#+ figuring out how things will evolve

[rot-to-the-core]

i really like the headcanon that aventurine texts like a boomer because he doesn't spend time with teenagers and mostly uses tech for work purposes and dr ratio has picked up some slang from his students

that being said i can't stop laughing at the idea aventurine discovering stickers on microsoft teams and whatsapp good morning gifs and texting like this as a result

vs ratio 😭

[fisheito]

UNLOCKED SCORCHING SUN (sunburst fever) DANTE ! (Spoilers? Here is a short summary of my reactions):

-eiden i live for the cheesy things you say when you wanna bone someone. ehehehehe when the corny roleplay actually works too well🎶🎵

-oh um 😳 eiden getting himself off bygrinding against Dante's leg ahaha💦💦 ok uhhh 💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦

- THE CONFUSED SPUTTERING WHEN EIDEN GETS SUDDENLY BLUE BALLED🤣🤣

-oh shir dante lore drop

-oh SGIT DAnte is working even harder than i thought just to make an equal society like,, dude,, that is sO MUCH to take on YOU ARE ONLY A BABY. BUT YOU TRY TO FIX CENTURIES OF INJUSTICE 😭

-aawwww...... gentle.....🥹

-DAMMIT EIDEN STOP BRATTING FOR 60SECONDS AAHHHHHAJAJAhaha oihh ahhhh

-dante is like the Grinch he doesn't know what the dokidoki in his chest is (.it's his heart) but. He'll get it one day

- they're cute 😭 and funny 😭😭 and eiden's "why do *i* have to go" is so... PETULANT i love them they're bickering idiots 🥳

ah, correction*: why "THE HELL HAVE" i gotta go. to be fair, that is a mild reaction to dante suddenly cockblocking him from himself(?). yeah. selfish lover moment deserves at MINIMUM that amount of sass 🤣

[meringuejellyfish]

old er. not particularly creative but its healthy to draw quickly without tons and tons of planning every once in a while. the apprentices have a lot of potential for interesting and fulfilling designs of which ive already seen a drawing or two of which makes me feel like i cant really do much better and also a bit of it being too early in my eyes to land on clever motifs for a future agott and coco (versus tetia and richeh which do have material) Bye

[kafkaoftherubble]

把死人给带回来？ 难道...?！

// If They Are Bringing Back the Dead...

This post contains spoilers for Chapter 184.1 of To Your Eternity.

It also contains speculations galore. This is NOT a meta essay.

Shoutout to my homie branetheory in Discord!

Thanks to them, I was reminded of what Parts of My Brain had wanted to talk about:

Bruh. I can't believe ToFu made me so high last night that I forgot to talk about this.

Honestly I regret nothing Okay, memory water.

A little Kafka Aside: I'm gonna have to consciously ignore how... not-there the scientific backing for this is. Honestly, this Memory Water thing reminded me of the New Age/Pseudoscientific idea of "water memory" or Masaru Emoto's "water consciousness" thing or DNA teleportation. However, this is a story where weirder shits have happened, so suspension of disbelief willingly and gleefully granted. I just need to get this out of my head first.

To reiterate, Kaibara's experimental procedure involves

Extracting cells from a person's body

"Turn" it into water (how?)

Make a "clone" drink it (who?)

-----------------------------------------------------

Who could these clones be?

The only clones we know so far are the Mizuha clones. Their existence seems to imply a similar purpose to Hayase's descendants—they are supposed to inherit Hayase's Will, which is 95% "get injected with a tumor we call the Left Hand Nokker."

But Nokkers have long become invisible and fully integrated into this ecosystem. In the Future Era, they are embedded in tag chips, and they grant the bodies they possess all sorts of abilities and augmentations.

What would an inheritance of Hayase's Will even look like here? At first, I thought it would be similar: a tag chip with the Left Hand in it. Mizuha's, uh, possession (for the lack of a better word) manifested through the same mechanism other Nokkers used, after all.

