#mistakes-learn-life

[thepersonalwords]

Once I am alive, I still have the chance to live rightly for the rest of my life.

Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

[mizandria]

people make fun of the "oh you only hate her because she's a WOMAN" crazy feminist mentality but yeah actually you guys do only hate her because she's a woman a lot of times. for every hated female tv character there's ten male tv characters who are a million times worse and still given at least the "intriguing morally grey character" treatment if not straight up praise. for every hated female celebrity in real life there's one hundred famous men who have done worse and don't get half the hate she does. for every hated female politician, for every hated female historical figure, for the women you know in real life and on and on.

[hollowistheworld]

Thinking about that post about the show murderbot characters not being as 'developed' (as in, are still in the beginnings/middles of character arcs) as their book counterparts, and I think a big plus of it is it lets Murderbot be in the same category as them.

The most obvious example is it and Mensah - both of them struggling with anxiety and fighting through it because there are people counting on them. But the one I'm really thinking about is Murderbot and Ratthi.

Ratthi didn't get weapons training like he was supposed to because he 'slept through it' which was because he was hungover (would love to know if Mensah already knew that before he accidentally announced it over the comms). His very feeble, obviously shame-filled excuse is that he didn't think he'd need it. Just like Murderbot didn't think it'd need the hopper repair manual.

These are dumb, youthful things to do. Go out and party and be too hungover to make it to class the next day. Watch your favorite TV show instead of copying down your homework. These things happen and 95% of the time it's no big deal.

And then one time it is. It's a big deal and now they can't help when they really want to be able to help. And Murderbot and Ratthi react to their mistakes the exact same way - by giving themselves a lecture on what big fucking idiots they are. Ratthi then does something dumb and dangerous to try and make up for it and Murderbot has Mensah crack open its spine. It's a very fun parallel between them and I think it's going to add some really nice depth to their friendship as things go along. You fuck up. You do dumb shit to get the short-term gratification.

And people love you anyway.

[squid-bunny-msi]

WIPs

[thesophistiicate]

the more interested you become in a wide variety of things (and people), the more interesting you become. there is nothing more tedious than a person with narrow taste and an arrogant attitude about anything that falls outside of it. good taste means finding the beauty and interest and wonder everywhere.

[emotionalwords]

Always see your mistakes as a learning curve.

Auliq Ice

[sunlight-shunlight]

thinking about veilguard and bioware in general, i think we are reaching a point where people need to grapple with the inherent limits of what stories can be told in our Current Society and in AAA gaming companies.

on a labour level: mass layoffs, tons of developers leaving despite previously talking about how passionate and happy they were to be involved, not even paying severance, and crunching employees to the point of burnout. this is unfortunately pretty standard for AAA game companies.

on a cultural level: it is SO white and SO centrist-ly Canadian. i wrote up these asks outlining how. it is a repeated pattern of writing in which they go into tortured racial oppression allegories at best, while constantly peppering in a "but BOTH SIDES were wrong and made mistakes :( :( :(", in between their fictional atrocities that are clearly mirroring irl genocides and enslavement. or at worst, it's "the qunari are radical islamic borg" which has even less nuance. i personally thought, since dai came out in 2014, and a lot has changed since then about the world and in public awareness, that this would have filtered into the narrative and resulted in more satisfying and historically grounded writing. unfortunately not the case. it's shocking if you compare it to how sharp and aware and unflinching something like disco elysium is.

so what does this mean?

under these conditions, it is unavoidable that we get development by people who are rapidly cycled out of the company or demoralized into burnout. we get digestible, easy little soundbites of lore without much substance, because any complexity needs more time and coordination rather than the process of "quick, we have these assets, a lot of people involved in making them just got laid off, we need to make Something by next quarter to show the CEO". we get very little cohesion between games, despite the clear intent from dai to have so many plot points set up to follow through in a sequel, because the team and development are so chaotic that they can't hold onto a vision and complete it.

we also get this inherent caution and "conservatism" from the narrative, because on an ideological level, they're largely white people who want cops to be included in pride. so any major change to even a fictional society is Bad and Scary, and shouldn't be done without making sure that every character finger-wags appropriately at non-state violence. there is clearly not much ideological or even ethnic diversity within the leadership; or at least not enough that anyone there felt comfortable even speaking up on minor issues like the Incredibly Orientalist Isabela Outfit, let alone anything larger.

i don't personally think there's too much value in trying to analyze veilguard's plot or lore at this point. the final product is chaotically developed and does not seem to reflect the goals of the creators as set up in prior games, it's basically a ship of theseus in terms of the people and ideas involved in making it. this is sad for all of us, who were interested in the story, and attached to the characters, and were creatively fulfilled by engaging in the fandom. it's probably worse for the developers who have lost their jobs, burnt out, or feel unhappy with the game that they spent years of their life working on. it's certainly miserable as an indictment of The Industry, as well as the general societal climate of white Canadian centrism.

the solution is to create a society where people can develop games in peace and prosperity and stay on projects for longer, rather than constantly getting turfed out without severance pay. and to get some genuine leftists, poc, and indigenous people on staff who can weigh in and provide significant input, rather than a Council Of Liberal White Edmontonians every time.

in the meantime, at the very least, let's please stop preordering AAA games and supporting companies who notably abuse their employees.

