#WHY IS SHE LIKE THIS <333

[nyaskitten]

I went back to "Snakebit" to make a post about something funny from the episode, but please TELL ME WHY THERES A CLOSEUP SHOT OF NYA KICKING A FANGPYRE IN THE LEGO SNAKE DICK. HELLO???

[earlgodwin]

An appreciation post for the beautiful Giulia Farnese: she's so smart, kind, and caring. She believed in women's solidarity and showed deep care for Lucrezia, always delicate and tender with her. Giulia proved her worth and loyalty when she rescued Lucrezia from the hands of her abusive husband. Even when she learned that Rodrigo cheated on her, instead of being envious and hating the young artist he cheated with, she offered a threesome. She never disrespected Vanozza but formed a friendship with her. Giulia was also a great asset to the Borgia family, helping establish and strengthen the church's charitable works, securing the pope's legacy, and earning her brother a cardinal's hat. She only departed when her relationship with Rodrigo was no longer working, with his blessing.

[poisonousquinzel]

sometimes a family is just a silly jester, her two carnivorous hyenas and her "Hot Plant Goddess" girlfriend <3

DC's 'Twas the Mite Before Christmas (2023-) #1

"The Princess Switch"

Writer: Rob Levin | Artist/Colorist: Bob Quinn | Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

"It's A Bunkerful Life"

Artist/Colorist: Andrew Drilon

[presiding]

a doctor turned serial killer turned doctor again, an actor who paints, a gang leader, a mining baron, and a vice overseer walk into the room.

oh yeah and they lead karnaca now.

dishonored 2 is my fav game but i think it's mid, story-wise. here's why dh1 works and why dh2's overarching story sorta misses

tl;dr: story integration is critical for gameplay that offers audience payoff, but emily's personal arc from dishonor to honor is inconsistently demonstrated in the story, and is not an interactive part of the gameplay.

essay/long version under cut >

recap: what's dishonored's deal

[skip if you want] dh1 is an underdog story: corvo is an honorable man swept up in the machinations of a callous city, so his canonical ending being 'this child will rule over an empire' isn't about the child's rule but rather about corvo's reputation being restored in a more hopeful city, due to his & the player's rejection of the violent connotations of the tagline 'revenge solves everything.'

similarly, in dh1 DLCs, daud's story arc is that of an anti-hero: a dishonorable man who realises too late he has done irreparable harm. he sees the error of his ways after a single monumental death, and eventually a single life redeems him when he/the player stepped in to circumvent a terrible fate for a child, enabling her to rule unfettered.

daud & corvo come to a satisfying conclusion within the extent of their narrative arcs. it doesn't matter that a child on a throne isn't really a fix for a decaying empire - the player's actions throughout the city of dunwall was what mattered - and these stories could be framed as parables. in that sense, young emily as a ruler is a metaphor for a hopeful future for the city & empire.

dishonored 1 & its DLCs are also great examples of storytelling with perfectly integrated gameplay - you, the player, worked towards the outcome that redeemed the protagonists.

in your efforts to save young emily, you either achieved a good outcome (corvo) or prevented a worse outcome (daud).

bringing us to dh2 -

what's emily's arc

emily's arc is a coming of age: we're introduced to a reigning empress who questions her role & skillset ("am i the empress my mother wanted me to be?"), then her titular fall from grace occurs. from there, she learns to reject the violent, selfish connotations in 'take back whats yours' tagline (a la daud & corvo!) while rediscovering why her rule is critical to the empire.

emily's rule is no longer metaphorical, but:

a literal thing for audience assessment (is emily a good ruler?) AND

the crux of her storyline.

at the beginning of dh2, emily is introduced as a disengaged leader ("i wish i could just run away from all this;" "i dont know if whether i should sail to the opposite side of the world, or have everyone around me executed"). the antihero has a precedent for the dishonored series in daud, so it's not at first glance an issue*, however, the fact that emily has ruled poorly reframes corvo & daud's endings as being less than ideal (a moralistic retcon) *we could talk here about how ready an audience was in 2016 for a flawed women as a protagonist, hell, even in 2023,,,

throwback to the beginning of this essay when i said:

