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lovecolibri · 2 years

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Things that did NOT Spark Joy-4x05

Fam, I am struggling this season and I don’t know if it’s just because it’s the last season and I’m losing my patience, or if things are getting worse, but I am...SO confused, so much of the time. Which isn’t always a bad thing in shows! They can’t tell you everything in the first episode, you’re supposed to have questions, it’s what keeps people coming back to watch. But RNM has a habit of not giving us answers to the questions we have and after 3.5 seasons I’m losing hope I’ll ever get answers so it’s to the point that having so many questions is no longer fun. On top of that, a lot of the question I have are not about the plot so much (okay they ARE but those are more “why TF didn’t we do/learn this ages ago” or “why is this person involved instead of someone else”) as they are about the mechanics of how LITERALLY anything is supposed to work. The show keeps contradicting it’s own lore, or just, having things happen with no explanation, or we’re randomly TOLD things and not SHOWN them, or pacing issues giving time and place no meaning which affects the audience’s ability to orient themselves with the story. Watching this isn’t like enjoying a good mystery where every new clue gives you more questions (BRB gotta go watch OMITB), it’s like playing a game with a 5 year old who keeps changing the rules to fit their needs leaving the adults to flounder trying to adjust what they already knew to fit the new, contradictory information.

The issues with season 4 seem to be mostly the fault of multiple seasons of bad choices culminating in the mess we have right now. Part of the pacing issue is this needlessly complicated set up for the main group to find out these tidbits of info about Dallas and his history, and these alien pieces, meaning we need 6-8 new and recurring guest characters, and everyone spread out doing different things with the new characters instead of each other. They should have had all these alien prisms as things already in possession by the main group. Eduardo could have the stone tablet thing (instead of sending it to Mexico and us finding out all about his family casita but not why Tezca was even IN Mexico and necessitating that to be a whole storyline in the first place, when Clyde said they were all on the ship with Jones. But also somehow didn’t know about Michael being his son with Nora? ANYWAY), Alex and Kyle could have had the prisms found in stuff from their dads/dad’s bunkers and on the reservation (maybe Gregory had a piece and says mom was holding it for Alex or something last season), or one is something Kyle pulled from Caulfield while he was gathering things up before it was destroyed. 🚗 said she pitched the show with a 5 season arc, and IDK how much Chris deviated from the alien part of the plan but with “the alighting” and “Ophiuchus” being name-dropped every season I feel like we’re still pretty on track, and changes were mostly made around personal drama stuff. So it’s not a stretch, again since things from season 1 are still being mentioned now, to think that they could have been setting this up all along, AND it would be the PERFECT way to keep Kyle and Alex connected to the main story, even though it should never have been a struggle but the show apparently hates joy, and interesting, fan favorite characters. They could have NOT killed off Jones and done *something* to wake him up this season (MAYBE having 1 guest star) and let him do the faceoff with Max. Jones specifically said he was going to go after Alex to get Michael to cooperate and this would have fulfilled that narrative promise they set up on a massive tee and then just....failed to hit, at all. Apparently Liz needs yet another rando scientist or two to work with instead of letting her work with Kyle and Michael again like she did to fix Max’s heart in season 2 even though we NEVER got to see it. We don’t need all these extraneous characters and backstories about them!

All this to say, this is REALLY long, and I have some salty shit to say and I’m going to be bitching about a lot of things I don’t understand and I’m annoyed about so I’m going to put it under a cut. If you happen to have answers, because my brain is swiss cheese about some events in this show (especially when they info dump for a whole episode), let me know! Then I’ll at least have some answers! If you’re only interested in the joy this show inspires, you can catch up on all that goodness here, otherwise lets dive in to the “clear as a muddy swamp” water. Who knows, maybe we’ll find a tunnel to whatever hole Alex has been kept in for the past month! (or you can go read my life reactions under my “roswell spoilers” tag since I’ll probably be reiterating a lot of it here, but those posts sometimes have memes attached!)

Link to previous episode posts: 4x01, 4x02, 4x03, 4x04

First bit of confusion right off the bat! Tezca saying the blue flame was a Power Jones had and she was able to access the power from Max even though it was dormant. HOWEVER, we never saw Jones use that power. We saw him quite often using regular fire. If we were going with some kind of blue fire, shouldn’t we have seen that at least once last season instead of retconning that it’s something Jones can do that we’ve never seen or heard about? Again they killed Jones too soon and without ever letting us learn as much as we should have from and about him.

Speaking of, NO JONES RESSURRECTION?! *throws phone*

So, Isobel found Cam, half naked in the desert and she was last seen with Max, who no one can find, and Isobel just....drops Cam off with Liz and fucks off to Mexico?! Without even trying to go look for her brother?! Season 1 told us Max could find Isobel even when she was in the middle of the desert and had no idea where she was, even though Max didn’t think he had the same mindscape powers as her, but she can’t rally the troops to go rescue her brother from the clutches of evil which, for all they know, could include Jones since they just found out his body went missing?! The show sidelining Isobel and Max’s relationship is one of their many, many crimes.

