.

Let me explain.

A few months ago I mentioned Who's Lila which was also a really well done ARG and meta mystery story which was born from Twin Perfect's reading on what Twin Peaks was supposed to be about.

The idea is that Twin Peaks was a response to how throwaway and artless television was becoming and specifically how murder stories were just a cavalcade of dead bodies and killers with nothing else to care about.

The metaphor used in Twin Peaks? TV Dinners. Whenever bad people were indulging in base desires they were eating TV dinners or other meals that lacked substance.

Yeah, I think you know where I'm going with this. UrbanSpook comes out the gate with a framing device for a gallery of artwork but the framing is bare bones and the artwork only satiates the desire to see gore. The artwork is good but in creating a story it is not judged as a series of images and is instead judged as a story.

As a story we don't know who the killer is, how they kill, why they kill (why they have to kill people to make paintings). We don't know the victims beyond them being dead, when they died, and how they died. We don't know who is primarily responsible for investigating the killings (as it is not uncommon for a specific person to be tasked with bringing a serial killer to justice).

We know about as much as you might learn in a B movie. Which brings me to what I believe UrbanSpook is. UrbanSpook is a no budget ARG Splatterpunk horror.

People come in expecting some kind of lip-service to pathos because at the end of the day people love character, not kills; and in almost every good horror story you get characterization of everyone as well as a strong theme beyond "We like violence, yes we do."

BUT in a B-movie or a cheap slasher film you want gore, you want some blood thrown around, you want TV Dinners.

I imagine though that the budget of UrbanSpook is quite limited so rather than make a completely animated venture he went for the Mandela Catalog effect.

And maybe it's a good gambit. With money he could make a better production but he's getting a Serbian film style reception which does hurt and lashing out on Twitter isn't great PR but that's beyond the art and really everyone is terrible on Twitter.

UrbanSpook isn't bad because it dares to do things that are audacious and repugnant, because the horror genre has gladly housed such films since the creation of film as a genre.

What UrbanSpook does bad is telling a story and while morally Horror can do whatever it wants, artistically there is a good design for a horror story and a bad design for a horror story and this is

Bad Design

#fandom #controversy #horror #shipwrecked 64 #urbanspook #Youtube

[mysteryman-17]

* B1RD-BR4IN 3000 - ATK 10 DEF 5 * One of the Conductor's greatest props ever. * Or so he says.

Time’s End is an AHIT/Undertale crossover AU of sorts, taking place in the aftermath of a timeline where you lose the final boss fight against Mustache Girl. You can find the write-up here! In addition, you can find the write-ups for the Neutral Endings and TimeWarp Route Requirements on Google Drive! The logo for Time's End was designed by @bittybattybunny. She's an incredible artist, be sure to check out their work here on Tumblr and over on Twitter!! This track was commissioned from my boi Wisteria Bird Studios. Be sure to check out his work too!

Motifs:

Battle of Award 42

Train Rush

original

You can listen to this track in high quality on the AU’s SoundCloud here, and in their separate "in-game" loops on Google Drive! The rest of the description is underneath the Read More.

The Conductor fills Mettaton's shoes in this world. He may be the sole greatest influencer in the bird entertainment now (thanks to him ousting Grooves during the initial "Time's End" fiasco) but… he's incredibly bored and agitated. There are no obstacles in his path to success, and only now does he realize how much he despises it -- though he'll be damned if he EVER admits to missing DJ Peck Neck for now at least. His kinder side -- although still faintly there -- has become a LOT harder for his crew to see over time, especially Thomas the Inventor, who receives the brunt of Conductor's unchecked cockiness and fury nowadays. Bow Kid's arrival in the Mafia Flows makes Conductor immediately pounce on the opportunity for something CLOSE to a rival in his life again. For the "dungeon" scene in this AU: the Conductor had a mech built from and disguised within the remnants of his first ever train (which derailed and was damaged beyond repair,) and after some reminiscing, he ambushes Bow Kid and SMASHES the old passenger car. The battle starts from here. …Unbeknownst to Conductor, Tom has his own ideas, so the mech has a lot of faults that Bow Kid is able to exploit.

