#an ask game I can really get behind

[hausofmamadas]

tag 9 people you'd like to know better. Prob won’t be able to do 9 ppl bc most of the ppl I’d tag were tagged, in addition to me, by @bellinitini and @when-did-this-become-difficult, two of my dearest dfs (dafucks dear friends)

last song: Buscando Oro by LOUJAY and Carlos Vallarino

currently reading: The Outsiders by SE Hinton and the Popol Vuh, both in Spanish to punish myself to get better. I’ve also finally started reading Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection by Leslie Cockburn which I started last year and just never got around to finishing. Just ordered The Bastard Brigade by Sam Kean on Amazon, which I have no doubt I’ll start reading immediately

currently watching: Finished The Bear in the span of a day so like not actively watching technically anymore? Except when I put it on to run in the background while I work. Another show I’ve been doing that with is the X Files, which provides a deep and heavy rotation sksk and then I’m like halfway through Top Boy which is fulfilling the need I have for new episodes of The Wire even though the show ended like 20 years ago so sksj

current obsession: hmmmmmmm I guess I have two really cracked ships that I’m kind of preoccupied with. One I can’t name bc it’s for an exchange, and the other I wrote an Andrea/Carrillo fic for the Narcos fandom smut alphabet and have nottttttttt been able to stop the rotisserie-ing with them. Going back to my roots too, reading some new San Diego Reader articles that’s reignited as if it ever really went out lbr my love and passion for my otp, Dinarrón. Also been working on this fan video for Sky Rojo that I’m pretty fucking obsessed with and can’t wait to finish bc it’s gonna be sick, even though only me and like 3 other ppl on the internet have seen the show

Taglist (only if you so wish to participate): @artemiseamoon @cositapreciosa @drabbles-mc @purplesong1028 @proceduralpassion @roostersrocket @garbinge @flightlessangelwings @salt-is-a-terrible-currency

[wreckedhoney]

MASSIVE SPOILER for one of the endings.

it's been a while since i tried looking, but i did hear that something like this happens last year and over time started to think, "was it a fluke?" bc no one posted footage or caps of it then, and i aimed for a completionist run in my first playthrough. turns out it's real! and definitely shines a new light on a character that, for most other types of playthroughs, will not give this much emotion! EDIT: transcript now included, and some stillshots under the cut

[0:28] Marie: Henry, this is the man who kept you from doing the right thing tonight. Kill him. [0:15] Forrest: Henry, you don’t have to do this. If you’ve not killed anyone yet, there’s still time to make the right decision. [0:05] Out of shot: (Gunshots) Henderson Police! Freeze! Marie: No! Henry, get out of there!

[saints-who-never-existed]

what is (or are) your favorite terror ship(s)?

(pairings not the sailing vessels, tho if you have opinions on those i’d also be happy to hear them lol)

Ooh fun! :)

Slightly niche perhaps but one of my enduring favourites is actually Gore/Little.

I just really love the idea of Golden-Boy Man-of-Action Gore discovering that he rather likes being bossed around/dominated/treated like the pretty little princess he is.

And I'm equally enamoured with the notion of sweet Nedward finding that he enjoys getting to be powerful/assertive/just a bit of a sadistic wee bastard for once. ;)

[butterflieswhisper]

hhelp wait this is so funny. didnt you follow me forever ago after a scott themed october song analysis . sorry if you dont remember that and this ask doesnt make sense but this is still funny to me

hi!!!! yeah. it was the cherri crane lives art i think and also where you made your flower husbands tag! I have never really interacted with fh outside of you (and like, seeing pretty fanart) but i am nonetheless deeply invested in your interpretation specifically!!! I honestly haven't watched jimmy outside of rats and the beginning of empires2 either i genuinely have no clue what they get up to you just seem to have a lot of fun with it

[zappedbywho]

.

