#This was a major tangent but basically I feel weird about doing normal things now while simultaneously knowing I can’t just sit and wallow | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sapphic-haymaker · 5 months

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Media Log #2: Armored Core 2!

Taking a leap into a whole new console with Armored! Core! 2!!

And oh boy!

this was kinda painful.

Armored Core Gen 1 post

The same game, but somehow less.

So. right off the bat. This game feels pretty alright. We've got pretty similar movement and controls to Gen 1, if a bit slower and pilots a bit smoother. Everything looks pretty nice for a Ps2 launch title. But once i'm past the tutorial mission, I see the Arena is open. I am possessed by a dark spirit to head straight into the thick of it, where I run into a major problem with the game.

All the arm weapons suck.

I'll find this is significantly less of a problem in the story mode missions, but in the Arena is where you're going to most feel it: Basically every returning weapon has less ammo and less damage. Technically weapon damage potential is a bit higher than listed due to a new mechanic where taking successive damage makes your mech overheat, dealing damage over time. But I found almost every arm weapon downright lethargic aside from a few.

I eventually landed on the MGSAW, which is the AC2 version of the same machine gun i cleared MoA on with [The Rook], it did not avoid the nerf bat completely. I think it fires slightly slower and it's damage has been dropped. But it still carries a whopping 1000 rounds and this game isn't bad enough that you can shoot someone a thousand times and they'll still live. This is my main gun for most of AC2's missions.

ACs are just generally bulkier in this new generation. Leading to the early arena fights, where you haven't figured out the damage sauce and the enemies are incompetently built, being absolute wet noodle fights. Shoutouts to the poor woman going by the callsign [Tomboy], equip with only a pistol, which i genuinely don't think could kill me if i simply stood still. It's a miserable existence out here on Mars.

I had never seen an enemy AC run out of ammunition in Gen 1, it happened multiple times with the first few Arena fights in this game. I definitely failed some missions due to my habit of not bringing a sword.

I think I did a couple missions upon running into the first somewhat competently built AC in the game, Werehound. But after doing that to scrap up a bit more money I went the distance and cleared the entire arena 4 or 5 missions into the game.

Small gameplay tangent:

At the start of the game, you're offered a choice between "Normal" and "Hard", I had heard some great things about Hard Mode missions in later AC games, so I immediately picked the option. After finishing it and finding it. not at all hard I googled what the differences was.

Not even the internet could consistently answer my question. It definitely makes your lockbox smaller apparently, some people also say that boosters consume more charge, but I can't find anything concrete beyond those two. These certainly make the game harder but I don't think it's in an interesting way. I wouldn't have switched off of it either way but what a weird design choice.

I did both Gen 1 and Gen 2 fully human. playing Human PLUS just does not sound appealing to me.

Missiles Missiles Missiles.

See. While all the Arm weapons have been nerfed. The back weapons are better than ever, due to Gen 2s being slower than Gen 1s, you can actually reliably hit people with missiles now (I swear it was easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle than hit high mobility ACs with any sort of missile in Gen 1).

I think FromSoft realized they had created a missile meta cause there's a whole new slot called "Extension", over half of extension parts interact with missiles. A new part slot weirdly called "Inside" also lets you mount even more anti-missile defenses.

You've got extensions that let you fire more missile per missile, you've got extensions that fire missiles to counter missiles, you've got decoys to mislead enemy missiles, you've got missiles that split into more missiles. You will find more missiles in AC2 than you will find stars in the goddamn sky.

Meet my next generation gal, [Rock & Soil]! I originally envisioned her as another solid rock(heh) like [The Rook] from MoA but that quickly went out the window as I learned the game. I went with red, earthy tones cause I was actually pretty excited for AC2's setting change to a newly terraformed Mars! (I really don't think they did enough with it imho)

I went with RJ legs simply cause I hadn't spent a significant amount of time on RJ legs in old gen and wanted to try em out. They're fine.

This build is a damage monster. The Arena enemies are FAR tankier than anything in a mission, but they're still balanced around AC2's lower power weapons, being able to spam missiles absolutely decimates them. On top of this, there is a new mechanic in AC2 called "Limit Release", which lets you gain infinite boost for a long period of time, followed by a long period of having zero energy whatsoever.

I abused the hell out of this mechanic. Every single fight I would pop it and completely rush down the enemy opposition with a swarm of missiles. Either I win within the duration or they maul me when it runs out. And that VERY rarely happened. Enemies in the Arena use the aforementioned counter missiles pretty often. But they rarely matter. If i see that they are using interceptor missiles, I simply just spam my weaker missiles until they're out of counter-missile ammo, then rain down pain with my larger back missiles.

Here's what your average fight in AC2 looks like. Kinda beautiful.

It's So Easy…

So. While Arena enemies are full AP ACs, the enemies you'll find in actual missions are… significantly squishier. Genuinely everything in this game melts like butter. There's a very weird decision FromSoft made where if you encounter an AC in story mode, they'll have like 30% the amount of HP. Meaning that you take one look at them and they DIE. It's kinda funny how this is the opposite of AC6 where enemies are easier and squishier in the Arena than they are in Story.

They still do full damage, don't get me wrong, but i've found the AC2 AI doesn't have the Gen 1 bloodlust and they go down without much of a fight.

Aside from that. Almost all AC fights and important boss fights in general take place in cramped, crowded, tiny arenas. It's genuinely kinda baffling how they just don't let you have a nice open arena for a showdown, so the enemies can't move and dodge your fire and they go down quick due to being at such a crazy handicap.

If you want an idea of just how pitiful the enemies are in this game. The final boss went down in 7 lock-ons of a middileweight missile launcher. It has two phases, both went down in the same mount of hits. The entire final boss of the game, down in 1 middleweight missile launcher's clip. Actually laughable.

I don't think I had an awful time with AC2, it had enough setpieces and neat missions to get me along. but it definitely left me feeling wanting. So when I heard I had another AC2 game in store, I was dreading it, but little did I know just how much Gen 2 I had left in store.

Story Tangent take 2.

I kinda didn't vibe with the story of AC2. There's the usual political intrigue and corporations waging war on eachother, but it all didn't hit as much as AC1, I think it has to do with the aesthetics, AC1 is pretty dark and moody, there's an air of mystery to everything. Meanwhile AC2 doesn't have the same vibe, and goes in a weird science fiction direction where you're dealing with implications of ancient aliens on mars that i simply don't care for in my real robot media.

THE REAL AC2 STARTS HERE.

Welcome to AC2: Another Age! (i'll call it AC2.5 a lot) Unlike the Gen 1 games, I did actually load my previous save. I think scrapping for cash is absolutely a staple of Armored Core but i'll be honest I didn't wanna spend anymore time in Gen 2 than I needed to.

It's harder! Mostly! Kinda! Enemies remain their same level of bulk with some new enemies actually taking some shots before going down, unfortunately you're still stuck with AC2's not-great feeling weapon lineup. The most notable change is due to no Arena mode, enemy ACs are at their full capacity and they are definitely more aggressive at times. A particularly early mission throws two absolute powerhouse ACs at you with the condition that you could just ignore them and go for the objective. But. I'm obviously not doing that and rammed my head into them for a while.

What i've found is missile spam is absolutely still strong, but it's less viable when the game is throwing multiple high AP ACs with actual room to maneuver at you. Some missions will even throw up to three at you at a time and the arenas are big enough for them to move around in! For most of my AC2.5 run I started using the series mainstay Karasawa for the first time, which i think it, along with the Grenade Rifle which acts as a higher power, much lower ammo sidegrade to it i feel, is absolute king of arm weapons in this game. No contest.

50 shots isn't a lot but it was enough to get the job done for many, many missions.

Speaking of. AC2.5 is uh. unique. in that it has no story essentially, and is more of a mission pack addon to AC2. Thing is.

It's O n e H u n d r e d M i s s i o n s long

One! Hundred! 100! That's almost TRIPLE the amount of AC2 and significantly more than all of Gen 1 combined! What the fuck! So many of these use the same maps, enemies, setpieces, etc, that you genuinely will run the exact same map with tiny variants 4 to 5 times! And FromSoft is expecting you to be more familiar with the game systems. Did you know that Hovertanks can fly over water without instant dying? I sure didn't until I saw an enemy do it! There's missions that are literally impossible to beat without specialized builds.

A whole suite of missions take place on water maps, making a hover AC practically mandatory. Another required a lightweight build with really good energy/thrust, to the point where my middleweight build genuinely could not make a jump. I hope to see more missions like this in future games. I think it's great and very fitting for the genre to have to modify your mech for different situations, along with getting players out of their comfort zones.

Meet [Sky & Clouds], unlike most games I really did not have a predefined build for all of this. I was constantly changing stuff to suit the mission, which is really good and cool but god I wish I was doing it in a more interesting game. This is a particularly late game edition of [Sky & Clouds], designed to be able to fire the Karasawa as much as possible since other weapons really weren't an option.

This was an absolute SLOG to get through. God. I somewhat wish I just went right to AC3 but my brain wants to say she beat all AC games, so i toughed it out. I don't think I regret playing this game. There was some genuinely cool stuff and neat missions in it. But they're buried under the mountains of monotonous boring missions cause theres no way you can make an expansion like this consistently interesting and unique.

I've put some praise in this AC2.5 section just cause the bad parts are so underwhelming they're not even worth talking about in extensive detail. It's just. Long. Really long and boring.

There's also some throwback fights, two of which were pretty underwhelming (Stinger and Phantasma still eat shit easy), and the other two were absolute blasts. I think it's absurdly cool they throw a Gen 1 AC at you, complete with Gen 1 style movement and damage, just to show the difference in power. In the end the true final post-game mission was a nice lil treat to end the game on and get me the comedic "103%" completion.

I'm so glad to be done with 2nd Gen, it's a neat look at a weird transitional period from the PS1 to PS2, and i have faith that AC3 will be much more refined, mainly cause i've heard good things about that one.

2 Gens down (3 if you count AC6), 3 to go.

Doing these has been a very fun lil experience. I love typing out my thoughts into long rambles. I took a TON more screenshots this time around actively thinking about what to include. If you've read this you're wonderful and I am blowing you a lil kiss. Til next time! <3~

#Fio's Media Log

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bunny-rambles · 2 years

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yeah lmao i've been a language major all the way since high school (that's a thing in italy lol) and just changed my languages once i enrolled into uni ahah :) also known as i hate myself that shit is hard tho french and japanese? as someone who studies or has studied both good luck if you ever wish to restart learning them!! japanese is harrrrd but fun, and i personally find french so fun to speak ahah ;;

imagine being the god of good voice in literally every single dub. only zhongli could do that i love him sigh

also oh my God now that you mentioned yun jin i can just think of scara as an opera singer ;;; i mean he was an opera singer in that genshin!french au i had talked to you eons ago while discussing albedo but ;;; yeah, beautiful gorgeous makeupped scara. what a dream also very very much looking forward to the new scara piece God knows i haven't even read it but i already adore it

oh yes! boba! let's talk about boba! berry's personal recommendation is to start with the most basic one ahah ;; i love the classic milk tea with black or red tea as a base, it's always so good and i feel like it's a good beginner's choice also it's ayato's favourite so you know it has to taste delicious

it's also the easiest to try making at home to be fair!! you just like need to dissolve some sugar in water into a hot pan, when it starts reducing add a bit of tea leaves and once it's nice and infused i just like, strain it straight into cold milk :'' a bit rustic but it works in the hot italian summers

also my like personal fave is matcha latte with salted cream cheese foam on top but matcha has a bit of a strong flavour that not everyone likes so you know, i'd recommend starting with a milder tasting tea if you're not already acquainted to the matcha flavour. also like, tapioca pearls do taste a bit stiff for some people so if you try them and feel like they're not your thing i usually just either ask for them to not be put in my boba or sub them off for other jellies :333

sorry i went on a tangent ahah bubble tea is kind of my thing i literally have a fidelity card for like most of the bubble tea shops in my city and trust me i live in a big city lol

do it! put hearts on your faces, put rhinestones on your faces, put whatever! who cares anyways, the face is yours and you should do whatever the heck makes you smile, not whatever other people might think looks nice. i've started just wearing weird nail polish colours recently and like, i was mildly frown upon for half an hour and then everyone just got used to it and now everyone ended up liking the change lol

me? a wonderful human being? nahhh lmao i'm just used to being the encouraging friend ig. but if my words make you happy then i'm glad!! 💕

gladly accepting the kisses ahah summer nights spent quietly watching romcoms do make you feel a bit touch starved. sending bunches of platonic kisses back!!

- 🍓

So much information about tea,,, I’m definitely taking notes !!

Japanese was making me so confused, I think I’ve learned a few key phrases, or I’ve learned enough to know when something sounds positive or negative or neutral. (Speech patterns,,, sorry for making it sound so complicated) and French,,, Just everything sounds and looks the same with that language after a while T^T I’ve heard that Spanish isn’t that hard, I might try there first if I ever want to learn again. I’m wishing you the best of luck with it though !!

Well, he is called the balladeer, I can definitely see it having some potential. Who knows? He might just be a huge theatre enthusiast !! Oooh you have more about that? I remember you talking about Albedo being a French painter (tiny brain can’t remember the exact name but I know exactly what kind of painting) and it sounded very intriguing.

(If you’ve read the Scara piece, I hope you enjoyed it, let me know <3)

I’m not a huge fan of milk but when it starts getting hot here that actually sounds quite refreshing, I’ve had green tea before and a ‘normal’ tea and that’s the only introduction I’ve had to the tea world hehe;;;;; please go on for as long as you like, I love listening to this !! I just don’t have a lot to say back because it’s something I’m not very knowledgeable in, but I really like encouraging people about their special interests, so if you ever feel like you have to talk about it, my inbox is always here for you <3 Tea must be a very important thing for you to have that many cards oh my goodness

I tried it !! I put make up on last night and it was going really well until I used a really dark shade,,, but I did feel pretty doing it !! The hearts, ehehe,,, I think I’ll just stick with putting heart shaped sequins or gems on my face, my hands are very shaky so it didn’t come out the way I wanted it to. But !! Your advice did work for a little while, thank you <33

You are wonderful. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. Even yourself.

I hope you have a good day/night dearest <3

#bun speaks #🍓 anon #tea talk #when I have the chance I’ll look for some bases

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dreamii-yume · 3 years

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not a request but, Idia seems like the type to make a hentai game based on his darling correct? so he uses that as a base to have experience to woo his darling. but now as he tries it irl, he's confused it worked in the game. so why is the darling crying? is there a glitch somewhere? thoughts?

It all started when he thought that you looked like a character from an anime he watched once. He was a fond of the character so, he couldn’t help but to observe you more than he should, hiding his excitement throughout. There, he found out that you don’t just share a similar appearance but a similar personality as well, the perfect embodiment of that character. Idia almost thought that you were some kind of base for that character, cosplaying even, but you were from another world, weren’t you? Could it be that you’re actually that character and just got reincarnated into his world without knowing that you’re an anime character yourself!?

Reverse Isekai, was it? A twist in that overused genre where the fictional character is the one who gets to be trasported to the normal world. Idia was there on the peak of its popularity, reading all the manga, novels that he can find, watching all the anime adaptations along the way. Then the premise just gets redone over and over again that it slowly became boring. Even if they add twists here and there, it still ended up the same.

But now comes you, a real person that got transported into his world! A person who just happens to look and act like the character from one of his beloved shows! You can’t blame him for being this intrigued by your existence! Because how can he not!? This is an otaku’s dream coming true right here!

And best of all...You have his favorite character archetype! How awesome is that!?

Before he knew it, he was all over you. Well, not really...Since he was too shy to actually talk to you, and all he was just doing is either hide behind that tablet of his and a wall at least five meters away. He had already embraced the joys of being a loner and is practically a master of running away from social gatherings or talking in general, but now that it came to this, it became a double-edged sword.

Ortho said to just build up the courage to talk to you if he so badly wants to and he does. He really, really wants to talk to you, at least once...Or twice...Or thrice- The point is that he really wants to. But as supportive as the little brother of his is, he makes it sound so easy. Of course, someone who doesn’t know jackshit about making friends would never be able to master that skill that easily. He cringes at the thought of doing so without any experience, you’d probably see him as another creepy otaku.

Then, it came to him...A thought that proves that he was actually the genius that everyone claims him to be.

Experience. Of course! He’ll just have to gain experience so he can level up! With that, he can conquer your route doing just that! And what better way to do this than to combine it with something what he’s well-experienced with?

So, he started working. His fingers worked on the holographic keyboard faster than he’d ever been, creating a dating simulator game in less than three days. Ortho himself was surprised to see his usually unmotivated and borderline depressed brother having this intense look in his eyes. Idia barely ate or sleep during all of that, but he doesn’t care, what matters is that he finished it.

He finished the game that can finally help himself out, a dating simulator with only one character to focus on. A character who’s basically a spitting image of you and named after you, he even sneaked in some voice lines that he secretly recorded you saying. Idia had observed you longer to know what to write in the game script, which choices you would make, which words you would say, there was even different sprites and assets of you, depending on your emotions! Though, his hand seems to have slipped and before he knew it, he had already hired some Top-tier doujinshi artists to draw some Not-Safe-For-Work CGs of you for some Not-Safe-For-Work scenes. Yeah...He thought so far ahead that it just kinda turned into...Those kinds of simulation games.

But he regrets nothing.

...Other than the fact that he should probably keep this game away from Ortho as much as possible.

Anyway, it was probably one of the games that he took his sweet time with. Even though it was a game that he himself created, it was like he had developed some form of amnesia and was marvelled at his first time playing such masterpiece. All the twists and events left him in awe, squealing at every single CG when your character goes as little as holding his in-game character’s hand. The more...special scenes had him gulping down his own saliva as a physical reaction, the moans and groans that he recorded from you was when you were stretching in the morning, or when you’re startled or exercising, and yet, it fits so well with each sex scene. His face flushed and his pants felt so tight as he read through the dialogue box, his hand later slipping underneath them just so he could relieve his excitement.

“(Y/N)...Hehe, (Y/N)...♡” He blissfully moans as his hand goes up and down his cock, biting his blue lip in anticipation. Sweat was dripping down his forehead and his flaming hair burned a brighter blue, expressing his excitement. His imagination was going ballistic, imagining your own tightness around him as he slid in and out of your slick insides. The closer the scene reached its climax, the faster his hands became, determine to release at the same time as your character. “Haa...(Y/N)~♡ It feels so good...So good...Haha...”

With a satisfied moan, his own strings of semen shoots against his screen, perfectly coming just in time as your character appears, all flushed and exhausted. Idia let out a sigh, calming down from his high with a few strokes here and there to make sure of a satisfying release.

