#having big Thoughts and Feelings about the main character

[erimyya]

Thinking about an Otome game au with Phainon with sprinkle of self aware au. Someone said Phainon is born to be in otome game but force to be a tragic character in turn base game. I cannot unseen it.

Imagine if hoyo made an otome game dedicate to Phainon after the whole Amphoreus patch.

You get to interact and see more of the character outside of the story quest and literally date him. Although it's a different game, it still connected to one another. You can call the otome version as a sequel to the main story in their main game. Take it as a heart warming dessert all of us player deserve after sobbing over this man.

Tbh it's almost the same as LaD concept, you can custom made your mc, dress your mc and take picture with Phainon in various poses. The different is you can run around freely in the open world with him or not— that's up to you. Now, why wouldn't you bring Phainon along with you? What is he there for? Decoration? You can explore the Amphoreus world in different perspective, more detail perspective. The building that you can't enter in hsr? You can enter it but whatever you saw in there better stay there. Phainon had to drag you out before you cause more peace disturbance and get in trouble.

Not to mention, you can jump now. Don't try to jump off the building. You don't want to give Phainon a heart attack now, would you? Game or not, you can respawn or not, just don't do it. Ignore the intrusive thought. He's begging you.

You can toggle with the pov perspective too! You want to feel more immerse in it? Use the first person pov! You want to see the world in more wider perspective? Just use the third person pov! Use the first person pov more often, Phainon may kabedon you when there's no one around.

You can fight too! But you gotta bring Phainon with you or else the game won't let you. That man forbid you from fighting by yourself.

Don't forget to build him. Yes, you gotta grind for his relic all over again. Additionally you need to build your mc as well. Then you just log in the next day and find Phainon hitting big damage. When you check the build, your Phainon is almost perfectly build. You just startle like two days ago? Let's just assume that the game copied your phainon's build in hsr since the two game is connected.

Did I say the two game is connected? Yes. If you used the same account to play the otome game, when you log into your hsr game, there will be some easter egg where he mention you from the otome game after you finished the whole Amphoreus quest. Phainon mention of your very recent activity from your interaction in the otome game almost everytime when you play around in his voice line or just talking with him in the over world.

When you log in into the otome game, Phainon will sometimes slip something like "You're not getting bore of me, are you?" or "You haven't been using me for a while now. Why is that?". You never suspect a thing because you thought the otome game keep track of your characters usage in hsr. You're not wrong, he did keep track of your interaction with other character.

Gacha system? Yes, they have it there too. Is it really hoyo without their gacha system?

You can gacha the lightcone —brace yourself for the fluff and angst those lightcone brought along— that come with their own specific outfit. Cough cough Flame Reaver's outfit. Phainon may or may not be jealous if you prefer his alter ego more though. But most of the time, I'm sure he don't mind.

Sending message to you. Yes. You bet he will. Phainon cannot send message directly to you in hsr but in otome game his own dedicated otome game. He can freely do that. So don't be surprise if you get a notification from the otome game, a message from Phainon begging asking you to take a stroll with him.

After what he's been through? Let this man have his quality time with you. He will appreciate it very much.

[utilitycaster]

#this is such a good point and weirdly something I think Matt started to have a problem with in mid C2#cause while you could chalk the reduction in reaction Nott gets in Rexxentrum to him not wanting to rehash older beats#with a high level party#that’s also when Travis was fishing for a reaction to Fjord’s Wildmother worship and Matt downplayed the Empire’s religious oppression#which was weird because earlier in the story we’d seen the Schusters imprisoned for worshiping the Changebringer#it’s like he lost confidence in telling that kind of story#and that’s why any backstory hardship in C3 flops when it hits the actual campaign#because the NPCs are so bland and accommodating and non-reactive#no one has reactive biases or prejudices#it’s like every NPC interaction for BH is a therapy session of#‘see your bad past experiences won’t be repeated by everyone you meet!’#but having understanding and accepting NPCs as a default just defangs so many of the stories set up by the characters’ backstories#not just Laudna but Ashton too!#Taliesin talked extensively about the difficulty of making a punk character in Exandria#because why are they that angry at the world?#and it increasingly felt like Matt gave him nothing to work with#and even undermined the attempts he made to have shitty people in Ashton’s backstory#to the point where the more people from their past we met the more the PC just looked like an asshole#which wasn’t the intent but was down to Matt not committing to playing small minded and reactive assholes *to his players*

