#those are some inSANE lore implications if it is

[11queensupreme11]

The only issue I take with the cheater cu chulainn au is that it means.. Percy could've functionally left him whenever she wanted?? 😭 assuming it's still a yandere au because that's the standard, but even if it wasn't...

I mean it's great for her, but also I feel like if she could've left like that whenever she wanted/iced him out.. personally I would've done that a lot sooner?? Like. Cheating is disgusting , but being a rapist is. Irrefutably, unspeakably worse??? By every margin possible. And that's been part of his lore since before they were together. Now this is the case with most if not all of her other yans too, because at least Hades and Poseidon are absolutely confirmed and Anubis has the potential with all the women he kidnapped, though i don't remember anything definitive about that.

I mean maybe she just needed an excuse to be able to leave in the eyes of godly society?? But i would assume at the very least the other yans would've been Team Percy-Getting-Away-From-Cu-Chulainn since Day 1 so if thats the case I imagine there were other outs for her regarding the whole circumstance

All that to say, as much as I have fun with the AU, it has unfortunate implications for our girl Percy that my unfortunately not very immersion abiding sense of justice will not allow me to reconcile without some very uncountable feelings about it ☠️ If she was allowed to have 'a line', and cheating was it.. Why was the pine not drawn a lot sooner over all of his arguably more grievously evil lore? Pardon the Percy slander for but a moment 😭😭🥺 but if she has the agency to stop whatever they had going on at functionally any moment, doesn't that kind of imply that she would've just been.. ignoring everything else about him until he did something that personally effected her?? 😭😭

Like... There's no real way around it I don't think, because there's no way she'd go that long without hearing his lore from somewhere or someone, so there's no way she'd be oblivious that he's. A literal rapist. And MAYBE it's been a very long time or whatever but regardless I feel like that would be the line for anyone with agency or any sense of decency? Even if she was desensitised from her experiences, she's a pretty righteous person so I feel like if anything heroic remains of her, i.e the essence of her character, that's not something that would be glazed over/that she'd be able to look past in the first place, let alone for long enough to be married to him??

It brings attention to uncomfortable realisations about Arsenic Blues canon too because. If I was in her place and I knew all of that about him, or learned about it over the course of time, I would switch up from banter to genuinely wanting him dead REAL quick ☠️ It makes me curious about how/if it'll be handled in the main fic honestly. Does she know about that specific aspect of his past? Does it change her perspective of him? Would it turn her away from being able to see him in an amicable light? She could probably assume he was a massive bastard that committed genocide or whatever but. Maybe its just me but there are a lot of reasons for murder, wheras rape is just a purely evil act for no end other than cruelty and violence. I don't think it's too controversial for me to say that I would even agree with the perspective that it could be seen as an even worse crime to that end, because those victims would have to live with it too.

She's been a victim herself in many chapters now 😭 Idk how she could ever see past it with the characterisation she has.

I'd also like to say that this is NOT hate and I'm so sorry if it comes off that way or if it comes off with a tone. This may very well come off as some insane unhinged rant, but I promise I'm not judging whoever originated the AU or the content of the Arsenic Blues fic/any related works!! It just got me thinking.. or maybe overthinking 😭 but now I can't stop thinking about it because it feels like kind of a big thing the more I ponder it. Cu Chulainn seems like he'd be the easiest to avoid getting to this point with because yandere or no, everyone kinda hates him, so in comparison he has a lot less influence excluding pure force, which wouldn't turn out so well for him regarding ALL the other yans with a vested interest in keeping him the FUCK away from Percy 😭☠️☠️

I know I might be taking this way too seriously but I think it's a point worth bringing up because it does have implications for the fic that I can't unsee now 😭 I definitely won't be cheering for Cu Cuhlainn anytime soon.

(Without ignoring what any of the other yans have done to her, but in those circumstances there's a lot of context for why she wouldn't be able to get away from them/why she might suppress any feelings she might have about them also being rapists in order to protect her own psyche 🥺 I.e, Poseidon and Hades are literally her relatives so she's kinda bound to them and Loki/Beel are insanely powerful with the influence to interfere with her life that Cu arguably lacks, etc... and none of this is to diminish that. But in contrast, a lot of the scenes with Cu Chulainn are where she either seeks him out or entertains interactions with him during chance encounters/when he pursues her to be annoying. It kinda sets him apart from the rest of them so he'd have a lot less ground to stand on if she justifiably did a switch up on him when/if she learned he IS actually THAT BAD, even if God society is judging him based on different things, that negative reputation wouldn't work to his advantage. She'd have a better chance at an early retreat from him if learning all this would change her opinion quick enough for her to stop giving him the time of day. She's stuck with the others though, RIP)

omg i feel so bad cuz you wrote such a long and detailed ask but my answer's gonna be so fucking short 😭😭😭😭😭😭

it's also a BIT of a spoiler (tho i'm sure some of my readers have probably already figured it out by now) so i'm putting it under the cut!

before act 4 (so before she gets yoinked to the pjo verse), all the seven love interests will be married to percy

BUT they will marry her in a way that she CANNOT LEAVE THEM. like what we have now:

hades: had yue lao bind them together with his red cords, making them married forever. she cannot divorce from that.

anubis: they're mated for life now 💀

poseidon: didn't do anything special, it's a normal marriage. however, only the father is allowed to demand a divorce and since poseidon's the hubby AND daddy... they're not divorcing 💀💀

so yeah, that's why percy can't just leave cú chulainn forever. i won't say HOW he does it (cuz i haven't planned it either LOL) but he will find a way to forcefully bind her to him just like the other yans

she can't leave them. EVER. she is forever theirs, and they are forever hers.

[celestiachan]

is the cover of meta knight's book the fucking planet from boxboy

[moe-broey]

"Pre-twist, it's not just a study in Alfonse -- it's a study in Kiran, how they conceptualize Alfonse, how much they must know about him, to successfully act as him. Either subconsciously, almost reflexively (my interpretation first run, as a defense mechanism), or intentionally with full knowledge that they aren't who they claim to be (REALLY FASCINATING ANGLE. MUCH TO CONSIDER)."

^^^^^^^^ highlighting this in particular like This is how the Loadbearing Alfonse Wish Lore can still win. This is how I can implement this to still be true to Alfonse's character and lore while ALSO staying in-line with the Kiran Twist. <- COPING

[unikhroma]

the tenna-ramb lore supercut

for those who are curious about their canon relations! things to note:

- ramb is in charge of watching toriel to make sure she's still asleep. he's one of the people who tenna's talking to through his antennas during the chapter (you'll see the scene that reveals this in this post)

- ramb's light world form is a power strip and tenna's is of course the TV in the living room. it's possible that the TV is connected to said power strip since there was flavor text saying that the TV's plugged back in in chapter 2, when it wasn't in chapter 1. yes i have also been wondering what the implications of this are

- tenna didn't know what to assign ramb to do at first and he says something that backs up that it was for negative reasons

the shit talking pippins might seem unreliable for info but remember: from a writing standpoint, there's a reason he's there and it's to tell you more about him

tenna's side:

context for this stuff:

this is when tenna is seen speaking to ramb for the first time after round 1. toriel was located and he's reminding him of some plan they've already arranged.

▲ tenna getting mad at ramb about toriel after round 2. ...not sure what the implications of him paying ramb's electricity bill is, or if this is one of those things where he's just saying whatever. also, "they" seems to be the knight, as tenna says he was instructed by them to keep the fun gang busy. guess they both know about the knight

made a gif of the end of the scene cause i think his animations are important. the "!" bubble seems to imply that ramb said something that pissed him off or he hung up on him

▲ happens at the tail end of the race to toriel. i think this speaks for itself

ramb's side:

▲ ramb's dialogue if you say "super fun" when he asks how the games were after round 2

▲ ramb's dialogue if you get Z-rank. the electrifying line seems to be in reference to tenna due to tenna using the same word with emphasis in the cutscene following the one where the electric bill is mentioned

▲ ramb insulting tenna's game the first time you talk to him in the S-rank room

parallels and dichotomies

- both tenna and ramb miss spending time with kris and want to appeal to them to see them have fun again

- they've both held onto the past very tightly, with both of them reminiscing about kris, asriel, and the holiday kids visiting. with tenna, he primarily remembers the family watching TV together, and ramb remembers kris and friends playing games together.

- tenna is afraid of/nervous around kris and is insecure about whether or not he's doing a good job entertaining them with his games and challenges. on the other hand, ramb rarely shys away from being upfront with them and is very sure that his own games will be enjoyed by kris

- at the end of the chapter, they both meet an unfortunate fate. tenna gets dismembered, and ramb turns to stone (...?). however, tenna can have a happy ending if you fix him and give him to mettaton/hapstablook, while ramb's post-chapter fate is left vague and concerning to make me and m-chromatic insane specifically (TOBY PUT THE POWER STRIP ON THE PHONE

and:

it makes me insane that i can't find the in-game source of these lines, i just know they're from a different pippins than the one that shit talks ramb

tried to find more inklings of them talking about each other but i think i got all of it. hope you enjoyed another Long-as-Hell Ramb Post From UNIKHROMA

[kelocitta]

what did you think of watcher? i noticed a good few people dropped the dlc because of high expectations and how different it felt from the rest of the game. which is a shame because it gets very good but that's how rain world goes.

[Non-spoiler Answer] I liked it! I was actually one of the beta testers for it and distinctly we were all super thrilled with the overall way it 'felt' because it did actually feel like vanilla RW again. It's not 1-to-1 obviously, but it was super nice to go back to that more esoteric wandering game than what Downpour was- which was very much a very distinctly more 'normal game' experience. Its got a few quirks that need some more evening out, either due to time constraints or just being a hard thing to balance without a bigger playbase, and hopefully they will be. There's also the issue of anti-spoiler rush to finish things before everyone starts posting about it, which means people get irritated easier or frustrated when progress isn't consistent, they only want the big reveals and bits or lore and are considering the process of getting to those a blockade rather than the game. I think a lot of people just forgot what its like to play vanilla Rain World, or at least didn't remember what its like to play vanilla Rain World without a wiki open or a guiding hand. Cause if you were playing RW truly blind, c'mon, this was a game where you wandered through a couple ecosystems until you effectively climb into a plot once you get up the leg and into Five Pebbles and someone can actually talk to you and point you towards a more physical goal, and even then most players who ascended had no clue what was happening, much less why. The pearls are fun but lets be real, most of us read those on the wiki and not painstakingly delivered all of them for the bits of bite-sized region lore. Rain World has always been like that, it was why it was so much more niche prior to DP- some people grew to love that quirk but most people bounced off hard cause of it. I enjoy Downpour but it's design philosophy is miles different, and in a much more accessible and appealing way. With that said, I think it has a great story, and one that is frankly, much more obvious and at the forefront of it than base RW. People saying it doesn't have a plot are insane imo, its extremely there, minus the initial wandering the (at least the first) goal and plotline is not at all vague. I was also pleasantly surprised by some fringe things I got correct, or at least put my thumb on at some point, lmao.

