#re-popularization

[deadbeatrevenant2]

Galinda in her corner of the dorm after spending the whole day with Elphaba ✨ (yes, Elphaba is also in the room)

[desired-misery]

Consider this:

This is Leon's last game. Not because he is going to die, but because Grace figures out the blackmailing that has held Leon hostage since RC. She finds out that Leon is another, different kind of victim from RC.

She saves him. Leon is finally released from being forced to work. A federal agent (like a cop), a young blonde, saves him from a world that has been using and haunting him since 1998. He can retire. He is finally allowed to rest.

[amphibianaday]

day 1421

[choccy-milky]

I can imagine Clora reading the "Final Problem" where Sherlock "DIES" and being depressed for like a month and sending hate mail to Conan Doyle while Sebastian tries to cheer her up.

THATS SO FUNNY YOU SENT THIS BECAUSE I LITERALLY DECIDED THE SAME THING A WHILE BACK BAHAHA i plan to mention it in my fic too

seb would 1000% find clora crying during their seventh year when "the final problem" is published LMAOO and he'd freak out wondering whats wrong. and when i read about how tons of doyles' fans sent him hate mail and were outraged i was like yup, clora would've been one of them BAHAHA. ["Obituaries for Holmes appeared everywhere. Petitions were signed and “Keep Holmes Alive” clubs were formed."] CLORA WOULD HAVE FORMED ONE OF THOSE CLUBS TOO LMFAOO

all the outrage made doyle resurrect sherlock a decade later, so that also means when they're older + married + have kids, clora's just gonna burst into the room one day and be like "HES ALIIIIVEEE!!!!!!!" BAHAHHAA clora's hate mail to arthur conan doyle is what brought back sherlock, CONFIRMED!!💯💪✨

[joodeegemstone]

i had a dream that there was a new atla video game, and if you played as sokka, you could just chop jet up with a sword during the pre-fight scene. if you chose to do this, everyone there (which included the freedom fighters, and for some reason, iroh) would watch in absolute horror, and you wouldn't be able to recruit any allies for the rest of the game because no one would trust you anymore.

[cannibaleather]

I WILL NOT BE SHACKLED BY THE FAILURES OF YOUR GOD

I AM MY OWN CREATION

[bettyrightnow]

its crazy how taylor will put out really interesting songs and albums that no one else is really doing but just because she's taylor it immediately becomes "boring" and "overdone" to the public. like when you're releasing anything at her level its going to inevitably become so big that it's seen as "basic" even when it isn't like anything that anyone else is doing

[rallamajoop]

That time Heisenberg stabbed Ethan with a rusty fencepost

Thanks to this one fic project that needed a pornographically detailed list of Ethan’s most memorable injuries, I've spent some time trying to figure out exactly what Heisenberg stabs him with when they first met. Working mostly from a free-camera version from youtube, I settled on calling a metal pipe with a square profile.

Tumblr: I was wrong. The reality is so much worse.

Having cracked the game files and installed my own free-camera mod, I tracked down the original asset for this thing, and, well...

No, really, this is it! Check out those matching cross-bars if you doubt me.

FWIW, it isn’t actually a spear. Those semi-mangled crossbars flag it instead as a spear-headed fence-post. (This may not be a distinction that Ethan would find very comforting after being stabbed with the thing, but there it is, regardless.)

In fact, if you poke around the cemetery area just outside the castle gate, you can even find the fence it presumably came from.

Look in on the cemetery near the church from the lane leading up to the Duke's shop beside it, and this is what you'll see.

It's not a perfect match (in fact, it's even worse viewed from the opposite side, because someone has clearly stuffed up the textures on different sides of the same asset). I'll also note that if you go back to this fence again after meeting Heisenberg, you won’t find any suspicious gaps in it where a post was recently ripped out. So I’m going to just go ahead and assume this particular piece was lying in a pile of surplus scrap in the cellar somewhere, and Heisenberg did not, in fact, drag the thing all the way there from well outside the whole damn building. I mean, at that point, you’re just showing off.

The fence post is, admittedly, pretty hard to get a good look at in the actual game. Unlike all the other crap Heisenberg already has levitating around him in this scene, the fencepost doesn’t appear at all until Heisenberg stabs Ethan with it. It actually seems to emerge at speed from between a couple of barrels at the back. But if you’re enough of a lunatic to play around with the various slow motion/rewind settings that came with the free camera mod, you can get a decent shot of it in flight, cleaning up any remaining doubt that this is the same asset that was used in game.

