#ambivalent endings my beloved

[octaviasdread]

Thinking about Carpe Diem and the cinematography of falling leaves to falling snow.

Seasons as cyclical as generations. It's tapestries and banners. It’s photographs on the wall. A structure, a system; tradition in the bones of buildings and boys.

There's a choice to be made - Nolan's hollow, ceremonial Light of Knowledge, or Neil's scavenged, man-made God of the Cave?

They’re children living for the future through a lens of past. Fireside stories embraced by woodland caves. They chant, dance, and recite from a sacred book - the heirloom they claim from a father they chose.

The window is finally open, but time froze at Welton lake. Forever winter. Forever youth. A moment in time, a feeling, a community turned to dust.

It's all so fleeting. Carpe Diem. Teenage years, childhood, a lifetime in three months. It’s a tragedy of classical epics.

The tale is old, but this wound is fresh. Falling to your knees. Shouting at the sky, praying and wailing, and clutching at the earth.

But the snow never stops.

Spring is up to us.

[ms-scarletwings]

A Messy, Sedulous Necropsy of Zib Membrane

That’s what we call him right? Not Invader Zib? Hell if I know, we’ll let the tags decide.

Whatever he is christened by his author, enemies, or fans, this titular villain of the Zimvoid is such a mind blaster to me. I wish we had more time with him within the comics. I wish he had been a concept explored in the show. I wish he had a movie. I am having fun with a little hyperbole here, but I truly do find him just as interesting and potentially pivotal of an antagonist as Tak was, if not even more.

Both, of course, were so badly underutilized for sake of the series status quo. To that, Zib was a much bigger threat than Tak, and especially to that of the comics’ own. He potentially changes everything, and somehow absolutely nothing by the end. The TV show always had a more overt tone of cruelty and the macabre floating about its themes. These print issues? I don’t dislike them. It’s still recognizably invader Zim, and the more the merrier, content-wise, but longtime fans can feel that there was this change of essence in the transition. More obviously, in the art, but more subtly, there was an audible softening of that bluntly darker, cynical tone the show was made iconic for. To put it very generally, they lean a little more into the whackiness of this world, there’s a lot more dark comedy to be found in what I’ve seen so far rather than in your face darkness, and in the absence of the ost and voice acting the show accustomed us to, the comics leave a lot more room to be read as you wile. To me, they’re goofier and more episodic in spirit.

This all is not a critique or rating on the comics.. It’s purely, I feel, why Zib stuck out to me all the more jarringly in his context. His reveal was a genuine twist that brought forth stakes higher than arguably any other threat in the entire franchise. He represents a plausible while horrifying prophecy of our main characters if only they made worse decisions. The most interesting of all, for every piece of amazing information he fed to us, he bred dozens more questions about everything than he answered, from Irken machinations, to his ambivalent backstory, to the secrets hidden by the sum of his parts.

Though he was left evidently alive at the end of his story, I don’t see any chance for him making a return, so he is memorialized as another defeated one-off the writers have brisked past and left behind for good. Therefore, I’m here today to take what we got and present it on the metaphorical autopsy table. I want to really pull apart why this character alone pulled me back into the TV series, really just flay open the bits I can’t get out of my own head and dig harder until we find something or we run out of threads to tug at. Starting with the one already hanging out of my mouth, but

• B.E.F

“Bad End Friend” is a term I learned the meaning of within the last 12 hours or so of writing this, and I’m exuberant over that discovery. It’s a niche trope i didn’t know ive been a giant fan of since I was a child. Summed up, fictional characters from beloved media, typically, animated child protagonists… given the worst case scenario treatment. Their “bad ending”, whether that means a corruption arc, demonic possession, a lovecraftIan tragedy… usually something that’s anywhere along the lines of a fate worse than death to a full villainous turnover. As a treat. The concept is strongly associated with fanworks and AUs of popular media, but just as often this is something that becomes explored in the source material as well. A couple great examples I know would probably be Ice Prince Finn from Adventure Time or what happens in Undertale when you decide you want to run the most depraved playthrough possible. From a more mature story, “Evil” Morty is another validly arguable sample.

Besides a bit of a fondness I got going for certain dark or spooky themes in general, what I REALLY love about canonical BEFs the most is their utility as characterization tools. They’re the “having your cake and eating it too” option! The perfect way for an author to explore certain things about any character without actually committing to well… a bad ending.

Almost always, they are necessarily hypothetical or reversible. If they’re not reversible, they go often hand-in-hand with a little universe tampering to make happen. Sometimes, this means the story goes the way of time travel and branching off butterfly effects. Sometimes it means confirming multiverse theory, which can be the same thing depending on your semantical position.

And Zib crossed off the BEF qualifications by far and away. His implications are extremely dark given any pause think about them, and he’s a living, disturbing tragedy in aftermath. If you want to view a rigamarole about that aspect of his characterization as he appeared in the comics, someone else long beat me to that and I’m enthusiastically recommending a peek at their own work. I’m thrilled to do so and build a little upon that with those extended what-if-wonders.

• Lessons From a Lost Episode

Elephant in the room I haven’t seen someone ask yet, uh..

By show rules, isn’t Zib supposed to be a clear case of the writers committing the sin of retcon? By show I’m including the unaired scripts, including “10 Minutes to Doom”. In that one we had what looked like the potential setup for a Zib case, and it was deconstructed across the whole episode.

In short recap, Dib learned the hard and reckless way about the true nature of what Irken PAKs actually are. This is not an inventory bag, it is not “gear”. It’s the actual Irken entity- at least, the primary component.

Detaching it from the organic shell essentially caused a temporary split into two instances of Zim, desperately trying to connect back together under threat of obliteration.

Like let me be very clear about this,

The PAK is an autonomous instance of Zim’s consciousness, and it’s the main one. We’ve seen it act to save his life when his body has been out cold or flatlined, and he doesn’t appear the least bit disoriented or confused once “he” wakes and jumps back into the action. There’s no known separate computer assistant AI or security autopilot in there. That code, that program, IS Zim. As Long as the PAK is active, he is capable of staying fully conscious and able to react to what’s happening around him, and that’s what we’ve been seeing, his own actions.

Zim proved me right when Virooz tried to replace him and detached the PAK. Take note of his phrasing after the chair event™.

“I” activated the protocol. Immediately after Virooz ran off with my shell.

“I” Voluntarily chose to do so.

I don’t remember it playing out like that in “10 Minutes to Doom”.

Attaching to a new host wasn’t the first reflex. Dib was not the least bit aware that that he has literally holding the actual Zim captive in sense, and the latter was fighting like a cornered animal to escape him. Failing that, alongside the distance between him and his original body growing fast, he made a last desperate gambit, and he willingly connected himself into Dib’s body.

I can see why he thought this was better than nothing, no matter how repulsive the notion might have been. If he couldn’t fend Dib off physically, he could incapacitate him in some fashion by trying to overtake his will. Maybe give the shell a better chance to catch up, maybe in the longshot hope of being able to pilot dib in order to become whole with the correct host again. And you can say he succeeded, at least in dominating bodily control away from Dib, but at the cost of his already tenuously held sanity. This could be because of the interference of Dib’s own mind still resisting to fully submit, or malfunctions because of the biological incompatibility; however, the thing that Dib mentally becomes is only the basic idea of what “Zim” is. Instead of remembering it needs to reunite with its shell ASAP, the PAK mistakes Dib’s body for its own and goes through the manic motions of following the Invader mission. And it does this, weirdly enough, with almost no regard for blowing its cover.

When things are set right again, Zim’s later words near the episode ending revealed that he knew that was an unsustainable state.

Such a risk was not just accounted for, he was actually banking on it if that clock had hit zero. If Zim had truly lost, if he was really doomed to meet his end on this nasty rock in the middle of Nowhere, Space, then by every damned circuit in his being, he was going to take down this insolent fool boy and as many other humans possible with him. A dying act of vengeful rage.

• The Exceptional… Exception

Now, wouldn’t all of this be the definitive reason for Zib’s existence to be an aberrant impossibility? Yes, but actually no. Fun thing about multiverses is if something doesn’t work in one setting, you can just tweak a few dials and suddenly you have a world where the impossible becomes possible. But that’s a pretty cheap answer, isn’t it? So, what exactly was that crucial difference?

What happened in Zib’s timeline that went down so, so divergently from the events of 10 Minutes to Doom?

Because the only one who was in any position to explain it for us was Zib himself, and he’s proven to be one of the most unreliable of narrators. It’s as @dana-chan-the-control-brain already spared no effort to demonstrate, when he does tell us something about his past, his story is pocked with contradicting half-truths or outright lies. Ergo it helps to break down each recount of events to pick out the real facts.

Version 1: This is an alternate version of dib who defeated his complementing Zim (logically sensible) and went on to achieve all of the success and respect he sought after in his timeline (absolute bullshit). He kind of gestures and only implies about what has happened to his body while explaining that he came to his current understanding of Irken technology by studying it through Zim’s lab (a partial truth). He lets slip in passing that he has in fact fused with the PAK in order to learn how to alter and reprogram its coding, lessons he has applied to Number 2 in order to have a brainwashed pawn (also apparently true).

Version 2, when cornered and red handed: This is an alternate version of Dib who managed to specifically stop Zim's mission (Again, makes sense) but somehow could not convince the world of his findings or his warnings about the Irken Armada (*VERY eyebrow raising). Frustrated with the people’s lack of cooperation, he decides he has no choice but to physically merge with Zim’s PAK post-mortem (concerning and evidently mostly accurate), dominate the Earth himself, and enslave humans to help him in his efforts (highly troubling and probably true). The construction of his EMP super-weapon is successful, but ultimately led to the creation of the Zimvoid when the device was field tested (self evident, absolutely horrifying).

You know what I noticed was missing from both of these accounts? Exactly how his Zim was defeated. Which honestly could have been some beyond useful wisdom to pass along to the main Dib??? More than anything else? I’m not going to fault our boy for not pressing that matter better under the awing circumstance; however, there’s an implication I’ve been reading between lines. 