[Small Spoilers about a small game design choice of the DLC, not plot]

One thing I'm surprised lots of people didn't like was actually the region cross-warp mechanic, I get why they don't like- things don't connect into each other in a sensical, worldbuild-y type way, but for me, who was someone who had a pretty big gripe with Downpour's 'Bubble Narrative' choices in how it was laid out it felt super cool to have this implication of an impossibly large, tangled world where you don't and can't know how everything is laid out. Everything in Downpour takes place in Five Pebble's immediate area. The creatures are consistent across the timelines (Not in distribution, things go extinct or change locations, but nothing distinctly new 'comes in' despite the massive world changes.) It makes the whole thing feel like a terrarium, where you can see it all despite the fact you shouldn't, that you don't have the right to know everything about the world. The fact that you aren't getting the full regions, that you really can't tell how they all connect- how much of the world is inbetween them, whether these areas are actually physically connected- its delicious to me frankly! The world is so big, so complicated, and you only ever get snippets of it. You are denied the full picture of life, its impossibly big- the world stretches out so far. Its the kind of the design that says 'hey, all those fan regions people make? Maybe those are all out there, somewhere, they fit into this grand puzzle but you'll never know where or how' I like that! The world is big and complex and unknowable again! We've seen outside the Five Pebbles bubble and were told only a scrap. I actually really like how jumbled up everything is after vanilla and downpour, I like thinking that the world map we have is full of empty spaces and unknowns in how all these places bleed into each other. I can understand why people miss the connections, or the pearls, but frankly I really like the spin they put on the exploration mechanic to spread things away from FP that isn't just 'make the bubble bigger'

[mania-sama]

Mondstadt and Its Religious Implications

One thing that I will NEVER get over about Genshin Impact is the iconography used in the designs for Mondstadt and the implications it has. Now, don't get me wrong, as a rule of thumb, Hoyoverse has done a really good job in creating unique environments for Genshin's nations that more or less accurately portray a real-life cultural region. Liyue is based on China, Inazuma on Japan, Sumeru on India and Egypt, Fontaine on France (and Australia, if you squint), and Natlan on African and Native American tribes.

Mondstadt is based on Germany. More specifically, many of the designs and icons seem to resemble the Holy Roman Empire. Now, an important thing to note is that most of Western and Southern Europe was some denomination of Christianity at this time, with some exceptions due to various holy wars that occurred kind of all of the time. Anyway, the point is that the Holy Roman Empire was an established Catholic nation (and Germany still is predominantly Christian in modern-day). One thing about the Catholic denomination is that they proudly display religious symbols anywhere they can or in ways that they can carry with them, usually coming in the form of a rosary or a cross. When it came to specific places of holy worship, they would obviously spend no small amount of effort to completely embellish the place with gold, art, and symbols. Catholic churches are known to be the most extravagant of the denominations for a reason.

When a design team looks at The Holy Roman Empire, they will see this religious imagery everywhere. Namely, they will see the cross, because that is kind of, you know, THE Christian symbol. So it makes complete sense for them to note that down and underline it in red; for a mostly-accurate portrayal of the region they are taking from, a church and crosses HAVE to be included.

Places of worship are obviously not unique to Christianity, nor is the "cross" as a religious symbol even born from Jesus Christ. There are a few cases from different regions in which crosses and cross-like images were used for their gods. HOWEVER, with the specific cross that Mondstadt displays, and with the fact that not only is it based on Germany/Holy Roman Empire but that it is the ONLY Genshin region to use the cross in its designs (along with the usage of distinctly Christian/Catholic roles like nuns)... it is safe to assume that this is representative of the Christian cross.

You can see the issue we are about to have.

The fact that Mondstadt displays crosses as a religious symbol in CHURCHES and on the KNIGHTS' ARMORY (because most knights were historically Christian), that characters like Barbara are seen wearing in their designs, implies two things:

Crucifixation is/was a method of cruel execution in Mondstadt's history.

SOMEBODY of high esteem and worship had to be crucified, and thusly held up as the ultimate symbol of religion...

For the first point, while it IS still crazy to think that Genshin would imply this, I can, indeed, believe it to be true to canon. Why? Well, Mondtadt's history is already rife with the same abuses as Europe's actual history. From slaves to gladiator fights to rebellion to cruel monarchs, Mondstadt has not had a pretty life. Crucifixion honestly fits right in. I can imagine, in failed revolts against the aristocracy, those rebels who survived were later crucified. Other victims may be those who try to falsify gods or improperly worship Barbatos in a manner that the ruler doesn't agree with, those who commit treason, etc. etc..

Is it insane? Perhaps a little. But if we really get into it, Hoyoverse has done some crazy things with their lore so it's not really out of place, no matter how cruel the actual punishment is.

The second point is a little more complicated. Let's first rule off Christianity being a thing in Genshin - while you could consider the most of the nations to be monotheistic because they technically worship one god, the respective one of their nation, they most certainly do not obey/follow one god holistically, nor is there one mortal representative that god, nor is there a specific spirit that lives on in every believer who follows that god. So, there is no Holy Trinity; no Jesus Christ, no Holy Spirit, and there is no God, so to speak. No Christianity.

However.

One thing about Genshin Impact is that it takes from biblical mythology heavily, for some reason (and I say mythology because modern denominations don't consider the demonology stuff canon). For example, Paimon is the name of a demon who was more or less a servant of Lucifer (interpretations may vary). It is well known that the Archons are based on demons from biblical demon mythology. Even in the latest Natlan Archon Quest, Ronova, the Ruler of Death, looks unnervingly like Ophanim, the one everyone draws when they make "biblically accurate angels" or whatever.

Mondstadt accomplishes biblical references in two ways: one, that Barbatos, the demon, had four main kings/knights that rode with him. This can be seen represented in the Four Winds. Two, that these Four Winds can be viewed like how the Catholics would view a saint. Saints were, in simplistic terms, mortals who achieved great things and helped many people, and were then canonized after the death (usually). The church essentially declares them a Saint and worthy of worship. Idols and imagery are produced of these saints and hung like one would a cross or other images of Jesus Christ.

The most clear representation of that in Genshin would be in Venessa, who is a mortal who dies and then ascends to Celestia. She then becomes the Falcon of the West, one of the Four Winds of Mondstadt. So, a saint, essentially. Even though Mondstadt isn’t Christian, it certainly is Catholic.

The reason why I am going over all of this is to say that, well, it may not be necessarily implying that Venti was the one who was crucified. That is the popular opinion when discussing the crosses - that somewhere along the way, Venti was crucified. I am here to say that that really might not be the case. While the Holy Trinity is interpreted by many denominations to all be one and the same as each other, it is still a fact that it was Jesus Christ who was crucified, not God Himself. Jesus is the son, not the God.

Which is to say that it could be anyone, really. The most clear "child" of Barbatos that comes to mind is Venessa, who we could interpret as someone who could have been, at one point, crucified (though she was not). Rulers and people of high esteem also claim her titles and name like monarchs would claim holiness and divine right in Europe. Again, the problem with this is that she was not crucified and lived a very successful life post-rebellion.

The other option that comes to mind is the Unnamed Bard. He also could have been crucified. Even though we know he died in battle, it is not unreasonable that his corpse would have been strung up by pissed-off nobles upon the defeat of Decarabian. But, again, the problem being is that a. the timelines don't match up (Barbatos was not yet the Anemo Archon), and b. they won the rebellion so he still probably wasn't crucified.

So, it could be someone we haven't heard of, or someone deep in Genshin lore that I don't know about. Or, you know, perhaps Venti really was crucified. I don't know.

THIS is what Hoyoverse is implying. AND I DON'T LIKE IT (it's fucking hilarious).

[blueskittlesart]

i kinda really wanna see a big ol vent/rant from you about genshin now lol. I would read an essay

I'm not sure you understand the insanity you just unlocked in me but ok

genshin impact is probably the clearest modern example i can think of of capitalism absolutely eviscerating a creative project. For context, I started playing genshin in 2021, just after the 1.4 update. it was venti's first rerun/the first windblume festival if that means something to you. and I really genuinely thought that it might have had something special. It was a gacha that didn't FEEL like a gacha, which was a huge feat to me.

it began with a very simple story pitch--you, the protagonist, are one of a set of twin siblings traveling through space. you come upon a seemingly unassuming world and your attempts to continue your journey are suddenly stopped by a mysterious, all-powerful figure. you are separated from your sibling and wake up alone on the shores of this planet you were attempting to leave together. throughout that opening cutscene and scattered through the world and your character's dialog there are implications that all is not as it seems, that your character is something unique to this world and that they possess powers and abilities that you've yet to unlock. You are told that you must travel the seven nations of this world in order to find your sibling, which is great--a simple, zelda-like objective which drives the player to explore the secondary narratives of the world. none of this is bad on the surface. in fact i'd argue it's pretty good. there's a ton that can be done with these story bones. even at launch the map and combat system were full of potential as well.

Note: for ease of reading, i'm going to label the different storylines of the game now. A-plot refers to the central objective of the entire game; the find-your-sibling plot and everything that encompasses, including the abyss order/dain, the heavenly principles, the fake sky, etc. B-plot refers to the secondary objective present in each new nation, usually meeting the archon and/or solving a problem for the archon. (A and B-plots will occasionally intersect.) C-plot refers to any story, location, or background information which remains in permanent gameplay but which isn't directly related to the A or B-plots, such as dragonspine, the chasm, enkanomiya, etc. D-plot refers to any story, location, or background information which is confined to limited-time events and does NOT remain in permanent gameplay, regardless of its connection or lack thereof to the A and B-plots, such as the golden apple archipelago, the infamous albedo/dragonspine event, the infamous kaeya/diluc event, etc. Lore as i will refer to it in this post refers to any information which is present in permanent gameplay but which is not directly told to the player within the A or B-plot story quests and objectives, including books, weapon, artifact, and item descriptions, world quest dialog and puzzles, etc.