However, the story gradually told us that the clones had all been massacred via an unknown operation for yet-untold reasons. Why would they do that?

Were these clones failures?

If they were failures, then it would make sense why Kaibara treated them as disposable; after all, in the past, the Guardians always exalted Hayase's Descendant(s) no matter how incompetent they were at their mission. Failure to secure Fushi's seeds I mean love never made them disposable enough to be killed, right?

So, as branetheory (crediting my homie even though they might not see this ahahhahah) also thought—

Could it be that Hayase herself has been successfully reincarnated in the body of one of these clones? (8)

I assigned this hypothesis an 8, or "80% confidence level."

Is she who you're gonna see, Bon?

Why would Kaibara need so many Mizuha clones in the first place? They only need one Descendant. They only have one Left-Hand Nokker...

Unless these clones were made specifically for bringing back Hayase. They were all experiments. Few experiments ever go right at the first trial. But this? Experiments this challenging and important as "recreating our legendary progenitor, Hayase?"

It will definitely require a lot of trial and error. So these clones were made to be expendables.

Honestly, who would name their offspring with numbers if they weren't meant to be seen as expendables?

----

There is an interesting point to note: Memory Water only works if one has a Nokker implanted in them. Remember how Abel can't drink it and instantly know the answers to their stupid-ass questions?

So do all clones have Nokkers implanted in them? They all own a tag chip, after all. But there is only one Left Hand Nokker, and that bitch seems deadset on possessing only Hayase's appointed heir (or in this case, Hayase herself).

Does that mean

all the clones have their own Nokkers, but none of it is the Left Hand, until the Experiment? (3) OR

all the clones have empty tag chips until the Experiment, in which the Left Hand Nokker is then implanted inside before the subject drinks the Memory Water? (6) OR

other hypotheses I could not think of at the moment? (1)

------------------------------------------

Doro and Her Sisters: Were They Trying To Stage a Rebellion Against Kaibara's Highest Echelon? (7)

Assigned (7); "70% confidence level"

Could this scene actually depict a failed experimental result, where #32/Doro was the subject? After all, she didn't look like she died in a massacre. She looked like she died alone, leaving her sisters behind..

Doro liaisoned with Fushi in secret. So secretly, Tonari didn't know it happened.

Why would she do that? Way back then, me and the Discord gang had speculated some sort of clash between Doro and the rest of Kaibara. At that time, I think our speculation was that it had to do with the Wish-granting Orb specifically.

But now, with this new information in mind...

Could it be that the liaison was part of the clones' planned rebellion? (6)

Assigned 6; "60% confidence level."

It could be that, in addition to passing vital information about Kaibara to Fushi (who is still not exactly forthcoming about what they know so far), Doro was also trying to ensure that the Wish-granting Orb will never fall into the Highest Echelon's hands.

Was her conviction formed out of concerns about what Kaibara might do with the orb?

Or was her reasoning more pragmatic—she didn't want Kaibara to have the power to crush her rebellion?

----

Back to the number-as-naming convention. What if these weren't names, but the assigned turn of each clone for the ultimate experiment (6)? If that's the case, then Doro is the 32nd experiment that failed.

That's a lot. And the fact that she failed would mean the experiment will keep going. The clones will keep being bred to be used for these experiments. It's a conflict ripe for seeds of rebellion, right?

And so, there are extra hypotheses as to why the clones were massacred in the first place:

Hayase has been successfully reincarnated (8)

The clones' rebellion plan has been found out (7)

Hayase has been successfully reincarnated AND the clones' rebellion plan has been found out (5.6; 8/10×7/10)

----------------------------------------

Dolly's Purpose(s)

While Doll's original purpose might have been for amusement and fun—Doro rescued it from some trash heap and just engineered it to be a playmate—I had always found its ability to dish out powerful punches suspicious. Why would a playmate be good at granting people concussions in the first place?!