[faebriel]

hgs brainrot has returned due to tbosas .. speaking of hgs here’s an ask abt the hgs au: if things were totally different, and Wilbur were to be a 12 victor, what do you think a possible mentor-tribute dynamic would look like between him & Niki? I feel like it would be similar to Snow & Lucy in the way that he’s just going out of his way to cheat n help her

anon u have in fact struck jackpot because this is a concept i was spinning some thoughts abt before bee mentioned avoxes and we went OOOOH at that!!! so yes i have considered rainduo as a mentor-tribute dynamic and would love to talk about that concept too :]

so for this concept i think wilbur and niki would be close friends throughout childhood from 12, and then in their teens wilbur is reaped and, well, no one has particularly high hopes (he's a writer and a musician at heart, not a fighter) but through sheer trickery and dumb luck, he makes it to the end of the games. wilbur pulled some pretty fucked up tricks to win - when you can't use brute force, you have to use your brain - and partly due to the trauma of the games, partly due to his shame and survivor's guilt, he sinks into the capitol and relishes a new life there as a socialite. to him, the old wilbur died in the games and the new one has taken his place - to niki, and to his other friends in 12, whatever the games did to him made him into every vapid heartless capitol victor there is.

or. niki has her doubts. they all saw how horrible the games were, but surely there is some part of him left, some part that's hurting, even if it's buried deep?

anyway.

like og spin of the au, niki is reaped and this sucks - this time she does expect wilbur as her mentor on the train, and she expects some kind of warm welcome (maybe even an apology for leaving them so suddenly and silently? an explanation?) but she gets jack shit. wilbur is jaded and cruel and unrecognisable and niki entirely hates it. this is the part where i REALLY WISH we got some time of those two beefing with each other directly in canon (or at least interactions while niki was So Mad at him) but it's okay we fly blind. niki feels abandoned, lonely, thrown off of her kilter - she expected an ally in this place, but she doesn't recognise the person wilbur has become. she doesn't recognise his shallowness (...much), his ruthless advice for the arena, the way he doesn't seem to care for anything. she's scared and now she's lonely and it pisses her off - their mentorship is fraught. here are some thoughts from discord on that:

i tend to think of niki as a bit naïve before l'manberg or even doomsday - i think this is an au where this streak would come out real strong, and niki is stubborn that she can get through the games without losing herself. stubborn that she can stop things, that she can protect people. i don't think wilbur is cold enough (or, really, can bear to say aloud) to say that her odds in the arena are slim enough as it is, but he definitely tells her that she's making enemies and that her odds of survival dwindle with the more trouble she causes.

beyond that... hm. niki's trust in wilbur is almost unshakeable until nov 16, even when she outright says she doesn't recognise him anymore. i think she'd reluctantly listen re: don't burn down any buildings, but she would grow bolder each day she had to stay in the capitol. she gets more honest in front of the cameras. she makes more friends in training, and not the ones wilbur recommends. she throws barbs at him every time he makes one of those callous, cold-hearted comments about other tributes and rankings and odds. and besides, she's going in the arena this time, not him. she needs to practice her bravery.

it's like... she hasn't given up on him. she thinks the old wilbur is in there somewhere. (she is wrong. that is not how trauma works.) but she won't hold her tongue just because she

for extra angst points could definitely play up the whole 'feeling abandoned' angle between them as niki goes into the arena - probably due to how fraught their friendship gets leading up to the games. niki wants to focus on them and their friendship, wilbur has stringently cut off (almost) everything from 12 and refuses to let her in; he tells her to behave for the cameras, she tells him she never will. i think the last point in that screenshot would also make for a super tasty argument where niki feels wilbur has gone astray, that he's abandoned 12, and that he'll probably do nothing but sit on his ass and watch her die and he can't even bring himself to care about her anymore, can he? just more fodder for the arena. and honestly, i think wilbur would passively agree with most of that - he values niki's opinion, after all, even now, and if she says he's rapidly descending into a lost cause then she must be right. and it's niki, so she will be fine, and he goes to his bedroom that night and tries to pretend he is sleeping perfectly fine instead of feeling paralysed with fear.