So now we're in mid-2021, there are two nations' worth of B-plot story quests released in full, and we've run into our first problem, which is that the game isn't finished yet. I don't have any actual information about how the game was/is written, but based on what i've observed over the past few years, my best guess is that the A-plot has been fully written since the beginning, at least in some form. there were very early-game events and information pertaining to the A-plot that would take years to see any actual payoff in the main story quests (kaeya's origin story, the 1.3 scaramouche fake-sky drop, the flowers in lumine's hair, etc.) but those kinds of A-plot story easter eggs very quickly dropped off when the game absolutely EXPLODED during the pandemic.

this sudden burst in popularity was the true beginning of the end for genshin, i think, because suddenly they had a HUGE fanbase that desperately wanted more content faster than they could pump out new A-plot or even B-plot story quests. one of the most pervasive complaints about the game when I began playing in 2021 was that there was nothing to do between story quests. update 1.4 (which was the update I started playing at) was important in that it was the first time since genshin's release over a year before that players recieved any new A-plot, in the form of the archon quest We Will Be Reunited, also known as the quest with the most fucking misleading name of all time. you'll never guess what doesn't fucking happen during this quest. anyways. we were a year into gameplay, two nations out of seven released and a third on the not-so-distant horizon, and it seemed obvious that players were owed some sort of A-plot payoff. and that's very much what WWBR was advertised as, from the quest's name to the banners full of art of the twins staring wistfully at each other. The thing is, what i'm describing as A-plot payoff was actually. not really A-plot payoff at all. WWBR was the reveal that the protagonist's sibling was working with the abyss order, and that the abyss order was connected somehow to Khaenri'ah, which at this point casual players would only have known about from THAT QUEST and MAYBE kaeya's character descriptions if they were diligent enough to get him to friendship level 10 (which, btw there is no indication that you should do to get important context about the story of the game, because kaeya is a 4-star starter character and the only character in the entire game that actually has genuinely important story hidden in his character descriptions.) So what I'm calling A-plot payoff felt at the time a lot less like A-plot payoff than it did like an abyss sibling cameo in an attempt to satiate everyone who was begging for more story. We actually gained almost net 0 information. this is very quickly going to become a pattern.

As I've already alluded to, the motives behind this writing decision are transparently obvious. Genshin is a free gacha game which relies on a consistently active and engaged userbase to make its money. With fans getting restless about the lack of engaging story at the time and a new, very ambitious B-plot quest gearing up for release that would require major support from that fan base in order to remain profitable, the writers were backed into a corner. they HAD to throw the fans some sort of bone in order to keep them engaged with the A-plot, since it was originally pitched as the driving force for the story as a whole, but they were also clearly not at a stage of the writing process where it was prudent to give the player any REAL information about the A-plot. This is how we ended up with a 10-second abyss sibling cameo and an offhanded mention of Khaenri'ah, a nation whose plot-relevance was at that point still basically unknown.

The real problem is, WWBR worked. at least, it worked as intended at the time. It satiated story-focused fans in the interlude between B-plot nations, as hyv was gearing up to release inazuma, which required a lot of time in preparation. WWBR was followed almost immediately by the C-plot golden apple archipelago in 1.6, widely regarded as one of the better events of version 1. GAA was memorable especially because it was the first event that involved an entirely new, limited-time-only map, meaning the event had much more longevity than the standard events players were used to. This is, imo, most likely the update combination that led to the standard formula which hyv uses for its quests and events nowadays. the back-to-back release of WWBR and GAA satisfied both fans who wanted A-plot story AND silenced criticisms about the game lacking endgame playability, which at the time must have seemed like a goldmine to writers desperate for a solution to their content-to-fanbase ratio problem.

From here, genshin started following a standard method of release for their next three nations--inazuma, sumeru, and fontaine. the formula generally went as follows: one major version update (usually version x.0) containing a major map update which included all B-plot relevant locations in the new nation, and the first chapter of the B-plot story quest relevant to that nation. this would then be followed by 2-3 version updates which would each contain the next chapter in the nation's B-plot story quest, sequentially. After the nation's B-plot quest ended, during the downtime in which the next nation's story and map would be finalized, subsequent updates would be largely C-plot, and would contain minor expansions of the map to increase endgame playability via exploration and world quests. This is how we ended up with updates like the chasm, the several extra islands in inazuma, and the quite frankly ridiculously large sumeru map, as well as the offloaded maps like enkanomiya and the sea of bygone eras. with the possible exception of the chasm, none of these areas are A OR B-plot relevant. hyv has realized that artificially inflating the map makes their game technically more engaging during the downtime between nations. However, this comes at a price. While the scenery and set design of the game remains consistently beautiful, the actual, mechanical gameplay that populates that scenery very quickly became mind-numbingly boring if not borderline unplayable. While the 1.0 questlines were not perfect, there was at least an emphasis on the player actually DOING things. 1.0 B-plot quests would have you going to mini-dungeon temples and completing challenges which would acclimate you to the combat system while also serving narrative purpose. There were quests that required you to navigate open-world dungeons. Because your characters were lower-level, combat challenges that arose during these quests were CHALLENGES, rather than two-second buttonmashing segments. By the time we get to sumeru, though, both B-plot AND C-plot quests have become little more than moving your character from location to location and tapping through (usually unvoiced) dialog. there's no GAMEPLAY in the quests anymore, because gameplay isn't what makes money. What DOES make money is giving players 300 hidden chests to find in an open-world map segment, each of which gives them 1/80th of a gacha pull. And so the story suffers and the map gets bigger.

Along with the map expansions, downtime between nations usually also nets us one A-plot quest, usually involving the character dainslief, who was the driver of the initial WWBR quest. This is the second half of hyv's magical formula for keeping fans happy between major releases. the A-plot quests will, as a general rule, give players either very little new information or no new information at all, but will dress up the delivery in such a way that it ALMOST feels as though the protagonist has moved forward somehow. the most recent example of this writing style, the 4.7 quest bedtime story, amounts to about an hour and a half of gameplay and, while it DOES contain a segment in which the protagonist finally actually has a conversation with their sibling, that conversation literally begins with the line "I have so many questions, but for some reason I don't want to ask them right now," ensuring that the sibling will not actually be required to give away any plot-relevant information whatsoever, and the quest ends with the protagonist FORGETTING THAT THE CONVERSATION EVER HAPPENED IN THE FIRST PLACE.

As I think I mentioned before, the cardinal problem of genshin impact's writing is that fans want answers faster than the writers are prepared to give them. I don't doubt that there's a game bible or relevant equivalent somewhere within hyv which contains the explanations we are currently lacking in regards to the A-plot. the game is consistent enough in its storytelling for me to believe that this isn't all just being made up as we go along. But I'm also certain that a lot of the late-game A and B-plot that is planned (especially if the Khaenri'ah is truly planned to be the 8th nation of the game) hinges on the player knowing very little about the A-plot. this would be fine if genshin was a standard single-release video game that players could work through at their own pace, but it isn't. it's unfinished, and each nation in the game releases months to years after the last, leaving the writers to scramble to fill in the gameplay gaps and players struggling to remember plot-relevant information when it's brought up literal years after they last heard it mentioned. Not only does the time between updates leave players frustrated about the lack of A-plot, it makes the A-plot harder to understand when it is brought up, because the writers are required to throw in so much dense C and D-plot just to keep engagement high enough to make the game profitable in its downtime. we joke about the insane convolution of genshin's lore, but that is first and foremost a byproduct of its financial model. the game requires engaement to be profitable, and adding lore for players to look into drives up engagement. The fact that having so much story with so little plot relevance muddies the waters and makes the A and B-plot stories considerably harder to understand doesn't matter as long as money is being made.

I want to take a quick detour here to talk about the release of sumeru specifically, because this is when I really began to clock the fact that genshin was declining. on paper, racial sensitivity issues aside (Not that they're not important, but i'm doing this deep dive from a storytelling and game design point of view, nothing else. that's a whole can of worms i don't have time to get into here) sumeru was a really promising addition to the game. The new B-plot quest which was set to drop in 3.0 was highly anticipated for several reasons. Two fan-favorite characters (kaeya and scaramouche) were expected to play major roles, because of earlier C and B-plot quests, and much of the nation's scenery that was teased in trailers and promotional content appeared to tie into the A-plot. the most exciting draw about sumeru and version 3.0, though, was the major update to the combat system.

Arguably genshin impact's most interesting feature upon release was its combat system. The map was basically a botw clone at that point, and the story quests, while decently engaging, were rough around the edges to say the least. What genshin DID have going for it was a unique real-time combat system that rewarded strategy and quick thinking.

Genshin's combat system is elemental, and on release there were 6 elemental affiliations: anemo (wind), cryo (ice), pyro (fire), hydro (water), geo (rock), and electro (electricity.) in a sort of pokemon-like system, certain elements were weak to other ones, but more importantly, certain combinations of elements could drastically boost combat stats. Players got to construct four-slot teams of characters, each with an elemental affiliation and certain "skills" which would match their element, and you were encouraged to use the interactions of these elements to build teams. very quickly, a huge community formed dedicated to optimizing teams and tiering characters. People would even make a game out of building teams specifically to do high-level damage with "bad" characters or characters who weren't designed to be damage drivers (my 100k jean burst was an incredible moment fr.) this was, of course, also a picture-perfect driver for the gacha aspect of the game, which was how players obtained new characters.

Pre-3.0, combat was... well i won't say it was balanced, but there was no elemental reaction that had any MAJOR advantage over the others. when you actually ran the numbers, i believe vaporize was the best reaction in terms of damage output, with the best team being raiden national with kazuha for EM buffs. but a well-built freeze or melt team could do similar numbers, or even better numbers depending on your artifact rolls. (ayaka permafreeze you will always be my #1.) Despite a steady stream of new characters with each update, characters from the earliest version of the game like xingqiu and xiangling were still topping the charts in terms of usefulness and versatility in teambuilding. However, as early as 1.0, players had been teased that a major update to the combat system was planned. There was a seventh element, dendro (plants) which pre-3.0 only existed as an elemental affiliation for menial enemies. there were no playable dendro characters, and the only elemental reaction that existed relating to it was very low-level and not particularly useful in combat.

Originally, dendro was projected to be added to the combat system somewhere in version 2, but its release was delayed substantially, meaning it came out along with its affiliated nation, sumeru. And as soon as it came out, it basically broke the combat system. I assume that the scaling they ended up going with may have been out of fear that players would be hesitant to integrate a new element into their pre-established team builds, and thus they may have been worried about sales on their dendro character banners, and i assume that the fact that 3 elements are required to get the highest-level reaction was an attempt to make the meta more balanced in the face of that scaling, but, well... it didn't work. At this point, the genshin impact combat meta is basically "if you're not using hyperbloom what the fuck are you doing." there's basically no reaction in the game that comes close to it in terms of both damage and ease of use. you are not going to beat a hyperbloom team with anything other than a better-built hyperbloom team. combat is now very heavily skewed in the direction of dendro, meaning that if you DON'T want to use a dendro team, you're going to be doing significantly lower numbers. And since enemies are added with each update, post-3.0 combat becomes difficult and annoying if you don't have a hyperbloom team on-hand.