'this child will rule over an empire' isn't about the child's rule but rather about corvo's reputation

emily's story arc, unlike for daud & corvo, is literally about the quality of her rule. we're no longer in metaphor territory (ironic phrase): a parable-style ending doesn't work.

does emily become a good ruler

we know she becomes a good ruler because the game says so. it is narrated to the audience via a (literal) word of god in the space of 30 seconds, after the final boss. the outsider tells us that emily becomes known as Just & Clever.

drawing a distinction here - this narration is not the same as the player actively being involved.

the player does not throughout the game become aware that emily has made political allies. during the game, she doesn't talk to these characters about saving karnaca or being a better ruler to the empire (there's a few lines might imply it, but you need to be actively looking and being careful to wait for every voice line. it's a far cry from daud & corvo's fight to save emily being unmissable - even though daud doesn't know at the beginning that's the goal).

how does the game show it

you can coincidentally not kill most of your subjects and never be aware that emily is looking to restore karnaca by means of instating a council - it's never brought up. it *couldn't* be brought up, because that council serves under the fake duke (armando), who is the last person she speaks to before she leaves for dunwall. its her suggestion that he rules karnaca, but armando's condition is that he will rule as he sees fit.

to back up a bit, emily's canonical method of restoring karnaca is by banding together key allies - hypatia, stilton, [byrne &or paolo], pastor, under a council beneath the duke's body double. they are passionate people who would each individually make worthwhile advisors, but if you think about those characters sitting at a table trying to reach an agreement, it feels like an assortment of people that emily didn't kill along the way and doesn't feel organic (up to interpretation). it's not stated if emily herself banded this council together, but logically she must have (worth a mention these are mostly characters that you as the player had reasonable rationale to kill during a high chaos run, except pastor). the underlying concept may be that karnaca's power is returned to its people - which is interesting given that the monarchy remains and armando's decision is final.

this overarching solution could also be taken as a critique to dh1's 'put your kid on the throne,' which is another reason its worthwhile looking at how emily was shown to be a better leader. obviously my point isn't that her solution was bad given the circumstance, but i mean she has very little agency here in all. if emily was shown to be more controlling as a leader, this could be interpreted as character growth, but that's not the case.

coming of age

how do you learn & grow when you can't specify your failings? emily doesn't really touch on her shortcomings as an empress. she non-specifically worries delilah makes a better empress than her. it's hard to argue her worries are meaningful when someone good at their job will still worry when lives are in the balance.

emily's best 'aha' moments (eg. crack in the slab comment about gaining perspective) are consistently undercut by a conversation with sokolov or meagan afterwards in which she demonstrates she hasn't learned anything (before the grand palace, emily condemns 'toadies sucking up to me' and is reminded by meagan that she's part of the problem). the story is confused about what it's trying to say about emily's progress, and when she's meant to show progress, if she was meant to show any progress at all. it could be argued that emily was never even a bad ruler, she had just been fed misinformation about the problems in karnaca and been the victim of slander by her political enemies. the game doesn't make this clear - it's easier to argue that the opposite is true given that her allies only have criticism.

worth a mention here that the heart quotes about armando - a fake ruler - interestingly mirror emily's character concerns. "see how he sighs? his life is a gilded cage." but this essay is already long.

while corvo & daud spend their games (and through the gameplay) 'earning' their redemption, emily is being led by the NPCs around her to a conclusion and a fix for the political mess in karnaca: meagan & sokolov guide emily to her missions, and there's no recurring quest for emily to investigate possible allies. she is able to gather the people she hasn't killed to herself by manner of... post-game narration. during the game, she's primarily concerned with getting her throne back.

an easy fix: if there had been less dialogue & narrative focus on emily's failings perhaps the ending would have felt more satisfying. it has the feel of cut content, but i don't know what was cut to be able to comment on it.