Ye ik it's still not funni musriel his theme real but I was low-key getting a bit tired of putting so many "heavy" tracks one after another on the account. So here's the song that plays when you fight a scottish bird's mecha built from a goddamn steam train. This is yet another one of the ideas in this AU where I had no ideas initially, then wound up shitposting my way into coming up with something needlessly-but-also-majorly awesome. Except this one actually winds up tying a bit into the "arc" I settled on for this part of the story! (A large string of these sorts of ideas also happen to be in the "Hotland" portion of this AU, come to think of it. Sexy robot rectangles and weeaboo lizards overcomplicate things ig lmaooooooo) The track is very much inspired from Digga-Leg's Theme from Super Mario Galaxy 2; the Super Mario RPG flavor was all Kristian's idea, and he did a fantastic job on this piece. Was fantastic working with him, as always. Hope you guys enjoy! :) (P.S. uhhhh don't worry i have an idea for the "Oh! One True Love" replacement too, i just honestly don't give enough of a fuck to wait to finish that one before i post this one. out-of-order posting for the win baybeeeeeeeeee!) (P.P.S. ik i didn't post the updated track 71 here on tumblr after the soundcloud post last month, part of me honestly doesn't rly feel like it but i'll maybe see about doing it when i can force myself lmaooooooo)

#a hat in time au #ahit au #ahit conductor #the conductor #deltarune #undertale #undertale au #ahit time's end au #time's end au #AHIT:TE!AU #a hat in time music #ahit music #music #audio #Oh! Dungeon

[emtheanxiousdragon]

So I read Thief in ThunderClan and all the comments people make about the ableism within it… I figured since I’m studying both English and Disability Studies, I could make a fairly informed statement on this.

I’ll preface this by saying that I doubt the Erins think as deeply about this as I’m about to, but let me talk. I also got inspired by a random set of tags that I can’t remember.

Within modern disabled circles, the key cultural value is that disabled people retain worth, even if they cannot contribute to society. The problem readers point out with TiTC (need the c to avoid issues) is that the story focuses on disabled people contributing to society, even in small ways. Multiple characters worry they lack value without service, fears which are not answered by saying the statement is utterly false, but by saying that they can serve in some capacity. It shifts the focus from worth despite ability to finding ways to serve how you can. This shift makes it feel like the characters believe “useless” disabled cats have no worth.

However! I think it is important to consider some facts about the series and disability rights in our world. To start, disability civil rights is simply not as popular as women’s rights, racial rights, religious rights, or LGBTQ+ rights. It simply isn’t. As a result, the general public isn’t aware of a lot of important trends in the community, such as the separation of disability from usefulness and identity. Basic Google searches can still direct them to older and outdated articles which focus on finding purpose within community. They should do more research, but we can extend some empathy regarding a lack of popular knowledge.

Next, the only characters in Warriors who think of disabled cats as worthless without usefulness (excluding villains and hated characters) are those who are disabled. When they struggle to pursue the occupations they want, they experience issues of self-worth. This is a normal response! Few people want to do nothing of importance to their community, and these characters want to contribute in a way they enjoy. It makes sense for a young character to fear going to the elder’s den because they want to do things with their lives. Characters who comfort them go for the obvious solution of pointing out ways they can contribute to their homes.

That’s the next big thing. The “all for one, one for all” attitude discussed in TiTC is central to Clan identity. The Clans are a survival culture. Their small populations have to continually work to provide food and security for one another. As a result, being able to pull a bit of your own weight is very important. Every member of the Clan needs to find a balance between their individual talent and capability and the support of their Clanmates. Otherwise, cats can die. Brightheart is chastised not for being lazy but for taking on too much. For the Clans, warriors need to find the balance.

And then again, if cats aren’t able to contribute in these important ways, they aren’t thrown aside or seen as worthless. The value of the sick and elderly is a key tenet of Clan life! The elderly are disabled, all old people are. The role of the elder is meant for those who cannot serve the Clan, outside of perhaps telling stories or giving advice, regular old people stuff. They are respected cats. This respect is often framed around past work, but that is the nature of their society. It’s kind of weird that they have to bury the dead, but that’s not the focus of this post.

