#'core' of their character and how they've changed as a result. i refuse to believe that you all Want to believe that people are static

[junonreactor]

hm

[jinmalos]

id love to hear your thoughts on the teaser for wave 4

OK OK OK OK. I MEANT TO GET TO THIS SOONER BUT THEN I GOT CARRIED AWAY WITH SOME ZINES AND SOME OTHER PROJECTS. BUT, I just finished speedrunning the game for my sibling to catch them up, Future Redeemed comes out tomorrow, I am Not A Normal Person About This Game.

Spoilers below, not particularly thought out bc i've given myself a headache from finishing the game and sobbing my eyes out again as of 3 hours ago

I. Genuinely have a lot of thoughts and they've changed a bit since it was announced and the subsequent trailers we've had, as well as refreshing myself on XBC1 and XBC2 lore since then. I will start with my joke theory, For the longest time I had a joke that boiled down to "Alvis is Riku and he's really enjoying larping as a nopon rn." Why the fuck would that nopon know so much. NOW, I'm more in the "give me the name of your god you nopon piece of shit." who is this fucker loyal to. IS IT MELIA? IM P SURE ITS MELIA. BUT LIKE. STILL WHO TF IS HE. WHY DOES HE KNOW SO MUCH. WHAT HAS HE BEEN UP TO.

Also! I'm not actually sure how I'm feeling on this game being a prequel! I'm not fully convinced it is yet even though thats EXACTLY what it looks like. Part of me really wants an epilogue to the base game's story or at MOST something that is running concurrently. It's not that I dislike prequels, I LOVED torna i've genuinely played torna all the way through upwards of 6 times by now. It's just really enjoyable. I just kinda wanna know what happens...AFTER the plot. But I'm not gonna be DISAPPOINTED if it genuinely turns out to be a prequel.

Madly in love with A's design, I think someone may have transed their gender =w=

Jokes/wishful thinkin aside, I wonder if Ontos will be playing a role in this. Alvis claims to be from a long line of seers, I wondered if maybe the Processor that is Ontos has just been spitting out random entities and A + the mystery White Alvis are just consequences. I wanna know how Z ties into that. I also wanna know where everyone..IS. Like, where is Fiora or Reyn, or Pyra and Mythra, or even fucking Morag or Tora. No mention of them, so i'm curious to know...why. Shulk is clearly Shulk here, and Rex is clearly Rex, If they aren't part of the cycle there HAS to be an explanation as to how they're in Aionios and what happened to everyone else, right?

I'm excited to see what's up on that front though. I refuse to believe that Alvis has become evil, not because I think it's implausible, but just because i dont want that evil Alvis to be Alvis because his concept art is WHITE. My opinions on Alvis being DIRECTLY Ontos have shifted to being a bit more..flexible on the concept because of A and the revealed mystery character, but in my heart he's still directly Ontos and I hope the Shalvis Divorce Arc ends happily.

Wishful thinking, of course, is that i'd like to see the Trinity Processors reunited in some way, shape, or form. I love joking about Aegis Sibling Family Reunions/Learning Where tf Ontos is, but I'll admit the ending of xbc2 is a bit ambiguous on what exactly happens with Logos and Pneuma and how that relates to Ontos OR the continued existence of Pyra and Mythra. I'll actually be really sad if there's no way they can be reunited/bummed if something's happened to Pyra and Mythra as of a result of the ending of xbc2. I just kinda want Malos to get a minor redemption arc or st least know if the Logos and Pneuma cores of the Trinity Processor was relevant at all.

BUT YEAH. IM SO EXCITED. VERY, VERY EXCITED. I'm sad this is the end of the Klaus arc of Xenoblade/the Xeno series, but I'm excited to see where we go next! If this wave 4 dlc is even remotely as good as base xbc3, it'll be an excellent ending to such a good series!

[rosemary-is-in-pesterquest]

ooh! I have thoughts on Eridan!

okay so, to me, Eridan ties into this thing that homestuck has going on with a lot of its more morally grey characters... the question of how responsible young people are for their negative qualities and actions, and where the age threshold for personal responsibility is.

the characters in homestuck all straddle this line between being young enough to consider them victims of the forces that influence them, while also old enough to understand what they're doing and how it affects others... especially because a lot of these kids come off as really smart for their age, and very precocious. we've all been through phases in our lives that make us cringe, not because we're ashamed of something harmless, but because we recognize that we had absorbed something harmful, and took longer than we wish we had to unlearn it. it could be as simple as being kind of a jerk in a misguided attempt to seem cool, or as dramatic as actually hurting someone in an attempt to remedy one's own insecurities by putting down others to seem better by comparison... but how far can you push that before people aren't willing to forgive? before people abandon the notion that better guidance and more appropriate role models could reform someone? and it's especially interesting when you consider how old homestuck's core audience might've been when they first encountered this story, and how it affected their perception of the characters if they saw them as peers, rather than as children from an adult's perspective.

so to talk about Eridan, I wanna frame this in terms of his classpect, because it actually goes a long way towards contextualizing his behavior. Eridan is a prince of hope, meaning that he destroys hope or uses hope to destroy... and this can be seen in practically every conversation he has. if Eridan is contacting someone, it is because he expects something of them. advice, or consolation, or a solution to a problem he's having... it's always something. when he contacts Kanaya, he wants her to auspistize between him and Vriska. when he contacts Feferi, he wants her to give him encouragement, and maybe date him when he asks. and in every case, the way he demands these things by being rude, whiny, or self pitying, makes people reluctant or unwilling to give him what he expects. he destroys what he hopes to obtain.