Max says he’s just waiting for the handprint to fade and break the connection. Everyone been knew he was lying about something and apparently Liz is...just going to trust him even when she acknowledges he’s lying to her face which, okay, but Michael doesn’t say anything either? About both the lying which you know he clocked, OR the fact that the handprint fading didn’t stop Jones from accessing that old connection and trying to kill Liz with it so why is ANYONE assuming the print fading will do anything? Or is this just more lore changes we’re supposed to ignore like we had to do last season when suddenly the faded handprint could still come back and kill you?

Michael has once again left someone who was kidnapped to their own devices but at least Eduardo told him too and it was okay though I did think Michael had gotten him untied and he was on his way out into the desert. Clearly he was found by Bonnie and Clyde again, but at the time, no one knew that yet. He could have been back at Deep Sky taking a shower and having a nap for all anyone knew. And yet, after a few hours since he saw him last, Michael is saying they need to stage a rescue op, while no one has heard from Alex in DAYS, even after they called him about a friend’s mom he knew well DYING and no one seems to think it’s the slightest bit odd? Not one single worry about Alex not calling to tell Michael good night, or answering Michael’s texts when Michael asks if he’s still up?! After showing us last season that they call each other just to chit-chat and check in and when Alex didn’t answer Michael went over and when he didn’t find Alex he went to Secret Government Agency headquarters to get to Alex?! *screams into pillow*

WHAT was the deal with the woman in the pod needing surgery?! I couldn’t see any injuries that would necessitate surgery in an unsterile environment with an untrained tech and no medical equipment! Kyle would know better than that and wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t a life or death situation which we are given NO indication that it was! This isn’t even just telling and not showing, it’s not telling OR showing! WHY was that even needed when she’s up and looking just fine? Did Kyle smuggle medical tools and anesthetics (which, he’s a surgeon not an anesthetist) into Mexico? Did he perform supposedly emergency surgery with NO anesthetics?! No monitoring equipment?! What kind of surgery was it?! Where did the find the silver goo to get her out of the pod?! WHY DID THIS NEED TO HAPPEN when all they needed her for was to tell them about the vault? We could have seen them pulling her out of the pod and her thanking them for rescuing her and doing the vault thing, and then showing them all the journals and stuff! It was SO unnecessary. And if they wanted Kyle and Isobel to do the investigating on their own, why pull her out of the pod at all? She could have been evil for all they knew! Why not leave her there until the figured out who she might be and then have the vault explanation? Also, how did the man who runs the distillery owned by Kyle’s family NOT tell him the casita was ALSO owned by his family?! Uuuuuuuugh!!!!!

The need for alien powers to open the vault was kind of cool but how did the not-alien Valenti’s do it? Did it require 3 of them to be in agreement to open the vault together? If so, why didn’t we hear about that?! Also, how did Tezca (who apparently named herself after an Aztec god even though she’s from outer space and wouldn’t know about them) even know it was in there? Can she sense alien things like Rosa even though this had no alien glass in it? It was smuggled down from Roswell fairly recently so was that something Jim took from Caulfield and gave to Eduardo? Instead of answering any of these questions, we had a whole thing about surgery. 🙄🙄🙄 But hey, at least one of the things the dark triad took was in Kyle's family! Which begs the question(s), why didn’t Kyle or Alex's family have the rest of the glass pieces? Oh right! Because otherwise m*ria would have nothing to do and no connection to the story so everyone else's story has to not make sense to squeeze her in 🙄 We should have been getting hints about this last season when we met Eduardo at LEAST. The main group should have found one or two of those glass pieces and been investigating them in the background (just a mention, some hints to build up to this) since at least last season as well, and they should have belonged to the Manes family/found in Jesse’s bunker, Eduardo/something else Jim left for Kyle, and maybe one on Alex's mom's side of the family from when Louisa lived on the reservation, instead of Patricia having all of them. Because when did Nora make the board? On Oasis? We didn’t see it with her when her and Louisa escaped! In Caulfield? How would Patricia have gotten it then? Why was it not a family legend passed down for m*ria's family if they were the guardians like the Valenti family? Mimi clearly thought Jesse and Jim just got mixed up in something and didn’t know what it was. It's just suuuuch a mess with no build up when it could have been teased from the start! Maybe Kyle found a piece in Caulfield while he was gathering stuff up before it exploded!