Yes, the Clans are horrible at allowing disabled characters to find their own place in the Clan rather than forcing them into a place. Cats who want to work as warriors are forced into the elder’s den or the medicine den. The fact that they have to constantly prove their usefulness unlike other cats is wrong. It is a missed opportunity that the authors don’t acknowledge this, and it contradicts many of the points made here. However, for TiTC to say that disabled people are still able to contribute to society and find worth in their work is far from the biggest sin of the authors. The response makes sense for the characters and their culture and isn’t a terrible response. After all, many disabled people find they can still do rewarding activities that are seen as useful to their community, even if those activities aren’t major.

If the Erins really dove into this concept, the disabled world of Warriors would be richer and more thought-provoking.

#warriors #warrior cats #thief in ThunderClan #ableism #disability #disability studies #warrior cats analysis #analysis

[sparkiekong]

Ugh!! Elita back on the smokes again!! Major yuck!! Major turn off. Somebody needs to tell her that. Also she needs to try harder to stop. Chosen one myass!! I bet Lyra and Cat are to blame somehow!

Hi there nonny. Sorry this is gonna be long winded...again.

TLDR: Yeah, it seems she's slipped off the wagon. Addiction is not an easy wagon ride! I'm afraid for some people it's much harder than others. The gang will have relapses and struggles just like anyone else who has addictive tendances. It's not going to stop entirely anytime soon, I'm afraid.

We depict a lot of these types things. Much of mine and @helenofsimblr's writing is taken from real world examples. history, mythology and we do copious amounts of research and add about 300% creativity. Smoking (even the underage smoking) is probably the LEAST worrisome topic in this story and much worse is to come. I hope you're ready nonny... the roller coaster has just started and it's not a smooth ride... It's also completely ok to unfollow for that reason alone if smoking is your line. I promise you that we are definitely going to go beyond that, so stay safe friend! It's quite ok to stop reading. I promise we won't be offended. This story is not everyone's cup of tea and that's ok.

If you're still interested in reading and it's just that I missed adding a trigger or you'd like an additional trigger, please let me know and I will add it. Especially if it's one that you like to use... At the end of the day we're all responsible for our own mental safety on the internet... I can only provide the trigger words to block. You have to do your part. Thanks for the ask friend. I hope you have a lovely and wonderful day.

Rest is under cut with a bit more examples of differences of KSU and IRL world and informational links on medical information on addiction:

There is a key thing to remember about this story and that is that the universe (lovingly called the KSU) is a kind of alternate universe to our own, some scientific developments happened at very different times to our own and smoking science has not yet caught up to ours. In some ways, it's got sort of a sixties feel and in others, it seems like future-vision. It can be a bit confusing, so I'll provide some examples!

A big example is that the KSU recently just discovered ultrasound tech that can be used to check on fetus health and that smoking is generally bad for one's health, but the KSU has been in space for quite a long time, is well established in space and have computers and cell phones... While the real world (the one you and I live in), ultrasound has been around for a long time and is quite advanced, the anti-smoking campaign has been going on for many years with decent success. However, we in IRL we have not until recently (maybe the last 10-15 years) been able to reliably get into space and back safely in various different countries. Admittingly, I don't track all space travel, just the ones that hit the trending list of my news app.

The rest of this is for people who are struggling to understand addiction and/or are suffering or watching someone suffer with it and are looking for understanding. Please! Talk with your family doctors or google your country of origin + addiction help and you can find the help that you or a friend or family member may need.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here are a few links that explain a bit about addiction and why it's not always just as easy as "just don't do that" or "Stop".

#nonny asks #smoking mention #cigarette mention #addiction mention #helenofsimblr #ksu ask #kong rambles

[stillness-in-green]

Wait wait wait if spinaraki is one of three pillars what are the other two

(Re: my tags on this post.)

Ahahaha, well, actually, what I was referring to there was my quip about betting on friendship in a Shonen Jump manga—one of the three pillars of Shonen Jump:

If you google those three terms + Shonen Jump, you can find more in-depth discussion, but basically, they're the themes that manga serialized in SJ generally aim for, not necessarily because it's a strict editorial mandate or anything, so much as because those are just viewed as the most key themes that make a Shonen Jump manga—well, a Shonen Jump manga. This sense of identity accounts for a lot of the traits of the “Shonen Jump main character” archetype, as well as the expected presence of “nakama”-type characters, and plenty of other tropes that you might think of as being synonymous with shonen manga in general.

