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Whenever I'm tempted to give Tears of the Kingdom an honest try rather than continuing to skip over it, I always manage to come across somebody pointing out that its water dungeon is easily the worst in the game. Then I'm more or less fine with giving it a pass.

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Damn, I never realized that Chulainn is barely a character. Feels bad knowing that people only remember him for the fact that he can give Ayra's kids major Od blood.

At least he looks cool..

The only conversations he has in FE4 are his recruitment scene and two dialogues with Ayra. That's it. He really does seem to exist only to be an incestuous (assuming we're counting cousin incest) father to Ayra's kids. He's not even that good of a dad for anyone else except maybe Brigid's kids.

Him having the sweaty hots for his possible descendant Ogma would genuinely be a big step up in characterization for the guy.

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My Decadence (or slightly post-Decadence) video, celebrating Manuela more than IS has ever cared to.

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Given the other characters in the event, the probable implication with Chulainn and Ogma is that they're very distant relations in keeping with some old developer notes on Jugdral being a precursor to Archanea. I however choose to believe that instead they see each other from across the arena and really dig each other's vibes, and they'll go on to have multiple rounds of vigorous, sweaty sex once the tournament is over.

That alone would give Chulainn more characterization than he has in his own game.

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Hikari - koi carp

Osvald - octopus

Temenos - squid

Partitio - yellowfin tuna

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Some scattered thoughts on Octopath Traveler 0, now that there's been a few hands-on preview videos and a (small) amount of new info since the initial announcement trailers.

It's unfortunate that graphically speaking this game looks rougher than even the original Octopath Traveler, probably as a consequence of the camera being zoomed further out to accommodate more characters at once. I already knew that Champions of the Continent was a visual downgrade as a mobile game, but that downgrade didn't have to get translated into a new console game.

Having eight playable characters at once should shake up the gameplay, with sturdier enemies to make up for increased BP gain and the characters in the back regenerating HP/SP. Individual character customization seems to be reduced as there's no secondary job page but instead a system where characters can learn different job skills by other means. That's not all bad, because while that probably means no alternate costumes that's arguably better than the first two games' awkward way of switching in and out of those between combat and the overworld. I prefer the idea of more static characters, actually, since it allows them to feel more distinct from one another and more tied to the identity of their jobs.

Fans and tomes return from CotC as new damage types; however, based on an intro page for the game's new merchant, characters aren't all limited to just one weapon type as in the mobile game. Still, unless there are also two new magic types I'm not fond of the lack of symmetry between physical and magical weakness numbers this creates. The game dropping the OCTOPATH name gimmick cuts away some of that tidiness as it is.

The town-building element has been compared to Stardew Valley, which...sure, why not. I hope there's no extensive crafting systems or anything like that added, but there probably is because it seems like every game has to cram something like that in somewhere now. Assigning characters to work at specific places in town most reminds me of Fire Emblem Fates's base.

Path Actions are apparently tied to the NPC being categorized into the CotC designations of Power, Wealth, and Fame. Some of the ones from Octopath Traveler II return although modified since there doesn't appear to be a day/night system.

Looking over the playable characters revealed so far, there's a new one for every base job except dancer, the place of which is taken by Stia who's an architect instead. A single new base job, really? There are at least six characters coming in from CotC, but in terms of jobs they're very lopsided with three warriors, two scholars, and a thief. I wonder if that will be addressed or balanced out at all. We've got a male hunter and one or more female warriors and scholars, but thus far no male dancers or indeed any dancers at all apart from Primrose.

Unsurprisingly given one of my usual complaints about modern Fire Emblem, I don't care for the customizable self-insert especially since early reviews suggest that they're a mostly silent blank slate and that storytelling is done via the other characters. I get that I'm in the minority with not liking self-inserts, but this feels like such an unnecessary feature in Octopath which has always been very modular in terms of what characters' stories you want to focus on and how you want to build your team(s). I suppose if there's a silver lining it's that it avoids the way that the previous console games force you to stick to your starting traveler until their story is finished.

The world looks to be solely an expanded Orsterra so far which I'm more than fine with. That's much better than trying to make that continent and Solistia believably exist in the same universe/timeframe.

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Chulainn got a seasonal in the same year as his base version appearance. Somebody on the team must really love the guy.

Also, this makes the third seasonal banner in 2025 that we've gotten at least one Jugdral character. What even is this year?