As much fun as learning about Dallas has been, m*rai did nothing this episode but drag his scenes down. She basically served as a rubber duck for Dallas to bounce info off of for the audience. Too bad Lucky isn’t still around, that would have been just as useful but at least enjoyable to watch. The whole symbol conversation was ridiculous given how instantly recognizable it is. As they both point out, before acting like it’s brand new information literally a minute later so m*ria can have an idea about it 🙄 I’m surprised they didn’t end up going to every Christian church in the area (there are hundreds in Roswell actually) because that symbol is everywhere. Apparently everyone and their mother know about the abandoned “church” but somehow it’s still miraculously empty of people or kidnap victims when they show up (guess they didn’t poke around enough to see the chair with rope around it?), and somehow everyone knows about the building but NO ONE knows about the SHED with the big ass TREE in it that grows STRANGE FRUIT?! REALLY?! And don’t even get me started on the Dallas backstory bit which, while sweet, makes zero sense with the other info we have about the time period and people involved. Did his dad put him in a pod and drive to a different town and put his pod in a lake before he was captured? Did someone else do it? If so, who? How was he out and freely living so long without reconnecting with his triad who were in the area? Clyde says he can feel Bonnie so clearly there is a triad connection! Why didn’t the military confiscate everything in that barn when they took him? Who knows! Not ever, ever us. Again, more questions that only arise because they contradict the stuff we already know.

Should have put in my Sparks Joy post that I would be delighted if m*ria and Dallas end up related? Because as much as I need them to stop using him as a reason to give m*ria screentime, I would absolutely cackle about that development. Everyone wanted her with Iz and they turned out related (but somehow still never addressed how close of relations that made her and Michael), so this would just tickle me to death.

As much as it’s nice getting SOME pod siblings moments, especially Max and Michael not ending on a fight, Max is STILL using every opportunity to throw Michael’s relationship with Alex in Michael’s face and I haaaate it. Also, why did they not have this discussion at the house? Because they drove out to the middle of the desert to look for Eduardo, and Michael suddenly decided Max needs to be back with Liz. Where he just was. Did Michael kick him out of the car and make him walk back to his house? Did he drive him back the way the just came and then drive all the way back out to the middle of nowhere to keep looking? (With THESE gas prices?!) It’s like they stage these scenes in a place that looks cool without any thought about how they characters got there, who all is there, when it takes place, how they end up where they do next, how long it takes to get anywhere, there is just no continuity!

So apparently squeezing their (alien?) organs produces enzymes that help powers manifest? Does everyone on Oasis palpate their kids organs to make their powers grow? Would doing so to Michael manifest any other powers seeing as how he’s also got DNA from Jones but only ever had the same telekinesis that apparently all aliens have until he found out he was immune to fire. Which apparently also now means he can summon it at will? Would have been nice to see that happening or talked about. Also, with as, frankly frighteningly poor control as Max has, I can’t imagine he’s had all these abilities from Jones and WASN’T basically Jack-Jack from The Incredibles going absolutely haywire all this time. And if all aliens have telekinesis, why did Max and Isobel have to work so hard to do it, when Michael had to work so hard NOT to and still many years down the line slipped up enough that he got branded as having demons?! (they were 7 when they came out of the pods? and 13 at the exorcism?) I want to be more excited about the alien stuff but it just feels like the writers don’t know anything about their own show or lore.

As fun as it’s been watching Liz and Cam have scenes together I’m once again asking why Liz isn’t having these heartfelt scenes with someone closer to her, like, oh IDK, ROSA! Yes Amber wasn’t available at the start but they could have done phone calls and just filmed Liz’s part and filmed Rosa’s later. The show wrapped before it started airing it’s not like they had the episode out before Amber was back on set. Or Michael who would also encourage pushing Max. Oh right, she did get to have her once per season 2.5 minute scene with m*ria to remind everyone they’re BFFs I guess 🙄 Also Liz brings up m*ria losing her visions means she can’t see Mimi anymore, but m*rai lost her visions BEFORE mimi died, and also, she died YESTERDAY. Not that you would know it based on literally anything happening. Also her “seeing the future” has literally never come in handy before so IDK why everyone is so distraught about it now 🙄

Clyde’s character continues to be all over the place, suddenly opening up to Michael, and being chill with Bonnie’s choices, not pushing about what happened with Eduardo, just, GIVING Michael the sky map, like??? Also sticking with my theory he and Bonnie should have been a couple. Also are we just supposed to....forget? that he AND BONNIE joined forces with Jones to commit genocide against their own people? But we’re supposed to buy wide-eyed, innocent Bonnie and Clyde saying the “first time” is always the hardest about her while 10 minutes earlier Bonnie was just saying she didn’t want to hurt people anymore?

I haaaaate that they are having Max and Cam talk about how she was in love with him (is it past tense if she’s still wondering what could be?), and how much he cared for her too. This should have happened in season 1 or if Cam wanted some space to get over it first, it should have happened in season 2 at the latest. She wasn’t even IN season 3, we are well past the time for having this discussion and now it’s just eating up screentime.

I guess Alex getting kidnapped by Eduardo and then, I don’t know, sitting back and getting his additional soda flavors from the Deep Sky lab techs while Eduardo bonded with the team and helped take down Jones makes him “really important” to Alex. The thing is, I WANT him to be really important to Alex! Alex deserves a good father figure! But we haven’t SEEN it or even been TOLD about it until this moment, when everyone is looking for Eduardo while Alex is currently eating dirt in a hole and no one cares.

