#(<- simplified explanation of it)

[chimerafeathers]

when i was initially playing isat, there were a number of things that pinged on my “overused/shallowly used storytelling tropes” radar (specifically, the version of that radar built from reading too many tumblr posts complaining about or otherwise criticizing “tumblry” tropes—regardless of how much or how little i agree in some cases, my Awareness of them has increased).

then i finished the game, and decided that pretty much everything i had been side-eyeing had been more than earned, given weight and depth beyond my expectations.

and then i got my friend to play the game, and he ended up having a lot of similar initial reactions. specifically, when he got to the “family” scene in the full friendquest run through the house.

my friend had a stronger reaction than i did, but what Odile says here is something that both of us fundamentally disagree with. we ended up talking about the value and importance that intergenerational friendships can have—passing on history, providing frameworks for a range of healthy relationships beyond “family” and “peers” (including what respectful boundaries look like when interacting with safe adults), sharing skills and knowledge, forming a supportive network of people that you can turn to if your blood/legal family fails you. humans are a community-based, highly social species; it’s literally fine and good for an old lady to be friends with a preteen.

but it’s a very Odile thing to say, and tbh i’m more similar to her viewpoint in my personal life in that it takes a very specific level of comfort and intimacy before i will truly consider someone a “friend” rather than “someone i know (/friendly).” but he worried that having it said like that, point blank, would reinforce the concept of “you can Only be friends with people your own age, and the only valid relationships outside of that are Family and Romance (aka precursor to Family).” on top of that, there’s the idea that friendships can’t be “enough” on their own, that they always have to be labeled as something else to be meaningful.

which is a fair concern, in my opinion! but in the full context of the game, and in combination with other elements (ex. the Daydreaming One and Bonnie fitting the party into specific family dynamic labels), what Odile says there is kind of a misdirect. because they ARE friends, whatever else they call each other—and because Siffrin’s unique circumstances mean the idea of “friendship” feels so much more terrifyingly fragile and transient than it might to anyone else.

so following that conversation, unable to properly defend the heavy-handedness without delving into major spoilers but still wanting to get my thoughts about it out, i wrote my train of thought into my notes. (for the record, the “defense” i wrote out was no longer necessary whatsoever once my friend finished the game. he Gets It.)

so here’s what i had, hot off the “AGGHHHH I NEED TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT THIS BUT I CAN'T BECAUSE SPOILERS” presses of several months ago (with a couple edits for clarity/more public presentation and to wrap up the end point):

YES friendships can be deep and intense and consuming. that is objectively What Siffrin Is Feeling. HOWEVER. with all due respect, Siffrin’s perspective of interpersonal relationships is fucked and he needs maximum assurance that things aren’t just going to go away.

there are a LOT of levels of friendship. they are relationships that, theoretically, can come and go easily for a lot of people. “we used to be friends.” “someone i used to know.” “an old classmate.” people drop out of contact, change interests and hobbies and lifestyles, move away, get jobs or partners, and suddenly someone who was so important to you becomes a distant thought. someone you might remember on occasion, if you’re reminded they exist somehow.

there are lifelong friendships, too, that can be no less intense or even deeper than the bonds of blood. but how can you know that the person who calls you “friend” means it like that? if the feeling runs deep for you, but the bond is untested by time or distance? what if this is all a friendship of necessity, of convenience, and it will all fall apart as soon as you have no common goal forcing you together?

of course it will! they all say it will, every time they smile and talk about going home to their friends and families and jobs and say I hope you visit! instead of stay, stay, stay with us, we want to stay with you.

it feels like a promise waiting to be broken, when you believe that “this journey meant so much more to me than it did to any of you.”

when your greatest fear is forgetting and being forgotten. (how long until they forget you?)

but the idealized promise of “family” is that the bond does not degrade, that it can persist invisibly in the face of time and distance and change. something that no longer takes persistence to maintain lest you drift apart, because you can survive drifting apart—you will remember, you will be remembered, you will remain connected. something that would instead demand great force or neglect to truly sever.

it does not matter if this is true. Siffrin needs it to be true. they need a bedrock instead of shifting sand, always slipping away from them before they can grasp it. he craves routine, stability, permanence.

there is no guaranteed permanence when it comes to life, to human connection, of course. Siffrin knows this—that everyone they once knew and loved, every bond that might have once shaped them, has been erased, with no means to reclaim what he lost. family included. and Loop acknowledges this, too, at the end—that one day, Siffrin will have to be okay with letting go. he can’t keep them all glued to his side for their entire lives. they know this.

