#Critical Counter

[tampire]

Critical Counter in KOF XII / Advance Strike in KOF XV

[yourhighness6]

Me, screaming into the void: I DON'T HATE MAI I JUST FEEL LIKE SHE NEEDED MORE DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE OF ZUKO AND HER ARC SHOULDN'T REVOLVE AROUND HER LOVE INTEREST

Also me, still screaming into the void: I DON'T HATE AANG I JUST QUESTION WHETHER HIS ROMANTIC INTEREST IN KATARA BRINGS OUT THE BEST SIDES OF HIM AND FEEL AS THOUGH HE AND HIS DEVELOPMENT IS NOT ABOVE NECESSARY CRITICISM

[utilitycaster]

ok firstly Celia's way for words is absolutely incredible and has been one of the many highlights of this series, I hope they come back for other CR things, and while obviously they'll be acting and not writing/improvising I might have to check out some of her other work. Secondly, as someone who thinks D&D (and other TTRPGs) are at their best when characters explore what their class means, the idea of a ranger being someone who is adept at finding a home when there isn't one is just...incredible, and says so much about Erro, and in a way, so much about Vex.

[burr-ell]

mother bitch counter: 1

[stevieharringtonwifeguy]

ovulation being a hell of a drug that ends up getting steddie together like

eddie and queen bee stevie harrington who have a weird kind of friendship where they share like. Everything. not a single secret between them. like eddie's got stevie's cycle pretty much memorised and she knows about every inappropriately timed boner he's ever had. and they're talking one day, smoking, shooting the shit, and there's a second of silence before stevie's like. oh my god. im so horny im gonna die. and eddie's like huh what. and stevie goes like there's a stain on your wall that's kind of shaped like a sperm and that made me think about cum and now im all bricked up. my vaginas haunted. fucking sperm shaped stain.

and eddie's like. wait girls- ok you know what im saying this in my head and im realising this sounds dumb but like. i thought girls didn't like. Get Like That. like i thought random horniness at a stiff breeze was a guy thing

and stevie snorts like nope girls get it too we just get to hide it bc we don't get boners. swear to god there's like a week of every month where i get fucking possessed or some shit. robin says it's like a period thing

but you're not on your period?

and stevie's like no it's like. the opposite of a period. like your period is your uterus being like hey you fucked up you're not pregnant but Horny Week is your uterus being like okay im ready let's get a baby in there time to get pregnant you know what to do. it's called like. oval. something. oval something. im all fertile and my body's trying to trick me, the fuckn prick.

and eddie just kinda goes huh and then there's another second of silence where he tries very hard not to think about stevie being pregnant. and then stevie throws her arms up with a frustrated sigh like god DAMN it now im thinking about being pregnant and eddie's internally like well at least it's not just me

and anyway another joint later this obviously devolves into stevie shoving eddie's hand down her pants and telling him please it'll be so quick he doesn't even have to do anything and she just ruts against his hand while he stares at her bc he's so high and the girl he's basically in love with just told him how fertile she was and then started rubbing her incredibly wet pussy against his hand and he feels like he might pass out

they do this and more about once a month for like a year until stevie does actually get pregnant. her stupid uterus successfully tricked her 😔✊

[shadovvheart]

not a huge fan of posts that go "you can't criticize veilguard for having a dumb thing because previous games did a similar dumb thing too!"

like, why not? just because a similar dumb thing was present in previous installments doesn't make it less dumb in the new game. we can still criticize it for being dumb. in fact, previous games have been criticized for this dumb thing many times way back when, so why stop now?

maybe if we criticize it enough, the devs will finally make an effort to either write in a better, less dumb way, or avoid ideas and concepts that they know they can't write & implement without stretching the player's suspension of disbelief paper thin in the first place. no one is holding a gun to their heads to do it in this one particular way, they can just write something else.

"it doesn't have to make sense, it's a video game" yeah, a video game with dumb writing. good video games make an effort to avoid dumb writing as much as possible. and we're not criticizing these games because we're haters or don't understand video games, we criticize them because we want them to be of better quality. we deserve what we tolerate etc etc

[grandwitchbird]

Veilguard is generally a well designed and well written game. I’m clear on what I think about DA as a whole, but it’s easily the best actual game in the franchise.