@luckthebard hope you don’t mind me responding to these tags but I think this ties into a lot of thoughts I’ve had about Exandria as a setting and actual play fandom both in terms of how they perceive the cast and how they perceive characters and stories about discrimination.

For what it’s worth I’m not terribly bothered by the Mighty Nein experiencing little discrimination in Rexxentrum, at least from officials, since they’re now useful to the Empire. Fjord’s scene in particular is with Ludinus, who ultimately hates the Wildmother as much as the (legal) Raven Queen anyway, plus detaining a foreign national from a allied country during wartime is probably unwise. What did strike me though is that discrimination against tieflings virtually vanished in the narrative once Molly was gone, in part because that wasn’t something Laura particularly wished to play. And it wasn’t that big a deal specifically because Jester’s backstory was not rooted in any sort of discrimination (vs. Fjord’s, or Veth’s-as-Nott); and it was already not a consistent form of discrimination anyway, ie, it seemed to mostly be concentrated among the wealthy of Zadash and in Shady Creek) but I don’t recall it ever appearing again. It’s not narratively that important, to the point that it’s one of those things I was happy to handwave until Campaign 3 showed that this was part of a larger pattern. I also think it’s noteworthy that Age of Umbra unfailingly showed Aetherweavers and Clanks being singled out - Idyl had to leave his home and experiences suspicion from Ghosthook even in Desperloch, Misty’s presence is why the party is denied access to Volkoru and she ultimately disguises herself, the family they find in the Cinnabar Quarter starved to death to protect a divinely touched child, and Brixton is treated dramatically differently when people believe her to have powers.

I think there are a few problems here and I think they come down to needing traditional session zeroes for the main campaigns, and that it might make sense to step away from Exandria - not because there aren’t still stories to be told, but because I feel Matt is unwilling to paint Exandria in an unflattering light.

A clear session zero will clarify what picking your character means. I think a lot of DMs (and certainly Matt) are reluctant to tell players “I know you are attached to this concept, but in this world, playing a goblin means you will face discrimination” (to give an example) but the fact is, some people want to tell those stories and want to play characters for whom that is important, and you have to be consistent in your worldbuilding for the sake of the story. It is not, as discussed, kinder to those players to have everyone be nice to their character, because that’s not the story they wanted to tell. This is also why I discourage the idea of being very attached to a specific character race or class until you have a game in which to play them. If you really want to play a tiefling and are in a setting where tieflings experience discrimination and you don’t want that aspect…sorry, but you need to play a different character race, or your DM needs to change the entire world, and the former is much easier and the DM needs to say “well you can’t play a tiefling who doesn’t experience discrimination.” (I also think players and certainly fans want the backstory of oppression and not the continuing consequences, ie, unless something has happened or said discrimination was highly localized to a specific place such as the twins in Syngorn, the discrimination will exist throughout the narrative. The failure to make Ruidusborn feel actually discriminated against unfairly was pretty egregious, because every Ruidusborn in the story was shown either invading people’s privacy or straight up joining a cult and murdering people, and there were no responses to them that were anything other than pretty reasonable responses to someone invading one’s privacy or trying to murder people.)

This ties into a discussion that you can see in the replies on this post - player comfort is very important! And again, that's fine and very reasonable! It's just that if you don't want NPCs to be an asshole to you because that makes you uncomfortable, then you will need to play a character for whom that makes sense. Like, I won't have fun if my character doesn't know what the fuck is going on in-world, and I won't have fun if I'm overly squishy, so I tend to play characters with decent INT and CON. It's no different than that: if you won't have fun as a player if your character experiences discrimination, you need to express that to the DM and choose to play a character who won't experience discrimination.

