#maximum sequels: 1

[lurkiestvoid]

the time is ripe. I we need a Xena: Warrior Princess movie. and Xena finally gets to kiss Gabrielle as long as she wants it doesn't even have to be related to the plot.

[galwithalibrarycard]

An Ode to Lovely Little Ficlets

A Fanfiction Writing Challenge for the Ten-Year Anniversary of the NMTD/Lolilo Hiatus

Ten years ago, in January 2015, the NMTD fandom was busily embroiled in the Lovely Little Ficlets 30-Day Challenge. A month-long event featuring daily writing prompts and no maximum word count, the LLFL Challenge was to celebrate the news of the then-upcoming sequel series Lovely Little Losers, and to give us all something to do and plenty of fic to read during the hiatus between series.

Now, in January 2025, we’re all awaiting the fan-run @lolilodaily experience, where each episode of the series will be emailed out to you in real time, Dracula Daily style. While we wait, let’s celebrate the anniversary of Lovely Little Ficlets too!

An Ode to Lovely Little Ficlets is a week-long fanfic challenge, because the fandom is smaller now, and folks might not be up for writing 31 ficlets in one month. An Ode to LLFL is not affiliated directly with the original LLFL event or the folks who ran it. We thank them for the inspiration! An Ode to LLFL is run by me, galwithalibrarycard, with input from my fellow LoliloDaily mods.

An Ode to LLFL will run from January 26 to February 1, 2025. I can make an AO3 collection for folks to add their ficlets to. (Link to come!)

No word counts- make your fics as short or as long as you wish! Write fics for all seven days, or just write one fic! Write about any characters, romantic ships, or platonic ships you love from NMTD and Lolilo! There are no Rules! ;)

Prompts

Day 1 - Friendship

Day 2 - Sonnet

Day 3 - Potential

Day 4 - Tent

Day 5 - Gunge

Day 6 - Shenanigans

Day 7 - Break ‘Dem Rules

Bonus Challenge - Write for one of the original 31 LLFL Prompts from 2015!

Most importantly: Have fun! Can’t wait to see what you create!

[ethelcainfest]

Ethel Cain Fest 2025 Announcement!

We're excited to announce Ethel Cain Fest, a fic, art, and edit fest centered around Ethel Cain's sophomore studio album, Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You (releasing August 2025).

The album is a prequel to Ethen Cain's 2022 album, Preacher's Daughter. This fest will feature song prompts from both albums, plus additional prompts from Inbred and Golden Age.

Important Links: AO3 Collection | Tumblr | Instagram

Dates & Deadlines

Sign-Ups Open: July 11, 2025

Sign-Ups Close: October 1, 2025 11:59 PM PT

Submissions Due: October 17, 2025 11:59 PM PT

Posting Begins: October 20, 2025

You can read more information about the fest below the cut 🤎

This is an 18+ fest, which means you must be at least 18 on July 11, 2025, in order to participate. No exceptions!

This fest is open to ALL pairings from the following fandoms: Harry Potter, The Raven Cycle, All for the Game, and The Hunger Games.

This is NOT an anonymous fest! Feel free to openly talk about your prompt.

There is a minimum word count of 1,000 words and no maximum word count. WIPs are allowed, but the first chapter must be finished by October 17, 2025 (the submission due date).

All works submitted to this fest must be for this fest. No sequels/remixes allowed. If the work is part of an ongoing series, it cannot be a sequel to other works in that series.

Dead Dove: Do Not Eat works are absolutely allowed, but we'll be checking the tags on ALL works!

There is a Discord server set up to share with those who sign up for the fest in July 🤎

There will be other announcements closer to the sign-up date with more detailed rules and information!

Additionally, this fest and its mods reject the hateful rhetoric and views of JKR. We will be sharing trans resources both here and in the Discord server. If you have any recommendations for resources we can share, please don't hesitate to send links via our ask box 🏳️‍⚧️

[themculibrary]

Post-Movie: Deadpool 3: Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) Masterlist

All I Want For Christmas is You (Deadpool Edition) (ao3) - jenniferlawrencelover logan/wade E, 52k

Summary: Wade never thought he would be engaged again.

And he wasn't.

Yet.

Children and Drunks Speak the Truth (ao3) - someone_worth_racing_for logan/wade M, 6k

Summary: Wade woke up hours later to a throbbing head and from the weirdest dream he ever had.

Wade had dreamed about getting over to Logan’s place and telling him that he loved him. He could also still remember about almost peeing onto Logan’s floor, dry humping his leg, sitting on his lap and throwing up in his toilet.

Why the hell did he dream bullshit like that? What was wrong with him?

With a frown and with his eyes still pressed closed, because he couldn’t deal with any lights right now, Wade slowly tried to sit up. He only made it half way, when he could suddenly hear a way too familiar voice in front of him