“Haa...Idia-kun, I love you ♡”

That was his favorite dialogue, no matter how many times he replayed this scene, it never fails to arouse him, making him all warm on the inside. A huge blush covered his cheeks as he smirked, slowly building up into an unhinged chuckle. He brushed his hands down the tainted screen, smudging his cum even more as he imagined it as your face. “Aah...Me too...I love you too, (Y/N)~” He whispered, shivering in excitement. “Aw...I can’t wait to have you for real...Wait for a little while, ‘kay? Hehe...”

This plan was a success and certainly helped him gain the confidence and experience that he needed to finally talk to you properly. Memorizing all the available scenarios and route he can go to, he just felt like he can do just about anything right now. With all these knowledge in mind, you surely won’t be weirded out and things wouldn’t be as awkward as he had already formulated a full conversation on his head. A bad end flag was still left arise, but it was placed so low that Idia can’t just spend another batch of his precious time with it, nothing would go wrong if he just do what he practiced, right? For that reason alone, his birthday was coming up and for the first time in forever, he could use a party as an excuse to talk to you. It doesn’t matter who comes anyway, he’ll have Ortho to accommodate them, Idia’s main focus should only be directed at you.

Plus, if he was going to confess on his birthday, then that’s just a major advantage! Plenty of stuff happens when it’s your own character’s birthday in any game, developers becomes extra generous with the drop rates in gachas, they give you more game currency to spend, and extra scenarios with your favorite characters! Sometimes even free stuff of your choice! This would definitely put his chance rate well above what he expected, it’s you after all!

“Happy birthday, Idia-senpai. I brought this gift for you, I hope you like it.” Ah, there it is, his goddess’ voice echoing through the walls. You said that you were going to conduct a birthday interview with him which got his heart beating like crazy. W-Were you going to start the confession event here!? With all these people!? That’s too daring! Though, that’s really charming of you, and a part of him actually wanted that to happen so he could finally point his fingers to these losers-

But no, unfortunately, he doesn’t have that much confidence to give and so, he ended up having to push you somewhere more secluded. Somewhere more...private. Like his room for example- that’s a good place, right~? Nobody can interrupt this interview that way and...and they can do play all sorts of games right after too...That’s fun, isn’t it!?

The interview was surprisingly fun, although it really just consisted of him ranting to you all about his interests. He ended up spilling all facts about his favorite idol group, games, and movies, his big mouth going off on a tangent once again because of that one question. This wasn’t exactly part of the plan, he was planning to give off a smooth vibe to it but he guessed he was just a tad bit under-level for that. Anyway, you ended gracing him with an adorable giggle so, it doesn’t really affect his motives! He’ll still conquer your route like he did with the game!

A few more questions about his favorite and least favorite food comes, Idia couldn’t help but be impatient. When were you going to activate the scenario, huh? The love confession event, it was the one question that he was waiting for. His heart was ready, his body was ready, his everything was ready...So, why were you standing up with a satisfied look on your face? Aren’t you forgetting something here?

“And that concludes our Birthday Celebration Interview! Idia-senpai, thank you for answering all my-“ Idia’s heart skipped a beat as his hands automatically grabbed your hand and pulled you down, rather aggressively.

“W-Wait! Wait, wait, waitwaitwait-“ Idia stumbled over his words, his face flushed as he stared at you with a crooked but nervous smile. “U-Um...! T-There something else...That I want to tell y-you...”

Oh, no...This was that one scenario in the extreme difficulty mode of the game, where you’re not triggering the confession event at all. You’re probably so conflicted with your emotions that he has to do it himself as the main character. It’s not the original route that he’s going for, but it’s fine, he has the script of this mode in memory too, he should be able to pull it off...That’s weird though, he never remembered activating anything to play in this difficulty...Whatever, real life really is something else, isn’t it?

You were surprised and quite honestly, bothered at his sudden outburst but that’s fine. You were the same in the game too, he just had to take control of the situation. “I-I...” He gathered the words in his head, his face heating up than it ever did before.

“(Y-Y/N)...I like- No...” He stammered as he tries his best to form a nervous smile, his heart was beating so fast but that’s not really something new. “...I love you, (Y/N)...”

Idia heard a slight gasp from you but delusions took over his mind before logic can come bursting through, rendering him practically heart-eyed at the situation. He was distracted, but he still waited for your response even if he was already a hundred percent convinced that his confession was a success. It has to be, he had already seen this exact scenario in the game for a millionth time. “...D-Do you...love me too, (Y/N)...?” He fiddled with the tip of his burning hair, leaning close to you as he knows that it’s a special skill that increases his success rate up to at least twenty percent. “...You l-love me too, don’t you~? Hehe...♡”

Yes. You’re going to say yes. You always had said yes in the game as there was absolutely no reason for you to say otherwise. Everything that happened before this went according to plan, he followed every route, said the correct dialogue choices, so there’s no way that he can fuck this one up. He had definitely conquered your route for real this time!

“Ah...” But he had to wonder though, why were you averting your eyes for? That’s cute, but you don’t have to be shy...Just say that you love him too, he can hardly wait! “Idia-senpai...”

“...I’m sorry.”

Idia blinked, his body freezing on its spot as you bowed in front of him so respectfully. Your mouth began to move to deliver more words of explanation for him to understand, but he just couldn’t hear anything else anymore.

What did you say? You’re...sorry? Haha...For what though? That’s weird, that’s not what you were supposed to say, even if this was set in extra hard mode. He did everything correctly so, no matter what difficulty he’s in, you should be able to accept his confession every time.

...Is it a bug in the system? A glitch that he didn’t see?

You called out to him once again, you called out his name and upon looking up, he could only see your face. So full of concern and pity, but no signs of falling in love whatsover. No...You shouldn’t be looking at him like that, what the hell just happened?

This is all wrong...!

Before Idia could even properly process anything, he had found himself on top of you, both frustration and anger building up inside him. His hand, albeit really shaky, had found itself a dangerous clasp around your neck and your expression suddenly turned white. You’re struggling underneath him, like a deer caught by a hunter, kicking and scratching his arms away. But you were scared, he could tell by that look in your eyes, he could easily squeeze your neck in this position after all.

“I-Idia-senpai...!” He heard you call out but your voice just bounced off his ears, he was too distracted by his own shock. This was not in any of the scenarios that he formulated inside his mind, and he created thousands, for Hades’ sake! His breathing became unstable as he began to hyperventilate, sweating immensely as he tries to wreck his brain for whatever the hell he was supposed to do in this scenario. This wasn’t how the game continues after a confession event! Was he too inexperience or under-level to conquer your route? Did he miss a side quest from you or something? What did he do wrong? Was it the lack of gifts of affection? Normally, you were supposed to say that you love him too, embrace him before the two of you share a kiss and-

...A kiss?

Oh...Oh, that’s right! Maybe this is where the code got rewritten and that the kiss should come first now? Maybe your character was taking a different turn, you were probably shifting to other character types to accommodate your new-found feelings...You’re being a Tsundere, aren’t you~? So cute, but you don’t have to push him away though, he’ll keep coming back to you anyways.

...And so, in hopes of desperation, that’s exactly what he did, he leaned down at you as he smashed his lips onto yours. You widened your eyes with a muffled scream coming out of you, but Idia kept your mouth busy as it is. He was on cloud-nine, enjoying your soft lips against his chapped ones so much so that he just instinctively started grinding his hips against yours. You were starting to panic, but that’s fine, that’s a normal reaction. Both in real life and in-game.

By the time that he finished selfishly sucking up your lips, ultimately creating a little bruise on the side, he pulled away with a string of saliva connecting both your tongues together. Idia giggled to himself, the feeling of your lips and tongue was still lingering on his that he can’t help but be hungry for more. However, looking back at you, he blinked as tears suddenly began to stream down your cheeks. Your chest heaving up and down as small hiccups comes out of your every sob.

It made him panic slightly at first, but then remembered a scenario like this once in the game...Though, it wasn’t a scenario as drastic as this one, that he’ll admit. “A-Ah, you shouldn’t cry...” He tried comforting, letting go of your neck and wiping your tears away with a nervous smile. “Y-You’re not supposed to cry after a c-confession event, it’s not in your file...”

You flinched at his touch. “S-Stop, please...L-Let me go...” You whimpered, lifting your arms up to try and shield yourself away from him. “I-I won’t tell anyone, I-I swear-!”

Idia’s hand twitched, quickly covering your mouth as a nervous rection so that he wouldn’t hear the words that he doesn’t want to hear anymore. He felt scared to touch you now, seeing how defensive you got, his little angel’s crying and it’s all because of him. Your words certainly impacted him, but he shook his head instead, he has to keep himself from looking down.

“...You shouldn’t say that either, that’s not in your script.” He said with a bit of stricter tone onto it, attempting to show you how capable he can really be. He grabbed your wrist and forced your hands open, revealing your terrified expression. “Don’t worry...It’s just a little twist on the story, I’m sure. I just have to restart the system, right...?”

“I-I’ll fix you up soon enough, H-Honey~” You watched him with eyes slowly widening in realization and terror as he started to untie his tie, to remove the birthday outfit that he clearly dislikes. You were frozen, you can’t move, not like you could do much with someone as big as Idia straddling above your stomach but you were left immobile with fear. His use of love words sounds extremely clumsy and Idia himself cringes at the sound of it coming from his own mouth but he’s enthusiastic. That doesn’t make it any less terrifying for you at all.

The game’s not finish yet. It’s just as he expected, there was a little glitch that needs a little fixing. It was the cause of a scenario as unreasonable as this one to appear. But it’s fine. He can fix it all up, he can fix you all up and when he’s done with that, he’ll definitely conquer your route for real this time.

After all, there’s no game that he can’t finish, that would be a shame to his Otaku title! It doesn’t matter if it’s his birthday, he’s going to work all night to fix this very unpleasant glitch in you. What a pain~ Idia wonders what kind of price he’ll get from you after this.

...Not that he’s going to complain anytime soon lol

Idia has the personality of an ugly bastard. Just saying *cough*

#twisted wonderland #yandere twisted wonderland #yandere #idia shroud #yandere idia shroud #Birthday Crumbs

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askkrenko · 4 years

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Krenko’s Guide to Pokemon: Grimer Line

Every RPG has slimes. Pokemon is no exception. DESIGN: They’re slimes. Grimer and Muk are just blobs of purple goo with eyes, and you know what? That’s okay. They have some distinctions- Grimer’s upright and looks cheerier while Muk’s more fluid and more terrifying. Grimer has wide eyes and Muk has narrow ones, but mostly Muk is just big Grimer, but when you’re making a mostly amorphous sludge pile, that’s how you do it. It also has a lot in common with the classic ‘mud man’ enemy type.

There’s nothing overly novel about Grimer and Muk compared to other slime monsters in other stories, but this cements them as really feeling like “the” poison-type Pokemon. Sure, there’s lots of Poison types, but none of them feel as innately toxic and disgusting as Grimer and Muk.

Meanwhile, Alolan Grimer and Muk ARE something special.

Based less on generic toxic sludge and more specifically on oil slicks, Alolan Grimer and Muk add color. It’s just a bit for grimer, though I do love the way the little crystals give him silly looking teeth, but then Alolan Muk is clearly doing that oil-on-water color thing. Further, it’s got toxic crystals which while I don’t quite ‘get’ as far as why they’re there, they look cool and definitely make it a lot more menacing. Alolan Muk is one of the best Alolan forms for design, in that not only is it super cool but it only makes sense as a Pokemon because we’re so used to regular Muk. If Muk is the slime in every RPG, Alolan Muk is the alternate version of the slime that appears late game to take advantage of the fact that you think it’s just a slime. EVOLUTIONS: Both forms of Grimer are late bloomers, not evolving to Muk until level 38, which is honestly awful for their stats. Grimer’s on-par with a Starter Pokemon, but Muk’s weaker than a fully-evolved Starter even though it comes later. I understand the starters are supposed to have a bit of an edge for gameplay, but still. Grimer should evolve somewhere closer to 32, or Muk should be a bit heftier.

Art by Clinkorz, the Laser Necromancer

TYPING: Kantonian Muk is pure poison, which is a great defensive type but a poor offensive one. Poison resists five types and is weak to two, but by the same note, it’s only super effective against two, is resisted by four, and steel’s immune. Adding Dark to the mix on Alolan Muk is major upgrade. Offensively, it’s two more types to hit, with no type resisting both Dark and Poison, and defensively Poison and Dark cover most of each other’s weaknesses. Alolan Muk is only weak to Ground, is immune to psychic, and is still resistant to Poison, Ghost, Grass, and Dark. STATS: Muk’s stats are mostly good all around. It’s only real weakness is a low speed, but it’s 105 HP makes up for its slightly-below-average defense, and combines well with a 100 special defense. 105 Attack is also pretty hefty. Muk’s special attack is garbage, but who cares? It just means Muk won’t use special attacks. Both forms of Muk have the same stats.

Art by tatanRG

ABILITIES: Both forms of Muk have access to Poison Touch, which adds a 30% chance to poison the target on all contact moves. As Muk is a physical attacker, this means ‘basically all your attacks.’ It also stacks with attacks that already have a chance to poison by giving a second chance, so using Poison Jab with Poison Touch gives a 30% chance to poison twice, which brings it to about a 50% chance. This is an all around good ability as long as you’re swinging.

Kantonian Muk can get Stench, which gives a small chance to Flinch the opponent on every hit. The problem is, Flinching only works if you go first, and Muk is at least 30% molasses by volume.

Kantonian Muk’s other option is Sticky Hold, which prevents it from losing its item to Thief, Knock Off, Bug Bite, or whatever. Unless your strategy really demands it, there’s really no need for this over Poison Touch. Alolan Muk can get Gluttony to eat a berry early, which is fine for more HP. Alolan Muk has decent bulk, so landing in half rather than being one-shot is frequent, and a good berry is a decent heal on a Pokemon whose best stat is its HP. Alolan Muk’s unique ability, Power of Alchemy, only works in double battles. If your ally faints, Alolan Muk gains that ally’s ability if possible. It’s weird, and it’s got one very specific use: Giving Alolan Muk Levitate. Ground is its only weakness, so if you can give it Levitate, it’s a lot safer. Of course, this generally involves exploding your own Weezing or something like that, but still.

Art by JoshuaDunlop MOVES: Poison Jab or Gunk Shot. They’re both good. Gunk Shot is stronger overall, but the low accuracy can easily leave you high and dry. Further, Gunk Shot is ranged, while Poison Jab makes contact, so if you’re using Poison Touch, the answer is always Poison Jab. With another ability, Gunk Shot is more reasonable. Kantonian Muk gets a bit of coverage in moves like Rock Slide and Brick Break, as well as the elemental punches. Though nothing is supremely special, Muk has good attack and just having a variety of types to hit with opens up opportunity, and the fact that they’ll mostly benefit from Poison Touch is an added bonus.

If you want to breed a Muk for it, Curse is a great setup move and will help Muk spam Poison Jab for even more damage. Muk’s a physical attacker with garbage speed already, so it’s all gravy. To really go all-in, throw in Rest and Sleep Talk and your Muk isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Alolan Muk is also going to want a Dark attack in its lineup, and while Crunch has the most raw damage, the right answer’s generally going to be Knock Off to inhibit enemy strategies.

For additional strategy options, Muk can learn Shadow Sneak and Pursuit, and has the attack to make use of both. Pursuit is especially notable on Alolan Muk because why would a Ghost type or especially a Psychic type want to stay in against that? It’s only weak to Ground. You gotta switch. And when in doubt: Muk can learn Explosion and has enough Attack to make that sufficiently scary.

Shiny Alolan Muk by Dolcisprinkles OVERALL: Muk does pretty okay for itself, but Alolan Muk is honestly just better. There’s basically no reason to include Kantonian Muk on a team now that Alolan Muk exists. Muk has solid stats, good coverage, and a great ability in Sticky Hold, and Alolan Muk just has all that stuff but better resistances and a second line of STAB. Yes, the resistances are different and maybe you really want to throw Kantonian Muk in front of a Fighting type, but that’s a minor thing. I like Muk overall, and it’s a fine Pokemon with a cool design. Alolan Muk is a great Pokemon with a cooler design. It’s disappointing to see Stench on a Pokemon that can’t make use of it, but my only real strong complaint about Muk is that it gets way too many special attacks. Just so many. I know the poison type is mostly special, but the only physical attacks Kantonian Muk learns via level-up are Pound and Gunk Shot. This makes it really hard to use in a normal playthrough.

I guess I’m going on a bit of a tangent here, but with Pokemon there’s two basic views of them: how they are in the RPG and how they are in high-end battles. Here I mostly talked about Muk’s place in high-end battles, which is ‘decent,’ but its place in the RPG is actually really bad. Kantonian Grimer’s a really late bloomer for evolution, and it’s a physical attacker that starts with Pound and doesn’t get another physical attack (other than the basically useless Fling) until Gunk Shot at level 40 if you don’t use a TM. While this is all fixed in Alolan Grimer (it learns many Dark type physical attacks, plus Poison Fang in the intermediate levels), it still puts Kantonian Grimer at a place where if you catch a wild Grimer and start to use it it’s just going to be awful. And it’s not. Grimer’s a good pokemon and a worthy addition to a team. But only if you throw TMs at it. Look, I’m not expecting every Pokemon - or even ANY Pokemon- to have its optimal moveset with no TMs, no Tutors, and no Egg Moves, but I do expect every Pokemon to have a STAB move of the higher of its attack stats before it evolves. Oh, and you know how Poison Touch is Muk’s best ability? Not only is it a hidden ability, but Pound is literally the only Contact move Muk gets via level-up.

Art by Kaek

#Krenko's Pokemon Guide #Grimer #Muk #Alolan Grimer #Alolan Muk

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terramythos · 3 years

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TerraMythos 2021 Reading Challenge - Book 2 of 26

Title: Authority (The Southern Reach #2) (2014) - REREAD

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Genre/Tags: Horror, Science Fiction, Ecological Horror, Cosmic Horror, Mystery, Weird, Third-Person, Unreliable Narrator

Rating: 8/10

Date Began: 1/05/2021

Date Finished: 1/10/2021

John "Control" Rodriguez, a disgraced former spy, is given an opportunity to redeem himself at the Southern Reach, the clandestine organization that oversees the mysterious and horrifying Area X. The director has gone missing following the disastrous "twelfth" expedition in Annihilation. Control is brought in to take over her job and fix the Southern Reach... and perhaps find a way to combat the insidious, paranormal effects of Area X.

But Control soon discovers just how deep Area X's corruption infects the place. Even worse, failures of the past-- both his own and those of the Southern Reach-- return to haunt him in disturbing ways. Badly outmatched within and without, Control will need to do everything he can to save not only the organization, but himself.

The last fragment of video remained in its own category: "Unassigned." Everyone was dead by then, except for an injured Lowry, already halfway back to the border.