The bandana is still a thing so why did we have to watch Alex take it off and them walk off alone through what looks to be a dystopian-ly empty town square while Jesse’s statue takes up the entire frame if they haven’t talked about it, and Michael’s still wearing it. If Rosa can come back as a Catholic miracle to Arturo and as Rosalinda to the rest of the town, SURELY Michael could get “miracle” surgery?

Max exploding in anger, what else is new? But even worse than him exploding in anger and hurting Liz and then the writers having HER apologize to HIM and decide to take equal blame, is the fact that the danger barely has a chance to register before it’s over. Instead of Max passing out after his outburst, or Tezca knocking him out and Liz getting hurt and Max waking up to Cam trying to keep Liz alive, and being worried that his fritzing powers are going to hurt her more, he just heals her in a blink and everyone moves on. THIS is the kind of drama we actually WANT to see, not the same cyclical patterns of them lying to each other and fighting about what avenue needs to be taken to fix whatever big problem is currently happening. That first healing where Max wasn’t even sure he could do it?! That moment is still amazing, and every time they have him heal her and brush it off it cheapens the power until it becomes mundane and I hate it.

Liz saying they want things to be simpler than they can be just rubs me the wrong way because things SHOULD be simple! Look at Malex! They loved each other even as broken teens with poor coping mechanisms and walls a mile high. Their separation came from outside forces, compounded by their trauma responses and them stopping communicating effectively with each other. Once they moved past all that? It was simple! They still have to work at it, but Michael sounds SO excited and content when he says he regrets not letting Alex in every time he shuts him out, because he KNOWS how good it feels, how much easier it is to let Alex it. But that has never been Echo’s problem. They don’t have outside forces keeping them apart, they have fundamentally different ideas about how to do nearly everything and when they should be pulling closer and working together they are ALWAYS lying to each other and shutting each other out. It’s not “simple” because they...aren’t compatible. And I hate that because I LIKED Echo when the show first started and I wanted to keep liking them but the writers make it SO HARD to root for a couple that can never tell the truth and work together on anything. Also Max is....who they decided Max should be. Remember when he fell all over himself when he saw her for the first time and when he begged her not to die and every time he looks at her with heart eyes when she’s being incredibly smart? If they had leaned into that instead of the “brooding, dark, tortured hero” aspect, he and their relationship would be so much better and more interesting.

.Supposedly Michael tells Dallas the fruit from the alien tree is fuel, not food? Even though he took a bite? Fuel for...their ships? For their minds? Did Clyde say that? Is this another thing they just pulled out of the air and put in a throwaway line to come back in 4 episodes where we’re expected to remember?

At least according to the preview for next week, that kiss from Bonnie was good for something besides proving that Michael is loyal to Alex, but honestly we should have seen Clyde say something to Bonnie by the end of that episode asking her like, a vague "did you do it?" and her saying yes and looking upset about it, and then seen Michael cough or something. Then this whole episode we should have seen a little something in each of his scenes, not much, maybe a sniffle here and a cough there, or a shiver, but something so that when he collapses at the end it all comes together. But we only saw his powers flicker once before that last scene and that was it! I honestly thought when I saw that, that we would find out there were alien flowers or something in the cave damping his powers. Instead they just had a kiss happen out of nowhere and then circled back 3 weeks later to make it into something different. As heavy handed aa RNM can be they somehow fully missed out on foreshadowing this. Like yeah it's a day or 2 in show time, but 3 weeks for the audience. Also, Michael hasn't really been physically hurt since the shed and Alex isn't even there to catch his boyfriend when he passes out?! Alex isn’t there when Michel gets to sit and look up at the map to his home planet?! This is Michael all alone after finding out Sanders wanted to adopt him all over again.

Speaking of Alex and the show missing opportunities, we are 3 full episodes and a month for the viewers past Alex getting quicksanded and you STILL want me to believe Michael isn’t the slightest bit worried about not hearing from Alex? I get that they need Michael to go nuts at the right time since apparently Alex is missing for quite a bit of the season and they needed Michael to be doing other things, but that’s like, SUCH an easy fix?! We JUST saw Michael being worried he messed everything up and Alex saying he trusts their relationship to be okay even if he’s gone for a bit. Michael being worried but forcing himself to push it back because he thinks he’s overreacting makes PERFECT sense for him! We should be seeing him leaving a couple messages every episode, updating Alex on what’s going on and sometimes just inane things like making fun of something Max said. We should see him talking with Dallas, and Liz, and Max about being upset Alex isn’t answering but how he thinks he’s overreacting until finally he says something to Kyle and Kyle validates that Michael’s not overreacting and he’s worried too. We should be feeling like the Jaws theme is playing in the background and watching the knowledge that something has happened to Alex getting closer and closer to their realization. Even if for some reason we couldn’t see Alex (though it’s the same thing as with Rosa, if he’s in a hole, they could shoot him alone in whatever space they are keeping him at a later date since the whole show wrapped before airing), we should be seeing everyone else, but especially Michael feeling his absence in every single episode.