even so, “family” is as permanent as it can get, right? at least, if their friends become family, some of the uncertainty eases. if they all agree on this, it means they aren’t content to let each other fade from memory, to become “someone they traveled with, once upon a time.” so once it’s introduced as a possibility, Siffrin clings, clings, clings to that thought, drawing comfort from the idea that maybe they all feel as much for him as he does for them.

but we know that just saying the word isn’t enough. the loops didn’t break just because they called each other something different. the fear and loneliness run too deep.

even when being called some form of “family,” the bonds seemed so much more thin and fragile than what Siffrin craves.

they were all still going to leave.

Siffrin is trying so goddamn hard to be okay with that. they fool themself into thinking they’re okay with that. because they have to be! everyone else has something to return to, it’s normal for them to have lives beyond journey’s end, it’s just him who will have nothing left once it’s all over, and they’re. fine. it’s fine.

if they hadn’t made that wish (and if somehow they beat the king first try), they would have parted ways, maybe visited each other from time to time, and Siffrin would have done his best to cope while loneliness and fear continued to dissolve them from the inside. because that’s the normal friendly thing to do. it’s what all of them expected the others to want, and were all afraid to vocalize otherwise.

i get the pushback against everything being “found family” these days. i get that sometimes people are ““just”” friends, or mentors, or coworkers, or something that defies labeling, and that those relationships are rich and varied and don’t have to have the “family” label slapped on top to be important, pigeonholed into rigid set roles, because a lot of the time it doesn’t fit and only serves to undervalue and warp the nuances of the relationships that they actually are. i LOVE when friendship is treated as something that can drive someone just as insane with love as romance or family. in the real world, people should be encouraged to cultivate a huge range of different types of friendships and relationships to broaden our understanding of the world, each other, and ourselves, and prioritizing family over all else can be actively harmful.

i also think that if Siffrin could conceptualize that fact as something that could be anything but agonizingly one-sided, maaayyyybe the time loops would not have happened! i think that if after All That, the rest of the party had gone “you’re important to us, but like, we still do have other shit to do. we’ll keep in touch though!” Siffrin might have just imploded. actually, sorry, scratch that, that literally happened in the game and the world nearly ended.

this story has to be “found family.” maybe they’ll get there one day, but Siffrin is simply not well-adjusted enough (or at all) to trust that any other kind of relationship is real enough to last. and it takes NEARLY BREAKING REALITY for them to accept even that much! that it’s possible for him, specifically! that the words aren’t empty dreams, that they’ve found something that they’re allowed to keep, that it’s not as one-sided as he’d convinced himself out of fear and self-loathing. that they won’t forget or be forgotten.

if Siffrin didn’t have the exact fears and insecurities and traumas that he has, i might still be looking at all those heavy-handed family conversations and going “urgh, okay, we get it, this is a bit much.”

but now i kinda appreciate those convos way more??? because it feels more like a conversation, a point of contrast with what this story means when it invokes “found family.”

it's not about the rigid roles or cozy aesthetics of family. Siffrin is not looking for a mom or a cousin or a sister or a little sibling. they want a home. somewhere to go, people to return to instead of just “visit.” roots, connection, permanence, safety. that is what “family” means to him. why his sadness is Mal du Pays—homesickness.

that’s also why just saying it isn’t enough! that’s why the final loop had to be ugly and broken. Siffrin needed to see that these people wouldn’t abandon them, even at their worst. that they could see him lashing out and bitter and needy and hurtful and still see someone worth loving. and that they would do this all before the word “family” is ever spoken, and would still do it even if it was never said.

the heavy emphasis on family and labels is, in some ways, a misdirect from the actual problems and the actual solution. the full friendquest run is a fakeout for Siffrin in that "the power of friendship" isn't enough to save them—at least, the one-sided, shiny veneer of it isn't. it takes raw, painful, soul-baring vulnerability—no masks to hide the ugliness, no "i'm fine, tell me how i can help you," no running away. the solution is ultimately "the power of friendship" and/or "found family," whatever you want to call it, as long as by those things you mean something messy and stubborn and mutual in its earnest devotion, riddled with misunderstandings and mistakes and the ever-present capacity to hurt each other, and still, always, bursting with love.