“Welcome back, bub.”

~~~~~

Or: Wade gets drunk to finally tell Logan how he really feels about him.

Dog Tags | A Poolverine Story (ao3) - andthatsallfolks logan/wade N/R, 15k

Summary: It's been 2 months since Deadpool and Wolverine saved the multiverse from the mega-bitch, Cassandra Nova-

'Ugh I hate that bitch so much. She’s literally so mean.'

“Shut up Wade.”

“Sorry Peanut!” 'Haha, Never.'

*Wade, can I just write the fucking story?*

'All right jeez Bossy Mcbossyton. Honey Badger we gotta be quiet, the author is getting pissy!'

don't fence me in (ao3) - Patricia_Sage T, 2k

Summary: Logan and Wade go on vacation.

Happy Together (ao3) - jenniferlawrencelover logan/wade E, 28k

Summary: When Logan moved into the crackhouse Wade made a crackhome, Wade never expected he would stay as long as he did. Nobody did. Least of all him.

Heartbreak is one thing (ao3) - Ikharys logan/wade E, 6k

Summary: Because letting Logan know that Wade wanted him would be like asking to have his head ripped off and thrown to a shark for dinner.

He Is Risen, Babygirl! (ao3) - RaysOccultBoobs logan/wade E, 3k

Summary: Sometimes a guy hits rock bottom so hard, he bounces and comes out a hero again.

What happened after Wade and Logan saved the Multiverse? The second coming.

In Hearts Once Dark And Hollow (ao3) - tardisy logan/wade M, 8k

Summary: Try as he might, Logan couldn’t remember the last time he truly enjoyed the holiday season, much less participated in any obligatory seasonal cheer. He still found himself perched on the periphery, watching, wondering, waiting. The perpetual outsider, like it had been baked into his DNA with his mutation, or pumped into him alongside the molten adamantium. Holidays or no, life continued on.

A series of snippets of Logan's life with Wade, set against the backdrop of the holiday season.

Or: Five times Logan kissed Wade during the holidays, and one time Wade kissed Logan.

In your messy motel room (ao3) - GAJAH_JJ logan/wade M, 9k

Summary: “I invited you here because I missed you."

Logan and Wade find each other again.

Maximum Effort (ao3) - ArtemisFAYZ012 logan/wade E, 168k

Summary: Grab your special sock, nerds. This is gonna get good. It's the sequel to Deadpool and Wolverine that they won't make because Disney is not ready for them yet...

Wade and Logan are living together. On paper, it's a motherfucking miracle. In reality, it's not what they thought it would be. Then the TVA offers them a job and things start a-changing. While Deadpool and Wolverine are fuckin' shit up, Wade falls first, but Logan falls harder. And shit goes sideways in the most colossal way.

I've split this story into 2 parts. Part 1 is Chapter 1 - Chapter 22. Part 2 is Chapter 23 - Chapter 34 (Epilogue) As this is a beast of a fic, you can stop at the end of Part 1. Part 2 slips more into Domestic Poolverine, all the romantic cuteness I could muster and a healthy sprinking of shameless smut ;)

Maximum Effort, Bubs and Babygirls

No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, I'll Crawl Home To Her (ao3) - MaxDoesThingsTheyShouldnt T, 13k

Summary: Deadpool was right, that's not how regenerative healing factors work. Once Logan's skeleton had been dug up from the soil the last bits of soft tissue were able to begin rebuilding him.

Laying in the forest and holding his daughter's hand Logan thought he would never wake up again, but he did, six years from when he was last conscious and with no idea where his daughter was Logan has to rejoin the world and put together what the hell happened all those years he was buried.

X-Men Logan comes back to life after the events of Deadpool and Wolverine.

Pavlov’s Dog (ao3) - panties_on_boys logan/wade E, 18k

Summary: Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille. Tobacco blossom, vanilla bean, and earthy spices.

Vanilla’s a classic, and the tobacco is a statement. Look, Lo, I already smell like you. I’m already yours, I smell like your hands when they ache in their tendons from rerolling those stupidly sexy Cohiba cigars. Do something about it before the animal beats you to the punch. 

Foolproof. Pavlov did it. Why can’t Wade?

Sunshine and Whiskey (ao3) - that_one_dead_author logan/wade E, 40k

Summary: “Oho, there’s number two-oh-seven.” Wade laughs and Logan already knows he’s grinning beneath his cowl. “That fight really got ya goin’ huh?”

Logan hated the way he could feel his cheeks heat up. He snarled, “shut the fuck up, Red.” There was a spray of warm blood against Logan’s knuckles, a breathy groan from Wade sending a shiver down the older man’s spine.

Wade glanced out of a broken window to his right. “Isn’t he cute?” He asked an invisible audience. Logan rewarded him with another stab.

Wade’s attention turned back to Logan, gloved hands grabbing his hips and giving an experimental roll of his hips. Logan’s breath hitched, and Wade had the passing thought that he wanted to swallow the sound.

the bucket list (ao3) - mikaminato logan/wade E, 33k

Summary: Wade loses his mutation and his cancer returns. With only a little time left, he decides to create a bucket list and make the most of his final moments. Together with Logan, he tries to check off every item on the list.

That is, until Logan decides he's not ready to say goodbye just yet.

The destruction of worlds, or men chatter about nothing (ao3) - danny_valentin_87 logan/wade G, 3k

Summary: The two, now good friends Deadpool and Wolverine, as is their custom, embark on their Saturday night pub crawl while engaging in meaningful conversation. Or at least, they try to.

Was That A Snort? (ao3) - bluebully T, 6k

Summary: To get some payback Wade attacks Logan with tickles and is beyond amused by the sounds he manages to get out of him while the whole experience ends up putting Logan's head in a better place. 💗

Some snorty, ticklish Logan for your viewing pleasure!

"Deadpool and Wolverine"-verse

M/M Tickle Fic

we got love sure enough (ao3) - ziphiidae logan/wade M, 30k

Summary: There’s something about the mundane that wrestles with Logan’s mind far more than violence ever has. He’s already proven to himself that he can be a hero. Now it’s time to prove he can once again be someone worthy of trust on a far more personal level. ___

Or, Logan and Wade's bumpy road to domesticity.

[literary-illuminati]

2025 Book Review #7 – Not Even Bones by Rebecca Schaeffer

One of my goals for 2025 is to expand my cultural and literary horizons somewhat. Which means reading more proper high literature and classics on the one hand, and getting over my distaste and giving some genre romance and YA an honest try on the other. This was checking 1/2 boxes for the latter – it showed up on a bunch of recommendation lists I’ve absentmindedly scrolled through here and there as (to paraphrase) YA for people who hate YA, which seemed promising. Having read it, I absolutely see what they meant, and if I read this when I was young enough to be part of the demographic I would have absolutely adored it. But the marks of the genre are very obvious on it, and having given it a try the appeal of reading this stuff as an adult is still a bit beyond me.

The book stars Nita, a 17-year-old girl with a somewhat unusual upbringing – her mother pulled her out of school to be her on hand vivisectionist, dissecting and preparing the body parts of all the supernatural creatures she hunts for transport and sale. She’s quite good at it, too – and despite being supernatural herself, happy with the work and resigned to the lifestyle. At least until her mother brings back a living boy her own age of a rare species to cut apart and bleed over time for maximum profit. Having a crisis of conscience, she helps him escape before returning to face her mother’s wrath alone.

A few days later, she wakes up in a glass cage on the other side of the country, an exotic new specimen for butchery and sale at the largest market in supernatural bodies on the continent. Along with a fellow prisoner and through an unlikely alliance with the pain-eating guard and torturer there to keep them in line, she spends more or less the entire rest of the book trying to escape Death Market before she’s cut apart and sold for literal consumption.

One of the more striking things about reading the book for me was honestly just how little actually happens in it. Not that it dragged, necessarily, but you could (I think) fairly easily condense this into a novella without having to actually cut any major plot points or characterization beats. You can count the number of actual characters on one hand, and there are even fewer actually meaningful locations. It’s all just very decompressed, with what felt like the better part of it’s ~350 pages dedicated to Nita’s internal ruminations and musings, and to her evolving opinion of Kovit (the pain-eating torturer with a soul, and the book’s male lead).

Nita and Kovit together get the overwhelming majority of the effort the book spends on characterization. Which is often delivered rather bluntly in what’s basically exposition delivered directly to the audience, but for all that they’re both at fairly compelling characters. They’re both endearingly fucked up, at least – especially in the way that both are very aware that something is wrong with them, but have incredibly skewed ideas of just how much or to what degree it is. Blessedly, the story is not a romance, though there’s plenty of subtext there if you want to go looking (and I’m sure it’s build on in however many sequels there are).

I can’t exactly hold the book’s prose against it – I more or less new what I was getting into here, after all – but I was still really struck by how direct and simple it is. The closest thing to actual YA I’d otherwise read recently was the Scholomance books, and by comparison they were elevated and downright poetic. It made for easy reading, though it was an effort not to start skimming at points. Which wasn’t at all helped by all the cases where it was very, very clear that this book set entirely in Latin America with a heroine who has lived there for several years was written by an American for a presumed audience of other Americans. Of impressionable young teens, specifically – the places where Nita’s internal monologue or basically anyone’s speech was hijacked for a paragraph or two to delivery education and edifying information about Peruvian history or cuisine or whatever were very, very obvious. Never exactly offensive – and incidentally teaching this sort of thing is in fact exactly one of the social goods books for children should achieve – but my god was it blunt.

Despite that, the book is also quite gleefully gory and amoral. In a very ‘edgy teenager’ way but, of course, that’s exactly who this is written for. I actually really liked that Nita never even really pretended to be any sort of good person (thinks of herself as far worse of a person than she actually is, even), and the narrative never really argues with her about that – similarly to a forced romance, I went in expecting a forced affirming redemptive arc and was pleasantly surprised by its lack. The reveal with Fabrico during the finale was also quite pleasantly nasty.

Kovit is interesting because the book very clearly frames and positions him as not as bad as Nita originally thinks he is, tormented and anguished and abused, dedicated to holding on to what shreds of his soul as he can, impossibly cute and absolutely desperate for any scraps of trust or affection, and so on – he’s basically designed in a lab to have fanfic written about him. But the story never quite forgets that he is, to anyone he doesn’t have a directly personal connection to, still absolutely a predator and a monster. He has all his lines in the sand he keeps to religiously, but he also did very much horribly torture a terrified dolphin-girl – and being allowed to do so was a treat from his employer. Which is roughly the arc that Nita spends the book going on, really – learning that acting on abstract principles or ‘wanting to be a good person’ is dangerous idiocy, that all that matters is whether the monsters your work with can be trusted by you. It’s a fun corruption arc.

Overall, I absolutely do see why people would like this book – and again, if I had gotten my hands on it in ninth grade, I would have devoured it in a single sitting. As an adult – look, I can see how the plot and themes could be made into something I adore. But the things that make it YA do in fact basically kill any enthusiasm I have for the sequel. But hey, I’ve tried a new thing.

[svartalfhild]

Microsoft's charging $70 for Avowed, the universe sequel of Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, which are $30 and $40 respectively (not including DLC). Avowed gonna be the price of both previous Eora games combined. And the PoE games are by no means small games. If you're a completionist like me, they're both easily 100 hour games, so unless Avowed is about be like 200 hours of game (doubt.jpg), I don't see a single good justification for the $70 price tag.

And the thing is, I wouldn't feel compelled to complain like this if Obsidian was still independent. Time was, I happily handed them my money. I gleefully poured an embarrassing amount into backing Deadfire. Because I knew that money was going to the project and the people making it.

Now that Microsoft has bought them out, I don't feel that same confidence anymore. At all. Microsoft wants to churn out AAA product at maximum price, and they are notoriously predatory in their practices. They are one of these massive publishers that have it in their fucked up little corporate heads that $70 for the standard edition of a game should be the new norm and that this is somehow sustainable. In this economy? Are you fucking kidding me? The $60 AAA standard is awful enough. Now we're pushing to $70? Fuck off.

[violetfaeryrealm]

hey i made a book list! welcome to my list! 📝