okay now onto the games - YES HE SO WOULD. or at least i think he would go out of his way to help. as for cheating - he's a recent victor for 12 and i think he would value tommy (no doubt a link to him... i think they'd be in touch in this au also) too much to risk the punishment falling onto him as well. i get the vibes this is a games closer to 74th than 10th, so there are far fewer opportunities to cheat and the consequences of getting caught are higher. but schmoozing up sponsors? making stupid ass radio interviews or whatever to talk up niki's odds? sharing anecdotes from their childhood - some real, some entirely fabricated - across capitol airwaves to stoke their sympathy? 100%. with less to lose in this au, i think niki would be far less inclined to play nice for the cameras - i hope you starve, she spits at one of them, and wilbur appears on a talkshow two days later as she scrambles for survival in the arena to talk up how she always saved loaves from the bakery for the poorest mothers and children in 12. he borrows and begs and swindles to the point where it feels like cheating. but hey, this new wilbur is capitol-branded. he knows how to play the game.

if anything he probably sinks into the game a little too much. self-preservation is not his forte. probably wracks up a few heavy debts and favours to owe, but those are not priority until niki is out of the arena, alive. as long as she wins, and as long as the family he has isn't in danger, he will manage. wow it would suck if at some point those two goals became impossible to co-achieve. anyway

i kind of see niki's victory in the arena being similar to the one in the main au - if only because planning out an entire games is hard for meee >-< . she walks in bolder and braver for sure, and with a less strategic pick of allies, but they all get picked off and she spends a few weeks so terrified she can barely sleep and then she ruptures some fuel line and sets the arena alight with a fire that burns brighter and more ravenously than it should. but she wins, and she's airlifted out of a filthy, muddy creek she had resigned herself to die in, and wilbur barges his way through as many peacekeepers so that he can actually see her with her burnt skin and hair and unfocused eyes and trust that what was on the screens wasn't a fluke, and that they made it. and then it's just a matter of surviving the after.

i'm sure there are some other random quirks or tidbits i can think of re: this take on a c!rainduo hunger games au but these are my base thoughts!!

[butterfliesornauseous]

So I realised I hit way over 500 followers and just wanted to say a quick thanks for all the support over the last two years! Especially since I have a tendency to take unexplained breaks, so it really means that a lot of you have stuck around.

I wanted to say this means a lot to me since you guys have helped me truly feel much better for being into what I am into and making me feel more inspired to continue. I’m so thankful that I have a bit of a platform where I can share my silly little ideas and feel welcomed and even hear back from you guys about your own ideas all because of you guys.

I want to do a little 500 special but haven’t fully settled in something yet but I have 2 weeks off from it being a break at my work so I’ll try to work on something 😁

Thank you all again for the support ~ Kai ❤️

[not-poignant]

I hope this doesn't come off as pressuring at all, I'm definitely not expecting anything, I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed a game we can try (I made like 3 separate comments and then deleted them bcos anxiety skjdhkjh) and will definitely look forward to updates /if/ they ever happen (either way I'm rereading it regularly ofc ^.^) ty for the work you do & im so sorry it didn't get the engagement it deserved!!

<333 Thanks anon, I hope I can return to it one day. I'm definitely not calling it on permahiatus yet or cancelled or anything, it's more just, 'it depresses me to think about right now so Ima wait.'

For what it's worth, just leaving a heart counts as a comment. And it lets me know that people are reading. There's nothing to stop someone from later coming back and leaving a second comment if they want to (like one with words), but if you've ever looked in my comment sections, you'll always see a few people just offering hearts, and I always reply to them, and like... it counts!

Unfortunately authors just don't know how appealing something is if there's not much engagement. I think if my motivations had been different - i.e. if like Smoke in Autumn I didn't care if people were reading it or not - I'd be writing it still, but this story, while I've always wanted to write it, came at this specific time as my love for kind of the Iron Lion fandom and its people, and well...

Well... anyway, hopefully I can return to it. It's definitely not ruled out. But I might make it way way shorter than I initially intended to.