Yet for a good twenty seconds the camera flew above the glimmering marsh reeds, the deep blue lakes, the ragged white cusp of the sea, toward the lighthouse.

Dipped and rose, fell again and soared again.

With what seemed like a horrifying enthusiasm.

An all-consuming joy.

Full review, some spoilers, and content warning(s) under the cut.

Content warnings for the book: some body horror but way toned down compared to Annihilation. Mind control/hypnotic suggestion is still a thing. Non graphic sexual content. Disturbing images. Without spoiling the entire book, there are several scenes that come off as gaslighting, but do have an alternate explanation. As before, a pervasive sense of unreality.

While Annihilation is a deep dive into the horrors of Area X, Authority takes a step back. It examines the situation from the perspective of the Southern Reach, the organization that oversees the expeditions we got to know so intimately in the last book. Control is a newcomer, so he functions as a natural outsider perspective. However, he's far from naïve due to his past experience in what I have to assume is the CIA (just called "Central" in the book). It's clear from the get-go that the Southern Reach is falling apart with its ancient buildings, circular and helpless theories, dwindling funding, and bizarre office politics. While Annihilation frames the Southern Reach as shady and possibly complicit in Area X's existence, Authority demonstrates the government would be predictably bad at handling an unknowable cosmic horror zone over any length of time.

Though I noted in my Annihilation review that most of the mystery surrounding Area X remains just that, Authority casually drops two major revelations in the first few chapters. First is... it's definitely aliens, right? Like, that's the only explanation that tracks-- why everything about the place is anathema to humanity, why it's impossible for characters to fully understand it, why mimicry is such a major aspect, etc. If you didn't suspect this already, it explains a lot. In particular, the "colonization" terminology and imagery in Annihilation hits different in that context. I have a lot of feelings about how this series approaches the extraterrestrial, but I'll save that for my Acceptance review.

The second reveal is that Control is taking over for the former director of the Southern Reach, who is MIA following Annihilation's "twelfth" expedition. Who is the director? The psychologist-- the pseudo antagonist of the last book, who we know got Super Killed Off. Turns out she's important and probably not actually evil? The biologist is also inexplicably back, but something is off about her, and she insists on being called Ghost Bird now. Did the biologist truly return (counter to the ending of the last book) or is this one of the shells Area X sometimes spits back out into the real world? If she's the latter, Ghost Bird seems to have much more personality and self awareness than the others. It is interesting to consider an entity of Area X would willingly name herself.

So, Authority is a weird book. The horror element is still present, but toned down. Instead, there's a lot of focus on the new character Control, his past, and the workings of the Southern Reach. In some ways this is refreshing. Annihilation (and the finale Acceptance) are so deeply entwined with Area X it's hard to see what "normal" looks like, and Authority brings that perspective. Relatively speaking. Second, and this is a spoiler, much of that normalcy is a facade. Control is basically mind controlled (heh) by a faction in Central, and is unaware of it for most of the book. It comes across in little ways, like the anachronistic storytelling and Control's confusion/disorientation at times.

We also learn that Area X doesn't just contaminate things inside it, but things outside it as well... and it's been doing this for some time. As a result, there's always a sense of Area X lurking in the periphery, manifesting in strange and unexpected ways. Something I like is the background chatter Control overhears being lines from Annihilation, which he isn't aware of, but the reader sure is.

I've read this book a few times, and while there are things I really like about it, it's probably my least favorite of the trilogy. I think the slower pacing and different narrative approach have merits, but just aren't as interesting to me as the rest of the series. It's noteworthy that my favorite bits in Authority are the disturbing video of the first expedition and the sudden End of Evangelion-esque return of Area X near the end-- not the espionage and philosophical tangents that comprise most of the book. There are several ideas that seem interesting but don't go anywhere, and those feel like a waste of space. I think Authority could be pared down to half its page count and still get across the same feelings and general concept.

Control is also not the most interesting protagonist, especially compared to previous and later characters. He's not terrible, but he spends most of his time just thinking in circles and observing mundane office politics. While this is fine at first it starts to drag as the story goes on. As I said, a lot of tangents go nowhere, and there's not much going on beyond those until well over halfway into the book. Control does have a hidden tragic backstory, and it's interesting enough, but it barely factors into the overarching Area X storyline outside some symbolic comparisons. He feels out of place, perhaps intentionally.

I do like the dry humor and observations Control brings and how they contrast with the intense tone of Annihilation. I can also see the appeal of having a more ordinary character, if only to bring context to the extraordinary. But the problem is Control isn't ordinary. He's the youngest member of a dynasty of professional spies! Yet somehow I just don't find him exciting compared to an antisocial biologist. I dunno. Ultimately Control is a pawn in the story, used and manipulated by other people, and (spoilers) this doesn't change in Acceptance.

I had similar dilemmas with VanderMeer's Ambergris books, particularly book two, so perhaps it's a fact about his writing. When it's good it's GOOD, but sometimes the things I like get lost in rambling narrative fluff. The question is whether getting through the less interesting parts is worth it for the really good parts. With The Southern Reach trilogy, I'd argue the latter. I have no issues with the style or pacing in Annihilation or Acceptance, and the overarching story is fascinating.

I've mentioned many times before that I usually struggle with book twos in trilogies, and this one isn't an exception. However, I do appreciate what Authority is going for on a meta and lore level when viewing the series as a whole. It does establish a lot of things that either explain earlier stuff or pay off later; it just takes a while to get to them. The context of everything else bumps this to an 8.

#taylor reads #8/10 #2021 reading challenge #google why was this image so crisp yet i couldn't find anything good for annihilation. biphobia at its finest #i like how this review turned out :>

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transgamerthoughts · 4 years

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Idle Thoughts On Games During Pandemic Times

I’m in an interesting position as I write this. Since I’ve written here I have moved out of journalism and towards the dev side of games. Good news! I’m happier! Bad news! It can feel weird to have public opinions. That said, I miss writing and I’ve had some thoughts about games I’ve played (mostly major titles) that I want to share. I’m keeping them loose and I hope folks will allow me the indulgence. Here we are!

Ghost of Tsushima

I’ve been surprised by how playable Ghost of Tsushima is. Which is to say that the world is very enjoyable to explore. There’s something about ambling between marker to marker, or stumbling upon a few hidden items, that fundamentally works. I’ve seen some folks imply that this is simply the result of overproduced open-world design philosophies. A sort of focus-tested gaming drug-world that it’s easy to slide into. There’s probably some truth to that, and there’s a discussion to be had about the dangers of pastoralism, but I think that the open-world itself is designed well. Sure, there’s collectables and outposts to conquer and all the things you would expect but those are not the appeal. In fact, in many cases, engaging with those things feels worse than wandering. In the early game particularly, combat is not enjoyable. But there’s a sensibility to the world, a sort of stubborn antiquatedness that calls back to an open-world structure—one where space existed for its own sake—that we don’t see in as many games now. That’s curious to me because Tsushima has been criticized for feeling old-fashioned but I think this approach to world design isn’t so far removed from Breath of the Wild. It is certain littered with more *stuff* that you can stumble on but despite the fact that I can set markers or unlock bonuses that make these things easier to find, I don’t feel an overwhelming push to engage with them.

That good because combat is a decidedly mixed affair. I’m not eager to slide into difficulty discussions but if Tsushima’s closest cousin is Assassin’s Creed, it’s no surprise that I’ve instantly found the game more playable at a lower difficulty setting. If the goal is to emulate film—and there can be discussion about how well that’s actually done; black and white filters don’t suffice to make something comparable to Kurosawa—then Tsushima’s normally cluttered and gamey combat rubs against that impulse. It’s a game with sub-weapons, ninja-like tools, multiple stances for breaking the guards of certain enemies, and a wealth of skill trees. The beauty of the action (which you can frame at the push of a button thanks to a respectable photo mode) can get lost in the shuffle. Lowering the difficulty has led to speedier and more dramatic encounters where a few sword strokes can slay a handful of men. It’s a curious thing, as I tend to play games on higher difficulties, but this is one of the few times where I felt it might have served a game better to streamline combat down to the most basic of interactions. Tsushima’s combat can get very busy and I did not enjoy tackling challenges or outpost conquest until I progressed to unlock more abilities while also lowering the difficulty. Even then, those are the moments I care for the least.

I feel unable to comment on critical discussions about Tsushima’s story and politics but as an observer to the input of Japanese-American writers and Japanese devs/players, one thing that’s struck me is how the broader gamer culture has reacted to the dialogue. There have been moments where gamers have minimized the voices of some critics with the exultations of certain Japanese writers, which eliminates valid concerns from people who have every right to look close at a game connected to their heritage. The lens through which Tsushima was made was at the end of the day a Western one and that’s worth discussing. I am grateful for the writing of critics like Kazuma Hashimoto at Polygon that dig into these tensions. I will say that I feel like Tsushima sometimes wants to do the proper thematic thing where it will say that entrenched nobility and cultural notions of honor can be inherently damaging but because that’s mostly expressed, at least in the main plot, as “the outside invaders are besting us because of our traditions” it falls flat. Tsushima works best in side quests where the stakes are smaller. It’s thematic aspirations are best when things are personal and on a more humble scale. I like the version of Tsushima I get to play in those moments more than I like the grand gestures towards honor or combat challenges. Which is to say I mostly want Way of the Samurai with multiple zones and a more connective tissue. Tsushima teases that possibility without ever really getting there. In those teasing moment, the game makes a lot more sense to me.

I’ve enjoyed myself and intend to finish soon. That enjoyment comes with a lingering question: what other game could this have been? It’s inspired an image in my mind of a different sort of open-world ronin game where there is a smatter of villages with sub-stories and perhaps the smallest A-plot. A game with Mongol invaders, dramatic family conflict, or shogunate decrees. Tsushima has capture my attention but I do wonder more about what might have been that what is right in front of my eyes.

The Last of Us: Part II

I have struggled with this game in ways I did not know were possible. When I play it, I find myself taken in by the raw skill of the actors. There’s a mood and tone I enjoy, a somber twinge to the infected escapades that lingers from the first game. I like The Last of Us. I think there’s small moments of character interaction that express core things about the cast’s shifting relationships. James Howell embarked on a video essay series about this very thing and while it will remain unfinished perhaps forever, I suggest engaging with it. Suffice it to say, the changing language of Joel and Ellie’s mechanical interactions does a lot to underscore the narrative. I think players often think of the The Last of Us in terms of pure narrative but these smaller considerations reveal a game with a very natural approach to story telling. The Last of Us 2 has these moments and often hides them within combat. When multiple factions of humans and infected interact, their clash and the behavior of the AI tells something fundamental about the game world.

The Last of Us: Part II is a cynical game with an unflattering view of humanity, a view that (in spite of Joel’s selfishness in the first game’s climax) feels somewhat at odds with what came before. It is, in fact, possibly the most cynical game I’ve ever played. That’s hard to talk about but it’s best expressed in the various dying barks of enemies or moments where the player is forced into violent, dehumanizing slaughter. In the former case, it feels like a magic trick. The first time you hear someone cry out their dog’s name, it can be tragic. The next five times you hear it, it feels forced. Like any trick, it’s never as powerful as the first time. You might argue that’s the point: that as you follow Ellie’s journey, the player also stripes enemies of their humanity and agency but the player’s culpability is secondary to the writer’s in some ways.

Players did not contrive to have Ellie rob Nora, one of the game’s major black characters, of her fundamental dignity before murdering her. Nor are players the ones who shove a knife into Mel’s pregnant stomach. Those are scenarios crafted by designers and writers, and much like how retroactively guilting the player for killing a doctor in the first game (An unavoidable action, mind you! Joel will do this regardless of what the player wants.) feels manipulative, calling a player’s culpability into question as Ellie fails to act like any sort of reasonable human being also rings hollow. There is a perpetual push and pull between players and controllable actors, best expressed in the verbs that we are allowed to perform. It is telling the more often than not, Ellie’s most egregious acts of violence happen outside of the player’s control.

And yet there are moments where I buy deeply into the story. Notably, it happens when Abby is on screen more than Ellie. (Tangent: Abby has more interesting gameplay scenarios that lean closer to horror game vibes like what you’d find in The Evil Within. TLOU is way more interesting working in that mode than HUMAN vs. HUMAN drama.) Abby is also allowed more growth and agency than the script ever gives Ellie. At the core of this is Abby’s relationship with Lev. It is here that I’ve had my largest struggle with the game.

Discussion about Lev has often bowled over transgender commentators. For many people, Lev resonates regardless of anything the plot says about his gender. Lev captures people’s attention because Lev is eminently likable. That’s a testament to Naughty Dog’s writing. Still, there is a sense that Lev’s wider resonance has left some folks (particularly queer folks) without as much space to talk among themselves and hash out sentiments without the discussion getting overpowered. This is complicated by an environment where creators seem more empowered to directly speak to criticisms.

Which is to say that as a trans critic (perhaps ex-critic) watching from the sidelines, I was very hurt and dismayed to watch people who do not share in the transgender experience comment quickly about Lev. And while the discussions about Lev are varied—the trans community, like any community, is not a monolith—it’s sometimes felt like trans voices were made the quietest when talking about this character.

Many things are true about art at the same time. Lev can act, as is the case for some players, as a token figure whose struggles are appropriated and turned into spice adding flavor to the apocalypse. Spice that allows us to be seen as we are usually seen: in pain and defined by that pain, and which displays that pain voyueristically for cis players. Lev can also be a kind-hearted and respectable hero, and ray of light within a dark story. Neither feeling is in competition. Some will find strength and inspiration in the character, others will see the machinations of corporate powers and award-chasing writers. Both can be true.

Enthusiastic fans and players are quick—not in a malicious sense; merely in their excitement—to defend the things they enjoy. If they found a thing good it stands to reason the thing must be good. They empathized and that is taken as proof that a thing is good irrespective of other concerns. This is a kind impulse but one that robs people of their concerns, or at the very least close off conversations quickly. I cannot properly diagnose this except to suggest that there’s a growing force of cultural positivism that’s encircled games of a certain scale. One which shuts down a lot of valuable engagement. The bigness of the moment, of the object, demands the moment be the Best Possible Moment For Games regardless of the qualities of the object itself. That’s worrisome to me.

The Last of Us: Part II has become nearly impossible to talk about even now because we are dealing with an object so large as to have a gravity that weighs everything down. A game with sublime moments that intoxicate deeply but one where voices of critique or caution are buried away largely because of the potency of that intoxication. I deeply wish that wasn’t the case because the breadth of discussions that might’ve happened would have been really valuable.

Aim Lab

I’ve gotten really into Valorant. It’s scratched an itch for a type of multiplayer shooter that I haven’t had scratched in a long time. My experience with the game itself has been good but the surrounding experience has been decidedly mixed. Suffice it to say I’m mostly living the solo-queue life and it’s a miserable existence even with the occasional highs. Yet, there’s a mechanical crunchiness to Valorant that deeply compels me and I’ve enough competitive drive that (in spite of the fact that the most of beloved social aspects of the game seem generally out of reach for me) I’ve really devoted myself to improving as player. Enter Aim Lab. It’s a totally free aim trainer that anyone can download off Steam. It has a variety of drills and exercises that can be used to improve a variety of first-person shooter skills. In one case, you might be flicking from target to target with the express goal of training your aiming speed. In another you might need to look at a group of colored balls, which will then disappear with one of them changed. You’ll then need to shoot at the different one as quickly as possible. You earn a score for each drill, which is tracked and compared to global records and folded into a ranking system. I’ve placed in the “Ruby” range for my rank, which is mostly in the middle of the road. (It’s a weird rank above gold but I think before Plat?) Mechanically sound with sloppy spots. I’m able to identify these thanks to Aim Labs. For instance, I know that I am fast and relatively accurate but that tracking moving targets is a difficulty for me. I know that I am quicker at things on the right side of my screen but also that I’m thankfully able to read changes in the environment quickly. This might sounds like a dry and rote way to approach video games but Aim Labs’ suite of repeatable and trackable challenges means that it is very easy to trace gradual improvements.

As a result, what might have been dull work becomes something akin to going to the gym. I can feel the ways in which my control over a mouse have changed. I understand which muscles need more flexing. Importantly, for all my weakness I also know strengths. Playing Aim Labs—and yes, this is play—becomes a semi-automatic and meditative experience like swinging at a batting cage.

As a player (again, I hesitate to use the word critic anymore) who tends to engage with games on thematic levels even when it comes to mechanics, it’s been surprisingly gratifying. Part personal ritual, part labor. Bubblegum for the brain. Chew chew chew. Shoot shoot shoot. Take some notes and chew some more. Not much more to say except Aim Labs has surprised me with how enjoyable and relaxing it can be.

Necrobarista

Necrobarista was not what I expected. That’s because I started playing it with what felt like a safe-assumption: it would be comparable to some of my favorite indie “drink” games like Va-11 Hall-A or Coffee Talk. It’s hard for me to break down those games and how their structure—insightful conversations punctuated by drink-mixing and the occasional memory puzzle or story choice—works for me. I know folks who have played those games and bounced off for entirely understandable reasons but I love them. They call to mind some of the personal experience I had as both someone who worked at a bar and coffee shop. In spite of their fantasy settings, they evoke a highly specific and idiosyncratic part of my brain. Necrobarista doesn’t quite do that because it is strictly a visual novel. Repetitive work such as drink making is entirely absence. As a result, I initially found Necrobarista harder to engage with. It lacked the percussive but comfortable rhythm I was craving in quarantine.

That highly specific preferential quirk/personal need might place the game lower on my list then the other two (the game’s certainly in conversation with them to a degree; it’s got plenty of shout-outs and references that make it clear the designers know the ballpark they’re playing in) but it doesn’t mean it is a “lesser” game in terms of the world it is presenting or the character you’re watching. Necrobarista has, if nothing else, some of the most naturally flowing dialog I’ve experienced in a while. That is partly because I’ve been sampling so much AAA stuff, where the writing tends to eschew the evocative for clean, crisp (and corporate!) staccato, but even in comparison to other VNs or drink games, it finds some more integrated and interesting ways to handle lore dumps. That’s helped by the core conceit. The lead character Maddy Xiāo runs a coffee shop alongside her wise former boss Chay that just so happens to serve drinks to the recent deceased. That makes it really easy to introduce a character, as the plot soon does, fresh off the mortal coil and eager to learn about life after death. It’s a common writer’s trick to place a clueless character in a plot so world-building can happen but because the stakes are high—the freshly-deceased have only 24 hours before they pass into the afterlife—there’s an urgency in the explanations that feels warranted. I could probably spend a lot of time breaking down the ways in which Necrobarista successful builds the world around the player. From a well-framed scenario and properly placed characters (an inquisitive child-genius, for instance) to the ability to click highlighted words for snarky but never crass footnotes, you never want for necessary knowledge but also never feel like your hand is being held. You’re not digging for meaning or piecing together arcane lore concepts. You know what you need to know, it feels fun to learn it, and the characters all make sense. They’re also incredibly likable. Necrobarista’s largest strength isn’t that the details are handled well; it’s that the core cast is deeply relatable. That’s important because the story moves from coffee to magic and death within a clipped 4 hour playtime. Relationships are clear, motivations clearer, and while some of the standout story-telling pieces are in optionally readable side-chapters, the main story lifted up by how eminently fun it is to eavesdrop of these character’s lives. The only glaring exception is a Greek chorus of robots that seem out of place and overly-chatty. Necrobarista sometimes feels eager to impress structurally, and that’s no more clearer than when these fellas are on screen. The difficult thing about Necrobarista’s literary approach is that the pandemic’s completely shot my attention span. It took my two weeks of on and off play to finish what is a very short game. That said, given the enormity of some world events I found it edifying and cathartic to engage with a piece of media explicitly concerned with death and dying. It wasn’t what I thought and I kinda wish it had a bit more happening mechanically but I’m really happy for the time I spent with this one.

Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

Shadowbringers and Final Fantasy XIV in general is a difficult thing talk about. Not because of the accumulated history of a long-running game and storyline but because my feelings are ultimately swayed by a host of personal and specific emotions. I am a social player on a social server. I’ve spent just as much time coming up with roleplaying plotline and casually taking in taverns as I have tackling difficult bosses. I have made dear friends through FFXIV and even more than that. Those relationships, their energy and gravity, mixed into everything like an errand paint drop. You can hardly see it in the mixture but it’s unavoidably there. For many, this is a game of heroes and anime plots. For me, it has been a doorway to some of the most fruitful, edifying, and occasional painful experiences of my life. I say this because I want it understood that in spite of this sentiment, Final Fantasy XIV is a good game and Shadowbringers is easily one of the most confident pieces of video-game storytelling that I’ve ever experienced. Which isn’t to say it’s not sometimes trite or predictable. It’s not to suggest there is something groundbreaking here. For all of the craftsmanship, Shadowbringers often succeeds by embracing the conventional. It sticks to more well-worn plot structures, it simplified job gameplay and streamlined a variety of features whose strange and un-sanded bumps brought charm to the game. Yet, in the streamlining comes something more refined. Like running a soup through a fine mesh sieve to create something creamier and more rich. When you look at Shadowbringers high level plot: travel to the corners of the world to fight monsters, all while unraveling cosmic secrets.. it’s familiar. Even as the patches following the launch experience did, as all FFXIV patches do, focus on the fallout of the main story’s event, it kept to a strict content release pattern. If you’re digging for a revolutionary experience, Shadowbringers cannot offer it by virtue of structure. But what has been releases is foundational. The writing is of such quality and battle scenarios increasingly playful that everyone should be taking notes. A core component of Shadowbringers success is how deeply the story is concerned with genuinely exploring the richness of the scenario. It would be easy to craft a story about evil mages destroying the world. FFXIV’s done the more straightforward version of that at launch and it proved stiff. Instead, Shadowbringers’ has a deep concern with motivations and takes unprecedented time to explore the interior of the cast. This allows old characters to grow into bright new versions of themselves, and it has (two for two now!) turned villains into more than just monsters. The writing exhibits a delicious empathy for the world, and it takes time to give everyone a perspective. In MMOs, this is not always afforded. Characters act as quest-barkers and clumsy plot chess pieces. Shadowbringers strength rests in avoiding this in favor of clear stakes both personal and cosmic. There’s plenty to be said for other aspects. Masayoshi Soken’s music remains an incredibly powerful trump card, and the latest patch (which concludes the Shadowbringers story and sets up for next expansion) shows an increased willingness to employ fight mechanics that trick and test players in new ways. The content is challenging and full of tiny subversive moments that actually rob players of power they’ve taken for granted over the course of hundreds of hours. In finding its stride, Final Fantasy XIV doesn’t just craft sweeping narrative moments, it better integrates those stakes into individual boss encounters. There’s a cohesiveness, an interlocking of parts where each piece (music, narrative, gameplay, et all) are in clear conversation with the other and often in conversation with not only other expansions but other games within the franchise.

Recently, a piece dropped on Polygon with the title “Games need to return to black-and-white morality.” It was, if I can be honest, a poor title for the article and one which left a freelancer unduly exposed to harsh feedback. But there is a core kernel to the article. To quote the writer: “Watching our heroes stick to their convictions, even against insurmountable odds, ratchets up drama, rather than destroying it. The concept that good can ultimately triumph over evil is a timeless one, and stories that rally around this trope — around unadulterated hope — can help guide us through the year’s ceaseless onslaught of calamities.“ Shadowbringers’s conclusion brought this piece of writing to mind. I’m ironing pretty much all of that piece’s argumentation but the notion that games about heroes have great efficacy in times of uncertainty shouldn’t be a controversial one. The crux of my favorite game, Skies of Arcadia, is that heroism is hardly a choice at all. It is a compulsion, it is a duty that we all must accept when the moment comes. Shadowbringers is not quite as simple but it is ultimately a story about hero defeating the baddies, and I would be lying deeply to say that there wasn’t something incredibly, nearly word-defyingly beautiful about the feeling of hope I felt in its concluding moments. The sweeping power of epic fantasy and heroism holds true and, like a genuine panacea, held a curative power for my soul that was not just enjoyable once consumed but frankly necessary for my well-being. I’ve no clean conclusion here (and I don’t have to! ha!) other than to say that Shadowbringers has consistently proven a delight in a sea of rocky games media. It is affirming, exciting, and empathetic in ways that I was not expecting. That, along with the friendships I’ve made while playing, have secured its place as one of my favorite video game experiences ever. From start to finish, it really was a delight.

------------------ And that’s that! I was gonna write about Blaseball but I need to let my Blaseball feelings settle before even trying that. Anyway, if you read this.. uh thanks!

#FFXIV #Final Fantasy XIV #Shadowbringers #The Last of Us Part II #Necrobarista #Ghost of Tsushima #aim lab

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spaceskam · 4 years

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prompt #1 - first kiss [ao3]

Liz Ortecho typically didn’t mind Michael Guerin.

Out of all the boys in her STEM classes (and there were too many) he was basically the only one who didn’t make her want to scream every time she left. They even were in a study group together that was basically all the people who fell into minority boxes in someway, deciding that sticking together would be the best way to survive it. For awhile, she had struggled to understand how the white boy had found himself in that group, but she learned relatively quickly that he was proudly bisexual and it suddenly made a little more sense.

What didn’t make sense was why the hell she found him so goddamn hot.

He wasn’t annoying in the sense that he was racist or misogynistic like a scary amount of boys majoring in the field were, but he was annoying in the normal way. Like when he leaned too far into her personal space to look at her notes or shed his hair everywhere he went or laughed so loud that it was deafening or had no idea how to talk in a cohesive manner to actually help anyone understand things. But he was gorgeous and he was smart and Liz was annoyed a little more each day at how she wasn’t annoyed.

Now he sat on her dorm room floor, his legs splayed out and his head tilted back against her dresser. His lips were pursed as he blew out random breaths in a rhythmic fashion and tapped his pencil against his notebook, moving his head side to side in tandem.

“You’re supposed to be trying to help me understand this goddamn problem, not drumming,” she complained. She couldn’t quite remember the sequence of events that led to her welcoming him into her room alone, but he was here and she couldn’t help but be distracted by it.

“It’s easy, Liz. You already know what a vector is on a two-dimensional graph, it’s basically the same thing. Just, like, perpendicular to the tangent plane, find the normal vector then you find the equation of the tangent plane at that point,” he said. Liz felt like he was purposely trying to give her a headache.

“What the hell is a tangent plane, again?”

He stopped drumming.

“Okay, now I know you need a break ‘cause you know what a tangent plane is,” Michael said, shifting his textbook off his lap. He looked up to her with that all too charming smile and batted his eyelashes. Maybe a one-on-one study session was a really, really bad idea.

“I don’t need a break, I need to understand this shit.”

“Come on, take a break,” he urged, “We could go get coffee or go get something to eat or, if you feeling spunky, we can vandalize the car of that professor who took one look at your last name and suggested you change your major to something a little easier.”

Liz huffed, “Which one?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

She smiled and he smiled right back, licking his lips and tapping against the ground again. Liz couldn’t help but shake her head and try to look back at her homework. But Michael was making noise and, when she looked over at him, he had climbed to his feet and was stomping on the ground.

“Foot’s asleep,” he said simply. She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t look away as he stretched. Her eyes went to the space where his shirt rose, his arms stretching towards the ceiling. Was the world playing some weird joke on her? She’d already admitted she found him attractive, wasn’t that enough?

“I need to focus.”

“Nope, you need a break,” Michael insisted, “Tell me what you need and I’ll make it happen.”

Liz’s eyes continued to linger on his torso and his arms. By the time they got back to his face, he had a confused smile paired with furrowed eyebrows.

“Are... are you checking me out?” he asked, sputtering a laugh. Liz felt her cheeks burn red and she snapped her eyes back to her homework. “I mean, it’s okay if you are. I get it. I check me out too.”

A startled laugh forced its way out of her and she turned her head back to him. He still had that charming smile on, not at all phased by catching her red-handed.

“Sorry,” she offered, but she wasn’t quite sure she meant it. By the way he smiled, she figured he didn’t mind.

Suddenly, she was remembering her thought process as to why she thought getting him alone with a bed right there was a good idea.

“I mean, hey, if you’ve got some other idea on what we could do to take a break, I’m open to suggestion,” Michael said, “I told you, tell me what you need and I’ll make it happen.”

Liz very distinctly noticed that he hadn’t taken a step closer despite his suggestive tone. She noticed the non-threatening way he stood and the way his face was still as kind as ever. She felt safe with him. If she asked him to stop or to leave, she was confident he would listen and not get angry about it.

“Let’s go get coffee,” Liz told him, more as a test than anything else. As safe as she felt with him, she still wanted to make sure he wasn’t a dick. He tilted his head to the side for a second, seeming to be manually removing the ideas she’d put into his head before his smile got wide again and he nodded.

“Yeah, let’s go. I got this new thing the other day with, like, honey in it and I think you’ll like it,” Michael told her, already heading to the door and pulling his phone out of his pocket, “I typed the name in my notes ‘cause I knew I would forget.”

She let him get a few steps there before she reached out and grabbed his elbow, tugging him backwards. Michael spun and waited for her to explain, his eyes big and curious.

“Let’s go back to the option that’ll involve actually taking my mind off it,” she stated, her eyes scanning over his face, “If you want to.”

“Hey, college is about casual sex. I think. I don’t know, there’s probably a double standard,” he said. Liz smiled and shook her head.

“College is about learning, but everyone needs a stress reliever,” she said, taking a deep breath as she raked her eyes over him, “And you’re hot.”

Michael laughed, “So are you.”

“So, if we do this, it’s not gonna be weird, right?” she clarified, her hands hovering over his chest. Her mind was full of equations and tangent planes and chaos and previous experiments had confirmed that sex was a good way to clear that chaos. “Like we can still be friends, no weirdness?”

“No weirdness, still friends. Casual,” he confirmed.

“And you want to, right? You’re not just doing this because I--”

“Liz, do you wanna write up a contract for me to sign? ‘Cause I will,” Michael told her, “I consent to whatever you wanna do to me, just, if it’s weird, warn me.”

“Cool, I consent too,” Liz agreed, wasting little time as she grabbed his shoulders and pulled him into a kiss.

It took a moment to adjust, but his lips were soft and he was at least a decent enough kisser. Her hands instantly went to the hem of the shirt he was wearing and she started pulling it off, Michael pulled away to quickly rip it off and she got a him a ‘not bad’ look that resulting in him laughing that too-loud laugh.

Liz grabbed him by the belt, though, and tugged him with her as she backed up against her desk. She hopped up to sit on it and he nodded in approval, coming back down for a kiss. This time was better and less awkward-first-kiss-esque.

His fingers curled around the bend of her knees and pulled their hips together. She slid her hand into his soft hair, holding him to her. And it worked.

And, for once, her mind finally fucking cleared.

#michael/liz #michael/liz fic #michael guerin #liz ortecho #roswell new mexico #my fic #my prompts for lesser ships

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shadyb00ts · 3 years

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A Chromatica Review

So I never really use Tumblr, but when I do go on here, it’s pretty much to review something long-form. As you can tell from my profile picture here, and from my glowing review of ARTPOP from 7 years ago, I am and have always been a Gaga stan. Just read the melodramatic first paragraph of my ARTPOP review and you’ll get the gist of how much I idolize this woman. Well, idolized. Past tense.

That’s not to say I suddenly hate Gaga–I’m still going to follow her career and listen to whatever she puts out. There have just been several factors this past year that have changed my perspective on how I view her, this album being one of those factors. But I’ll get to those later. First I just need to lay out all my issues with this album.

Yes, this is going to be that type of review, so if you’re a fellow Gaga stan that isn’t able to criticize her work, this probably isn’t for you. Otherwise please read to the end if you can, because this is honestly about more than just the album.

Issue #1: The Mismatch Between Music & Aesthetic

When the cover of the album came out, I was so gagged. Like, just look at it! It’s striking, and Gaga has rarely ever disappointed me when it came to visuals. Actually, I can’t even think of any visual choices she made in previous eras that disappointed me. Even in the Joanne era, the pink cowboy hat became iconic and all of her aesthetic choices fit with the overall vibe of that album cycle.

So naturally, when she revealed to us the new visual direction she was taking for Chromatica, I assumed it would give us some insight into how the music would sound. The aesthetic of this era always gave me grungy cyberpunk and heavy machinery tease. When I look at the album cover for example, I can hear a song produced by SOPHIE in my head, the clink-clank queen herself. (There were rumors that Gaga was going to or did work with SOPHIE but that was never confirmed, unfortunately for us.)

For those unfamiliar with SOPHIE, here’s Ponyboy, which was most recently used in the ad campaign for Beyoncé’s Ivy Park clothing line.

youtube

That was the kind of production I was more or less expecting when taking the visuals into account; dark, metallic, basically similar to ARTPOP’s production (to be honest ARTPOP sonically fits better with the Chromatica aesthetic; think about it).

But what did we get? Light, garden variety dance pop, a stark contrast to what the album cover and the promo images teased us with.

In the album, we get these orchestral interludes that are beautiful but don't really mesh that well with the actual tracks. The songs don't have any orchestral elements by themselves, so the interludes felt a bit misplaced to me. I wish they'd incorporated more of that into the individual songs, so that there could be an orchestral through-line to give more cohesion, like what Ariana did in her album positions by using strings. However I will say, the transition from Chromatica II into 911 remains unmatched.

I get that the album is supposed to sound happy, that it was her returning to her “dance pop roots” and singing about serious topics like mental health over happy-sounding beats, because it’s supposed to reflect her current mental state. I get all that. But if that was the case, I think she should’ve gone with a different visual direction to match. Personally I wish she went a different direction musically instead, but even if it was just the other way around and she changed the aesthetic of this era, my opinion of the album would probably improve slightly, cause at least there would be cohesion between the visuals and the sonics.

I look at that album cover, and promo images like the one below, and then I listen to songs like Fun Tonight or Plastic Doll for example, and there’s a noticeable dissonance there.

You might be thinking “why are you so hard on her for this?” and I guess it’s because I’ve always held Gaga to a high standard when it comes to how she links those two elements. Think of every era she’s had in the past, and you remember how the visuals always just worked with their respective albums.

And that’s before I’ve even talked about the videos. Oh lord, the videos.

Issue #2: The Videos Are Lackluster (Except For 911)

It started with Stupid Love, the lead single. I had mixed feelings about that song in the beginning, but because I was so thirsty for new music from Gaga at the time, I played that song like hell when it leaked and it was on rotation for a good while. But when Gaga premiered the Stupid Love video, I’m not going to lie; I really didn’t like it.

The whole “shot entirely on iPhone” schtick really did the video a disservice. I’m sorry but it had to be said. If I imagined the video with a higher budget and more of a plotline as opposed to just being a dance video, I think it could’ve worked a lot better and been a decent introduction to not only Chromatica the album, but this fictional world/planet that she’s created. Which by the way, she didn’t really deliver in that regard either.

The concept of Chromatica being a fictional world could have been expanded on further; she could’ve showcased all of the different factions (I know they were called “tribes” at first but that’s appropriative so I’ll call them factions) and perhaps had an overarching storyline about how these factions are at war, and it’s Gaga’s job as one of the “Kindness Punks”, as she calls it, to bring everyone together for a rave.

This is why I will always say it: Chromatica needed to be a visual album. Just imagine the storyline I mentioned just now being turned into a full-length feature, and now imagine the album’s orchestral intro playing as they’re essentially opening the gates to Chromatica and Gaga discovers this world for the first time, and then it goes into the first song Alice where she’s meeting all the factions and getting acclimated to her surroundings.

Honestly I could go on and on cause I have thought about this for SO LONG now and I’ll never shut up about it. It’s just such a missed opportunity cause the concept was just begging for a visual album. Anyway sorry for my tangent: back to the Stupid Love video.

The whole “shot on iPhone” gimmick really was unfortunate. Like she really ruined the quality of a music video because she wanted that Apple check??? Come on, Gaga, there could’ve been some other way to secure that check.

And then there was the Rain On Me video, which definitely have visuals that are a massive improvement from Stupid Love because it was professionally shot and cinematic. But even that was another purely dance video with not much in the way of storyline. Not that storyline is always required for music videos, but I think specifically when it comes to Chromatica, not having storylines in the M/Vs does a disservice to the overall concept.

I guess my issue with these two music videos, but mostly Stupid Love, is that Gaga isn't fully utilizing her COIN. Like she's successful enough to the point where she has budgets for these videos and can go all out, but doesn't. She has the capacity for extremely high production value, but up until 911, the last video she did that had that level of extraness was G.U.Y. I miss the days when her music videos were an event. I still remember where I was and what I was doing the exact moment the Telephone video came out. That's impact.

Taylor Swift I think is somebody who really knows how to blow her budget on a video. Look What You Made Me Do may have been a terrible song, but I always thought the video was sickening.

Anyway, I have no notes on 911. She's a masterpiece. If there was a music video category at the Oscars, I'd be campaigning for it right now.

Issue #3: Any Other Girly Can Do This

The thing I always loved the most about Gaga's music was that nobody was doing it like her. Everything she put out always felt like it was distinctly hers and hers alone, it's unmistakable. Even in Joanne, despite that album being a major departure from what she normally did.

I know Joanne is a very polarizing album, even for Little Monsters, but personally I've always loved it. Joanne was an album that I always knew she would make and I thought was essential to her career and body of work. Despite her straying away from pop for a more earthy, grass roots sound, it still sounded very much like her music. Even from the first track, Diamond Heart, her DNA is all over that.