Finally, and much as I’m ready to FINALLY get the Kybel train moving, I was absolutely correct that it would be rushed and either they wouldn’t get together until the end, or they would shove them together RIGHT after the breakup and either way it wouldn’t feel like the story Kyle and Isobel deserve. I guess this is the better option as we have more episodes to enjoy Kybel content (that is, if they don’t decide to be awkward about it and Kyle doesn’t get quicksanded with Alex to keep them apart), but BOY does it feel cheap to not only have them getting together within about 24 hours of Isobel breaking up with Anatsa, but also to have IN THE SAME EPISODE, in the span of a few hours, Isobel going from crying about driving the best relationship she’s ever had off a cliff to “she wasn’t my person”. And Isobel brings up something Kyle said two full seasons ago as like, a reason she never thought he was an option, but she was off hooking up with someone else that night, so how are we the audience supposed to connect that blip of a moment that I do not remember to Isobel liking Kyle this whole time but thinking he didn’t like her? AGAIN, this is something we should have been seeing hints of since that episode or at the very least had Isobel mention something last season before going out with Anatsa about thinking he’s not an option for her so she’s going to take a chance on someone else. It’s just so frustrating that all the tiny crumbs are being held up like, “look this has been here all along!” because the writers are bad at their jobs and can’t seem to hit the broad side of a barn-sized emotional beat to save their lives.

Finally finally, here is a live reaction of us waiting for literally anyone to care about Alex because if I don’t laugh a little Imma tear my hair out

#roswell nm #roswell spoilers #roswell nm my behated #things that did not spark joy #4x05 #anti maria deluca #i have looked at this too long so sorry not sorry if it's a rambling mess #i'm definitely not going back to re-edit it anymore #it's your problem now!

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mt-words · 3 years

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Can we get some dream smp fandom positivity posts? As someone who posts mostly analysis and has never once had someone say anything rude in response, I think we perceive the fanbase as more toxic than it is because of a few outspoken individuals. Y'all are pretty chill and I like you.

In no particular order-

I love that Eret’s fans come up with such cool theories, I swear she could give you two sentences of lore and I could see three five page essays on what it could mean about their character within an hour and each of them is unique, intricate, and makes logical sense.

I love the compilations Foolish fans make of him doing ridiculous things on stream, he’s a fun guy that never fails to make me laugh and everything I see from them embodies that energy to me.

I love how creative Hannah’s fans are, you take the awesome ideas she has and turn them into the most amazing designs and concepts.

I love that Techno’s fans might write a ten page essay about his character or just say they enjoy watching him do crime, and you never know which it will be because both come from the same people.

I love how Philza’s fans embrace everything he does with so much enthusiasm. His chat is a flock of crows? Excellent, they can work with that, you will see fifty incredible pieces of art and a hundred theories in the first hour and they’re just getting started.

I love that Niki’s fans are so careful to pay attention and not miss any details. It has been ages and I still see occasional mentions and theories about the “Dear Friend” letter.

I love that Fundy’s fans are very empathetic, they love to find and elaborate on the connections between characters and that’s pretty cool!

I love Tommy’s fans for their energy. They seem passionate about making things right and hopeful that no matter what your situation is things can get better. I’ve seen so many breathtakingly emotional art pieces from this side of the fandom.

I love that George’s fans unapologetically simp for him but then catch me off guard by making deep insights about his character.

I love how Bad’s fans are as genuinely sweet as he is, they’re willing to really look at everything that makes up a character and see the tragedy of it and have compassion about things. And some just want to see an egg rule the server, c'mon, it would be funny.

I love the running gag with Skeppy fans of making Skeppy critical posts, y’all are hilarious.

I love how Purpled fans play up his lack of lore as him being an incredibly powerful cryptid, and they’re right. He totally carried the wither fight on Nov 16th.

I love the balance Quackity fans have between a love of humor, justice, and darker topics. I think like Quackity they are often underestimated and thought of as the jokester side of the fandom to an extent, and then I start reading things they write and it’s well thought out and insightful.

I love that Tubbo’s fans love chaos, cute things, or both to an unhealthy extent. Seeing anything from them reminds me of princess unikitty in all the best ways, and then they turn around and throw a super in depth meaningful analysis at me in the next breath.

I love everything about Sapnap’s fans. Y'all are perfect. The writing and art from the born in fire line? Gold.

I love how Jschlatt fans are generally chill and just enjoy whatever they want to. Their favorite Manburg president was the one who publicly executed his right hand man and gave Dream a resurrection book for firepower, and he looked good doing it.

