#(major spoilers implied) ->

[anendtopursuit]

not to gush too much abt neil newbon's performance as astarion (and stephen rooney's writing for him) but like. he's discussed on streams before how conscious the decision to make him feel like he's constantly performing is (regardless of outcome; theatrical spawn astarion & operatic ascended astarion), and how stephen rooney leaned more into the whimsy and fun of the character based on things he saw in his portrayal (hence astarion progressively getting funnier and more charismatic through game development). but the thing that drives me absolutely mad tbh is the moments where all of it drops and he's suddenly so sincere, because it hits you like a truck to the face.

his voice going all soft and quiet and brittle when he describes cazador instructing his spawn to torture themselves. his mannerisms shifting from seductive and playful to a little more nervous. but the one that always gets me is in the graveyard romance scene, talking about what cazador has taken from him, how it was taken by force; "but he did take it," in this voice that's so full of sorrow that it almost sounds hollow, muffled by none of his usual pomp and theatricality, when even in cazador's palace his admissions of upset were sandwiched between attempts to brush it all off. dear god.

[kaiserouo]

if ordan karris wanna complete that sentence does that mean he also likes us?

[styxxsyringe]

yeah boy and doll face

[contract-crawdad]

Rafta analysis after the update! Spoilers for 1.5 under the cut.

1.5 sheds a lot of light on Rafta’s mentality!

The facts:

Rafta’s condition does seem to get worse as time goes on! Her voice getting raspier and her speech growing slower as she talks when you visit her again after failing to convince Nestor to stop by. This might be why she’s so eager to get Nestor to visit.

Rafta seems to grow more aware of jet physical changes with time, commenting fairly casually that she doesn’t have eyes anymore.

The bad ending in which Sam serves as Rafta’s rebound offers a few more insights:

Rafta doesn’t eat her way through Nestor and multiply inside him, like we’d all of been assuming. Rather, her proximity makes a body ‘remember’ that it was always worms. Sam explicitly comments that it feels like this transformation began a moment before Rafta squirms herself through his eye.

Much like when she was stuck in the pipe, Rafta is eerily calm and casual even as she’s rooting around through one’s brain. Some confirmation that her mental state is addled comes when she looks for an epipen in a handbag she doesn’t have, while fretting that Sam’s body unspooling into countless worms might be some kind of ‘allergic reaction’. It seems pretty clear that the result of her ‘date’ with Nestor isn’t something she consciously desires.

Curiously, Sam completely loses his mind a few moments after merging with Rafta. Meanwhile Nestor, while insane, is still able to think and speak and remember the events leading up to him be coming a worm-filled head. Maybe that’s why he was Rafta’s first choice? Maybe there really is some kind of special chemistry there.

MOST importantly!! The bad ending confirms that Nestor and Rafta are able to speak to one another! True love CAN bloom in the apocalypse…

[arolegos]

im way too scared to say this on main but icl i love lloyrumi n' i love ur lloyrumi art ... can u draw them more for me ... maybe dr harumi meeting sora and jordana like 'damn lloyd they js like us fr fr ???'

i love when the relationship dynamic is "kiss marry kill? all of the above"

[phoebebuggers]

haven’t seen anyone talk about this yet but in response to the question about how he’s similar and dissimilar to mike finn said “…i don’t think id be out there in a different dimension, trying to save my friend…”

obviously like we been knew but this confirms mike is going into the upside down to search for someone, most likely will, in s5 to me because as of now mike is one of the only main characters who’s never been in the upside down in any way and yet finn says mike is brave by being “in different dimension.” and i know he’s generalizing but why would finn say that if it doesn’t happen

[levitanias]

who up tricking they ghost

[booasaur]

Special Ops: Lioness - 1x07

[lonelyroommp3]

oh and another thing. i would love for fandom as a whole to stop acting as if suzanne collins is a perfect unimpeachable pillar of Good Progressive Author Who Never Sells Out. "suzanne collins only writes when she has something to say, she doesn't write for the sake of it" and the fact that a movie got announced on the same day the book was doesn't mean anything? "suzanne collins would be so mad at the whitewashing of her characters" really? bc in this book she is very vague about haymitch's appearance outside of his build. i don't think she describes anyone from the seam at ALL, actually. like and that's fine and whatever, but writing essentially fanfiction about how she'd be SO MAD about this movie inevitably casting a white haymitch is crazy. i don't doubt she had limited control over the original movie's casting, but at this point it's pretty clear that they're going to defer to her on a lot of matters. which is FINE, but people are insistent on holding her up as a pillar of progressiveness and it's wild to me.