[deus-and-the-machina]

ffxiv garlemald discourse is so funny because people will go "ugh people just cant stand it when things aren't black and white" and then you look at how the empire are portrayed in stormblood and shadowbringers and its like hm. that seems like a pretty intense and accurate display of violent imperialism to me! Wow I wonder why people in this day and age may find it hard to feel sympathy for them or even hate them on principal. god its such a mystery.

the games like 50/50 to me on how it tackles these themes because I actually like the garlemald arc in EW, I think it has a lot of horrific and powerful scenes depicting how self destructive fascist propaganda and beliefs are, but I also think it doesn't go far enough on some fronts. the garleans' xenophobia is most notably and obstacle to getting them to accept the contingent's help, which is what they're there to do,

but there's never an admission of harm from any garleans on the uuuuuuuuh massive amount of war crimes the nations around them are still suffering from they're just kind of like "we misjudged you...but you actually wanted to help us all along" like yeah thats great now can we get you all some deprogramming because you keep talking about returning to your prime and glory days and I think we need to unpack some stuff you really SHOULDNT return to. im not even really talking about EW proper but the patches where things are a bit more chilled out and people are recovering.

It feels like they wanted to have their critique of imperialism and also have things end with the beauty of human connection and reaching out and these things just don't mesh well because hey a lot of your modern day audience is not gonna like having to treat people yelling xenophobic things at the cast and your character with kid gloves after you showed them hours and hours of the awful things these people's beliefs have done. especially in the present day hoo boy.

[heraldofcrow]

do you think eileen is bloody crows mom?

Not biologically if we’re talking headcanons and obviously there is nothing to imply this in actual canon.

But in my hc world, she raised him up from the time he was pretty young, so they have an almost mother-son bond, but it’s broken because he starts projecting his actual mother’s memory onto Eileen, who doesn’t realize this. And Crow’s actual mother…was…a certain way, so it gets messy. I’m fully going off the rails into my own world here, but I wanted to explain that while she’s not his bio mother, he starts treating it that way and it leads to their conflict.

[swordmaid]

am getting a lot of character inspo for shri’iia from amy gone girl. I don’t think she’s as smart nor calculated but she is similar to some degree in that she’s hyper aware of the current persona she’s presenting and how she’s appealing to the people. the masks and the mjndgames, that’s basically how shri’iia operated while she was still serving under her matriarch in menzoberranzan. she needed to play the roles the matriarch required of her and it was only when she was with her matriarch that she can be ‘Real Shri’iia’, and that’s how I imagined shri’iia to be esp in act 1 when she is so new and scared in the surface. she needed to work out who these people are (her companions) and what they liked, so her first persona - her blank one - the charming helpful paladin who got tadpoled and wants to go back home just like the rest of them (which was half true). she didn’t really argue and she generally agreed to what the group wanted. she was helpful and co-operative, ask her about her past and she will tell you something bland and generic- interesting enough to be ooh-ing about but not too interesting that they’ll delve deeper into it. then, when she got to know them a little more, she started crafting little personas adjacent to her first one ; she’s the girl who’s curious about magic but never had the chance to learn with gale, she’s a cool girl who likes mischief as debauchery with astarion, she’s the one who likes to take risks and live in the moment with karlach, the knight in silver armor who’s willing to help the tieflings with wyll, a disciplined fighter with lae’zel, someone who understands the depths of devotion with shadowheart - but none are really her, not really. ofc her own personality might slip in here and there but for the most part she’s appealing to them and what they’d like her to be but none of it is really genuine. shri’iia just needs to be on their good side to minimise the chances of them turning on her, and if they let her guard down it’ll be easier for her to get rid of them should the need arise. taking up all these different masks, collecting all these intel abt them to be used for later, slithering and making a place in their minds - it’s really how she operated back in menzoberranzan. I think the only one who catches on to her game is astarion but that’s bc he’s doing the same thing too, so it’s very game recognises game lmfao

it’s only when she breaks her oath and goes through her existential crisis that all of her masks drop and her real self comes out. she was never that kind of person lmfao ^, she’s greedy, selfish, paranoid and rather obsessive. she doesn’t care about a lot of things that doesn’t concern her, she has a cruel streak that she hasn’t shown before, and she hates doing anything that won’t really benefit her. but she’s fiercely loyal to anyone she likes, like a dog. and severely she craves validation and approval - also like a dog.