It's difficult to explain what exactly I mean when I say there's a certain signature "Gaga-ness" or that she has a very specific DNA injected into her songs. If you've been a fan of hers for a long time or followed her career, you probably understand what I'm referring to. It's the way she laughs maniacally in the beginning of ARTPOP on Aura, how she says "I don't speak German but I can if you like, OW!" and proceeds to recite broken German on Scheiße, how she invented the phrase "disco stick", literally the ENTIRETY of The Fame Monster.

These examples probably give you the gist of what I'm trying to convey. Gaga is fucking weird. She has always been fucking weird and I love that so much about her. And her brand of weirdness was so specific that if any of the other pop girls tried to do what she did, it would have been cringey as hell. To me, the most disappointing thing of all with this album was that this weirdness that was so uniquely hers was missing.

It's there in brief moments, in tracks like Sour Candy, 911 and Babylon, but most of the album doesn't really sound like her music. It sounds like songs that she wrote for other people, like her old unreleased stuff. OG Little Monsters probably remember songs like Second Time Around and No Way. These were leaked unreleased songs that Gaga had written for other artists, and even though they were absolute bops, they didn't sound like her. They weren't supposed to.

A similar feeling I had was when her song The Cure came out a few years ago. I genuinely thought that was something she wrote for someone else, cause even though it was a solid pop song, it absolutely had zero Gaga-ness and any current pop girl could sing it. This pretty much encapsulates how I feel about the majority of Chromatica.

I was gonna say it sounded like songs that were written for Ally, her Star is Born character, but I think even those pop songs from the soundtrack sounded more Gaga than Chromatica does. 💀 I can easily imagine Hair Body Face being on The Fame.

Final Thoughts

It's funny that the last review I had posted on here before this was my review of Kingdom Hearts III. The Kingdom Hearts game series is something that's very near and dear to my heart, and I waited a wholeass decade for the third game to come out. And then it did, and I was so disappointed.

So you know what happened after that? What helped me deal with my disappointment of that game was my anticipation for Chromatica, or at the time it was still called LG6. I had no idea I would feel the same exact way about this album the way I do about KH3. Now when I think of both of these things, I'm mostly frustrated by all of the potential and the missed opportunities, but I also look at them with a certain fondness. I had fun playing KH3, and I also had fun listening to Chromatica, despite both of them disappointing me overall.

In the beginning of this review I said that there were certain factors that have stopped me from idealizing Gaga too much. Firstly it's because I'm much older now, and secondly it's due to the sheer state of the world this past year. The pandemic really precipitated the fall of celebrity culture, and all of that made me really examine how putting someone on such a high pedestal can be damaging in the long run.

Gaga is a human being and I haven't agreed with everything she's done, particularly how she handled the whole R. Kelly situation back in 2013. And also the simple fact that she's a white woman, we know how a lot of the time they can't help but show their asses and are bound to disappoint us in some way. I'm forever grateful for her artistry and how she saved my life when I was a suicidal little eighth grader, but I'm also going to hold her accountable for any of her mistakes, and I'd be ready to stop supporting her entirely if anything she does ever goes too far.

Now I stan artists for fun. It's not healthy to idolize them to the point of revering them. I mean, I like to make jokes like that about Beyoncé, like "no way on Beyoncé's green earth", etc. But even she is just a person that we shouldn't deify for real.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Chromatica being a lackluster album and era ended up being a good thing, because it helped me grow out of idolizing celebrities too intensely. Chromatica was pretty much the best disappointment I've ever listened to.

If you've read all the way to the end, thank you! Writing this was very therapeutic but also stressful; this is a second draft cause Tumblr fucked up my first post. 😭

Anyway, SAWAYAMA & Ungodly Hour are albums of the year. Argue with the wall.

#album review #gaga #lady gaga #chromatica #pop music #review #music

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joxabear · 4 years

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Lore and World Building

So throughout my writing experience, I've realised I'm really good at world building and lore. I’ll be using my WIPs as examples for some things, and mentioning some elements. Feel free to be inspired by some! I give you full permission to borrow some of these ideas for you own WIPs! I’m being as vague as possible anyway, so the chances of you 100% taking the idea are slim.

This is very long so I’ll put it under a break!

First off, what type of book are you writing? This post will focus on fantasy worlds, as that's what I tend to write. If requested I can make another post for non fantasy worlds.

I have a whole other document of just the world lore and history. A trick of mine is to search through our own history. I have a list of books I've been flipping through for inspiration.

Examples are;

I have a big nature book, I've had it my whole life, and I've read it multiple times. It has many animals, human anatomy, natural occurrences, and more. It really helps me when designing new animals, the landscape, the humanoids, even the anthropomorphic onrd. The book is called "Encyclopedia of Discovery: Nature" and is written and edited by multiple people. (if you look up the title it's the blue book with a snake head on it).

Another book is actually just an Egyptology book. My book isn't Egypt based or anything, but simply reading about traditions will help you create some. Also it's just an interesting read!

I'm also looking into "The Many Faces of God" by Jeremy Campbell to help me with the religion side(I'm not religious myself, so it's a great help to see how people perceive deity's and especially God!)

I'm also reading "The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson, which has a lot of lore! Reading books with lots of lore or similar elements to your own will help you grasp the idea of what you want and how to write it.

A few others are The Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein, The Binding by Bridget Collins. Also video games! Those worlds are really in depth! A few I like to look into are TERA, Blade and Soul, Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem, Xenoblade.

Now enough about books. Those are just some suggestions and they won't fit everyone's own world! My world heavily revolves around religion, prophecies, and fantasy elements, so those are the books I've been delving into. Another book of mine is very science orientated, explaining magic through science means and the like, so I actually have a quantum mechanics book for that("Quantum Mechanics Primer" by M. Warner and A.C.H Cheung to be precise)

You don't have to read random nature books or learn quantum mechanics to write though, it's just something I like doing.(and I've barely learnt quantum mechanics really I just know some fancy words and can bullshit enough to sound smart)

First off, I like to start with any major locations, you don’t always have to do this, but it’s nice to keep track. Now, going on a tangent here(I’ll be using my current WIP as an example) I’ve got a few kingdoms(nine to be exact.) If you have a kingdom, even if it won’t be on page, go into their beliefs and traditions! It’ll help with characterisation. Each kingdom worships a particular deity(I’ll be going into religion soon, don’t worry) so they dress, teach, and have differing politics depending on which god they follow. Not to say they don’t follow them. In another WIP of mine I’ve created holidays we’ll likely never see, but it does give life to the world!

Naming can be a hit or miss. My ways of naming are look around, change a few letters, done. Other times I simply mash letters together, then edit it to look vaguely like a word. Sometimes I just use real names. One of my worlds is just called “Reality.” Yeah, original, am I right?

Once you have these major locations, you can decide with minor locations(ie. villages you’ll never visit, random forests, plains, beaches. I live in Australia, and have never been to Bondai Beach, but it’s a thing! I wouldn’t map out Australia based on where I’ve been. The map is for everyone, not the MC.)

You don’t always need a map, but maps are cool! Most of my WIPs have maps, the only ones that don’t are the ones set in Earth or a specific place I made up(cannot speak about it it’s a spoiler!) I usually look at maps, both in real life, in video games, and in books, to help me. What kind of style do you want your map? Usually they’re horizontal, so that’d be a good start. Is your map the one island? Or the whole world? One of my maps is one island, and can go into more detail. Another one is the whole world, so I only have major locations with a few minor(unnamed villages.) You can also decide to have a world map then each separate island.

Now you have a world base, so lets get into the lore and history.

Religion is all around the world, and to think of a world without religion is a little weird. Making a religion could be a little harder. I’ve made multiple, but they are quite similar. So first, what kind of religion? A pantheon? One God? Maybe something else? I’d look into our own religions. I take a lot of inspiration from the Greek and Roman Gods. If you have multiple Gods, write down what they represent. Maybe they have a specific animal? Gemstone? Food? Beverage? Plant? Maybe they have personalities! In one WIP my gods have a home on the different planets, sun and the moon. Also, is it real? As a non-religious person I believe heavily in do what you want, but ultimately, I likely won’t believe anything you say about any god. There will be people like that, and there will probably be fake religions. Maybe every religion is fake? Maybe there’s multiple real religions.

So traditions, fancy things. I personally don’t have any traditions, I’m a white Australian, the most traditional thing I do is a Bunnings snag. So I’ve had to delve far into religions. The internet will be your lover. Festivals, certain activities, the way people dress, any specific jewellery? Look into traditions outside of your own and take inspiration. And tie them into the religion, if you can! Or something of cultural significance! Maybe an old story?

Are there children’s tales, or famous books. In our own world, there’s very old famous books, or famous authors themselves. Not just books, though! There’s also drama, art, sports. Delve into those, maybe just on passing your MC notes that their favourite artist drew something? Or they’re wearing their favourite teams shirt?

Animals are funny. Depending if you want or not, you can make up animals. I love making up animals. I name them random things, and then just mash already made animals together. I have a phoenix that isn’t really a phoenix, but still has the base idea of one. I have a weird rabbit-frog. Give everything wings! Maybe gills? But do look into the animals you’re mashing together. Or don’t, but if you have the anatomy down, it’ll be so much easier. Also, what are these animals like? What do they do? Are they carnivorous? My rabbit-frog is an omnivore, but usually eats the leaves on top of the trees it lives under, it’s a generally peaceful animal, and a cute pet(if you can keep it in the yard without it hopping out, that is.) Now, feel free to use that idea if you like, it’s a cute sounding animal, go and change it around! I don’t mind. I doubt they’ll have the same name or exact habits anyway. Don’t forget natives and pests!

Something not many think about, especially in fantasy worlds, are solar systems. Now, I mentioned that the gods live on a planet each, they aren’t the planet, but they chill there. So, yeah, I have a solar system. How many planets would it have? How many suns? Moons? How close is the moon to the world? How close is the world to the sun? Is it possible to inter space travel, or do they just know of planets and stars? Maybe they don’t know of planets! This is completely optional, but a cool thing to tack on!

Does your specific world have any plants? Native plants are important as well. I won’t be finding a cactus casually growing on a heavily jungle based island, that’s a little strange. You can also make up plants!

Food and beverages. Now, making up food can be harder, easier with made up plants and animals. Does your land have a traditional food? A native plant? A native animal? Maybe a certain animal is sacred and eating it is taboo, or maybe eating it will grant you special abilities or gifts?

A weird detail, I have potions. I have the method to making it, the ingredients, how much of something as well, and most importantly, what the potion does. This can tie into foods and beverages. One of my potions is a “Prophetic Coma” type, basically, it puts you in a coma where you can have a prophetic dream. I’ve used a mix of real things and made up. (my rabbit-frog’s blood can make you experience hallucinations, so that’s an ingredient to help urge a prophetic dream), look into natural remedies and things as well,like drinking warm milk helps you sleep, so maybe that’s an element in a sleeping potion?

Another weird detail is spiritual means. You know, like tarot cards and the like. One of mine is you climb up steps, and depending on whether or not the step is polished, cracked, or crumbling depends on the answer you get. Another is a simple rune throw. You can make up new ones or use already made ones.

History is fun! No one remembers anything as it happens. Have wild stories between normal ones, have people recount things differently. In fact, my “lost kingdom” really isn’t so lost, people are just kind of dumb with history. Look into history yourself, maybe there was a war? What’s the aftermath of that?

Magic! How does your magic work? Is it natural? Man-made? In one of my WIPs spell tomes are rare, and magic uses the power of your soul, so it’s rarely used. How do you use it? Is it a natural wave of the hand? Maybe simply thinking? Are there wands? Staffs? Staves? Tomes? Specific symbols and sigils? Do you say a spell name?

Now, getting into some dark territory here. Is there racism in your world? Sexism? Any specific hate towards any specific group? I personally don’t have any of that, it’s not my style. But if you’re writing in modern day Earth, there will be that. That doesn’t mean you have to write it! You can avoid it entirely! That’s what I’m doing. Besides, if my MC went around getting misgendered the whole time, that’d take away the real story. Only put these in if you think it’s 100% needed.

Wow, this is long! Sorry about that! This is what I’ve done to build my world, and you don’t have to do all of these, or any! This isn’t in any way a “you have to do this” it’s simply my own methods in making lore and worlds. Truthfully, not all of my WIPs have all of these elements. And some share things! That’s okay! Feel free to add or correct anything! We’re all learning!

So, please, take this as you will, I hope I helped some, and thanks for reading! It turned out way longer than I initially thought it would. If I miss out anything, I’ll make a part 2! They’re WIPs for a reason, I’m still working on them! I also might make a post on map-making if y’all want.

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whetstonefires · 4 years

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director's cut top guide? I don't have a section in specific pick your favorite I guess I love the whole thing

Awwwww thank you. 💗😊 For the compliment, the interest, and the guidance. Additionally thanks because I just discovered I didn’t update this fic in October like I thought I did! It’s still in the status it had in July. So uh. I’ll be getting right on that. ˋ( ° ▽、° )

I think I’m gonna go with a passage back near the start, in the first half of chapter 4, the one where Tifa’s getting Vincent out of his coffin. I like how it came out and it’s pretty important, and if I’ve rambled about it at all, it wasn’t recently.

There’s a push-pull effect fundamental to this scene–first physically, with Tifa moving and destroying actual barriers, and Vincent repeatedly attempting to withdraw. But also on the level of Tifa attempting a series of verbal sallies, which Vincent initially rebuffs and then ignores by vampirically pulling the covers over his head and generally putting the passive in passive-aggressive.

But after telling her to go ahead and set the building on fire with him in it, Vincent gets his lid on and settles on being inert, and Tifa gets to do a monologue.

There are a lot of speeches in this fic, honestly, because of the precedent set by canon/the kinds of characters I’m working with, but most of them are nowhere near this long, and even though Tifa’s trying to achieve a specific rhetorical objective here, they’re generally not quite this honest.

“It’s easy to decide to die,” she told him, at length. “It’s easy to stop fighting when there doesn’t seem to be any hope. I know.

“But you’ll always regret it. You know that. If you’d been brave enough to choose Lucrecia over the Turks before Hojo got his grubby claws into her, maybe none of this would ever have happened. If she’d been brave enough to choose you sooner, it might have been okay. Not choosing is almost always a bad choice. If you come out of hiding, more things will happen—things that can’t unhappen. I know that’s frightening. But things happen without you, too. When you’re not there. When you do nothing.”

Tifa rocked back on her heels. “You can’t make the world go back to the way it was before, get back the same happiness or hope from your memories…not even if you could wind back time.”

Here Tifa is combining her intimate knowledge of Vincent’s circumstances with her own situation to create a sort of…weaponized empathy.

She can’t afford for Vincent to not listen to her, because she refuses to either give up on her mission or kill him, so when the normal approach fails she falls back on contingency and proceeds to run absolutely roughshod over all his personal boundaries.

Now, being able to wield future information against people this way is one of the major features of this general genre of time travel story, particularly when (like Tifa here) the traveler had level-ups, but didn’t get to carry them into New Game Plus. Tifa later uses it against Tseng with no artfulness whatsoever.

But that kind of blunt, bludgeoning use of intimate knowledge is a power game; it’s not how you treat a friend. So Tifa spends a lot of this speech, especially the opening, drawing connections between her experience and Vincent’s, exposing herself emotionally as much as can reasonably be managed without going off on any Tifa-centric tangents.

Being displaced in time and separated from everything you cared about is relevant, here. And she’s also able to bring her personal experience with feeling helpless and trapped–not by the sort of clear antagonistic obstacle you can batter down with your fists but by the certainty that every possible course of action is Terrible and Wrong and so you can’t act, because you can’t choose–she specifically frames it in terms of having to decide between binary options, because that’s how we’ve seen her experience it wrt i.e. ‘talking to Cloud about how his brain is weird.’

The experience is similar enough to Vincent’s, especially his not-initiating of important relationship conversations with Lucretia at the beginning, for these terms to work for communication purposes, but it’s very definitely Tifa’s experience being mapped onto Vincent’s here, and proffered to ameliorate the inherent violence of what she’s doing.

Her coping mechanism for that trapped feeling, though, is to distract herself with Doing Something Constructive that allows her to avoid the issue without feeling like she’s stuck.

There’s a certain extent to which allowing time to process or grieve is important, and Tifa is bad at allowing it, largely I think because she’s very aware of the danger of getting mired in paralysis and ruminating on the bad thing until it’s all that exists. Vincent more than anyone else in the cast is defined by his choice to identify with his trauma, and while Aerith is the one most defined by trying not to do that, Tifa’s far enough to that end to create a conflict in viewpoint even when nothing vitally important is at stake.

I also included a dialogue ping to the place where she talks about this in the Advent Children movie, though if you’ve been following my opinions on ffvii any time at all you probably know I have so many problems with thedecisions made with Tifa in that film. Even the parts that areconsonant with her established characterization require her to have rolled back mostof her development from the OG.

The part where she doesn’t come with Cloud on the rescue mission shebullies him into is so utterly backward and the opposite of her establishedbehavior and values and just basic logic that I have to sort of write around it,because I can’t accept that it happened. But if we ignore that bit, and the amount of self-centeredness in the harangue, some elementsof the interaction have potential.

Because if nothing else it’s the most explicit verbal treatment in the Compilation of the recurring theme of people being ‘stuck.’ Not by bars and walls and certain death, but by the prisons inside their heads.

“But…there are still possibilities. Still things you can do to make the world better. Her choices…they weren’t your fault. But whatever you’re blaming yourself for right now…lying here until you die won’t make it better. The biggest sin of all, to me, is not trying to make things better.

“You aren’t a monster, Vincent. Nothing Hojo did to your body, nothing Lucrecia did to bring you back, could make you one. As long as you have your mind, you decide. And it’s what you decide to do that makes the difference between a human and anything else.”

She’s hitting hard, here: call to action, absolution, extremely targeted personal affirmation, clarification that she really does know what’s up with him, new information that Lucrecia was involved with his current status, and finally, optimistic conceptual framework imposed on the situation, since Vincent certainly isn’t capable of that himself.

This treatment of Vincent’s situation vis-a-vis humanity is, of course, also very relevant to the ensuing plot-central question of what Sephiroth is, and whether he has the power to make good life choices. Which Tifa is not nearly as sure of as with Vincent, since while she stands by the principle that it’s a matter of choice she knows for a fact that Vincent can make good ones, but has certainly never seen evidence with Sephiroth.

And then of course there’s Genesis, who would love to get everyone to accept that his sins are a function of what rather than who he is, and drag down with him anyone he can reach, and who by his very effort to sell the idea makes it seem less likely.

I’ve excerpted only Tifa’s dialogue and some of the tags from the rest of the passage, because her narration gets lengthier and isn’t what I’m focusing on for this commentary.