The major gripe i have with dendro isn't even the scaling, though. I mentioned offhand earlier that the 1.0 B-plot questline had a section which taught you the basics of the combat system via mini-dungeons. These mini-dungeons, of course, taught you the version of the system that existed pre-3.0, so there's no tutorial for dendro reactions. Rather than integrating the tutorial into the story and world like they did in their early quests, upon playing 3.0 for the first time players were given a popup that explained, very wordily, how dendro reactions worked. there was no opportunity to test these reactions in an environment without consequences--if you wanted to try them you'd have to remember the relevant information, build yourself a team, find an enemy to try them on, and just hope you got it right. This lack of integration is something i began to notice more and more with genshin as it progressed, especially in sumeru. where in mondstadt and liyue open-world puzzles would be explained to you by an npc or via environmental context clues, in sumeru you'd be stopped while exploring every two seconds by a popup explaining some puzzle or another which, of course, you wouldn't read, because you didn't want to do the puzzle right that minute anyway, and then by the time you DID want to do that puzzle you'd have no in-game way of figuring out how to do it. The puzzle popups may seem like a small thing, but it's one of the clearest examples in the game to me of the fact that the player experience is so clearly not being prioritized here. the game doesn't even TRY to be immersive anymore. they have no qualms about pulling you out of the story to read a paragraph about how the puzzle works. they don't care how your character, in-universe, is supposed to have acquired that information. they don't care why your character, in-universe, is doing the puzzle in the first place. because they know the reason YOU are doing the puzzle, which is to unlock a hidden chest that gives you 1/80th of a gacha pull.

That was not "a quick detour" was it lmfao. ok anyways. back to the story. Now i want to talk about D-plot, meaning limited event stories, and lore as i defined it earlier, meaning contextual details not present in quests or playable story. This is where i think genshin's story becomes completely inaccessible.

Already, we've covered the fact that in order to consume the very basic story, players have to be willing to wait years between A and B-plot quest releases, punctuated by irrelevant map expansions and interlude quests. I mentioned before that genshin's incompleteness is one of the major problems of its story. the fact that players have to wait years, remembering plot-relevant information that they have no way of knowing will even BE plot-relevant, for the payoff of these narratives is frustrating at best and actively malicious at worst. But in theory, there should be an obvious way to circumvent this. One could just wait until the game IS completely finished to play the whole thing. Sort of like buying a game in early access but waiting until it's actually finished to play it all the way through. that's theoretically possible. but, as i have been hammering home this whole time, genshin is a free game, and therefore genshin relies entirely on a consistently engaging fanbase in order to remain profitable. if genshin does not have a base of players who are willing to log in every day, or at the very least once every update, the game's financial model collapses on itself. therefore, genshin puts on limited-time events. this is a standard in gacha games, as a way to keep the fans consistently engaging. What is not standard, however, is the way that genshin uses these events as vessels for its story. about 19 out of 20 limited events in genshin impact will be useless menial bullshit with no effect on the story or really even the player aside from maybe making you fucking angry. 1 out of those 20, though, will be innocuously named, with nothing in the banner or event description to indicate that it's special in any way, but it will contain serious A or B-plot relevant information that exists nowhere else in the game. My personal favorite example is the infamous 1.3 scaramouche appearance, in which he showed up, told the protagonist that the sky was fake, and then immediately fucked off again. Scaramouche did not show up again until at least 2.0, and the fake sky wasn't so much as MENTIONED again until 3.2, almost TWO YEARS LATER. but there are others, such as the (almost equally infamous) albedo doppelganger event in which a major character's loyalties are called into question, or the event where major biographical information is revealed about kaeya, the only playable character with major known connections to the A-plot and Khaenri'ah. With all of these events, once the event period ends, the information contained within them vanishes from the game completely. there's no way to replay old events that you've missed, even sans rewards, so if you miss a plot-relevant event the ONLY way to catch up on that story is through word of mouth. again, this is a transparent way to keep genshin's userbase engaged during downtime between B-plot quests; if you don't log in and play every event, how will you know if you've missed something important? You might not be able to fully understand the future story if you miss out on the D-plot now!

The D-plot problem is something that I think could, in theory, be circumvented by dedicated record-keeping. if the wiki had anything resembling an easily accessible event database that marked story-relevant events and contained summaries or gameplay videos, at the very least you wouldn't have to fear being completely lost on the off chance that a random throwaway line in an event from fucking 1.3 becomes plot-relevant. but hyv obviously doesn't want that, because it undermines their financial model, and the sheer number of events and the amount of rerunning of irrelevant events they do makes the task of recording and categorizing them all daunting if not impossible.

Then, of course, there's lore. this is arguably what genshin is infamous for in certain circles of the internet. You know that unraveled video where bdg reads every book in skyrim? if you tried to do that with genshin the video would probably be about 10 hours long. and it's not just books; genshin hides (potentially) plot-relevant information in weapon and artifact descriptions, in random hidden world quests, in character bios... the list goes on. and 9 times out of 10, the information is essentially written in code. Plot-relevant characters will have multiple names, or the relevant information will refer to them as vaguely as possible, presumably to further the "mystery" and encourage theorizing among fans. but the sheer amount of information like this that exists within the game makes it all but impossible to determine what is plot-relevant and what isn't. For a topical example, the most recent A-plot quest bedtime story mentions the name Rhinedottir in connection with events in Khaenri'ah, suddenly making that name A-plot relevant. Rhinedottir is an alternate name for the character Gold, whose existence you would only have known of before this point if you'd unlocked and read the character Albedo's character bios. (Albedo is a limited-run character who hasn't been available since november 2022, btw.) the only other information about Rhinedottir permanently available in the game comes from the description of the weapon Festering Desire, which was only obtainable from a limited event back in 2020, anyway. So basically, if you wanted ANY context for that remark, you'd have to have been playing the game since AT LEAST 2022, AND you'd have to have taken the time to go over your weapon and character descriptions with a fine-toothed comb. keep in mind that as of right now (june 2024) there are 85 playable characters in this game, each with 10 unique unlockable character bio sections, and over 150 weapons, each with their own unique descriptions, not to mention over 50 artifact sets, each with 5 unique artifacts, which all have their own unique descriptions as well. there are also 51 different collections of books which contain written lore as well. the idea that any player could keep up with all this, or that anyone could even sift through it all to pick out the important things that they NEED to keep up with, is insane, especially when the game makes a point of withholding crucial plot information from its players within the A and B-plot quests. this amount of written lore only exists, again, to drive up engagement in the hopes of subsequently driving up profit. Even if the average player isn't reading and absorbing all this information, the fact that it's there coupled with the fact that the writers consistently refuse to reveal anything beyond surface-level A-plot information means that there's basically ENDLESS theory fodder. and THAT means that people will be posting their theories and talking with each other and getting into arguments. it means "genshin impact" trends on twitter. it means engagement, and engagement means money.

basically what it comes back to is that everything is so transparently money over player experience with this game. I think what we're witnessing with genshin is what i would call an end-stage gacha game--a gacha game that's gone on a little too long and gotten a little too popular, and so the veil has started to slip a little more than usual. Gachas work primarily because they operate by toeing the line between what is fun to play and what is a predatory mechanic. As long as the actual gameplay remains engaging and rewarding, players can ignore the unsavory business practices underneath. At this point, genshin has swerved too hard into the money-hungriness and is still hoping that they can use their old tried-and-true engagement farming methods to remain popular regardless. currently, it seems like those methods are still working, unfortunately. Like I said in the post that prompted this, i really can't wait for the hyv writer NDAs to expire 10 or so years down the line, because I can only imagine what an insane shitshow writing for this game must be. I want to see the tell-all articles. I want carnage.

That being said, I played genshin impact religiously from 2020 to 2023. I loved the game. Despite myself, I am still really, REALLY interested in the A-plot. I want to know what's going on with the protagonist and their sibling; where they came from, what happened to them, what the heavenly principles are, what role celestia plays in all of this. I want to know Kaeya's full backstory, what role Khaenri'ah plays in the overarching story, and what happened to it in the past. but I don't really have any faith that I ever will, because I know that as long as keeping their fans in the dark and stringing them along remains profitable, that's what hyv will continue to do.

Do I think genshin impact is unsalvagable? in its current state, yes. If I was given the ability to turn back time and convince a bunch of executives of the profitability of this venture, I would change almost nothing about the story of genshin and completely rework the mechanics of its release. I would make it a series of single-release self-contained games rather than a constantly-updating gacha. Each game would be one B-plot quest, or one nation, eight games in all, preferably released once every year. Removing the gacha mechanic, players would be given access to a certain pool of characters to build teams at the start of each game, and then periodically unlock new characters as the story progressed. for example, if you were playing the inazuma game, you'd start out with only your protag, and after progressing to a certain point in the story you'd get a pool of inazuma 4-stars to teambuild with freely. Then, as the story progressed and you met plot-relevant inazuman 5-stars you'd add them to your pool. I'd change basically nothing about the combat system except for a properly integrated introduction of dendro when it makes its appearance in sumeru. Once you completed the story in that nation, you could move onto the next game in the series if it was out, or if it wasn't, you could continue to explore the open world while waiting for the next release. Would this be as profitable as the gacha model? probably not, but what it WOULD do is allow for much more consistent pacing and writing, with the added bonus of not making your userbase feel like you'd shoot them in the head for their pocket change.

[classicanalyzer]

Skeleton Crew - Can’t Say I Remember No At Attin Thoughts

"Perhaps someday, when I am leader of the Triok, I will remember your ways. I see now. You weakness...it makes you kind. And my world could use some kindness." Hayna

This was a pretty noice follow-up to the last episode. It was a lot more focused on the character interactions as home seems to be ever far away.

Those satellites at the opening look very much like the ones used for Operation Cinder. Given some of the Imperial-looking uniforms (especially the Imperial Army Trooper helmets) in the episode and the destruction of the world, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. But Jesus, if their world was destroyed by Operation Cinder, that's one hell of a dark backstory for At Achrann. Especially given how Jod even said,

"This is At Attin? It tastes like ashy dust. Looks a lot like my home planet, actually." Jod Na Nawood

It has to be Operation Cinder unless the satellites are part of a similar barrier system (or the world could've been hidden by different methods). I also wonder how bad Jod's world must've been for him to make that comparison. I can't wait for that Episode 7 Jod lore.

