Helluva Boss Season 2 break down. Pt 2: Apology Tour!
I have a feeling this is how Apology Tour will start: Blitzø breaking down due to overwhelming self loathing. Possibly due to someone else going off on him. I believe the cake(? Some sort of food) depiction of him isn't real, but something he's picturing.
Honestly I don't have a damn clue how we got here, but it seems Stolas is performing at a Verosika show, them bonding over there shared heartbreak from Blitzø, made most obvious by the curtain behind them with "BLITZO SUCKS" spelled out in huge letters.
I also think its possible this is the first time we will see the Envy Ring. As the sky looks more purple here to me than in Lust. But i might be crazy.
My assumption is Blitzø crashes the show, why and how I am also not sure. I have a few theories but they aren't rooted in much. Presumably him and Verosika get into it, landing them both in jail. I think here we will see similar to in Oops him and Verosika fighting about their past, that leads to actually communicating, them both finally seeing the others side. They end up working together to escape.
Also want to point out that the window behind Verosika shows what might be a green sky. Which would be kinda strange for them to have traveled to a completely different ring. The neon light in the back of the cell seems to be more of Lust's aesthetic. So honestly who fucking knows what ring they are in anymore.
I think these take place after Blitzø and Verosika escape. Possibly them talking about his relationship with Stolas, and her pointing out the blatantly obvious to Blitzø that Stolas does love him.
I believe the close up shots of them do take place directly after one another, mostly because they are in the same outfits they are shown to be in in their respective clips with Verosika. I think again this is finally them communicating and understanding each other, and possibly here is where they officially become a couple.
I believe these shots of a fight sequence in the Lust Ring are going to be this episodes B plot. We get parts showing Millie, Loona, and Moxxie (and the cool mega man looking ass robot) but no Blitzø.
These clips are a little difficult for me placement wise. They would fit with my expected story line of this episode where Blitzø is remembering and regretting everyone he has hurt. Although I have a feeling they are actually from Mastermind, Ill elaborate on [my post for that episode]
I'm not completely sure where the shot of Millie with the broken glass fits, its been a really tricky one for me. I do not think it has anything to do with Blitzø, like how the line playing when it comes up alludes to. This episode is my best guess, but honestly it could fit a lot of places.
I want to include this background detail from Hells Belles that may have possibly been foreshadowing to this episode. The sign does say "Pride Tour" though, which AGAIN just fucks with what ring this damn episode takes place.
Again I am sorry for the shit photo quality, and possible bad grammar and spelling. I currently have the posts for the rest of the episodes nearly done so expect those in the next few hours ♡ I'd love to hear any other ideas or theories about the upcoming episodes, or anything I missed/got wrong!
Pt. 1: The Full Moon | Pt. 2 :Apology Tour | Pt. 3: Ghostfuckers | Pt. 4: Mastermind | Pt. 5: Sinsmas
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Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, and Themes of Disability, Mental Illness, and Criminality.
Back Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy on kickstarter before May 10th if you want to help a disabled person with limited ability to work pay his bills.
Verisimilitude, What Would a Person Do?
To understand Eureka’s themes regarding disability, mental illness, and criminality, you first have to understand its verisimilitude.
“Verisimilitude” is defined as “the appearance of being true or real,” and it is a big part of the core design ethos behind Eureka. It is a very realistic game.
We aren’t necessarily of the opinion that “realism” is a better design choice than stylization overall for RPGs, but it is a better design choice for Eureka, because we want the PCs to be very normal, believable people who make believable, organic decisions in extraordinary situations. No matter what anyone says, the mechanics of a TTRPG strongly influence what kind of stories are told with it, and what characters do in those stories. So if we want characters to make realistic decisions, the world they inhabit and interact with must be constructed of realistic rules.
Even though there is a small chance that they may be a supernatural creature, PCs in Eureka are still not fearless action heroes, chosen ones, or anything of the sort. They’re normal people with jobs, friends, and families who get mixed up in mysterious and/or dangerous situations, often against their will. They are fragile, vulnerable, imperfect, and they, largely, know it.