[its-always-sunny-in-city17]

last supper

[serenityquest]

[somegrumpynerd]

Actually it turns out I had more thoughts about that post that I forgot about lol

Would Nightmare actually give up his boys? Yes and no

If it was just a black and white situation of they're miserable, they don't wanna be here, they have somewhere better to be, then yes. He would leave them out to wherever they needed to be despite his own feelings and very quickly realise afterwards just how much he'd gotten used to the noise and company. I think he would get a little clingy with Dream about it, which I'm sure Dream would find very weird after everything but not unwelcome, he did miss his brother after all.

(If he couldn't attach himself to Dream's side for whatever reason, I think he might just sit in his castle and go insane. Or maybe he'd just spend all day at Ccino's trying really hard to project that he just likes the atmosphere and isn't lonely as hell)

But the thing is, most of them don't have somewhere better to be. Horror has his au, and Nightmare would keep up the supply of food even if Horror said he wanted to quit at this point, so he would understandably let him return home. Killer, Dust and Cross effectively don't have aus anymore though, and they tend to get into self-destructive habits when they're left to their own devices. (Obviously bringing Color and Epic into the mix to make sure Killer and Cross are taken care of eases matters, but Dust doesn't really have any friends outside their group he could go stay with - that Nightmare knows about at least).

The flipside of this is that his boys may not necessarily want to be given up. I think if Nightmare got really in his head about this he could easily end up convinced this is the right thing to do without ever asking them if it's what they want, with potentially terrible results. He's established such a pattern of always returning to find Killer when they get seperated, that if he never showed up Killer might just keep sitting there and waiting for him greyfriar's bobby style, refusing to leave because he's certain his boss is coming back.

[mkniesy]

o-pee-chee didn't make a joe card in their retro collection so i had to make one myself.

[miraculous-ninjabird]

Crying over Mu Qing, a god who is so so lonely and loves like worship-from a distance never to be truly returned-finally finding the friendship and care he’s always craved.

Finally after 800 years of guilt and resentment and loneliness realizing that people actually care and have always cared.

Finally reaching a point with Xie Lian where for the first time they come to an understanding of each other’s feelings so they can move forward without regrets

The realization that even after being at each other’s throats for the entirety of their history together, Feng Xin wouldn’t hesitate to save him-to carry him on his own back when he couldn’t walk himself

Mu Qing has spent his entire existence believing deep down that the only person in the world who ever actually loved him was his mother and that other people at best only tolerated him on a good day. He thought the only person he truly wanted to be friends with hated him. but it’s not true!! It’s never been true and now he knows it!!!

He’s made mistakes, he’s been an ass, but people still care!!!! It’s going to take some fucking work but for the first time in his life he can move forward with Xie Lian and Feng Xin rebuilding a relationship with a reciprocal foundation and he’s not alone

Fucking hell man it’s gonna make me cry I love Mu Qing’s character arc so much

[dark-lord-of-awesomeness]

Oughhhhhh :,(

Those baby vamp scenarios are just so angsty with a hint of comedy.

Like, teen Venus vampire Stanley is living in his own world, separated from reality. Everything is like those teen drama shows with mystery, supernatural, and adventure (with the occasional traumatic event). MEANWHILE Ford is only experiencing The Horrors everyday. Even more so with this version of Stanley, having been dead at the same he was kicked out.

Stan's whole life is angsty with a hint of comedy really.

Teen vamp Stan is forever seventeenish and in total denial about it. They're stuck in Murder Woods for Reasons and Stan's doing funny little songs, getting wowed by crazy monsters and punching them in the face, finding cool bugs to show off and boasting about how he's not scared of a little forest! This is a cool haunted woods thing they got going on but he's not gonna get freaked by some guys in make up Ford! All the Horror that have happened to him over the years are buried under Teen ability to ultra suppress, like when shit gets real in high school but you still gotta go to class.

Meanwhile Fords hyperventilating about things jumping out and trying to eat Stan, his tiny itty bitty baby brother who keeps telling Ford to stop wearing heels (because obviously thats the only reason Fords taller! No other reason!) He just saw Stan go into a blood frenzy and the sight of his chubby cheeked twin who's been dead for ten years covered in blood and snarling seared itself into Fords brain and makes him choke up with the fact that Stan really isn't going to grow up.