if you’ve ever wanted a tattoo inspired by a specific book or series, if you wanna know what i’m currently reading, or if you just want some book recs… then this list is for your eyes :)

alphabetized by author’s last name & 🌟 added for when I really love a book or author

last updated: June 18, 2025

currently reading:

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

The Hunger Games (re-read :)

Dracula Daily

most recently finished:

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto

bookz:

Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame

🌟 Chain-gang All-stars

Friday Black

Aoki, Ryka

Light from Uncommon Stars

Arafat, Zaina

You Exist Too Much

Armfield, Julia

🌟 Our Wives Under the Sea

Atwood, Margaret

The Handmaid’s Tale

Baldwin, James

Giovanni’s Room

will be reading Go Tell it on the Mountain soon!

Brontë, Charlotte

🌟 Jane Eyre

Butler, Octavia E. 🌟

Parable of the Sower

Bloodchild and Other Stories

Kindred

Fledgling

will be reading Parable of the Talents & Lilith’s Brood series soon!

Chambers, Becky 🌟

🌟 🌟 The Wayfarers Series

↳ The Long to a Small, Angry Planet • A Closed and Common Orbit • Record of a Spaceborn Few • The Galaxy, and the Ground Within • To Be Taught, If Fortunate • A Good Heretic (A Wayfarers Story)

🌟 The Monk & Robot Duology

↳ A Psalm for the Wild-Built • A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Clarke, Susanna

Piranesi

Collins, Suzanne

🌟 The Hunger Games Trilogy

↳ The Hunger Games • Catching Fire • Mockingjay

A Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

Sunrise on the Reaping

Crane, Mac

🌟 I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

want to read A Sharp Endless Need soon!

Dickinson, Seth

🌟🌟 The Masquerade Series

↳ The Traitor Baru Cormorant • The Monster Baru Cormorant • The Tyrant Baru Cormorant

El-Mohtar, Amal & Gladstone, Max

🌟 This is How You Lose the Time War

Feinberg, Leslie 🌟

Stone Butch Blues

will be reading Transgender Warriors soon!

H, Lamya

Hijab Butch Blues

Harpman, Jacqueline

🌟 I Who Have Never Known Men

Highsmith, Patricia

The Price of Salt

hooks, bell

🌟 All About Love: New Visions

will be reading more!

Huxley, Aldous

Brave New World

Jemisin, N.K.

🌟 The Broken Earth Trilogy

↳ The Fifth Season • The Obelisk Gate • The Stone Sky

will be reading more!

Johnson, Micaiah

The Space Between Worlds

Kimmerer, Robin Wall

Braiding Sweetgrass

Kuang, R. F.

Babel

Le Fanu, Sheridan

Carmilla

Le Guin, Ursula K.

The Lathe of Dreams

will be reading more!

Lo, Malinda

Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Machado, Carmen Maria 🌟

🌟 In the Dream House

Her Body and Other Parties

Miller, Madeline

The Song of Achilles

🌟 Circe

Muir, Tamsyn 🌟

🌟❤️‍🔥🫀❤️‍🔥🌟 The Locked Tomb Series

↳ Gideon the Ninth • Harrow the Ninth • Nona the Ninth • (Alecto the WHERE. please. when)

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Oseman, Alice

🌟 Heartstopper Vol. 1 - 5

Page, Elliot

Pageboy

Porter, Chana

The Seep

Sáenz, Benjamin Alire

🌟 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

want to read the sequel soon!

Sanderson, Brandon

The Mistborn Series

↳ The Final Empire • The Well of Ascension • The Hero of Ages

The Emperor’s Soul

Sappho

her fragments (lol)

Shannon, Samantha

The Priory of the Orange Tree

Solomon, Rivers 🌟

🌟 An Unkindness of Ghosts

The Deep

Sorrowland

Model Home

Stiefvater, Maggie

The Raven Boys (book 1)

will read the rest of the series!

VanderMeer, Jeff

🌟 The Southern Reach Trilogy

↳ Annihilation • Authority • Acceptance

Walker, Alice

The Color Purple

Walter, Heather

Malice

Misrule

Waters, Sarah

🌟 Tipping the Velvet

Affinity

Fingersmith

will be reading more!

Yamamoto, Makana

Hammajang Luck

nostalgia edition!!! :

The Percy Jackson series

The Infernal Devices series (Shadowhunters)

Twilight series…….

The Uglies series

Maximum Ride series

Hunger Games series (listing twice bc <3)

The Giver, Lord of the Flies, etc (books we had to read in grade school that i ended up enjoying)

Homestuck……. 😳 … … 🌟

books high up on the TBR :

The Wicked Years series, by George Maguire

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto

The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall

Lilith’s Brood series, by Octavia Butler

Imperial Radch series, by Ann Leckie

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin

The Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin

The Jasmine Throne, by Tasha Suri

Crier’s War, by Nina Varela

and literally so many more…….

if you want a tattoo to represent your favorite book but are unsure how to go about that, i am always always down to brainstorm & discuss how best to immortalize! 🐞

i love reading… & i love tattooing… this crossover would be Epic and Awesome 😳🫶🏼

[dc-marvel-crossovers]

To celebrate and promote DC/Marvel crossovers, we’re hosting a “fanworks of fanworks” event!

Participants create fanworks in various mediums of existing crossover fics. The idea is to connect a community of writers, artists, and appreciators of DC/Marvel crossovers.

More under the cut, or in doc form here.

How it Works:

Writers submit a bookmark of their existing DC/Marvel crossover work (one fic or series per submitting author) to an Ao3 collection. Writers will also need to create at least one fanwork (any medium) of another author’s fic, but that comes later; see step 2. After bookmarking your fic, complete this form.

You do not have to submit a fic to participate! Participants sign on to create up to five fanworks of submitted fics, within the following categories: playlist, art, collage/moodboard, remix fic, timestamp/sequel fic, and podfic. Details below. If you’re interested in fanworking (but aren’t submitting a fic) and you want an email with a ping once the submission period closes, put your email on the list here! 

Writers and fanworkers are encouraged to share ideas and promote each other’s work!

Guidelines for the Event:

Writers will be able to indicate which types of fanwork they’re okay with their fic receiving. Each fic submitted will receive at least one fanwork, but can receive up to one of each type. A fic cannot receive more than one of each type of work.

If participants choose to create more than one fanwork, they each need to be for a different fic — you can’t sign on to do more than one type for the same fic. Participants can do more than one of a type (as long as they’re for different fics). For example, you can do playlists for up to five different fics, or a playlist for two fics plus a remix for three fics.

Any crossover of Marvel and DC is eligible — no restrictions on content, pairing, or length. But keep in mind that if people don’t want to read your fic, it’s less likely to get multiple claims.

A fic with more than one author can be submitted by one of the authors, even if a co-author has submitted a different fic of their own. The writer who submits the fic is solely responsible for participation and fanwork creation.

Timeline:

January 1 - Fic submissions close; reading window opens! Participants are encouraged to read all the fics in the collection before choosing which ones they’d like to fanwork. 

January 14 - First round claims — for writers only, to guarantee that each fic gets at least one fanwork.

January 21 - Open claims start. Once your claim is confirmed on the Big Spreadsheet you can start creating/posting immediately.

February 29 - Tentative deadline for posting fanworks. If a lot of people express interest we may set up staggered posting dates.

Types of Fanworks:

All fanworks need to be posted on Ao3 using the “inspired by” feature. If you need help embedding images or whatever else, we can help you figure that out, but you do need an Ao3 account. 

Original art. Digital preferred, but if you’d rather create traditionally and then scan to upload, we can work with that. 

Collage/moodboard. You can use a simple grid layout, or get more creative with it. These should have at least nine elements involved. 

Playlist. At minimum, ten songs. These will get posted to Ao3 either using a screenshot of the track listing, by typing out each track name/artist, or embedding the playlist. You can also include cover art, explanations of why you chose each song, snippets of lyrics, links to each song on YouTube, etc, if you want to get more in-depth with it. 

Timestamp/sequel fic. Maximum 5000 words. Fill in a scene that takes place during the original fic but did not make it into the original story, or write a sequel. 

Remix fic. Maximum 5000 words. Put your own spin on the plot of the original fic. Keep the original characters, but you can add additional characters to a scene, or see how one character making a different choice would change the whole plot, or reverse their roles, etc. 

Podfic. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Ideally, podfic should be complete by the end of the posting window, but if you’re working with a long fic and want to break it up, make sure you have at least one chapter posted. 

Questions? Message us on tumblr or email dc.marvel.crossover.mod@gmail.com

[explodingsilver]

Book review: Nightbane by Alex Aster

Lightlark…2!

I’ve already made my thoughts on the first book quite clear (read that review first if you haven’t already; I don’t feel like rehashing all the context), and were I a bit more sensible, I would have stayed away from its sequel. I am, however, somewhat of a literary masochist, so of course I borrowed this from Hoopla the day it was released (November 7th, not too long ago). Very pleased that I was able to write this review much faster than the first one, though this review is shorter, at only 2,100 words long. Was the experience worth it? I don’t know, you tell me.

(There are spoilers ahead, on the off chance that you care)

The plot and style

After the events of the first book, Isla is trying to learn her several powers as well as get a hold of this “leading two different realms” thing while trying to move on from getting betrayed by four different people she used to love. At a celebration for a Wildling holiday (in which no Wildlings other than herself are in attendance), Grim magically crashes the party from afar and announces that the Nightshade army will destroy Lightlark in thirty days. The other realms start preparing for the invasion, and Isla tries to recover all her lost memories of being with Grim in hope that they will reveal what his goal is and how to stop him, especially after receiving a prophetic vision of him standing in the ruins of a village he destroyed with his powers.

Put simply, if the plot of the first book is split between “Isla and Celeste search for a MacGuffin” and “Isla and Oro search for a different MacGuffin”, this book is split between “Isla and Oro do basic defense building stuff” and “Isla remembers the time she and Grim searched for a third MacGuffin”. There’s also a subplot about a rebel group trying to capture Isla, but this is inconsequential and could’ve been dropped entirely.

It feels like there was an attempt to address some of the criticism of the first book, but not nearly enough of an attempt. On the one hand, metaphor usage has improved to the point where it actually feels like it was written by a human being and not a neural network (no throbbing and raw glaciers this time around), the book acknowledges that no longer having a power no one else had in the first place is less bad than having a maximum lifespan of 25, and Isla realizes that Grim let her win the duel in the first book and that she did not win against a 500+ year old army general on the strength of her own skill. On the other hand, it does not address questions like “how does Starling society even function if none of them ever live to 26?” or “if Oro always knows when someone is lying, why didn’t he call bullshit the moment Celeste said ‘Hi, my name is Celeste’?”

Speaking of that last thing: I didn’t mention it in my review of the first book because it didn’t really feel relevant to anything, but each ruler has a ‘flair’, a special power that is unique to them. Oro’s is that he can always tell when someone is lying. Grim’s is that he can teleport. This book reveals that Isla’s is that she is immune to curses. Glad to finally have an answer to one of my biggest questions of the first book (checks notes) 75% of the way through the second one, when this explanation should’ve been given the moment we learned the original stated reason does not apply.

Wildling elixir and its (lack of) consequences

Much of this book centers around the presence of the Wildling elixir from the first book, a potion that is super effective at healing wounds. As you might imagine, this kills a lot of the tension. Used in conjunction with Isla’s magical teleportation device, “teleport away, use Wildling elixir, teleport back” becomes an easy way to recover when the characters get their flesh ripped apart. And indeed, they do this all the time! The book tries to nerf this strategy by stating that the elixir is rare due to the flower used to make it being rare, but 1) this is at odds with Isla’s very liberal use of it, and 2) aren’t the Wildlings the “make flowers grow instantly” people? Why can’t they just use those powers on it like they do for every other plant?

There was a bit of potential for an interesting theme with these flowers: Isla eventually learns that while the Wildlings use them to make the healing elixir, the Nightshades use those exact same flowers to make the titular nightbane, which is basically fantasy heroin. I was intrigued by this motif (I like it when things have a dual nature like that), but unfortunately this doesn’t really go anywhere, other than some vague gesturing at “wow, just like Isla”. Speaking of Isla…

Isla

