#ah. this is a lot of ranting

[myarizen]

sakamoto days would've been so peak if the mangaka actually utilized lu xiaotang instead of inserting akao into the main mix. i think the jcc application test was the final nail in the coffin for shaotang's character, because the arc after that had heisuke involved and absolutely no explanation as to why xiaotang was to stay at the store. while someone does need to mind it and play with hana, can't it be apart who's been mia for a million chapters??? tho i mainly have a problem with xiaotang instead of him because she was introduced to be apart of the main trio (a Harry, Ron, Hermione-Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura-Itadori, Fushiguro, Nobara situation), but got cast aside in favor of more "plot relevant" characters.

[ladyloveandjustice]

I was going through the yj cartoon tag to find my specific rants (12 YEARS AGO!!! TWELVE!!!) and I completely forgot they namedropped Asheville (my hometown) during an episode. Our airport anyway. From an old post:

“How come Homeland Security wasn’t all over this” BECAUSE NO ONE CARES ABOUT ASHEVILLE WALLY SOB of course our plane crashed

(no one died in the plane crash the asheville citizens were safe)

[charliespringverse]

i think it should be possible to scream without making any noise or disturbing anyone or inviting any questions . just sometimes . as a treat .

[icepandawarrior]

Jenna 🤝 Alaric

Being adult humans with legal authority who were supposed to protect the children they were assigned guardianship to

who also eventually died due to supernatural turmoil and narratively have been given more praise than they truly deserve

[monster-noises]

Like.. genuinely, very genuinely.

Where and how to do hunt down events in your city? Like places and groups and activities where people who like the same things as you gather and hang out and do social stuff?

Cause I do follow like.. local game stores, comic shops, book shops, galleries/art programs, concert halls, the 1 gay bar in town, queer group pages, the library, and at least one local zine making group whose events never line up with my schedule except the 1 time it did and i went and it was very awkward for me so idk how good that one would pan out if I kept tryingggg-

And while a lot of these places host events semi-regularly the year a lot don't appeal or apply to me so I'm just at a Bit of a Loss for where to find events where I may connect with other people..

So like if ya'll know of some secret search term of webbed site or what have you IIIIII'm open to suggestions!

(and lets just completely ignore the fact that they're all going to be scheduled during my working hours anyway and I won't be able to go, I'll breakdown about that one later. I need to delude myself at least a little bit or else I'll Implode)

[losver07]

blogs with no content are like. :(. you dont have nothing for me to stalk? ok then sorry for trying ig :(((

[presiding]

What is your favourite thing about Billie Lurk?

(Answers are obvious possibly but i love when people talk about her👍)

thanks for the ask!! YEAH ME TOO I love when people talk about Billie! I can't say I have a favourite thing specifically, but I can explain why she's my fav. apologies for not taking this qn literally, but -

short answer: she’s really cool

& you can stop reading there, or, for the maybe 2 mutuals who might have time to read this my thoughts on her as a character, her meta, and her character as raw potential...

long answer:

i considered making this entire thing a gush so you could read a gush about Billie. but, part of what draws me to her is that she’s not always well written, and in fandom she’s underrated for a literal protagonist.

since you ask...

billie is a cool character

when I played Dh2 (hadn't played Dh1), I was excited to see a black woman with disabilities who was captaining a massive ship by herself. wow.

then I discovered Billie’s backstory with Deirdre, the way she responded to that, then having to survive while living on the run, and her bisexuality. as well as her history with daud & delilah. fascinating!

she’s an outsider who has so much to lose, and knows what it's like to lose everything - having lost everything not once but three times - but nevertheless speaks truth to power. she's so brave! she went and helped Emily & Corvo and she must have known they might kill her! plus, she’s smart, she’s funny, she gets shit done, she’s gorgeous.

but... the meta

mild critique of fandom & arkane incoming.

skip this bit if you want - you've been warned twice now - jump to tired Hayao Miyazaki and read from there if you'd like my thoughts on writing her.

i thought Death of the Outsider was going to be amazing and then... well. *sad trombone* i've written about that before so i won't keep banging on. i figured others must be disappointed too, so I joined a few fandom spaces in hopes of finding camaraderie.