Its like a mix up of Scooby Doo and Friday the Thirteenth here where Stan's laughing at the guy with a chainsaw and looking for clues and rolling his eyes while Fords desperately making sure Stan doesn't lose an arm and seeing all the dead bodies and carnage left in the killers wake. Ford wants so badly to shake Stan and yell about how awful everything is and how he can laugh about being dead, but then he see's his little twin brother trying to lick his nose with his tongue and be silly and he loses all his steam. Doesn't have the heart to shatter Stan's coping method of Not Seeing it and acting like life's totally normal even after being on the road for ten years and not really maturing in any way from it.

Then Fords holding him and crying into his hair about the tragedy of outliving his twin brother while Stan's screetching and growling about Ford being gross.

[artemismoorea03]

DPxDC Prompt: I Got You Brother

Danny has been in Gotham for a while after things went south with his parents. But that's what happens when one's parents are convinced by the G.I.W. that Phantom killed "Real Danny" and took his place as a way to fill his sick obsession of "being alive" which - they couldn't be further from the truth - but his parents were so convinced by the evidence that they refused to listen. Vlad expected Danny to go with him and when Danny refused it made part of him snap.

Danny fled from his parents, the GIW and Vlad in the dead of the night. No family, no friends, nobody knew where he was and that was how he liked it.

He lived at the cave with the bats but refused their offer to come upstairs. He knew who they were and that they were safe but he also knew that if he took one step onto that elevator they would be his family. They would be his family and he couldn't risk losing another family.

He thought that living in the cave would prevent any of them from getting attached. So quickly his schedule turned into a cycle of patrols. Start patrols, stop in for lunch, patrol until dinner, patrol until breakfast, patrol again until lunch. Repeat day in and day out.

He told the team he didn't need to sleep and told them that he was fully a 'Ghost' from another dimension. As many details as he could keep from them the better.

Or so he thought.

Until after nearly a week of these endless patrol things changed. A fight with a particularly powerful ghost had wiped him out and while he managed to stay on his feet when he tried to continue patrol his vision blurred and his transformation dropped.

And so did Danny.

Danny wasn't even aware somebody was tailing him until a thick rope wrapped around his wrist and stopped his fall. Danny swung, hitting the side of a building with a tired grunt as he looked up.

Orphan.

"New brother! Got you!" Orphan called down to him as Danny tried to get his powers to respond, desperate to do anything to protect Orphan who was sliding closer to the edge.

Spoiler showed up within seconds, grabbing Orphan's ankles just as Orphan went over the edge and Red Robin grabbed Spoiler around her ankles. Frantic shouting echoed as Nightwing grabbed Red Robin around his ribs, the weight threatening to pull them all over before Red Hood grabbed Nightwing.

Danny reached up, trying to grab the rope when another wrapped around his free wrist from next to them. Batman was there and by his side was Robin, also there to help Danny and the others up.

He hadn't wanted a family.

He had run from who he was and the ones he loved.

But he found more people to love him.

It wasn't until Signal showed up - having been alerted to the situation and called to the scene - that Danny let the tears drip down his face.

He was home.

[54625]

some of my (mostly qFit) headcanons because I don't think I've made one of these posts before

i remember making a post about this aaaaaages ago, but in my mind 2b is a prison dimension . Everyone who lives there either committed some kind of terrible crime in another world and was sent there, or was born there via two "inmates". That's why everyone sucks there, and it's also why fit being able to escape via madagio's portal was a big deal . You're not supposed to be able to escape.

I believe that fit in his young adulthood was a journalist on another world who was fascinated by and trying to find information on this prison dimension, but ended up getting sent there as punishment for prying. This is why he became a historian while there, cause he was always trying to study the place anyway. It's also why he's nicer than the average person there.

Demons in this world are either born or created through immense sin. I like to think that because of that a large portion of the population of 2b are demons. Like a LOT . That's why fit was so normal about mouse openly being a demon when most other people were canonically weirded out by it. He's just used to seeing and being around them.

Warning for a darker subject here, but I do think that some people believing QFit was a virgin comes from an inherent mischaracterisation of that server. Yes it's very violent and hostile, but there are also very close knit alliances and established groups, and another big part of the culture is the general degeneracy. We already have a pretty reliable real world idea of what happens when a bunch of nonetheless homophobic men are put into the same inescapable area at once, and it's prisons. I believe that's another big reason why living there is so nasty. I won't go into any more detail than that.

↑fit is nonetheless still very repressed. It is faaar from encouraged to be openly gay there. There is a big difference between doing something because you "have to" and liking it

I believe that 2b, either intentionally or unintentionally, has an effect on its inhabitants' ageing. Essentially it makes them immortal but not invulnerable. If you shoot or stab them, sure, they'll die. But if left alone, they won't age past their prime or die of natural causes. qFit is the age he appears to be, early 30s, but in ten or so years if he was still alive it would begin to be noticeable that he hadn't got any older looking after that.