This time around, Isla is clearly traumatized by the events of the last book, trusts very few people, and is aware that she is in over her head with leading two realms full of subjects she barely knows while also being the king’s unofficial consort. Not a bad start for a character arc, but in effect, she has gone from naive and impulsive to naive, impulsive, and guilty about those things while making little effort to amend them. It feels like her attitude towards leadership is basically “I’m allowed to call myself a bad leader but nobody is allowed to agree with me on that.”

Much of Isla’s internal conflict in this book is based around her Nightshade heritage on her father's side. She is convinced that there is an inherently evil part of her because her father was from the Inherently Evil Realm. This may not come as a surprise, but I do not like when stories have such a thing as an Inherently Evil Realm. Not only does Nightshade fill this role, but the book never even gestures at pushing back against Isla’s conviction that her heritage taints her, and in fact ends up affirming it.

This book really told me to my face that Isla is the first person in millennia to have both Wildling and Nightshade powers. I do not buy that even for a moment. Maybe my disbelief is because the series discarded the “only one realm’s power set per person, even if their parents are from different realms” thing in the same book it was introduced, and I would expect there to be Wildling/Nightshade couples way more often than once per few millennia. But no, that highly plausible thing can’t happen because then Isla won’t be the most special person currently alive!

The other characters

Sadly, the rest of the cast did not improve, and in some instances, got worse.

Oro going from "world weary, distant king" to "official love interest" has unfortunately sanded down all his interesting aspects, and everything I liked about his character in the first book now takes a backseat to being overly protective of Isla and making stock Love Interests threats to kill anyone who hurts her. I swear, he turned so generic that some of his lines were indistinguishable from something Grim would say. But hey, if nothing else, he at least didn’t get character assassinated like I was sure he would!

While Grim actually does stuff in this book, he still has no personality traits other than what's included in the Sexy Villain Starter Pack. Like, it actually upsets me that he's such an absolute nothing of a character. Everything about him begins and ends with “what if the villain…was sexy?”, and there are about a morbillion stories out there that provide more interesting answers to this question. You’d think focusing on him this much would be the perfect opportunity to give him any unique traits at all, but Aster certainly did not take that opportunity, nor did she ever answer the question of why he likes Isla, despite the sheer number of pages dedicated to their relationship.

As for everyone else? Azul, our beloved token gay black man who runs his realm like a democracy, still receives woefully little page time. Cleo, the bitchy ruler who hates Isla for no reason, receives even less, but at least we get to hear about her dead son, I guess. Ella, Isla's Starling assistant, is mentioned so rarely I wonder if Aster forgot she exists. There are also several new average citizen characters introduced, but none of them are remotely interesting. They're all defined solely by whether or not they're on Isla's side. It says something when the best new character is Isla's new animal companion (a panther named Lynx, who rules because he does not give a shit about Isla).

The chili pepper emoji, as the TikTokers call it

Because I must do as the book did and address the topic of sex before I get to the final important bits.

This book is much hornier than the first one, but in a way that makes large parts of it feel like one of those dreams where you're trying to have sex with someone but your attempts keep getting interrupted. I regret that I did not count the number of times Isla was about to fuck someone and then got denied for some reason or another.

There are three times she actually succeeds, and luckily these scenes do not read like they were written by Sarah J. Maas, despite her obvious influence on everything else. This doesn't seem like much of a compliment, but this series needs all the W’s it can get. That's not to say everything is fine, though. There's one scene that's obviously using all the "first time" stuff for characterization, and I can't help but feel this would be more effective had they not already slept together a few short chapters beforehand? Like c’mon, all you had to do was switch the order of those two scenes.

The ending

Shortly before the Nightshade army is set to storm the island and destroy it, Isla learns Grim’s (and Cleo’s) real motivation for doing so: there’s a portal on the island leading to another world, one in which the original founders of Lightlark came from before making Lightlark in the image of the world they left. Grim and Cleo want to open that portal and reach the other world, which will just so happen to destroy the island. They’re not actually trying to kill everyone for the evulz. Isla, in her naivety, accidentally opens it for them before they even arrive.

During the final battle, while trying to steal Grim's powers so she can kill him and save Lightlark, Isla finally remembers the last two important memories: 1) she and Grim actually got married right before he memory-wiped her, and 2) what she thought was a prophetic vision of him killing an entire village was actually a memory of her doing so. Convinced that she'll accidentally kill Oro if she stays with him, she agrees to go with Grim, whom she just realized she is still in love with, in exchange for a promise that he'll withdraw the attack.

I cannot remember the last time I had this strong of an "are you fucking kidding me" reaction to the end of a book. But after some thinking, I decided that it actually makes for some great tragedy material. “Traumatized woman with a supportive partner becomes convinced that she’s too horrible to be with him and goes back to her terrible husband” would make for a good story if this was a more grounded book written by anyone else. Alas, this concept just had to be tackled here.

I also naively thought that because the deal was for two books, that means this would be a duology. But it feels like there will be a third book, and I'm hoping there is, not out of any desire for more (unsure how much more I can take), but because it would be straight-up authorial malpractice to end the series on that note.

Conclusion

This honestly wasn’t quite as bad as the first book, but the problems that persisted outweighed the ones that got fixed, and the severe case of Middle Book Syndrome certainly did not help its case. It’s a very small improvement stylistically, but when the nicest things I can say about it are “there were some concepts that could’ve made for an interesting story in the hands of a better author” and “the sex scenes aren’t atrocious” and “the cat is kinda cool”, then I feel justified in calling it terrible overall. It’s a good thing that Lightlark…3! is presumably a long ways away, because I will need all that time to recover from having read this.

[blondephil]

dnp movie analysis p2: genres, studios, franchises

thanks everyone for enabling me <3 i'm back with some more analysis by genre, franchise, and studio!

genre ratings

first, genre ratings (genre is kinda arbitrary here, tbh; there's a lot of overlap!)

here we have the first table (please tumblr don't mess with the quality) (i can post the excel sheets if needed; r tables were being a pita)

here we have the number, mean (= median for all of this analysis), minimum, and maximum ratings by genre. within each statistic, i've highlighted the minimum (light) and maximum (dark) for dan (blue) and phil for genres with >1 movie (just realized i fucked up western, ignore that lmao)

phil has watched the most horror (64) and dan mostly sci-fi (53). interestingly, but presumably because of their love for these genres, each of their minimum scores went to these genres. if you watch a lot of one type of movie, you're gonna find the duds.

both of them liked christmas movies (tbh this was like, home alone, so), with their highest minimum and mean ratings being for that category (nostalgia, i assume because like, same). lowest mean scores were for superhero movies (both) and mystery (phil). for both of them, marvel was pretty all over the place (we'll get into that in a sec), so that's not super surprising.

their highest minimum scores were both given to war movies, which is a little surprising but this include movies like 1917 and dunkirk which are ~critically acclaimed~, so makes some sense. their minimum max scores went to westerns and mysteries for dan, and musicals, mysteries, and biopics for phil.

here are the histograms/bar charts for genres. these aren't the prettiest tbh, and i excluded some that had only one or two movies / weren't very interesting. without delving deep into the data, you can see how their preferences play out especially in horror and sci-fi, where phil has more highly-rated horror movies (partly because he's rated more) and dan has a lot of highly-rated sci-fi (but also low ratings). you also see how superhero movies are pretty middling -- there's almost a normal distribution! (not really, but sort of!). romance too. there's in general a lot of left skew here -- they like to rate movies highly.

final genre analysis is number of movies in one genre rated by one and not the other. i'm so sorry this table is so long.

i highlighted here the top three genres one has watched without the other. again we see phil likes his horror (and as i said in my last post, a fair amount of these movies were watched when dan was on tour, and this doesn't even include the guillermo del toro's cabinet of curiosities episodes he rated), but also thrillers (similar!) and comedies (which i get; i love to put a comedy on in the background). unsuprisingly, dan's watched a lot of sci-fi without phil, but also horror and comedy. in general, though, his genres are more distributed.

next, studios/franchises!

again, i've highlighted the maximum and minimum in each column, only for franchises. both of them really like ghibli, and dan likes disney more than phil (though i think this is missing big hero 6 now that i'm looking at it again, because dan rated that lower). that's theatre kid behavior: the 4.5 was beauty and the beast, all pixar and aladdin and so on were highly rated.

i fucked up the matrix somehow so just ignore that -- they both gave matrix sequels low scores

turning to franchises, phil is a harry potter hater (valid at this point). but loves lord of the rings. so does dan, though his dan's ratings actually skew pretty high for franchises in general (see: his maximum scores for each franchise are 4.5 or 5); he can pretend to be alternative or whatever but he's still a millennial at heart. their minimums minimums are both for star wars (sequels!) and marvel, which, valid. phil's highest minimum is bond (there were only a couple rated) and dan's is the hunger games, but unlike phil he only rated thg and catching fire, not either mockingjay.

and bar charts!

i only picked the most interesting ones here as well. marvel follows a similar distribution to the superhero movies, which, since they each only rated a couple dc movies (and i didn't include nolan's batmans), makes sense. again they both rate lotr highly, but the hobbit was low. the studio ones are less interesting imo because they skew so far left, but again: dan is such a disney kid.

that's all i have! i love this because dan, for all his faux cynicism, just rates movies so highly + it's so often the movies that don't fit his curated doomer persona but moreso the pooh one. and also phil expressing opinions! phil just watching a lot of horror!! i love it.

[thebibliomancer]

Universe X Special: Spidey #1

Hi Spiders-Man!

Fun fact: this was the very first image I ever saw from the Earth X line. I had NO idea what it was and assumed that the monstery half of Spider-Man on the cover was Doppleganger because I was aware of Maximum Carnage.

And now I have context!

As I’ve said in past posts, Earth X was massively successful so when a sequel series was in the works, it seems like the plan was More. So we get these Universe X Specials, focusing in on something specific and moving the overall story along.

Last time, the 4 Special brought Sue Storm back to life. And also had focus on Reed and Johnny. Poor Ben was kinda Just There. Just like he was kinda Just There in Earth X.

I guess this time, the focus will be on the spider corner of the verse. Spider-Cop, Venom daughter, and Spiders Man.

Lucky for Miles, he missed out on this verse.

The NYPD of martial law America is Very Concerned about the big mobs that Pope Immortus is pulling in. Immortus’ crowds are still threatening the Human Torch (the building) and they’ve also seized the grain silos, taking control of food stores for the entire city. You either join the church or go hungry.

Boss of America Marshall Muldoon points out that Immortus relies on Spiders Man’s illusions to keep his flock loyal and that they need to do something about that.

Cop Spider-Man volunteers to take care of him, leading Cop Cage to ask take care of how? How far are they going to go?

Peter responds with a pun, leading May Venom to cringe like she’s an embarrassed teenager.

I’m not actually sure how old she is.

Anyway, Peter goes on the mission but goes out of contact for a few days so May decides to go look for him.

Infiltrating Immortus’ crowd, May finds Spiders Man and Peter locked together in some illusion. Since beating the shit out of an unresponsive Spiders Man doesn’t jolt him out of the illusion trance (but does make him cry from the pain, geez), May decides to go into the illusion by using her symbiote to interface with Peter’s mind.