It even freaking spins in the air as it moves. FTR, yes, it does go in pointy-end first. And the whole fucking spearhead ends up buried in poor Ethan. (Please feel free to insert your own dick-joke here.) Those paying really close attention might even note that the blood on Ethan's shirt is present even before the spear hits him, but that's just going to be virtual-stunt-coordination having a normal one.

I can offer you no similarly definitive insight into why Heisenberg would think stabbing Ethan with this thing was a good idea. I can’t even tell you if he knew for sure that it was Ethan Winters he was talking to at this point (maybe he's just playing dumb, pretending not to recognise him. Or maybe he legit didn't know that Ethan himself had made an appearance until Miranda told him. Sure, he's already got that whole conspiracy board, but finding real pictures of this Ethan-guy is surprisingly hard.) But whether Heis was already testing out Ethan’s ‘interesting body’, or whether he’d just generally assumed that anyone who could survive a full lycan assault on the village wouldn’t be too seriously inconvenienced by a little stabbing, hoo boy was this one way to make a first impression.

I’m not even sure which of these losers is the bigger idiot here: the one who imagined Ethan might still agree to work with him even after inserting a very convincing imitation-spearhead into his intestines, or the one who never thought to seriously question how he keeps shrugging off injuries just as exciting as this one.

They probably deserve each other.

[kenzan-brainrot-mp4]

Hello! The twist ending of PYIH kind of shocked me. 'Twas really foolish of me for thinking that for the entirety of Kiryu's saga, Majima has just that twisted obsession with Kiryu, being a "Mad Dog" and all. I came across your PYIH analysis the other day and it really brought home what they were conveying with the ending.

I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around the premise of PYIH. Is the sole purpose of Majima's "filming/documentary(?)" is to rehearse telling it to Kiryu? Because if it had been, that would be even crazier.

Oh, and at this point, is it even reasonable right now to interpret their relationship as platonic or brotherly? What do you think?

YEAHHHHH imo I think yakuza kenzan yakuza 3 (rooftop scene) is where we first truly starting seeing a glimpse of a deeper dynamic between Majima and Kiryu that goes beyond the "weird twisted obsession" reading, and we see more examples of it later as the series goes on (gestures at yakuza 5 and IW) but moments like those were decently subtle/blink-and-you'll-miss-it (not to mention they lessen in frequency also probably in part to Majima's lessening screentime throughout the series), but pyih's ending really goes out of its way to ensure that you actually Know how deep and genuine Majima's feelings are, which I am both extremely appreciative of and Kinda Crazy about

I think the whole documentary thing is interesting. Given the fact that they went out of their way to get the equipment/crew/etc. for the "film version", I would say that the Majima's retelling of his story at the studio and at Kiryu's bedside serve different purposes, and that him telling the story on set was not specifically for Kiryu (what Majima plans to do with the "film version" I'm not completely sure, but I guess for now we can assume it's just a project Majima wanted to do while getting Majima Construction back off the ground?) I'd say the premise of pyih is both to retell Majima's story as he presents it to the "general audience" And Kiryu, hence why the game starts with one and ends with the other. It's the same story to everyone, for the mostpart, and the main difference between the two 'versions' is How he presents it (to the cameras/the players/main audience he puts on the fuckass pirate costume and the theatrics, to Kiryu he tells it to him straight, without the extra show stuff for the cameras. We can Assume the story he tells to each audience is practically identical, considering that the cutscene of him telling it to us in the beginning of the game and him telling it to KIryu at the end of the game use identical lines (cough cough in the Japanese audio), but his tone of voice between the two are notably very different)

Uhhhh shoot I don't know if any of that made sense 💀 Point is I think Majima telling the story of pyih is, in fact, meant for Everyone, it's just that Kiryu gets a sort of special, more authentically told version of it if you will (After all, Majima could've just shown Kiryu the film when it was finally done, but instead he went out of his way to tell it to him personally)

As for the question of "is kazumaji canon now", WOO boy. First of all I actually lowkey want to thank you for asking that question, I've been wanting to post about it for a while now but kept putting it off lol. I mulled over this exact question quite a bit during the week-or-so long time period that I was writing most of my analysis after finishing the game, and, despite the fact that I myself am very vocal about liking kazumaji in a romantic scenario/context, I would not personally call it canon, and I say it is still absolutely reasonable to interpret them as platonic.