When Zib mentions “defeating” his own Zim, he’s talking about something different than ours.

When our Dib has always talked about “defeating” Zim, he’s meant incapacitation and capture. Throughout the show he explicitly wants to present Zim before an audience alive and whole. Yeah, he fantasizes about other people torturing or disassembling him for study, but HIS role was supposed to be reaping the fame for an undeniable, ground-breaking discovery. Conspiracies and cryptids are all this kid breathes and lives by! And as long as pop culture has always been fascinated with the paranormal, and he has to know this full well, people keep bringing forward hoax after hoax after scam. I mean there’s a freaking current one or few still going IRL about this exact topic. Dib would want no room left for being dismissed as another one of those con artists. 

Nonetheless, I actually doubt this is the reason Zib couldn’t get through to the scientific community. A genuine alien lifeform, even a dead one, could still be confirmed by any basic medical examination. The world thinks Dib is too crazy to listen to, but his father is still Professor Membrane. In "10 Minutes to Doom" OUR Dib got as close as having Membrane literally analyzing a PAK, or at worst, preparing to. “Ultimate Dib” gets his hands on the same thing and pulls a move I’d expect from an HP Lovecraft Protagonist instead.

We’re assuming way too much to what these two Dibs have in common, because this ^^^ is really what made the Zimvoid an outlier in the multiverse. That world didn’t only have a very different, more threatening Zim from the main timeline, it had the Dib who proved even more formidable, cunning, and ruthless, even before the fusion. 

He didn’t obtain that PAK ala the “10 minutes to Doom” accident, it’s a personal trophy. This is extra strange remembering that capturing an Irken is realistically more easy than killing one. They’re seriously more tenacious than kudzu and will even fight back in PAK form alone. I’m convinced that whatever sort of final showdown made the Ultimate Dib the victor, there are two optional endings on the table.

Option 1: There was not a body even left intact enough to bring in to research. Maybe Dib’s fault, maybe an accident, maybe even Zim’s own luck running out and his incompetent antics finally swallowed him (and possibly GIR). This theory assumes that the PAK was the only sort of remains to come into Dib’s recovery/possession.

Option 2: Curiosity Killed the cat,

but satisfaction brought it back.

Or, the one I personally headcanon. Dib… all Dibs, I assume, don’t just hate the Irken species. They are mesmerized by them, and all that they represent from his perspective. Firstly, the epic villain he gets to roleplay nemesis to in order to feel his own worth and importance. Secondly, an unknown wonder from beyond the boundaries of the cosmos. He’s not really a ghost buster or a Men In Black agent at heart, but a scientist, like his father. Underneath his contempt for Zim’s plans to destroy the world is a genuine and appropriately childish awe for alien presence, especially for Zim’s technology. His silent, dopey smile when Tak’s ship ended up in his backyard said more than words ever will.. 

Earlier in the show, a great deal of Dib’s time and effort was spent on trying to infiltrate the lower levels of Zim’s base. Sneaking into the house was hard enough, but the computer security can’t be bypassed like the gnomes. Not even by Zim himself unless he really is all himself. Perhaps you’re starting to sniff where I’m going with this one when I refer back to “Bolognius Maximus”. I’ve another reference that’s a little more on the nose, and a lot more… dark.

Were an expired Irken husk before you, you too might take your victory and cash in then. Still, who knows what sudden impulse may run through the head of a less humble version of yourself, one some could call greedier, obsessive to a fault, a screw or two loose, yet, a hell of a smart cookie. Smart enough to see it for what it actually was, the keys to a whole world of discovery that went so many layers deeper than they could ever imagine. It’s possible the Ultimate Dib already learned beforehand the same hard lessons about the PAKs that our own did, and took that understanding toward not repeating the same mistake this time. What happened to Zim? I think he was murdered in cold blood, body, and entity. “10 Minutes to Doom” showed us a fight between 2 brains clinging to one body, struggling until one overpowered another, but that’s not what this is. Through whatever means of science were available to him, this Dib has probably tried to “disarm” the technology by either erasing Zim’s consciousness out of it altogether, or by forcing the autonomous code into a kind of dormancy. His intentions were to render it back to its basic hardware without losing its precious knowledge and usefulness, something like the brain-filled tank that was wired into Skrang’s head. Zim’s PAK doesn’t cling onto his body like a parasitic teratoma this time; it’s merged in a literal sense with his nervous and circulatory system. As well, he has fooled the device’s ability to detect and reject a foreign host shell, the exact same way he deceived the the base’s security AI. If an Irken biology is what these measures authorize to command them and their secrets, then he had the tools on hand to give them just that- in an atrocity I like to call

the darker harvest.

Within this theory, there is not as much room to wonder exactly what became of Zim’s organic remains. 

But where Dib fucked up was, for the second time, in his ignorance to the true nature of what he was even playing with. That was a mistake that even the mighty Elder Brains of Judgementia lost themselves to; How much more vulnerable was the weak, human mind? Though Zim can be devoured, he can never be digested. In that fact was born this aberration against nature, sanity, and humanity alike.

"Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects… don't have politics. They're very… brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first… insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but… I'm afraid, uh… I'm saying… I'm saying I - I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake." - Seth Brundle, The Fly, 1986

By fusing what is half-mad and what is utterly mad, neither being was cured, only assimilated into the birth of a new madness. The madness of the creature that snickers behind the curtain in the Zimvoid. I rightfully fear that lonesome thing, but not I think as much as I pity him.

• Dejavu, or Re:Plagarism

One more thing about the Zimvoid arc I find curious is the way it makes you question more and more just how much of the aberration is actually still Dib, and how much of it is Zim's infection haunting him. He does nothing with all of his intellect, his resources, and his time in the void doing anything but surrounding himself in everything he claims he despises. He decries alien tyranny in one breath while lording over a homemade, cruel dictatorship in another. He calls for eradication of the very race who's technology and physiology he has thoroughly appropriated. He laments feeling unable to protect the Earth from the Armada alone, yet sneers literally through Irken teeth to insult humans as inferior and of no value to him any longer. Our Dib spent the whole damn show longing for the support of other people, but Zib pushes away potential allies in his arrogance. His broken timeline never became a Dibvoid instead because while only half of his mind can't stand Irkens, both of the souls inside him remember that they loathe and look down upon a Dib, deep inside.

The corruption goes as far as even subverting his own creativity. None of Zib's plans are wholly original. His anti-Irken weapon was already a concept blueprinted inside of that PAK before the merge. Our Dib has several times shown a propensity for some DIY ingenuity, sometimes dipping a toe into the supernatural. Zib entirely calls upon, scavenges and regurgitates Irken designs with a few modifications or upgrades. The Dib Virus, I think is his most uninspired creation yet, for it's original form was always something inside of Zim, even if the latter himself was not aware of the fact. Like all else, it is a weapon he has plundered, customized, and turned around on everyone else for his own selfish ends. This brief point I will end on one  more reflection. The one kind of help Zim ever allowed at his side were the likes of GIR and his own creations. Unable to connect and cooperate with his peers and own kind, his ego preferred to be around those defective machines he related to- drones to be owned by him and always loyally at his beck and call. A slave to admire him unconditionally is the only companionship he's ever been willing to admit to desiring.

And what was Number 2's purpose again? What role exactly were the arena combatants auditioning for, when you think about it?

[quicksilverlightning]

A Theory on Cogita

Some Discord dialogue left me theory crafting about Cogita, so let's jump in shall we? Thanks to @praazlwurm for help with the conclusion!

It's been common speculation that Cogita is long-lived/ immortal, and that she may have written the Ancient Verses. This round of conjecture relies upon the evidence of two things:

That Cogita has been around a While

That Cogita did indeed write the Old Verses

I will spend an eternity… until the one with the mission appears Old Verse, Number 11

It seems I'll be able to fulfill my duty at long last, thanks to you Cogita, during the first meeting

Alongside a claim that we have no evidence of:

That the Old Verses are true.

This is not to say that the Verses are wholesale falsehoods - much of them are certainly accurate, or as accurate as one can be when dealing with gods and events before recorded history. However, from the very beginning, Cogita has a... let's say ambivalent relationship with the truth. Even as the end of the world looms above, the truth has to be finessed out of her. At no point in our journey did she seek us out, not when people were being hurt, Pokemon were suffering in their frenzy, the various groups were on the edge of a peace that could break at any moment - why?

(I've heard any number of theories, but lets set them aside for now - the point is, Cogita had the ability to help at several points, and chose not to.)

Looking at the Old Verses, a number of them are concerned with either the existence of various beings of legend (1, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17), the Ancient Hero and his retinue (3, 4, 10, 11), or the writer (2, 9, 14). Cogita clearly knows quite a lot - yet, there are only two verses about the Celestica people (5, 20). Why does she seem to know more about ancient events than more recent ones? Or, at least, why are the ancient events written down, but not whatever tragedy befell the Celestica?

Which brings us to the only other known descendant of the Celestica, Volo.

The very first thing we hear from Cogita is not directed towards us, but to Volo:

Shirking your work to come pester me again? Even beneath a bleeding sky, you never change.

Cogita has no reason to distrust Volo pre-reveal, yet consistently treats him dismissively at best, numerous times over:

"Kindly spare me your doubts, young man. I know the old words and what they bid us do. How true they are isn't mine to know

How nonchalant you sound. How confident of successes to which you contribute nothing

"Watch"? Is that all you really do?

So what's her deal? Why is she so callous towards the only other member of her lost people? I believe the answer is in her very first line - she believes Volo has come once again to ask questions that she doesn't want to answer. Which of course leaves us with a different question: why doesn't she want to answer? Why is not only so accepting of the Celestica being forgotten, but actively hiding any information about them? Especially from someone with who she shares that culture?

And now, we leave hard-evidence-based hypothesizing and jump into the craziest thing I could come up with:

Cogita is responsible for the downfall of the Celestica.

