puchiehk

[kotoneshiomiofficial]

Trying so hard not to go for the most obvious one lets do YUKARI bc shes on my mind lately

nooope strong as fuck hamuko attack again

favorite thing about them

i think what makes me the most insane about her is how she gets the option to kill takaya. like i know everyone's like "teehee bloodlust!" but seriously think about it. this girl who is only ever vulnerable when she chooses to be, who is so deliberately kind and caring, who's mask is so carefully constructed. for her to, without hesitation, move to kill her enemy at the first opportunity? and the only reason she doesnt is because aigis *stops her*? like the drama. the tension. i fuckin love it

least favorite thing about them

nothing she's perfect. disliking kotone is a character flaw

favorite line

"It's because the theater owner is going bald." (in repsone to some random person wondering why the movie theater is less crowded sometimes)

brOTP

i know everyone goes for junpei but i personally think akihiko. like the potential of a friendly rivalry between them could be so interesting given aki's comments about "i cant lose to an underclassman...". itd be cool to see hamuko return some of that energy

OTP

hamaigis of course, but for an ot3 yukahamitsu. ive been shipping it since i first got into p3

nOTP

excluding the obvious [atlus moment], junpei. look no hate but junpei's already got chidori like thats a whole story beat. let him have that

random headcanon

she destroys in fighting games. junpei is losing ALL of his lunch money. no mercy. figure out how to beat ram,lethal combos or perish

unpopular opinion

she is one of the most characterful silent protags atlus has written in the past like 20 years. i say one of because objectively that has to go to joker but thats only because he has miles better animations. she only loses to him due to technical limitations

song i associate with them

heroes of our time by dragonforce. LISTEN!!

[steakbones]

WAIT nobody told me about MONAS new outfit omg its so cute so much better than her old one... wish i actually had her now :(

[tumblunni]

Hhhhh if i can raise $500 in a month i could design the new gym teacher character for a sequel to a nostalgic fave game of mine

Aaaaaaaaa

And i'm a little dissappointed that even though the first game literally awakened me to the whole concept of being genderqueer they still arent gonna have any actual genderqueer characters. That kinda sucks cos seriously that goddamn two sentence mention of different pronouns existing fuckin EXPLODED MY MIND and led me down a whole road of self discovery. A bit sad to know it was a big deal for me but maybe not for the writers. Oh well!

...so man i kinda wanna throw $500 bucks at them and be like PERHAPS..CONSIDER...A NONBINARY ANYONE. Like i dont even have an idea for a character yet lol! Only being able to pick the gym teacher is a bit specific so none of my past oc ideas would work. But can i just throw money at people to let them know that nonbinary people play their games and we're enough of a market to maybe add like one npc somewhere or something? Seriously just those two sentences were worth so much to someone struggling as a teen, can you imagine how many more young queer kids could feel that "oh god im not broken" moment if there were more characters like them? And i mean things have actually progressed a lot since the first game came out. We now have a lot more commonly accepted genderqueer pronouns! The first game was pretty ahead of its time for raising the subject but it talked about old 1970s scienceman pronouns and stuff. (Tho lol a part of me wishes the spivak set would become more popular just cos it was my first introduction to the topic)

I dunno man am i asking too much? Am i just projecting onto this game cos i played the first game during a dark time in my life? Ehh..