She waited. But the man in the box didn’t move, and he didn’t speak. “Lucrecia is still alive,” she told him. “Preserved in crystal. Hidden away. You two really are a pair, aren’t you? And maybe you’re both right to be concerned—she’s got Jenova in her, and you’ve got those things that replaced your Limit Breaks. But they don’t control you.”

[…]

“They don’t control you,” she repeated. “Hojo doesn’t control you. You can choose to do nothing for the rest of your long life if that’s what you really want. But it’s not your destiny. And it’s not what’s right.”

‘It’s not what’s right’ is an interesting line in retrospect, because Tifa’s saying it within a framework of denying Vincent’s reasoning that there’s something somehow virtuous about closing himself off from the world, so he can’t do any more harm. Specifically in the context of assuring him that he has control over his actions, and his Limit Break things don’t.

But in the overall argument, about how his power of self-determination relates to responsibility to the world, it can also be read as a moral condemnation, the suggestion that there is a specific thing that’s right, and Vincent isn’t doing it.

“Sephiroth is an adult now,” she said [….] “They put him in the Shinra military. Made him a General.”

[…] “If Hojo and Jenova have their way, he’ll become a monster soon,” she confided in the coffin. “Maybe there’s no way to change that. Maybe it’s too late for him. Maybe it’s his destiny. But it’s not too late for the rest of the world, not yet. I know that much. Everyone who has the power to fight him has a responsibility to try.”

That’s where her speech winds up–rather abrupt return to her earlier, blown-off argument about Sephiroth imminently killing everybody and how Vincent should help. He doesn’t do anything. He continues to be a box.

So then she punches her way into the coffin.

“What are you?”

She knew it wasn’t her feat of strength that had impressed him, though he probably appreciated the rhetorical force of it.

I really like this line. Describing ‘punching open the box someone’s hiding in at the climax of an inspirational speech’ as a rhetorical device is the kind of thing I find very funny, and I got characterization of both of them and story advancement into the sentence too.

“Tifa,” she said. “Tifa Lockhart.” She held out her right hand. “Get up, Vincent Valentine. The world isn’t done with you yet.”

He let her pull him up onto his feet.

Some obvious symbolism there, fitted into the very important fact that this worked.

Getting Vincent out of his coffin has been the only thing Tifa’s attempted so far in the story that has turned out more or less exactly as planned. Not entirely easily, and not following a step-by-step plot because that’s not Tifa, but without random factors interceding and requiring her to recalculate wildly, make decisions entirely on the fly, and draw up a new set of plans in the aftermath, either.

In a way, the Vincent recruitment section microcosms the fight Tifa’s having with the universe throughout the fic, in her efforts to make things line up so she can get a better outcome to this nightmare scenario she’s been pitched back into: direct, physical actions are persistently vital and necessary, but her real success must always hinge on her particular knowledge, and ability to apply it.

Apply it specifically, thus far, mostly to getting people to take her seriously and do as she says. Because she’s been placed in a position where as useful and important as her personal power is, it’s not the right tool to rely on for her central task. That has to be tackled via community building, in a context that intensely disinclines her to attempt such overtures.

Which in turn invokes one of the several great dichotomies of Tifa’s in-game characterization–the periodic tension between her social impulses, to bind and soothe and promote bonding, and her…reactive impulses, to seize the world in both hands and find something to fight and do and change, so she doesn’t feel helpless in the face of all that is evil.

The parts of her character arc in the game that aren’t actively about Cloud seem to center around being forced to face that both these behavior patterns (especially in their role as coping mechanisms) are capable of being not only inadequate but actively, harmfully inappropriate to particular situations.

And then coping with this fact, and continuing to inhabit these parts of her identity in ways that turn out constructive. E.g., choose caring for Cloud over leading party to do anti-Shinra things that have only the vaguest prospect of actually averting the apocalypse; successfully retrieve his mind from the Lifestream. Help punch Sephiroth to death and stop him from holding back Holy; world saved.

If you try really hard to get a personal moral for Tifa out of the OG that isn’t pretty sexist, it might come down to something like: realize that you might be acting wrongly; then, act. Stay afraid, but do it anyway.

And, optimistically: perhaps you do not have to choose between your faces. Perhaps they are both allowed. Perhaps all of you is allowed. Perhaps you are enough.

One of the things Tifa and Cloud share is needing so desperately to be enough.

In a way that’s a feeling that unites the entire party, in their various ways, except maybe Aerith, depending on how you interpret her relationship to the obligations of being the Last Ancient. But Tifa and Cloud are about the same age and come from the same context and share a major trauma, so it looks particularly similar in them.

And of course there are also ways it looks especially similar between Tifa and Vincent, because they’re the most hopeless romantics in the party. 😆

#this is too long #but i'm tired of trying to cut it down #it is what it is #ask meme #director's commentary #my fic #ffvii #meta #tifa lockhart #vincent valentine #top guide #hoc est meum #a nonny mouse #ask

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realisationanddoubt · 4 years

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The binary: realisations and rants

Can we talk about the gender binary a bit? Of course we can. It’s my blog, we can talk about Naruto or the impossibility of clown cars if I wish. So I’ve been thinking a lot about me after my break up as, I suppose, is normal. Thanks to this I’ve stumbled across an identity crisis I’ve been putting off for years. I’m non-binary and that’s a weird thing to just non-chalantly write down for me. See, I’ve spent years talking about how I don’t really care about gender. As a bisexual, I’ve had the conversation numerous times. As a stereotypically effiminate person I’ve spoken many times about how I’m comfortable in myself acting however I want because the gender stereotypes hold no interest to me. But I’ve never really bothered to delve into why.

It’s taken awhile to come to terms with being non-binary. It’s like coming to terms with my sexuality all over again. As usual, I’ve been presented a choice. The sexuality and identity fairy came to me twice now and happily asked “men or women” and I, in classic me style, didn’t really pay attention to the fact that there was a clear binary choice and only half listening just replied “Oh, no thank you!”

It’s difficult to live in a world defined by binaries and then realise you’re not really interested in participating. When I very first realised I might be non-binary a couple of months back, I got lost in a strange narrative. Do I need to start wearing make up? Should I make myself more androgynous, shave my beard? How do I present as non-binary? Of course the answer (For me) is you don’t. I should have really known that from the start because I had to do the same thing with my bisexuality. It took many years to get from “How do I let everyone know I’m bisexual?” to “I don’t really care who knows what my sexuality is and I have no desire to share that information.” I’ve approached being non-binary much the same. I get that people are proud of their sexuality and identity and seriously, good for them. That must be a nice thing to have. Thing is I’m not particularly proud. Let me see if I can put this into words.

So for me, sexuality and identity are both very matter of fact. I’m not proud of either of those aspects of me but don’t get me wrong, I’m not ashamed. The idea of being proud of either of those things is, for me at least, the same as being proud of having curly hair or brown eyes. Sure, there was some emotional turmoil coming to terms with my sexuality and identity but it’s not like these are things I had to strive and work for. They’re just facts. I don’t really care if people call me he or they. They feels a bit more natural I guess but it doesn’t particulalry bother me being called he. And note, I get called he because I have a beard and a masculine build. When I was a teenager with heavy eyeliner and long flowing hair I got called miss and she a lot and that never particularly bothered me either. I’ve never particualraly felt some kind of rage at being misgendered. I don’t really care that people assume I’m straight (I kind of care in that way of, Jesus dude open your mind and stop making assumptions but not enough that I’ve felt the need to correct anyone.)

Though I wonder how much this is a story I tell myself. Just like it’s difficult telling yourself actually, you’re not any of the traditional genders, telling yourself you don’t really care about presenting and pronouns in a community that’s so fired up about them feels weird.

“Welcome to the queer community! Would you like to be angry about misrepresntation of your sexuality or your identity?” The queer fairy politely but firmly asks.

“Ah, no thank you, I’ve already eaten.” Josh replies, not really paying attention to the climate or the question.

I even considered whether I’m supposed to change my name. Am I supposed to change my name to something a bit more androgynous? Maybe start calling myself Alex or Frankie or any other name that could be either gender? But I don’t want to. I’m just Josh. I’m a bisexual, non binary mess and Josh is my descriptor.

Should I care more? Should I be fighting some war against ignorance? Am I somehow doing a disservice by not participating?

Not participating is basically my default. “Here lies Josh, they didn’t participate.”

I kind of make life more difficult for myself by not divulging these things. People have asked me before “Are you gay?” and I just reply “nope!”. Then I get annoyed that people just assume I’m straight despite literally never giving any evidence to the contrary. I guess it’s just a problem with the system. My sexuality and identity are improtant to me but they’re personal. I’m not going to talk about them to work colleagues or friends anymore than I’m going to talk about my kinks.

“Hey Josh are you gay?” My well meaning but misguided colleague asks.

“Oh no, I’m bisexual, non-binary and I like scratching and biting during sex.”

You really going to just out your kinks like that online huh my dude? It should say enough about me that I feel a swell of anxiety to putting a fairly vanilla kink on a personal blog no one I know will ever read. Do I really want Tumblruser420 to know I like biting in bed? Feels like an overshare.

This really became a bit of a deep dive into gender identity huh? I guess I’m just going through some stuff.

Quick tangent, whenever I hear a noise in my house, despite having two cats that are always the cause, I need to check every room just in case. I even check the bathroom which only has one very small window next to the door. Just in case some sneak thief broke in through the plughole I guess. Some S’wit. Some N’wah.

God I’m just going through some Stuff y’know? I worry how much of my outlook might be down to internalised shame and not just non-chalant IDGAF attitude. I haven’t put Non-Binary on my tinder profile. I mean I have but I’ve set it not to show. I don’t know if that’s out of fear of being judged for it or simply because I haven’t come to terms with it myself. To be clear, I definitely haven’t come to terms with it myself yet. I have bisexual on my profile but I guess I’m still kind of ashamed of that.

Is it shame? I guess it’s more fear. Not like a fear for myself or my safety or anything. More a fear of people’s perceptions. It’s not even that I’m scared people will be shitty to me because of it. If that’s the kind of person they are, fuck them. I just don’t want to be “That queer one”. Does that make sense? I kind of hate to term cishet because it only seems to be used as derogatory but I need to use it a sec. I think the main reason I’m happy to just pass as cishet is because then I’m allowed to be a person. The second you’re something different that’s it. That defines you. I get it needs to be a conversation so people stop being ignorant and hateful but at the same time even just the discussion about it feels like it’s pushing me into this definition. Like being bi or being non-binary means I’m a certain kind of person.

I guess it’s the classic tale of any ism. Racism, sexism, homophobia...ism. I am bisexual. I am non-binary. But I don’t want to be the bisexual. Being defined by something like that, something so out of your control... It feels so... dismissive? I’m not a person anymore. I’m not Josh. I’m a bisexual. I’m non binary. I’m white. I present as a man. All that shit. This is starting to become a rant on the construction of society as a whole and the role of privelege and what that means huh?

I’m creative, emotional, witty. That’s what I’m defined by. That’s who I am. I’m not just some pigeon hole word. Define me by my facets, not my facts.

Realisations are a funny thing. I have a lot of realisations in my life and mostly I like them but this one leaves a sour taste in my mouth. It’s not that I don’t care, that much is apparent after this rant. I’m just so tired of it. I avoid all the discourse and conversations about any kind of identity issues because I’m tired of defending myself. It doesn’t matter where you fall on the spectrum. These kind of labels aren’t useful. They’re just a method of pinning something to someone that says “Can I just hate this person out of hand.” and it’s rife. It’s everywhere and it’s all the same. I don’t care if you’re having a rant about black people or a rant about cishets. It’s all just vicious hate. We live in a world where people are so desperate to have someone to hate because they’re different. Whether that difference is in the majority or the minority it doesn’t matter. Hating all men or all straights or all whites is no different from hating all trans people or all queer people or all black people. Hating all millenials because they’re special snowflakes is no different from hating all boomers because they’re not progressive. It’s just pure hatred because they’re different. Just blanket statements attached to something someone can’t control to give you a reason to say “Oh don’t worry, I’m allowed to hate them”.

Maybe keeping my identity or my sexuality to myself makes me a coward. Fine. I refuse to participate in these wars of hatred. I just want to spend time with my cats, fall in love, help people and laugh.

As always, as will be written on my gravestone one day, I refuse to participate. To all those people who fight for my ideal world on my behalf, thank you. To all those people on either side, progressive or traditional, just to hate one subset of people, go fuck yourselves. I’ll just be over here, trying to make the dying smile and trying to give people a little longer in this world to spend with the people they love.

That’s it. Rant over. I’m going to try and get another hour or two of sleep before work. I know it’s customary to drop the mic after a big speech but know if it felt like I did, I just fumbled putting it back into the mic stand and I’m trying to own it. If you look closely you’ll see that the blood has drained from my face and perspiration is clear on my forehead.

#non binary #emotions #rants #hate #I really went off on this one #identity #gender #sexuality #bisexual

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ais-n · 6 years

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One Piece theory

I’m in a mood to talk about a One Piece theory I have. This contains SPOILERS for One Piece’s world/history in general, but I’m guessing about the future so I could be totally wrong on ideas or predictions. I’m trying not to do any major spoilers in this beyond what we’ve learned of the ancient weapons, but if you’re worried about any spoilers at all, don’t read if you aren’t at least through Fishman Island arc.

btw you may read this and go “...yeah, and?? I already thought this too” but I wanted to put it down anyway, if for no other reason than potential amusement 10 years from now to look back and see how right or wrong I was.

Specifically, my theory is about what “one piece” itself is, and what would need to happen in order to achieve it. And why I think “one piece,” as I imagine it being, would end up also fulfilling the dreams of the main characters and many we know.

SPOILERS BELOW

So, let’s look at the ancient weapons as we know them.

Pluton is a ship, capable of massive damage and destruction, built in the Void Century on Water 7. My theory includes that Pluton represents “land” or at least, the elevation level of land - in this case, water/the ocean, which is the baseline level around the world because the majority of the world is water. In other words, Pluton is mid-range in terms of height. It would be used by people who naturally live at that level, aka humans or other beings which can’t just swim around in the sea and have to use a ship to navigate beyond there.

Poseidon is a “weapon” which we later learned is actually a person - specifically, a mermaid princess from the Void Century who had the ability to talk to Sea Kings, which are huge afffff and could do some massive damage. Poseidon represents the lower level or the deep sea - the lowest of the levels in terms of height. It is a weapon which can only be used by a denizen of the deep sea; a mermaid princess, in this case, who naturally would have been able to speak to sea creatures anyway but because of her extra powers she can speak to creatures of an age and size no one else (mostly) can communicate with.

Uranus is the last weapon, and we know nothing about it - except that it could be animate or inanimate, based on Pluton and Poseidon. My theory is that Uranus will be a weapon of the sky or air, something on the level of Skypiea or higher. Possibly even the moon. We’ve seen that there’s advanced technology in use already on the moon, thanks to Enel’s little foray into space. I feel like Uranus might end up being a weapon based on the moon OR be a weapon (or person or creation such as an android or cyborg or etc) which operates from a place of height such as the clouds, sky, or moon, and which is only capable of use by someone who naturally lives there. So, someone from Skypiea perhaps, or the moon people. Or possibly the sky weather wizard dudes, but since Uranus has been thought of as a night god and we’ve seen the technology of the automatons up there, I keep going back to the moon in my mind. But if we tie it to the Void Century, it’s harder to do because according to this One Piece timeline the moonfolk had already abandoned the moon at that time, which makes it seem like Skypiea is a choice again. But Enel clearly met someone up there since then, so... At any rate, Uranus represents the highest level of the weapons in terms of height.

In other words, Poseidon is the sea, Pluton is the land, and Uranus is the sky.

Why this matters is related to my theory and the Void Century.

So, prior to that, there was a great kingdom on Raftel which started gaining power. I keep thinking that kingdom is related to the D family line or at least the D’s in general, but we don’t know. What we do know is that 20 other kingdoms formed an alliance to fight the great kingdom, and those 20 kingdoms eventually won and became the World Government and produced the Tenryuubito - a system which, by this time in the OP world, is corrupt from its dominating power for so long.

We also know that prior to all that, the great kingdom had “built” 3 ancient weapons which I already named above.

Additionally, we know somewhere along the line Noah was brought down to the Fishman Island by Joy Boy in order to ??? - we don’t know for certain, but my theory is to bring the fishpeople and merpeople up to the surface.

We also know that it’s possible in the OP world for someone to have foresight, as Madam Shyarly/Sharley has shown us. And we know that some people can live a long ass time even if they are human in present settings.

Another thing we know is that Raftel is where “one piece” is allegedly going to be found, but no one has been there since Roger and his crew, who won’t really tell anyone what was up. There are 4 Poneglyphs, very specialized kinds called Road Poneglyphs, of which all are required in order to locate Raftel. (From what we understand, you would basically draw an x between these points, and the center is Raftel - x marks the spot) Which means Raftel isn’t something you can just willy nilly stumble across accidentally. There are implications with that, of course, but we’ll leave it for now.

(Just sayin’, though, do we know for certain it’s an island in the sense of the word we usually imagine? The images we’ve seen of it are mostly cliffs with fog or clouds surrounding it, and theoretically the blue at the bottom is water but it doesn’t necessarily mean it is, or if it is water that doesn’t necessarily = the ocean. I don’t have a strong opinion on this part, mind you; just mentioning it because if it’s not a traditional island, that would make it much harder to run across. Such as if it were on or in Red Line itself, or if it were beneath the water or in the sky, or some other unexpected location. But, again, that’s not really part of the theory, just a comment. It could easily just be a regular island that’s hard to find, too. Just seems like it would be a bit easier to stumble across if it is.)

Lastly, what we know is the world is divided into oceans based on the Red Line (a long string of land which goes all around the world) and the Calm Belt (which bisects the world perpendicular to the Red Line, and is two long slices of water where there are no currents and no wind and the Sea Kings thrive - therefore being a mortal danger to normal ships and boats). The Grand Line and New World - a turbulent strip of ocean circling the world - is located between the two Calm Belts and can only properly be accessed through the Red Line due to the Calm Belts (unless you are super special). The rest of the world is constituted of the more normal seas of East Blue, West Blue, North Blue, and South Blue. They span the entire world, but they are broken into their little sections by the Calm Belt/Grand Line on one side, and Red Line on another. Here’s a visual if anyone needs to be reminded. Also, here’s another two visuals which are different ways of looking at it.

This entire system keeps the nations and sea life and peoples and everything of the world all very much segregated from each other.

There is something known as “All Blue” that Sanji is seeking as his dream, where allegedly all the waters of the world pool together, meaning you can find all the sea animals/fish/etc of all the world co-mingling and all available. As a chef, he loves this idea.

