#c.paradisi

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well this sucks

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wheres the tweet of the guy who decided to quit and went scorched earth and blocked everyone that all the americans thought meant he killed himself

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no but fr shoutout to all my gnc gcs heads. under my communist dictatorship transfem butches who get vaginoplasty and transmasc queens who get phalloplasty will have multiple honorary federal holidays

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before you write out that elaborate fantasy of putting all trans men to death for listening to mother mother and cavetown choose compassion and consider that youtube mixes keep auto-adding their songs to the mixes generated from heel turn 2 and then counting the fact that they autoplay while he sleeps as him liking them and so they're recommended more than any of the songs he actually likes

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a lot of people pick up on everyone treating ena like an eyesore or actively hating her but i keep seeing youtube comments wondering what ena did to deserve this, like what horrible thing she did to piss everyone off, which is interesting because theodora just tells the audience: nothing. she says that nobody deserves punishment just for being born except ena. ena's sin is, according to the person who most directly tells her to fuck off, being born.

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PASSED 2.5/4 OF MY FINALS. MAYBE THE OTHER 1.5 WILL EVENTUALLY BE GRADED

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can all the people posting from the alternate universe where every trans has biggggg ugly surgery scars and walks around all day with their dicks out saying I LOVE BOTTOM SURGERY EVERYONE SHOULD GET BOTTOM SURGERY please give me a goddamn name. just once. just one time. i want to see it. please

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i should probably just like not . reblog the genre of post that goes around every month or so like "would you consider yourself bad queer rep" it always just makes me depressed thinking about the fact that like i dont fucking know ive never seen a character like me. i dont know what people would say. i just know a lot of people wouldnt like them

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look i just think that everyone else should be as precise and deliberate with their language as possible so as not to hurt my feelings, while also extending infinite grace to me so as not to hurt my feelings even if i while speaking casually say something that is not technically true

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every time I practice Mandarin I remember the time I was so embarrassed about misunderstanding a question in my 101 I accidentally racefaked to avoid explaining I was wrong for an entire semester

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the one thing i miss is having friends who i can force to watch streams of me playing games on discord. i miss that so fucking much sometimes. i dont want to play multiplayer games i just want to be a twitch streamer to an audience of one

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ahhhhh complaining about octopath racism. how quickly people forget primrose chapter 1 and the fucking FUR BIKINI

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no therion's story doesn't only make sense if you do a solo run. i've seen this take multiple times and every time i'm completely baffled because No It Doesn't. not true. false. incorrect.

like okay this does require you to understand that the literal words a character says are not necessarily the truth, but therion's story and gameplay both make way more sense if you accept the fact that therion is not a loner and shouldn't be one.

let's start with the beginning! the FIRST scene you see of therion is him meeting darius at age 11, who he will spend the entire rest of his childhood with and implied some time into adulthood, so he has spent probably the majority of his career as a thief working in a team, which is also borne out in his gameplay, because thief is a support class.

don't argue with me i'm right. while you can run therion as a DPS, investing in attack over speed and evasion means that therion's frailty gets in the way, and he struggles to do damage on par with olberic/h'aanit/alfyn, and cyrus/tressa do way more elemental damage than he does. however, if you instead spec him for support, share SP becomes the most insane skill in the game. a speedy therion can debuff a boss into oblivion before they have a chance to do much before stealing enough SP to let olberic fire off three divine skills without needing a refill. dancer therion is worth doubling up on weapons because his speed and evasion means that he can buff allies quickly and a dancer/thief is the only combo that will regularly dodge attacks before the late game.

therion's skills primarily revolve around giving allies openings to more easily take down enemies(i mean for balancing reasons but play with me in this space) because that's the job he had when he worked with darius. he's not an especially skilled combatant on his own because he didn't need to be, his job was to pin foes down so darius could spam sweep.

additionally, while i hate this decision badly, therion's percentages are fixed so that every chapter past the first has a necessary skill check that's very difficult to pass without either a glean info character and a KO NPC character(why did they do base 3% brigand leader's garb to him.), again because he's used to having someone else deal with gathering information and doing the majority of the fighting for him. he's not terrible at getting info out of people, but he's also not great at it, for example he just goes along with barham's scheme instead of finding a way to threaten or coerce him into revealing the info right away. like basically all of his plans would've failed if the guards or his informant had just said No and refused to help him as opposed to cyrus who responds to being told no by finding out that his informant's daughter died in order to manipulate them into coughing up the info he wants. therion might be capable of manipulation beyond basic impersonation or pretending to be friendly, but if he is we don't see it.

