#but it occurred to me

[artbyblastweave]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[acarillustrated]

something that i really like about blue eye samurai, now that im thinking about it, is that it discusses violence against women without becoming torture porn. like, in a lot of media that portrays women's issues, they show you that scene. like they give you this extended visual of a woman experiencing something traumatic and then laud themselves as feminist for doing so.

blue eye samurai doesn't do that. the whole show is set in a world that is extremely antagonistic toward women, and it makes a point to tell you that being a woman right now sucks, because they are property and are used sexually. but even though it doesn't shy away from this, it doesn't show you the violence itself, which you would almost expect it to because of how graphic the rest of the show is.

im thinking specifically of kinuyo. they very well could have shown us a scene of her being abused, but they didn't. they didn't show the abuse itself, but they did show how it affected her. they showed her seeing a doctor for her sores. they could have made this incredibly traumatic and grotesque scene a spectacle, showing us exactly how powerless she is and how powerful he is. they could have shown us this incredibly triggering event in full detail for our entertainment, but they didn't. they chose not to. and i think that's how it should be.

it is not necessary to have an extended visual and auditory reenactment of violence against women. we the audience understood the gravity of the situation and were able to empathize without needing that scene. having that scene would have completely detracted from the point they are trying to make. it would have turned something completely reprehensible that women everywhere fear because it's a very real issue into entertainment.

#blue eye samurai #not art #mizu #kinuyo #bes #tw abuse #tw implied violence #tw sex assault #if im being honest i may be a little high rn but ive been thinking about this #because it's important #and it just occurred to me

[hunnam]

@BeefyPeaches on Twitter

#BeefyPeaches #usermichi #userdylan #smoking #pecs #Mine #i made a certain gif of him flashing and shaking a certain part of him but deliberately left it out #if you want to see it go to his twitter #I been following him for ages only just occurred to me to gif him #he's so damn hot

[jencsi]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Julie "Finn" Finlay/D. B. Russell Characters: Julie "Finn" Finlay, D. B. Russell Summary:

They say I did something bad.

#julie finlay #D.B.Russell #csi crime scene investigation #fanfiction #writing #I let castles crumbling go to my head #but it occurred to me #that Finn would not have gone down so easily to GHK #she would have put up quite a fight #as evidenced in Girls Gone Wild and Karma To Burn #so without further ado #the end game sequence redo #keep the violence hold the coma #yeah I did something bad #and so did she

[permit-it]

"Kill them with kindness" WRONG. To the barricades! 🪑🪑🪜⚰️🪑💥🚪⚰️🪑🪜⚰️🚪🪑⚰️💥⚰️🪑⚰️🪑🪜🪑💥⚰️🪜🪑⚰️🪑🚪🪑⚰️🪑💥⚰️🚪🪑⚰️🪑🪑⚰️💥🪑⚰️⚰️🪑🪜⚰️🪑💥🚪🪑⚰️🪑⚰️🪜💥🚪🪑⚰️⚰️🪑💥🪜⚰️🪑🪑⚰️🪜

#finding barricade related emojis was the most difficult part of taking part in this meme #les miserables #enjolras #les amis de l'abc #kill them with kindness #les mis #les amis #not screenreader friendly #didn't even occur to me to add that before! sorry!

[asleepinawell]

me wearily opening twitter: please show me just one nice thing for once

twitter: baldur's gate 3 lets you fuck a bear

me: you know what? good enough

#congrats to the bear fuckers out there #it's a druid in bear form I guess so this is consensual bear fucking #an important distinction #mp #baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate 3 spoilers #occurred to me that even this should be spoiler tagged #this is the only thing I've heard about this game so far I should add which just makes it funnier

[bloodofgrapes]

it turns out there’s a sixth love language

#art #Phoenix Wright #Miles Edgeworth #Ace Attorney #narumitsu #Trucy Wright #Apollo Justice #Dick Gumshoe #it occurred to me midway through drawing this that the peephole is too high on the door #because that's the angle I'm used to looking at it from #woe being short in a tall people world be upon ye #grapes comics