so what went wrong?

i can't help but wonder if arkane were worried they would lose a certain demographic if corvo wasn't playable (may have been deemed too much of a risk - 2013 was a different time), and so they had to take out story elements that were unique to emily's growth as a character/empress, because the usual storyline/gameplay integration had to work for both characters - in other words, gameplay that made sense for both corvo & emily was prioritised before emily's story & character development. which is a silly problem to have in a game that added character voices for the sake of improving characterisation - maybe emily's tale would have felt more akin to a parable if she had less lines that betrayed her ignorance (to the disdain of those around her).

i wish more care had been taken with emily's story. most players will never really notice the large variety of different endings - they're not particularly satisfying in and of themselves.

it's ironic that one of Emily's complaints is about her father/protector being overbearing, when his (parallel universe) presence in the gameplay may be one of the reasons her own narrative arc falls flat.

what are the upsides here

changing tune from what didn't work - don't you think the concept is fantastic? it's a great idea overall - can you imagine if the coming of age storyline was better integrated into the game?

it's valuable to talk about the integration of story and gameplay and characterisation from a craft perspective. dh2 genuinely is my favourite game - it's beautiful, the imm-sim design philosophy makes the world a delight to explore, the combat gives endless creative options for tackling any fight, there is a far greater diversity of cast in an in-text canonical way. there's loads to love!

i love emily as a dodgy leader, to me it adds interesting dimensionality to the outsider's narrations - of course in dunwall there's never a neat happily ever after! emily, like the outsider, both work well as characters who hold ultimate power but aren't necessarily worthy of it - and this makes perfect sense for the dishonored universe's morality & critiques of power. however, within this grey area there's still plenty of room for a satisfying ending, which isn't what we ended up with, whatever the true reason for that was. and also, damn, emily's a marked assassin empress, if she can't lead well then who can?

while dh1 was criticised for its narrative simplicity, dh2 in contrast and in hindsight shows us that simplicity isn't so bad - there's satisfaction in gameplay achieves a clear, simple narrative goal.

[lemonstars8583]

HELLO FIVE NIGHTERS i am back again and you can’t stop me from appearing spontaneously. Hello.

hardly any representation of Sarah here i know i know i’m sorry.. but um 👍👍 at least she’s here

ANYWAY i have. NO idea what to say about this. if you have any question ask (PLKEASE 🥹🥹 PLEEK… PLEEK…?) idk what to ramble about unprompted, normally i can talk on end for hours at a time but rn my brains drawing a blank.

uhm fun fact: Millie has memorized the name and location of every main artery thanks to the plague on society that is funtime freddy

I AM EDITING THIS POST TO SAY THAT UHm millie and sarah were in the same grade at the same highschool. no they were not friends at all. millie thought sarah was annoying for constantly wanting to be like other people and be “popular” (she HAAATES the popular kids after her “bff” ditched her or whatever the fuck happened in the book and she CANNOT understand anyone who wants to be like them), and uhhh sarah thought millie was WEIIRD she thought she was super super weird and carried diseases like rabies or some shit yk. like she’d camp out in the woods and kill frogs or some shit yk. she’d follow flocks of crows to a corpse to examine it yk. rumors like that LMFAO

[smokestarrules]

People who complain about Luz only really talking to Hunter and Camila in Thanks to Them are just. so close to getting the point

[lyxchen]

I'm on episode three of Heartbreak High season two and so far I have to say: too much Spider, TOO LITTLE QUINNI!!!!!!

[kheyys-worms]

Plucking away at your happiness.