Anyway if i can't do HERE 500 DOLLA PLZ PUT ONE ENBY STUDENT IN THE BACKGROUND then i'd maybe do this gym teacher thing? I was thinking just.. A nice person. Some big bubbly happy teacher who doesnt have any form of grumpiness or avtually-kinda-manipulative-behind-a-false-facade. Just cos these poor kids deserve at least one teacher they can trust, lol! Also cos gym teachers are often the most stereotyped as grumpy bastards out of all teachers forever. Itd be nice to imagine an ideal world where gym lessons arent the worst part of every week and like.. Actually goddamn help kids stay healthy or enjoy sports, instead of being just a boiling pot of abusive army seargeant teacher and every bully getting free reign to smack you about. Just gimme a nice buff teacher whose muscles are strong for hugging and supporting everyone! Oh and maybe their character flaw could even be that they're too nice? Like sort of an ironic thing of the gym teacher being strong physically but emotionally a "wimp". They're sort of seen as dumb muscle and not taken seriously by the kids, but half of the time their funny "naive" moments are just them being too trusting of everybody. Its easy to spin some sob story and ditch class! I think that'd line up well with how gym class goes in the first game, wher eyou never see the teacher and it seems that the bully kids are making all the decisions about the lessons. Like i could see the gym teacher caving in to stuff like "we dont wanna excercise at all we're just gonna use magic to move the ball" if they were kind of a doormat. And maybe could even have a plotline where its like.. Dark consequences from this? Like you're getting bullied and the gym teacher basically becomes your enemy despite being good natured, cos they keep falling for the bully's side of things and not believing you. Or tehy try and be all "lets look at both sides of this" when there really isnt a second side, or their way of dealing with conflict in general is to completely ignore it with some overly optimistic and utterly flawed sort of "just talk about your feeeelings" hippy crap. And in the end you could call them out on how their attempts to "be nice" are shortsighted and hurting people worse than intentional cruelty ever could. And really they're not even a "nice person" but just someone terrified of conflict, who's willing to sacrifice their morals whenever anything gets too difficult. It could potentially be a really good plotline cos the player might get to trust this teacher and like their goofy comic relief personality and then they betray you when you need it the most. And its even more crushing because its not them being an intentional fucko like the other jerk characters, its just them deciding you arent important enough to take the risk of standing up for you. And maybe it could indeed have a good ending of this teacher atoning for their shittiness, but that'd also mean they decide they really arent prepared for being a teacher and shouldnt be in this position of authority over children. So they resign and that leads to the situation in the first game where gym class is just the kids being left alone to fuck around with a bag of basketballs for two hours. Alas! (But yknow if the writers liked the character and wanted to bring them back in later games i wouldbt exactly object to that, lol!)

Tho probably i wouldnt make this character nonbinary cos honestly people get Really Weird about gender when it involves sports and bodybuilding and stuff. Its already hard enough to get people to accept a buff or tomboyish female character so i bet no matter how androgynous i draw a gym teacher everyone's still gonna assume male. I mean i still get fuckin bummed out whenever i watch lets plays of Undertale and see people calling Undyne male for houuuurs after the game constantly and repeatedly tells you she's a woman. >_> So yeh if i wanted to make a genderqueer oc it would probably be in less of a loaded plot role, yknow? But gym teacher is the only option currently available on kickstarter. Someone else nabbed Librarian in under an hour after it started! No fair! XD (im excited to see that libarian if the backer was THAT DEDICATED to getting the character, i bet theyre gonna be awesome!)

[tumblunni]

Randomly, i do like the misdirect involved in Kaine's backstory. Like you think that the people of the Aerie hate her and treat her as a monster because of her Shade-arm, but no that all happened AFTER they treated her like shit. They were just bigoted against a small child for being born intersex. She only got her Shade powers as a consequence of this shit village pushing her and her grandma to the edge of the forest and doing nothing to help when they were attacked by shades. Kaine was treated like a monster, so she became one in order to live. And she used that power to help people, even as she was treated as EVEN MORE of a monster because of it! kaine is so damn strong. She has every right to be a goddamn tsundere when her life was so shitty, god...

Tho i still kinda dont understand what exactly happened with Tyrann, tho? Like at first i thought the shade that possessed her was the same one that killed her grandma, but no that was apparantly the lizard boss you defeat shortly after meeting her. So where did Tyrann come from and why did he decide to save this kid and possess her body? I hope its not something like 'oh she was indeed born cursed and he was always trapped in her soul until that moment awakened him'. Like i mean that could have a bit of problematic connotations since i mean this is a male character possessing a female one and itd be messed up if they said she was only intersex because of the possession or something. Instead of just the fact that many women across the world are born this way and it doesnt make them any less of a woman.

