mysaldate - Tumblr blog

[mysaldate]

Turned off anons after the last one. I still have plenty in my askbox so I'll try to work my way through them. Feel free to send more asks about ships/fandoms/characters/whatever, just take note that anons are off for the time being.

[mysaldate]

So you hate Rook for being a gaslighter but you got no issues with Jade? Yeaaah sounds like you're lying to justify being hater 🤪 you prolly weren't even abused just making shit up so people can't call you out

This may be wild to you but I don't need to give you details of my abuse and don't need you to believe me either.

That said, not every manipulative/toxic character is a gaslighter. Only one of these two pulled a "you should trust me more than your own senses because I know you better" and it was not Jade. Also, only one of them pulled a "will you believe me or everyone else" and it was also not Jade. And let's not forget "everyone will leave you if you don't do exactly as I ask" which was ALSO not Jade.

I don't know if this is coincidental timing or if you're a fan of the big artist who got these and similar asks but pretty much in reverse over the last couple days but their interpretation of characters isn't a justification for you to attack people who believe otherwise. Just like them, I've been gaslit, and for almost two decades on top of that, so I dare say I know what triggers me and what doesn't. If they choose to call Jade a gaslighter, that's their right and I hope whatever reason they like headcanoning him that way, it gives them the closure they're looking for. I don't see any of the traits of my abuser in Jade, I see all of them in Rook. That's why one is fine with me while the other is borderline a trigger.

Hope this helps and you can stop being a hateful little gremlin defending the rights of fictional characters over real people's.

[mysaldate]

1, 3 and 10 for the violence ask game for any fandom 👀

1 – the character everyone gets wrong

TWST: There are a few but the most victimized ones are probably Sebek and Rook. Sebek because people just call him racist despite the fact he's way less racist than Malleus and Lilia simply because those two are conventionally attractive. Rook because his fans are rabid and will defend everything he does and call him a good friend and healthy influence despite him having a history of literal gaslighting, stalking, physical harassment, death threats, and more.

AFK: Zaphrael, hands down. Not helped by the fact Lilith themselves seem to think having a dick makes you responsible for your wife's psychotic tendencies. Honorable mentions to Gavus and Eugene because people can't fathom their gap moe.

Makai ouji: It used to be nobody but in recent years, people for SOME REASON started calling Baalberith a good father? Like, that's the guy who raped his son as a child and continued to sexually, physically, and mentally abuse him for thousands of years. He had one extra where he was nice to other people's kids, that doesn't erase everything he's done to Sitri.

3 – done in previous ask

10 – worst part of fanon

TWST: People need to learn to read before they open their mouths. Just because Vil is strict about not ruining your diet when you're getting ready for a MILLION MADOL PRIZE CONTEST doesn't make him fatphobic or whatever. You signed up for this, you better work for it. Vil just gets a lot of fanon extremely wrong and against core parts of his character (don't even get me started on the racism in the trasfem!Vil community)

AFK: The entirety of Journey. That game isn't canon and will never be, although maybe calling it fanon is an insult to fanon. Oh well, in that case, we need more non-furry fanfic, please.

Makai ouji: The one person claiming that there was nothing gay about the show that literally ends on a "I came back from the dead because I love you so much" and features two (albeit forced) gay kisses. Otherwise, the fanon was always very nice and pretty cool.

[mysaldate]

20, 3, and 4 uwu

20 – part of canon you find tedious or boring

TWST: Honestly? Not much. It's not tedious or boring, it's either good or very frustrating. If the actual writers are on the writing job, I don't think I can get bored even if the canon concerns characters I couldn't care less about. If it's the US team, then they so far always broke the world and characters and made an absolute clownshow of very interesting concepts and ideas.

AFK: I don't care how many more "Lucretia is the victim" comics they make, she's not. She's a stalker who went on to kill dozens of children because she couldn't protect her own child and couldn't communicate with her husband. Is Zaph completely innocent? No, he has his issues too. But Lucretia is way more responsible for this whole mess and only getting a pass because she has a vagina.

Makai ouji: Nothing. I am 100% biased, yes. I love Makai ouji to bits and every scene is important.

3 – screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on Tumblr

Hoo boy, there's a LOT of these. Let's see.