-

Another fic fanart, this time it's inspired by another @merakiui's masterpiece: His Blueberry Eyes 💙💙 Go check the fic out! But do read the warnings first cause, boy... ngl, this one's heavy--

[apollos-boyfriend]

i've seen people talking about maybe this is why the census bureau showed itself to jaiden first, why it always showed so much favoritism to her compared to the other islanders, but like, this also probably explains why jaiden was so trusting of the census bureau despite it all. because, from what she knew, she really shouldn't have been. she'd heard of it kidnapping multiple of her friends, laughing at their deaths, taunting her with bobby's. yet she believed in it. she didn't hate it. before, this could've been explained by qjaiden just being overly kind and loving, but there's a deeper meaning behind that now. she didn't just trust it because she believed there was more than met the eye. she knew there was more to it. because she'd seen it first-hand, even if she didn't remember. that familiarity and trust was still there.

[stabbyfoxandrew]

Hey Aerie! I'm sorry you had a bad week, hopefully this one will be better!! Could I have some Vampdrew? I love how different (close!) his relationships with his humans are! And Neil just smelling too delicious 👀! Thank you for sharing your work ily <3

WIP Wednesday (4/24) | Vampire Andrew AU (Part 117)

Andrew pulls away immediately, feeling a thousand times better. He uses Nicky’s eyes as a mirror and sees he’s only got a bit of blood trickling from the corner of his mouth this time. He thumbs it away before saying, “I owe you.”

“If you pick up the popcorn explosion, we’ll be even,” Nicky mutters before slipping into his post-drink coma. Andrew rolls his eyes at the request but agrees to the terms. He’s picked up twenty-three pieces before Aaron unwisely opens his mouth.

“I’m starting to think we need to lock you in a bathroom for a while.” 

Andrew freezes for a second at that. And Nicky valiantly tries to sit up, the venom making it a bit difficult for him to get his voice working. “Don’t—”

“If you find a bathroom that can hold me, you can try.” Andrew challenges, looking Aaron in the eye. To prove his point, he zips around the room and picks up every piece of popcorn he sees— which is all of them, one hundred and nineteen to be exact. Then he pushes the bowl into Aaron’s hands.

His twin looks up at him, bewildered for a moment at his speed. “I’ll get to work on that.”

“Good luck.” Andrew wipes his hands on his jeans to remove the greasy feeling. “I have to go back to the court now. If you hear sirens… It’s probably me.”

“We’ll bust out the good pitchforks for you,” Aaron jokes. Then he takes a piece of popcorn from the bowl and Andrew doesn’t stop him from putting it in his mouth.

“Hey… That was… on the floor,” Nicky slurs, making Aaron grimace.

“Oh. Ew.” His face twists and Andrew cackles as he leaves, finally in a decent mood.

[ghosttotheparty]

has anyone written anything where everything is the same but steve has beef w eddie bc he saw hellfire coming out of the school the night of lucas’s basketball game

[wwskalisto]

Tagliatelle Cookie womp womp

Did you know she's racist-

She's a criminal lmfao, not a St Pastry Order member, the reason she looks like one is because she wants to look innocent

Why does she look like socks

[iqmmir]

I want to talk about my ocs.......... They're so stupid...........

[paleode-ology]

"oh babe, I'd let you know" is just running on loop in my head god they sound so good

[pandoa]

can we please take a moment to appreciate karuho shiina's art and beauty she's put into her work like-

look at this absolutely stunning cover she made for her kimi ni todoke spin-off. not only is it of kurumi, but it is also so unexplainably ethereal i honestly stare at her artwork in her manga just to take in the brightness of her art style. it's so pretty and gives me this soft and fluffy feeling in my chest idk how else to explain it lolol

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

love how long it took her to identify anger as one of her driving emotions like babe. babe. 12 was like looking angry all the time when he didnt mean to be so 13 is putting all the effort in appearing Nice and Nonthreatening at all times when she doesnt need to.

she is so incredibly angry here it's amazing. "i AM you, im BETTER than you, i have more EXPERIENCE than you, and youre sacrificing your men because you will not HUMBLE yourself to the advice of someone else"

shes literally like. him. shes like if i was a century younger you would have listened to me. shes like Do You Not See My Expertise You Stupid Baby You Have Literally No Idea What Youre Talking About. shes like all this and MY inferiors dont fucking know im drunk half the time because IM not a fucking amateur, amateur.