Jod's "kill me" look and line delivery just killed me. He's so sick of this BS now lmao. I honestly thought he and SM-33 kicked all their asses but it just turned out he just gave them Old Republic credits haha.

Also very interesting that the Hattan army seems to have a CIS tank as well alongside the Imperial Army Trooper helmets. The world must've been destroyed and known to the galaxy for quite for some time by that point.

Neel is pretty brutally honest about his friends, lmao. I love seeing his kindness shine through in such a hellish, war-torn world. I also like seeing his brief friendship and relationship with Hayna, who only knew war and nothing of a possible peaceful life. Plus unlike the girl he had a crush on in Episode 1, she actually knows who he is. Given how Episode 3 focused a lot on KB and this episode on Neel, I wonder if Episode 5 will focus on Fern and Episode 6 will focus on Wim.

It's pretty sad how the Triok and Hattan are stuck in a forever war and only trading for weapons, especially given the implications of the world being a victim of Operation Cinder. The idea of child soldiers being normalized in the world is pretty disturbing much less how desertion is met with death even applied to kids. I still find it insane to see on-screen aftermath of Operation Cinder in this episode, especially on this show.

I also like how we see that for all of Fern's tough front, and she's just as scared of being truly lost forever.

SM-33 continues to be a comedic riot even when we see him being terrifying. God, when SM-33 was remembering his old Captain's orders and his voice started distorting into a nightmarish tone, that was pretty chilling. I would like it if the treasure was actually a legit stereotypical pirate's treasure.

This was a noice follow-up episode and I hope Episode 5 continues to expand on the mystery of At Attin.

"I do remember At Attin. It was in this very room. The captain killed any of his crew that saw the coordinates to At Attin. Slaughtered them, he did. Then he ordered me to destroy them and forget everything I knew about At Attin. And then he told me, if anyone ever comes around poking around, looking for the treasure... He told me to pull them apart. Pull 'em apart. Pull 'em apart. Pull 'em apart. Limb from limb. Limb from limb. Limb from limb! Limb from limb! Limb from limb! Limb from Limb." SM-33

[cctypical]

me yapping about the hellaverse/blackgryphon controversy that I literally could not give less of a shit about

UGHHHHH I didn’t wanna say this but ig I fucking have to since yall are so petty abt it.

I’m a hazbin/helluva fan. YES. ME. I am NOT a vivzie fan.

I like to stay out of controversy because it sucks. Everything is always biased and the internet doesn’t help give me the straight facts. I wasn’t even aware of all the horrible shit the vivzie ppl did until I specifically asked for a brief explanation. I do not want to support vivzie and I never had because im not that heavy on merch or anything at least from there, plus im literally unable to buy any products. The most I’ve supported them is by watching videos I guess, but that’s not me wanting to give them money that’s me wanting to know about updates.

When I got into hellaverse I was in it for the art, story and occasional adult jokes, over time those adult jokes became waaay more frequent and just made me cringe out a lil bit but I still watched it because of the lore. No I don’t like the implications and bad writing. No I don’t like the fact every single character is skinnier than a pencil meanwhile the females have these insane drumsticks what the fuck. I absolutely fucking hate the angel thing I understand you want to put a traumatic backstory in there but cmon. I get it’s an adult show but it can do so much better man. As much as I hate everything im odd like that, I HAVE to finish something I started, I want to watch the rest of both shows until they are finished then be done, cuz that’s all I want, to finish the shows.

Yes I like the characters. Yes I think the characters are cute/hot. No I don’t like the asshole or way too freaky side characters. The only exception is vox I think bc he’s pretty one dimensional.

TLDR I like hellaverse for the plot, characters and art. I hate everything else. I will finish both shows and then never touch them again. Honestly im only in it for chaggie atp cuz I think they’re like? The only good relationship rn? Them and m&m.

(This is directed towards my moots/followers bc I’d hate to lose anyone over liking a show, but I gotta check they’re not one of those people who attack others for liking something, even if it’s by a horrible person as long as they don’t try to excuse their actions I don’t see what’s wrong with it)

While im on this subject i might as well talk about the blackgryphon thing. I like billie bust up in fact i love it i will love it forever. I like barnaby as a character. Blackgryphon? I was never a huge fan of him in the first place but he’s a good singer. APPARENTLY he did some fucked up things, these allegations were made by someone who is known to make shitty allegations against innocent people and stir shit up. I am at a neutral standpoint until it is confirmed by people who actually know what they’re doing whether these allegations are true, which they most likely aren’t. I don’t hate blackgryphon or the game. Let me enjoy a media without being attached to the people behind it dammit. It’s like the jk thing. Jks a bitch but people still like Harry Potter. I like Harry Potter. I’m not in the fandom but I like the one book I read and the three movies I watched, no matter if the creator is dehumanising trans people.

I have been yapping for incredibly too long holy shit. I’m gonna stop cuz I don’t like talking about shit like this sooo yeahhh im open to convo in the replies, don’t be an asshole just opinions mmkay.

(This is bc I started a way in the sexy machine comp when I asked how vox was losing and ppl decided to attack other ppl. I don’t hide my fandoms I’ve just been lazy, idc what yall say I like hellaverse n that’s it period)

[directdogman]

Hey dogman, idk if you answered this

Who, out of both DSAF and Dialtown, was your favourite to write and/or create?

It's very hard for me to pick favourites with my characters because I don't tend to give characters a lot of screen-time unless I find a character interesting or fun to write. You've caught me in a talkative mood, so warning, there's an onslaught of text coming!

DSaF: Dave was the most fun to write for, as I remember it. I mean, the guy is the walking personification of chaos and even when he's being constructive (eg, rigging robots to do insane stuff), it's usually in a destructive capacity. Dave will do LITERALLY ANYTHING but contribute to society in meaningful/valuable ways.

In terms of what character-writing I was most 'proud' of, I was also pretty happy with Dr Henry Miller, as a villain. Namely the research he embarked on, described in his logs in DSaF 3 (which the fandom evidently agreed with, as I got really strong feedback on those logs.)

One issue a lot of people (including myself) have with canon William Afton is that he's this kind of mad scientist character but his research doesn't really seem to be... idk, going anywhere? Other than using remnant (soul nectar?) to make kids possess robots, it's kind of a mystery how he got to this point he did from running a bad fast food restaurant. William gets fleshed out motivations in TSE and even then, it mainly revolves around his relationship with Henry Emily, iirc. It's actually pretty accurate to how real serial killers think, imo, but there's a pretty wide berth between this kind of serial killer and becoming a sci-fi fast-food mad scientist... So, I decided to try to bridge that gap.

DSaF Henry's logs actually mention where the idea for his research came from, namely the fact that he existed in a world with normal scientific rules just like ours and seemingly discovered something supernatural, and he approaches it like an amoral scientist would - trying to figure out how to figure out more about the fabric of reality using the newly discovered phenomenon of possession. The 'joy of creation' phrase people pulled from Golden Freddy's phone call in FNaF 1 is given context - Henry is trying to find out what's on the other side (and eventually, how existence itself formed.)

There's other aspects to his character that make him more interesting too, like the implication that his research is partially an excuse for him to act on an underlying sadism (with scenes implying that he inflicts damage on others than can't be justified as assisting with his research.) His background as a dissident/quack laughing-stock scientist (thanks to pushing his soul theory in a best-selling book, which is considered pseudoscience) BEFORE he embarked on his journey to become a fast food tycoon also makes it less farfetch'd that he'd be capable of y'know, harvesting human souls intentionally to continue his research?

I had more for the character on paper that people haven't seen but some of it wasn't revealed due to it feeling a bit too disturbing to publish. None of the contents would've been all that controversial, more just too tonally disturbing when written about in detail (like a omitted part from his backstory/lore post where he managed to pick up a hazy audio of his wife + son's crying from the radio of the car his wife/son drowned in and reacted with genuine elation upon realizing he'd discovered a new scientific phenomenon (as this was the first time Henry witnessed soul-possession.)) Yeah.

I don't feel much of a need to revisit Henry as a character because as a series villain, he was pretty thoroughly-written and he did his job effectively... And his fate was well earned! (He even got an epilogue short-story a few years back, further cementing his fate!)

Dialtown: From the characters/writing that the fandom has seen? Tough to say. I genuinely really like every DT character. Gingi and Mayor Mingus are two of my favourite characters to write for because they're both really insistent and react to adversity in a really comically indignant way. Mingus is more like Gingi than she cares to admit in very specific ways, which is the core hypocrisy of her character - she's one of the most abnormal things IN Dialtown, and spends the game on a quest opposing abnormality that she, herself, can't stand.

Many absolute rulers have debilitating physical and/or mental cruxes and despite that, usually have the final say on what is/isn't okay, often guided by arbitrary preferences. It's funny to remember all of the ancient kings and emperors who dictated how others should act, talk and even think, when very many of them themselves were anything except a good reflection of their own subjects! It's an irony I quite enjoy and leads to a fun character to write for!

My favourite DT writing is probably some of my Callum Crown speech drafts. I have a definite bias here since Crown's character is based on many figures I've encountered in my own reading (and his story relates to topics I enjoy reading about.) A lot of that is real nerd shit that wouldn't be interesting to 99.9% of DT fans (like a long conversation where Crown + Milt discuss a campaign speech Milt wrote for Crown and they bicker about if the wording/arguments used are truly honest.) Again, not super relevant to Dialtown-proper, but it explains a lot about why the world of DT ended up the way it did.

Realistically, the story of Dialtown itself is basically a weird little epilogue to a story that ended decades upon decades ago, centered around a bunch of small-town nobodies circling around the carcass of the last surviving main character of the old story.

I'm also very happy with Gingi's character partially because I know more about Gingi's past/future than you guys do. Gingi has such rotten memory that Gingi's backstory before DT's story begins is basically a complete mystery. Thanks to Gingi never getting close enough to any humans before laying its eggs, there's nobody in Gingi's life that can fill in the gaps. Companionship means so much to Gingi because prior to meeting The Gang, Gingi is aware of a massive and unknown block of time that's a complete mystery precisely because Gingi had nobody in its life. To Gingi, this time was basically akin to being non-sentient or dead, and Gingi would never go back.

While I was making DSaF, I drafted a ton of other stories on paper. I considered making most of them, but decided not to for various reasons, despite getting some solid feedback from collaborators. Bits of almost all of those project ideas made it into DT, with Gingi having traits from several other main characters I prototyped years and years ago. This includes where Gingi came from and what exactly Gingi is. I don't want to mislead people into thinking Gingi is more important than it is, like Gingi is the key to unlocking DT lore (I promise there's a LOT of aimless scuttling/devouring in Gingi's past and relatively little else!) BUT: Of everything from those old scrapped projects, Gingi is what I decided deserved to survive the most. And that has to count for something.