Mental abuse isn't real, only physical abuse counts

If you're not willing to share intimate details about your abuse, you aren't allowed to point out behavioral patterns of abuse you went through

Having any criticism or simply disliking a non-white character is racist

Having any criticism or simply disliking a female character is sexist

Having any criticism or simply disliking a character someone else hcs as neurodivergent is ableist

Whatever you enjoy in fiction, you 100% always condone in reality

All siblings hate each other and positive sibling relationships are unrealistic

TwstEN is a good localization

4 – what was the last straw that made you finally block that annoying person?

I have a weird relationship with blocking where I either block very liberally or don't block until it gets way beyond annoying. I'm guessing one would be roping me into a paid project for a big company with an insanely short deadline (one week for five separate videos) without consulting me first, then bailing on our meeting time about it and getting pissy when I called him out.

[mysaldate]

Twitter is so dumb as always but the fake fans who grift to whatever character is popular are extra dumb.

"NEW INFO ABOUT VIL OMGGG!!!:".

Thing we knew since Halloween 2020

Thing we knew since union birthday

Thing we knew since Vil's backstory in book 5

Thing we knew since Halloween 2020

Thing we knew since Broomquet

Straight-up lie

Do two minutes of checking before pretending to care, I know you like using Vil as a shitty ship accessory to your favorite abuser and don't care about his character but any Vil fan will be able to see right through your bullshit.

[mysaldate]

Titty Trio makes me giggle lol Showeth/describeth? 👀

Bless your heart, asking about my WIPs 🥺

Titty trio is a very nsfw fic about these three big booba guys from Twisted Wonderland:

Trey

Jack

And Sebek

Who agreed (or were coerced, what's the difference) to take some potions and get milked so that Mostro Lounge could make some special deserts. Hallucinogenic drugs are involved so each of them thinks it's actually someone they like fondling their titties. Should've read the contract they signed more carefully ngl.

[mysaldate]

Uhhh I guess I can try, I have quite a few WIPs too. My titles aren't very funny or cryptic tho.

Basketball club

Birthday Vil

Cater and depresso

Cater getting slayed

Endless Halloween Night

FloVil baby

FloVil library attempt

Heatwave (empty)

JamiKei

JeiVil

Knight of Dawn

Liberta Ezizh

Lil bunni

LiliKei (empty)

love spaghetti

Lucius wreck

maid Azul

MalleDeu

Overblot (empty)

Respen getting wrecked

The darker Respen

Titty trio

Lost touch with most mutuals on here but I'll try with @kaydreamman

ty @fyodorkitkat for the tag <3

RULES: make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it! and then tag as many people as you have WIPs.

actual brain sex

2. russian forest

3. ada feifei

4. i love fyodor

5. Tey does Taxes

no presh: @sappyking @linklethehistorian @bungoustraypups @stillnotginger10 @doctorforks

[mysaldate]

2, 5, and 18 for the violence ask game

It can be for any fandom you like

Let's go! *cracks knuckles*

2 – a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

Let's do a few fandoms then! However, I will preface this by saying I don't usually have a strong top/bottom preference. Arguments, though, I can make!

TWST: Vil wouldn't bottom due to his deep-rooted trust issues (which are pretty justified tbh). I also feel like he has issues with control so him bottoming isn't very likely for me to see. Jade wouldn't usually bottom because he's a control freak and a massive sadist. I could maybe see him bottoming for Floyd or rarely Azul but other than that, eh, not really. Azul wouldn't top because first and foremost, I don't believe he would have sex with most people in the first place. And by the time he's comfortable enough about that, I believe he'd have enough trust (and ego) to let himself be pampered.

AFK Arena: Respen is absolutely a bottom, a bratty bottom but a bottom still. I don't have any deep or profound reason, I just don't see him topping. He's kinda too irresponsible and a bit lazy to top lol. Gavus is a bottom too. Anyone who doesn't see what a massive bottom he is never bothered to actually read about his character and just goes by first impressions. The gap moe is very strong with Gavus. He's a malewife, he's rash, he's emotional, he's irresponsible, he's way too hot-headed, and doesn't think about things enough. He's like the definition of a bottom.