I love that Callahan has fans. You people are dedicated and I respect it. The fact that Callahan was one of the first names to pop up when everyone was trying to figure out who Harpocrates was even though he rarely involves himself with plot? Your influence knows no bounds.

I love that Alyssa’s fans are simply too powerful. She hasn’t played on the smp since way before I started watching and there are still people defending her barn and drawing pictures of her.

I love that Antfrost’s fans have taken so many ideas and just ran with them and made them awesome. Like him practicing magic? Perfect, he now carries potions and gets a wizard hat.

I love that Dream fans look at a character who has been portrayed as pure evil from many points of view and understand that Everyone has motives based on their situation, even if it isn’t handed to us in an easily understood way.

I love how Jack’s fans are so ready to support any action he takes. Crawling out of hell? Incredible. Killing a child? Good for him! Go team Rocket. Grieving the same child? Learning healthy coping, he’s the coolest.

I love that Connor eats Pants fans are the most reasonable people in this fandom. This is terrifying. Thank you for your service, you always make me smile.

I love that Punz fans unapologetically just love their capitalist mercenary. As they should, his presence always tips the scales and everything he does brings more depth to the characters and plots he interacts with.

I love how much Ranboo fans love complexity. Most of them aren’t afraid to admit that their favorite characters are flawed, because aren’t those flaws what make them interesting and relatable?

I love the variety of Hbomb fans. Half of them may be embracing the cat maid bit while the other half goes on about how impactful and cool L’cast is, but they’re all super chill.

I appreciate that Puffy fans take the time to understand so many perspectives. So many posts I see involving her tie in lore from other characters and find interesting ways to connect them and build them together, kind of like Puffy herself.

I love that Wilbur fans seem to approach the story like they’re solving a puzzle, carefully piecing together details from months apart to figure out how and why everything goes down.

I love how hard Ponk fans work to spread awareness of how awesome he is. Ponk says and does wonderful things and is very fun to watch. I never would have tried his content without them.

I love that Karl fans saw him wanting to be involved and started coming up with such cool ideas around his character that they actually made them canon. Correct me if I’m wrong, wasn’t the time traveler thing a fan theory at first?

I love the creativity Sam fans have with his design and their willingness to discuss complex moral issues. Sam is involved in some heavy lore stuff but he and his fans keep things entertaining and calm.

I’m sure I missed some things, please feel free to add on!

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shima-draws · 4 years

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Okay listen I really really enjoyed The Wonderland/Birthday Wonderland a LOT but there’s definitely like. Huge chunks of stuff that are missing from the plot that I would have loved to see;; SPOILERS AHEAD BEWARE

First of all let me say that this movie definitely would have worked better as a TV series. Why? Because the world itself is MASSIVE. There’s so much worldbuilding shit going on that they only got to touch a little bit of each section, and left so many things open ended. And then there’s the fact of the plot itself that leaves a lot of holes behind and unanswered questions.

Rest is under the cut so ya’ll can avoid spoilers if you so desire:

What the fuck happened with the sweater contest? They make it out to be such an enormous, important part of the plot that literally ends the moment Akane hands the sweater over. We see her protectively guarding it the entire journey to the city, and yet it’s never even touched upon if the sweater wins the contest or not. What happened bruh?? I want to know if it won, a lot of unnecessary screentime went into the development and story of that sweater! Don’t leave me hanging!

“Our world is dying”, Hippocrates says, as the majority of the land is still thriving pretty okay from the looks of it. Aight. There’s lots of gorgeous visuals in this film that are made clear through the gift of water that they’re living--and apparently there isn’t even enough water to go around for humans to drink. At that point literally everything else would be dried up, right? There is literally a giant pond--GIANT! With koi fish right outside the city. They just gotta learn to distribute their water better;; it’s a shitty system tbh lmao I mean there’s plenty to go around. They just don’t bother to try spreading it evenly, which is why some places are flourishing while others are not. They really should have spent more time showing how people are suffering from this rather than showing the remaining gorgeous parts of the land--that would have made the impact of saving that world that much stronger, made the stakes so much higher. If Akane had seen how bad it really got without water, maybe that would have driven her character development earlier on, and made it more significant.

Akane’s change. It felt...really...anti-climatic. Or maybe just rushed. It was a sudden, minor sort of thing that when I realized I was like “Oh, okay, she’s already come to the conclusion that she can be strong on her own, but I wanted to see that?” They didn’t execute it super well. It feels like we’re missing an entire scene where Akane finally breaks through her fear to gain courage and make her own choices. There was definitely a bit of that right before she made her grand speech to Zangu, but there was nothing that prompted it. The whole movie is a coming of age story for her, building up until the moment where she has her great breakthrough and is able to be confident with herself. But...they don’t show that. We don’t get to see that moment. I don’t know why, because it’s the most important thing of the entire film? They really could have handled that better.