One day I'd love to make sequels to DT and perhaps explore some of the stuff I've described above, like why the hell the world of DT is the way it is or maybe where the hell Gingi spawned from. Thanks

[lemoneon]

TRANSCRIPTION AND BETTER EXPLANATION DOWN BELOW THE CUT!!!

BRIGHT LIGHTS;

Lightbulb and paintbrush; survivors

-i couldn't bring myself to separate them

Fan and Testtube; killer and survivor

-John and Jane doe type beat. Fan got corrupted in his obsession to solve the mystery of the egg.

Apple and marshmallow; Survivor and Killer

-bow is more of a malevolent force. When she possessed Apple and split her and Marshmallow, marshmallow sided with bow and her anger corrupted her.

Yin and Yang; Survivor and Killer.

-Two entities that had been sealed inside one body, set free by Test Tube [I literally only just realised I wrote 'by testube' twice, whoopsies. I had a bad day today cut me some slack]

[[also I can't remember which way round they go]]

Cherries; survivors

-i ain't writing allat it's probably gonna be changed fairly imminently

GRAND SLAMS;

Baseball and Nickel; survivors

-two survivors playing unawares of the problems they've caused. Baseball prefers not to think about it, but Nickel is just plain ignorant.

Balloon and Suitcase; killers

-Balloon, grappling with his inability to find forgiveness, slowly lost his mind trying to make it up to nickel.

-Suitcase ultimately ended up drowning. With nobody to save her, her realisation nobody would extend a hand to her corrupted her mind

-balloon doesn't realise he's hurting people, Suitcase feels like her damage to others is justified and earned

Microphone and Soap; survivors

-I can't think of any lore for those two rn, I'll figure it out.

Knife and Box; Survivor and Killer

-knifes just a guy

-Box, Betrayed and abandoned by her creator, had her fears turn to anger, and she rose again. 1x1x1x1 type role

Trophy and Cheesy; killers

-Cheesy literally got shredded I think it lobotomised him whoopsies

-Trophy's ego and pride was his downfall. L

-Cheesy knows what he's doing, but doesn't realise the implications, thinking it's all one big practical joke

-trophy knows full well, and uses his status as killer to show off his strength.

ONES I HAVENT DRAWN;

Dough; survivor

-the replacement to Bow, not understanding entirely who he was replacing, but knowing the story runs far deeper than he knows

Bow; killer

-a malevolent force furious over her caging and swift, unceremonious demise, now a vengeful ghost getting back at those who hurt her

Tissues; I literally have no ideas for him

OJ; Survivor

-the only one save the mephones who remembers what Inanimate Insanity once was, seeking to 'win' this new round of games and fix everything.

Taco; killer

-twisted by her desires, Taco seeks out those who outcasted her to get revenge and get them out of the game that ruined her.

Paper; Survivor/Killer

-struggling to contain his evil side, Paper tends to stay away from his fellow survivors, not wanting to hurt them. Evil Paper, however, is far more willing to bear fang and enjoy the chase.

Mephone 4; Survivor

-trapped participating in a game he made, once a friendly competition show turned death games, mephone 4 is desperate to take back control and find a solution.

Mephone 4s; survivor

-determined to help his "brother" set things right, even if it's from behind the screen.

Cobs; spectre role

I need to stop making II crossover aus with my hyperfixations

[gooselycharm]

hi there! i'd just like to say that your kris and noelle "something else" comic has been driving me insane /pos and i'd love to hear more of your thoughts on those two!! their relationship is one of my favorite things in deltarune and your comic just got everything about them so right 🙏

thank you for reading "something else"! oh man, [more of] my thoughts on kris+noelle.... i sure got some of those.

this was one of the first tweets i made after finishing chapter 2 nearly... freaking 2 years ago. and basically i've just been saying that over and over again in different ways because i'm still not tired of the concept yet and probably wont ever be LOL. i'm obsessed with how badly the narrative wants to force them into an easily categorizable dynamic, especially the romantic one in snowgrave. the literal THORN RING, the more possessive dialogue options, spamton calling noelle a side chick LOL... it all creates this unnerving visual novel bad end atmosphere that feels manufactured by someone who's only ever learned about romance through secondhand sources. they're two queer teens trying to navigate their changing relationship with the only role models they know being their parents' own failed heterosexual marriages. they're so divorced² (divorced children of divorce).

i also like that for being so tragically doomed coded they can be funny! both in a dark humor way and also like, genuinely funny, like the stories of them as kids with kris covering themselves in ketchup and hiding under noelle's bed lmao. i mean there's even something funny about the romantic trappings of the snowgrave route, like trying to put wedding cake embellishments on a crime scene... you know, funny like kids trying on their parents clothes but they're too big and for some reason they're also crying and covered in blood? um.

i'm also SOOOO interested to see how snowgrave will continue in chapter 3! i really liked the hopeful note chapter 2 ended on (well. i took it as hopeful anyway). there's that bit where noelle is talking to herself and she says something like "recently kris has been acting so strange and no one else has noticed... i have to figure out why" and then kris jumpscares her LOL but i think i took that one line and really ran with it. noelle really is the one who knows kris best and despite how scared she is, she's still determined to help them... i like the little subversion of victim/hero going on, the implication that kris might be the one who needs rescuing.

the additional story/lore that came with the spamton sweepstakes made me CRAAAZYYYYY like my GOD... it's cute that noelle likes glitches/creepypasta when kris is kinda a walking creepypasta <3 also, god, noelle falling asleep listening to kris playing piano in the other room... there's so much like. wistfulness and nostalgia and this like... distant/detached intimacy packed into how noelle narrates that scene. it's kind of funny how much there is to dig into when like on a surface level they're just fairly regular childhood friends who grew apart LMAO they're extremely deep to me okay...

on another note i guess i do ship them? i like their dynamic whether it's platonic or romantic (the best is a weird mix of both 👍). it just can't be boring LOL like... this is one ship where trying to apply cookie cutter tropes to them really falls flat and the game is ahead of you on that anyway. in terms of romantically shipping them, i honestly don't think they're doomed to repeat patterns forever... i think they could actually be good for each other! but that's not really the aspect of their relationship that interests me akldjf;alk;sdg maybe i will make 60 page comic of kriselle going to couples counseling some other time

ANYWAY i'm going to cut myself off here, because i really could go on forever lol. i'll give you some links for further reading though

hellspawnmotel's deltarune art

lula pillowbug99's deltarune art

this art by raspbearis which features prominently in my internal kriselle bible

my own unfinished kriselle playlist

my own essay on gender & allegory in deltarune if for some reason u are not tired of hearing me talk yet

okay bye now & thanks again for reading my comic!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[fourswords]

For informational purposes, can you explain all you know of LoZ 1 & AoL world building? If you want to, of course.

I don’t know much about those games, but I always found it interesting that Link in AoL seems to have went on the entire adventure to save one random girl—and when he has the entire Triforce, all he does with it is wake her up.

Like, what??? I guess I just don’t get his characterization, but I also don’t really know the lore, so maybe I’m missing something here (or maybe the cartoon was right, lol).

to actually understand it, i would recommend you read the manuals and their stories themselves (they're very short!). you can find scans of the first one here and the second one here. their stories are fairly simple, given that the games were released in the 80s, but i think that adds a lot of charm to it + it opens up avenues for imagination because it leaves juuuust enough vagueness that allows you to fill in the blanks in a fun way.

but! to tl;dr it all—ganon attacks hyrule one day and zelda makes the decision to shatter the triforce of wisdom herself in order to keep ganon from getting it. she then a) goes to hide the pieces of the triforce in the dungeons herself (which is like. an insane implication in the manual given that she's implied in the official art to be the same age as link. they're both TINY) and b) commands impa to go find a hero with enough courage to defeat ganon, before she is then captured by ganon and imprisoned within death mountain. impa finds herself cornered (she's an old lady in this incarnation) and then link, a little traveler of a kid, shows up and "skillfully" drives off ganon's monsters (HE DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A SWORD AT THIS POINT BTW. i'm convinced he was throwing rocks or some shit) and impa then tells link about what happened and link decides to help out, and goes through the dungeons rebuilding the triforce of wisdom until he eventually uses it + the silver arrows (because the silver arrows are the only weapon in the legend of zelda universe that can actually kill ganon, not just seal him away) to defeat ganon and save zelda, which makes him the only incarnation of link to have ever wielded the triforce of wisdom specifically (not just in conjunction with the other two triforce pieces). after that, he also takes the triforce of power from ganon's ashes and just. Fucks off. Like he literally just leaves hyrule with both triforce pieces:

"Link has destroyed Ganon, and has managed to rescue princess Zelda. Now that he's got ahold of the two Triforces, he once again goes off on his travels, making his way towards countries unknown … Who knows what the future holds for Link?"

but he is eventually shown to have returned at some point in the almost six years that have passed between the first and second game in order to help out with rebuilding, as per aol's manual (really love how it starts off by saying "Hyrule was on the road to ruin" like man those rebuilding efforts are NOT going well). close to his sixteenth birthday, the mark of the whole triforce appears on the back of his hand and he shows it to impa, who freaks out for a second before deciding to show link the sleeping princess, and she unlocks the door to the sleeping zelda by pressing link's triforce mark against it, which is an insane way to make a key to any door for the record. then she tells link the sleeping zelda's story (about her, her brother and the king of hyrule) and asks him to wake up the princess. so really, aol isn't about saving the kingdom or anything at all—it's literally just about impa asking link if he would recover the triforce of courage in order to wake up a princess who'd been asleep for centuries. and this makes sense, because link already killed ganon! the enemies come from ganon's monsters, who figured out that link's blood could be used to resurrect ganon, and that's where the danger lies. if not for them, the game honestly would've been pretty chill. just go to all the palaces, defeat the guardians, wake up the princess, and boom. done. and then link presumably somehow keeps all three triforce pieces after everything's said and done because they hadn't come up with the "triforce flies off after wish is granted" plot point yet.

it's funny to me because both quests link went on were at impa's behest. this random old lady he rescued in the woods asks him to save the kingdom? sure, yeah, why not, he's not doing anything else. he comes back to help rebuild and he gets a weird mark on his hand? well, impa seems smart, so he's going straight to her to see if she knows about it. impa asks him to wake up this cursed-to-sleep-forever princess by getting another triforce piece than the two he's carried around for literal years? sure chief you got it 🫡🫡🫡🫡 HAHA. but yeah, the reason all he does is wake her up is because it's literally what impa asks him to do! there's no real big bad guy to fight, only the constant paranoia that ganon will be resurrected if link's blood is spilled on his ashes. also, that infamous botw cliff scene? taken straight from the original legend of zelda's art. all the champions' abilities from botw? taken straight from link's own magical spells in the adventure of link, except aol's spells were all a hell of a lot more powerful (revali's gale = jump spell, urbosa's fury = thunder spell, daruk's protection = reflect spell/shield spell, etc.) and showcased the absolutely insane amount of raw magic the original link held in comparison to all the other links in the series. nobody was doing it quite like this kid. i love him and his two princesses.