Makai ouji: I don't ship Michael much, definitely not in a sexual way. That said, I'm going to say he wouldn't bottom because of his massive trust and control issues and his angry cat energy probably makes him a very selfish lover too. Not to mention my biggest ship for him is with Sitri, which leads me to... Sitri is not a bottom, he's the bottom. Boy is so submissive and timid and just... aaaaa

5 – worst discord server and why

Honestly, I don't know. There used to be one TWST server, not sure if that one is still up, but it had a very annoying rk/vl fan who took it upon themselves to "convert" me to a ship that was a literal trigger at the time, and would hijack every conversation I had with anyone in there to talk about that ship instead, and when I asked them not to, they ran to the mods and accused me of shit and because they were friends with the mods, I got kicked. There's also the server I first started playing DnD in where the DM, his wife, and their mutual friend would repeatedly try to SA my character and gaslight me into thinking I was the problem for not wanting that to happen to my poor poor girl.

18 – it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on…

TWST: Sebek. Everything about Sebby is amazing and people are sleeping on him because he's not conventionally attractive and has gap moe which apparently people are afraid of these days. Some also see him as a "rival" when it comes to Malleus, ugh. AFK Arena: Lorsan. No, Journey doesn't count, Journey sucks and did him so dirty. He's a precious little baby people-pleaser bunny and not a slacking idiot hated by everyone in his life. Fuck Journey. Makai ouji: Like... this series existing. People sleep on this amazing manga, it's so good, it's so perfect, it's literally so awesome. I need more fans please I beg of you go read the manga or even just watch the anime please.

[mysaldate]

@special-vibe It's your boy!

Ruggie!!🏵

I love him omg. I would feed him every day.

Some pencil sketches I scanned because I was too lazy to draw in digital.

He is such a baby boy. I can't.

[mysaldate]

The secret wish is to write a fanfic that someone loves so much they make fan art of it, or to create a drawing that someone creates an entire fic based off of it.

[mysaldate]

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?

[mysaldate]

Might as well give this a shot!

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥

the character everyone gets wrong

a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

what was the last straw that made you finally block that annoying person?

worst discord server and why

which ship fans are the most annoying?

what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

worst part of canon

worst part of fanon

number of fandom-related words you've filtered

the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

worst blorboficiation

that one thing you see in fics all the time

that one thing you see in fanart all the time

you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

there should be more of this type of fic/art

it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

you're mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like...

part of canon you found tedious or boring

part of canon you think is overhyped

your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

ship you've unwillingly come around to

topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

[mysaldate]

how nice

[mysaldate]

TWST Rarepair Week 2024

Our annual Rarepair Week is upon us once again! Stay tuned for more information coming soon!

Rules Prompts Discord

[mysaldate]

Trust me, you do not want them to touch Baden. They'll ruin him. Just like they ruined everyone else. They made Brutus a pacifist. They made Lyca a superstitious coward. They made Arden a recluse. They made Lorsan hated by everyone. You do not want Baden in Journey.

I really want to see Baden in the AFK Journey........... Due to Valen's skills, Thane will most likely not be there. It is very sad. But we have hope for Baden💔my little meow meow

[mysaldate]

Nothing too personal with the first one ofc

Please Reblog This If It’s Okay To:

Send questions about yourself

Ask questions to/about your characters

Ask about your headcanons 

Send questions about your works (fanfics, art, music, RPs, etc) 

Ask about popular ships/headcanons

Ask about plot ideas you’ve had but haven’t acted upon yet (snippets of AUs, a scenario you wish to write/draw but haven’t gotten to yet)

Questions about other ships/headcanons that aren’t as popular or are rarepairs

Questions or comments about favorite tropes, headcanons, characters, foods, weather, or anything else you are okay in answering!

[mysaldate]

Important addition I somehow forgot about:

There is a boss fight game mode that used to be amazing and made the game's grindy battle system the main point. With the right timing and strategy, even F2Ps were able to routinely score in top spots. Then the manual mode was removed and now it's a whale-fest.

AFK Journey review by a beta tester

AFK Journey came out yesterday and I see it getting quite a lot of attention so I figured I'd at least put this out there so that people don't go into it expecting something it's not.