Let's take a look at a Verse that I find very puzzling, Number 16:

"Heaven's crown, nearest to almighty Sinnoh… "Power of almighty Sinnoh, gather as stone at heaven's mount. "Stone, let your power flow— distort and bend the world around you."

This is not a verse describing something that already happened. This is written in present tense. This sounds like a summoning ritual.

And who is being summoned? Is the word "distort" not ample clue?

Now tell me, if this Giratina desires more than anything else to challenge almighty Arceus... where do you think it might appear?.. Exactly! Where one is closer to the heavens than any other place in Hisui! ...And where the space-time rift first opened!"

I propose that Cogita lost someone, as we read in Verse 2:

My own beloved is now gone from me, departed to a place I cannot reach.

And in her grief, she did something Unwise in an attempt to reclaim them. The Giratina statue in the Celestica Ruins was destroyed because, when they tried to stop her, Cogita turned its power upon her own people.

Still to my breast I clutch this hopeless dream, a futile wish for us once more to meet

And thus:

Once it shone upon us all, with all the warmth of welcome sun. "But now we weep, to grief we fall, starved of light now it has gone. Old Verse, Number 20

Further, I propose that is was Cogita who, however unintentionally, set Volo upon his path. She kept him distant from the only person from whom he could learn about his culture - herself - leaving exploring the ruins as his only option. One of these ruins, the Sacred Plaza, is where Verse 16 is found by the main character; Volo found that Verse at some point, and managed to infer enough to take the first step. Giratina once again manifests itself at the behest of a Celestican.

Enter the Player.

[red-hibiscus]

Semi-coherent thoughts on DFF ending

I went into the episode wanting chaos and death, so at least on that I kinda won

Very happy about the gore and death chaos. Thank you very much. This is what I wanted. I wanted thriller and I was served.

I sorta predicted the open ending bc this is a thriller and wouldn't be the first time I've seen such an ending. That and the time they were working with was rather short. Cliffhanger felt possible. Kinda gives Us open ending vibes. Not exactly the same, but it reminded me of the film.

The pacing is kinda wonky. Fast paced in a weird way. I got some thrill factor, but I kinda wanted it to be more drawn out to build suspense. I think that's what I wanted, more suspense and not just all hard hitting stuff if that makes sense

Sad about white. from a fan pov, boc how could you my baby boy. From a chaos enthusiast, yea lets go death and pain ig lmao. Best way to create pain and horror is to have the most beloved (innocent) character die by the hands of his hallucinating bf. Painful as hell, but i get it in a way. Did i want it? No, but sure ok.

I'm ambivalent about New dying (?? yea I assume he died). Could've gone either way. If he had lived this would've been more revenge thriller I guess. I think his part could have been done better though. Not sure how, but yea.

[evilelitest2]

Was Sander's Robbed in 2020?

Ok so lets walk to the past for a bit. Its 2020, the Democratic primary is getting heated. Biden keeps leading in all the polls, but after three primary elections, he has been coming off short. Moderates are panicking and it looks like Bernie Sanders might be able to get the nomination after all. He was counted out after the heart attack, and yet he kept on going.

So Sanders going in 2020 had two options for how to run his campaign. About 30% of the party loved him, about 20% of the party absolutely hated him, and 55% were mixed more ambivalent about him. He could either

Try to win over the parts of the party that aren't already supporting him, in particular the black community (Sanders does this a bit with the Latino democrats, his latino outreach very impressive and very underreported in the Democratic party

Try to hold unto your 25-30% of the party and hope rest of the vote is split between all the different moderates, so he can win with a plurality of the vote. due to the weirdness of the Democratic primary rules he can still win the nomination even without the majority, the winner only needs a plurality. if the moderate votes are split between Biden, Mayor Pete, Bloomberg, and Klobuchar, then Sanders could squeak in a victory with less than a third of the party.

Biden is the frontrunner, is polling ahead of everybody else, particular among the all important African-American segment of the democratic electorate. However he isn't beloved and there are a ton of Moderates running against him, and all of them are focused on attacking Biden in the hopes that they could take his place.

Sanders too option 2, which was risky. Winning with a plurality rather than a majority always leaves a lot of sore feelings, and had Sanders won the 2020 primary he would have to have dealt with the 70% of the electorate who didn't vote for him feeling sore, but maybe he could have handled it, we will never know. The advantage of his plan is that he just needed to hold unto his base, who already loved him. The danger is that if the moderates ever managed to rally around a single candidate, suddenly he is very outnumbered. Risky play but he did it. This is the same plan that trump use to win the Republican primary in 2016 (to be clear, that isn't a moral judgement on sanders, Trump isn't bad because he won with a plurality, he is bad because he is a fascist). There is one key difference though the Republican primary uses a winner takes all approach, so who ever wins the state gets all of the points, which allowed Trump to expand his lead. This is because Republicans don't believe in democracy.

Those are some great mittens

So far this plan has been working well for Sanders. The moderates have split the vote, Sanders won Nevada, New Hampshire and either won Iowa or it was so close that he basically won Iowa. Biden has yet to do well in any of the first three states.

But Then, South Carolina, the first state with a large black electorate. Biden secures a key endorsement from US Representative and Civil Rights activist Jim Clyburn. The results were a pretty stunning turnaround for Biden, who won 49% of the votes and got 39 of the delegates. Sanders came in second, with 20% of the vote and 15 of the delegates. Buttigieg, Warren, Steyer, and Klobuchar didn't get a high enough percentage of the vote to get any delegates.

Biden almost won more than the rest combined.

So lets take a moment to talk about the US primary system, because it is both illogical and needlessly complicated. Rather than have all the states vote at once like a normal fucking country, each individual state plus the territories plus DC hold there own primary, most of which are not in order. So for example, the great state of NY, fourth largest state in the country and the center of the global economy, has its primary at the literal end of the process. So yeah, I've never in my lifetime gotten to have any effect on a presidential primary, because the race is already over by the time it gets to NY. So who wins a primary is not necessarily the most popular person with the party, its who ever can stay in the race longest, its a marathon. A super popular candidate could still drop out if they aren't popular in the first few state. Maybe Elizabeth warren was super popular in New York and if she had been able to hold unto those state she would have won, but we will never know. this system sucks, and I hate it.

So the way the primary goes down is that you have 4 elections from individual states. Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina. Then you have something called Super Tuesday, where Virginia, North Carolina, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, Alabama, Arkansas, and Utah all go at once. So basically you go from 4 individual states to a fuck tone of state (including the two largest) all at once).

So another critical thing about the democratic party is demographics. While the republican party is a white Christianity identity party, the democratic party is a diverse coalition. The most important part of that is the African American vote, who have steadily become the deciding vote in the Democratic party since the 60s. About 90% of African American voters are democratic, and African Americans make up just over a quarter of the Democratic party. They are also by far the most organized and proactive voters, due to years of having to fight against voter suppression (especially in the South). The black electorate in the democratic party is one of the parties greatest advantages, and it also why the party has become steadily less racist every year (Obama really accelerated this process). To be clear this is a good thing, the Democratic party is better for it.

For a series of very complicated reasons I could get into another time, Sanders had never done particularly well with African American voters and Biden has. This isn't universal, the African American community is not a monolith and has a diversity of views but that is how the demographics played out generally in the primary. Most importantly, apart from Biden was the only candidate, moderate or progressive, who seemed to excite the African American voting bloc.

The reason why this matters is that Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada don't have very large black populations, Iowa and new Hampshire are lily white, and Nevada is less than 10% African American. Despite being more than a fourth of the party, the first three states are not representative of the African American vote (maybe we should have one nation wide election eh?)

So once biden won South Carolina, it became obvious that A) Biden's defeats in the first three states were not affecting his popularity in the larger states B) none of the other moderates had any real African American support. This is what leads to the supposed "betrayal"

The Day before Super Tuesday, Obama called up the remaining moderates, and convinced most of them to drop out and endorse Biden. They did so, and it basically shattered Sander's chance of winning. With most of the moderates unified, Biden won 10 states to Sander's 4, wracking up 726 delegates to sanders 505. Biden got 286065 votes to sanders 74,755. Not only was this a great victory for Biden, after super Tuesday all of the other moderates withdrew, allowing him to crush Sanders going forward. Biden had 2709 Delegates to Sanders 1,113, but more importantly Biden won 51% of the votes, with sanders getting 26%. Some Sanders fans have blamed Elizabeth Warren for not dropping out, but even if Warren had and every one of her votes had gone to standers (and there is a lot of evidence to suggest a third of her votes would have gone to Biden), that would only make Sanders at 33% to 51%.

To put this in raw numbers, Biden won 19 million votes. Sanders had just under 9.7 million. Biden won 10 million more votes than Sanders (Elizabeth warren got 2.8 million)

So I see a lot of leftist types claim that this was an example of democratic treachery, that the DNC party robbed sanders of his chance of winning, this was Nixon style Ratfuckery that destroyed Sander's populist campaign to put Biden, who nobody likes anyway, in charge. And as a progressive who didn't want Biden to win, I have to say it sucked...but that wasn't a cheat.

Biden won the popular vote, love him or hate him, he did win more than half of the democratic votes, that makes him the candidate, that is how democracy works, sometimes you lose. Some have claimed that Obama calling up the other moderates and getting them to drop out was a cheat but....how? The moderates knew they couldn't win after South Carolina, and they were ideologically closer to Biden, so they dropped out and endorsed the person they agreed with more. Most Sanders fans wanted Warren to drop out, so I knew you guys understand that importance of consolidating behind a winning candidate. Thats just good politics, the fact that Sanders didn't bother to try to court other candidates to drop out is actually a major weakness of him as a candidate. If the situation had been reversed, and the moderates were trying to win with only 30%, wouldn't you guys want the other progressives to drop out behind sanders

Because Sanders is a populist, and his rhetoric is so tied to the idea of "The people rising up against the elites" that idea that he lost demographically is sort of a trauma his more radical followers can't really deal with, so they retreat to conspiracy theories. Remember, a conspiracy theory is something people turn to to avoid facing a difficult truth. If you identify yourself as populist, and you lose demographically, you have to face some difficult questions. Maybe sanders was the wrong candidate? Maybe he made mistakes? Maybe his fanbase sabotaged his chance of winning, maybe his hardcore fans make a mistake in there understanding of the political situation. Maybe he didn't do anything wrong, it just wasn't the year for a progressive? Or maybe Sleepy Joe Biden actually was a more cunning political operator than they gave him credit for and they were duped.