[swordfright]

(hello dsmp!catholicism anon here... sorry for another long one)

i just finished ouroboros... waow!!! that house is alive and it loves you so fucking much it can never let you go...

when i read the ending it felt soo much like the ending of rgu to me (if you've seen that) except ofc dream goes back. but there's maybe a little more for dream than there ever was for anthy lol

for my requisite christianity/religion fill, i thought sam's moment of thinking of pilgrimage in context with visitation process sooo interesting. the implication that sam thinks of himself as some sort of monk (of course!)

but also (funnily enough) i took a course about pilgrimages and one of the things we were focusing our discussion around was this idea of 'contesting the sacred', which is to say that pilgrimage produces the sacred by virtue of the fact that it takes up space (like, if you're at a sacred site that holds importance to multiple groups, the fact that all of these groups might make similar passages makes the underlying theological claim more valid, by virtue of needing to be contested. if that makes sense!)

+ that line of "he just wants to be dream"—each person (quackity, bad, even sam to some extent) is bringing in their own interpretation staking claim over dream just adds to his religious value. and he thought if he was out of sight he'd be out of mind!

this ask is a week or two old (sorryy) but it is crazy that you sent this when you did because i literally started an rgu rewatch with my partner like, maybe a day or two before this ask popped up in my inbox. serendipity. i have some dsmp/rgu au art floating around somewhere on this blog but i guess i didn't tag it bc i can't find it anymore whoops

monk!csam is so funny to me, he'd look so stupid with one of those little monk haircuts <3 actually i think he's very paladin-adjacent, or at least sees himself that way. i'm thinking like, multi-class artificer/paladin? morally gray character who sees himself as lawful good, on a holy mission to protect the server by keeping dream locked up (<- oversimplification but let me have this ok)

ur pilgrimage lore is cool and i think you can sorta apply this to dsmp in that some canonical holy sites (church prime) are sort of legitimized because multiple characters acknowledge them as holy, or at the very least as powerful (thinking again about tubbo and dream's interaction at church prime on nov 16th and about the lads baptizing tina, which i talked about here). i especially love tina's baptism because it's like...iirc this happens while dream is in prison and has been in prison for months. he's thoroughly disgraced. a number of characters have either voiced their condemnation of him, or are complicit in his condemnation by not speaking out against his imprisonment etc etc. c!sapnap has (i think) already visited the prison at this point and told dream to his face that he deserves to stay there. and yet, sapnap still chooses to help baptize a new server member at a holy site founded and consecrated by dream. even at dream's lowest point, the other characters (even characters who hate him) can't help but legitimize this religion he co-created. crazy!!! they were insane for that!!!!

as for that last bit --- yeah, a lot of the conflict surrounding c!dream is spurred and/or exacerbated by this habit other characters have of projecting their worst anxieties about power onto him. i shared some thoughts on this here but many of the other characters seem to view dream as this quasi-mythic figure from the beginning, which is an inherently dehumanizing way to look at someone. c!dream is consistently othered by the perceptions of people around him, which makes it really easy to demonize him in later story arcs.

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s2 episode 24 "our town" thoughts

this episode was quite spooky. because cannibalism is real. but something about scully about to get her head chopped off and boiled seemed more outlandish than all the aliens and the guy that kills people with his shadow or even lizard man eugene tooms!

which is strange. because those things are pretty outlandish! maybe its because it was so much scarier than even evil lizard men.

let’s jump in:

so this is an episode involving more meat. did we need more meat, after the earlier meat processing content in s2 episode 10? many are saying no. but not chris carter!

we begin at a dirt road at night. in the state of arkansas. we have an older man and a younger woman named paula in a car, which is not suspicious at all! /s

oh and now the old man choking? is this natural or did she induce it with some poison. i mean maybe he deserved it, if she did. he takes some pills, so I’m guessing it is due to natural causes. now she beckons him out to the woods. 

into the woods. she says he has to catch her. is she luring him into a Bigfoot trap? we have yet to really see Bigfoot, and maybe he’s hungry. although Bigfoot is more Pacific Northwest than Arkansas, i think.

author's note: we tested negative for bigfoot in this episode :(

oh! this man tripped and is now surrounded by people with flashlights and very cool masks. get axe murdered, fucker.

back in DC! aforementioned fucker has been gone for 10 weeks and scully thinks the higher ups are sending them on a wild goose chase. “i’m not questioning the legitimacy of the case, just their motives in assigning it to us” <- damn, very well spoken by a rightfully suspicious woman

oh, but at the scene, someone saw a fire. and mulder says the fire is “supposed to be the spirits of massacred Indians” OH...

(mentally i was like, please do not be another scary Indigenous story episode. and we did in fact get that. sighs deeply. we can make things scary without making Indigenous people the scary ones! or using the trauma of genocide as a setting for spooky time! well, i'm sure you, dear reader, know that, so i shall not preach to the choir, but i will point out that these thoughts were going through my mind)

“these are only legends, mulder”, says a dismissive scully. and why is her hair looking excellent today. I mean not that it isn’t usually but damn. shoutout to the hair and makeup team.

the place on the side of the road where he went missing had a big fire! could be a bonfire, both parties thought. until mulder remembered a documentary he saw in college...

(hehehehe mulder spent college watching documentaries <3)

! MULDER LORE REVEAL ! wow it's been a while since i've gotten to format some text like that. he watched a documentary about an insane asylum in college and it gave him nightmares.

(and this may not be super relevant to his character, but to ME, it is, so i shall note it <3)

he's got the VHS from the doc all loaded up, and presses play on a guy rambling about a fire demon!! who was found in the same spot as the fire mark!!! dun dun dunnn 

(love the implication that he either purchased his own copy of the documentary that gave him nightmares in college, or had to go rent it from the video store. both are wonderful possibilities)

cut to arkansas. mulder is on the scene holding a plastic fork from the ground. wearing his silly sunglasses. lmaooo idk why they make me laugh. what a serious gentleman.

sheriff arrives at the scene. he says the witch’s peg to ward off spirits is normal there and also that the fire mark comes from illegal trash burning. and, as an American i am aware of how Americans love an illegal trash burn. but still. suspicious.

sheriff says the missing man george was chasing women out of town. lovely sounding fellow /s

wife questioning time!! he left her years ago. oh, but tea: the day before he went missing he was going to cite major health violations in the chicken plant! hmm... a cause for murder?

mulder gives the wife his phone number. also mulder is also looking very good today. but that is an evil voice in my head that ought to be silenced.

noooo, it's chicken plant time. no thank you ma’am, i would be out in the car <3

paula from the woods at work in the plant!!! taking mystery pills. seemingly in pain??

chicken cutting cam. oh, this is not for me! 

the agents chat with the manager, who says george was trying to shut them down. and while clocked in, paula is sweating. she just gasped in front of a whole bunch of chickens and some guy with very blue eyes. she sees a human head on the chicken stand and picks it up and throws it off. shoutout to this fake decapitated head and my best friends in the prop department for making such a funny creation.

(but of course, it was a hallucination, and she really just threw a poor chicken on the floor!!! his sacrifice was in vain... gone but not forgotten)

mulder is inspecting the chicken gutting operation and i've said it before and i'll say it again: he is braver than me. 

ohh, more chicken drama: george was filing a lawsuit about “line hypnosis” and it was dismissed before he vanished! he deserved to win. is there a meat processing union? there ought to be. but he was the only one citing bad health practices, the other 3 workers said it was fine... sooo what’s the truth…

“what’s that” asks mulder, who then gets shown the feed processor, and asks “chickens feed on chickens?” <- heartbreaking realization. many of us remember where we were when learning this information. i'm sure it will stick with him forever. and i'm frankly surprised he didn't know already.

NAURRR THE SLUDGE AND BLOOD nasty nasty evil

OH plot twist: paula is holding the manager with a knife to his throat… scully telling everyone to calm down. personally i would be not calm. she said “don’t get excited” but me? experiencing an active hostage situation at my place of work? i would be excited

NOOO the sheriff shot her and she fell into the feed conveyor belt processing… thing. sheriff i KNOW you are covering something up. you will not hide from me.

SHE GETS GULPED INTO THE FEED BELT THINGY GAGGG it’s giving the jungle by upton sinclair that caused many american 8th graders to confront the corruption of the meat industry

paula had gone to the doctor about headaches… like george!!! doctor had assumed the condition was stress induced. and they did have similar symptoms. 

treated them both with codine… ain’t that a bit strong?? this man doesn't seem to be a very good doctor, tbh. i mean i don't think the guy that works at the chicken plant to sew back on fingers needs to be an expert in everything but like. codine for headaches? umm girl.

mr. chaco of chaco’s chicken was paula’s grandfather… if i was a grandfather rich off of chicken money, my grandkids would not be working the processing line, let me tell u that much!

back to the agents: these two should not be looking as good as they do in a chicken processing plant. they had to really step it up today to compensate for the horrors of the set.

chicken man lives in a mansion. further evidence of corruption. paula, i would not have had you working in such conditions if i was your grandfather. there has been a deep wrong here, i can see already.

and he’s got a big hat and is feeding his chicken corn. not other chickens, like the feed he makes in his plant... seems he is aware of the ethical issues implied in his business. also, mulder with those weird ass glasses. 

cacho is going on about the subject of chickens. and how he built this town. he sure is taking an awful lot of credit for creating a town, pretty sure that's a team effort mr. chaco. he's also going on about how he thought george was trying to tear him down. 

AUTOPSY TIME!! rare degenerative disorder in da brain of paula. and scully has only seen it one other time back in med school because you can only really find it in an autopsy. nice work, doctor! <- i just typed “nice worm 🪱” so we'll let that stay for the added sense of whimsy it provides

but despite looking like a young girl fresh out of high school, paula was born in '48?! she was 47 years old. allegedly. this is not adding up. so they go on a quest to find her birth certificate and see what the truth is.

debrief in the car. so: odds are not great that she and george had the same very rare disease

during this discussion, our duo are run off the road by a chicken truck!!!! no! oh... he drove them into a river. mulder has shifted into rescue mode as the river is red with chicken gore. i feel someone might be distracting them and trying to get the body… (this was actually not the case i was just overly suspicious)

but more chicken drama: the driver had the same symptoms as george and paula! how can this be?!