People are picking up, however, on a real critical flaw and mostly failing to locate the flaw while getting distracted by nonsense. It’s a flaw present in every DA game if you dig enough. Let’s talk about story bosses.

This is a tricky thing in arpgs. RGG and CDPR try to ensure that story bosses are densely interwoven into the world in a way that works thematically.

Adam Smasher would have been a problem in any universe; he’s just enabled and enshrined by this one. Hansen points us right back to the military industrial complex, the ghost of which we’ve spent the entire game wrestling with. Literally. All of that directs us right back to the systems in place in our cyberpunk world. It points us at our own motivations as V and interrogates our love of the power fantasy as a player.

In an RGG game, when you run down a corridor towards a boss, it’s a gauntlet. It’s there for fun and also to highlight the legendary clash that’s about to happen with reference to the Yakuza films the series started as an homage to. The boss may wait at the end or jump you, depending on their personality and goals. There will be mini bosses along the way because you’re generally fighting hierarchical organizations.

In Veilguard, our enemies wait at the end of a corridor. They’re powerful and don’t need to come to us. Ok good start, also a nod to ME. Occasionally you’re lucky and get story ‘minibosses’ that interrogate that very idea. The first warden is here to flesh out everyone’s motives and challenge us as the player. Sometimes you’re very lucky and the boss is Johanna Hezenkoss and she’s exclusively here to have clear motives that flesh out Emmrich’s arc and to cause problems because it’s fun. Most of the time, you get Aelia or whatserface Aelia 2.0 in Lucanis’s arc. Or the others I don’t remember after playing the game 5 times. Anaris? What did he even want? No I don’t mean power. What was under that? What was his motivation? Because I can explain the power-hunger in every Yakuza shithead or nationalist asshat I’ve fought in an RGG game. But Veilguard, like all of DA is avoiding real discussions of power and psychology and ~implications~.

I’m not a forgetful person. I’m meticulous and have the true blue autistic pattern recognition. I genuinely can’t say what made Aelia and Aelia 2.0 anything other than cosplay tyrants. Not without projecting onto the text or stretching it to breaking point by leaning hard on one specific short story.* Dragon guy and other antaam guy came out of literally nowhere. Mail order villains those two.

Even with our big bads, we get mere hints and gestures. Everyone is impressed with whatsisface doing a bad imitation of Bowie’s lines in Labyrinth. He’s a spirit of tyranny though. What does that mean. What makes the tyrants work in this world. And why are we cribbing from the Goblin King while carefully editing out the sucker punch?

We know the answer in the real world and can project that onto the game. But it’s not in the game. Not in a way the text doesn’t flinch from. And this is something people are picking up on. It’s also not been in any of the other games sorry to say. So this isn’t new. Veilguard just isn’t hiding behind obfuscating design choices and allusions to better stories. It’s still making those allusions (see gif above) but it’s a more honest text re: its limitations.

As with everything. The Mourn Watch and Grey Wardens stand heads and shoulders above the rest of the faction/companion-based conflicts. Their bosses have clear psychologies, motivations, and represent coherent and grounded goals (in hilariously disparate ways) Solas, likewise, has us/Rook as a mirror and his needs/wants and the conflict between those needs/wants are forefront and incredibly well developed. It’s not all bad. It’s actually quite good.

But when people flounder at surface details looking for the ‘problems’ with the writing. This is what’s getting missed. The problem is never ‘plot hole’ or ‘bad lore’. It’s something in the structure and conflict and motivation. And I’m afraid to say it’s old news with DA (Loghain is fine but the entire end of origins is an asspull. Don’t @ me). This game is much stronger than the others on that front. That would still be true if we had only Solas. We also got Johanna fingerguns Hezenkoss and the entire Grey Warden plot. I, for one, am counting that a win.

*the extended media is a critical weakness of the franchise. Referencing your own EU is not the same as entering a dialogue with an existing subgenre populated by works from diverse sources.