Anyway its still not exactly a good representation of intersex people because of the whole fetishization of her and the DAMN STUPID excuse that she likes wearing lingerie 24/7 because it makes her feel 'more like a real woman'. :P But still man its literally the only case i've ever seen of an intersex character who's just intersex, yknow? Like not a 'magic alien whose species is always like this' or 'a magic fusion of a cis man and cis woman' or some other fantasy excuse to portray a real person in a way that validates that they dont exist in real life. Nonbinary people often get the same treatment, since conflating gender and biological sex is a big bigoted cliche, sigh. Like man intersex people have the exact same rates of being queer as anyone else, there is literally no correlation between genetalia and being more likely to be trans. Execpt that intersex people end up with very similar types of predjudice and hell, because of the way society treats them. The absolutely disgusting medically accepted practise of amputating functional genetalia and tertiary sexual characteristics from LITERAL ONE DAY OLD BABIES because they're intersex is just so fuckin messed up! And most of the time these kids are never even told by their parents that this was done to them, so they just grow up with all these health problems and dysphoria while being gaslit about the cause of them. Like seriously when you're rolling a damn dice on which gender to turn your kid into with goddamn invasive plastic surgery, of course its gonna be wrong half the time! You're just picking what they fuckin 'look like', before theyre even old enough to know! Its so relateable to the trans expperience yet EVEN WORSE because you know your parents knew ALL ALONG and they consented to mutilating you to try and "fix" it! There's so much real life predjudice against intersex people and honestky i would say there's even less awareness or acceptance than for trans and gay people.

So yeah its REALLY IMPORTANT to have positive and realistic representation of intersex people. And not just lame corner-cutting where the character is technically intersex yet the story treats it like an impossible fantasy thing and refuses to address any of the real life issues these people face. So yeah man at least Nier does indeed have an intersex character who is indeed intersex and is canonically stated to have been born this way and also canonically stated to be a real woman and only villains treat her as anything less. But it still sucks that the positivity about her also escalates into gross 'lol f/uta sex object' stuff. *sigh* Again, another way the predjudiced depiction of nonbinary trans people gets mashed into the same thing by bigots. And hell there's also the conflation of cis gay men with trans women, because seriously bigots have no damn concept of any sort of reality, apparantly...

Gah the whole thing pisses me off! It also sucks how its hard to represent intersex people in anything except an M-rated game like Nier. (Tho kinda ironic that they can show all this gore and sex but still dance around in metaphors when explaining this..) Like I mean its absolutely possible to talk about being intersex without talking about how people have sex, like seriously saying otherwise would be just as bigoted as saying trans people or gay people are inherantly sexual. But to an audience of cis people who dont know much about LGBTQ community terms it would be kinda hard to make it clear when a character is intersex rather than trans or nonbinary. Like before i read the artbook details i thought Kaine was just a DMAB trans woman based on how its described ingame. And saying 'someone who is both a man and a woman' would be implying intersex and nonbinary people are the same thing, when most intersex people still identify as male or female rather than nonbinary.

Like the only time i've seen intersex representation handled more clearly and more canonically confirmed than Kaine was Angel in DDS2. It was a really good way of explaining it respectfully to a cis audience, just "Angel is a woman but she's both Sera's mother and father". (Due to some complicated in-universe sci fi science where she could extract both her sperm and egg cells and use them to make a clone of herself that could telepathically communicate with the sun. This story is kinda weird lol.) But on the other hand i dont really count that as much of good representation as Kaine, since this one singular sentence about her being intersex is very hidden in an optional area. Aside from that all you get is characters mentioning how she has an 'androgenous beauty' and her boss battle transformation is designed to look 'half male half female'. (Tho at least its 100% tasteful and just a nonsexualized monster vaguely shaped like a dress and a trenchcoat split down the middle, with half lipstick.) Oh and yeah also she's a friggin villain and a manipulative abusive parent, so yeah. She is a synpathetic villain and she's apparantly reincarnated into a happy life with her dead boyfriend at the end, but still she's the primary evil force for 75% of the whole series and never atones for what she did to her daughter.

So yeah sorry this just turned into a rant about how the Two Only Intersex Characters In All Of Fiction So Far are kinda not perfect, and also both from pretty old games too. I really hope i can find some more representation someday, sigh...

[tumblunni]

Also HELL YES FOR CASUAL PLAYER LOVE

Im so happy to hear that Let's Go is indeed INTENTIONALLY designed to be "more casual" and everything these super anti-casual conpetitive players are complaining about was intentionalky put in there cos the developers legit think its better. THANK YOU!

i dunno man it just seems like we NEVER heae about the developers doing anything for the fans unless its enablibg competitive play or iv breeding or whatever. Like those are the only definitions of "fans" that interviewers seem to care about. And Its hard to know what the developers really think when the questions that are asked leave out a huge componant of the fanbase, yknow?

