gremlinaristocrat

[gremlinaristocrat]

Howdy. Fellow Foreach enjoyer here, just wanted to say I enjoy reading your comments on the tumblr update posts every week : )

That's very nice to hear, thank you! (You might want to join the discord, there are a lot more people saying clever things about Foreach there.)

[gremlinaristocrat]

[gremlinaristocrat]

"I, er, ah, love Danganronpers. Especially, er, ah, Nagiter Komaeder, with whom I would consider myself 'kin'."

Now more than ever, it is important to put some time aside each day to imagine Mayor Quimby pretending to be Danganronpa trash in a canny but inept attempt to capture the weeb vote.

[gremlinaristocrat]

Now more than ever, it is important to put some time aside each day to imagine Mayor Quimby pretending to be Danganronpa trash in a canny but inept attempt to capture the weeb vote.

[gremlinaristocrat]

I want there to be a Fangan where someone takes the protag aside sometime during Case 2 and tactfully tells them that while everyone appreciates their contributions yelling "No! That's Wrong!" is kind of rude and annoying (especially if you do it like once a minute every trial jfc) and then for the rest of the game they interrupt by saying "I think you're missing something" or "That doesn't seem quite right" at a reasonable volume.

[gremlinaristocrat]

Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.

[gremlinaristocrat]

Jean subtly sets up the room allocation game such that he's guaranteed to end up with either Kai or Desmond.

No matter what you pick when playing rock-paper-scissors against him, he wins; metatextually, this implies he somehow fixed the game so he'd get access to Desmond's room.

Desmond's room is special because it contains A) Desmond and B) a shitload of weapons.

In conclusion, I'm like 85% sure Jean's going to be the killer and/or victim next case, and 95% sure he's at least going to be heavily involved/suspected.

[gremlinaristocrat]

A list of several things Polyta doesn’t do while making the choice to abandon Jiro:

Try to get Sunny’s input (you know, that person who demonstrates unique insight into Jiro’s mental state, and who must still be within shouting distance since you heard the Bastard’s monologue) or rescue her (depending on how that girder angled as it fell you might not even have to reach her, just pop the portal horizontally instead of vertically and hope the kinetic energy from Sunny’s fall into it doesn’t lead to her being splattered across a palm tree)

Leave Mercy some healing potions in exchange for the guns (they’re miracles to her, and if you’re about to conclude the mission it’s not like you need them), or try to recruit her (you’re short on manpower, and the Major would probably get a kick out of having something to protect again), or leave any kind of physical evidence your adventure with her wasn’t just a psychotic break (she jumped to “guilt-induced hallucination” when faced with something she couldn’t understand, a keepsake could do a lot for this lady’s sanity).

Question whether an eldritch bloodangel bapy and a crazed serial killer with a visible head wound are really your best sources of life advice.

Agree in principle, resolve to use the Bottled Homecoming whenever you’re next in trouble, but keep trying to save your allies for as long as it doesn’t have unavoidable costs for you. (You’re not in immediate danger, the Bastard left chasing Jiro! There’s no downside to giving yourself five more minutes to figure something out!)

Consider whether the people you’re returning in order to lead will still accept your leadership after surrendering their shared crush to the lizardbirb imperialists and the Nightmare Gargoyle. (Or whether they’ll even trust your version of events, given how surprising Jiro’s actions were, and the fact you’re the only witness to the fate of your main competitor for said leadership.)

Pictured: what Casandra will probably be imagining after hearing your story.

. . . I mean, Poly-sama probably even made the """right""" decision based on what she knew (though there’s a lot of strategically relevant stuff that’s happened on the island which could make her look and/or feel like a clown and/or monster when she gets caught back up). But this kid is so profoundly BAD at being heartless that for her the best consequences are legit more likely to come from “abandon Consequentialism, just stick to Principles and Virtues”. (c.f. a couple pages ago when she tried to make the Hard But Necessary Decision™ to abandon an ally and betray a protector so she and her love interest would be free to . . . launch themselves into the Lake of Searing Flame?)

To sum up, this is a very clever depiction of a character being a very specific and sympathetic kind of stupid. It’s like she’s shut part of her brain off (which is exactly what happened, she’s committed to doing something her entire personality is against, of course she’ll self-sabotage, of course she won’t be able to dispassionately analyze how to get the best return on her sin-vestment), it’s like she’s convinced herself that because she’s making a sacrifice and going against her moral code the universe owes her a win (I’d say that’s symptomatic of living in a decently-polished strategy game where every downside is paired with an upside – if the unit has higher ATK for the same cost that means it has lower SPD and/or DEF, if you violate your morals in the name of your island then that means your island will be better off - but actually I’m pretty sure real people think like this a lot), and more than anything, it’s like she’s a traumatized teenager doing her best (we never heard what happened to the rest of her Love Battalion, did we?) and letting a stressful situation force her to miss out on like a dozen Pareto improvements to her strategy.