[bleakbluejay]

you motherfuckers have no concept of what "land back" or "decolonize" even mean. you're too busy demonizing entire groups of people, terrified, shitting yourselves, that they'll do even half of the horrors to you that you've done to them for decades or centuries. this shit comes off as hella racist for real. you hate arabs so much. you hate first nations people so much. you hate black people so much. even if you sympathize with them, you can't fucking bear the idea of them gaining freedom, independence, autonomy, safety, because you're so, so scared they'll hurt you back and cause chaos in the streets. these same people who just want to rebuild. who just want to go home. who just want to see their families again. who just want food. who just want medical care. who just want dry, warm shelter. you're so focused on the ideas of colonization, of "us vs. them", of one people displacing the other for a state to exist, that you cannot comprehend coexistence, and your only idea of peace is if an entire group of people were just gone and dead.

grow the fuck up. for the love of GOD, grow the fuck up.

#eli talks #rant #i just watched a video shared by someone i'd been following a while denying the genocide occuring in gaza entirely #are you kidding. are you fucking kidding me. #the video was trying to run with the idea that “from the river to the sea” means jewish people will be expelled from the region #no the fuck it does not you stupid motherfucker that's NOT what decolonization is #anyway. land back. decolonize. from the river to the sea. peace and love on planet earth. #stop razing olive trees. stop scorching the earth. stop bombing hospitals and schools. stop destroying the sea. #if i have to see another palestinian child undergo anesthesia-free amputation im going to start being physically fucking violent #if i have to see another mother with blood on her hands wailing and begging for her child to come back im going to start burning shit #one day all the people of palestine will be free. muslims and jews and christians and all and none. #one day all the people of sudan will be free. all the people in the congo will be free. all the peoples in the americas will be free. #and all the other occupied places suffering genocides and ethnic cleansings that the news neglects to mention. theyll be free too.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

so glad not to see any Skeleton War nonsense on my dash this year. such a dumb concept. as if the skeletons could ever not win, literally every human is a sleeper agent

#also i was gonna say they massively outnumber us #on account of over 100 billion humans have lived and died #but then it occurred to me i have no idea how many of those skeletons are um. intact #so like. they *probably* outnumber us. but probably not by a lot #...except that again. all living humans also have a skeleton inside of them waiting to take over. so yeah they have the numbers

[anarcho-skamunist]

"girl dad" has got to be one of the disappointing terms. What do you mean it's just some guy with daughters? I assumed we were talking about like. Butch milfs or something.

#i keep seeing posts calling chilchuck a girl dad and my first reaction is always 'so true chilchuck is such a girl to me' #and then it occurs to me that's not what they mean and my heart sinks...

[ministarfruit]

thinking about mia and maya

#ace attorney #mia fey #maya fey #damn... siblings in media #they love to beat me up for free #ALSO. also. does maya inherit mia's acolyte clothes #like is that a thing that happens because the thought just occurred to me #does she carry mia with her everywhere she goes.

[sketchy-pones]

#just occured to me tht i can draw anything i want lol #mlp #my little pony #dungeon meshi #dunmeshi #marcille donato #falin touden #ponyfied #farcille

[thedreadvampy]

Losing my shit about this article in which a transphobic Tory was so busy panicking about existing in the vicinity of a Trans that she almost certainly misheard "jeans" as "penis" and decided that not only was this a problem with the other woman, but also that the world must be informed of this pressing danger.

"a trans woman! I had to stand directly behind her....I thought, 'this is going well', I'm handling The Situation fine'..."

translated: I saw a tall woman with broad shoulders. How would I get out of this alive? I thought. she has a PENIS. PENIS PENIS PENIS. through some force of PENIS I mean will I managed to PENIS behave normally towards her. My hands were PENIS PENIS PENIS shaking as I tried to dry them. summoning up all my PENIS courage I said 'dryer's crap innit'. she turned to me and said " yeah I'm just goiPENIS PENIS PENIS"

It's been a week and I'm still shaking. This proves trans women are the problem and I'm not weird. I'm fine. It's fine. If you think about it I'm the hero hePENIS!!!!!