“Composure” is a mechanic that helps you know it too. I’ve given a deeper explanation of the Composure mechanic in the post linked here, but I’ll give a very very very condensed version in this post. Composure can sort of be thought of as “emotional/fatigue HP,” (and no, it is NOT “sanity”) it acts as a guideline for how well your character is handling the situation, and when it gets low enough, it starts to have serious mechanical effects as well, because a character’s stat modifier can never be higher than their current Composure level. Fear, hunger, and fatigue all lower Composure, and eating, sleeping, and bonding with one’s fellow investigators can all restore it, at least for normal people. More on that further down. All you really need to know for now is that when Composure gets below zero it starts eating into HP, so characters can even pass out or die from loss of Composure, and also one single bullet is enough to permanently cripple a character, and the rate of Composure loss during combat reflects how serious that is for the characters.
Grievous Wounds
It isn’t too uncommon for RPGs to have some sort of “flaw” system, whereby in character creation you can give your PC “flaws” or some kind of penalty, and usually get that balanced out by being able to add extra bonuses elsewhere, and these “flaws” may take the form of disabilities.
Critical Role’s Candela Obscura, the whole document of which is one of the most egregious examples of liberalism and toxic positivity I’ve ever seen in the TTRPG space, takes this beyond just character creation, and makes it so that if a PC receives a “scar” in combat that reduces their physical stats, their mental stats automatically go up by an equivalent amount, and proudly asserts that to make any mechanic which functions otherwise is ableist. I think you can probably tell what I think of that from this sentence alone and I don’t need to elaborate. Getting bogged down in all the failures, mechanical and moral, of Candela Obscura would make this post three times as long.
I actually do think that as long as you aren’t moralizing and patting yourself on the back this hard about it, “flaw” systems in character creation are a pretty good idea in most cases, it allows for more varied options during character creation, while preserving game balance between the PCs.
But in real life, people aren’t balanced. The events that left me injured and disabled didn’t make me smarter or better at anything—if anything, they probably made me stupider, considering the severity of the concussion! Some things happened to me, and now I’m worse. There’s no upside, I just have to keep going by trying harder with a less efficient body, and rely more on others in situations where I am no longer capable of perfect self-sufficiency.
Denying that a disabled person is, by definition, less capable of doing important tasks than the average person is to deny that they need help, and to deny that they need help is to enable a refusal to help.
This is the perspective from which Eureka’s Grievous Wounds mechanic was written.
When a character is reduced to 1 HP, which by design can result from a single hit from most weapons, they may become incapacitated, or they may take a Grievous Wound, which is a permanent injury with no stat benefits. Think twice before getting into a shootout.
Grievous Wounds don’t have to result from combat, they can also be given to a character during character creation, but not as a trade-off for an extra bonus.
“But then doesn’t my character just have worse stats than the rest of the party?” Yes, didn’t you read the above section? There is no benefit, except for the opportunity to play a disabled character in an TTRPG, and this character will probably have to be more reliant on the rest of the party to get by in various situations. Is that a bad thing?
Monsters
Just like mundane people in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, monsters are playable, because they are regular people. I’ve gone over this in other posts and also you can just read about it in Chapter 8 of the Eureka rulebook, but the setting of Eureka doesn’t have a conspiracy or “masquerade” hiding or separating supernatural people from normal society. They exist within normal society, and a lot of them eat people.
Most RPGs consider monsters to just be evil, they do evil for evil’s sake. RPGs that seek to subvert this expectation often instead make monsters misunderstood and wrongfully persecuted, but harmless. Eureka takes a wholly different approach.
There are five playable types of monsters in the rulebook right now, and it’ll be seven if we hit all the stretch goals, but for simplicity’s sake this post will just focus on the vampire. Despite them applying in different ways, the same overall themes apply to nearly every monster, so if you get the themes for the vampire, you’ll get the gist of what Eureka is doing with monsters in general.
I mentioned Composure above, and how it can normally be restored by eating food and sleeping. Well, vampires can not restore their Composure this way. They don’t sleep, and normal people food might be tasty as long as it isn’t too heavily seasoned for them, but it doesn’t do anything for them nutritionally. Their main way to restore Composure is fresh living human blood, straight from the source. To do what mundane PCs do normally by just eating and sleeping, vampires have to take from another, whether they’re happy with this arrangement or not. They do not, of course, literally have to, and a player is not forced to make their vampire PC drink blood, just like you don’t literally have to eat food, but they do and you do if you want to live in any degree of comfort or happiness, or else they’d eventually just sit at 0 Composure and not be able to effectively do anything.