UPDATE!

Read Foreach from the beginning HERE.

Keep up to date! Join the Discord here!

[gremlinaristocrat]

[gremlinaristocrat]

perfect bot interaction on twitter

[gremlinaristocrat]

Did anyone notice that the one modern sounding thing Alastor ever says is when he says "now he's pissy, that's the tea" when singing about Vox? Being conspicuously old-timey is basically his religion but he'll use slang if it helps piss his ex off make the case that he's still relevant in the modern era.

'Alastor was so chill while challenging Vox' no the fuck he was not. He was just acting calm. Because that's what he does with Vox, acts like he's beneath him because he knows it pisses him off. He literally heard him talking shit from across the street and hauled ass across the city to his station to do a radio show. You better believe the second he was off the air he let out a torrent of swears against Mr. TV man, the same way he did in Vox's very first appearance.

[gremlinaristocrat]

Theory: Su's going to (try to) use Samium's book to wipe all her memories except the ones experienced solely by Shiko; everything happening now is just her psyching herself up for this finale, while remaining in denial that that's what she's doing.

[gremlinaristocrat]

Outstanding Ambiguities in Almost Nowhere

I here use ‘outstanding’ both in the sense of ‘unresolved’ and ‘extremely good’; I sincerely hope we never get a definitive answer for these.

Was Hector Stein originally a human being?

I’ll lead with my favourite: we never nail down whether Hector was a person placed in a Chestromath-y crash by Anomalings, or an NPC they stitched together to play a part in someone else’s dream.

Obvious signs seem to point to ‘human’, but consider:

He’s preternaturally charismatic, compelling, larger-than-life, and yet thoroughly unimaginative; all his tricks are copied from elsewhere. Once you start seeing the parallels between him and the (other?) fictives, it’s hard to unsee.

IIRC we never hear about his pre-crash history from anyone, even though that would be an excellent potential source of slander and scuttlebutt; considering the partisanship of the authors, this silence is conspicuous, ergo suspect.

Every other character seems subject to the convention “living humans and Anomalings are referred to with a first name only; fictives get surnames (which we don’t bring up for fictives we like, unless we’re making a point of reminding you they’re fictives); Annes can have little pseudo-surnames, as a treat”. Hector is the sole (apparent?) exception.

If he was a real boy, this raises the question: what sort of person’s Shade-assigned fantasy life looks like being cast into the role of “the teacher all the schoolgirls get crushes on”? And if he wasn’t . . . has everyone on Earth spent the last few years constantly hearing about the daring revolution being headed by (a fanfic version of) (their equivalent of) Severus Snape?

(I love this one the best because literally everyone in-universe would know the answer, and the only reason it’s not clear to me is that none of the half-dozen narrators felt it was non-obvious enough to be worth mentioning. Terra Ignota vibes, amplified to and past the point of parody; 11/10, no notes.)

What exactly did Azad do to Anne Twenty-Seven? Under what circumstances?

Yes, he hurt her. Yes, he broke her heart, abandoned her, and chose her sisters over her, only to abandon them in turn. But Azad – in the chapter he spends spelling out his various crimes – is weirdly vague and reticent about the exact nature of his original sin, the snowball that started the avalanche: all we hear for sure is that ‘it involves trust’. Is he staying quiet for his sake, or for hers? Is he magnifying his evil, or minimizing it? Or is this all because it’s another thing everyone already knows, the part of the sordid story the Nowhere-to-Hides wrote across the stars, and Azad only feels the need to confirm the allegations and fill in the blanks?

We don’t know; we don’t get to know.

Was Azad actively tortured while in Twenty-Five’s custody, or ‘just’ given awful working conditions?

We see a man stooped over a desk, compelled to eternal labour and penance. We see him later, rescued and refusing to believe it, insisting this is one of Twenty-Five’s tricks. Is this paranoia born from guilt, or past experience? Grant asserts based on his condition that “Hector’s guys” must have been “doing some pretty crazy shit”, but this is never confirmed or denied.

Later still, we hear his screams as he processes what happened in the crashes. How many of these are driven by guilt from Michael’s crash, versus trauma from Twenty-Five’s? Did she really have him working full-time on translation, or did she take some time every now and then to remind him of how her wants are structured?

I think Azad (and his co-authors) left this one in on purpose. He knew this book would be read by his victims – the Annes would have been top of his mind, but literally all of his in-universe readers would be living in a world wrought by What Azad Did – and wanted to preserve ambiguity for their sake: everyone (save Twenty-Five herself) gets to read their preferred ratio of self-inflicted vs other-inflicted suffering into the monster.

What happened to Annabel?