And uhh.. I mean its just good to specificially know that theyre okay with casual fans existing, like not just "its for kids" but "hey you are not bad if you are an adult who also enjoys the game for its intended appeal points and not for a huge mega complicated mathematical metagame people made up to be 'more mature'". I was really surprised to see that written interview with masuda specifically mentioning IV breeding as the place where conpetitive goes too far and makes the game not fun anymore. "Pokemon wasn't meant to be a game about hatching eggs and nothing else." Like.. Playing competitively itself is not bad, i dont wanna sound like i hate hardcore fans and im a big ol jerk. I admire the dedication because it all seems so super unattainable and mathematically magical to me! Im not into that stuff but i can admire that you have to be a damn genius to achieve all that stuff. BUT i also get what he's saying. Because it sucks when you HAVE to be a damn genius to EVEN START PLAYING! Whenever high level competitive strats become the goddamn baseline it makes competitive completely inaccessable to everyone except the most hardcore of the hardcore, and its like damn man how do you even become that if you have no way to start practising? Iv breeding is so INSANE in retrospect! Like when you think about it, its wild that people even cracked the code for how to game the system and get the highest possible randomized stats for every ridiculously minor thing. Like how the fuck did they even figure out any of this?? And then all the further madness into figuring out how to attain it and how to raise odds of shinys and hidden abilities and how they keep figuring out new ways to do it with every new system each game brings out. And then people will spend friggin LITERAL DAYS OF REAL TIME running up and down the same road in the game, hatching thousands of eggs just to get the one mathematically superior pokemon from a confluence of random events. And this is treated as fuckin REQUIRED to play the game! You can't touch competitive if you dont do it. And these bad sorts of competitive players will try and force this requirement onto other non-competitive parts of the game, and shame casual players for not doing it even though its literally not what they want to play the game for.

Seriously, man! Individual values were just designed to make individual pokemon more random, so the play experience would seem more unique to each run. It was literally invented for a "casual" reason! It just really sucks that they implimented it in a way that had an objective "best" value to get, so people ignored the whole point of "adding personality" and just wanted that one. Tho i mean at least they patched out the early issue where gender and shinyness were linked to these values so you couldnt get certain types of pokemon as the "best" version and it was even more limiting. Glad that GSC didnt have online metagame yet, lol! (Tho it makes it possible for people to more easily predict which pokenon will become Shiny when transferred from rby to gsc, which is neat.)

ANYWAY WHERE WAS I

Oh yeah! I appreciate that each generation of games lately has made it easier to see your IVs and EVs and to get them to their "best" versions, with even the FUCK YEAH feature pf being able to "fix" bad IVs on level 100 pokemon. I carried my Sneasel named Reaper since RSE and he's been completely unuseable for so long and bottlecaps fixed that! Kid me just played the game like he was my starter and i loved him. I didnt know about IVs or EVs, so i took this terribly-statted dude with a bad ability and made him fight all the wrong pokemon because he is my best friend and he needs to win every gym battle and i will buy him lemonades afterward. Also he wore the Blackglasses item forever cos i thougjt itd be cool if you could put accessories on your pokemon. So yeah i did Everything Wrong and thus all the pokemon i actually cared about were made weak and useless by my love and i had to spend 48 hours running down a stupid road to hatch and abandon 1400 new ones just to get one that was "useable". Thanks to bottlecaps, this is no more! Decade old weasel pals can be revived! Tho still it sucks that i hit level 100 before this mon's evolution came out. Alas!

BUT

Like.. Even tho now its slightly less hard to make a "perfect" pokemon its still tedious as hell and really takes you out of the moment and you have to already know beforehand that its necessary. Kids are just gonna blunder in and not even know why they keep losing due to no fault of their own. Adults are gonna also do that. Seriously this isnt a "kiddy fans vs mature fans" or "non fans versus FANS" thing, this is just "fans who have one very specific skill for memorizing a bunch of numbers and steps and enduring hours of boredom doing it vs..people who think that kinda ruins the game". And even if nintendo fully streamlined the process into sonething easy, itd still feel like an unnecessary roadblock in the way of just getting to play the damn game. We really need to add some sort of hardcore/casual or iv breeding/no iv breeding thing to league divisions, as well as the tier lists. This is why im so hyped for the current "Spooky Cup", since it actually seems like a "just for fun" multiplayer experience, and its kinda dumb that we have to rely on nintendo actually programming limitations into a tournement cos the players refuse to allow anyone to just do it normally. I did a big whoop at "no mega stones" and "everyone gets a participation prize even if they lose"! And the limitations being a random event based thing rather than a skill cap! Yay ghost types!! Reminds me of the baby pokemon only tourneys in the n64 games. That was a kind of hardcore challenge that had a bit of creativity to it!