I have been in the testing of this game and continued to provide feedback all the way from the alpha test back in the fall of 2021 and through all the beta testing that started in April or May last year. I have also been aiding in making lore-focused streams about AFK Arena for over a year and seeing as AFK Journey is supposed to be set in the same world, this will be relevant later. I have also been contracted to make officially-backed videos about AFK journey – a deal I left for a number of reasons, not least of all the reasons I have for writing this post. Now with credentials out of the way, let's get to the actual review.

The visuals take your breath away

Let's start with something positive – this game is gorgeous. Farlight Studios have outdone themselves yet again and after the vibrant and futuristic world of Dislyte, their take on Esperia is surprisingly tame, in a good way. The colors are soft and lovely, the models look amazing, and the customization screen of the main character is awesome! The characters look great and move in a smooth fluid fashion. Ult animations, idle animations, and the overall feel of the characters as well as the skins added into the game thus far are all nice and fit into the wider world well, not to mention look wonderful and clean, a lot of effort and skill went into making them. Sadly, if we ignore the skins and ult animations, this has been the case since the alpha without any major changes.

Gameplay could be improved upon

I will be up-front about this, I don't care about gameplay all that much. However, I have to say, the game is not open-world, despite claiming to be so. If you venture off the paths, you get stuck on fences, stuck on bushes, stuck on rocks, or just prevented by an invisible wall. There is no swimming, no climbing, no gliding, or most other things we came to associate with open-world games. The vertical gameplay is a plus to be sure and you get to pick characters to follow you around without having to use them in battles which makes the exploration more fun. The overworld puzzles are creative and fun too! The real issue comes with... everything else. At the start, fights in the overworld are easy. However, they will scale up way faster than you can level and you will soon be adding an additional roadblock to the list: enemies. The combat itself is creative but requires attention as the autoplay function is usually wonky at best and outright damaging to your party at worst. AFK Journey is not living up to its AFK title either. One thing I found really annoying was the story progression not being tied to the AFK rewards. You have to grind a separate set of battles to increase the AFK rewards you receive. The AFK rewards and story also still cap each other so you won't be able to progress in one without progressing in the other.

Outside of the main story, the game offers multiple game modes. If you don't enjoy PvP, be warned that the game puts great emphasis on doing your PvP arena every day and being good at it if you want to build any good characters. The game also has a labyrinth mode which tracks your health across multiple battles and allows you to gain upgrades as you go. This mode is somewhere between AFK Arena's and Dislyte's in terms of fun. It is more varied than AFK Arena's which makes it more fun and less repetitive, however, you have a limited number of characters you can bring in which severely limits how varied your gameplay experience might be. It was also recently nerfed to the ground and now poses little to no challenge. Honor Duel is another PvP mode in which you buy upgrades and then fight randomly generated players with supposedly the same level of upgrades as you. If you can claim eight victories before three losses, you win the run. However, the factions and characters are currently so imbalanced that depending on your luck, you may not win a single battle in a run or you might breeze through all of them without any effort.

The gacha element is pretty much non-existent. If you scrounge up enough resources to pull, you likely won't get anything much. You'll be relying on hand-outs of pulls and PvP shops to build your characters. AFK Journey should not be called a gacha game. It is, at best, a game with rare gacha elements.

Co-op is a lie

While AFK Journey does have a cooperative mode, in the form of connected guild dungeons, it is not really what it advertises to be either. All your guildmates can separately whale on some enemies together and depending on how you do, you will receive rewards that are generous compared to what the rest of the game offers. You can lend your friends your characters but they'll be the ones fighting with them, not you. The most social aspect of the game is seeing other players around the map and spending your friend points to buy different animations to perform at each other. The chat function is also pretty bad, though not as terrible as it is in AFK Arena.

The guilds and friends to add also don't work cross-server. So if you have a friend on another server, you won't be able to see them or talk to them or enjoy even the limited interactions that are actually in the game.