We know a lot more things too, but it all ends up on tangents from what I wanted to get at now for my theory:

Personally, I think “One Piece” is the world becoming one world, by breaking down the Red Line, which I think was erected by the World Government or someone else in some way during the Void Century (or, barring that, was somehow taken advantage of by them). I think the three ancient weapons were made so that everyone had to work together to use them - people of the sky, the land, the sea - so that no one nation and no one people would become a danger of completely subjugating another.

If you look at the way the world is broken into pieces, a lot of it is based on the currents. The Grand Line is mega fucked because the currents are weird as hell, and the only law on that side of the world is the magnetism of the islands. In order to reach the Grand Line from the Blues, you have to scale a great mountain using what’s basically a backward sea current, which happens because all these different oceans try to meet at the same place and the pressure shoots the water upward and over into the Grand Line.

These ocean currents also probably play into the formation of the Calm Belt.

But when you look at WHY there are these wonky ass currents, personally I believe the Red Line is a large reason for it. That is what causes the water to be unable to flow all around the world, that is what stops people from being able to migrate between countries, and it’s only through the Red Line that you can “easily” access the Grand Line/New World which is sandwiched between the Calm Belts. In a world of water, the Red Line is the outlier as the only massive strip of land which bisects the entire world. Everywhere else, it’s islands.

Also, whether by design or simply by taking advantage, the World Government controls a lot of the migration of people and more by controlling essentially the ports and gates of the Red Line. The Red Line allows them to exert inordinate control over a world otherwise easily run or equaled by pirates or just regular seafaring folk. Because the World Govt has its holiest city at the Red Line, and controls Sabaody and other places which are the only way to realistically gain entrance unless you’re willing to risk your lives and your ship by going the more difficult route of the sea floor.

If there were such a powerful set of weapons which could attack from below, at sea, and above, in sequence, it seems like they could at the least break a hole through the Red Line. The Sea Kings are absolutely massive, and if they were to ram themselves against the Red Line the way Laboon did Reverse Mountain, it seems like at the very least they could do some damage. I don’t think on their own they could break through, though, nor do I think a single ship could, nor any weapon no matter how powerful from the sky. The Red Line is incredibly massive, tall, and deep. It would take a coordinated attack on an extreme scale to make it budge.

But imagine a world where the Red Line was gone, or at least opened up significantly. If the Red Line is the reason for the messed up currents, then that could on its own affect the blue seas which would in turn affect the Calm Belts which would in turn affect the Grand Line/New World which would in turn affect the entire world.

If the world were, in fact, one piece, it would mean everyone would have an equal chance, it would mean power could be redistributed, and the people who felt banished to the sea floor could come back to the surface, and the people who fled to the moon or sky could return to land, and everyone would come to know each other and see that they all have meaning regardless of how they look or what they are. It would mean All Blue would happen, because now all the creatures of the sea could swim wherever they want, and a chef in the East Blue could, for the first time ever or perhaps hundreds or thousands of years, see naturally in the ocean a fish from the West Blue.

The Pirate King would be a king who ushered in a new world, a new nation comprised of the world nations as one, but being that he’s a pirate, he doesn’t want to rule it. So it would be a ruler who would let everyone rule on their own, without a governing agency telling everyone what to do and how to do it.

And through the creation of this sort of ‘one piece’ it would, in turn, fulfill the dreams of everyone in the Straw Hats:

Luffy: to be the Pirate King, not because he wants power, but because he wants to be the most free - now he is free to go on any adventure, anywhere, any time he wants

Zoro: to be the strongest/greatest swordsman in the world - now, he can easily travel the world to seek out opponents and rivals and maybe even proteges

Nami: to make a map of the world - now, because it’s all open, she can easily navigate everywhere and create the most complete

Usopp: to become a brave warrior of the sea - there would be no braver warriors of the sea than those who reunited all the seas into one

Sanji: to find All Blue - now, with the world opened to all the oceans, All Blue is everywhere; literally All of the Blues of East Blue, West Blue, North Blue, and South Blue

Chopper: to become a panacea, a doctor that can cure any disease - now he can go anywhere in the world, learn all of the medicine and healing advice from all of the cultures, and he can collect all that knowledge in order to use it to save everyone

Robin: to learn the true history of the world - the process of getting to the point where the world becomes one would likely inherently include learning what happened in the Void Century, but even if it didn’t she could now go anywhere, learn anything, talk to anyone, to learn even more

Franky: to create his dream ship - which he sort of already has done, in Thousand Sunny, but for it truly to be his dream ship he wants to see it around the world, through all these adventures, in all these contexts, and in the process of making the world one, he would do just that. And afterward? He would have that much more world to explore on his ship.

Brook: to navigate the world and return back to Laboon, so he knows he wasn’t abandoned by the crew all those decades ago. They would likely make it back to Reverse Mountain anyway through the process of all of this - because if indeed attacking the Red Line is part of what frees the world then that’s the natural next stop - but even without that, if the Red Line is no longer a barrier, then Brook and Laboon won’t be stuck on either side of the world from each other, and they can reunite anywhere.

Jimbei/Jinbe: TECHNICALLY not a straw hat at the moment, and so therefore we don’t technically know what his dream would be, but based on what we know of him he seems to wish for the fishpeople and merpeople to be free of oppression, to have better relations with humans/their like, and just generally for everyone to be safe. This could happen, with the world as one.

You could get into others at this point -

-Dragon and the Revolutionary Army want a revolution, primarily to wrench control away from the World Government which they seem as corrupt and oppressive (this dream would be met if the World Govt falls or loses its stranglehold on power).

-Coby, Smoker, Fujitora, formerly Kuzan and Garp, and all of the other Marines who see justice as something other than the justice the WG has been enforcing would see a more just justice come to play if the WG is no longer the monopoly on power and world navigation, and if everyone who joins the Marines or WG are able to do so of their own volition, and can affect the nature of the organization through hard work and a genuine passion for helping others.

-Everyone who’s talked about the Will of D would see the ancient weapons of the D empire, Raftel’s great kingdom, come back to the world in a manner which allows the world to regain a sense of freedom it hasn’t had in hundreds or thousands of years

-Alabasta, Dressrosa, Fishman Island, and all the nations who want better relations with other countries, who want a more equal world, would see a greater chance of that coming about with the Tenryuubito and others at the very height of it no longer dictating for everyone else. Including the nations who represent that gathering of nations (as all those I listed do) but who feel their voices aren’t being heard.

-Everyone who wants adventure without near certain death, who wanted to race around the world on a ship but whose dreams were broken by the severity of the Grand Line/New World, would have another chance

-Even the Vinsmokes may have a chance to regain their kingdom, since what seemingly took it away was the World Government

And many more people from many more perspectives. Hell, even Big Mom’s dream of everyone sitting at the table would be sort of achieved through this, except she’s kind of crazy so idk that she’d see it that way since she’s taking her dream to be much more literal than figurative.

Basically, the main people who would lose out in this are the corrupt people using the segregation of the world to their advantage to control traffic flow and monopolize power.

I could go on... I have theories about what may be going on with Vegapunk and more, but my theories are less strong down that line.

For now, I’ll leave it at this.

If anyone got this far, you probably already had all of these thoughts, too. If you did, I’d be curious to see if you have any other reasons for thinking all this which I didn’t mention. I didn’t go into everything for proof or evidence of why I think any of this, so it’s possible you’d be pointing to the same thing as me, but you may have noticed other things I didn’t - so it would be fun to compare :)

And if you hadn’t thought of any of this and you got this far, I’m curious what you think - if you think I’m tooooootally off, or if anything is interesting to you.

#one piece #one piece theories #about me #long post

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sunwisecircle · 3 years

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Hwaet

I’m having some thoughts this morning. I was having them yesterday, too, but I ranted to husband and felt better for a hot minute. I no longer feel better.

I feel like a lot of people have forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner, to be just starting out. I’ve only been doing this polytheism thing for around 2,5 months so I’m still very much a beginner and I’m aware of that so I am by no means claiming to be an expert. I’m also autistic and have been told I have no empathy /// I have empathy for the wrong things, so I may be entirely off the mark here because I do not know how to human.

So here’s the thing. Because I am just starting out, I can very much remember what it feels like to be looking for information for the first time. I’m in Germany and we’re still in lockdown here. I don’t belong to the local university so I can’t use their library right now, and I don’t know if the city library is open. Even if it were, I’d rather not because I’m an at risk person and I don’t feel like dying of plague. I could go to my university library, but that would require me to take a day trip to another city, and even for university members there are restrictions for how long we can be there etc, etc, etc and I still don’t want to come down with plague.

So what do I do? I say, hey, I bet there’s a tag on tumblr. I bet I can scroll and see if there’s someone who doesn’t seem like an idiot who posts information about Greek paganism. I figure blogs like this must exist because I’m a historical linguist and I follow a few academically inclined linguistics blogs, so why wouldn’t there be academically inclined blogs about other topics.

I got absolutely inundated with posts that terrified me. I saw post after post about how deity work wasn’t for beginners. I saw posts saying that only certain deities were okay for beginners. I saw posts saying you had to ask a deity’s permission to worship them, and if they told you no, you weren’t allowed to (they’re deities??? They literally want to be worshipped?????). You have to do an introduction. You don’t have to do an introduction. You need to be very formal at first to avoid offense. You don’t need to worry about offending the gods, they know you’re a beginner. Unless you purposely blaspheme, you can’t offend the gods, you’re a mortal.

How do you ask a deity’s permission? How do you know which deities are okay for beginners? How do I know if a deity has given me permission to worship them? What’s an introduction? How do I do it correctly? You need an altar. You don’t need an altar. You need to build a relationship with the deity. I am autistic I literally cannot build relationships with humans how do I do that with a deity. How do I avoid offending this immortal being who I already revere because they are a literal deity and I am a mortal??? I need details, please.

Do your research.

So I do some research. I find some decently academic blogs with resources and free PDFs and I am foaming at the mouth because I am a grad student and free information yessssss. I scroll through these academic blogs and see what sorts of people they reblog from, betting that they’ll know a few other academic blogs. I am correct. I get lucky and see that someone has posted about introductions. I find some other posts about introductions. Some are lacking details. Some have details, and it seems easy. Some are very elaborate rituals and I realize hey, I need to research what all of these terms are that I don’t know, and figure out how to do the things that are listed because this is written using technical terms and I am a historical linguist, so this is very much not my department and I do not know what they are talking about. Also when you say ‘recite a hymn’ do you mean I actually have to memorize and recite it, or can I just read it out.

I need to research.

Yes, fine. I have got multiple books on my laptop, thousands of pages of information. But how do I know what’s important? Do I have to do months and months of research before I can worship, because it seems like I need to do an introduction which I need to have a good foundation of research in order to do correctly to avoid offending this being whom I really want to adore, then wait on the deity to give me permission to worship them after doing this ritual, and I am a burnt-out autist who needs to throw themself at the feet of a deity now I need them now. I came to Dionysos while in a pretty rough patch after trying to drink myself to death. I spiritually crawled to him on my hands and knees, tears quite literally running down my face, begging to worship him. The Dyllan Owlglass who had just puked their guts out on the bathroom floor, whose husband had to call an ambulance to try to help them, was not in any state of mind to do any sort of research for weeks. I wasn’t anti-academic. I needed a deity who didn’t hate me, to give me spiritual solace, and I needed that deity in that second and not a second later because that quite literally may have been the death of me and I couldn’t research the right way to do it.

If there is one thing I cannot stand it is being called intellectually lazy. Grad school and all. I’ve almost finished my current term paper, after which I have one more, my research module, then my master’s thesis. I know how to research. I’ve got over a decade of experience. But the thing is, when you’re just starting out in a topic, there’s a lot of information. It can be difficult to know what’s important and what isn’t.

Let me put it this way. I’m getting my MA in historical linguistics after having gotten my BA majoring in German (with a focus on linguistics) with a minor in linguistics and a second minor in TESOL. I have been working with linguistics for over a decade. I am bilingual in English and German, and have studied in some capacity at some point Old High German, Middle High German, Old English, Old Norse, Old Persian, Latin, Lithuanian, Icelandic, French, Spanish, Italian, and Scottish Gaelic. When I first started learning Latin my husband, who took Latin in school, made a game of giving me a Latin word which I would then translate to German then English by doing sound changes in my head. I defy someone who has no knowledge of Latin or linguistics or language change to figure out that stare means ‘to stand’ without a dictionary. Want to know why German is Like That? Have a seat. I hope you have time. Want to know why your brain did that weird thing with language just then? Let me get you a cup of tea, I have an answer or two for you and will likely go on a tangent about language acquisition. Do you have a moment to talk about invisible pronouns. You say you like epic poetry; if you have a minute I can give you a detailed explanation of how language change influenced language and caused the death of particular metrical forms that were used in Old English epics like Beowulf and are no longer extant today.

I say all that to say this: I know my topic, at least a little, after dealing with it for as long as I have, and because I’m in it so much, if I don’t know the answer, I likely know someone who does.

But if an 18 year old came up to me interested in linguistics and was like, hey, you know these things, I heard there was a language from which German and Greek and Italian all came from, I want to know how we got to this point, can you help me get started, I wouldn’t fucking hand this kid the copy of Urheimat der Indogermanen I have sitting on my shelf and say here, do some research, because they don’t even fucking know what phonological notation is yet. How, in the names of all the gods, would I expect a beginner to process that? Yeah, it seems easy to me. It was an easy read. Okay some of it was difficult because it has essays in there written in the late 1800s and that stuff is dense. But otherwise, pretty easy read, but I’ve also had literal years of experience. I wouldn’t even hand the kid a copy of Martinet to explain language change. I wouldn’t even give them a copy of Introduction to Historical Linguistics, at least not only, not at first. They need an introduction to linguistics and, because I have literally been doing this for a decade, I would know which chapters are important for a beginner. Here’s an intro linguistics book. I’d start with these chapters; you can read these if you want to but it’s not necessary for your particular question; this one is dry but it’ll help you get the basis you need to build things on later. Then here’s an introduction to historical linguistics. These chapters in particular will be interesting to you, but read these chapters here first because it gives you an overview of the method for how we got to the information in those chapters. If you find a topic that strikes your fancy and you want to know more, hit me up, I may have a book or two I can point you at. If you see a book in the rec’d reading, I may have it as well, and if not, I may know where to get you a copy if you can’t find one.

And you know what? I’d do the same thing for someone who had gotten a BA in some other subject. Yes, they know how to research, but they still don’t know this topic as well as I do. I may not hold their hand, but I’d still point out which chapters are the most relevant for their particular question to get them started and they can find related information from there. And I wouldn’t expect the 18yo or the person with a BA to understand terms that are particular to linguistics. Why, for the love of everything holy, would I expect them to know what a frequentative derivational morpheme is when no one who isn’t in morphology has any reason to know what that is. Yes that is a real thing. Yes I can explain it to you if you really want me to. Sometimes it’s difficult when you’ve been in a topic for a long time because you forget that things which seem basic and normal to you are not basic and normal knowledge for people who aren’t in the topic.

Now I’ve done okay on my own. I know how to research. One has to know how to research if one is going to get their MA, at least I would hope. It’s overwhelming at first because there’s a lot of information, but because I kind of know what I’m looking for, and since I do have quite a bit of experience in doing academic things, I wasn’t as lost as I could have been. There are still some things I’m lost on, but the Theoi are good and they know I’m just a mortal. Seeing that other people did the same sort of thing as me, just starting their worship and learning as they went, was really helpful to me. Seeing examples of other people’s practice is also helpful to me -- it gives me things to think about, things to consider, and helps me draw relations. I’ve listened to some good podcasts that have given me ideas on other starting topics.

But I know not everyone has years of experience being an academic. I wouldn’t get angry at a baby linguist for not knowing things, for needing quite a bit of help. I remember what it was like to be a baby linguist, too. To start you need to know the basics, but it’s hard to know what’s basic when you’re just starting. I have no doubt that some people are lazy. I have no doubt that some people just want others to do the work for them, or just want to complain. I had a guy like that in a syntax class in my undergrad; I had to turn him in for plagiarism because fuck that guy and I got harrassed by him for a semester until he dropped out.

But that was just one guy in years and years of academia. So I feel like there are less baby hellenics on here complaining because they don’t want to research as much as there are baby hellenics on here bonding over the fact that damn this is hard, there’s a lot, it can be overwhelming, and when there’s so much information it can be difficult knowing where to start and when you know “enough” especially when you see as many posts as I have claiming you can’t worship a deity without doing your research, but not specifying at which point you have done research enough to be allowed to worship.

#shut up dyllan #baby hellenic ramblings #alcoholism #suicide #cw #tw #rant #alcohol #swearing

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decadang · 6 years

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The Last Jedi: Past, Present, and Failure [SPOILERS]

How’s that for a title? I don’t get paid enough for this. In fact, I don’t get paid at all, but TLJ is the exact kind of movie that prompts me to gather my thoughts and talk about it, so that’s what I’m going to do now. The last time I did this was with Justice League, though for wildly different reasons...little weird, but it’s been an interesting year.

I do want to try to structure this a bit more so I can cover everything, cause there’s a lot. If I go on some tangents here or there, forgive me, as when I do this it’s never a script or something that goes through drafts, just a stream of my thoughts. Let’s get started.

The major underlying theme and the crux of the story is that the past, for as fondly it can be remembered, was never a perfect time and that it’s worth looking back and learning from the good as well as the bad. It’d be nice to ignore the bad stuff and say that the good will guide us through the future, but the movie doesn’t do that, and based on the major characters’ actions, we, the audience, see how the story plays out and comes together.

Offshoots and other themes include growing up/adulthood, growing old and the differences between it and growing up, taking things for granted and why we shouldn’t, loss and rebirth of idols, the middle of extremes, leadership, and the unpredictability, challenges, and process of life as well as how it changes.

The main characters that drive these themes and learn from it are: Rey/Luke, Finn, Poe, and Kylo.

The main characters that guide the first group into these and how they deal with the consequences are: Rey/Luke, Yoda/R2, Rose, Leia, and Snoke. No, that’s not a typo - I’ll get to it, but you’ve seen the movie.

“But Mark, what about every other character?” Secondary or not nearly as important to the main themes, for the most part. Sorry to break your hearts, Porg-lovers.

Before I really begin with thematic elements, I want to address that yes, characters I didn’t mention are involved in the plot and they’re fun. But in a franchise as huge and sweeping as Star Wars, I feel like the plot ultimately is a throughline for the themes and characters. To me, a movie doesn’t elicit an emotional reaction because the plot is threaded and twisty, and I would bet that it’s the same for most of you - we’re not robots. Plus, we’ve already seen what happens when character is sacrificed for plot threads in Star Wars and I’m sure not going back there. Point is, if anyone I didn’t mention is your favorite, great! There’s just more going on with the true focal points that I’d rather not have to try and find a reason why BB-9E is an integral part of this.