Or most difficult of them all. Maybe most Americans just don't agree with Sander's position?

Those are hard questions, but you kinda of have to answer them if you want to be a progressive who accomplishes things. I might do later posts that address them if people are interested.

There is a segment of the left who are moving into purple

However, for those who can't face difficult choices, they retreat to conspiracy, and they claim that Sanders was robbed

Hey you know who hasn't been saying that Sanders was robbed by the DNC? Bernie Sanders, because he is an adult who understands how democracy works. He lost, he took it gracefully and then he endorsed and campaigned for the winner, cause sanders actually cares about the cause and not faux revolutionary nonsense.

(Fun fact, Biden and Sanders are friends Irl. Like no joke, those two get along personally)

I didn't vote for Biden in the primary and I was not happy when he won the Primary. However I never thought Biden was senile, or a fool, or a hack, I think that he is a very cunning politician who has a public persona that encourages people to underestimate him And become people can't stand the idea that they could lose to Biden, they retreat into fantasy. This is why MAGA denies the election, they can't face the reality that most of the country doesn't like them, and they can't admit that they lost to a man who doesn't fit there mental image of an impression leader

Yeah...that ends well.

[frociaggine]

tell us more about that gay and closeted roy wip.... he is already so high-strung but i trust that you can make him even more strung

OK this is a very hazy plot I haven't fully pinned down yet but the main inspiration was the hook "what if Roy was on Grindr in S1?" and my brain went "what if S1 Roy was on Grindr because he had literally no other options?" Because it would be juicy. To me. Therefore:

Roy is gay and very aware. He's known for decades, he's not in denial or dating women or uneasy about his sexuality, but he's VERY deep in the closet for professional athletes reasons.

He had the same career as he does in canon, beloved former national legend, very recognisable wherever he goes etc; he spent 20 years living with a constant baseline of paranoia about being outed

Probably makes his regular hookups sign NDAs, that sort of stuff. He had a long-term relationship with a partner that ended because the pressure was too much. These days he’s on Grindr. Duh.

Unlike canon Roy, he’s slightly more ambivalent about the upcoming ending of his career. He still dreads it and knows he will be unmoored without it, but on the other hand he can at least see a world beyond football.

ANYWAY given all of this. The idea I'm fucking around with is a S1 AU where Jamie and Roy are both on Grindr, Jamie recognises Roy and sort of pulls a Trent. Like, he sees Roy's profile and he's all excited because he thinks he can hook up with his hero if he plays his cards right, but he acts like such a try-hard about it that Roy worries he's trying to blackmail him.

Will probably be less angsty / sexier than I'm making it sound! Happy ending etc. But I'm just very interested in how Roy's life would be different if he was gay and always knew it (as opposed to figuring out later in life) bc on the surface the changes wouldn't be THAT evident; in canon he's already unmarried with no kids and keeps to himself. But his mind would be a slightly different place.

HAPPY ENDING THO.

[autisticbokutoenthusiast]

tracking nuthphop through music: ep 4 and 5

*warning that songs and timestamps may not be 100% accurate, i tried by best tho. also i tried to descirbe the emotions of some of the songs but im not great at naming emotions so sorry in advance*

Ep 4

first nuthphop scene where phop is streaming.

- (kenji-ooyy 2:00) at the beginning of ep 4 their first contact is nuth private messaging phop while he’s live, the music is digital and in my sleepy state i’ll describe it as uptempo rock guitars with a lil hip hop influence. it’s exciting and sits closer to dark than light.

-(couldnt find the track 2:50) we then change to just nuth and phop messaging and the music is this like quick pulsating suspense synth and kick drum that to me sounds a bit like a beating heart.

- (couldnt find the track 3:20) then it switches to a 4 on the floor disco edm type sound.

- (machine vs machine - dream cave 3:50) when nuths payment comes through we go to dark and heavy synth sounds to me it almost sounds like a battle scene.

- (inverted - hampus naeselius 5:03) when nuth gets blocked we go back to quick pulse beats that sound like it’s misc digital percussion with some haunting higher pitched synths pulsing in and out

Phop agreeing to film with nuth

- (32:23 drifting emotions howard harper-barnes) this song starts right after the keen and phop moment where they have to stop because keen refused to wear a condom, it plays during phops narration about sex work and ends when he checks a message from nuth [the "im so sad you blocked me" one]

- (34:26 ambivalent thoughts- magnus ringblom) their messaging convo is silent until nuth sends a deposit and phop starts seriously considering meeting up with him again. it’s a sentimental piano ballad.

Nuth on the phone with mystery guy (i suspect jason lee) aka my beloved invisible hand scene

- (couldn’t find the track 37:57) it’s silent as the camera zooms in on nuth looking at his bank account. then at his trophy/plaque. when he makes the decision to call to ask to sell drugs [for daddy jason lee??] again theirs a heartbeat like bass drum and various reverbed and echoy percussion sounds that come in and out

- (39:11 cry- johannes bornlôf) another sad piano song. this plays as nuth finishes the phone call. i think it’s interesting that we get sad piano ballads for the phop/nuthphop/nuth scenes because they don’t [typically] repeat songs despite choosing ones that sound very similar…

the filming

- (couldn’t find the track 48:22) phop arrives at the filming location to a hip hop drum beat.

- (colds- guß 48:50) this sorta upbeat while still being lowkey electro instrumental plays when nuth tells phop to relax and they begin to set up

- (49:25 feelin ma self- push n glide) during the test lines this more uptempo and confident beat plays, specifically when nuths camera changes from just filming phop to filming him is a sexual way? idk how i want to explain it but yeah the song changes when the camera nuth is holding changes the way it views phop. [sidenote hihats in this one lowkey hit, idk what the gun shot sounds doing here tho].

- (50:22 kenji- ooyy) then we have an upbeat synth and electric guitar based hip hop beat when nuth says he’ll start revealing the acts he wants phop to do and what he’ll pay for them. This is the same song they play during our very first nuthphop moment so its like full circle for them in terms of their journey this ep (i think this may represent the fact that they begin and end with nuth paying phop to perform on camera for him) [side note the beat drops when nuth says he’ll wear a condom]

- i will also mention a trap beat plays at the end of the ep but it plays over all the characters so i’m not really counting it as a nuthphop song

ep 5

nuth and phop are chilling high on the bacony with nuth teasing and recording phop.

- (30:35 kobicha- arden forest) a sad? low piano solo plays while nuth watches fondly as phop tries to lick his own elbow.

- (31:24 yoiyami- sayuri hayashi egnell) a different piano solo (brighter and a bit pluckier) plays as phop begins reading nuths new script. this song continues playing through the “people like us can’t make porn that gets seen as art or wins awards, ours only gets seen as obscene” scene. it stops when nuth starts looking sad and phop changes the subject to having to leave and go to work.

- (32:50 ambivalent thoughts- magnus ringblom) this is the song that played last ep when nuth asked phop to consider filming with him and sends a deposit. this starts playing as nuth carries phop out on his back and then as hes shaving him. it stops abruptly with a high pitched noise when phop refers to nuth as his client and nuth points out he can only pay with drugs and not cash. there’s not music playing as nuth asks phop not to leave him to go work.

- (34:15 scared of water - kikoru) this eerie string piece plays as nuth stares down at phop with the shaving blade in his hand, it continues throughout them kissing and the pan down to nants necklace on the floor

artsy nuthphop scene

- (45:40 yoiyami- sayuri hayashi egnell) [notice this played earlier] it begins during the convo where aob rejects puen and then carries into the scene where the camera is all shaky and nuth and phop are under a purplish spotlight in a room that is dark. as nuth says “im hallucinating i can hear his voice” phop suddenly appears next to him and says “im physically here” and the music stops abruptly. i will say because of where it played earlier in the ep this song feels like it represents nuths hopeless feelings.

- (46:49 i can’t find this song for shit yall im sorry like it’s making me insane i cannot find this fucking song) phop says “i miss you” and nuth says “me or the drugs?” when phop says “both” a new song starts and plays while they have sex it’s upbeat and with strings and digital percussion and have lyrics that give like love against the odds vibes or like love at the end of the world. this is while they have sex and theres also random shots of a field of grain? and cowboys hugging?

- (49:08 incomplete- gavin luke) after they wake up and are staring at eachother a new piano song plays it’s kinda sad not in a i’m sad way but in a feeling lowkey CALM calm is the word but also light

- (50:00 last level part 2- hey son) this song plays briefly when phop picks up and shows nuth the N necklace. and nuth has a flashback.

- (50:40 hope will prevail- ecobel) this piano part that leads into like edm ish lowkey beats plays when phop asks it he can keep the necklace to remind him of nuth. the beat drops when they kiss.

this was really interesting imo. like how in ep 4 they begin and end the ep with the same song, how when they're being honest about emotions and feelings they get piano ballads but they have different flavours, etc. im excited to do the next eps

ep 6

[apesoformythoughts]

So, it was all there at the beginning with the epigraph from the in-universe The Creation of Éa:

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.

My uneasiness, too, because my (sometimes-too-quick-to-judge) inner alarm went off at the vague suggestion of dualism. In the end, I’m trying to see in it our beloved et-et/complexio oppositorum, but I think, if that’s the case, there’s always the risk of misunderstanding. It’s the “only in dark the light” that rubs me the wrong way, as if good needed evil in any capacity.

But I might be the one misreading dark and light there. So Ged becoming whole in the end doesn’t mean he “embraces” his “inner shadow” in a dualistic or ambivalent way. I mean, it’s right there in the text: “whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”

[waheelawhisperer]

Alright so, not my kind to send these kind of asks, but I feel like I have to because I'm genuinely curious.