I also think as mentioned that at least a portion of the cast is just sort of precious about Exandria at this point, and it’s not a bad thing, but it stands in the way of them telling stories. I said as much regarding Catatheosis - it can’t actually do much of note other than make the gods slightly harder to talk to directly, which was always kind of hit or miss, because there are too many beloved characters with divine powers whom no one in the cast wants to nerf. I don’t know if the answer to Laudna should have been “okay, so, cool aesthetic, but just to be clear you’re going to have to either disguise yourself all the time or hide or accept most people are going to hate you - your charisma score is going to be entirely on the basis of intimidation and fear” or if it should have been “this doesn’t really fit in the world as I envision it, can we rework this” and the same goes for Ashton and their difficulty finding things to truly rebel against in Exandria. I don’t know if the answer should be “this is how we make it work, and it’s going to make playing the game as this character harder: are you okay with that?” or if it should be “this concept doesn’t really work in this setting as I envision it, so let's find something else you're excited to play” but it had to be one or the other and making it neither weakened both setting and character and remains, in my opinion, the biggest reason why Campaign 3 fell flat. I think about how for Candela, there was a clear decision outlined by Rowan Hall regarding Newfaire being without queerphobia, or misogyny, and I don’t mind this as a choice, and the Candela series never relied on those forms of bigotry to drive the story (and did tell some good stories about class) - but it does mean that if you want to tell a story about queerphobia, you can’t use this setting. I think the cast may want to play with concepts and themes that simply don’t fit within Exandria, particularly not an Exandria where their existing characters are still major players. As Age of Umbra shows they absolutely can pull this off, at least in short form; but they might need to go to another setting to do so. And regardless of how they address this, they definitely need to have more conversations about how their characters fit into that setting and into the narrative they want to tell.

[the-camp-half-blood-library]

Hi there! I was wondering if you knew any good fics where Hazel is the main character, or at least a major supporting character? I'm especially interested in anything that explores her past as a black girl growing up in Louisiana in the 30s and how that has impacted her, but any good Hazel content is appreciated. All content ratings and ships are fine. Thank you for your time, and I hope you have a wonderful day/night!

Hey there! We've found a few Hazel-centric fics for you, with one or two set in/around Louisiana...

I'll set the Table for You by Confuzzled_Giraffe

Frank and her had decided that they'd learn to cook dishes from their childhoods, even if they had no clue where to start. Hazel and Frank share a dinner together. Or: Food and what it means to us.

Future Rust; Future Dust by @mrthology

“Sometimes,” Percy said slowly, drawing Hazel from her thoughts, “I feel like I’m a couple of thousand years too late for everything.” Hazel made a strange sound, startling herself. It almost seemed like a sob. “That I understand,” she said. She hugged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on her them. “I sometimes think I should have just stayed dead. This time is…” Percy looked back at the river, leaving Hazel privacy to collect herself. “Seems unfair sometimes, doesn’t it?” he asked. “I didn’t think I’d live past my sixteenth birthday, then was sure I’d die on the last quest. Sometimes I wonder if I was meant to.” — Hazel sometimes isn't sure she belongs in this time. Percy isn't either.