And it was good enough to take out mercenaries, right?

I'm quite confident that Doll's punch is a defensive ability to guard whatever's stored in its memory (9).

I should review what Previous Me had speculated:

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves or consciousness

Doll holds the Left Hand Nokker within it

Doll is a combination of Doro's consciousness/brainwaves and its original AI

There is also the speculation that Doll is the Wish-granting Orb itself, but I think the confidence level for that hypothesis has gone pretty low... at least to me, personally. It sits at less than 10%.

Now, I want to add new hypotheses and rearrange them from most confident to least:

Doll's memories include Kaibara's top secret: key infrastructures, their real master(s), their experiments, whatever information they have gained about the Wish-granting Orb, their master plan to counter Fushi, and the like. Things that could give rebelling clones an edge. (8)

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves/consciousness integrated within its original AI (7)

Doll holds Doro's brainwaves/consciousness AND it is Doro's consciousness/memories that possess knowledge of Kaibara's top secret (5.6; 8/10×7/10)

Doll holds the Left Hand Nokker (less than 2)

The first (and by extension, the third) hypothesis can be supplemented by the fact that Kaibara really wants the Doll. Why, if not because the Doll holds vital information regarding the entire company?

They could go after it for Doro's consciousness, sure, but the priority would drop a lot more, wouldn't it? ...Unless the third hypothesis is true!

The second hypothesis can be partially supplemented by Abel's dedication to possessing the Doll; he really cherished Doro, and to him, the Doll could lead him to her again. He also claimed that Doro "is still alive," though when pressed, he gave no evidence.

Was it wistful thinking, or could he have been privy to Doro's experiment to transfer her consciousness into Doll? Did he really know nothing about Doro's death?

There is also the "Now I am human" line Doro uttered while blindfolded. Given we now know what the clones are used for, Doro might see her existence to be inhuman/subhuman because of her real purpose. Maybe, to her, she could feel more human by being a doll than in her human body.

Hell, who knows? Doro might secretly envy Abel's humanness—a guy who was likely born from normal copulation and couldn't fit in with the rest of the Tagged society, yet all the more a genuine human being than the rest of them.

-----------------------------------

What is the nature of Doll's Brainwaves?

Could it have been a digital transfer, or could it have used a similar mechanism to the Memory Water?

----------------------------------

Miscellaneous Implications of Memory Water Bringing Back the Dead

Bruh I swear if they reincarnated the Nameless Boy to torment Fushi I will fucking sever my friendship with Left Hand Nokker and nuke their Paradise. Oh hi Left Hand, nothing over here.

----------------------------------

And that concludes my hypotheses round-up, updated to only Chapter 184.1. Remember! Y'all are always welcome to reblog and add your own thoughts to it!

Fuck, I will be so honored if y'all Fushi-fied my writing by adding absolutely anything.

Thank you for reading my ramble. Rest assured, I have prepared just the right image for the moment I clown myself by having most of my hypotheses come out spectacularly falsified:

(Hi everyone this is Kei from Ajin)

[nexus-nebulae]

suddenly realising that a decent amount of our system's dysfunctions might be due to OCD 😭😭😭

[forestofmemories]

you know what i think would’ve been incredibly funny? if dawn’s togekiss had turned out to be that Evil Togepi from dp142

[skrunksthatwunk]

ive started a brainstorming doc for the kaiji koi-koi fic and a large large amount of it is just trying to figure out what works about kaiji and how i can innovate without diverging too much from the tone or themes etc. anyway ive been thinking about how the modifications fkmt makes to the games in kaiji function (i.e. minefield mahjong, restricted rps, one poker, etc), and how they each tie into key traits/feelings of playing to original versions. minefield mahjong centers and intensifies the feeling of waiting on a crucial tile while trying not to leave too much of a trail, one poker leans heavily into the bluffing via raising/calling elements of poker, and rrps sort of flips rps' main issue(?) on its head by removing its arbitrariness (while preserving at first the illusion of arbitrariness), and thus making it like.. something you can win via strategy and not just luck. ANYWAY i think ive figured out the key thread to pull for koi-koi and im very excited about that

[good-wine-and-cheese]

Lowkey hate when I have the rest of my fic fully figured out because then I end up getting excited about the endgame stuff but I still have to like, get there.