therion in general is also a very passive character if you look past his words at his actual actions. he resists for about two seconds when heathcote cuffs him before following their orders for the rest of the story even when he's uncuffed in chapter 2 when he's still not a huge fan of the ravuses. he again goes along with barham even when he's almost certain he's being fucked with. he is almost always either acting on someone else's orders or defending himself from someone else's attacks. the reason for this is best illustrated in one of the cutscenes with darius where it's made pretty clear that for the majority of their partnership, he kept therion dependent on him to make decisions, and because that started when he was relatively young it's likely that therion just doesn't have that strong of an instinct for advocating for himself or firmly saying no to people twisting his arm(he asks darius a question once and gets thrown off a cliff for it, implying he was even more obedient before that). he can say no once, but we have no idea if he would've given in to the bandits at the beginning if they hadn't responded to his initial no by attacking him, so it does actually make perfect sense that any of the stronger-willed travelers could just respond to that no by saying they weren't asking and dragging him along. he's prickly and verbally hostile, but that mostly seems like a defense mechanism because otherwise he's easier to coerce than ophilia. i get that this seems like i'm trying to infantilize therion but that's really not my intention, in fact that takes the Therion Doesn't Kill People point i made awhile back reflect less on his being a secretly good person and more being too passive to feel the need to finish the job and generally makes him more morally ambiguous because it's less clear what decisions he makes due to personal growth and what he makes due to inertia. is he a good person, or is he just too tired to be a bad person? ideally the story would actually go somewhere with that theme but it wouldn't be octopath if they didn't periodically drop the most insane writing that rewires my brain before either doing nothing with it or actively ruining it.

also, therion's story gets way stronger if he's in a party, because while cordelia and heathcote are (TREATED AS) the reason he learns to trust again, in-story they spend, what, one hour together maybe? cordy and heathcote are his bosses and the most either of them do cordelia using her empath powers to deduce that therion looks sad or heathcote telling him that he's the real asshole for being mad that he's being blackmailed. they're also canonically lying to him when they say they don't know what the dragonstones are, so even at the end of the story they don't really trust him(i wont spend too much time complaining abt them i just don't think you get to be a savior character if the town you own has a ghetto). on the other hand, if you do his story with a party the travel banters all make some attempt at showing therion slowly coming to trust and rely on them despite initial friction, and in gameplay therion acting as a support expresses the theme of him realizing that he actually can work in a team where his allies have his back and there are people he can trust. in that instance his final conversation with darius includes him talking about his companions, because to be here at all they have accepted him after seeing him at his worst and helped him despite it, and who he's been able to help in turn. if you're doing a therion solo run he's just talking about how his boss who's blackmailing him for free labor said he looked sad one time, which is a pretty weak climax if we're going to be real. i stand by saying that octopath works best when it's episodic and stories shouldn't rely on specific characters to work, but genuinely i do think therion's story's themes being expressed strongly in gameplay and the nature of rpgs with a party system are quite cool and my favorite thing about his story.

so it specifically annoys me when people are like "oh well he limply says no before letting you continue to drag him around" like it's a plot hole and not a character trait especially when therion's being a prickly asshole who is also a complete doormat is i think very interesting characterization!!!! ophilia commenting on the fact that therion has no instinct for revenge and therion says "yeah what's the point" makes me so normal.

ALSO why's therion the poster boy for "hey this character's story doesn't make sense with their gameplay" when primrose exists???? why it so contradictory a character whose story is about them learning to trust in their companions again to be in a party while a character who starts off by telling you to fuck off and leave her alone because this is her fight before heel-turning for no reason and then just continuing to be your ally with no justification is totally fine. also why is primrose a support class???? she's not a dancer she's an assassin she doesn't support anyone in her story and her character is about her singleminded and specific familial revenge. she's also a very strongwilled character so it makes no sense that she wouldn't just say no and mean it. i know the answer is that octopath doesn't like women so primrose just got slapped into a princess jasmine costume and femme fatale character before any of her story was actually developed but like oh my goddddddd. primrose girl im so sorry they put you in the nightmare hell dimension.

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promo tangelo to give one sweet kiss to the soft mouth of the hadal snailfish?

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the one good thing about being a filthy californian is that my midnight comes after everyone elses so after everyone else has already posted all the funny jokes i can slide in at the last minu

habpy new yrear :)