#it really does feel that way sometimes

[nincki-minjaj]

Something, something, feeling like your writing is getting less attention the better you get at it

grumble, grumble, feeling like an ungrateful bastard for being annoyed with lack of engagement

sigh, sigh, wondering if you should just write some more smut because that seems to be what people wanna read

something, grumble, sigh, ugh

[ale-arro]

been going a little bit insane about this sentence from Ace by Angela Chen for the past week

[lowercaseaugust]

I can only imagine that the way tumblr staff got that 1/4 number is if they counted the spam bots as users

[chloesimaginationthings]

Okay, but Elizabeth being an absolute savage girlboss isn't something that's talked about enough.

Love how you're spitting facts for our girly pop. 💪💪💪

TBH I go off the personality baby has, and gotta assume some of that sass is definitely Elizabeth

[fisherrprince]

Instead of writing a fanfic like a normal person this oneshot turned into two separate, contextless things,

[lazylittledragon]

i think thats supposed to be about sex things but Not One Of Those, this is the fourth, fifth? couple youve given a lil baby and i think you maybe love lil babys

i too, give the Characters lil babys, because i love them

as well as the myriad of Situations it puts the blorbos in

fourth or fifth publicly/in recent memory, i've been doing it for Years in art i haven't posted akfdhdjhd

i do just really love putting them in Situations you're right

[suosage]

Ｉ ＷＡＳ ＨＡＰＰＹ．

NAGI SEISHIROU; 05.06 Birthday 2025

[doctahchang]

something about season 5 of voy starting with the episode called night where janeway is at her lowest point + wants to go on suicide mission and ending with the episode called equinox (the time when day and night are approximately the same) where she goes on a revenge rampage, nearly killing someone. <3

[astralzeraphias]

“he was mentally ill. this monster was a- was a sick fantasy. a product of his dementia.”

“…i saw it too. does that make me disturbed? demented? does… that make me sick too?”

[selunesfavouriteprincess]

something darkly comedic about the fact that Clea’s last words to Alicia before Aline’s chroma overtakes her are “have fun” and what follows next is just sixteen straight years of Maelle experiencing The Horrors

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[cybertron-after-dark]

Being constantly surrounded by the presence of a loving God sounds great until you realize you never know when his freaky fuckin eyes are gonna show up to check on you.

And man. They do it a LOT.

[vaguely-concerned]

bunter keeping peter from being swallowed up by an evil bog with the kind of hysterical strength otherwise only known by mothers deadlifting cars to save their tender babes is something that can actually be so personal

[t-u-i-t-c]

Rikuo Byakuya in No. 1 Sentai Gozyuger 01x17 Shine Brightly! No. 1 Sports Day!

+ bonus

[rmbunnie]

I like Batman. I like Batman as a character. I like Bruce Wayne. But it is very unserious when people act like Jason Todd, or maybe Damian, the robins as a whole, or any one writer, or any specific story arc, is singlehandedly corrupting Bruce’s character into an severe and inflexible colleague and distant, emotionally-unavailable father. Because even if he hadn't consistently been a questionable, loving yet unhealthy AT BEST father figure in the majority of his appearances since the early 80s (and I do mean to Dick, to Cass (actually shaping her into his image in Batgirl 2000 at the cost of her social development and autonomy ISNT good,) a BAD mentor to Steph, not even getting into Helena, like truly it’s not all about Jason?) The first well-written book that comes to mind where his morality is at its worst imo? That’s Wonder Woman: Hiketeia. No robins, no batfamily, just Bruce putting aside Wonder Woman’s input and the context of the situation and chasing down a girl who killed the men responsible for trafficking, assaulting, and killing her baby sister, to the point where it ends with her jumping off a cliff.

And the thing is I still like reading him in Hiketeia, because he fills the role he needs to fill in that story well, his actions align with his wordview even if it’s taken to the extreme in an uncharitable way, and he keeps my attention. I just think it’s goofy how some of us on here look at the guy who’s big character trait is being a hard-to-know, stubborn, and condescending control freak who puts other people's emotions on the wayside in favor of his mission prolifically, and go “all he did was LOVE TOO MUCH! His mean kids and associates and teammates are PUNISHING HIM for LOVING with his BIG BIG HEART and it’s tainting the narrative!” And you could say “well Hiketeia doesn't count, Greg Rucka is just a hater!” (though I certainly wouldn’t.) But when the issue is Damian entertaining the idea of leaving the family business, and before that it’s Red Hood stepping on toes, and then, wait, before that it’s Green Arrow and Wonder Woman, and then Huntress, and then oh wait we can’t think about the weird patch with Nightwing where their relationship was super rocky, and then Jason but before he died, and of course the Green Lanterns are basically treated like punching bags for him to do something awesome then- Like maybe if it’s a consistent pattern spanning what, 20, 30 years now? The issue isn’t Damian or Red Hood alone, or PKJ or Greg Rucka or Judd Winick or Marv Wolfman + George Perez or even Jim Starlin being a hater, but your blorbo just having extremely well-documented character flaws?

[introspectivememories]

jason and juno's relationship is like "you were my mother, why couldn't you have just been my mother? and "i will be your sword and your shield" and "i made you into a hero. you ruined me. it's the same thing!" and "i will spend my lifetime being your dutiful champion" and "everything i am is because of you" and "it was my life! you had no right to take that from me. it was my life" and "a girl will be the daughter of zeus but you, jason grace, shall be mine" and "mom, am i still young? can i dream for a few months more?" and "i love you and i always will and i am sorry. what a useless word" and "i have my father's nose and all his rage, but i have my mother's face and her grief" and "or was my rage my mother's? or her mother's? or hers? an inherited creature?" and "but i am very homesick for arms that have never held me" and "the arms that cradled you are covered in an unfathomable amount of blood. but they cradled me, yes?" and "i will die your daughter and i will die your daughter and i will die your daughter" and "i hate you for what you did and i miss you like a little kid" and "hello? this is your mother. are you there? are you coming home?" and "mother, eat me and give birth to me again. this time around i'll make you proud" and "a fragment of god has been found in my mother's tender, fleeting smile" and "beause i'm my mother's son, i leave the arrow in my throbbing heart. what kills me keeps me alive" and "i have searched for my mother's love in all corners of the world" and "to say that you abandoned me would be very unjust, but that i was abandoned, and at times horribly, is true" and "i've done everything you have ever asked me. everything. i have given everything i've ever had" and "if i let him do this to me, what else will i allow? anything, anything, anything" and "i love you so much i'm going to let you kill me" and "you believe me like a god and i destroy you like like i am" and "i am forever your most devoted believer" and "somebody always needs to go first. i know this. i go first" and "i ache for the idea of it" and "i still loved you. i still have to live with that" and "i forget about you long enough to forget why i needed you" and "i miss you more than i remember you" and "when you find an old picture of us, and you clear away the dust, i hope you miss me sometimes" and "if home is where the heart is, then we're all just fucked. i can't remember, i can't remember" and "and i'll dream each night of some version of you, that i might not have but i did not lose" and "it's been a long time since i've been me" and "i am not the person i dream of being" and "i want everything back, the way it was. but there is no point to it, this wanting" and most importantly, "of course the love is there. still, still, still."