Phantom Pain by crawlingupawall

Death, Sammy Valdez, blue coffee and everything in between. Sometimes, Hazel feels detached from the living world. Like she's nothing more than a wisp of a girl, floating theough the fields of Apesohdel. Luckily, she has a friend who also died and came back pretty recently. He seems perfectly fine and well adjusted, surely he can give her some advice? Right? Small TW for self harm: it's not detailed or a focus but if it might be upsetting pls dont read

We Have Each Other Now by @ikeasharksss

“You’re in Asphodel.” She doesn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t a question. He takes his hands out of his pocket. His nails are coated in black, and a thick band of metal is on one of his fingers. He’s twisting it like a bottlecap. Hazel looks away. “I can get you out of here,” he says. He’s still twisting, brown eyes unfocused and glazing. Hazel’s lungs are filled with water. “What?” “The Doors of Death are open. You can leave.” Hazel doesn’t know what the doors are, but he’s looking at her now and she knows he isn’t lying. She knows she can follow him, she knows it by the cold feeling down her spine. She can do it. “Okay.” He nods. “Let’s go.” Nico brings Hazel to Camp Jupiter from Asphodel.

And Let My Body Feel The Dirt by @hazellevessque

There is a lot Marie wishes for. Beauty. Fame. But her shop is losing more and more customers, and food seems harder and harder to afford. “Fortune. I want all the riches the Earth has to offer.” — OR, Marie and Hazel through the years

Home Ain't A Shotgun by lil_macaroon

Hazel thought going back home to New Orleans would help her find some stability, some direction. Nico tagged along because that's what brothers do. And there's never a better time to visit the Big Easy than during a Mardi Pardi.

082. Experience by @aimmyarrowshigh

Experience. Hazel Levesque has seen just about every kind of life humanity has had to offer in the last century.

We hope you enjoy! Leave kudos, leave a comment, and happy reading!

-Mod 2

[beigetiger]

Also, I've finished Medicine Walk

[sonknuxadow]

am i the only one who still thinks that they didnt do enough with rouge in sonic prime. and not in a "she didnt get enough screentime" sort of way but in a "they didnt seem to be putting as much thought into what they were doing with her as they were with the other main characters" sort of way

[sysig]

Pretty clothes for you! ✨ (Patreon)

[taraxippos]

I never touched it but I feel like i only ever hear positive things said about song of achilles.. in (rough strokes at least) what makes it dogshit to you?

Okay it's been a while since I actually read it so some of this might not be spot on accurate. Sorry if at any point I say 'the book never does xyz' and it actually does once or twice but I think my underlying criticisms are accurate

-Patroclus is made into like this soft gentle tender quivering little yaoi boy. In the source text, he's shown as compassionate and moved by the suffering of his own men (and apparently having some medical skill, tending to the wounded in the camp), but very much invested n combat and very, very good at it (pages worth of descriptions of the guys he's killing left and right). In this, the arguably more complex character from this 8th century BC text is flattened into Being A Healer, he doesn't want to go to war he just wants to help people, he only goes because Achilles has to but he doesn't want to fight he's a HEALER he's a gentle lover NOT A FIGHTER who just wants to help he just wants to help everyone around him he HEALS while Achilles is a doomed warrior who is so good at fighting and KILLING its a DICHOTOMY GUYS!!!LIKE THE BEAUTIFUL SUN AND MOON DOOMED LOVERS SO SAD patocluse HEALER . (I Think he's specifically characterized as being BAD at fighting but might be misremembering)

-I don't remember much about Achilles' characterization I think it just makes him less of a jackass while not adding anything of interest and levels out into being mad boring.

-Not getting into the literal millenias old debate whether the mythological characters Achilles and Patroclus were being characterized as some type of lover by the original oral sources of the Iliad or its Homeric writers. We will never know. We don't even know what (if any) culturally accepted conventions of male homosexuality existed in bronze age Greece (we know much more about their descendants). But there are some interesting elements of their characterization in this direction, with how unconventional their relationship is WITHIN the text itself- Patroclus is described as cooking for Achilles and his guests (very specifically a woman/wife's job), Achilles chides Patroclus like a father, but there's also scene where Achilles' mourning of him directly echoes a passage of Hector's wife mourning her husband, Patroclus is explicitly stated to Achilles' elder, and is overall treated as his equal or near-equal, closest confidant and most beloved friend (to the point that pederastic classical Greeks would debate over who was erastes (older authority figure lover) and who was eromenos (adolescent 'beloved')- many took it as a given that this text depicted their present-day cultural norms of homosexual behavior but it existed so Outside of these norms that it had to be debated who was who). Their relationship is non-standard both within the text and to the descendants of the civilization that wrote them.