[mkzmerryfriend]

Backslide is really feeling like “fuck I feel myself getting more and more depressed, I don’t want to be depressed again, what if it gets as bad as it was that one time? I can’t pull myself out of that again, I don’t think I’m strong enough to go through it again. I wish someone else would notice and help, but I don’t want to be a burden and ask for help, because I don’t even really know how I need help. I don’t know. All I know is this can’t keep happening. Fuck.”

[mxtxfanatic]

The more I get into this translation and am able to read other works, the more I fear that the “plain language” of cnovels are actually a manmade problem and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some translators, for whatever reason, flattened out the metaphors and imagery in the works they translated, those translations became popular and widely spread, people began to acclimate to this way of writing as “just the way cnovels are,” other translators internalizing this idea pick up other cnovels to work on, rinse and repeat. Cause there’s no way tgcf is this colorful and yet only a trickle of that shines through into English.

[khytal]

you do your best to help people while keeping prices affordable and everyone hates you anyway because their dental insurance didn't fully cover something from their visit so now they owe you an extra $20

[askoverkill]

OOC, Utena Anon here to elaborate on my previous ask. I will keep it a bit vague as to what exactly happens to avoid as many spoilers as possible just in case.  It's a bit of an open secret that Revolutionary Girl Utena is all about patriarchy and abuse and how putting women in positions of power in a patriarchal system doesn't necessarily lead to meaningful change and how the only way to truly achieve equality is to tear down the patriarchal systems entirely. Mirabelle seems to be in a unique position where she is both choking under unhealthy systems pressuring to be something she's not like Anthy the Rose Bride and a force that is aiming for positive change but is ultimately hampered and made a tool of the patriarchal systems like the duelists competing for the Rose Bride. (I dunno, am I making sense?)

//thats super interesting!!!!! and yeah, i think you're making sense. i watched half of the first episode in the car earlier so i'm gonna binge it soon to fully understand. (been meaning to watch for so long, just needed an excuse)

//i think its SUPER awesome and interesting and meta that Mirabelle in canon isn't blessed. she's just some guy!!! a regular guy! (we're just normal men. Innocent men.) and that means the world to me

BUT on the other hand. what if she WAS actually blessed? how fucked up would that be? hows that going to impact her arc?

[mrmanbat]

I hate-love silver age comics.

One one hand they can be fun and campy.

On the other they are soulless, nonsensical, and overly censored.

For those of you who don’t know- back in the time between the golden and silver age people started thinking that comics made kids into gangsters.

Literally the equivalent of saying that video games cause violence.

Right so- ✨the comics code authority✨ was created. If you had the stamp on your comic it was like a guarantee to the buyer that there was nothing that could remotely be a bad influence inside the comic.

bc of the public craze over comics ‘brainwashing’ the young- most of the big guns in comics just refused to publish comics without the stamp.

Funny enough- it died out after the government wanted marvel to publish a drug psa and the use of drugs was deemed inappropriate by the comics code authority.

…

Point is- fuck the comics code authority.

Also fuck you Collin.

[roykiller07]

i think the reason so many ppl have a hard time understanding the concept of a queer platonic relationship is that they read the words together for the first time and hear it as "a platonic relationship between queers" and not as "a relationship who's status as platonic has been queered"

its a queer-platonic relationship, not a queer platonic-relationship

[wheeble2252]

Smthing I worked on in early May, right around when my carpal tunnel decided to make itself known again

Unrealistic blood and injury

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

Watching Severance does feel a bit like reading a fic with 15000 word chapters that are almost entirely world-building and setup and there are only 2/47 chapters published and those came out 3 years apart

[jonsaremembers]

and if I wrote Dan and Phil as plainfin midshipmen what then. WHAT THEN

[the-meme-monarch]

do you think berdly would actually genuinely know all the lore of kingdom hearts or do you think he'd just pretend he does

[hinako-supremacy]

look at this diagram i drew :3

[lemonine]

every pride month im like hm should i do something with my ocs for this but then i remember bean is Not proud lmao. yes hes bi and ace and in a poly relationship and theres something going on with gender but hes no good at explaining all of that or giving it a name

it just is what it is and its no ones business!!

[birdricks]

every member of the smith/sanchez family is autistic and queer. see my vision

[gendernull]

demigreyromantic flag!

demigreyromantic - someone who very rarely experiences romantic attraction, but when they do, it's only towards someone they have developed a strong bond with.