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Someone brought to my attention there's info on the Octopath 0 thief - not much, but Celsus is a bodyguard who is extremely devout. Between those details and his art, my interest is piqued

Details on OT0 are still pretty scarce, and it's hard knowing what to expect. The whole concept just sounds bizarre - it's a console adaptation/expansion of a mobile gacha that is itself an expansion of a different console game. I'm hoping they keep the Solistian crossover stuff to CotC and focus solely on the expanded Orsterra for content in the new game, purely for the sake of cohesion.

But with "over 30" characters there's a lot of room for interesting new material, yeah. Even if that means there's only 32 or 40 (because multiple of 8) and that number includes the travelers from the first game that's still a lot of new or new-ish faces. Are we going to get FE support-esque conversations? Shared storylines? While the town building mechanic is not the kind of thing that appeals to me that's prime fodder for the kinds of character interactions modern FEs do in their bases. Celsus is one guy I've taken note of along with Phenn (male hunter, although not the gruff old man type) and Solon (older scholar from CotC).

A little unfortunate that the game abandons the OCTOPATH name gimmick, but it would be hard coming up with so many names beginning with just one of six letters.

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My impression is that the popularity of Partikari comes from very popular fanart and some early fics, and like you said that they're the only two conventionally hot guys left after the fandom latched onto Crimenos so hard. They do have potential but tbh I don't see much of it used in fanfics, those look mostly like more or less standard romance scenarios to me

That's usually how fanon gets going. It's really a shame too, because there's just so much more to dig into with Osvitio up to and including the fact that Osvald is hot in a slightly unconventional way. It's not hard to notice that pretty much all of the handful of Osvitio content creators agree that the guy is raw sex, and that Partitio is just right for expressing that when they have that one gay party banter and he's elsewhere got a thing for muscle guys. Partitio would be extremely into Osvald's big fuzzy peaches, no question.

Also, that age difference is a feature, not a bug. Fourteen years is in that sweet spot where you can either ignore it (as the game largely does - note how mom-coded Castti is in her Crossed Path with Ochette in contrast to how the Osvitio story treats them as peers even though they actually have a bigger age gap) or lean hard into it. Partitio's got two dads, one of whom has tried to kill him, so you know he's got some interesting daddy issues to work out. Then you get into the whole multigenerational gay parenting thing with Papp and Roque parenting Partitio who's with Osvald and Elena now and there's a bunch of interesting subversions you can do with Partitio being the sweet sentimental one despite his pseudo-Wild West background juxtaposed with Osvald who's bad at expressing his emotions. It's practically criminal that there's maybe half a dozen dedicated Osvitio writers and artists in the whole fandom, but damned it we don't do our best.

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If you could pair up the Octo 2 characters in crossed paths different from the ones we got in canon, how would you do it?

Oh, this is just mean. I have a whole fic series of 300K+ words building a torrid gay romance from one of the canon Crossed Paths, so splitting those guys up is not something I'd enjoy doing.

In one of those fics I nodded at the concept of a completely straightwashed take on the Crossed Paths solely to highlight how very not straight most of the travelers are by contrast. That was

Hikari/Agnea (unchanged)

Temenos/Throné (now romantic instead of queerplatonic BFFs)

Partitio/Castti (romantic)

Osvald/Ochette (platonic father-daughter since Osvald is "old" and the game's writing likes to treat Ochette like a child who needs to be parented...incidentally, here's a reminder that Ochette is 20 and not even the youngest of the travelers)

But I suppose that wouldn't fly either since half of them are the same. Ugh, if I must:

Partitio/Hikari - sell me on Partikari. I still don't understand why this is the second-most popular M/M ship in the fandom when there's nothing to their few interactions, and the one time somebody tried to explain the ship it was basically about their missed potential rather than anything in canon. My read on this ship is that since Temenos is elsewhere occupied and Osvald is too much of a bear daddy for some people these two get thrown together instead. So...make it work.

Castti/Throné - the most popular F/F pairing and I can kind of see it? The parallels to Castti's thing with Malaya would be something to build off, and their stories are overall quite melancholy so it's a good tonal match.

Ochette/Temenos - for some reason it's Temenos who gets the lategame beastling lore dumps, so lean into that for more cohesive worldbuilding.