I also believe the eggs, because they are either partially or fully dragon, are the same way. Immortal but not invulnerable.

The immortality thing is part of why Phil and fit became such easy friends, they have that in common. The only difference between them - as I have touched on before - is that while phil was blessed by his wife to be immortal, fit was cursed.

Ramón is always wearing a hat for two reasons. The first reason, the one he would tell you, is that it protects his ears from the sounds of his machines. The second reason, the one he'd never admit to anyone, is that he has the exact same curly black hair that spreen had, and he hates that reminder of him.

Speaking of Spreen, I do believe Fit would silently forgive him after finding out his reason for never coming back was that he died.

Fit probably lost his arm during maybe the aureus city era, because if he hadn't had trusted basemates with him during that time he would definitely have died. One of his friends there would have made him his first prosthetic, and it would have been godawful.

I canonise ccfit saying his cubitos arm is a gauntlet and then pivoting to it being a prosthetic as qFit lying. He claimed it was just a gauntlet at first, in order to not reveal his weakness of a missing arm, but then became open about it actually being a prosthetic when he finally accepted that noone on quesadilla was going to use it against him.

Ramón definitely made a new much better arm for Fit after seeing how horrendous his previous one was

For the duration of QSMP pac always portrayed himself as self-conscious and unconfident, but I like to image that before prison he was more of a badass Cool Guy 😎. It was being in prison and losing his leg that truly and almost permanently crushed his spirit and self image. I imagine he consistently sees himself as weaker than others not just because he was unable to fight back against cellbit, but also because of the literal physical ability he lost when the leg was taken.

I never draw him as such because I can never decide on designs for them, but in my mind pac has quite a few tattoos. I imagine he had a full leg tattoo from knee to ankle on the leg that he lost, which he was devastated to realise was gone along with the leg. Cellbit probably targetted that leg on purpose because he thought it'd be funny.

Pac and mike smuggled a radio into the prison with the express purpose of listening to fit's broadcast. Years before he ever knew they'd one day share a bed, pac would fall asleep to the sound of fits voice.

Qpac is bisexual but only ever dated women before prison. It was only being stuck surrounded by a bunch of dudes that made him realise his attraction to them. The reason pac finds himself attracted to dangerous men specifically is because all of the men he first realised he could be attracted to were literal maximum security prisoners.

Conversely, the reason fit finds himself attracted to dangerous men specifically is because he doesn't realise there is any other type of man that exists.

You're gonna kill me for this one, but I do actually headcanon that qpac died at the end of qsmp. There's just no other ending for him that makes sense. He really didn't give us much. I'd think something better if there was a better option

However I 100% believe that Ramón is alive and does one day find a way to reunite with fit, way far off into the future. Probably when he's a fully fledged adult, having raised himself along with the other surviving eggs still on quesadilla.

Pac would have been terrible at cooking, having got way too used to having meals preprepared for him everyday in prison. Fit on the other hand, would be pretty good at it . He's had a decade of experience in having to drum up makeshift meals out of really unattractive, rudimentary and barely edible ingredients. That would translate extremely well to real, normal food. Pac would ask fit one time to make one of his "wasteland struggle meals" for the both of them and he'd be simultaneously impressed that fit managed to make it taste like... something, and also devastated to think that fit had to eat stuff like this every day. Fit would mention that it brought him back to the wasteland, and pac would spend the rest of the day hugging fit and saying he's so so sorry

Contrary to popular belief, I actually think during his time on 2b and when he first arrives on quesadilla, fit would not be particularly muscular. He would have a level of utility muscle, but without proper stable access to food or working out, he'd be on the smaller side. However the second he got access to real and consistent food and a calmer, quieter life on quesadilla, he'd start bulking up. That's the reason he built the gym.

Fit and pac both have PTSD, and sharing a bed is an absolute nightmare for them (no pun intended) as they both wake each other up in the middle of the night because of a night terror extremely frequently after they start dating. They tried sleeping apart again once, but both decided they'd rather be near each other despite the inconvenience.

Fit and pac probably don't cuddle very often when they sleep near each other, as they both value their space and like to feel like they could easily get up and run if they were threatened at night. They also only showed each other physical affection on occasion in canon. They prefer to just be side by side, close enough to hold hands, close enough to know that they're looking out for each other.

Fit probably isn't actually more down bad for pac that pac is for him, he is just more verbal about his love because he was a lot more repressed than pac ever was. Fit feels more of a need to exercise his newfound freedom.

Fit has poor hearing and poor eyesight, but is too stubborn to accept an aid for either of those things.

Pac is pretty badly claustrophobic, thanks to prison.

Ramón is probably autistic.

[johnnyshrine]

★ 131 // “Watercolor Cards”