So, from the beginning. The First Order is right on the Resistance and they’ve brought a Dreadnought, ship with massive power and threatening the last of the Resistance ships. Poe takes out the main cannons, paves the way for bombers to take it down, and gets out of there alive and well while pulling off some damn cool moves. In the end, a lot ends up being lost, including Rose’s sister.

But that’s okay, yeah? The ship is gone, and a Star Wars movie began with a space battle, just like it always does. There’s always a character that dies by themselves on a ship, too, so that’s pretty normal. The moment where Poe drifts and outfoxes the fighters is great, and we can celebrate now.

Here’s the divergence. Where any of the other movies probably would have just wiped immediately to the next new moment, we instead see Leia looking at the lost ships and feeling the pressure of what’s to come. That’s why she tries to stop Poe from going forward with the bombing, even though it feels good to him and the audience to see it happen as it’s initially presented. I think that this scene with Leia at the desk and the fallout are the most important parts of this initial space battle, as well as how it serves both Leia and Poe as characters within the framework of their experience and of course, the themes.

From the very beginning, TLJ takes something we’ve always accepted and taken for granted as part of Star Wars and takes it somewhere new, showing a confidence in the story it wants to tell as well as a respect for its audience in a way that Star Wars hasn’t really done before. Since we’re on the subject of Poe and his journey, I think it’s fair to continue with him so we see where else he fits.

Even though the entire cast of characters is split apart for so long, it’s the thematic elements that keeps them all closer than they appear. Poe’s growth and arc I think isn’t so much becoming an inspiring leader, at least not yet. He’s still the flyboy, and it’d be easy to say he’s supposed to mirror Han, but I think that isn’t where he’s gone or is going at all, and that’s very heavily on purpose. Han meets Leia and they clash and banter, and they fall in love. Poe meets Leia and they clash and oppose each other, and they end up respecting each other to a degree where Leia trusts Poe to lead the Resistance.

For this new trilogy to set itself apart and become the new chapters in Star Wars that make us care about them, it’s very important that the main four NOT be like the main four of the original trilogy - Luke/Leia/Han/Vader and Rey/Finn/Poe/Kylo, in case it needs to be spelled out.

This is why I think TFA is unfairly chastised for being like ANH. Sure, the story beats and callbacks are familiar, but it’s a true new take because the characters are new. and exciting They are not expies and that’s especially true after TLJ. More with this when we get to Rey and Luke.

As for Finn, he’s actually pretty selfish at the beginning of the story. Now that I think about it, the more I like that this entire movie follows pretty much right after TFA, because seeing the development on-screen instead of timeskipping ties into the main topic and point of this essay, a lot.

Anyway, Finn is all but ready to leave and find Rey because he basically only cares about her and if she is safe from harm. It’s a sweet sentiment if you look at it from his point of view, but this is The Last Jedi, and challenge is the name of the game. That’s why Rose is so important to both Finn and their story tying into the main theme. In spite of how small the Resistance is, Finn still would rather save himself and Rey, and I’m so glad Rose is there to call him out.

Maybe the framing of Canto Bight could have been better, in terms of cinematography and humor, etc, but the most important part of this sequence is the theme and the conversations the two have. No, not the obvious societal messages, important as they are. When DJ shows Finn that the Resistance and the First Order both benefit from people outside the conflict, he sees both sides and even though the Resistance is ultimately fighting for good, the bad should be addressed. This is something the original trilogy never did and maybe never wanted to do. Does that make this new take wrong? Hardly. Johnson and his story and direction add so many layers and depth to Star Wars that the originals maybe would never touch on, and it’s done with such confidence that I can’t help but admire it. Plus, it’s a good thing to do - reflect on your side, on your self, and see the bad for what it is so you can make yourself better.

After Finn learns a real, valuable lesson, he’s actually ready to fight for more than just himself and Rey, he’s ready to fight for real, for the Resistance. That’s why his willingness to sacrifice himself, that fight with Phasma, that moment where you think he might die, they’re all powerful. Try not to focus on that Phasma is a bit left out of the main story, focus on what it means for Finn. It’s the same thing as Boba Fett - sure, he looks awesome, but he doesn’t make the movies he’s in great.

I am slightly disappointed that he didn’t die, and the romance with him and Rose is kind of sloppy, but I’m also glad he’s still around because John Boyega brings some real great stuff to both the character and the movies.

Now...the big one. The movie’s not called The Last Jedi for nothing. We’re going to be talking a lot of characters here so hopefully it’s not too much of a read. Rey as both a character and an audience surrogate works so well that I think the only people who don’t like her character may not really have more than superficial reasons to dislike her.

When you are a child and see Star Wars, experience the story, the legends of Luke Skywalker, do you want to be him? To learn from him? To see him succeed, no matter the odds? Of course! And guess what? Rey does too. She is the true main character of this trilogy - at least, one half of them, and that’s why it’s important to bring her down and have her deal with these feelings and consequences, because it’s important for us, as people, to do the same things.

Why is it that the darkness underneath the island is a mirror? And why would Luke be so scared of it? I mean, it doesn’t harm Rey when she finds it and looks into it, right? Huh...

Why’s this important? Rey does idolize Luke, yes, but he does the exact same thing. When you save the galaxy and are immortalized as this living legend, someone who might be able to do no wrong? That would get into your head. You are THE successful one, the one who people look up to for generations - not only in the story, but in life. Why else do we hold the originals in such regard if not for Luke the absolute most?

Let’s go back to an earlier point, that these new characters not be like the old ones. Rey wants so desperately for Luke to save the day, or train her so that she can do it, just like he did. When he says no, she persists, and he does train her, but not to fight. The entire scene where she really feels what the Force is, the true balance of the world, that’s powerful. But it’s not the end for her arc, not by a long shot.

Luke is so afraid of failure that he won’t face the mirror below...but Rey pushes to understand it, head-on. Not just because she’s a bit impulsive and childlike, but because she’s trying to conquer her fear. Even though her fear becomes true, that the hero worship isn’t the most important that about Luke, and that her parents aren’t anything more than nobodies, she still, at the end of the film, finds new resolve and in that way becomes a true successor to Luke. Not by being him, but being her own person.

And no, I don’t think that Rey’s parents might be actually important. The scene where it’s revealed they aren’t - that line comes from her, not Kylo. He just presents the question.

Before we get to Kylo, I need to touch on Luke some more. THE legend. Untouchable, infallible, even. But what does he do in this movie? He failed. And so the audience and Rey, who had spent so much time believing he couldn’t, also feel like they failed. Tough pill to swallow, huh?

We never like to think about it with these heroes or ourselves, but no one is ever perfect. It seems so obvious that other peoples’ problems are out there, and I don’t have those problems, so I must be better than them, right? I hate to break it to you, but life isn’t wired that way. It’s not a switch you turn on when you go out in public and turn off when you go to bed.

A reality check on this level probably would rattle a lot of heads if you’d never experienced that before. Poe goes through one, Finn, Rey, and now Luke is about to. It’s this theme that really lifts the scenes with Luke meeting Yoda and R2 again to a height that transcends the original trilogy. Luke, for all his training, his learning, his now age and wisdom, still had so much to learn in this movie - as Yoda says, failure is our greatest teacher.

Age does not make you better, not on its own, and neither does knowledge. It’s how you handle it and your perspective that defines who you are. Yes, Luke’s perspective when it came to Kylo was wrong, and the weight of that choice is why he severed his Force connection and wanted to live out his days dying. But that inherent heroism I think is still present in Luke in this movie, otherwise he could have easily offed himself. Would that have been unceremonious? Uh, yeah. That’s why it didn’t happen that way in the story and why I think some who say Luke’s heart and true character were lost maybe might want to take a breath to look at his journey in this movie.

Why does Luke face Kylo in the final confrontation and not Rey? Why isn’t he the battling, heroic legend? Because, well...he’s not that any more. The entire movie establishes that point. His projection at the end isn’t just his image, but his newfound resolve against what Kylo has become, his renewed faith in Rey and the idea of hope, and the love he feels for Leia, even after being gone for so long.

Okay, now Kylo. Oh my goodness. Alongside Rey, he might be the most developed character in Starr Wars, at least on-screen. So Kylo actually embraces the theme of letting the past go the most in the movie, and not just because he says the line that most echoes that statement.

It’s his reasoning for killing Han in TFA, his reasoning for killing Snoke, and his reasoning for nearly killing Luke and Leia. For Leia, well, that exchange between them, without any dialogue, said so much that I don’t think my words could do it justice.

The true opposite balance with him and Rey serves their characters to such a great degree. Let’s take a lesson from their circumstances. Kylo came from royal blood, Jedi blood, love and care, and still he is the villain. Rey came from basically nothing, just some unknown power that dwells within her, and she’s the hero.

Just because you have everything doesn’t mean you are whole.

Just because you have nothing doesn’t mean you’ll never find anything worthwhile about yourself.

I imagine Snoke is killed by Kylo because Snoke represents what he might resent most about authority figures in his life, and their need to cultivate him into something great. Han and Leia entrust his youth to Luke, to make him a great Jedi. It should have been easy, but it wasn’t. But even when he goes to Snoke, he’s conflicted. Not because he wants to be with the light, as we learn, but because he doesn’t want to be with either. He just wants to be. While that’s something we could all strive to be, Kylo does it with such passionate anger and hatred that it leads him to believe his way must be the only right way, and that’s why he’s an incredible villain, a perfect foil to Rey.

There’s so many more things I could talk about here, but this is getting pretty long and I think the major points I wanted to make are all present.

The Force Awakens reminds me of why I like Star Wars.

The Last Jedi solidifies why I love Star Wars and indeed, a lot of my favorite stories.

It’s real, it’s not easy, it’s unforgettable, and it’s Star Wars, really maturing and growing up.

Maybe it’s time we do the same.

#star wars #star wars: the last jedi #spoilers #tlj spoilers

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getoffthesoapbox · 7 years

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VK Science II - Odds & Ends

So I thought about it, but I hope my straightforward answers don’t come across as condescending! Aside from being blunt, I try not to write too much, but I guess it’s not a problem now? ’(^_^) In any case, before I get to the next theory I want to respond to some of your points :)

Your answers didn’t come off as condescending at all, don’t worry! You just seemed like a typical science-oriented person wanting to make sure everything was accurate before proceeding, which I completely respect. (I have a thick skin anyway, and I’m fairly blunt myself though without as lofty a reason, fufu. ;D) But yes, feel free to write to your heart’s content, as long posts are a speciality of my blog anyway!

Pureblood Pregnancy: The reason why I can’t answer this is because Hino has full creative freedom to create whatever duration of pregnancy she would like for humans birthing Purebloods :/ Would you expect it to be longer? Probably. Honestly, though, I already don’t agree with her concept of Purebloods having a range of duration of pregnancy rather than a set time as most other organisms do (O_o)

Teething: This could be another reason why the Purebloods were scattered as I would think that this process would terrify their parents and even lead some to, sadly, label their children as “monsters,” abandon them, and leave them for death.

Well, of course Hino can do whatever she wants with the narrative elements; she could go off the rails (and has) if she wants and we’d be stuck having to try to pretend it makes sense. I honestly found her making the pregnancies 2-4 years to be just a ridiculous method to excuse Yuuki’s teen pregnancy and allow her to give birth in her twenties. I don’t think when Hino originally came up with VK that she ever intended the pregnancies to last longer than the human terms–it’s just that Hino needed to make the accident pregancy “acceptable” to shoujo audiences. This is just my personal theory, but for the sake of the story I’d say that the reason Pureblood pregnancies last longer is probably due to maladapted hormones of some kind that require the fetus to gestate longer in order to fully develop. Originally, before the Kaname magic pregnancy, Hino made it clear in arc 2 that Purebloods had a difficult time conceiving (hence why Haruka and Juri only had two kids despite living 3K+ years, and why the Pureblood numbers were shrinking despite them being immortal). That’s just my current thought from where we are, fufu. Really, though, I think it was just Hino trying to make Yuuki’s unacceptable teen pregnancy more palatable. =P

The Vmpr gene: In regards to your question… I’m not exactly sure since we’re not shown any examples. Not just that, but I intend to view human-turned-vampires (I always wonder if I word this write .-.) from a disease perspective. Based on my theory… I guess they would always code for humans since it’s a disease acquired later in life. In Zero’s case, I want to say that they would be human since the majority of Zero’s genes code for human and, again, I do not view the Level D’s as carrying the Vmpr gene, but… Well, maybe my next theory will help ’(^_^)

My thought was in line with yours that Zero (and any other Level Ds/Es) would code for human if paired with a human partner. Yuuki’s Pureblood would obviously be dominant, which would probably place Ren as a Level C or perhaps a Noble at best.

Charisma: OHHH (O_O) Yeah, I just viewed those scenes as “hypnotism” rather than “charisma.” I see people’s willingness to listen to and follow Kaname as a result of charisma rather than Rido manipulating (hypnotizing) Aidou - they’re two completely different cases. As far as Yuuki’s charisma, I saw it as how she was primarily raised human and wasn’t sure how to act as a Pureblood princess (an authoritative position), so she lacked the same noble nature Kaname and even Sara exude that would attract others. In short, I think it comes down to how you define “charisma” in VK XD

Well Hino’s notorious for not directly explaining things and leaving things up for interpretation, but she makes a point of having the nobles fawn over Kaname in the first arc that he doesn’t use his charisma against the other vampires, implying that it’s an actual ability (if I remember right; it’s been a while since I’ve revisited arc 1). This would of course imply that his personal magnetism could be amplified to control his fellows (which he actually does when he murders the council). But this is assuming of course that charisma isn’t a social construct that the nobles have imagined due to their historical worship of the Purebloods. If it’s actually just in the nobles’ heads, then we’re just working with natural charm and Rido’s and Sara’s abilities are separate from the charisma. Either way, you’re spot on about Yuuki I think. Either she’s just deficient in charisma because she was turned back into Pureblood later in life, or because the Nobles saw her as human first, they can’t go into worship mode for her. Same results either way I suppose. XD

Mixed Children: …This is a weird title for this point considering how I am mixed LOL XD Technically, I can’t answer this, which goes back to why I was salty (=__=) In any case, I don’t think they would birth humans because vampirism is dominant. Due to the percentage of vampiric genes a Pureblood would be bringing in, it’s unlikely they would have a human child. The only evidence that kind of supports this is that it is implied (to my knowledge, at least) that the rise of the Aristocrats came from the Progenitors mixing with humans, which would follow the Night class’s explanation of the higher levels of “human blood” aka DNA as you go down the hierarchy…

Sorry, I couldn’t think of a better simple paraphrase to cover all the potential pairings. XD Hope I didn’t offend, lol. But okay, that makes sense that the vampiric gene would be dominant, so you wouldn’t have any human children cropping up unexpectedly (unless I guess there was another environmental shift that reversed things).

NaCl: ( O_o) Ah… But are there Purebloods that have some human blood? Is that why the Kurans are powerful? …Because they have none? Wait… What? UGH that changes everything! This is why I gave up on figuring out the inheritance of genes! X( And in the first place, WHY would the Kurans be the only ones? Huh? Huh?! Did everyone else just “conveniently” die? And I’m not supposed to side-eye that? Yeah, ok, I see you Hino ( T_T) *diffuses in high concentrations of Na+*

Haha, oh no, I don’t think I meant to imply that Purebloods have any human blood, only to question whether or not it was possible for them to birth a human child if the recessive traits lined up right I think? Obviously they’d have no human blood in them as they’d be the purest expression of the vmpr gene, right? Sorry, I got wound up with speculating what the story would be like if two Purebloods accidentally had a recessive human child or if there was a character who was a more human expressing Pureblood/Noble (such as, say, a Noble who had all the traits except no powers manifest, or a Pureblood who had bloodlust but no fangs, or short lived Purebloods, etc.). That was more speculation about where Hino could have taken the story. ;D (See, and here’s where my narrative theory tangenting comes into play, so just smack me when I go overboard, fufu.) But no, I think your theories are right on and it’s not an inconsistency on Hino’s part; it was just me rambling incoherently. XD No need for you to become a pillar of salt over it, methinks. =P

Zero: I’m getting ready to review my theory before sending it in a little bit. Before that, since you’re curious about Zero and I’m sure a lot of your followers are, could you emphasize some special traits of his that are mentioned in the story, so I don’t miss any? I’m not sure I’ll be able to cover them since his hunter genes will play a factor. If I can, I might make it a separate submission. I want to point out that I know that you’ll probably point out Zero delaying his fall to bloodlust and descent to vampirism, but I intend to cover this for Level D vampires in general.

Oh sure! The big one of course is that he overcame the twin curse in the womb, allowing his twin to be born rather than devoured (as vampiric twins are and as hunter twins are due to the vampiric genes they carry). The second unique one is that he can overcome the Master/Servant bond (where a Master can hijack and control his actions). The third, and this is only sort of implied by Takuma during the last battle with Sara, is that he seems to have a sort of weird “Pureblood charisma” effect–where he’s basically to the Purebloods what they are to the Nobles. For some inexplicable reason, they’re all drawn to him/entranced by him despite him being about as low class a vampire as you can get. It’s implied that this is all due to his ability to overcome the Master/Servant bond, but if that was all there was, only Shizuka should be interested in him because she’s his Master.

As for Zero delaying his bloodlust and his fall, I never saw that as particularly unique to him as Zero (but of course we never got to see a normal person get turned and fall, so we have no idea how long the process usually takes). But given how chill Kaien was about it, and that both Kaien and Kaname seemed to expect “when” it would happen, the process Zero went through in this just seemed to be normal Level D experience in my estimation. Happy to hear your thoughts on this of course, but I myself never saw this as part of Zero’s special characteristics.

Hunters: I know I said I wasn’t going to address this point, but I did look up some things regarding the hunters. Since the first hunters drank the Hooded Woman’s blood, they didn’t just consume her red blood cells, which contain no DNA, but her white blood cells, which do… Although, someone can double check me on that since I had to look that up. As for what that would do and how that fits into my theory scientifically, I’m not sure, but we know what happens in VK, so meh; we’re already ignoring blood types, so why not? I still don’t understand the science and how it would genetically alter a whole group of people, so that’s all I got for this point.

I didn’t know white blood cells contained genetic info but red didn’t! That’s a fun fact. XD /random nerd

Well we can just assume that what happened was the Hooded Woman ordered her genes to meld with the Hunters’ legacies so they can pass them on to their children (we know the Purebloods have control over their blood within other people, so we can easily allow for the Hooded Woman to have given the order here, or perhaps the cells just did what they do and took over).

Thanks for continuing this discussion with me! I’ll send in my next theory soon! Until then :)

I should be thank you for hanging in there with me while I dropped out to play games! =) Will be looking out for your next theory!

#vampire knight #vk science anon #submission

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