She’s expecting some horrible torture but just finds a nice New York City.

May finds an unmutated, powerless Spiders Man. And she beats the shit out of him again…

Spiders Man tells her that he’s trapped here too and is not in control.

Also, we can guess that before the terrigen bomb, Spiders Man may have been a homeless guy. And then he mutated to be a lizard with spiderweb scale patterns and illusion webs. Manipulative masterminds keep exploiting him. And an angry maybe teen keeps kicking his ass. He’s just not having a good life.

May swings off to find her dad and get him out of the illusion herself.

And because she’s Peter Parker’s daughter AND Venom, she does this in the most dramatic way. Crashing through a window to yell at him.

But she discovers to her shock that in this illusionary world, Peter is married to Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane is married to Harry Osborn.

Which sorta makes sense, those were the dating couples before Gwen died. And there’s even a What If type logic to everything.

Which helps May realize that Spiders Man isn’t steering this illusion.

Peter is.

This is all a subconsciously self-inflicted black mercy type situation.

In this dream, Peter stopped rubble from falling while he was fighting Doc Ock. So Captain Stacy didn’t get squished pushing a child out of harm’s way.

With Captain Stacy alive, for some reason he wound up arresting Norman Osborn on charges of being a green goblin. So Gwen never died.

For some reason, his family falling apart prevented Harry from having a bad drug overdose that drove Mary Jane to dump him. So they’re still together.

This is, May infers, Peter’s perfect world. And she has to bring him back to reality.

She tries telling him what REALLY happened. And saying that Green Goblin killed Gwen does seem to jolt Peter from the fantasy.

Because the Green Goblin didn’t. He did. Catching Gwen recklessly with his webbing broke her neck.

In a nice touch, Peter letting the sad reality leak in renders him in a more detailed art style versus the simpler one that’s been used for this fantasy world.

Peter flees into his memories and May gives chase. Shes confronted by Spider-Man and subdues him, assuming it’s her dad hiding behind his mask.

Except… it’s Ben Parker. Peter’s son with Gwen.

May hasn’t loved seeing Peter’s fantasy was marrying someone other than her mom. She’s had some harsh words to say about it. But discovering that he seemingly didn’t even want a daughter, that she’s been outright replaced in this scenario breaks her.

She dramatically melts and jolts out of the illusion.

So she can beat the shit out of Spiders Man again.

That poor guy.

May even goes to kill Spiders Man. But Peter snaps out of the illusion in time to stop her.

Peter admits he doesn’t deserve her forgiveness. He can never make this right. Not just fantasizing about a different life but the emotional neglect towards May after MJ died. And that he never let himself love Mary Jane as much as he should. It’s not that he loved Gwen more than MJ but because his guilt from Gwen’s death made him feel he couldn’t love. He didn’t deserve to.

Peter Parker. Him and Matt Murdock are the most guilt wracked people on Earth. Although, I think Matt is dead now so Peter wins.

May asks why Peter abandoned the fantasy if he had everything he wanted there and he answers “when I saw you, everything wasn’t enough.”

So thanks to this psychic lizard man, the family issues between Peter and May have been brought out into the open and discussed. I’m sure there’s still a lot of work to be done, wounds made over years don’t heal overnight, but it’s a start.

Oh, right, there’s also the reason for all of this. Peter asks Spiders Man to come back with them.

And I cannot fathom why he says yes.

He has been severely beaten three times today because of this family. What about this experience made him want to abandon Immortus?

Unfortunately, we don’t get a lot of insight into Spiders Man. He features on the cover and he drives the plot but he could be an illusion casting lamp for all it matters. Who he is as a person is not relevant to the story. This is about May and Peter and he’s just unfortunate enough to be the instigator.

I do wish we learned more about him. He’s probably the most iconic new character of Earth X but Earth X does not do a lot with its new characters.

Remember the new circus X-Men who basically did nothing last series?

Even here. May gets a lot to do here but it’s really all still Peter focused.

That’s my primary criticism of this. It’s a pretty interesting Peter character piece but the new characters that could use some exploration wind up just parties to exploring Peter’s issues.

Share some space, Pete. It was a long special.

Anyway, next time the liveblog returns to the main book with Universe X #4.

[tireddovahkiin]

Just finished watching Katana ZERO and HOLY FUCKING SHITLORD.

MY BRAIN- I feel like I got high, then a concussion, and then finally watched this game. The writing is INSAAAANELY good. Legendary, even.

The game itself is just plain art. The gaming style, animation done so smoothly even though its all pixelated, THE SOUNDTRACK, the CHARACTERS MAN- EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM are so cool. Despite having maybe short screen time in the whole game.

But ya know as always, yo girl has another favorite villain character mmmhmmm🥱 Leon Von Alvensleben. Man who appeared for maximum five minutes in total, and managed to make the fandom obsessed with that lunatic.💀

(But he serves cunt and is gorgeous dilf material)

I already drew him two times already😭 YEAH HES AN OBSESSION YOU COULD SAY THANKS TO MY FRIEND AT UNI👹

BUT FIFTEEN TOO THOOO... He so fine. A mysterious assassin who enjoys killing and was created to be a machine for the Government, who knows wants revenge, with a long ponytail, badass powers, goes with the alias 'The Dragon'? Sign me in🤑

I still have so many questions tho, who are the masked men? Who's that little girl and why didn't anyone else see her? I'm still kinda confused😭

ALSO WILL THERE BE A SEQUEL? PREQUEL? ANYTHING? This cannot be the end, they DID say 'To be continued'... I'M TRUSTING YOUR WORDS11!1!1!

[theguywithaplan]

List of Video Games Turning 20 Years Old in 2024

Alien Hominid (started off life as a Flash game and graduated to a real game.)

Army Men: Sarge's War (the sequel to the Sarge’s Heroes games, but this one was rated T for Teen and used realistic guns instead of plastic ones)

Astro Boy: Omega Factor (seriously, if you have a chance to play this, take it. This game is AMAZING)

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II

The Bard's Tale (the 2004 version with the guy who played Wesley in The Princess Bride)

Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings & the Lost Ocean (hey! That collection with this game and it's follow-up is out on the Switch now! Go get it!)

Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space

Blood Will Tell: Tezuka Osamu's Dororo

BloodRayne 2

Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django (this GBA game had a special cartridge that required you to go outside into the sunlight to power up your character in game)

Breakdown

Bujingai: The Forsaken City (the game where you play as Gackt)

Burnout 3: Takedown

Call of Duty: United Offensive

Call of Duty: Finest Hour (a side story to the original Call of Duty, which came out the year before)

Capcom Fighting Evolution (the darkest of the dark age of fighting games)

Carmen Sandiego: The Secret of the Stolen Drums (a full-on adventure game where you play as the mascot of a series of edutainment games)

Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (the rare movie-in game that's not only really good, but is actually better than the movie it's based on)

Crash Bandicoot Purple: Ripto's Rampage + Spyro Orange: The Cortex Conspiracy

Crash Twinsanity (a childhood favorite)

Crimson Tears

Crusader Kings

Custom Robo (the first one in the series to release in North America)

Cy Girls

Dead Man's Hand

Dead or Alive Ultimate (remakes of Dead or Alive 1 and Dead or Alive 2)

Def Jam: Fight for NY (the vastly superior sequel to Vendetta)

Dog's Life

Doom 3 (the original version. Hope you've got a flashlight on you...)

Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors

Dragon Ball Z: Buu's Fury (the final game in the Legacy of Goku series)

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3

Drakengard (Yoko Taro's debut as a game director)

Driver 3

Evil Genius

Fable (another childhood favorite)

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (the last Fallout game made by Interplay before Bethesda acquired the IP.)

Far Cry (the very first one.)

Feel the Magic: XY/XX (a launch title for the Nintendo DS)

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (the only Final Fantasy game to release for the GameCube)

Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls (remakes of the first two mainline Final Fantasy games)

Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone

Front Mission 4

F-Zero: GP Legend (the last F-Zero game to release for almost 2 decades, until F-Zero 99 released in 2023.)

Galleon

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (the PS2 one. There was another version of SAC that released for the PSP a year later that is completely different.)

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2

Ghosthunter

Godzilla: Save the World

GoldenEye: Rogue Agent

Gradius V (the last mainline Gradius game)

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto Advance (yes, there was a GTA game on the GBA.)

Growlanser Generations

Guilty Gear Isuka

.hack//Quarantine

Half-Life 2

Halo 2

Hitman: Contracts (the third one)

Hot Shots Golf Fore! (yet another childhood favorite)

It's Mr. Pants (Rareware made this for the GBA after being acquired by Microsoft)

Jak 3

James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing

Katamari Damacy (the very first Katamari game)

Killzone (PlayStation's supposed "Halo killer".)

KOF: Maximum Impact

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

Kirby & the Amazing Mirror

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures

Lifeline (a microphone-based survival horror game for the PS2 by Konami.)

The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (a turn-based RPG that uses the exact same battle system as Final Fantasy X.)

The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth

Mario Golf: Advance Tour

Mario Party 6

Mario Pinball Land

Mario Power Tennis (not to be confused with "Mario Golf: Power Tour" for the GBA.)

Mario vs. Donkey Kong (the first one, which is getting a remake for the Switch in February!)

Maximo vs. Army of Zin

MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault

Mega Man: Battle Chip Challenge

Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun/Blue Moon

Mega Man X: Command Mission

Mega Man Zero 3

Mega Man X8 (yeah, there was a lot of Mega Man stuff in 2004.)

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (a remake of the original Metal Gear Solid for the GameCube)

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (SNAAAAAKE EATERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR)

Metal Wolf Chaos (LET'S PARTYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY)

Metroid: Zero Mission (a remake of the original Metroid for the GBA.)

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

Monster Hunter (the very first one)

Mortal Kombat: Deception

Mushihimesama ((a bullet hell that you’ve probably seen a lot of if you search for “HARDEST GAME OF ALL TIME?????” on YouTube)

Myst IV: Revelation

Need for Speed: Underground 2

Ninja Gaiden (the reboot from the Dead or Alive devs)

The Nintendo DS

Onimusha 3: Demon Siege

Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors (an action-adventure hack & slash made by FromSoftware)

Painkiller

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (can you believe this is getting a remake this year??)

Phantom Brave

Pikmin 2

Pitfall: The Lost Expedition (the last game in an series that started all the back in 1982 on the Atari 2600)

Pokemon Colosseum

Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (the 3rd one)

Red Dead Revolver (the predecessor to Red Dead Redemption.)

Resident Evil Outbreak

R-Type Final

Sacred

Samurai Warriors

Scaler

American McGee Presents: Scrapland

Second Sight

Serious Sam: Next Encounter

Shadow Hearts: Covenant

Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (you know that “Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series” meme you guys love so much? This is where that came from.)

Silent Hill 4: The Room

Siren (a spirital successor to Silent Hill from the same creative director)

Sly 2: Band of Thieves

Sonic Heroes

Sonic Battle (an arena fighter for the GBA.)

Sonic Advance 3

Spider-Man 2 ((based on the movie of the same name. The one with the really good web-slinging)

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (the 2nd one)

Spyro: A Hero's Tail (the 5th one)

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (the 3rd one)

Star Wars: Battlefront (the one that everyone liked)

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords

Steel Battalion: Line of Contact ((this, and the original Steel Battalion two years prior, used a special controller called the Mega-Jockey 9000, which had 44 buttons, two joysticks, a throttle handle, a radio channel dial, five switches, an eject button, and three foot pedals.)

Sudeki

The Suffering

Super Mario 64 DS

Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain (the 4th one)

Tales of Symphonia

Thief: Deadly Shadows (the 3rd one)

Tony Hawk's Underground 2

Total War: Rome

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

Viewtiful Joe 2

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

X-Men Legends