So anyway anyway what i'm getting at...

I'm just happy that the devs are saying "yes this is a casual game with more of what casual players want, and less of those hardcore limitations" and THATS NOT MEANT TO BE A NEGATIVE!! Actual developers sitting on a couch hugging giant pikachu plushies and saying this game is for people who just want a fun game about..well, hugging pikachus! They changed the way you catch pokemon because they wanted it to be more fun. They brought back following pokemon because fun. You get all these new features for your starter because they wanted you to really feel like a kid going on their first pokemon adventure and sharing all these special moments with pikachu! They talked about how the art style was decided upon because it was the closest to "how you imagined it in your head when you played pokemon yellow", and "if it was photorealistic it just wouldnt feel right". They picked eevee for the second option because they actually paid attention to the fans and which pokemon was the second most popular and had a similar "both cute and cool" appeal with all audiences. And they put the most effort into the visuals and the cuteness and making everything just feel like a good and fun adventure that recaptures everything you wanted as a kid playing the first game.

And they just act so unapologetically HAPPY about all these parts of the game! These are their favourite parts! They're the goddamn DEVELOPERS and even they say that they prefer the story and the characters and the relaxing childlike whimsy to the concept of refining gameplay to a ridiculous hardcore perfection and throwing out everything else in pursuit of that. And man, seeing them hugging the big pika and eev plushies in EVERY PROMOTIONAL VIDEO and just enjoying playing their own game so much!! And babbling on about dressing up your pokemon!!

God its just SO GOOD to see this as a fan who's been here since the very beginnibg and is starting to feel quite self concious about being an adult fan who isnt doing it "properly". Like man the pressure of hardcore competotive being the "only right way" started even when i was just 11, like seriously THE AGE THE ACTUAL TRAINERS ARE IN THE GODDAMN GAME. Before you even hit your teens you already got stuck up older kids telling you you were too old to just enjoy a game cos you enjoyed the damn game, noooo you have to make it as unfun as possible and only derive enjoyment from defeating other people. It took me until ORAS to actually even be able to try competitive at all, i found it so overwhelming until they added other methods to EV train. And even then i still felt like the blandness of the preparation outweighed any fun of playing these "higher level" battles. Like sure maybe some people like that stuff but it felt so dissappointing after all these years of being pressured to try it...

Sometimes its just good to enjoy a game cos you legit like the world and characters. Sometimes its just really validating to see the developers talking about enjoying making those things, cos it gives you permission to be less embarrassed about it. Sometimes its good to also see them hugging a hundred dollar giant pikachu while you hug your hundred dollar giant mimikyu. Cos seriously what is the point of being an adult if youre not allowed to buy these adult sized plushies? What kid could ever afford those! Im not letting my childhood dream pass me by just because ~maturity~ when im finally able to slap a fat wad of cash on the table and yell GIVE ME THE BIGGEST CHU

I will embrace all my pure childhood love and enjoy this game of just huggins and nothing else! And i really like this concept for the series, if they continue doing Let's Go as a spinoff so we'd have a set of games appealing to each of the casual and hardcore demographics. I always feel bad complaining about hardcore when really my actual opinion on it is just "its not for me" and im actually only complaining about the rude fans who tell me im not a real fan unless i like their genre of stuff. Dude i was three years old when pokemon came out, i think ive earned my right by seniority to hug a plushie or two! So itd be awesome if hardcore doods could get their super hardcore game too, and we could just argue less cos we'd each be able to enjoy what we enjoy. Tho i mean the main series games already have a pretty clear divide between story/fun being the main game and hardcore competitive being a postgame thing. And yet we still get all this fandom fightibg over "ignore the actual 90% of the game, skip the plotline and only play competitive" apparantly being the "real" way to play it. Like man im worried that attitude is still gonna stick arpund even if they do give us separate games appealing to each side of the fandom?

EHHH WHATEVER! Im just gonna sit here in my corner of casual hugs and work on my self confidence to be able to stop feeling bad about not being someone else's idea of a "real" fan. If real fans can't have pikachu in a little hat, then that is not the life i wanna lead!

LITTLE GODDAMN HAT, MY GUY