you know the contrast between how Vergil is presented vs thinking too hard about Vergil’s story is pretty funny. Man’s reputation is this iconic badass, the pinnacle of what video game rivalries can be, the coolest guy to play as, the guy who breaks every game he’s added to,
and then you go to the story and like. man’s lost his free will and autonomy at 19 and then came back a fractured man half of which was a lovecraftian eye beast the other half of which was a chronically ill goth man. and then he reunites and hes in like his 40s now I believe but legit the last time he was actually in a game where he wasn’t being mind controlled when he was 19 which is both sad but also thinking about how this guy who’s considered one of the top badasses of gaming has never really lived life outside of being a teenager.
Anyways this is the secret comedic potential of post DMC5 for Vergil because not only has the human world probably changed a fair bit in terms of technology, if he’s sticking around Dante he’s gonna actually have to learn in depth how taxes and grocery shopping work. Amazing.
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Okay I've witnessed it happening enough in Queer Internet Circles that I think I can confidently say something about it.
Can we PLEASE stop picking arbitrary lgbt+ demographics out of a hat and having entire conversations about how they 'aren't actually queer' and 'taking valuable resources' for the crimes of 'some of them are cringe' or 'some of them are assholes' or 'they have a nebulous privilege over the rest of us so they're the oppressor, actually'.
Like look, some conversations are absolutely worth having. There's a lot of transmasc shitheads who latch on to toxic masculinity or seem to completely forget what it's like to navigate a world that considers you a woman, or completely fail to realize that being transgender yourself doesn't suddenly mean you don't have to examine yourself for internalized transphobia or transmisogyny. And that should be addressed, every community has its issues, no community is a monolith, no demographic is made up of entirely good smart righteous people or evil bad oppressive abusers. Obviously.
But I'm not talking about that!
I'm talking about people bringing up the same tired rhetoric they used when they tried to claim that nonbinary people are clout-chasing attention seekers who will keep cishet society from taking the rest of us seriously, that people used when they decided asexuals were actually cishets who co-opted our movement for their own personal gain, which was recycled from when people tried to claim that bisexuals are het-passing fakers and if a REAL queer has sex with one they'll be left for a cishet because that's what bisexuals do, which is the same as the shit they spewed at whoever the target was before that! It's paranoid nonsense all the way down, people looking for an acceptable target to take their shit out on!
Can we stop doing this, please?? Can we stop picking demographics within our own community that people arbitrarily decide are fine to bully and mock and kick out of the spaces they helped create because you think that they're cringe or that speaking about the issues they face is privileged whining? Can we stop giving bigoted cishets free reign on already vulnerable communities because someone arbitrarily decided that THESE queers are evil and cringe so its okay to make shitty comments and jokes about them? Can we PLEASE stop the cycle in its tracks while we can still see the crosshairs moving onto tranfems and trans women? We can stop this now before it starts getting uglier and deadlier, but we HAVE to be aware and do more than complaining about it online.
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okay posting this now because i feel like the surprise song combo was so intentional and i hope we get to hear more about it on ttpd !! the getaway car/august/other side of the door mashup got my gears turning and now i can’t get them to stop.
the common thread between those three songs is the third party — i wanted leave him i needed a reason, you weren’t mine to lose, was she worth this? — and i know that basically ever since the breakup people have wondered if joe cheated, and this seemed like it could have confirmed it. while i definitely see the evidence for that, it hasn’t quite seemed like the right fit to me, and after this surprise song combo i finally figured out why. i don’t think that the third party she was singing about in melbourne was an actual person, but the idea of a person.
a huge theme on midnights is what led her to being who she is now. she is both the anti-hero and bejeweled, a mastermind and the unreliable narrator in dead reader… there are so many different versions of herself. clearly she was contemplating these different versions and the implications of being each of them.