[atamascolily]

There's a game I play as a writer that I call "Story Problems" -- I'll stop an episode or a movie halfway to three-quarters of the way through and try to sketch the ending I think the writers have in mind based on what I've seen thus far. Obviously, this is much easier with self-contained mysteries and ten-minute one-shot children's cartoons than extended dramas, but through regular practice, I've learned to pay attention to all the clues dropped in the exposition and how seemingly unrelated details are woven together into a coherent narrative whole.

Some people use the term "Chekhov's gun" for these hints, but I prefer "set-up and payoff". No matter what you call them, writing is essentially a sleight-of-hand performance, where the writer tell the audience exactly what they're going to do while simultaneously distracting them so that they're too busy focusing on other things to notice until the big reveal.

All this is a roundabout way of saying I've spent a lot of time thinking about the "story problem" represented by Walpurgis no Kaiten and how it might unfold.

First and most importantly, why bring Walpurgisnacht back in the first place? What role can a seemingly defeated witch (however mysterious) have in PMMM going forward? What are we, the audience, missing that would allow us to make sense of this? What in her story remains incomplete or unaddressed?

I sympathize with those who wanted Walpurgisnacht's nature to remain a mystery, but I think that ship sailed the moment SHAFT decided to bring her back for the sequel. If indeed Walpurgisnacht is returning--and why name the movie after her if she isn't?--then she must be somehow connected in some way to the main cast beyond her role in the original series as the Final Boss, or else why even bother?

(Seriously, if SHAFT wanted Walpurgisnacht's presence to be a surprise, they could have titled the movie literally ANYTHING else, but they didn't. That was a deliberate choice on their part, so I not only assume that Walpurgisnacht must be important somehow--central, even--but the big twist is not THAT she returns, but HOW and WHY.)

Cut to several years of radio silence after the initial announcement, giving me plenty of time to think. One night in the fall of 2022, the following conversation played out in my head unprompted:

Brain: Hahahaha, you know what, I bet they're really going with the whole 'Homura is Walpurgisnacht' twist after all! "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace", and all that. Plus, can you imagine how angry this will make people on Reddit? Me: Okay, but why are you telling me this NOW?

Brain:

Me: crying You sick son of a bitch.

To be fair, improbable plot summaries have something of a history in this franchise--if I were to travel back to 2012 and tell people that Homura becomes a witch and traps everyone in her labyrinth and then turns into the Devil, I don't think many people would have believed THAT either until it played out in front of them. But this one was particularly disheartening because the "Homura is Walpurgisnacht" theory*--which was initially popular when the series was released--was seemingly discredited in Rebellion with the appearance of Homura's witch Homulilly. To say otherwise was going to be one hell of a hard sell for a lot of people.

(*I know, I know, I know, Walpurgisnacht is a composite super-witch made of multiple entities, but I need a shorthand way of describing it, even if it's not as technically accurate, so bear with me here.)

But even though my assertion seemed counterintuitive on the surface, I was convinced that it would eventually prove to be the case for several reasons:

1) Another game I like to play as a writer is called "The Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen" (alternate title: "Put That Character In A Situation"). Essentially, I try to imagine what would hurt/challenge the characters the most for maximum drama or effect, and then I make it happen. Based on Homura's history and her relationship with Walpurgisnacht, what would be the worst thing that could possibly happen re: Walpurgisnacht's return?

Well, given how much Homura has invested in protecting Madoka from this witch--from reliving the same month hundreds of times over to becoming the self-proclaimed embodiment of evil just to make a world where Madoka could be happy--the worst thing that could happen to Homura would be that she discovers that everything she's done, all that she's fought and sacrificed for, has led directly to the one thing she's been trying to prevent this whole time: the (re?)creation of Walpurgisnacht herself.

In other words, this tweet:

I mentioned my theory to someone recently, and their response (paraphrased) was that they felt the original series had already covered this particular form of dramatic irony and they hoped WnK would go in a different direction. Fair enough, but this is a series that thrives on revisiting the same scenes from different angles, to the point of a shot-for-shot remake of Madoka with her family at the beginning of Rebellion to mirror the original series! So just because they've done similar things before doesn't mean it's necessarily off the table in the future--to me, that makes it even more likely, actually. And frankly, I think some amount of revisiting the past was inevitable the moment SHAFT decided they were bringing Walpurgisnacht back in the first place.

Given PMMM's obsession with cycles and repetition, I'd go one step further and make it worse: not only are Homura's actions what bring Walpurgisnacht back, these same actions are what lead to all the Walpurgisnachts in the past, so that Homura created the very monster who killed Madoka and caused Homura herself to become a magical girl in the first place. Essentially, Homura becomes her own ancestor in a massive time loop/bootstrap paradox with no beginning and no end (or at least, that's how it seems at first--I doubt that's where the story TRULY ends, though it would make for one hell of a cliffhanger).

It would be bad enough if Homura directly or indirectly created Walpurgisnacht AND created a time loop, but you know what would make the situation EVEN WORSE? What if the enemy that Homura had been fighting for so long wasn't some other external force outside of her, but her own SELF-- if Homura not only created her own enemy, but also WAS that enemy, too, becoming the thing she feared and hated the most? I've talked in my previous posts about how PMMM excels at making the metaphorical literal, as well as its proclivity for turning characters into their opposites, so this would be a logical next step in that direction.

Given that Gen Urobuchi's nickname is "the Urobutcher", I think it's safe to say he knows how to make characters suffer. Thus, I'd be deeply surprised if he doesn't play the same game that I do--and if so, he might draw similar conclusions to the ones I've outlined above.

2) A major twist in every installment thus far has been that Homura is not who or what we think she is--first a time traveler, then a witch, then the Devil. If this pattern continues, what new revelations would surprise us about Homura? In order for the story to continue, it's likely that she must grow and change beyond her Devil persona--what might that look like? A transformation into the massive super-witch that was her enemy would certainly answer both questions and then some, although it may not be the answer people want.

(If nothing else, Homura will likely have at least one new outfit in Walpurgis no Kaiten so that SHAFT can sell the merchandise, lol.)

3) Not only do Homura's actions drive the plot of PMMM, the franchise is deeply concerned with her emotional life, and she is the center around which everything revolves (although this is not always immediately apparent due to the way each installment is structured). Thus, it's likely that Homura's relationship with Walpurgisnacht is both central to the plot and deeply personal--and what could be more personal than this?

4) In a show with excellent visual design, where every detail is selected with care, and usually means something (even if that meaning is not immediately apparent), there are far too many visual and narrative parallels between Homura and Walpurgisnacht to be a coincidence. Having the two be connected in this fashion would explain all of this in a concise and satisfying manner.

5) One of the things I admire about PMMM from a storytelling perspective is how efficient it is--every character and detail has a purpose, and nothing is wasted. Having Homura be/become Walpurgisnacht is not the ONLY way to establish a connection between them, but it is undeniably the simplest and the most efficient from a purely technical angle, as it only involves one character the audience already knows and cares about vs. adding an entirely new entity to the mix.

That was my answer to the story problem of "What is Walpurgis no Kaiten about?" in late 2022, based solely on the limited information available to me (i.e.m the title of the movie + everything that has come before). But while it seemed abundantly clear to me--almost inevitable--that Homura would somehow become Walpurgisnacht, I didn't have a good explanation for HOW this might come about beyond "timey-wimey reality-bending and/or multiverse shenanigans"--which, while adequate for my purposes, was not enough evidence to convince others of my argument, and so I let the matter rest.

Then the key visual dropped in September 2023, and I burst out laughing the instant I saw the second Homura, because I knew how SHAFT was going to solve the problem that had stumped me: one Homura would create/become Walpurgisnacht and the other would attempt to stop her (and probably fail, at least at first).

Homura is such a complex and multi-faceted character, I think it's a bit simplistic to say that one of the pair will be purely good and the other evil. Suffice to say there will be one Homura that we're rooting for (the one with ribbons) and one that we're probably not rooting for (the one with the headband) and leave it at that for now.

I'll freely admit that I still don't fully understand the mechanics of how and why there are two Homuras or how Walpurgisnacht arises from the actions of one or both of them, but I don't need to: everything we need to know is contained within the framing of that key visual. Homura will be the source of all her problems in this movie; that's all that matters. Everything else is details--delicious, to be sure, and I look forward to analyzing them in great detail, but the core (heh) conflict of the movie is already apparent.

Of course, you could make the argument that my original gut feeling was wrong because the second Homura doesn't "count" as Homura. To me, that's semantic hair-splitting--for my purposes, if she looks like Homura and is voiced by Chiwa Saito and retains all of Homura's powers, abilities, and associated symbolism, then she IS Homura in all the way that really matter, but I'm sure people can and will disagree with me on that. In the end, when it comes to PMMM, it's Homura all the way down--and I think Walpurgis no Kaiten will make that literal before the end.

(not gonna lie, the idea that all the Clara Dolls turn into Homuras too, so that Walpurgisnacht is made up of nothing but Homuras is pretty delicious--but so is the idea of the doppelganger Homura somehow hijacking or corrupting the Law of Cycles, which we know is full of witches, and turning it to her own ends. Or both, both is good, too!)

I know a lot of people hate the "Homura is Walpurgisnacht" theory, but I think it keeps popping up for a reason, and will continue to do so until Walpurgis no Kaiten finally gives us sufficient information to either make it canon or lay it to rest for good. Personally, I love the idea--as a quick browse through my "#vein of gold" tag will attest, I love when characters are forced to confront their shadow selves, their dark sides, and their doubles; I love when the call is coming from inside the house. For me, Homura becoming Walpurgisnacht wouldn't be cliche or boring, it would be a plot twist that would explain everything we've seen to date while simultaneously re-framing it, making it a Greek tragedy of incredible proportions. And a lot of people hated the whole "Homura becomes the Devil" twist when Rebellion came out, so why should Walpurgis no Kaiten be any different in this regard?

One of the things that I love about this franchise is that it's never been afraid to go big and bold and cosmic while simultaneously remaining deeply personal--and solidifying the connections between Homura and Walpurgisnacht would be all of those things at once and then some. I don't know why this particular idea has captured me, or why I feel so strongly about it, but in the end, I don't have any inside information, just an intuition that refuses to let go.

Ultimately, I suspect whether you like this theory or not comes down to whether you think the primary conflict of Madoka Magica is external (characters battling an enemy outside of themselves) or internal (characters battling an enemy within). My gut feeling is that Walpurgis no Kaiten will be an internal battle playing out on an external stage, essentially making this a "both/and" situation, and it will revisit many elements of both the original series and Rebellion while simultaneously breaking new ground.

It may well be that Urobuchi and SHAFT have a different answer to this particular story problem than the one I've outlined here--but if so, I can't see it. In the end, all I can do is imagine the story that I would write based on the clues I've been given, which may or may not be the same as the one they are planning. We'll find out if there's any truth at all to my intuitions or if I'm barking up the wrong tree when the movie finally comes out.