it goes deeper than that though. Eridan has absorbed this ideology of sea dweller superiority from living on Alternia... and he actually takes it way farther than it even makes sense to. the aristocracy on Alternia use the lower class for all sorts of menial work that they feel entitled not to have to do themselves. they might have the ability to freely cull individual low bloods for any reason, but eradicating all land dwelling trolls would leave a lot of unpleasant yet necessary tasks with no one to do them. I don't think Eridan actually wants to live in a reality where sea dwellers have to pick up the slack of doing things like sanitation work, or construction or something... but another concept that is heavily tied to the hope aspect is delusion. Eridan is exaggerating. he's trying to agree with Alternia's ruthless class structure so hard that it's actually kind of absurd. but Feferi calls him on that... she says she thinks that he self sabotages on purpose. because he knows, at least in some capacity, that the consequences of getting what he "wants" would actually be really uncomfortable to live with.

so not only is Eridan's goal to destroy... it is also a false goal that he constantly undermines. and all of his waffling between grandstanding and self pity destroys his romantic prospects, which are what he actually seems to want the most.

if you look at the way Eridan pursues relationships, he actually makes a lot of logical sense, but not a lot of emotional sense. he's idealized the act of perfectly filling the relationship requirements of each quadrant. he wants Feferi to be his matesprit, which is purely based on the fact that she's high enough on the hemospectrum to be an appropriate match in terms of status. he wants Vriska to be his kismesis, and Kanaya to be their auspistice, and there are hints that Karkat might've been someone he was considering for moiraillegience, though it wasn't emphasized as much. and there you go! his goal is specific, but it's based more on ideals than on the actual needs and feelings of the people involved, and it's totally self centered... he always wants them to cater to his own needs. the reason why he gets as nihilistic as he does on the meteor, is because all of his endeavors to achieve these relationships are falling through. he feels like he has no hope of mending his existing connections, because he still only sees them in terms of people either giving him, or not giving him, what he wants. but the rest of their race is dead. as the last twelve trolls in existence, they only have each other as romantic options. and as Eridan gets more and more desperate, he gets more and more demanding, which is the exact quality that drives everyone away from him to begin with, and it culminates in him having a "if I can't have what I want then nobody can have any of their hopes either" meltdown.

to backtrack a bit, I wanna reconsider questions such as, when is a kid old enough to be held responsible for their own negative qualities? like... when are you comfortable with ceasing to blame environmental factors? when are they just a bad person? is it after they've refused a certain number of chances to make better choices? when do they reach an age, or level of bad behavior, that makes you think they can't be helped to reform from these negative qualities? where does an adult lose their patience for the idea that a kid is just a victim of their upbringing?

obviously Feferi is Eridan's peer, but these are basically the questions she grapples with when she talks to Eridan. it's like growing up next door to a kid whose parents have some aggressively wrong-headed political stances. as you grow, that kid might mirror their parents' way of thinking... and by the time the two of you are in your teens, it's hard to ignore how much of a jerk that kid is becoming. but you've seen them at every step of their development. you know where it comes from. maybe theirs is the dominant political belief in the community, even if your own parents aren't like that. maybe you wonder if you would've agreed with them if you grew up under their circumstances. you've felt the pressure, but you haven't lived in it like they have, and maybe if they just had the chance to grow up under different conditions, they wouldn't be this way. and you are aware that you could be an influence on them... maybe they need you to help them see another perspective. you always got along so well as kids. when did things even change? and that's kind of where I imagine Feferi is at when we're introduced to her and Eridan. it's a crossroads between believing that you might still matter enough to them to change their outlook, and the persistence of their ingrained beliefs. it's tiring to do that kind of work, over a long period of time, to minimal results. when is the appropriate time to give up? in this way, Feferi's own hopes for Eridan fade over time. she says at one point that she was mainly acting as his moirail so he wouldn't try to underfeed her lusus and kill the land dwellers that way. she's not sure how serious he is, and she can't take that risk. deep down, I'm pretty sure Eridan knew he was never actually going to commit a genocide... but his need to grandstand, and legitimate belief in his caste superiority, had convinced Feferi enough that she still felt obligated to manage him as though he was a real threat.

these characters are thirteen years old. they're right at the edge of childhood and adolescence... right at the age where children aren't quite so innocent. they want to assert themselves. they aren't mature, so there's a lot of responsibility that they still shouldn't be trusted with yet, but they've become aware enough to feel like that's demeaning, and to want to be taken seriously. in an effort to make people acknowledge them without looking down on them, they'll try just about anything. they don't have the experience to know what they're doing yet, so it doesn't always work in their favor, and that's frustrating. you can see bits and pieces of this in homestuck's characters. like with the way they try to paint themselves as an authority on something, or shit talk each other in order to emphasize their own strengths. it's a really interesting theme, because homestuck pushes some of these young characters really far in terms of how bad the things they've done can be, or how much their lived experiences have taught them that what they're doing is acceptable. they can be really self aware in some ways, and come off as really childish in others. it's hard to know what you'd do about them in real life... and your answer changes depending on your own age and perspective. it's a really cool gray area to poke around in, and homestuck is excellent at it.

wtf I like Eridan now