Osvald/Agnea - platonic father-daughter, this time with less beastling weirdness and more direct ties to Osvald's family since his late wife apparently liked dancing and he gets drunk in a tavern banter and hallucinates Agnea as his daughter (also, this is the actual oldest-youngest traveler pairing)

I would not have found this setup as compelling, because Osvitio truly is a playground of angsty and kinky gay action that I honestly don't think even dedicated Partikari could match...but then, I happen to like bears. At least it would still have been better than making them all straight.

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I read an article discussing modern turn-based RPGs and how they (in the writer's opinion) need to move faster with both their combat and their story scenes. Leaving aside that turn-based games are not at all what you should be playing if you're looking for fast combat, the writer specifically cited Octopath Traveler II as one of several examples of games that were too slow for his liking.

I hope he's never played the first game, because OT2 is much faster than its predecessor.

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In Memoriam, Then and Now

29 August 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

Many New Orleanian creatives have been marking the occasion with poignant lookbacks and eulogies on our most recent dramatic hurricane event - and I call it that not to be mocking, but rather in admiration of how we as a city have always been able to dramatize tragedy like few others. It's the sort of flippant morbidity that endears us to our famed cemeteries, not merely as macabre curiosities for tourists (although they certainly are that) but as a constant reminder that one cannot properly dedicate oneself to all the earthly pleasures that the Crescent City offers without reveling as well in the beautiful inevitability of death.

I have my own Katrina stories, of course, some dramatic and others decidedly less so, but I'm still not sure if I'm ready to properly tell them as I've recently been grappling with something even more significant. A former lover of mine, not from here, once observed to me that in his experience New Orleanians rarely leave the city. Some of us do our share of traveling, yes, but most of us born in the City that Care Forgot die there as well - and if we do leave, it's almost never by choice. That was the case for many in the wake of Katrina, which caused massive demographic shifts throughout the region and a drop in population across metro New Orleans from which it still hasn't really recovered.

The think pieces commenting on this often remark on the resilience of those who remain, citing the city's unbearable climate, awkward location surrounded on all sides by the suffocating Bible Belt, chronically failing infrastructure, rampant corruption, sky-high rates of crime and disease, and other statistics to suggest that the people still living in New Orleans all suffer from some sort of collective Stockholm Syndrome. The usual - and correct - rebuttal is that, regardless if any of that is true, New Orleans possesses such a unique character that to go anywhere else, at least within the United States and its largely interchangeable cities, would feel like an irreparable loss.

At the same time though I've come across one such article written for Katrina's anniversary pointing out that New Orleanians are tired of being called resilient over preferring our city with all its obvious failings to what might as well be foreign territory. (To Louisianais such as myself, Anglo America, land of eye-rolling self-denial and moralizing Protestant tedium, is foreign no matter what maps might indicate.) Is that really so strange? I make New Orleans a major part of my online presence not just because I know how much this city looms large in the popular imagination vastly out of sync with its current population size or economic relevance, but because it allows my corner of the internet to always feel a bit like home.

But I still can't look back on Katrina, because I find myself faced with a fate I was spared from twenty years ago: that I might have to leave New Orleans, not for a mere few weeks as I did in 2005 but indefinitely. As that lover of mine remarked, I wouldn't be leaving by choice. Nor would I even have much say in the matter as to where I'll end up. So many of my relatives have had to contend with the same in the last several decades and especially since Katrina, and none of us are really happy to leave. There's a hollowness to it all, and I don't know what it will signal for my online content. That's strange to say considering how so much of the internet attempts to divorce itself from any real sense of place, but it is nonetheless. I could remark based on my handle that I would be exiled twice over, but where does one go after that quip?

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One of my fics just hit 100 kudos for the first time!

For reference, only two other authors for this particular ship have fics with 100+ kudos. This is a niche audience I'm writing for.

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Another fic, this time based on furry fanart (not for the first time) and more fluffy and romantic than smutty (also not for the first time).

Trot on Now You Pony-Men

Never let it be said that I don't have some very weird fun with my OTP.

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A very interesting video covering some of the reasons that fictional religions rarely feel representative of reality - which seems rather relevant for a fandom or two I've been involved in.

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That awkward moment when you're more than halfway through writing a fic and you realize that the wacky fantastical premise actually works as a spot-on metaphor for the characters' queerness...except that a metaphor isn't necessary in this case when I've already written over 300K words in this same continuity making that queerness very explicit.

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Oh no, the next WoW expansion is doing the one thing that might get me interested in the game again: revisiting and updating Quel'Thalas. Blood/void elf content, yay!