And hey, if I'm going to be wrong, I'd rather go out with a wild and crazy idea than playing it safe with some half-assed guessing. If I can't be right, I might as well be INTERESTING. And there's always fanfic to fall back on if the movie ends up going in a radically different direction and I still feel strongly about this by then.

[lovewash3d-doll]

📖Self-Publishing Guide for Teens!📖

(As a teen in the process!)

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Why should you self publish? Self-publishing is an accessible, faster, and easier way to publish, that allows you to have higher royalties and more control over content. However, there are some downsides: indie book are sometimes perceived as questionable quality, as they are not stamped as adequate by a publishing firm, and advertising can be more of an endeavor. But these are not tall mountains to cross! Here are some tips to maximize your success and a simplified timeline of self-publishing!

1. Writing

The first step is obviously to write! Choose a genre, age group, and target audience you think your book will appeal to (this will play a role in marketing). Remember, the reading age group of your book depends on both content and reading level. If you are targeting juvenile category, keep in mind that younger children may have difficulty understanding more complex words and plots, but that young adults or adults may not be as interested in certain story concepts and topics. To be successful, your book does have to fit within the realm of the book industry. My tip is trying to organize it in a section following a library shelving system.

To avoid the quality crisis of indie books, it’s also so important to ensure your novel is the best quality possible. Several qualities that stir me away from some indie novels are ‘green’ undeveloped writing styles, a lack of flow, inconsistant or poorly-written plots, and trope-y charcters without much depth. It’s so incredibly important to properly plot your novel, create distinguishable, well-rounded characters, a strong voice, and use sentence variability. You might not be ready yet and that’s okay!—there is always room for improvement even in the best writers and you just may need more time to develop your own voice and style. Additionally, please don’t revolve your stories around tropes or fall into the modern pet-peeve of ‘all smut and no plot’ books. A story should have something significant to tell and a theme to show its reader!!! To ensure the best quality, your story should be getting peer reviewed or receiving feedback from others in between drafts. This way, others can point out plot deficiencies and comment on word choice or other structures improvements. When you intend to publish a book, it is not just for you! Your story must fit the standards of others too. Take as much as time as you need but try to set a timeline! This is the most important part of the entire process!

While writing, you also want to keep in mind how long your future book will actually be. Depending on the intended physical size of your book and font size, there are many online resources that can estimate your page count using your word count. Luckily, as indie authors, no one can limit your word count. Normally, debuting* traditionally published authors have a capped word count, equating to a maximum of 300 pages or so (this depends on genre) because publishers want to save money if a book isn’t successful. Even with this self-publishing freedom, your book should ideally be around or over 50k words (200 pages) and mindful with its length. A debuting novel with 500-1,000 pages may be unreasonably long and you should consider if that many words are really necessary— sometimes we tend to use too many words than we really need. Is a plot dragged on for too long? Is there a subplot that doesn’t contribute? Is a sequel a better option? If your book is a bit on the shorter side, a slightly-sly tip is to increase the font size and lower the book dimensions (shhhh). There are plenty of famous books on the shorter side but a book may look more aesthetically pleasing or comparable to others if it has an adequate thickness.

The excitement of publishing your normal may encourage you to speed up and diminish the quality of your writing. Try to motivate yourself to have the best quality possible!

2. Editing & Getting an Editor

Once you have a final draft, it’s time for final editing. I’ve noticed that many indie authors, especially younger ones, tend to skip out getting a professional editor, because it is so incredibly costly (some of the best services cost at least $1,000 for 50k words!!). But no matter how confident you are in the quality of your writing, you aren’t above getting an editor and it’s really a game changer for your novel. Editing polishes your work and saves you the embarrassment of having misspelled words and incorrect grammar in your first edition. It builds your credibility as an author! Obviously paying out-of-pocket $1k is a bit ridiculous, and there are cheaper alternatives. Newer editors will charge much cheaper, such as $100 to edit 50k, which in my opinion, is a much more reasonable option. Some advice is searching up writing groups on social media or scouting out editor websites across the internet. It’s important to make sure you don’t get scammed and that you are satisfied with the quality of the editing you receive! Make sure whoever you select as your editor has the proper qualifications and a website with a portfolio. Before committing, you should ask them to do a sample edit of a small section of your writing. Good luck! If you don’t want to spend any money at all, at least ask someone with an English degree or somewhat qualified to look over your writing, such as a teacher, grammar-savvy parent, or school writing lab helper. I personally advise against using Grammarly, Spell Check, AI, or other online programs as your sole editor. While these tools are valuable, they are not always accurate, don’t always understand the context of your writing, and cannot provide you with a full-depth, comprehensive editing service such as a human could. My Grammarly always suggests removing purposeful repetition and doesn’t understand the flow of my writing at all!

Before you dive isn’t the realm of finding editing services, it’s also important you know the different kinds! Developmental editing focuses on the big picture of the story and plot; Line editing focuses on word choice, pacing, and flow; Copy editing focuses on grammar. Here is a more comprehensive summary of all the services available by an editor: link. The type of editing you should seek depends on the needs of your story. If you have received useful, constructive feedback in between drafts from other friendly writers and feel confident in your final draft, you may not need any or much developmental or line editing. You may be better off simply asking for more feedback rather than spending money on an editor. I am personally going to pursue a professional editor for copy editing or at least seek out someone with the qualifications because perfect grammar is essential for the quality of your book. Lastly, invest in a few beta reader, such as friends and family, to read your entire book before it’s publishing-ready.

3. Book Covers

People do judge books by their covers (I’m guilty) so it’s important to have approachable, well-designed cover art. I personally find covers that use pictures of actual people, plain designs, and a lack of balance a bit of distasteful and tend to skip over them when I’m looking at a bookshelf— I dont even read the synopses. Rather, more artistic, beautiful, and colorful books catch my eye. On that topic, I don’t think I’ve ever bought an ugly-looking book. Obviously, many readers are less picky but, nevertheless, it is still important to have a good cover as it can make your book stand out and increase sales. Firstly, a cover should reflect the atmosphere of your story and its elements. It should represent in it in its best glory! What do you want to be physically highlighted? A darker-themed book should be a darker color and have a frigid, sharp design; while, a more light-hearted book should have a casual, maybe cartoony, colorful design. Nothing angers me more than being deceived by a book cover!! A good rule of thumb is looking at book covers in your genre and searching for inspiration. I personally made a mood board for my book cover and pulled different elements from different books until I found a style and certain elements I wanted to retain. The next step, of course, is making or finding someone else to make your cover art. I am more leaning towards commissioning a book cover but I am not opposed to drawing my own. Drawing your own cover is a fantastic way to save money as long as you are skilled enough to design it just in the way you imagined. As an artist, I’m prone to thinking I made my best drawing yet and then, looking at it months later and realizing it’s unproportional or has some fatal flaw. I’m a little too cautious to allow that to happen with my own book. Instead of drawing, you can also use online editing tools to merge images and make digital designs. However, be wary of copyright on programs like Canva and any stock photos you may use. If you are seeking to commission a cover, my favorite way is to scout artists on social media, especially Instagram and Twitter. I’ve found many beautiful artists that offer commissions in styles I like! Like the situation with professional editors, the price you’ll pay for a commissioned book cover depends on the level of the artist, the size of your book, and the complexity of your envisioned design. Newer artists will charge lower, while professional artists may be pricer. Typically, a lower end book cover may cost $50, while the a high end one may cost up to $800. Make sure to check full commission policies and the appropriate steps to not get scammed! Additionally, make sure to double check the file type of the cover and which size you may need!!

*IMPORTANT: for hardcover books, the synopsis is found on the inside of the jacket; for paperback books, the synopsis is found on the back & should be incorporated in the book cover design.

4. Publishing

Now for the exciting part! There are many self-publishing programs and platforms on the Internet, and has their own guidelines and benefits. The one I’m planning to use and the one regarded as the best platform is Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP is completely free, grants you 60-70% of royalties, and immediately launches your book on Amazon. *If you are under 18, you will need an adult to create you account for you because it requires tax information to publish. You will be able to fill out a product detail page and have the liberty of selecting an age group, genre, key search words, etc. It’s important to note that when publishing an authentic book, authors do purchase or receive ISBN and Library of Congress numbers to allow their books to be categorized into library systems and be formally identified as a commercially-sold book. Kindle does provide you with a free ISBN code but with some strings attached, such as only being able to use it commercially on their platform so, you can’t legally sell you book anywhere else if you use their provided ISBN. Make sure to be wary and fully understand terms & conditions! On the next following steps of self-publishing, KPD will allow you to upload your cover and begin the formatting process. There are many tutorial videos and instructions to properly format your book within the program, and you can even find outside professionals , that are familiar with KPD, to format your book for you for around $150. To make your book as professional-looking as possible, analyze the format of other published books and pay attention to what’s at the beginning and the end, such as a copyright page, dedication, author’s note or acknowledgment, and an author bio. Finally, publishing is simple with just a button! But before that, you should order a book proof (pre-published verison of your book) to ensure everything is just as it should be!

5. Marketing

The most difficult part for self-published authors is marketing, compared to traditional authors whose publishing companies advertise it themselves. Some ideas for marketing, that I’ve seen indie authors do are:

Create author social media accounts & advertise their book through posts & videos

Donate your book to local libraries (To do this, fill out a form & it will be accessible and at the disposal of library go-ers. Someone might check it out and appreciate it!)

Attend local author events & get involved with other indie authors (Libraries tend to host events that promote local authors, displaying their books & allowing them to give speeches. Joining indie author groups can also give you access to more event opportunities!)

Promote your book in your local newspaper (A peer of mine who self-published a book pitched the publication to a newspaper and was interviewed for a front-page article!)

Add your book to Goodreads & other book platforms (With the Goodreads Author Program, you can add your book to the collection of titles on the database & open it to readers who may be interested!)

Remember that no author got famous overnight and that advertising is a process! Whether or not you become as successful as Dr.Suess or Oscar Wilde, you are still a worthy author and your book is as wonderful as any other!

I hope this helps! As my progress continues, I will provide more tips!

XOXO,

lovewashed doll🩷📖

[dogs-leading-dogs]

PapyrusPikmin1997 replied on Chapter 5: Now, this is an amazing fic, but like… how the hell is Olimar and the President dying in like sublevels 1-3 of the dream den? They aren't even that hard, and canonically the Pikmin leaders cannot die by pure damage, as in Pikmin 2 if both leaders "die" the ship just beams them up back to the surface and the day ends. (Unless however, you don't do it like this and instead make their life support damaged or something, which would be a very intelligent workaround)

