readingwithgoblins

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I am a huge fan of retiring to my quarters

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crab crab crab hand hand hand frighten

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id tag game changer spoilers but what does that even mean at this point

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obsessed with this

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Robert Irwin and a quokka

(Source)

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not many people know about “goldilocks code” from the 80s where queer men would have hot porridge in their left pocket if they were a papa bear and cold porridge in their right pocket if they were a mama bear

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Important fucking reminder!

I come bearing important news from the House of Hope!

If you play as a druid and use Wild Shape you can avoid the conversation with Haarlep and sleep next to him.

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84 years after everyone, I'm playing Stardew Valley ^^;;

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Kevin the Kitten and Satan the Cat 🖤 Artist: 📸@vanessastockard

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The Aera problem

Thought I'd write up a post about this, mainly because I want to put this information out there but I don't want it to be in a reply where it'd come off like I'm descending on any specific person.

To clarify ahead of time: You're perfectly free to accept whatever parts of official XV-related content you want! You can enjoy them and be excited about them and I'm happy for you. I just also think there's a lot of context that some people might be missing on this that they might want to know.

So, Terada. For those who don't know, Terada took over game director duties as Tabata was forced to focus on the next project (Agni/Forspoken, at the time it was still closer to Agni). That was about when EpP was being developed, though that was mid transition and not fully him. Which is why you start to notice contradictions around that point.

Terada is a fucking sexist, there's no putting it mildly. He's done such delightful things as: arrive at a fan gathering, notice it was mostly women, and open his panel with "wow that's a lot of females". Another time he talked about how it's guys that play video games, don't you know? Women don't do that. And said that there's no point in the game having more costume options for the characters because "nobody wants to dress up men".

He's also a liar, loves to take credit for other people's accomplishments, and everything he makes is just really badly written, but those are kind of tangential to what I'm trying to say here.

The main issue is that then, after no previous mention of Ardyn ever having had a love interest or family, we suddenly are told "actually, ALL of his motivation was about a dead woman". We had been already given plenty of reasons for the way he was: He'd been in the process of healing the Scourge, he was accused and "ostracized and daemonized" in his own words. We know he was imprisoned for some time, (again: I am treating pre-Terada stuff as canon here, so it wasn't necessarily all the time up to when he entered the Niflheim political scene) and we know he's unable to die! That's plenty!! That's a great reason to be upset!!!

And suddenly Aera gets introduced and none of what I just said is given *any* more attention. In fact it's actively stated (by him being perfectly docile at the start of EpA) that none of that mattered! He's fine! Totally not broken by betrayal and imprisonment!! Instead we're given a new character that has no reason to be there and no agency at all. She's just an accessory for Ardyn to be sad about.

Time to bring up another anectode about Terada. They did a livestream when the EpA anime dropped. They did a Q&A there. It wasn't live questions. These had been gathered, vetted, and pre-approved. He had EVERY OPPORTUNITY to prepare for it. He gets asked something along the lines (paraphrasing but I remember it very well): "I'm very interested in Aera! What can you tell us about her? What is she like?" What followed was a solid minute of the guy going "uhhh... ummm... well... uuuhhhhh.... she likes.... uhhh.... tea.... and uhhh... a-archaeology?" You know, like she has a shot in the anime where she's drinking tea, and another where her and Ardyn are in some old ruins for 5 seconds.

Alright, long enough post already. One last thing is many of you might point out that there's little difference betweeen Aera and Luna. And that's a valid point, but I have to disagree. Luna has many problems as a character, I won't deny that. She's criminally underutilized. But she has infinitely more agency than Aera, she's at least mentioned/acknowledged infinitely more, and the game actually properly explores and develops Noctis's OTHER reasons for doing what he's doing, so she's not solely a convenient piece of motivation for him.

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This video is for The Slenderman only.

If you are not The Slenderman, DO NOT WATCH

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