no literally!! i think people are very very keen to cling to her as this image of the anti-jkr like "wait we still have a beloved YA franchise where the author never sold out or had any problematic views ever and writes actually effective political allegories" and that's simply... making a really black and white dichotomy where there is none. at the end of the day she's a wildly successful author responsible for one of the biggest franchises of the century thus far, which says absolutely nothing about her other than she wrote one really solid trilogy. it does not make her immune to flawed writing & worldbuilding, or to selling out or fanservice, or to really half arsed depictions of issues pertaining to race, sexuality, and gender (and the intersection between those things, as per my previous critiques on the way covey girls are presented as love interests - it's really funny how snow's stereotyping of lenore dove based on his experience with lucy gray is clearly meant to be viewed in a bad light but sc doesn't really make it any better by writing lenore dove to fit many of the same ethnic stereotypes that applied to lucy gray but she's also really romantically devoted to haymitch and would never ever betray him because she's literally nice)

and i think if a few more hunger games fans were willing to a) admit this and b) by extension admit that these flaws do not mean they are not allowed to enjoy aspects of (or even the majority of) her writing and storytelling it would be far easier to have normal and sensible and critically grounded discussions of the series

[ndostairlyrium]

I couldn't resist ;u;

It was hard to pick between Emmrich and Davrin, like, I feel legit bad for my hunter bestie because him and my gremlin are always around each other :'D but I unlocked the friendship route with Emmrich first, so..

-

Veilcard template provided by @biowarescreenshotsdump go give them some love, they did an amazing job with this!

screen under the cut because the boys are super cute <3

[hero-deserves-to-be-happy]

Grief (in OMORI)

After unspeakable tragedy, the five friends left behind grieve differently.

A study of Sunny, Basil, Aubrey, Hero, and Kel's grief. Soul-Crushing Angst. Part Fanfiction; Part Analysis. Cross Posted to AO3.

(Warnings for Soul-Crushing Angst, Grief, Depression, Referenced Canonical Character Death, and Heavy Themes. Canon Typical OMORI warnings and MAJOR Omori Spoilers)

Sunny’s grief is quiet. He fades into shadowy corners watching his mother’s wailing with stormy eyes, but he doesn’t make a sound. He hasn’t spoken a word since Mari died—not that he talked much to begin with, but now there’s nothing he could even want to say. He can’t stand speaking to an empty room, waiting for that familiar laugh or the lilted, tinkly voice of his sister that would never come. He’d never hear her voice again, never hear her laugh, never hear the sounds of her piano playing.

The house is quiet without her. There’s no laughter. No music. No sound besides the violent sobbing of his mother. Silence has never been so deafening. He hides in the comfort of his mind where she’ll laugh and talk again, forever because the guilt of knowing why the world’s gone silent is too much for him to bear.

His father thinks him cold and unfeeling because he won’t talk—won’t wail and weep like his mother or his friends, but painful tears struggle free from the corners of his burning eyes. They catch in his eyelashes, trickle down his cheeks—pained but silent. He feels the loss of her like losing a part of himself. It’s more painful than he could ever have the words to explain, so he doesn’t even try. His mother says that talking about it might make him feel better, but he doesn’t feel he has the right to that anymore, not after what he’s done. He silenced Mari and the world along with her, so he silences himself. 

(Continues Under the Cut)

*-*-*

Basil’s grief is destructive. It eats him alive from the inside until tears stream out of his bloodshot eyes like a faucet. He weeps unconsolably from the moment he gets up in the morning until he cries himself to sleep at night. He doesn’t think he will ever stop crying. He doesn’t think he deserves to.

Even thinking about Mari brings tears to his eyes to the point where he can’t even remember her—can’t even hold on to the good memories. The pages of his photo album are all colored out now as if that could somehow erase them. He doesn’t feel he deserves them anymore. He doesn’t deserve to remember her happy—to remember her as anything more than contorted, still, and lifeless at the bottom of those stairs or swinging limply in the wind from the limb of that tree outside.

It almost doesn’t feel real. A part of him still wakes up hoping it was all some horrible nightmare, but it wasn’t. It isn’t. Mari’s gone and playing a role in that means he doesn’t deserve to remember her. His grief will destroy him.

*-*-*

Aubrey’s grief is volatile—loud. She cries and screams as if the sounds of her wailing could somehow bring Mari back. But she knows that it won’t. Most days, she feels like she’s falling down a dark, bottomless pit without anything to catch her—without anything to hold onto. She can’t make sense of it—how something like this could happen. Why it would.

Her hands clinch into fists, throw things at walls of her room, pound into her pillow as she screams because she doesn’t have the words for the pain she’s feeling. Then, everything goes quiet, and she weeps.

The weight of a world without Mari is too heavy for her small, trembling shoulders. She’ll have to make them stronger.

*-*-*

Hero’s grief is overwhelming. It crushes him until he can’t breathe. He hasn’t been able to catch his breath since he heard she was gone. He feels like he’s drowning in pitch black darkness—dark water seeping into his nose and mouth if he tries to breathe, drowning out any cry for help he could possibly make. But he doesn’t make them. He doesn’t deserve to—not after he didn’t love her enough. If he had, maybe she’d still be here. The truth that she isn’t constricts and strangles like a chain around his heart, a crushing weight he’ll carry for the rest of his life. He crumbles under it.

Every time he thinks he’s finally stopped crying, the tears keep falling again. He can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t do anything but stare blankly at the ceiling of his room, tortured by guilt, by “what ifs,” by questions of if there was anything he could have done, if there was any way he could have saved her. But he is too weak. He can’t even save himself.