[ladyhoneydarlinglove]

there is obviously nothing wrong with people making sanji out to be a pretty boy, but ngl, every time i see it in art or in fic there is a not insignificant part of me that wants to dig my heels in and insist that no, actually, i don’t think he should be a pretty boy at all! in fact, i kind of think he should be a little bit uggo!

[maxedes]

nico calling lewis goat again. fork found in kitchen

[jisreal64]

Yeah yeah yeah, the reason you don’t like Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss is because you’re either a conservative christian who hates queer people and/or doesn’t like the idea of the two shows depicting Hell, Satanism, and The Devil in a positive light and Heaven in a negative light; OR you’re a reactionary leftist who thinks that it’s racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, promotes rape, and antisemitic (even though the show was created by an openly queer Latina woman and you’re the exact same people who think that Israelis should kill themselves) all because the characters who are confirmed to be POC don’t look like they’re POC (even though the characters who are confirmed to be white don’t have any white attributes to them and that you’re also fine with characters like Darwin from TAWOG being confirmed to be black while not having any black coding to him outside of his voice actors). The reason I don’t like Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss is because they’re both childish and stupid when it comes to writing and humor, over relies on slapstick and blue humor, doesn’t do justice to the Abrahamic and Satanic mythologies they’re based on, has a cast that mainly consists of characters who are annoying and/or unlikable, heavily plagiarizes other media (such as The Good Place, The Purge, Disney movies, and the filmography of Tim Burton), created a genre that started a one-sided indie animation boom, and has a soundtrack that sounds like it was written by Jake Paul using an AI that was trained on the soundtrack of the Princess Diana musical. We are not the same…

[topaz-mutiny]

Matt Mercer: *says the word "voluptuous"*

Me, a tumblr gremlin and Dracula Daily aficionado in the midst of the start of Dracula Daily 2024: *starts barking on reflex*

[forgetriestowrite]

omg this might be Vax's last week as a ball

we should throw a party or something

[burr-ell]

mother bitch counter: 2

[captainsparklefingers]

There's a distinct lack of Kingsley in that Bell's Hells/M9 meeting and I am very disappointed. :( not surprised, but still disappointed.

I mean maybe Essek is picking him up. Maybe they haven't given Robbie a crash course in how to play him (because no way Tal is doing THREE characters, that's so many. And can you imagine if he had to do Percy too? Jesus.). Maybe...I don't know, but at the very least, mention him! Please?

I just want more of the purple pirate king. Please??

Anyway prayer circle for, at the bare minimum, a mention, hopefully more, I need food here please Matt.

[georgeharrisonsmiling]

unpopular john opinion

I think the fandom tends to treat John like he was dumb way too often, especially when talking about the period during and after the breakup.

While I agree that he was easier to influence than the others, he also knew what he wanted most of the time and his actions were his own. More often than not I see comments about how John was manipulated into doing x or y which is simply not true. Treating John like a child who couldn't make his own decisions is doing him a disservice not only as an artist but also as a person. Blaming other people for John's mistakes also removes any complexity in a discussion.

I guess that John is easier to use as a prop in a way because he was killed young but there is enough information about him to understand that he was an adult who made his own decisions in life.

[agent-troi]

i think i’m more inclined to stick up for mulder even when he doesn’t necessarily deserve it for the same reason scully is. he’s been emotionally abused by most of the people he’s cared about his whole life, living with a burden of responsibility and failure that he never should’ve been forced to bear, and he’s constantly ridiculed and dismissed as “spooky” when all he wants is to find his sister. i’m not saying his trauma is an excuse for treating scully badly sometimes, but the fact that he never really knew what a healthy relationship was supposed to be like is an explanation (as is his lack of emotional object permanence when it comes to the people who have hurt him). i think people overestimate how difficult it is sometimes to unlearn unhealthy habits (especially when they may not even have a clear understanding of what healthy even is), and i’m definitely not saying mulder shouldn’t try (the man desperately needs therapy lmao), just that i understand him i guess