man. shadow the hedgehog really is pretty cool
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probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.
we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."
at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.
the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.
the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.
what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.
here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.
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thinking about how the extra area added on to a pacifist run of undertale, the true lab, is about alphys's past mistakes. how it ends with the story reaffirming that, despite the pain she's caused, the thing that matters is that she has now made the choice to do the right thing. she's still worthy of her friends' love.
thinking about how undertale doesn't expect the player to get a pacifist ending for the first time. how it's more likely than not that the player will kill toriel the first time they battle her, how lots of players don't initially figure out how to end undyne's fight without killing her, etc. what it expects — not even expects, really, but hopes — is that the player, if they care enough, will use their canonically acknowledged power over time to make up for those mistakes.
no matter how many neutral runs a player has done before committing to the pacifist run, the thing that matters to the characters, to the story, is that you've chosen, now, to do the right thing.
compared to alphys, the player honestly gets off lightly, in that you're the only one (other than flowey) who really remembers any harm you might have caused. and any direct guilting the game could have done about it is long past at this point.
instead, as undertale often does, it makes its point via parallels: alphys caused harm, and she knows it. she has committed to being better. in doing so, she has unlocked for herself a better ending to her story. and she deserves it. she's forgiven.
those structural narrative parallels are all over undertale, if you know where to look. and that's one of the things that makes it so fuckin' good.
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its interesting to me how self-deprecation neatly ties into making others feel bad. like. if you constantly assume that you’re stupid no matter how informed or skilled in a topic you might be, people who are a bit less learned or skilled than you might see how you, someone who is obviously skilled, talk down about yourself, and assume that if you think YOURE an idiot you must think theyre an even bigger idiot and lose confidence or find you intimidating as a result. its fucked up. and its part of why it can be so important to break out of cycles of self-hatred--not just for yourself, but for people around you
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im sorry but your mike/fnafsb vanessa dynamic reminds me vaguely of the fuckass deviantart hot yaoi base so i wasted like 30 minutes of my time doing this
my brain loves to continuously shit out horrible ideas and for some reason i decide to do them
This is a greater compliment than you can even imagine
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I couldn't get outta my head @/velvetroomba (on twitter)'s hilarious Ace Attorney x Jenna Marbles crossover of Ivana BeTall, a witness who lies about witnessing a murder because she was secretly too short to see what happened lmao (it was fun giving a try at the games' artstyle!!)
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Not to be all "I have a degree and I know more than you" but it really bothers me how the people on tumblr who are against the word transandrophobia being coined talk about feminism because they're all just like. So wrong. It's like half the time they're doing 1970s radical feminism and half the time they're just making shit up. Like jfc read a book watch a YouTube video feminism isn't what it's your heart it refers to several theories you have to LEARN ABOUT if you've never read or listened to anything about feminism then this is what you get. People who think the patriarchy doesn't harm men, and people who think "system of oppression" just means "people in power doing things to people without power" etc. Like words have meanings. You have to learn those meanings. You aren't engaging with feminist theory, you're just making shit up. If you don't know what Foucaultian discourse is, which is part of THE basic theories of contemporary feminism, if you don't know what performativity is (no, it's not performance), then you need to learn those before you engage with the theories. Like, fuck, man, I totally get being too tired from work or too disabled or whatever to engage with learning theory, but if that's the case then you should just say "I don't know much about the theory" instead of "I know that 'intersectionality' means people have more than 1 marginalised identity because my heart says it's true". Like, we aren't just saying random shit here, established theories arise from meaningful conversation and engagement with philosophy, lived experience, and research. You can at least put a video about feminism on in the background while you fucking video game.
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