most people with complaints about DotO didn’t like how the Outsider and Daud were handled. which is valid & I agree. but it seemed like most paid no attention to Billie; when people talk about her it’s with respect to Daud, as opposed to in her own right. you could argue for fandom misogyny because people don’t talk about adult Emily Kaldwin that much either, but in Billie's case, it’s misogynoir (compare & contrast with the popularity of thomas, particularly the popularity of thomas portrayed as a white man for no particular reason that i've been able to discern - i keep asking around, is it in the books???).

i think this is a LOT better now than it used to be, which is fantastic. or perhaps i have found the correct echo-chamber? ha.

ultimately, The Fandom is a fraction of the entire picture, and not even the important bit since The Fandom is not who these games are made for. you can't make money relying on only your hardcore fans even if all of them spent a fortune on merch, this is true for any AAA game.

while it's true that Billie is underrated from a fandom perspective - but Billie as an underwritten protagonist is squarely Arkane’s fault.

it was reasonable when she was a side character - the lack of info in Dh2 makes perfect sense (if anything there was more lore in Dh2 which is kind of wild)-

- but as a protagonist in Death of the Outsider?

.... there’s lousy writing, and there’s whatever is going on with Billie Lurk, a black woman who mostly exists as a foil or saviour for light-skinned characters. In her own game there’s barely any of her own lore except where it's relevant to saving two dudes.

lore hints at, but barely touches on what race means in the Dh universe (xenophobia is stronger in Dh1; separate essay i guess), but Arkane has patted themselves on the back for portraying non-white characters, which feels like the same thing as the aesthetic of diversity we're seeing in advertising currently because it’s in marketing trend guides. it's self-congratulatory and it's a missed opportunity for deeper storytelling.

you can see an example of diversity at its most shallow in the way that Billie’s written: there’s little engagement with her as an entire person with history & wants & preferences, and the world she walks through in that game feels like it has nothing to do with her. you could make a case for alienation as a theme, but then, how do you handle the titular premise of 'Dishonored' without ever letting Billie make changes in an environment without a chaos system? it's disappointing from that angle too.

in my opinion, whatever it's worth, it was an accident Arkane created such an awesome character - they needed someone to betray daud. congrats billie.

all this said, it makes her an underdog as far as characters to enjoy & create art & stories for. it's nice to find so many like-minded, switched on people! <3

billie's character potential

she’s got a wealth of unexplored lore, being deeply intertwined with both Karnaca & Dunwall’s fates & criminal underbellies, as well as her connections to the witches & whalers, and three Empresses.

she’s lived a few distinct lifetimes and in the games we get to meet her at two peaks (KoD & DotO) & a low (Dh2 as Meagan).

her voice is very distinct, her dry & often dark humour is entertaining & fun to write. her perspective is really interesting - she’s had the widest variety of void-powers of anyone canonically, and she’s also lived through the highest highs and lowest lows.

she's got everything going for her :) i couldn't really pick a fav thing!

[the8skermit]

The following is a RANT because wedding impossible is got me in a RAGE

Istg I'm watching wedding impossible and why the heck are they trying to make Do Han look STRAIGHT-

Mans acting like a whole questionable second male lead when his stroy should have been given the screen time it deserved :D

Like even the little things like how when Do Han meets his ex there's no real indication that they liked each other at any point. Like you could pass him off as a stalker and be done with it. It's like the script is intent on making the queer aspect 'palatable' for mainstream straight audiences and shooting themselves in the foot.

Then this whole narrative of oh Ji Han and Ah Jeong shouldn't be blamed for something they didn't do - just - pause. The show is so insistent on making them victims when in reality they both have zero fucks about the situation they were putting everyone in.

Like they're literally running around public even though the engagement was announced? Like fake marriage or not this is literally about keeping your promises and not acting like absolute jerks.

And the press conference fake out- not the show spending the entire run saying it's "selfish" to not come out and then REFUSING to let Do Han to act on his own accord when he wanted to - because its totally not important for him to be the one deciding his own story ahahah -

And Also Ji Han's whole shtick about "living his life for his brother" is just absolute bs but the show does not want to admit it. Like the man literally planned his dream life of conquerorkng LJ and put Do Han in the picture cuz he knew the grandfather wouldn't give him the company.