There’s a reason that this is a numerical mechanic and not simply a rule that says something like “this character is a vampire and therefore they must drink blood once every session,” and that is to emphasize and demonstrate that the circumstances a person faces drive their behavior. In America, there is a tendency to think of criminality and harmfulness as resulting from something of an intrinsic evil, but in my experience and observation, people do not just wake up at like age 16 and decide “I think I’ll go down the criminal life path.” Through their life circumstances they have been barred from the opportunities that would have given them other options. People need food, food costs money, money requires work, work requires getting hired, but getting hired requires a nearby job opening, an education, an impressive resume, nice clean clothes, a charismatic attitude, consistent transportation, and so on. For people without, criminality is something they are funneled into, which becomes harder to avoid the longer they go without consistent access to their basic needs. The choice will be between taking money from others by force or trickery, or running completely out of money.
As the Composure counter ticks down, a vampire, or other playable monster, is going to encounter much the same dilemma. There is little to no “legal” or “harmless” way for them to get their needs met, even if they do have some money. Society just isn’t set up for that. And no your kink is not the solution to this, trying to suggest every vampire get into sex work is like one step removed from telling every girl she should just get an OnlyFans the minute she turns 18, or that women should just marry a man and be a housewife that gets taken care of if they want their needs met.
Playable monsters in Eureka are dangerous, harmful people. They were set up to be.
“Oh well then the vampire should just eat bad people!” You mean those same bad people i just described above? See this post for answers to all the other arguments people are going to make to try and absolve vampires of causing harm.
Society not being set up for that brings me to next reading/theme: Monstrousness as disability, and monsters as takers.
Mundane human characters restore 2 points of Composure per day just by eating food and sleeping, but vampires do not, they can’t. To restore their Composure they have to take from others a valuable resource that everyone needs to live and the extraction of which is excruciatingly painful and debilitating (blood). No one knows what happens to blood after a vampire drinks it, it’s just gone. Vampires are open wounds through which blood pours out of the universe.
This is a special need, something they have to take but cannot give back. Their special needs make them literally a drain on society and the world.
Even in so-called “progressive” spaces, there is a tendency to consider takers, people who take much more than they give back, such as disabled people, as something that needs to be pruned, with the mask over this being the aforementioned total denial of the fact that disabled people take more than they can give.
In this way, vampires and other playable monsters are, inarguably, “takers,” but in positioning them as protagonists right beside mundane protagonists, Eureka puts you in their shoes, and forces you to at least reckon with the circumstances that make them this way, as well as acknowledge their inner lives. You have to acknowledge two things: That they are dangerous, harmful people who take more than they can give, and that they are people. Because they are people, Eureka asserts that they have inherent value, a right to exist, and a right to do what they need to do to exist.
One final point is that of monstrousness as mental illness. Mental illness is a disability, one pretty comparable to physical disability in a lot of ways, so all of the above about disability can apply to this metaphor as well, but there are a few unique comparisons to make here.
It’s not the most efficient, but there are a couple of loopholes deliberately left in the rules that allow vampires to restore Composure without drinking blood. Eureka! moments can restore Composure, and Comfort checks from fellow investigators can restore Composure.
When I was writing the rules for how monsters regain Composure in accordance to these themes, I came to a dilemma where I wasn’t sure if it was thematically appropriate for them to be able to regain Composure in these ways, but ultimately I decided that yes, they can. It works with themes of mental illness, which is mental disability.
People with mental illnesses may have the potential to be harmful and dangerous, but study after study, including my own observation, has shown that mentally ill people with robust support structures and agency allowed to them to handle tasks are much less likely to enact harm, be that physical violence, relational violence, or violence against the self. So that’s why I kept that rule in for playable monsters. Being able to accomplish goals, and having friends who are there for them, makes the harmful person less likely to cause unnecessary harm.
I couldn’t really figure out where to fit this paragraph in so I’m sticking it here right before the conclusion: Vampires are especially great for this because they’re immortal, and because they always come back when “killed.” They can’t be exterminated, they aren’t going away, there will always be problem people in society, no matter how utopian or “progressive.” They’re a never-ending curse, who will always be a problem. The question is how you will handle them, not how you will get rid of them.