Like I have some 6-7 chapters left and at this rate I'm going to write the back end 5 before the actual next chapter lmao

[thatringboy]

rwby in a honkai star rail AU where the plot is exactly the same except the Brothers are now Long and Tayzzyronth and Salem hasn’t realized that those aeons are dead is this anything

[sqlmn]

What does he look like as drowned rat?

Them, in all their drowned rat glory.

They start off as a really good agent, filled with confidence and really convincing to others! Then start to find out things on their own that the agency would rather they don't know (also through very illegal means but hey, whatever) and decide to dip.

Before leaving though, they act as the mentor to Clifford, a young and impressionable agent in training... and make sure that he's the best agent he can be according to their very harsh standards. They then even tell the higher ups, hey, kid's ready and you should give him a nice name for missions. And then suggests Bravo, convinced Clifford will accept any code name with gratitude, they want it more personal. But like. Personal to /them/.

So every time someone uses that code name, it's basically praising their hard work with the guy. Anyone who uses the name Bravo is acknowledging Clifford's skills, but more importantly, acknowledging the one who gave him those skills.

[atanxdoesstuff]

my favourite koi boi <3

tried a bit of a different artstyle, i think it turned out quite nice :3

fun fact: the colour is ALL on one layer (except for the background)

anyway lemme know if you wanna see the procreate speed paint vid

[obligatory-name-change]

thinking about a house. the house is sentient but not in a way i would typically recognize. it would view me as both a part of itself (similar to how an animal is a part of its ecosystem) and also something inherently lesser (like how an owner views its pet). i can't communicate with it in any meaningful way. i can't even tell when it's paying attention to me if it doesn't try to draw my attention. it can manipulate whatever is inside of itself except me, which would give me a sort of edge if it ever viewed me as a threat, but since it doesn't it sees it in more of a "awww look at your little claws" way.

[goldensunset]

i need to make a full outline for what i’d headcanon kh characters’ pokémon teams to look like at some point

[chronurgy]

highly-specific assumption: you come across like you enjoyed history classes in school or at the very least have an above-average interest in history, like particularly biography and narrative takes on history: not memorizing the details of wars or trade agreements but on the lives of people in the past. not because you literally discuss history in your fanfiction, but because of the way you pull together threads of setting detail, the way the world informs the person.

Highly specific but correct anyway! A good portion of my history education really focused on trends and currents and understanding how technology shaped social change and vice versa (example - the rise of protestantism as a function of the printing press and rising literacy levels). I found that view of history particularly fascinating and almost certainly did enjoy it more than average. I love seeing what shaped historical events and how people were shaped by them in turn. Some of my favorite questions to ask when reading or writing are "how did people respond to that/how does this change things" and "what made this person the way they are" and I guess that comes through!

[jurweem]

"UH-HUH!"

[wibblyparfait]

pt 2 to this post, mayb i shouldve waited til i could post both these vers together but i do not CARE because Ilis <3

aka. treat making an older-ish version when he gets stuck in the Library after LobCorp 👍 despite how L Corp Was (statement.) he kinda preferred that over the Library & hence is sorta itching to Get Oute, trying to pretend hes not homesick & wanting to see his moms again & helping out w receptions mainly for the sake of Getting It Done rather than Cuz He Wants To Do A Good Job like before o(-(

he is not perceiving his own burnout arc tho shh let him pretend all is well & continue Chesedkissing esp now that he is Not A Box & prolly needs better stress coping mechanisms than lowkey picking up smoking </3 DNFNDF