And the audacity of this show to say that its wrong when Do Han wants to give up the company and not like the life he's been put up to but it's okay when Ji Han wants to give everything up? Like DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF.

I found it very difficult to believe that the brothers actually loved each other. Especially in Ji Han's case because he claimed that he's been living his life to guard Do Han and then he goes and BEATS HIM UP because being closeted in a homophobic country is SELFISH and suddenly the fact that it was a mutual contract doesn't matter because now thay he likes ah jeong she can do no wrong and is bejng used EVEN THOUGH she literally said yes on a whim with zero actual intent to "protect" Do Han. Girl literally did it for REVENGE.

I really enjoyed the first few episodes but then the direction they took was utterly exasperating.

I cannot

I'm not even done with the series yet

[general-du-vallon]

I for sure have different opinions about characters in 2024 than i did in whatever the other years were. Espec Aramis. I was gonna write a big post but actually all I really mean is I like him. I got a bit into negative against Aramis things last time around, I intend to keep on liking him this time. this time around i am watching for pure hedonism to enjoy the characters doing fun fighty things and then I will read many fanfictions,

[professor-cold-ramen]

.

[raggydollsscreenshots]

Posting screenshots from The Raggy Dolls every day until ITV puts it on ITVX: Day 106:

[socialiseisnotinmyname]

A little improvement??

(Ignore the extra "with" ;_; )

(honestly feels like a downgrade...)

[dragonlordazuroth]

Bro, Squishmallows are complicated as fuck.

I'm trying to make a list of Squishmallows that I already have, and I'm trying to make it as comprehensive as possible, but it's quickly becoming complicated. There are a LOT of Squishmallow's (which I know sounds obvious at first, but it's simply baffling just how expansive the product line is), and it's more difficult to find help in collecting them than I had assumed.

First off, I'm trying to figure out the size range, and I keep getting mixed results. I keep seeing sources that say there are 12 sizes for Squishmallows (3.5, 5, 6, 7, 7.5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20, 24 inches), but according to the wiki for Gio and Shahzad, they come in 4.5", which is the size I have both of them in. Then I found one source saying that there wer a whopping TWENTY-ONE sizes, going all the way up to 28", yet all the other sources insist that the line stops at 24". And when it comes to the smaller Squishmallows, I see sources going "oh yeah, all the mini Squishmallows are 2 inches", but these exclude the Micromallows, which are 2.5 inches. In fact, when I search up minis, all that comes up is the Squishville lines. I had to dig to find the Micros (which sucked bc I forgot what they were called).

Secondly, there are far more lines and offshoots of these things than I initially realized. Like, you have the regular Squishmallows, (including the keychains even though I would assume they'd be considered a separate thing but the size charts consider them the same so idk), there's also Squishville, Micromallows, Fuzzamallows, Flipamallows, Squooshems (which I don't think are even plushies), Squishdoos, Stackables, and Squeezemallows (which I had trouble finding ANY info about and only ever saw ONCE at a single Target store), and also the Mystery Squad(s?) (which I don't know if they count as part of the regular line or not). That's not even including the trading cards, hats, shirts, slippers, ornament, baskets, costumes, accessories, pet beds, pet toys, and lord KNOWS what else.

Lastly, there are multiple versions of most of the Squishmallow characters. Whether it be different sizes, different product lines, seasonal versions, or whatever else the creators might choose to through out there, it feels like there's an infinite list of both characters and character iterations.

It hasn't taken me long to realize Squishmallow collecting is complicated, even to a casual fan such as myself. And I find it strange that despite its large fanbase of avid collectors, it isn't easy to find any sort of comprehensive and all-encompassing guide to 'Mallow hunting. Nevertheless, I'm a stubborn bastard who loves cute plushies, and by god I'm gonna give it my best shot.

[popponn]

mysme is doing wonders for my mental health i miss you so much my defender of justice 707 my love my star my planet the light of my life the bfest bf to ever bf the earth

[0ne-shot]

currently ping-ponging between mAny team chaotix fic ideas and its killing my brain aldkmb;sfgj

[chipped-chimera]

I am asking the general public at large a very 'please stop poorly informed knee-jerk virtue signalling and actually learn what cultural appropriation MEANS'