I really wish they touched more on Midori’s involvement;; she was so minor I almost didn’t catch the connection between her and the previous Goddess of the Green Wind. I like that Akane feels closer to her because of this, but we never really get anymore information than that. How did Midori end up in Wonderland so many years ago? Was she a reluctant hero type like Akane, or was she determined to save the world? Did she meet Hippocrates way back then, or was it a different alchemist that lead her on an adventure? Was something wrong with the prince at the time which required her presence in order to make sure the drop rain ceremony went well, just like Akane? I don’t know! I want to know!

The ending was SO abrupt and short. Literally right after Akane and Chii get back that’s it bam roll credits movie over! I’m like. Whiplashed by it. I wanted to see how they were affected by the journey (besides Chii immediately going to take a nap which fandjksad MOOD), and how they’ve changed from their adventures. We obviously see a huge change in Akane at the end, but how does this affect her life in her own world? Does she start treating her friends differently? Does she ever make up with the girl she abandoned in order to be in the popular group (which is another huge thing they never came back to). Is she more determined to do things now, to be confident? Is this a change her mother notices? At least show the impact of what they went through;;

Halfway through the movie we’re introduced to a London-type city that’s really...not so fun looking. Dark, gloomy, and depressing, with obvious signs of poverty, where everyone looks angry all the time. It’s a very very clear outlier in the colorful Wonderland. I’d love to have seen more history on this city...why is it so different from the rest of the world, and so dark? Why do all the people seem so unfriendly, when those outside of its walls are generous and kind? How did this city come to be? It’s such an enormous mystery that they never talk about, besides hinting that this was where the prince had ended up once before he became Zangu.

Speaking of the lovely prince. I know we got kicked in the face with his backstory (and that shit hurted, this poor baby who also kinda deserved it but not to THAT degree), but I would have liked to see even more. Maybe I’m biased because he became my favorite character the instant his identity was revealed, idk. (And, to me, he feels way more fleshed out and rounded as a character regarding his development than Akane does, which is another reason why I like him best.) But while we were given his motivations in becoming Zangu, the personality difference between Zangu and his regular princely self is IMMENSE. I really don’t think the prince would have ever committed such acts--he may be a little shit and have a lot of anger issues (which, valid, I mean his parents died and he suddenly has all these huge expectations on his shoulders and he’s. He’s just a kid man, that HAS to be traumatic) but I really don’t think he would ever strike against his own people or openly threaten them. Sure, he’s definitely shown to be prone to angry outbursts, and is fond of pushing everyone who cares about him away, but he’s not purposefully malicious. And as soon as Akane transforms him back, he calms down immediately and becomes immensely selfless and heroic. So: why the enormous change of heart? I think something that could be canon that they never really mentioned is that, when he was transformed into Zangu, he became sort of a puppet. A lifeless doll without any real empathy, and the only emotions he could feel were a burning anger and a desire for revenge to those that wronged him and made him feel pressured to perform the drop rain ceremony. Being trapped inside a body like that probably just made those feelings escalate, resulting in all of the crimes he committed and all of the people he hurt. (And maybe they did touch on this but I just don’t remember since my memory is garbage lol)

Going off of that, I know this is the type of story where we follow the hero characters, and as soon as Chii and Akane made it home that was it, we weren’t allowed another peek into the Wonderland. But...what if we were granted that opportunity? Could we have gotten the chance to see how things changed after they left? Perhaps the prince began a journey traveling to all of the towns and villages he terrorized, and apologizing to the people. Maybe Ron starts to train under Hippocrates just like Pipo. Maybe the rain washed away all of the sorrow in that lonely city, which caused people to start to change it and make it brighter. Change, change, change! I want to see proof of Akane’s help!

Why the fuck did the other alchemist/sorcerer (I forget his name and there’s no info on him anywhere MDAKMASD I’ll update this when I find out later) do that to the prince?? That was SERIOUSLY fucked up. “Oh yeah, to punish this child for being naughty and angry after his parents died, which is actually perfectly reasonable, let’s turn him into a doll where he can’t MOVE OR SPEAK and let him sit there in absolute torture until I feel like setting him free again, instead of trying to find an alternative way to confront him about his anger issues”. Dude;; No wonder he was so fucking angry and bitter when Ron finally allowed him to speak again. I would be too! Trapping children in naughty doll prison is not the answer!

I’m trying to think of more but I think I covered most of it :’) If ya’ll have anything to add, please do!

Like, overall, the movie was GREAT. It would have been even better if they didn’t shove so much information into it that ended up becoming irrelevant later on. It felt as if they were trying to cram a TV series into a movie, trying to cover all of their bases but failing. There’s just so many things they left open-ended and unanswered;; and you know me, I’m a slut for lore like this so I want to know EVERYTHING. And I only got little bits and pieces of it. I really would kike to know if they just cut out large portions of the movie to fit the time limit and the budget;; because that would make a lot of sense, because it feels as if I was handed a puzzle without all the puzzle pieces.