Basically what I'm saying is this book had opportunities to like, explore the unconventionality of the relationship (being presented here as explicitly lovers), explore the dynamics of why Patroclus wants to do 'women's work' (besides being a tenderhearted softboy), the weird dynamics where they take on paternal roles to each other but also roles of wives, how they feel about being this way, and just kind of Doesn't. Which I guess isn't an intrinsic fault (because it omits much of what I just talked about to begin with). it's just like.... Lame. This book takes jsut abandons everything interesting about the source text in favor of flattening it into bland Doomed Yaoi.

-The conflict that sets off the core story of the Iliad is Achilles and Agamemnon fighting over Briseis, an enslaved Trojan woman taken by Achilles as a war-trophy, Achilles spends most of the story moping because he was dishonored by his 'trophy' being taken. Achilles and Patroclus and everyone else are raping their captives, all the women in the story are either captured Trojans (or in the case of the free women within the walls of Troy, soon to be enslaved, and are slave owners themselves). Slavery as an institution and extreme patriarchal conventions are innate to the text and reflective of the context in which it was developed. You cannot avoid it.

But obviously you can't have your soft yaoi boys doing this, so the author has them capturing women to Protect Them from the other men. Their slaves are UNDER THEIR PROTECTION and VERY SAFE (and they might even Like And Befriend Them but I might be misremembering that. Briseis does though). Our heroes have apparently absorbed none of the ideals of the culture they exist in and the author seems to think "they're gay and aren't sexually attracted to their captives" would translate to them being outright benevolent (also as if wartime sexual violence is just about attraction and not part of a wider spectrum of violent acts to dehumanize and brutalize an accepted 'enemy')

In the source text, Briseis mourns Patroclus as being the kindest to her of her captors, who tried to get her a slightly better outcome by getting her married to Achilles (which probably would be the Least Bad of all possible outcomes for a woman in that situation, becoming a legal wife instead of a slave), and wonders what will happen to her now that he's gone. This is a really really sad, horrible, and compelling dynamic which could be fleshed out in very interesting ways but is instead is tossed entirely aside in favor of them being Besties. Like brother and sister.

All of the above pisses me off so much. If you don't want to engage in the icky parts of ancient/bronze age Greece then don't write a retelling of a story taking place in bronze age Greece. I'm not gonna get mad at children's adaptations of Greek myths or silly fun stories loosely based on them for omitting the rape and slavery but it is SO fundamental to the Iliad. If you're not willing to handle it, either fully omit it or better yet set your Iliad inspired yaoi in an invented swords-and-sandals setting where you can have all your heartbreaking tragic doomed lovers plot beats and not have to clumsily write around the women they're brutalizing.

-The author didn't seem to know what to do with Thetis and she made her just like, Achilles bitch mother who spends most of the story trying to separate our Yaoi Boys (iirc her disguising Achilles as a girl and hiding him on Scyros is made to be more about getting him away from Patroclus than trying to save her son from his prophesied doom in the Trojan War) until she sees how much they loooove each other and I think helps Patroclus' spirit get to the afterlife or something in the end?

-This is more of a personal taste gripe but it has that writing style I loathe where the prose feels less like a story and more like an attempt to string together Deep Beautiful Hard Hitting Poetic Lines that will look great as excerpts on booktok (might predate booktok but same vibe). It's all very Pretty and Haunting and Deep but feels devoid of real substance.

I really like The Iliad and The Odyssey in of themselves. They're fascinating historical texts that give a window into how 8th century BC Greeks told their stories, saw their world, interpreted their ancestors, etc. And genuinely I think these texts have 'good' characters, there's a lot of complexity and humanity to it.