In conclusion,
Eureka is as much a study of the characters themselves as it is the mystery being solved by the characters. It is a harsh, but compassionate game, that argues through its own gameplay that yes, people do have needs which drive their behavior, many people do have special needs that are beyond their ability to reciprocate, and failure to meet the needs of even a small number of people in a society has high potential to harm the entire society, not just those individuals whose needs are unmet.
And Candela Obscura sucks.
Back Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy on kickstarter before May 10th if you want to help a disabled person with limited ability to work pay his bills.
If you want to try before you buy, you can download a free demo of the prerelease version from our website or our itch.io page!
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Join our TTRPG Book Club At the time of writng this, Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is the current game being played in the book club, and anyone who wants to participate in discussion, but can’t afford to make a contribution, will be given the most updated prerelease version for free! Plus it’s just a great place to discuss and play new TTRPGs you might not be able to otherwise!
We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.
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Hi! "“and one more time”" for the WIP game?
ok im gonna cheat a little here cause "and one more time" is a sequel/part of a duo. hindsight being 20/20 I should've had it + "never again" together but I Did Not Think Of That
"never again" + "and one more time" are both gonna be really short oneshots that deal with the parallel scenes in MASH that make me the most insane- that being Trapper knocking Hawkeye down in Mail Call, and BJ punching Hawkeye in Period of Adjustment
I don't really have much written down for these besides the beginnings, so I'll put those down here...
"never again"
""Did I hit you?" Trapper asks out of nowhere.
Hawkeye looks up from putting his boot on. "Huh?"
Trapper is sitting on the edge of his cot, frowning with a look like he's studying him. "Yesterday, when I was... you know," He gestures vaguely, "Did I hit you?"
Hawkeye considers him for a moment. He was hoping Trapper wouldn't remember that little scene. He thinks about denying it on the off chance he might be able to convince him that it didn't happen, but he knows he waits too long to reply, because Trapper looks about the guiltiest he's ever seen him look.
He looks back to lacing up his boot. "You barely shoved me." He tells him quickly."
"and one more time"
""How's the eye?" BJ asks out of nowhere.
Hawkeye was wondering when that would come up. He's amazed BJ managed to go the entire OR session without mentioning it. He looks up from where he's sitting on the bench, finding BJ hovering close to him as he tosses away his mask.
"It's fine." He replies. It only hurts when he smiles a certain way, but he doesn't tell him that.
Doffing his cap and tossing it aside, BJ hunkers down to be more level with him. "Mind if I take a look?" He asks.
"Go ahead," Hawkeye invites, "It's really not that bad. Charles already looked me over." He reminds him.
BJ's frown tells him he's unconvinced. Hawkeye supposes he'd feel the same were he in his boots."
basically both of these have Hawkeye dealing with the aftermath of his best friends hurting him during drunken bouts of homesickness, because the parallel there is absolutely insane to me. i do wonder how deliberate it was, considering MASH is pretty famous for not really sticking with continuity, but regardless of if it was or not its still very very good
comparing both episodes is interesting to me because with Mail Call, Trapper shoving Hawkeye over and trying to desert is mostly played for laughs and quickly diffused. there's some tension in the scene but its ultimately not taken super seriously, and ends as soon as Frank comes in and gives Trapper something to laugh at. meanwhile in Period of Adjustment that is VERY much not the case, with that episode having very few laughs overall. one of those comparisons that really shows the tonal differences between the first 3 seasons vs season 4 and onward, especially getting into the later seasons of 8 and onward
I had the original inspiration for a bit of a different idea a few months ago when I first started reading fic actually, there was like... one mention in a fic I read of how Hawkeye is perceived as this easy target for everyone's anger. I wish I could remember which fic it was off the top of my head, I dont even remember what the fic itself was about, but I still think about it. cause like... yeah, Hawkeye is often the target of unfair anger, and thats not something that gets explored a whole lot within the show, so here I am 50 years later to write angsty fanfic about it
thanks for the ask!! hope you dont mind me bringing in another WIP haha but I figured it was relevant to digging into my intentions with them
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