very this

#red said #it's just. I'm obsessed. #everyone on Twitter is saying 'never happened' and i think they're wrong #this absolutely did happen and she's been obsessing over how vindicated it made her feel enough to WRITE AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT #because she MISHEARD SOMEONE IN A CASUAL CONVERSATION #i lay out my reasoning thusly: if you were INVENTING a scary trans woman in bathroom story out of nothing. why would it be this? #why would you go with 'we had a banal conversation until she said a sentence that makes no sense and that no human has ever uttered #but which does coincidentally sounds almost exactly like a mishearing of a very NORMAL thing to say in the circumstances #then she left and nothing else occurred' #if you were going to INVENT a story you would probably make it MAKE SENSE or SOUND THREATENING #i truly believe this is a very authentically told account of what she thinks happened #because who would. by means other than mishearing. think 'I'm going to wipe my hands on my penis' makes any sense at all. #a) 'I'm going to dry my hands on my genitals' says the presumably fully clothed woman #b) who then proceeds to leave without doing anything threatening #c) WHO SAYS PENIS THREATENINGLY? sorry it's writing out 'penis' repeatedly that made this jump out to me but like. who says that? #you might hear someone talk casually about their dick or cock but i stg it's only doctors and TERFs who casually use the word penis much #it's so. clinically descriptive. it's a weird use of language. but it IS. something you could plausibly mishear from 'pants' or 'trousers'

[umblrspectrum]

hi heres art so you pay attention to me now go read the tags

#ive been rewatching episode 7 like its the only thing on youtube and made note of many things #first off. the solver can only have one host. nori mentions skyn wants to kill off all the other solver hosts (with the dds) and disregards #the idea of both uzi and doll being its current host when they get chased #plus the main solver possessions only occur when skyn is out of the picture (the fightt in ep 7 is only after n decapitates “tessa”) #solver uzi is possible too but i dont count her cause she doesn't have the yellow #personal theory is that its more an instinctual response to overheating or something and not full on possession #second off nori calls the solver cyn. how does she know that name #cyn was on earth and only showed up to copper 9 recently and i presume nori's been here her whole life #it probably wasn't the other dds cause none of them made it down and they're all more savage beasts #since cyn specifies n's team retained their personalities and that makes me think the other teams didnt #also also we should've immediately questioned tessa arriving in the same type of pod as the mds when they were revealed to not be sent by j #im running out of characters also the people who dont like when i use tags like this can bite me #murder drones #murder drones nori #artori? that sounds cool #ill probably just stick with nori though #i have so many solver heart refs now #art #episode 7 #murder drones episode 7 #murder drones episode 7 spoilers #using the same black for shadows as my lineart doesn't work when i have to draw thin things over it #murder drones spoilers

[wildshadowtamer]

Hey do you think Michael Shelley being named after the woman who wrote about the monster rejected by its own creator has anything to do with The Distortion's creation and how Gertrude didnt even stick around to check if he was alive before leaving?

#tma #the magnus archives #michael shelley #michael distortion #it just occured to me now

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

some misc Barn & Wally doodles from the past week or so <3 i heart them

#i read 'barnaby bites wally out of affection' exactly Once and it imprinted in my brain forever #its so damn cute... what the fuck... who authorized that.... #one thing about me: yes i Will exaggerate size differences. no im Not sorry #listen one thing i love more than the big guy & their lil buddy dynamic #is big guy & their lil buddy 'rough-housing' #where it looks vicious but the big guy is actually being so so gentle and careful <3 #it kills me every time!!! #AND THESE TWO ARE PERFECT FOR BOTH BABEYYYYYY #the bestiessssss themmmmm them them them #i have so many thoughts / feelings about them and many of them Directly Conflict <3 #scribble salad #welcome home #wait when. when did i start drawing barnaby so damn much #every other scribble is Him #uh oh! looks like hes Blorbo!!! #anyhow sometimes i sit on doodles for Days and Days #until it occurs to me that hey. i can post these #i havent been scribbling much bc ive been chipping away at comms when i have the free time to do Art #the only non-comm stuff have been silly warmups riperoni #BUT! AHA! last week's me (early this week???) was in their Barnaby & Wally feels!!! #providing current me with Crumbs to post!