He always believed the sun shined brighter whenever Mari smiled, but he knows that better now because losing her has completely snuffed it out. The world is dark now, and Hero drowns in it.

*-*-*

Kel’s grief is aching like the dulled pain of an old injury when it rains. There’s an empty space in his heart now and it pangs every time he finds himself turning to say something to her or wanting to show her something or tell her a story only to realize that she isn’t there and that she isn’t going to be there ever again.

He doesn’t cry as much as Hero or Aubrey or Basil, and he worries it isn’t enough—worries it means he didn’t care about her enough. But he knows he did. He had to because even if it doesn’t always bring tears to his eyes, something breaks a little in him every time he realizes he’ll never make her laugh or make her smile again.

He tries to think of what would make her happy, if there’s anything he could do to make her happy now. All he can think is that she wouldn’t want another person crying for her, so he tries his best to heal, to remember the good times, and to smile when he thinks of her, even if his smiles are a little bittersweet, a little empty now.

He worries that his friends don’t remember how to be anything but sad and grief-stricken. Worries he’ll never see his brother smile again, will never see Basil without bloodshot, weeping eyes, will never see Aubrey without gritted teeth and clinched fists as she blinks back tears, will never see Sunny again at all. Kel’s grief isn’t just losing Mari—it’s losing everyone. It’s watching them suffer without anything he can do to fix it. Left wondering if any of them will ever truly be happy again. Wondering if they even can be in world without Mari, even when he knows that’s what would make her happy.

He’s never felt so helpless, and maybe that’s what hurts worst of all.

[anonymocha]

You are not alone!!! (at least she thinks that)

[paragonrobits]

thinking a lot about a premise where after the events of Psychonauts 2, years later, Raz winds up breaking off all contact with his family overall (barring his younger siblings, his older sister, his dad and Nona, and his younger siblings are a borderline case depending on whether or not they pick up their mother's passive aggressive and dislike of psychics like Raz's older brother) and the story idea is SPECIFICALLY Donatella, being grief-stuck at Raz completely cutting off all contact with her and much of the family after he was able to eventually become independent with the Psychonauts and is now a beloved icon and hero to the world famous for his advances in the use of psychic work to aid psychiatry and he very explicitly does not discuss her and acts as if she died when he was a kid

and the whole thing is basically about her having to very bluntly have to come to terms with the fact that if she hadn't been so cold to him or made him feel unwanted because of his powers, or his older brother learn from her example to become a vicious bully towards him (even by older brother standards), then maybe he wouldn't have fixated so hard on the idea of the Psychonauts as a place where felt he belonged and didn't feel like his very existence was shaming her

and its entirely her fault, and all her passive aggressive guilt trip actions in Psychonauts 2 made it worse and just made every moment around her, no matter how much he missed his mother, hurtful and he only felt better when he spoke to Helmut Fullbear who at this point was the first genuinely nice and accomodating voice he'd heard once the events with Maligula took off.

(He would be the first to admit much of that was his fault, but he still felt alone, and it was nice to feel such a kindly and welcome voice, like someone from a group he really belonged to, and that Donatella very specifically never made him felt like he belonged.)

And there's no magic fix. There's no tearful reconciliation, no heartfelt pleas that led to a happily ever after and the family reunions she wants. Decades of resentment, bitterness and childhood unhappiness that gradually turned into simmering hatred isn't something that can be taken back and she has to live with that; her second born son wants nothing to do with her and has written her completely out of his life, and will be quite happy if he dies without ever having to see her or speak with her ever again.

Also probably something like a line like "He stopped loving you a long time ago. After all, he thought you stopped loving him first."

[inksoover]

CHAPTER 3 SPOILER

HOW MANY PEOPLE SPAMton actually DIVORCED?!!!!???

[castleinthemist]

big ol' seabed spoilers down below (using the scene from ch.1 but there will be unbidden major characters spoilers)

sorry for the complete wall of images. only one person has drank coffee in this scene. pay attention to the time, sachi mentions (not pictured) a full half hour has already passed and there's only been a few lines of dialogue between the two. the offputting-ness that seabed sometimes tracks with character perecptions is so fucking good and you won't even realise it's happening until you're already asking questions about it when it wants you to. far out.

it's not so much that sachiko is an 'unreliable narrator' (in some way narasaki picks up the slack for her hehe) tbh for a good while she's a really hard character to get a good read on! calling her plain feels too simple, paying attention to when narasaki appears (in direct correlation to takako memories) and when sachi seems to shut down (see takako memories) (nanae's failed drugging & hit-on attempt as an isolated and pointed example) is kinda key to trying to understand how she's wrapped her life around in grief (understandibly). i think maybe she's a character that benefits best from a re-read. ah...but to paraphrase from naraski herself...she's perhaps someone with an increadibly rich understanding and imagination

[moomeecore]

the only pheaseble explanation i have for the new eps is that they had an entirley different writing team for the rest of the show. then they just last minute brought on different people for just these two episodes and only had them watch the other eps of fionna & cake, and then told them to create an ending based soley on that. and gave them a terrible, very short deadline.