First of all, what did Rhine Lab, and specifically Saria/Silence fans have done to you to get to this amount of hate? While I agree some are debatably like the satyric description you've made, the majority are not just braincelless idiots. If anything, these people are probably the most invested in character psychology and symbolism in the fandom. Thinking that fans give them no personality trait is outright wrong, and their creator themselves is investing a lot in those characters to make them deep and symbolic. People aren't stupid 6-years old playing dolls like you may think, the reason why they would be invested in these characters is primarily because they are interesting to analyze in a psychological point of view.

Secondly, these characters are bound to get along. This is not even some take from a highcore fan, it's just that it's meant to happen. NoriZC left a lot of hints and their entire relationship is based on family and trust. From their words, "grass and rocks will always compliment each other over time", with the grass being Silence and the rocks Saria. It's not some fanfiction with a long slowburn just to end in romantic cliché, it's a story of trust and healing. It takes time to show your true heart and accept someone within, it's true for these characters and for actual people. While it doesn't have to be outright romantic, these characters undeniably share a really strong familial bond, that "friend" or "best friend" simply can't fit. I agree that there's very low chances that the characters actually end up in an amorous relationship, because gacha game be this way, but it seems very implied by NoriZC that they support this, as they retweeted and liked fanarts of them being shown as a couple, and they already supported wlw couples before.

Lastly, I just don't think you can claim these characters have nothing interesting, and that Rhine Lab has no influence over the entirety of Terra. A lot of things, even in the main scenario - Rosmontis for an example - were caused or a consequence of Rhine Lab's actions. And so much more is to come with Lone Trail, this is simply just one of the most powerful company in all over Terra. And just like the Seaborn, this is a highly dangerous threat slowly building itself up and that will end up being destructive, as Kal'tsit herself wishes to avoid facing Rhine Lab (Mountain's files).

Is symbolism and character building so unknown to you? Is it something only your beloved Nearl can have, or can you actually open your heart more?

Lone Trail releasing reminded me that this was sitting in my inbox lmao

I'm going to do you the courtesy of assuming this ask was sent in good faith and isn't an attempt to troll me, despite the egregious misunderstanding of my position, and answer it accordingly.

To start with, I don't specifically hate Rhine Lab or Saria/Silence fans over any other given group. I dislike/am ambivalent about a large number of other popular ships for precisely the same reason I don't care for Saria/Silence: their fanbases are full of morons who ignore the complexities of the multifaceted characters involved in favor of reducing them to one-dimensional caricatures with no defining traits beyond being another character's girlfriend or uwu cute representation (or, if they're lucky, being "toxic lesbians" in the most milquetoast ways imaginable). I've spent enough time on multiple platforms to determine that most of this fandom is stupid as shit. Saying that "fans giving these characters no personality traits is outright wrong" is objectively incorrect and easily disproven if you spend a little time reading comics on reddit or pixiv or even tumblr itself. If Saria/Silence fans are the "most invested in character psychology and symbolism in the fandom", it's only because there's so little competition. The primary reason most of them are invested in these characters isn't because they are "interesting to analyze from a psychological point of view", unless by that you mean the fanbase wants to psychologically analyze their desire to taste each other's lips.

What the characters' creator invested in them to make them deep and symbolic is irrelevant. They could've packed every instant of Silence and Saria's onscreen appearances full of the deepest possible messaging and symbolism and it wouldn't have mattered because the fanbase would've ignored all that shit anyway in favor of forcing them into simplistic premade character/relationship templates like it actually did and continues to actually do with other interesting and complex characters and relationships. Frankly, nothing in the second paragraph actually matters unless the person saying them actually has influence over or speaks for the people writing the story. Whatever the artist believes doesn't change the fact that a) as of the moment I made the post this ask is responding to*, I felt that it was plausible based on the evidence presented strictly by canon material that Saria and Silence would not reconcile or enter a romantic relationship with each other, and b) the fanbase is stupid and doesn't give a shit about authorial intent if it gets in the way of mashing the pretty anime JPEGs together like dolls.

To address the third paragraph, I can claim whatever I want. I didn't say Rhine Labs lacked narrative relevance and doesn't have influence on the lore, I said I thought its storylines and characters were (mostly) boring. I know it's connected to Rosmontis and Mountain, I know it's a threat, I know more is coming with the release of Lone Trail, I simply do not care. I don't find anything about Rhine Labs besides Saria interesting enough to want a game with a bloated cast and a narrative that already moves at a crawl to allocate its limited resources in that direction. Don't confuse a lack of interest for a lack of understanding.

Yeah symbolism's just for Nearl, glad we're on the same page here

*I got this ask like two weeks ago and Lone Trail released today. I haven't read it. I don't know if I'm going to.

[bidyke]

We need to talk about Interview With the Vampire’s biphobia (Part 1: Bi erasure)

Amid rave reviews, praising the new AMC series for “finally letting the vampires be gay”, the conversation about the show’s treatment of bisexuality is silenced. To describe the show’s take on bisexuality in one word, it is complicated. Simultaneously erased, elevated, trodden down, associated with evil, seductiveness, villainy, privilege, freedom, and queerness. Laden with rich meaning, some of the scenes form a master class in cinematic storytelling through bisexuality, while others are the epitome of classic biphobia.

This is going to be a series of articles in which I show how Interview With the Vampire takes the source material’s bisexuality and turns it into ambivalent biphobia, by depicting it as simultaneously oppressive and liberatory. I’ll explore bisexual erasure, the meanings given to bisexuality, and explain how these ultimately reveal bisexuality’s subversive power against dominant social structures.

Let me start with a disclaimer.

Just so we’re clear – this is a great show

Though much complaint is heard from fans of the Anne Rice books for deviating from the original, critics have been praising this show to no end – and justifiably so. The show’s irreverent treatment of the source material is nothing short of a stroke of genius. The showrunners took the original book and ran with it. They spun it into a retelling that is fresh and original, standing on the shoulders of a giant to create something new, while still preserving the core, the heart of the story.

Specifically, the choice of making Louis – originally a slave plantation owner – black, brings a whole new level of meaning, depth, and complexity into the narrative. It exposes the viewers to a culture and experience that the source material could never dream of. It also makes for a brilliant solution to the problem of depicting a white plantation owner as the romanticized protagonist of the story, by literally turning the book’s racism on its head.

Even as its own text, without regard to the source material, this show does its job incredibly well. It’s well narrated, written, and acted. Its beautiful cinematography makes every episode a delight to behold. It is completely legible to people who haven’t read the book, while still adding easter eggs and meta commentary on the original that both enriches and subverts it.

On the whole – I fucking love it.

And therein lies the problem – when something that does so very well on literally every level fails so hard in this.

Bisexuality in the book

[Book spoilers]

Interview With the Vampire is a very bisexual book. Though very little is explicit and on the surface, the subtext is rich with it. From the outset, the interview itself between Louis and Daniel takes place after they cruise each other and then go to Louis’ apartment. Most of the book/the interview itself focuses on his relationship with Lestat, starting with courtship and ending with an embivalent breakup. In addition, Louis tells about his love for a woman named Babette Freniere, which continues even after Lestat turns him into a vampire. When Louis and Lestat turn Claudia, Louis’ feelings towards her aren’t just fatherly, as in the show, but also romantic (yes, Anne Rice has a penchant for p*dophilia). Their relationship is consistently described in terms that blend and obscure the boundary between fatherly and romantic love. At one point in the book, while talking to Louis, Armand calls her “Your lover”, to which Louis replies: “No, my beloved”, emphasizing the complexity and multiplicity of Louis and Claudia’s relationship and feelings for one another. All the while, during this part of the book, Armand also is trying to court Louis (ultimately successfully, once Claudia dies). So, Louis is bisexual.

Moving on, both Interview With the Vampire and the Vampire Chronicles book series in general, make it abundantly clear that Lestat is bisexual. In Interview, he continues to feed on men and women, where bloodsucking is invariab;y described as erotic in Anne Rice’s books – both with the refrain that feeding replaces sex for vampires, and through the erotic language used to describe the act. Lestat is the one to seek out the relationship with Louis and turn him into a vampire. And throughout the Vampire Chronicles, Lestat has relationships, both romantic and erotic, with several women and men.

Daniel is also bisexual. During the Vampire Chronicles, he is shown to have relationships with Armand and Marius, and Anne Rice has spoken multiple times to the fact that all her vampires “transcend gender in their orientation”.

The book is not biphobic in its representation and storytelling. Don’t get me wrong, one can certainly make a case about the fetishization of male bisexuality in the books. It also, of course, links between bisexuality and vampirism, a well rich with meanings that by association imagine bisexuality as innate (the problematic notion that “everyone is bisexual really”), and as predatory and monstrous, dejected and dangerous. The latter meanings, though lovely when reclaimed, carry negative cultural meaning, therefore revealing a negative attitude and fear of bisexuality (=biphobia)*. But because Anne Rice’s vampires are all bisexual, and because they are humanized, romanticized, and eroticized, this doesn’t carry over to a strong negative characterization of bisexual vampire characters.

The show messed this up. And it starts with bisexual erasure.

[* Saying this is not, in fact, biphobic, nor is it a form of respectability politics. It becomes respectability politics when in response, we demand that bisexual characters be made respectable. Pointing out biphobic tropes , in itself, is not biphobic. Honestly this shouldn’t need explaining, but here we are..]

One bi character left standing

Out of three bisexual main characters, only one is left. Where it had the choice of staying true to the bisexual source, the show chooses to erase both Louis and Daniel’s bisexuality – Louis is made gay while Daniel is made straight. First and foremost, this change betrays somewhat of a bifurcated perception of bisexual identity and attraction, i.e. imagining it as “half gay” and “half straight”. One can imagine that the showrunners thought this change made sense as they chose which “half” to go with for each character.