Anonymous asked a question on my main blog: I know this sounds random, but for DLD, what... "game mechanics" have been changed? Because, so far it seems like the ""game"" is much harder and ruthless. I can infer that no longer does losing both captains just result in the hocotate ship beaming them up, ending the day and causing all the pikmin to die, but what else?

I received this comment reply and anonymous ask a few days ago, and considering that they're talking about very similar things, I figured I'd respond to them both at the same time. The long and short of it is that both of these questions are making a series of aggressive assumptions about how DLD "works" and kinda getting sidetracked as a result. There are also a few misconceptions that I feel are important to correct, because even if you are thinking of things in vague game mechanics terms (and you shouldn't be), they make it much easier to swallow what's going on if you properly account for them.

Fundamentally, DLD is a grounded story with a strong emphasis on how things would play out in a more or less real-world scenario while factoring known series lore; this groundedness is meant to make the emotional conflicts at the core of the story stand out all the better. For more details, let's continue below the cut, starting with correcting the assumptions.

Number one: The President hasn't been accompanying Olimar on any of his trips to attempt to find Louie. He may be physically present on PNF-404, yes, but he's more or less functioning as a middle-manager type or rubber-stamp than doing anything actually useful. This is demonstrated during the first scene of XVI and compounded via the President's noted absence during every other scene in the chapter. The long and short of it is that he's not relevant to the story that needed to be told here, as this story is very much about Olimar, the Pikmin, and their relationship; having the President be present as anything more than a nod to canon would have made things unnecessarily complicated here in a section that already had too much to say.

Next up: Olimar being alone in the Dream Den (aside from the ship's pod and the Pikmin he brought with him) also solves that "difficulty" issue more or less. I also never said that they specifically died on the first three sublevels — the Dream Den obviously has fourteen, and the only important part of the whereabouts everyone died is that the maximum sublevel they could have reached would be sublevel 13. It's important for the mainline sequels that neither Olimar nor the Pikmin encounter the Titan Dweevil here, so they must have all died before getting to that point; other than that, the exact details of their demise are up to the reader's interpretation, with the most likely scenario being a gradual decline in Pikmin numbers until Olimar fucks up in an encounter with any enemy, gets squashed by any kind of boulder or caught in a bomb rock explosion, or takes too great a blow to anywhere near his head such that his already-compromised helmet shatters and leaves him to slowly succumb to the caustic oxygen in the air.

Another thing is that considering what's "canonical" from the game's perspective is kinda the wrong question to ask in a lot of ways. HP bars or stamina wheels or any other kinds of video game abstractions like that work perfectly fine when you're playing a video game, but the second you're not they become really weird to work with and place very awkward limits on things. From a narrative perspective, working with this video game logic — where Olimar can get thrown around willy-nilly for 12-16 hours taking hard falls or getting crushed by boulders or god knows what else, end the day, and come back the next morning like nothing happened — makes things very awkward, because there aren't any consequences for fucking up. None of the Pikmin games have any kinds of systems to account for major injuries, such as Olimar's dislocated shoulder or Louie's implied concussion both from chapter 4; much less do they have any kinds of energy or stamina system to account for Olimar gradually starving in Chapter 1. Some games have systems like these — take the Fallout series as only one of many examples — but limiting what you can write to what is Explicitly Possible in a game just isn't conducive to writing a good story.

Having the day end when both leaders go down but letting the player try again tomorrow with no consequences other than losing a day is a good choice for a game, because it gives the player a chance to correct their mistakes; however, it's a bad choice for a story, because it removes all of the stakes. On the contrary, part of the reason that Pikmin doesn't have a lot of these systems for longer-term consequences and instead handwaves why some of these things aren't happening — such as PNF-404's relative lower gravity being the reason why none of the characters take fall damage — are because adding those systems would be bad for gameplay. In a game that is very fundamentally about doing things quickly and efficiently, it wouldn't just be annoying if e.g. Louie broke his leg and couldn't move and throw Pikmin at the same time due to needing crutches for a realistic length of healing time, it would be bad game design because it would be far too punishing to be fun. In writing, where the goal is to be fun by having higher stakes, the opposite would be the case.

That's a bit of an oversimplification — not every story benefits from higher stakes, even if DLD itself does — but one could easily write an academic paper about storytelling in interactive vs non-interactive mediums and how they function differently, and I don't have ten billion years to come up with definitions for all of these things to explain everything wrong with applying the rules of a certain medium universally especially when those rules are intended as abstractions. Either way, it comes down to the same thesis statement: "Applying the rules of a very dynamic and choice-based medium to an entirely predefined and non-interactive medium generally does not work well unless you're having your story be about applying those rules and all of the myriad problems or conveniences that it results in." DLD is not about applying Pikmin's video game logic to a non-interactive medium because it has far more important and deliberate things to be about, like communication, trust, personhood, fate, and perhaps most of all, dogs. Therefore, it does not benefit from having simplified video game logic that allows for infinite tries, and would in fact be made infinitely worse if everything that happened so far had no consequences beyond the end results of the immediate day. Olimar needs to die in the Dream Den because this is essential for his character arc; having him just "go down" and "get rescued" to "try again tomorrow" removes all stakes from this, because if he throws himself at the problem enough he'd eventually luck out and be able to save Louie. (Olimar is already very fond of throwing himself at problems until they get fixed; as we'll see, he doesn't need a "get out of jail free" card or a "get out of a bad situation without dying" card to continue with this behavior.)

So if we're not working off of video game logic, how does DLD generally work? More or less real life logic strongly informed by canon material. To some extent it's a vibes thing — I have definitely picked and chosen what works or doesn't depending on my own personal preference, and I've taken liberties with things that happen in the games as necessary to tell the story that I have in mind. For instance, as I've alluded to before, a lot of the rules about Onions and Pikmin work much more similarly to how they do in Pikmin 4 (with the exception of the three-type limit because it's purely a gameplay limitation put in place to not frustrate noobs). Some things, such as the exact symptoms of Olimar's leaflingism, are a blend of various ideas taking inspiration from canon, from other artists, as well as just what works better thematically. (Olimar growing a tail and "fur" certainly emphasizes the fact that he's a dog, not to mention the fact that it's that perfect combination of "cool" and "utterly horrifying", and the fact that his face remains uncovered by leaves has another thematic reading that we'll get to much, much later.)

But a lot of the minor day-to-day stuff is grounded pretty solidly in reality and an understanding of "if you were an inch tall, how would you approach this situation", which is much more effective for conveying the level of Absolute Deep Shit and general danger PNF-404 presents almost the entire time. You would not survive if a boulder three times as wide as you were tall rolled over you; Olimar and the other captains only do because Pikmin doesn't have permadeath, since that would be a very frustrating gameplay experience. You can cheat your way out of things like that hurting as much as they would for you, a Normal Human, especially when you factor in the fact that they are an inch tall, but past a point there's only so much handwaving you can do before you have to accept that half of the things that you only take "major damage" for in Pikmin would just be nearly instakills in real life. Allowing for more realistic damage creates more story, not less; you can't take damage from cornering too tightly in any of the games, but allowing it to jar Olimar's shoulder like that in Chapter 4 gives reasonable stakes that add to the situation rather than detract, as it makes it feel even more like the water wraith is a real threat.

As for other "game mechanics" that have been changed… thinking of DLD as a "game" in general is the wrong question. My philosophy with DLD so far has been to create a relatively grounded story about people and choices using Pikmin as a scaffold. (Not that DLD or any of its side material could ever be divorced from Pikmin itself — they're far too intertwined — but being faithful to game mechanics is literally the last priority that will only ever be nodded at in things such as the occasional mention of the max 100 squad size.) For everything else, I've tried to flesh the setting out using "speculative realism" where possible: by examining how things actually work in real life and applying those same principles to this setting.

For instance, while a lot of the medical science is simplified for a variety of reasons, such as ease of research and reduced scene complexity, almost all of it so far has actually had at least a little bit of research put into it. (Maybe don't orally ingest a topical eye medication, but tetrahydrozoline hydrochloride is a common active ingredient in eye drops or nasal sprays that reduces mucus membrane irritation; Omnicillin Z3 uses the naming convention of antibiotics in the penicillin family, implying that their medical science has progressed beyond ours; and demethoxycurcumin, one of the "active ingredients" in turmeric, is a yellow-orange compound that has anticancer effects among many other health benefits.) I've put a similar level of pseudorealism into the flight scenes as well; I've mentioned Olimar using various kinds of checklists multiple times (Wikipedia only has a page on preflight checklists, but here's a full list of checklists for a 747), and implied that Olimar has been acting as captain and pilot flying while the Hocotate Ship is effectively first officer and pilot monitoring via both of them effectively employing cockpit resource management principles. I even had Olimar do a walk-around on Day 30, though that was admittedly less of an intentional choice than being simply what the scene required for proper pacing. Even a lot of the specifics around how Olimar has been able to live as a leafling up to (and beyond) this point have had a lot of consideration put into them with vague real-life-adjacent explanations — it is admittedly more vibes-based than some of the rest of what I've listed out here, but most of that is because leaflingism in and of itself is a rather hefty lift away from grounded reality.

The long and short of it is: If something is actually important to be thinking about, the story will tell you that. If it's not, it won't. It should be easy enough to figure out what the actual differences are from there, but a lot of those differences simply aren't relevant on any grand scale.

In fact, the only "game mechanic" I can think of that's even vaguely relevant (and isn't essentially rolled into "baseline lore", such as the mechanics of Pikmin and Onions that I mentioned earlier) is Pikmin 1's ending requirements. DLD has simplified these requirements, in that there's no longer a strict two-tiered system with some specific parts being required while others are optional, but the general outline for part count has already been referenced in Chapter 1's title. In these relaxed requirements, you get the bad ending with 24 parts or fewer; the neutral ending with 25-29 parts; and the true ending with 30 parts. (I.E., the only change is that it's any 25 parts being required to get the neutral ending or greater rather than 25 specific parts.) Chapter 1 splits the difference as the exact dividing line between two wildly divergent outcomes of the bad or neutral endings, and thus the chapter title references 24.5, or the numeric dividing line between those endings.

Other than that, the exact game mechanics of all games in the series are for the most part entirely irrelevant. DLD is a story about people, and critically, one of the most important things that a person can do is die. Robbing Olimar and the Pikmin of their ability to end is a choice that must be made very deliberately, with great intent on the part of the story being told, and shouldn't be done merely out of faithfulness to the source material. …And that's about all I can say to avoid unnecessary spoilers.