WRT the Iliad- all of the main Achaeans are pretty fascinating, the one singular part where Briseis Gets To Talk and laments her situation is great, Achilles fantasizing that all of the Trojans AND the Achaeans die so he and Patroclus alone can have the glory of conquering Troy (wild), Achilles asking to embrace Patroclus' shade and reaching out for him but it's immaterial (and the shade being sucked back underground with a 'squeak' (the squeak kinda gets me it's disturbing and sad)), Hecuba talking about wanting to tear out Achilles' liver and eat it in a (taboo, exceptioally pointed) expression of rage and grief for his mutilation of her son's corpse, just one tiny line where the enslaved women performing ritual wailing for their dead captors are described as using it as an outlet to 'grieve for their own troubles' is heartrending, etc. A lot of grappling with anger and grief and the inevitability of death, a lot of groundwork laid for characters that could be very interesting when expanded upon in the framework of a conventional novel.

And Song Of Achilles really doesn't do much with all that. I know a lot of my gripes here are kind of just "It's different from the Iliad", I would have thought of it as mostly mediocre and forgettable rather than infuriating if it wasn't a retelling (and I DEFINITELY have strong biases here). But I think the ways in which it is different are less just a product of a retelling (of course there's going to be omissions and differences) and more a complete and utter disinterest in vast majority of its own subject matter, to the book's detriment. I think a retelling has a point when it EXPANDS on the source, or provides a NEW ANGLE to the source. This book doesn't Really do either, it just shaves off the complexity of its source material, renders the characters into a really boring archetype of a gay relationship, and gives very little else. Its content boils down to a middling tragic romance that has been inserted into the hollowed out defleshed skeleton of the Iliad.

Bottom line: I definitely would not be as mad about it if I wasn't familiar with the source material but I think it's fair to expect a retelling to Engage with/expand on its source, and I also think it's weak purely on its own merits. This book was set up to disappoint Me specifically.

[frameconfessions]

I hope the protoframes remain relevant even after this story arc for the Drifter concludes, but I also recognize how complicated things would get with how many characters they could keep trying to make stay relevant, leading to a Konoha 13 Naruto type situation where we have too many relevant characters from Umbra & Ordis all the way to Kaya Velasco.

.

[bookshelfpassageway]

i'm gonna be the one insufferable bastard on this earth that liked everhood 2, huh

[meganhalsey]

I think Dan's biggest problem is that he seems like the type who becomes very loyal to people very quickly, and it takes A Lot to break off that loyalty. It puts him in a position where his instincts are telling him to follow/defend someone long past the point he knows he should. You're in his life for the briefest moment and he's already casually ride or die, and Herbert probably picked up on this very quickly, and used it to his advantage.

[doverstar]

every year around this time I rewatch Julie and the Phantoms, and every year I am reminded how much heart this little tween show about grief and hope has

[floorpancakes]

i like my xxxholic aus to be modern or time ambiguous for the bit but its lowkey underrated as a 2000s period piece like. please consider himawari showing watanuki nightcore on her phone and rewiring their chronically offline brain like a victorian child tasting a dorito. doumeki taking up tekupara as a hobby (and being rly rly good at it) . yuuko getting really into gwen stefani back when she was in her harajuku girls era

[magicalgirl6]

Luchia and Kaito are such an awful couple btw I hate them for each other

[autism-corner]

I couldn’t stop staring at those long, slender fingers as they lifted the glass of red wine to her lips, as they carefully cut up the meat with her knife and gracefully brought the food to her mouth...

She looked at me and smiled. "You always tend to provoke controversy, just like a Venus flytrap. Do you long for a sword that much?"

[mariathechosen1]

Was Anyone But You a good Much Ado About Nothing adaptation? No, not at all, but fuck it was fun!

[thetangibleghost]

I've always wanted to wake up from a dream laughing and I just did but I realized after I woke up that I have missed a million social cues :((((((((((((((((( it wasn't even funny idk why I couldn't stop giggling. I dont even giggle irl.