We can only guess what motivated the showrunners to make this change. One option is that they wanted to tick more representation boxes. They knew the series would receive greater acclaim if one of the characters would be “fully gay” rather than just “half”, i.e. bisexual. They may have also felt they were being more faithful to the source material by doing so – as the rave reviews say, letting the story be “actually gay”. Similarly to the above, these two notions also reflect the belief that bisexuality is only “half”, that it is not “fully queer”, or that it’s a “cop out”.

Another reason why leaving Lestat as bisexual while making Louis gay might have made “more sense” to the showrunners is that Lestat is to a large extent the villain while Louis is the victim. The range of meanings associated with bisexuality in culture means people feel more comfortable seeing bi characters in villainous roles, it “makes sense” for people to associate bisexuality with evil. Whereas this has also been the case for representations of gay people in the past, this has overwhelmingly changed over the last 20 years. Though queer coding villains is still a prevalent practice, explicitly gay characters are not so often cast in such a role anymore. But bi characters are.

Yet another possible reason for this is the association between bisexuality and whiteness. After making Louis black, it might have made “less sense” to the showrunners for him to be bisexual, since bisexuality is widely perceived as a white identity (ironically enough, as statistically, bi people are disproportionately people of color). Meanwhile blackness, like gayness, is an oppressed identity that is actually perceived as oppressed. Therefore it makes “more sense” for the black character to bear a gay identity, while the white character is allowed to remain bisexual an imagined marker of “privilege”.

On a more sympathetic note, one can also imagine the showrunners may have wanted to avoid the “everyone is bisexual” trope which is broadly present in the source material. As I noted above, this trope suggests that everyone is actually bisexual. It consigns bisexuality to an eternally latent status, always lurking underneath, but never present in the here and now. Combined with vampirism, it suggests that bisexuality is only possible when one exists outside of society and is able to live a long life. It also imagines bisexuality as supernatural and inhuman.*

[* Again, pointing this out is not biphobic, see above.]

[TW: discussion of p*dophilia]

Another valid reason why the showrunners may have chosen to do this is avoiding the p*dophilic tones in Louis and Claudia’s relationship. Anne Rice was openly supportive of p*dophilia, which is deeply disturbing. In the 1994, there is actually a scene where Kirsten Dunst and Brad Pitt kiss. She was 12 at the time, while he was 29. So I’m genuinely glad and relieved that they decided to leave that part out. However, they absolutely could have done that while letting Louis stay bisexual.

[End of TW]

Whatever the reason, making Lestat the only bisexual character makes him the focal point of bisexuality in the show. He remains to represent it alone, meaning that his depiction, his actions, and his function in the plot make up the whole of the show’s commentary on bisexuality. And the meanings given to his bisexuality in many ways echo the points made above.

In the next part, we’ll delve into the many and complicated meanings that the show attributes to bisexuality through Lestat’s character.

[suolainensilakka]

favorite kingdom hearts characters. for science

WELL, gently taps the current pinned post of this blog, that one's a freebie ^__^

Anyway. BOY ranking them all is really hard bc so many characters in the series have permanently set up camp in my head by now and arent particularly inclined to leave any time soon, but if I had to list off just a couple examples that have caused me the most brain damage so far, itd be:

- Terra, hands down my number 1 most specialest guy in the whole world. Instantly became enamored with him from the moment I first set eyes on him and then proceeded to have all of my ribs carefully and meticulously pulled out of my chest one by one throughout the entirety of bbs and the entire rest of the series after that. Its so dire man I literally cannot look at any images of him now without physically having to hold myself back from making a long strangled whine Out Loud With My Mouth every time

- the entire Wayfinder Trio as a collective unit + Vanitas also tbh. Terra's obviously my Primary Favorite but the wayfinders as a whole also make my heart hurt so fucking bad man. My partner and I choose to interpret them all as siblings bc it leads to some exceptionally delicious and painful rs dynamics to explore imo and something abt it just makes The Miseries hit that much harder in ways that have literally had me writhing on the couch with a thousand yard stare rapidly cycling through the five stages of grief on loop. I'm also counting Vanitas as part of the unit bc he's just so closely tied to Ven in my brain that separating them (lol.) feels Wrong (lmao.), and. God. Vanitas might just be one of THE most tragic characters in literally any media I've experienced and I say this without a single hint of irony. The current total wordcount of the rps that I've written abt the wayfinders with my partner so far has probably shot past 50k by now. Why am I hurds

- Kairi. I was originally mostly ambivalent/neutrally intrigued abt her but kept getting increasingly more pissed abt her treatment and constant sidelining by the writing to the point where I got to kh3/mom and something in me snapped entirely, and from that moment onwards I decided to love her entirely out of spite. She instantly shot up to become one of my favorites after that and if I think abt her meta and story potential for longer than five minutes at a time I start frothing at the mouth

- Sora, naturally. I have so so so so many thoughts on this little darling boy that could easily double the wordcount of this ask just by themselves but the most important thing to mention here in lieu of that, for now, is that he's is the One (1) and ONLY child ive ever seen, whether real or fictional, that has made me experience emotions anywhere Close to resembling baby fever. I want to dribble him like a basketball but also gently pinch his cheek affectionately and also spoil him silly like a grandma seeing her beloved grandson again for the first time in months

- Xigbar. This fucko is the one I'm the most mad about ending up liking as much as I do, not because hes a bad character, absolutely far from it I fucking ADORE this terrible bodyhopping little cunt, but because it happened by complete accident after I realized he shares a lot of (surface) similarities with my favorite blorbo from another entirely unrelated franchise and I then got mad about realizing I have a very easily clockable Type (which I've affectionately dubbed the Guys That Suck category. I have more too obv but its the funniest one I have). He's also infuriatingly fun to write. Get me OUT of here

- Xemnas, Terranort and Ansem SoD. Everyone in the Nort Collective counts tbh but those three are the ones I lose sleep over the most, particularly the first two; Xemnas bc he makes me feel an unfathomably deep and haunting sense of grief (brought on by me finishing bbs and then realizing days later the exact way his creation connects to Terra's story and hearing the sound of fucking glass shattering at the back of my head instantly), and Terranort bc I'm fucking terrified of him and he also makes me want to eat gravel whenever I think abt him in context with him interacting with the rest of the wayfinders. He's also really fun to write and this fact Upsets Me. Ansem's listed bc you can never go wrong with the ol reliable mad scientist. The rest of the norts I would probably also be a lot more insane over once I actually get off my damn ass and start picking through the mobile games but that's an endeavor for Future Salty (i am very excited and terrified)

- the Lingering Will. I'm counting it as a separate entity from Terra and the rest of the Terra Collective on a technicality bc (LOUD TELEVISION STATIC AS I GESTURE FRANTICALLY AND FURIOUSLY @ THE JUMBLED BALL OF YARN LABELED "my thoughts on the physical and psychological effects of being a guy who got his soul and entire being shattered into like five million distinct pieces for over 10 Whole Entire Years" THAT I HAVE NOT EXPLAINED THE ENTIRETY OF TO A SINGLE OTHER SOUL ON EARTH) but. Eah. This fucking haunted hunk of metal has been eating holes through my brain tissue ever since I first saw the kh2 secret superboss and I'm distraught over it every single day of my life. This thing is like a weird bug to me. Do you understand. (tearign up) Do you get me. Do I have to pull out the Lingering Will/The Hollow Knight venn diagram

And as for the other fuckos haunting my cranium on the daily I can only mention a couple other honorary picks that honestly could also very well have made it to the main list if not for the fact that this post is already long enough as it is, and these following characters are therefore mostly delegated to Sleeper Agent Blorbos who I don't think about QUITE as often as the ones listed above but whenever I Do I get just as distraught and ailed over them. Anyway, shoutout to the entire Seasalt Trio, Demyx, Riku, Repliku, Naminé and Saïx and probably many others I'm forgetting rn bc it is currently 2 am and I'm running on approximately 5-6 hours of sleep and a prayer 👍 god bless and amen

[grandoldmovies]

Furious Secrets

The title of the 1950 film The Secret Fury is a bit of a puzzler.  Just what does it mean?  I’d like to think it refers to the passions aroused in the well-to-do wedding guests when bridegroom Robert Ryan shows up at his high-society nuptials with a rented-tuxedo box tucked under one stalwart arm.

People, as Ibsen’s Judge Brack observed, don’t do such things...

Secret, and not-so-secret, furies abound in the film (up at my Grand Old Movies blog here).  There’s local district attorney Paul Kelly, the bride’s former boyfriend thrown over by her for Ryan; later he’s the prosecutor grilling the bride on the witness stand when she’s tried for murder.  Or there’s flustered aunt Jane Cowl, who’s thrown into bafflement by her wealthy niece’s wish to marry the hunky, lower-class Ryan — please don’t do anything “eccentric” at the ceremony, she begs the latter.  There’s also legal advisor Philip Ober, who always seems too ready to throw in advice, much of which turns out to be not too helpful...

And then there’s the bride herself, starry-eyed Claudette Colbert, whose wedding march is interrupted when a guest raises an objection to the marriage--on account the bride is already married to someone else.  That last piece of news throws the bride into a tizzy, which ends up in a murder, for which she’s tried and found guilty, which then lands her in a pricey asylum by reason of insanity.  It’s there we finally learn the title’s secret meaning — said to be the suppressed rage within a psychotic mind.  No evidence of which, the asylum doctor remarks in puzzlement, shows up in Colbert’s EEG analyses.  So, how crazy can she be?

I liked Bosley Crowther’s review of this film as “cheap and lurid twaddle.”  It makes it sound so much more exciting than it is.  Much of the film is first a back-and-forth search by Colbert for evidence of her earlier wedding, which she says she can’t remember...and then a back-and-forth search by Ryan for murder suspects.  In between, the asylum-trapped and make-up-deprived Colbert stares moodily into space or pounds frantically on the piano for emotional release.  She then escapes from the asylum —we’re not told how —to confront the One Behind It All, an action I thought showed a lot of gumption on her part, and which I wished could have been more a part of her character.