This is so weird. Shades don’t kill. They don’t even kill animals. And during the fall of Advanced Containment, long after she was supposed to be dead, Sylvie describes her as “stable, contained”; the dead don’t need much containing. But the official story is that she was slaughtered by Anomalings when Hector first left the crashes.

I think the official story is wrong. I think she disagreed with Hector, defected from him, joined up with Sylvie’s side . . . and then her former allies rebased her, rewriting her story so she dies at the most convenient moment. But mnemopoesis preserved her contribution to the manuscript, in the form of some autobiographical chapters (written in first-person, unlike any of the Annes the authors knew better, with the jarring justification that they just had to try mimicking her unique voice and personality), a deep understanding of the games and codes used in Michael’s crash (would we really be able to learn as much as we were shown from Eleven’s wilfully neglected witchcraft, and secrets Cordelia stole from Twenty-Five?), and a pair of un-attributable comments from a [REDACTED] co-author.

. . . unless, of course, that’s exactly what Azad and his co-conspirators want me to think: another piece of anti-Stein propaganda, all the more effective because they made me put the pieces together myself. (If that’s the case, it’s the kind of trick I can feel proud about managing to fall for.)

Who was [REDACTED]?

I mean, you know my opinion. But if it wasn’t Annabel, who was it?

It wasn’t her . . . and wasn’t a fabrication . . . I like to think it was an Anne who actually managed to erase herself from the narrative. Someone who stepped from the stage, and just kept walking, refusing to re-inflict the wound, leaving the entire sorry mess behind them.

How much damage control was Hector’s faction doing behind the scenes?

For most of the story, the world and its’ population remain precariously preserved, balanced on a bed of knife-edges. But with uncanny regularity – especially when you remember this is technically a war story – nukes don’t fly, crashes don’t fail, and Named Characters don’t die.

Towards the end of the story, we find out that Hector has thrived as long as he has by – essentially – savescumming. A little after that, Anne Eleven dies tragically, nigh-simultaneously with a substantial fraction of humanity, as the dog-god of war lets himself slip. And immediately after that, Sylvie restabilizes, as he figures out how to make sure Hector’s trickery can never work again.

So . . . how many disasters was Hector quietly averting? How many of Sylvie’s more destructive tantrums did he (unwittingly?) head off? How many times did he find Advanced Containment, and then rebase away his knowledge of it to save the people trapped inside? Does he even know? Does anyone? What’s the expected lifespan of this too-brave new world now our heroes have successfully smashed the Undo button?

[gremlinaristocrat]

Overthinking Sylvie’s Strategy

So, I know the Gio&Molly vs Sylvie fight in Ep2 was mostly about getting the protagonists to show off their personalities and powers . . . but I think if you read (way too far) into the strategy Sylvester uses it tells you a surprising amount about him.

Start at the start. Sylvie overhears our heroes talking about how they’re villains. Instead of sneak attacking them while he has the drop on them, he starts a dialog, to confirm they’re actually bad guys (and maybe to satisfy his own desire for drama and/or indulge in his sense of invulnerability). Gio responds by confirming he’s a criminal, calling Sylvie a kid and initiating combat.

It’s kind of overshadowed by what he does later in the fight, but the doc is pretty reasonable early on; I get the feeling he’d have been even more willing to talk things out if dealing with Indus’ stupidity and Mera’s manipulation hadn’t shortened his already-short fuse and made him Done with Trying To Talk To People.

Sylvie’s first move is to use sleep pollen like he did with Indus earlier; unlike all his other attacks, he doesn’t call its name when he uses it, probably to minimize the chances that his targets will figure out what it does in time to stop it. This is a 10/10 opener, with the potential to harmlessly incapacitate enemies and end fights before they start.

When that fails thanks to Molly’s quick thinking and Gio’s creativity, he follows it up with Counting Sheep. This is another solid decision, and unlike the last one, it actually works out for him: his minions swiftly swarm and overwhelm his opponents.

Pictured: Flawless Victory.

Note that – as far as I can tell – Sylvie has basically won at this point. Molly and Giovanni have no way to stop the sheep before they nibble and poof them into unconsciousness; all he has to do is stay the course.

And then our boy screws up. He banishes his own army – or maybe incinerates them, the animation isn’t clear on that point – in order to confront a twelve-year-old girl with her worst nightmare, while having no idea what that nightmare is or how he’d be able to use it.

He also picks this point to sacrifice his vantage point, achieving no obvious gain. I don’t think Jello did this on purpose, but it fits very well that Sylvie literally gives up the high ground for no reason – while forcing his opponents onto a different patch of high ground – at the same time he’s metaphorically doing that.

Let me psychoanalyze the psychoanalyst: what the hell is the good doctor thinking when he unleashes (almost literal!) hell on the adorable cosmic brownie? What’s going through his head when he passes up sure victory for the chance to re-traumatize a child?