a huge theme in gothic literature are characters that are not present in the setting, but the idea of them and what they would do is so strong that they end up influencing the story anyways. this happens in rebecca, the novel that inspired tolerate it, where the main character is haunted by living in the glorious shadow that rebecca cast, an impossible standard to live up to, despite the fact that rebecca died and actually, crucially, wasn’t as great as everyone made her out to be. but it doesn’t matter that she wasn’t that great or that she’s never actually there to be truly compared to because it’s the IDEA of rebecca that’s so powerful. it’s the GHOST that haunts the narrative.
and i wonder if that was part of what drove taylor and joe apart? not an actual ~other woman~ but the idea of who taylor could have been instead. all of the other versions of herself she contemplated on midnights. the third party she seemed to be singing about. even on other albums, before this, she’s contemplated what version of herself could be loved — “i’ve been the archer, i’ve been the prey, who could ever leave me darling but who could stay?” i wonder if there was an idea of taylor (a taylor that isn’t “too big to hang out”) that was so palpable, so real, that it ended up taking up the space of another person and haunting their narrative anyways? because, like the main character in rebecca, how could she live up to the idea of a perfect life?
basically: how can you say that you love someone you can’t tell has died? did you love the real me or the version of me in your head that perfectly fit into your world?
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Hospital Bed - Lolina: Origins
i am obsessed with this concept album its on bandcamp please go listen to it i need to not be the only person who cares about this
[id: a digital comic consisting of three pages, in grayscale and red.
the first page is four panels, each the width of the page. the first is all black. four beeps go diagonally down across the panel. the second panel is mostly black, with a somewhat fuzzy light in the middle left of the panel. it reads "what is this pain? what is this place?" in the third panel, the fuzzy image of a person is visible, the edges of the panel are still dark. it reads "am i alive? am i awake? what are these scars across my face?" in the fourth panel, a woman in a lab coat and a mask, the doctor, leans in. the right side of the panel is still dark. a speech bubble from the woman says "you are home". the narration interjects with "they say". the woman continues "you are safe."
the second page is three panels, the first one taking up most of the page, with the other two next to each other under it. the first panel is a birds-eye view of a room in a hospital. in the center is Lolina, a woman laying on a hospital bed. she has black hair, a bandage wrapped over her eye, and a red cut down the side of her face. the doctor stands next to the bed. sideways, in large letters, it reads "hospital bed, I'm back on mars." the second panel is a close-up of the upper half of Lolina's face, focusing on her left eye, which is red, and the bandage covering her other one. it reads "but i am wounded." the third panel is a close up of the lower half of her face, focusing on the cut on her cheek held together with butterfly bandages, and the large bandage on her other cheek. it reads "I feel the scars."
the third page is a drawing of the doctor standing by the bed, from Lolina's point of view. across it is dialogue interspersed with small panels. the doctor says "we can regrow your cells," and next to it is a small panel showing cells dividing. then she says "we can restore," and next to it is a panel showing the right half of Lolina's face, with her eye and cheek healed. then she says "you will go back," and next to it is a panel reading "Sandy's Place" in glowing red letters. the narration interjects with "they say." the doctor continues "to the life you had before." under it is a panel divided diagonally into four sections, the first showing red lips, the second showing black hair swishing, the third showing a pair of legs wearing red high heels, and the fourth showing a body from neck to hips, wearing a strapless red dress. under that the narration reads "to the life i had before". end id.]
(I've never written an id for a comic before and there was some visual stuff that was really tricky to describe so if I've messed something up or if something should be clearer please tell me and I'll try to fix it)
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I've put this in the tags of a previous reblog but feel like it deserves its own post so PSA to tall people: your short friends likely have shorter legs than you and therefore physically can't walk as fast as you without exerting way more effort, they're not going slow on purpose or exaggerating/joking when they say they're more tired than you after an outing. your casual stroll is a speedwalk for them and doing that for extended periods of time is exhausting. also you will lose them in crowds way less if you make a conscious effort to match their pace rather than just assuming theyll keep up
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