“i just came up with a sick theory, mulder” (grabs her shoulder) “ooh, I’m listening” LMAOOOO this is sososo funny to me. yeah tell me ur sick theories scully you have my full attention.

GAG!! because it is both gross and shocking. her theory: what if someone put george’s body in the feed grinder, and then since it’s a prion disease, a chicken ate it, and someone ate a chicken, and it spread to the humans!!!! AHHHH! well that would be an epidemic, because they ship chickens out across the country… she glances knowingly, implying things could be very bad 

the river is filled with bird gore from the plant BLECH... who allows this??!! please say there are some modern regulations in place to prevent this being done irl.

mulder says he wants it dragged, thinking that maybe george is in there. and the sheriff is hesitant to do this. once again, i’m onto you, sheriff. i mean, a river full of chicken gore: it would be a good place to put a dead body.

and bam! a body is found. or rather. many many many bones. many bodies. and they are still going. damn.

so, we have a ton of bones. scully can put them into 9 distinct skeletons, one of which is in fact george. i love that she can do that, put the bones into distinct skeletons. she knows it's geroge from a pin in his femur!

“all of them share one, strange detail though” “well, they seem to have lost their heads” “… well, besides that” <- LMAOOOO idk why this was so funny to me... he really thought he picked up on something but he did Not.

here's the linking detail: all the bones are smooth and buffed like they have been polished. ??? who is polishing bones? it sure isn't me, i'll tell you that much. 

george’s wife is at the scene, learning her husband's body has been found, and she is sobbing. and the sheriff says “we’ll take care of you” now what does THAT mean? because it's not really sounding like the welcoming words of a man who is going to guide his neighbor through tragedy, and instead like there is something bigger at play here...

back at the plant, the doctor is mentioning another guy coming down “with the symptoms”…. omg. so this IS a known thing from the inside. mr. chaco knows but he isn’t doing anything about it!!!!! chicken dramaaaa goes crazy 

scully at the scene of all the bones, carrying a bucket of chicken. lmao. she is braver than me, for i would have gone vegan the first moment i set foot in chicken processing land.

mulder does some digging: 87 people have disappeared in the area in 50 years! that seems... a lot? and he thinks the same person or persons were responsible. he thinks they were EATEN!! boiled in a pot.

“they used similar evidence to prove cannibalism among on the Anasazi tribe of New Mexico” okay: 1. why do you know that 2. need to look into these allegations for myself and 3. Anasazi… that is the title of the next episode!!! what could this mean!! another cannibalism episode?!

scully is very sad to say that paula could have gotten sick from eating george :( girl I’m not convinced the chicken is clean put it down NOW 

cannibalism = eternal life? follow for more crazy mulder theories!

she puts aside the chicken……. good!

mr. chaco says “he’ll handle it” and george's wife doris arrives, saying she “can’t keep lying”… she says “she did it” (!!)

OH????? she... killed her husband? that is a bold thing to admit to.

“we’re gonna take good care of you”, says mr. chaco, which raises the question: are they a cannibal cult???? is that what he means when he mentions that he “built this town”???

now what the hell is going on. <- an interjection i stand by

mulder and scully are going to the courthouse to look at the papers and all the birth records are burnt!! doris calls mulder and says he’s afraid mr. chaco will kill her… they split up…. nooooo i hate splitting up!!! i watched so much scooby doo as a kid!

GASP! a guy in a mask like we saw at the very beginning of the episode is in doris' home!!! drumbeat playing while she screams…. overall, this is very not good, i wrote, referring to the use of Indigenous imagery for this murder, and also doris being murdered in the first place

scully at the scene of the murder ft. big ass flashlight. she gets in through the side door. gun: out. trench coat: open. looks: served. diagnosis: baby girl that could kill me, and i am respectful of the fact that she has this power yet refrains from using it on me.

mulder at mr. chaco’s house. mr. chaco has some… stuff in his home. including photos with Indigenous people and also bones. having human bones in your house, and especially on display, is not a good sign of ethics in play. and a skull. Oh! it says the skull is from a tribe in New Guinea... why tf does he have that. put it back???

at the back of chaco's parlor, we see a mysterious door. mulder is busting it open.

LORD ALMIGHTY, I DID NOT THINK THERE WOULD BE HEADS INSIDE??? HELLO???

so that must be where all of the heads that mulder noticed were missing have gone. they're sewn up sort of like shrunken heads. very spooky. once again, pour one out for the props department for such a creation.

noooo chaco is in the house with scully, who was investigating the call of doris. NOOOO HE KNOCKED HER OUT!!! this seriously needs to stop happening like i'm worried about the brain damage she is experiencing.

back to mulder cam. goodness. all of these heads. 

in a field now. doctor is serving some soup. to a bunch of people. who are eating around a big bonfire. do NOT tell me scully is in that meal....

she is not. YET! but he is bringing her over to be roasted. and they ate doris! chaco is yelling about turning on each other and how they were only supposed to eat outsiders. girl you shouldn't be eating anybody last time i checked. 

man in the mask shows up with an axe. and chaco is decapitated in front of scully. who is put into the decapitation thingy next. GIRL THIS IS FUCKED UP!!!

mulder on the scene, just in time. he shoots the dude in the mask.

“you alright?” he asks, brushing her hair back after lifting her out of the decapitation machine. my good friend, i would venture to guess that she is not quite alright at the moment!!! this will take an awful lot of unpacking!!!

sigh. but the tenderness of the near death experience. coming back to life in someone's arms. yeah i'll romanticize that.

TEA!!! the sheriff was the one under the mask!!!!!! i knew he was up to no good.

wrap up: chicken place shut down. unclear how many citizens of the town ate people. 27 have become ill with prion disease. chaco’s plane was shot down in 1947, and he spent 7 months with a cannibalistic tribe, and also he was born in 1902, so he was 93 at his death- so the cannibalism really WAS extending life. and we see some more feed being scooped to the chickens as scully says his remains have yet to be found. end scene.

HUH???? what in da hell. so what are we thinking kids…?

well, i'll tell you something: turns out i am afraid of cannibal cults, no matter how outlandish they seem! i guess when you get a villain or evil situation of the week show like this, you WILL learn exactly what kind of fear pushes your buttons. i can imagine almost nothing scarier than being led to the slaughter like scully was. seems a purposeful commentary on the meat industry, especially when taken in with the other meat episode this season.

so, if i were scully, i do think i would need to take a week or so off. but she is just built different than i am.

some things bugged me here. first of all, like i mentioned, you don't need to throw in Indigenous people to make a scary story. like is the thought of a bunch of arkansas cannibals not horrific enough? the scary was there!

second, i have not been doing a kidnapping count, but i feel that scully is getting the rough of the deal here. i believe in gender equality when it comes to characters being kidnapped. like, an even 1:1 ratio. why are we denying mulder his damsel in distress arc? does anyone think about how he would feel? how nice it would be to see scully burst in with a gun and shoot the fellow that was about to cannibalize him?

still, it is rare an episode actually spooks me, so i must give credit where it is due. even if it felt a little outlandish, your girl was frightened! scully needs a vacation now. i also thoroughly laughed at the sick theories line and his funny sunglasses.

it's funny to note, but i like the episodes that are either very silly and light hearted, or incredibly angsty the best. and that may seem contradictory, but you cannot tell me that one breath and humbug may be on opposite ends of the tone spectrum, but they are both objectively Perfect. i'll have to think more on why they are the best in my opinion, but i think honestly i would watch these two read the dictionary.

[nickcharleswife]

Help Wanted in Causing Chaos

In a few weeks I’m hosting a PowerPoint night for my friends & I’ve decided I want to do it on Teen Wolf: the Movie

(I watched it once back when it came out & cannot bring myself to watch it again after I ranted whilst pacing for 15 minutes about why I hated the ending)

((I only stopped ranting because I, & my friend who suffered through it with me, needed to go to bed))

However, this group knows nothing about teen wolf plot except what haphazard pieces I’ve told them over the years, so I’ve got some ground to cover & explain before I can get to the movie.

(I have also given everyone a suggested presentation timeframe of 5-10 minutes with a cap at 15 minutes because there could easily be enough people & topics to fill 3 hours, which would be fun but long)

Therefore I am requesting assistance!!

Right now my two biggest gripes that I feel can be adequately described by the show’s canon are:

the nogitsune’s random new ability to adopt werewolf traits despite the Shugendo Scroll (since that’s literally how they killed him before)

AND

Derek’s death plus his handing over responsibility of his child to Scott (& evidently Allison???)

My current thought process is that I go through the show’s canon in chronological order, starting with the fire and ending with the conclusion of season 3B. I’ll add a few highlights of the additions of Liam & Mason so their presence, if mentioned, in the movie makes sense but otherwise I’m skipping a detailed discussion of the later seasons.

Questions I have that I’d like suggestions on:

Am I incorrect on the werewolf-Nogitsune hybrid problem? I get that the Nogitsune in the movie manages to have a corporeal body cuz of the dimension hopping (god those words strung together hurt my brain) but I’d think/hope the same theory applies??

dear lord I’ve just realized/remembered the show has precedent for dimensions given the whole Ghost Riders plot — that’s not a question I’m just mad now

Is there a different or additional point about the movie I should be making?

What pieces of canon do you think I need to be clearly highlighting in order to get these points across?

I’m taking suggestions for looney bits of lore to include specifically from seasons 1-3

Should I pivot and discuss a different terrible angle of Teen Wolf? OR even just spend the time explaining the whole show for funsies rather than deep dive into the movie?

Also I’m taking presentation title suggestions. The current one is “The Murder of Teen Wolf Canon: how Jeff Davis took his own story out back and shot it”. Another idea was: “Teen Wolf: The Movie — the canon that broke itself to make a terrible plot”

I do acknowledge this is an insane amount of material to cover in 15 minutes or less…hence my request for help in hopes that yall can help me narrow down my points (pretty pretty please?)

Alright…thoughts? Feelings? Emotions? Ideas? I eagerly await any and all assistance the fandom can provide.

(Listen, I realize I’ve not even touched on the “Eli is definitely Stiles Stilinski’s kid” angle but I fear that requires even more chaotic explanations 😅)

OH AND I ALMOST FORGOT - we are DEFINITELY discussing how Adrian Harris was deader than a doornail and should’ve FUCKIN’ STAYED THAT WAY (which leads us down the rabbit hole of infinite questions and implications about how the movie begins in the first place)