Well, it’s possible that Counting Sheep drains stamina faster than it appears to (though he doesn’t seem winded after using it). It’s also possible that he’s worried about one of them using ranged attacks on him, and feels the need to end the fight ASAP. The magic system in EE is intentionally kind of loose and vibes-y, so there’s an endless list of possible excuses.

That said, I think the most likely answer to “what was he thinking?” is “absolutely nothing”. This whole thing looks like a (legitimately!) clever synergy-exploiting strategy he thought up a while back, rarely or never got to see in action, and is just unreflectively executing on even though a more humane approach would have straight-up let him win.

I didn’t notice this until the Youtube comments pointed it out, but I think it’s neat Gio never calls Sylvie a kid again after he finds out the doc has issues with it (except that one time he does it to signal that he’s putting on a show for the cops). He’ll mock you mercilessly, and maybe steal your stuff, but our glorious pink-haired overlord will not use That Word You Dislike to describe you once he knows you dislike it.

Anyway, back to the fight. Sylvie tries to negotiate with his prisoners in the Flame Vortex, since apparently his Psychology PhD never taught him that confronting people with their literal worst nightmares might make them unreasonable and/or push them to extremes. Gio escapes with Molly; Sylvie doubles down on the Nightmare Fuel; Gio responds by thwacking a ball of yarn at him.

This is another point at which – again, as far as I can tell – Sylvie has basically won. The fact that Giovanni resorted to such weird and desperate measures suggests Gio & Molly don’t have any better ways to attack or escape from their current position. All the alleged genius needs to do is take cover behind an exhibit and let his summons finish the criminals. Instead, he cancels his own winning move (again!) so he can summon Dr Beefton, escalating (again!!) in a way that doesn’t actually help him (again!!!).

Like, seriously, what was the plan here? There are a lot of words you could use to accurately describe Sylvie’s colleague/alter-ego/fursona, but ‘agile’ and ‘nimble’ aren’t among them; if Gio and Molly had decided to hold onto their high ground on general principles after Sylvie (apparently) fainted, or if they’d sprinted off in different directions instead of trying to stand their ground, what would he have done then?

From here on out, the beef revolves around Beefton. This tells us very little about Sylvie, except maybe in terms of how much frustration he’s repressing, and what being powerful means to him.

Pictured: What Peak Performance Looks Like

So, what does all this say about Sylvie? He’s clever, willing to hear people out, and merciful when he can get away with it; however, he makes dumb or pointlessly cruel decisions under pressure, and follows a prescribed plan instead of adapting to the enemy; will escalate when surprised or provoked, even when it’s counterproductive, choosing moves which feel strong instead of ones which make sense. In summary, he’s the world’s smartest dumbass, and (at least in this part of the story) acts more like a stereotypical cop than the actual cop character.

He’s getting better quickly, though. I think a lot of this is symptomatic of him being new-ish to fights, and especially new to fights where people get hurt and/or which last more than one move . . .

Yeah, it shows, and not in a good way.

. . . since he gets more flexible and responsive when fighting Mera . . .

Pictured: Character Growth

. . . though, uh, apparently not enough for him to realize that he could demoralize her and/or broker a truce by offering to remove her Epithet with the amulet if he wins.

Out-reasoned by the tweenager; that’s embarrassing.

[gremlinaristocrat]

Su is still refusing to spell out the reason existing in Kuroka's body - as opposed to 'just' Kuroka's social and economic situation - was so unbearable (either trans, disabled or some kind of Flowerverse equivalent; some of the throwaway lines in the last dozen chapters make me think trans is most likely) . . . and she's just kind of ignoring the way she started self-administered self-annihilating assimilation therapy literally as soon as she started wearing Shiko's body, way before recruiting Ran (after specifically calling out the number of days she's been using her books as the main hint that she was hiding stuff from the reader before) . . . and she's also acting like it was unforgivable and futile for her to go through assimilation therapy at the usual rate when she was a year behind but like girl literally what were your options, you didn't have any excuses to feed your therapist . . .

I really like how, after a hundred chapters of trying to hide exactly how horrible she is, she's flipped to trying to hide all the mitigating and extenuating factors. "I'll make them hate me, but hold back some excuses so I can be certain at least some of the hate is unfair" (or some similar reasoning), she just cannot let anyone see her entire self for any reason, honestly peak character writing right here.

[gremlinaristocrat]

Playing as Saturn: "You know, I bet Luna-Terra's faction doesn't have this level of internal conflict and dysfunction."

Playing as Pluto: "You know, I bet Luna-Terra doesn't have to make so many high-stakes decisions on her own."

Playing as Luna-Terra: " . . . are you ****ing kidding me?"

[gremlinaristocrat]

Day 13: In which the Haruspex finally finds time to visit the lavatory.