The importance of this ethos factors into some of my frustrations with Deku, actually. While he had to put in lots and lots of hard work in the early parts of the manga, since acclimating to OFA, there’s been considerably less Effort going into his victories.  It’s part of the conflict between his relationship with his classmates and the secrecy All Might demands, too, a tension that comes to a head in the Deku vs. 1-A fight, but that doesn't really continue on to a better place, I don't think.

If you look at where the three tenets are in that fight, it’s clear from the beginning who’s going to win.  Deku might be putting in Effort, but so are the rest of the kids, and it’s really obvious where the Power of Friendship is between the kid trying fiercely to go it alone vs. nineteen kids working together for a single goal and with the value of their bonds burning in their hearts.  Effort + Friendship = Victory, see?

Even after having proven the supremacy of friendship-based teamwork, though, the characters in-universe (especially the adults) continue putting Deku on this pedestal as the character who'll solve their Shigaraki problem and the kids just kind of—let this happen.

Well, I could elaborate on that more, but EH. That's not why I nor you are here. So to refocus, one of the things that makes the League of Villains so interesting and unique as SJ villains go is how they interact with the three pillars. Villains don't, as a general rule! A key part of having protagonists that express Friendship, Effort and Victory is contrasting them against villains who express the opposite of those things. And, indeed, many villains in BNHA work in exactly that way: AFO has to work for very little, Overhaul is very much not here to make friends (though some of his minions are a different story; the trash trio are very interesting in this context), and so on.

The League, however, is different. That’s most clear in the My Villain Academia arc, with Shigaraki being emblematic of Effort, with hints of Friendship here and there, Spinner’s Friendship taking the form of devotion that powers his Efforts, and Twice being a beacon of both.  Mr. Compress’s faith and self-sacrifice (Friendship+Effort) are instrumental in the villains’ escape from Jakku.  Toga’s grief over losing Twice (Friendship) is pivotal in her endgame arc.  Dabi is pretty bad at the Friendship angle (it’s what most clearly sets him apart from the rest of the League), but he’s a monster when it comes to Effort, pushing through a lifetime of pain because giving up might as well mean dying (and dying absolutely means giving up).

Looking more closely at Spinner and Shigaraki, you can read large chunks of their character arcs through this lens.

Shigaraki starts the story as a cranky and entitled manchild, unpleasantly demanding towards the few people he’s close to; he also bails on USJ once the odds turn against him.  Having thus no Friendship to speak of and being disinclined to bother with Effort, of course he can’t obtain Victory.  His lack of determination is one of the things Deku critiques in their mall encounter; during the training camp, Kurogiri asks if he views the Vanguard Action Squad as merely pawns.  Losing AFO at Kamino deprives Shigaraki of his reset button, meaning he will need to put in more Effort to secure Victory, since there will be no one around to mitigate his defeats anymore.

In the Hassaikai arc, we see him develop an understanding of his team and begin to clarify his ideology, demonstratively opening up to Toga and Twice, and trusting in their Friendship and Effort as the basis of the plan that culminates in the highway attack.  A few months later, Gigantomachia pushes him to extremes like never before, with the place of belonging he offered Twice in particular being key in the League overcoming the MLA.

This arc of finding comrades (Friendship) and discovering the beliefs he’s willing to fight for (Effort) delivers him to a decisive victory (you get the gist) at Deika.

This arc is also why I find the possession plot so frustrating and underwhelming—Shigaraki being subjugated by All For One, his friends scattered and used, feels violently at odds with the way Shigaraki engaged with the three tenets up to this point.  Like, why did we even spend so much time on Shigaraki’s Efforts and Friendships if him spending two years and 85 chapters of the climax as a damsel thanks to AFO is all it was going to amount to?  So I’m very much hoping him taking back control will get us in a better spot going forward, even if I’m skeptical that it’ll be able to wholly undo the damage.