Probably the best thing/s about the film are two brief performances not highlighted in the film’s publicity.  The first is an unbilled cameo by Jose Ferrer as an attendee at a jazz session.  He doesn’t do much but he looks so right in the scene, the way he listens, with slight rhythmic head nods; and sits, with a mellow attitude and a lank, loose posture.  Ferrer is so natural and unassuming, he shows up the other actors as fussy and artificial.  I wish his role could have been enlarged.

And the second is Vivian Vance —yes, that Vivian Vance, the beloved Ethel Mertz of I Love Lucy fame —as a chatty hotel maid claiming to have met Colbert during her earlier ‘honeymoon.’  Talk about cheap and lurid.  Vance is surprisingly sexy-slutty in her brief bit, looking as cool and hard-boiled as the most glamorous noir femme fatale.  Vance didn’t make many films, and she was ambivalent about her fame as Ethel Mertz, due mainly to that character’s utter lack of glamor or sex appeal.  I wonder if she would have wished to be remembered for her performance here instead.  Ethel Mertz she ain’t.

You can check out my full post on The Secret Fury at my Grand Old Movies blog here.  Tuxedos (rented or not) not required.

[clarenecessities]

Can we not say the newly canon confirmed lesbian would be better as a bisexual?

I understand if you are really into your headcanons but it’s sad how often lesbians are not celebrated by the wider community.

I understand also if you just meant it as a joke but it stung a little too much and maybe that is a sign it’s time for me to mosey on out and hit the dusty trail. Pleasure blogging with you.

"would be better" lmao. there's that good faith reading!

idrk how to respond to this because like. i am a lesbian? i'm not sure what you mean by wider community (gays in general? overwatch players?) but this is like, my own demographic. i'm allowed to have an opinion on how it's being 'represented'

i guess i'm sorry i can't derive more joy from representation, but i do not now and will never recognize word of god from Activision Blizzard, who have three canonical ages for the cowboy they had to rename after sexual assault allegations against his original namesake. like... they couldn't write their way out of a paper bag.

i categorically refuse to take ovw seriously. i hold up each character and i weigh them against a feather & what i determine is between me, god, and anyone who deigns to read my tags. i understand if you don't want to be counted among them & i wish you well.

what was the end game here? did you want me to reword my opinion to be less ambiguous? "i have always thought of pharah as bisexual, and do not respect blizzard in any capacity, so i will not be adjusting that opinion even though it would afford me direct representation". is this clearer/less hurtful to you?

like you shouldn't be looking to the global paramilitary hired guns for representation of any kind imo (except beloved gorilla), but if my long-standing headcanons about a game i don't even play anymore matter that much to you then like... i don't really know what to say. what stings? why? is there something about that feeling that's more tangible, or accessible, when it's caused by my tags? to me it seems like salt in a deeper wound, & i can't help address either in the course of one ask.

i guess to answer your question... yeah, we can not say that. i never said it in the first place, because it's nonsense. i'm not very into my ovw headcanons at all, as i now regard the franchise with something between ambivalence and disgust, depending on the news cycle. i guess it was kind of a joke bc i was claiming to understand blizzard's characters better than them, but i do think of pharah as bi & nobody is going to sway me on that. could see ace, maybe. but also it's barely a joke bc i really don't think they understand their characters so much as use them to deflect valid criticisms, and like... at least the versions in my head are consistent

[aaronieros]

i remembered that i never posted this here so here is my yakuza games tierlist (only of ones i've experienced so no dead souls kenzan etc) and here is my reasoning for each under the cut: (warning: this shit is long as hell)

1a. yakuza 6. first of all, the only game in which i like kiryu instead of being ambivalent at best towards him outside of funny substory moments. the absolute best thing they could have done with him, especially with the dragon imagery/reputation always associated with him, was give him something to protect, fiercely. he's old and tired and stressed out and he's all out of patience. one of the first things he does is tell a cps guy to go fuck himself and kidnap a baby. and it's the first game where he actually feels Threatening rather than being in stoic pacifist mode all the time. i do think he was genuinely ready to kill joon-gi for example, and he did punch his entire son-in-law through a glass door.

joon-gi is in 6 which automatically gives it a tremendous amount of points because i love him as he is and then i retroactively love him more due to the fuckery in 7, but the hirose family and the general plot are good enough that, upon rewatching a playthrough, i wasn't gnawing my arm off the whole time waiting for him to show up, because the game is already phenomenal without him. i fully acknowledge that some games (mainly kiwami and 3) i only think highly of because of one specific character, but 6 would still be good even if you replaced joon-gi my absolute beloved who i am obsessed with, with literally anyone else. also the ending was cheapened by kiryu being brought back into the fray of course but that doesn't change the fact that even Thinking about the steps scene brings tears to my eyes. love that shit. also fujiwara's voice acting as yuta is so fucking good. especially when yuta is going through some shit and his voice sounds completely hoarse and broken, and the subtlety with which it's delivered in some scenes as if he's trying to hide how affected he is (in serena while nagumo is asleep comes to mind). all in all just super super good. i love yakuza 6.

1b. lost judgment. my first actual rgg experience i fully sat through after playing yakuza 0 for a few hours but not enjoying the gameplay nearly enough to bother continuing. lost judgment is what ignited my passion for the series and essentially served as my actual entry point since i'd given up on 0 for the time being, and for several years no less. lots of beloved characters but i also really appreciate the actual storyline, more than any mainline yakuza game in fact. the scene on the roof with sawa might be my favorite in the whole game. the side stories are also very good, especially the boxing club one in my opinion (it's also neat that the school side cases are entire storylines in lj). i also really enjoyed the motorcycle gang one, and the minigame for the dance club was the main reason i even bought the game for myself after having watched a full playthrough.

a lot of people claim that judgment was better than lj, especially in terms of writing, but in my opinion, the only places lj falls flat in terms of writing are kuwana's character (there is so much about him that should be interesting but he is just a piece of cardboard to me) and the way yagami wields sawa's name after a certain point in the story. it really becomes a "drink every time yagami says sawa-sensei" type deal, which is comedic at best and annoying at worst. but every other thing in the story is not only good, but there's something else very specific to my experience that i'd like to talk about.

lost judgment made me rethink the way i view storytelling. i talked about this on twitter a long time ago and made these graphs to represent the way the characters are presented in the narrative of most stories versus the way lost judgment feels, with the black line being the protagonist's path and the colored lines being the rest of the characters in the story.

if you can't tell what i'm talking about, don't worry too much about it. it's difficult for me to put into words and i doubt people would readily agree with my perspective (or even that it's a better way to handle storytelling) even if i did explain it perfectly. it's just something that i really appreciate, that this one game allowed me to walk away with something so major, especially as a writer myself.

2a. yakuza 0. i have been talking too much already from my goated with the sauce category so i will try to keep these next ones more concise. 0 obviously deserves respect for being the technical starting point (unfortunately resulting in retcons and inconsistencies because it wasn't actually the first game) but it's also a fantastic game on its own. mainly majima's side. you will see a running theme where i just can't really care much about what happens to kiryu except in 6 unfortunately. but the cast in 0 is huge and all the characters have things to love and hate about them and it's so easy to get attached to them, seemingly moreso than other yakuza games (or people just play 0 to get in and then don't play any games after that, so it seems like the characters are more popular. it's also easier to give them attention Because of 0 being the starting point, because you can still get new fans who aren't deep into the series to relate if you're drawing/writing/talking about stuff from 0).

all in all 0 is very good and definitely deserves the popular opinion of it being the best yakuza game, especially with the work it did to revive the series and give it life in the west in particular. it demands respect on principle in the same way the first game in any series does, even if that game (not 0) happens to suck or be hard to play, just because it established the series and allowed better, more fun games to be made later. y0 is nice because it doesn't have the caveats of "well you have to respect it BUT" it's just a good game.

2b. yakuza 7. where to even begin. first of all, ichiban is infinitely more fun of a protagonist than kiryu. i happen to be extremely critical of all protagonists in every piece of media because they tend bore me extremely easily which sucks because they're the main character so they get the most screentime and we're stuck with them forever. ichiban never has that problem where it feels like a drag to be with him at all times. i happen to hate the brawling gameplay of the mainline yakuza games (and i only use crane style in lost judgment because it's the most fun) so it being a turn based rpg is extremely good. i bought it both because i knew i would enjoy that gameplay (especially with breaker ichiban in the funeral suit, that's such a good flavor that i wish was the canon default for him rather than hero/freelancer but i understand why it's not), but also because i am completely obsessed with joon-gi and wanted to witness every line and detail of him for myself without having to hunt for all of it online (especially since i only like the jp dub).

joon-gi's whole thing is my favorite part of 7, but only by a small margin. the plot of y7 in general was something i was extremely absorbed in and intrigued by, and my favorite scene in the game was the first coin locker scene. i, like many people, feel like the ending was extremely cheapened by what happened, seemingly for no reason, and especially with it being presented as a total non sequitur, but i do love that it gave ichiban the ability to perfectly parallel my favorite scene, all the way from what must have been an hour into the game, if even.

i happen to love all the party members including eri, who i wish had an actual role rather than being an optional party member. most characters in this game, i liked or appreciated in some way (for example, i do appreciate aoki but. "like" is a stretch.) so it didn't feel like a pain in the ass to max everyone's drink links. one complaint about the drink links i have though is that zhao's made it clear that he was only a party member as an afterthought, because for some reason his direction was different from all the rest, which i can reasonably assume was because it was directed quite a while after all the rest.

2c. judgment. i said i would try to shut the fuck up and then didn't so let's try it here. love the characters, love the story, i just didn't enjoy it *quite* as much as lj. i like kuroiwa but i do think people who say he's better than soma in any way are insane and high on copium.

2d. ishin. my beloved. as the tier name says, this one is only as high up as it is because i love historical dramas, but holy shit. first of all, obviously i am very happy to see izo (nishiki) and hijikata (mine), especially considering ishin gives us the opportunity to see mine when he's not in the middle of a combination homosexual and existential crisis because there's nobody in particular he feels insane about and capitalism hasn't ruined his life. but characters aside, the ending to ishin resonated with me something fierce and i regularly quote ryoma's little monologue about the future to myself and it makes me very emotional. the future's secure in the hands of so many others we've never known, whose faces we've never seen, whose voices we've never heard.