[lord-squiggletits]

pharma really is such an interesting case. one thing i’ve always felt with pharma is that he absolutely doesn’t want consequences. and facing up to it requires a lot of looking at and showing people what he’s done and you know. the consequences. i mean hell he’d rather start a plague than say “hey i got coerced into doing a very bad thing by the djd”

I do understand what you mean about Pharma not wanting to face consequences, but on the other hand, I kind of understand why Pharma made a plague rather than admit to medical malpractice/murder? Because like, the thing that I don't see brought up often enough with regards to Pharma is that blackmail... is blackmail. Like, as someone who's unfortunately been on the receiving end of blackmail, the entire point of blackmailing someone is that you corner them into doing bad things by convincing them that they CAN'T turn to an authority figure to ask for help. Like, the person doing the blackmailing generally convinces the person who's getting blackmailed that if they try to reach out for help, the law/authorities/etc either won't care about their predicament or will punish them for the bad thing they did that they're getting blackmailed about.

I kind of feel like (and this isn't an attack on you, just a commentary about the nature of blackmail) when someone like Ratchet looks at Pharma and says "but you could've called for help or shut down the clinic or anything!", it kind of ignores the fact that...... when you're being blackmailed you're fucking terrified, and people who are terrified generally don't jump to the most rational, safe solutions possible? When you add in the fact that Pharma was blackmailed by Tarn of the DJD, notorious hater of Autobots and fanatic leader of a torture club, it's not hard to imagine that Pharma was both afraid and in pain (or threat of pain) while at Delphi and thus wouldn't be thinking straight about it.

I don't know, like. Yeah, on one hand Pharma made a plague and killed a bunch of people to try and cover up his crimes and maintain his career. But he didn't just do it for ego related reasons, he was also almost certainly facing threats of torture and death.

[catboybrain]

sniffles sadly. every day im so sad that fnaf didnt go with placing vanny into aftons role.... god forbid women do anything ! ! !

[delusion-of-negation]

@ gamedevs, the discourse has painted "make your game more accessible" as "make your game easy", and i can prove to you we actually don't mean that. play your game drunk, or eating with a hand and playing with the other, or fucking jacking off idgaf, not fifteen minutes of it, i want at least four hours of game time that you're distracted and only using one hand. now take note of the mistakes you're angry about still- you're not mad because there wasn't an easier boss, you're mad because you couldn't reach a button to hit him fast enough, or because you couldn't read the scrolling text fast enough and didn't know what to do, or that an accidental click discarded an item you needed immediately. you aren't upset about difficulty, you're upset there wasn't a way an issue could be circumvented or fixed when you couldn't do what "normal" people could do. that's fine, that will happen with really anything when you're disabled, but most people eventually will become disabled, and if you want people to still enjoy the game, you're going to need to add ways to slow down rapid sections or change the speed of text scroll or ask for confirmation before an item's discarded so you don't lose things you've worked for. that would be what people are asking for, not "make the main boss a lower level so i can beat him", his level doesn't matter if dodging always necessitates using a button you can't reach and the devs haven't added options to change which button does that, for eg. personally, i have hand spasms, and when you can fuck up with literally one click, in a way that still affects you hours later or will waste hours of work or so forth, that's an inaccessible game for people like me with nerve damage and muscular issues. when a conversation doesn't have subtitles or they don't match, and the information given is essential, that means i won't know what i've gotta do to progress. these things make playing less enjoyable. i haven't said, at any point, everything has to be accessible to like literally every person- that's impossible. i'm just saying that your misrepresentation of the discourse as "make games easier" just wastes everybody's time, but you can distract yourself or hinder yourself to see what playing your game actually is like for those unable to concentrate, hear, see properly, reach things, y'know? again, not just fifteen minutes of looting, long enough to feel an effect when there's a tiny mistake that hurts you going forward.

[puppys-rhythm-heaven]

y'know i think remix 6's just have a good track record like. tengoku remix 6 is amazing, it's a medley remix after all. ds remix 6 is also v v good though also the space soccer to lockstep transitions are hell. fever remix 6 is v v good also fever set 6 is the best set in fever tbh. barbershop remix is also v great and yes i know how hot of a take that is klsdfjfkdsjdfskldsf-

[greenedbeans]

the way that d&d dragons are both sentient and complex creatures who can integrate with society to some extent, but that their body is still considered valid and ethically sound to harvest for all parts is just a whole hell of a lot to think about huh