As to Spinner, his arc begins with him being inspired by Stain’s willingness to strive even when he’s one man against the whole world; this admiration of Effort is what leads Spinner to the League, while his sense that his Effort is being wasted is what drives his confrontation with Shigaraki in Chapter 220.  He’s struck to empathy after hearing Shigaraki speak of being empty, however, and seeing Shigaraki’s Efforts lead to Victory in Deika solidifies his loyalty (Friendship). That keen understanding of Shigaraki leads to him being able to wake Shigaraki at Jakku, avoiding a defeat if not securing a victory; his enduring loyalty then leads him into AFO’s hands.

In the last scene we’ve gotten of him thus far, all three tenets are on display: his dedication to Shigaraki drives him to power through heroic opposition and his own fragmenting mind to wake Kurogiri with a plea that’s based in his love of Shigaraki and the League; Kurogiri being woken is directly responsible for Shigaraki being returned to full power just as he also returns to his own mind.

Friendship mixed with Effort leads to Victory—that progression is what I was specifically thinking about when I said I felt pretty good about betting on Friendship in a Shonen Jump comic, and made the quippy tag about the three pillars.

That's the serious answer. See here for the funny/fannish one.

#bnha #the three jump pillars #shigaraki tomura #iguchi shuuichi #bnha spinner #stillness answers

[glamourgoreandmuchmore]

welcome to the blog! here’s a little about the blog and it’s author! 💋

hey guys! i’m beyond delighted to welcome you to my blog, i’m looking forward to showing you all the future content i have in store.

the blog

the title explains a lot for me here!

if google has the answer to everything, why am i always struggling to find exactly what i want? maybe i’m looking for a very specific book recommendation, a time stamp in a real housewives of beverly hills episodes, and often times, i’m trying to find factual and fun news, not competitive, untrue and boring news.

this blog is my way of sharing my expertise knowledge on all the random topics that have piqued my interest over the last few years, my experience through teenage years leading into early adulthood, books, shows and movies that you all need to experience one time in your life to consider it a life well lived.

i look forward to giving advice, sharing my own experiences to help you lot learn from my mistakes and straight up embarrassing moments.

the title of the blog highlights the basis of the blog, glamour being all things pretty, pink and reality tv in life. ( get ready for a lot of real housewives drama ) i plan to tell all my self learnt tips when it comes to travelling, boyfriends, girlfriends, school work, parents ( ugh ) and everything in between. think of me as a fairy godmother sent with the sole purpose of helping you all through your problems and even non problems

the gore, i do have to admit i chose the word gore simply because it created a catchy title, but that doesn’t mean i won’t include it. the gore i speak of in the title is what i played on in my intro, here i plan to keep all of my lovely readers updated with the current factual news, typically crime and court news ( you’ll see why in my about me section further down ) i aim to keep everyone updated on the current and important news, making sure that everything on this blog is 100% factual and as helpful as it can be

the much more, as i mentioned earlier, my life experiences and interests through the years have left me with valuable experience in many ways, socially, intellectually and especially emotionally, if i do say so myself, i would have to toot my own horn and say that i am a master of emotions, i aim to teach you all the ways i have learnt to process emotion and how to use it in the right way to benefit you. here i also intent to give advice, tell my stories, answer questions and most importantly, recommend.

about the author

so, about me, i’m a 20 year old woman studying at university, my course links closely with court and crime ( i’m sure you can take a guess of what it is ) so that explains my gore section of this blog.

although i am 20, i have lived a life full of experiences and lessons, this is part of the reason i started this blog in fact. you will learn a lot more about me through the blog, through my stories and advice.

music, animals, nature, friends and family ( more importantly, friends who are family ) are the key factors in my life, they’re all i need to maintain my positive and healthy outlook on life. i wasn’t always this way, i have grown and taught myself how to see the world in a better light, and how to look for the positive parts in my day, i’m beyond excited to share this with you guys and hopefully help some of you out too. i’ll leave my about me at that so you guys can learn as you read,

thanks for sticking with me

thank you for reading this post, it really does mean a lot!

remember this is my blog, but it is all about you guys, please don’t hesitate to message me about posts you’d like to see, stories you’d like to hear, problems you have that you’d like me to give advice on ( everything’s anonymous don’t you worry )

i’m looking at putting together a form that you guys can submit your problems to, i plan to post one advice post per week! looking forward to talking to you guys

- 💋

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