The story is disappointing at best and nobody knows the world

You may have noticed I've been avoiding talking about the story of a story-focused game. This is where the biggest disappointment lies. Let me preface this by saying, the story didn't always use to be this way. It used to be actually really really good back in the alpha and even at the start of the beta. However, in the last three months, the game underwent five or six complete rewrites of the main story, each worse than the last. As things stand right now, there is no nuance in protagonists or villains, there is a literal diarrhea conversation (like an actual conversation, several scenes long) for no reason, most of the story could be summarized on one page and the rest is pointless bickering that makes every other character utterly unlikable. The main character is an amnesiac going by the title of "Magister Merlin" despite the fact that Merlin from Arthurian myths, whom this is clearly based on, is an existing character in the world of Esperia.

In terms of lore, AFK Journey is not even close to what it promised. It promised to be a game set in the world of AFK Arena – a world with surprisingly rich and interesting lore that has been built up over the years. Unfortunately, it is very much not that. Not only are important world events treated as nonexistent, not only does the writing erase character relationships and dynamics, but the writers couldn't have even been bothered to learn the basics of the world they're working with. Factions get swapped around randomly for no reason, and important factional politics have been flipped on their heads. An organization that is supposed to be an outcast is now the ruling class, the timeline is all over the place, and even the names of things are not only inconsistent with AFK Arena but also inconsistent with Journey's world itself. The loading screen already breaks the world by telling you magic didn't exist until the "Fall of the gods" which is supposed to have happened recently, yet the entire time you will be running around ruins of magical civilizations from ages long past.

Speaking of the gods, there are characters who straight-up don't know what a celestial is. If you know anything about Esperia's lore, you know how important religion is to its history and how jealously the gods guard their authority. The thought of someone having completely no idea of what they were is strange, to say the least. The game also invents new gods instead of using preexisting ones with the same function and even disregards events relating to the gods that changed the course of Esperian history – such as the death of Esperia's primary goddess Dura. In fact, AFK Journey doesn't even consider Dura important enough to have a model. Once again, this is the primary goddess of this world. As for the characters brought over from AFK Arena, they have been butchered beyond recognition. The warlord of an entire country who slew countless enemies is now a pacifist whose only interest lies in spicy food, a hard-working girl who, for the sake of her family, developed her skills until she was recognized by the stars and became the fulfillment of a prophecy is now an angry Mary-sue who was always perfect and didn't actually need to work for anything – and gets offended if you suggest otherwise, the list goes on.

The sound design is refreshingly good – for the most part

As a game with voices, we have to talk about those first. The voices, for the most part, are alright. None of them really stands out as particularly amazing, though I do like a few of them more than the others. I like Fay's voice quite a bit. Sadly, none of the characters from AFK Arena is voiced by the same person anymore, and in most cases, it is a massive downgrade. And that isn't talking about the worst offender of all – Valen, one of the main characters you'll have to listen to the whole time. Valen used to have a voice that fit his character – suave and kind of bold and full of life. Now he sounds like he's still going through puberty, and he's a whiny crybaby at that.

The sound design outside of the voice acting is great. Once again, this is a very strong point for the game. The music and background noises are great and even the menu sounds are not disruptive in the least. If anything, they feel natural to the world.

PC client could as well not exist at all

This is coming from second-hand knowledge as I have played AFK Journey on phone but so far the reviews I've seen appear to be as follows: Game lags when walking, freezes when trying to talk to NPCs, and is prone to crashing. Mobile devices perform better for AFK Journey than PCs do.

The mystery of translation

Back in January, the only publicly admitted localizer has been fired from the project. About a week and a half ago (around 10 days before the game's launch), the official Discord posted an application form looking for translators for the game. Apparently, the game has several translations already out at this moment, but none of them particularly good. Some are even so bad it's sort of funny. In a really... pathetic sad way. It probably doesn't help that they're still looking for translators as we speak.

In conclusion...

I wish I could recommend AFK Journey, I really do. I've been excited about this game ever since its announcement and I've been providing as much feedback as I could throughout both alpha and beta. The organization has been awful and the game suffers for it. Internal changes happened a few months back and since then, everything about the game just fell apart. Even things that were good before got ruined and now all that remains is pretty visuals and nice music with nothing else worth paying attention to. It is a major letdown when it could've been incredible. The game is nothing it was advertised as – it is not an open-world game, it is not a gacha, and it is most certainly not set in the world of AFK Arena.

I hope the people who decide to play it can still find some fun in it regardless.