While many of the aspects we see in their relationship (especially on Majima's end) such as obsession, devotion, etc. etc. are often associated with romantic interest (Especially in fandom spaces), I don't think they have to be considered specifically romantic. People who have read through my posts may remember a while back that I did an analysis of The Sun at 36.5 wondering if the song was written with the intent to represent Majima's feelings towards Kiryu (for the record this was incorrect and the meaning behind it goes past the scope of the game) and I was going pretty insane about it lol. That's because, had the song been written with that in mind, it would've meant with almost 100% certainly that they would be, in fact, canon, and that would've been Insane. However, this is not the case, and other than that theory I had there's nothing else in the games that would specifically state that either one has Explicitly Romantic feelings towards the other. Do they have a very deep and complex relationship, the likes of which they don't share with many other characters? Definitely. Is it explicitly romantic? I wouldn't say so

The main example I would like to bring up to argue against it would be minedai (*cough* my second favorite yakuza ship I fucking Love Mine Yoshitaka so much he's one of my favorites). I'll link this amazing post with all the examples but essentially, while minedai and kazumaji share many of the same themes in their relationship/dynamic (again, obsession, devotion, you get the drill (can you tell Majima and Mine are two of my favorite characters yet LOL)) the main difference between them is that, with minedai, it is basically outright said Multiple Times in Multiple Sources outside of even Yakuza 3 itself that Mine loved Daigo, with words used Specifically to convey strong romantic connotations, a choice rgg went out of their way to make every single time they wrote about them together. Kazumaji, on the other hand, does not use these kinds of words to describe each other, whether it be in words coming from Kiryu and Majima themselves, or official relationship charts, descriptions, etc.

Can feelings including romance be heavily implied without needing to be explicitly stated? Absolutely, but with the way rgg tends to Very Obviously and Explicitly state when characters Are romantically interested in each other, and also simply because there is still (imo) plenty of room to read kazumaji as Not romantic, I wouldn't say it's canon. And for the record, I wanna reiterate that this is coming from someone who is personally very enthusiastic about kazumaji as a ship, so I'm trying to be purely objective here, and that is my verdict (Also this is just a random aside, but I really don't agree with the people who are (unironically) labelling Kiryu and Majima's relationship as "queerbaiting". but that's a whole other discussion entirely)

Thank you for shooting an ask !!

[ryllen]

something i promised on my kofi 6 months ago... 🫠

[kittybellzie]

me if u care

[helenvaughans]

i really wish v for vendetta (both the movie and the graphic novel) hadn't become associated with deeply irritating (and often reactionary) online political subcultures bc it really does slap so fucking hard

[inafieldofwhitelilies]

2024 has been me trying my best to escape from Sui Ishida's works and failing

[letterful]

Jean Madar, chairman and CEO of InterParfums Inc, recently told Bloomberg that fragrance is part of a person’s “core identity”. And while cosmetic companies can face criticism for conflating external products with existential outcomes [...] perfume conveniently sidesteps the problems of the flesh. It’s not trying to change how you look, but how you feel, and, for the span of a spritz at least, it does. In the age of wellness-as-beauty and neurocosmetics, the science of scent is marketing gold.

[...] I wonder if what we’re after here is not a sense of self but a (related) sense of life.

I say “we” because – despite my documented skepticism of beauty brands – I, too, am powerless against a good perfume ad.

Last month, casually depressed and subconsciously seeking comfort and some sort of release, I spent $240 on a scent called Tears by Régime de Fleurs. “What a luxury to weep,” the website read. It described the perfume as “emotion in liquid form, the romance and the sadness”. It promised “nostalgia” too, with notes of lilac to remind me of my grandmother’s front yard and frankincense to call up childhood Sundays spent in incense-blessed church pews. I suppose I wanted Tears to take me back to a time when someone who loved me baked me cookies every week, when I believed in God and goodness, and life stretched ahead of me in an endless expanse of hope and potential.

Of course, it didn’t do that. It smelled fine. I felt something, for a second. But I was still me, and I was still mostly numb.

I thought of that perfume the other day while reading the preface to Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove. James summarized it as the story “of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life” – someone “passionately desiring” to “achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived”.

Something clicked: how to explain Tears if not a brief and broken sense of having cried?

[sunnycrittercorner]

Pudding/Flan stimboard!!

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