3a. kiwami. i think the tier name says it all. i am here for nishiki's corruption arc and how incredibly interested i am in chewing on him. i also recently watched a playthrough of the original yakuza 1 on ps2 and. i have to say, the retcons to turn nishiki into an actual character were a godsend. because based on nishiki in kiwami, you can't tell how or why shindo and kanda ended up as the next patriarchs considering nishiki's entire downward spiral started when he killed a rapist, only for some lame ass sex pests to succeed him. but in yakuza 1, it kind of makes sense given the line that implies nishiki thinks beating kiryu in a fight will make yumi "his". it gives the impression that he's so much more shallow and that he only killed dojima not to protect someone he cared about but because he was encroaching on something (someone) he felt entitled to. kiwami's retcons here are gentle and make it feel much more like he loved yumi but wasn't a freak about it, and that he killed dojima to protect her for her, not for himself. in conclusion, nishiki hard carries the game.

3b. yakuza 3. i do hold so much love for mine, but luckily he is not the only good thing about the game. the orphanage is introduced, you have the ryudo family and especially rikiya, but mine remains the best part of the game to me. only thing he did wrong was the ableism but to be fair he was having a complete and utter gay moment and freaked the fuck out because daigo didn't wake up within 5 seconds.

4. yakuza 4. what can i say. akiyama was great, love his character and his story, and especially love the cutscene direction. i thought going back and utilizing the money explosion in y1 was very clever, and was impressed that they built an entire fleshed-out character around that. will confess that i literally have no idea why he has the slut reputation that the fandom slapped on him, but i also barely know anything about dead souls as of right now, so maybe he shows hole in that or something.

the parts of the game that were not akiyama. well. kiryu and tanimura were fine. saejima was not. initially it was fine, but the prison escape thing is highly cheapened by the fact that this man is fucking addicted to prison so you have to do it AGAIN in the very next game. not only that, and not only the extremely uncomfortable scene with haruka, but saejima suffers from the same problems ryuji and sayama do (i will get to them.), where the game overhypes the fuck out of them just for them to not really do much of anything. the rubber bullets thing is stupid but it doesn't change the fact that saejima *thought* he killed those people, i'm not saying he's actually a pussy for not having committed Real Murder (it's just that god forbid a playable yakuza character actually does a killing). it's just that he doesn't really have anything interesting to say or anything cool to do except that scene in purgatory where he humiliated the whole audience down there for not valuing human lives beyond ending them for entertainment. i was fine with him for a while before that due to not knowing any better yet, but it's now retroactively the only scene where i don't kind of hate him.

5. yakuza 5. guys? it's not good. saejima is addicted to prison and still not a well-executed character in the slightest, with baba being the only bright spot in his section (but still a bit overplayed). but shinada is y5's biggest problem. it's not just that i don't give a fuck about baseball, it's that you have to be EXTREMELY passionate about baseball to let the absolutely ridiculous and dragged out and, rather quickly, extremely predictable story slide. i spent months trying to get through yakuza 5 and hated the experience so much that i thought i just wasn't into yakuza anymore. then ishin came out and i loved that and i decided to just skip the rest of 5 and go straight to 6, only to discover 5 was the problem and i do still love yakuza so incredibly much. luckily, the start of 6 recaps the ending of 5, so finishing it wasn't even necessary. and thank god for that.

6. literally anything else you can think of.

7. kiwami 2. i am nowhere near enough of a misogynist nor a brainless homosexual to like anything about kiwami 2. the only people i see who like ryuji are the ones who are attracted to him which is beyond me. people who like sayama i can only conclude have zero standards for the way female characters are handled. let me dive into this the same way i've bitched on twitter about it 109280437127421897432 times.

first, i will just quickly mention again that ryuji and sayama have the same problem as saejima. the game itself hypes them up so much that they almost have no choice but to fall flat. but sayama falls so much fucking harder than ryuji. and so does yayoi. yayoi's thing is quick, so i will cover that first.

you are telling me. that this strong, scary, takes-no-shit woman. gets manhandled *without even being restrained* and needs kiryu to come save her. and then when openly sexually assaulted just gives shindo one pansy ass slap across the face. almost like it's a gag in a rather sexist comedy sketch. realistically, according to her character, she should have pulled out a dagger and killed that man the moment he tried to kiss her. unfortunately, she is a woman in yakuza kiwami 2.

but at least yayoi just has one scene where she is dragged relentlessly through the mud. sayama is stuck being a woman in yakuza kiwami 2 for the entire game. pretty much the first thing she does is get shot in the shoulder. the shoulder. and while any male character in these games would either shrug it off or die dramatically from a single non fatal injury depending on what point in the game you're at, sayama, for some reason, faints and develops a fever. which means she needs kiryu to carry her all through kamurocho. and then a bit after that, she calls him while he's out to tell him to buy her underwear. and then when he brings it to her, she reveals that she just got out of the shower and drops her towel in front of him. if you can't understand why it's infuriating that the only major female character besides the Small Child is treated this way, i genuinely don't know what to tell you. she then spends the rest of the game asking endless questions and acting flabbergasted by everything (me too, girl). only good thing she ever did was shoot that one guy. and then of course the ending is a make out scene. only for kiryu to never think about her again after her cameo in the beginning of 3 (referred to yumi, inexplicably, as the only woman he has ever loved in 6 (he loved her?????))

in conclusion. from what i can tell, people like kiwami 2 for the following reasons:

they like the gameplay

they want to fuck ryuji

they think sayama's girlbossing makes her a good female character

mix and match any of the above. this game's only redeeming quality is that emo phase daigo is funny (if completely pathetic)

if you actually read all this, thanks for hearing me out and i am deeply sorry you wasted your time on some guy on the internet's opinions.

[mishervellous]

tagged by my beloveds @energievie @celestialmickey @whatwouldmickeydo @thisdivorce to do this Fic Writer Interview ✍️

How many works do you have on A03?

15

What's your total A03 word count?

179,622

What are your top five fics by kudos?

Nobody makes me crazy like you (ambivalent)

Ian Gallagher and The Long, Convoluted Title (prom fic)

Mick’s Sunshine

Back on Track (Off The Rails)

The Road Not Taken

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

i try my best but i get anxious and stressed about it 😭 but i read them all and appreciate them a lot! and i’m trying to get back to everyone 💙

Fic with the angstiest ending?

probably Fix You? it’s hopeful but unresolved if that makes sense

Fic with the happiest ending?

probably The Road Not Taken

Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

i used to! but i’m not in enough fandoms simultaneously to do that anymore lmao

Received hate on a fic?

every single one </3 fuck ‘em

Write smut? If so, what kind?

yesss!! all kinds, within my comfort zone ofc

Ever had a fic stolen?

nope

Had a fic translated?

not that i know of

Co-written a fic with someone?

yes! a still unpublished gem with my bff

All time favorite ship?

it’s a tie between gallavich and destiel, you can’t and won’t make me choose grrr

WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

i think Inner City Blues, i don’t even really know why i posted that first chapter tbh lmao although i truly love that story, probably the one i have planned out in the most details, but it is what it is

What are your writing strengths?

probably humor and dialogues

What are your writing weaknesses?

long ass paragraphs lmao and sometimes the fact that english isn’t my first language

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

i’m doing it for Vacanze Romane and i love it! as long as there’s a translation somewhere, it’s a-okay in my book

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

probably Dragon Ball back in 2008 lol

What's a fandom/ship you haven't written for yet but want to?

weirdly enough? Destiel!! which is criminal if you ask me

What's your favorite fic you've written?

it’s a work in progress still, but I Am The Walls of My Home is my favorite so far <3

i feel like i’m late to this one too fjdkdndj i know half the thing is tagging other people but you gotta cut me some slack today [sweats] do tag me if you do this though!

[sumireviku]

tentative tagging system i'll have to retroactively update (accidentally wrecked my about page trying to link so that's a problem for future me)

[[MORE]]

#x2 = xillia 2

#x1 = xillia 1 (all x1 characters go here even if they're x2 designs)

#zes = zestiria [additional old tags: #tozx, #zn (novel), #mnt (manga)]

#ber = berseria

#rays = rays

#ast = asteria

#ot = other tales/off topic

topics:

#translation = fan translations/commentary

#ceci n'est pas une traduction = my machine translations

#datamining

#official

#adj = adjacent, not specifically tales but i'm making it so

warnings:

#amb = suspiciously ambiguous kresnik posting that is probably meant to be gen but 🤨

#ng = selfcest or incest cw

#partial nudity

relationship tags (platonic stuff included):

#lj = ludger and julius (probably not romantic bc i already sound unhinged enough as it is)

#lv = ludger and victor (probably romantic bc i think it's funny)

#lr = ludger and rowen (only romantic bc i think it's funny)

#el = ludger and elle

#vfe = victor(!ludger) and fractured asteria elle

#ar = alisha and rose (either, im lazy with this one)

#ms = mikleo and sorey (either, im lazy with this one)

removing rowen/ludger from the #ng tag bc rowen/ludger is already exclusively romantic so there's no need to include it and the only other things i ship are. uh... basically all cw-able for one reason.

x2 tags:

#bad end best end = julius ending my dearly beloved

#loneliest end = ludger ending my dearly beloathed

#chosen end = elle ending my. im actually ambiguously ambivalent.

#murder daughter = fractured asteria elle my sweet child

#normal niisan behaviour = striborg julius

#family parallels = ludger & julius and ludger & elle and victor & elle and claudia & ludger and--

#pre-canon = sobbing noises

aus:

#role reversal au = berzestyx2 au. it's a long story.

#loc sorey = asteria inspired zesty-verse au where post-canon sorey becomes the new lord of calamity and epileo isn't okay

#perfect end = everyone lives au (might include victor)

#fae au = canonverse violet-eyed elle lives