#Basically Shima goes off about everything she wanted to know about this movie #The Wonderland #Birthday Wonderland #Long post #バースデー・ワンダーランド #Shima speaks #Spoilers

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inspector-montoya-fox · 5 years

Text

let’s talk about the themes of the Sly games

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (2002):

Paris: this might not be the game’s main theme but it’s the theme that is most omnipresent. Paris is the glue that connects everything together. it immediately has such an impact on the player, even though it’s just the tutorial and the gang’s base of operations. Sly being a thief but also living in Paris just sounds so right, like it’s the way it should be. it fits.

The Thievius Raccoonus: this is the main theme and what provides the game with its premise. it’s the book that needs to be glued back together and its importance is highlighted throughout. almost every level has a page included so we’re constantly reminded of its significance. the skills we earn by retrieving the main ancestors’ pages elevate the gameplay and force the player to respect it. other than that it’s a clever way to spotlight the ancestors and establish that Sly does come from a long line of thieves.

Family: this doesn’t need much explaining but i’ll do it anyway. we start off with Sly’s parents getting killed and him landing at an orphanage where he creates a new family for himself with Bentley and Murray. you’ve got 3 different types of family: (A) Connor and Sly’s mom getting murdered and Sly’s aim to avenge them, (B) Bentley and Murray being true brothers when Sly was left with no one (i’m tearing up), and (C) the ancestors, which are explored more in-depth through the theme of The Thievius Raccoonus. Family as a theme explores Sly’s motivations and drive, even though Connor’s role is minor, especially in comparison to his role in Sly 3

Morality: Sly 1 is rudimental in its gameplay. it was a little game with a big promise at the time it was released, hoping to serve Sony and the Playstation 2 with a worthy mascot and an even worthier title. but right off the bat the player is bombarded with a shit-ton of lore about the world Sly lives in and how he operates. we immediately find out he’s an antihero, an honourable thief who has a code of conduct. this comes into stark contrast with the game’s villains who are basically filthy crooks. thief takes down thieves and the theme of Morality is SP’s attempt to make the player distinguish between good criminal and bad criminal. Morality as a theme is spotlighted immensely in Cold Heart of Hate when Sly saves Carmelita because he truly is the good guy, but also when it’s revealed that what’s been keeping Clockwerk alive all these years is the lack of morals and the hatred. the game establishes Morality as the outlining theme of the entire series, placing Sly on a pedestal because he’s honourable. morals trump hatred, so fuck off Clockwerk (even though ‘perfection has no age’ might be one of the coolest lines in the game lol)

Sly 2: Band of Thieves (2004):

Paris: this is the theme from the first game but on steroids. like make it x10. when you take the plot of Sly 2 and boil down to its core, it turns out to be a full-on race against time to save Paris. it provides both a nod to the first game and a sense of closure at the end: the game begins in Paris and ends in Paris. It’s both a setting and a catalyst, and it is absolutely brilliant in the game. you spend most of the game globetrotting, away from home but as soon as you find out ClockLa is on her way to unleash her psychotic brain waves and turn the city evil, you find yourself at the edge of your seat, caring more about Paris than anything else. it’s omnipresent and powerful and i don’t know why but i love it.

Spice: if you wanna be my lover. here’s an amazing replacement for drug trafficking as a plot device in a children’s game: spice. the spice trail is what pushes the narrative forward but also gives the gang something to face before the pieces fall into place and the larger scale of things is revealed. before ClockLa steals the show, spice is the main antagonist in the game. it brings the villains together, leads the gang from one location to another, provides some memorable missions and obstacles (Spice in the Sky and a raged, spice-infused Murray). but it’s not to say that it fades away in the long-run. Spice is actually the subtle thread that connects the episodes together but also is significant to the final master plan of hypnotising Paris.

Deception: obvious one here. Neyla pretending to be an ally is the major example. we’ve got the Contessa pretending to be loyal to Interpol, we’ve got Arpeggio seemingly being the mastermind behind everything (which he kinda was until he wasn’t), we’ve got the whole evil plot reveal on the spice, we’ve got Neyla ripping off Arpeggio on her journey to become the most well-written villain in video-game history. lots going on here. overall great theme. on a wider scale (and i’ve touched on this before in some recent posts) we’ve got SP deceiving the player into thinking the plot is all laid out at Rajan’s ball until it all turns to shit and nothing goes as expected. Appearance V Reality is a sub-theme that pops up when Bentley fights Jean Bison and Bison constantly underestimates Bentley until the turtle fucking blows his lights out. it’s not an instance of Deception per se, but it’s worth mentioning

The Past: Clockwerk’s return makes this a theme instead of a motif. before ‘saving Paris’ becomes the main objective, it’s Sly’s determination to prevent Clockwerk’s revamping that kicks off the game’s events. the events of Sly 1 play a pivotal role here as they lay the groundwork for the plot of Sly 2. it’s not just Sly 2: The Sequel. with its own set of characters and an intricate story it becomes its very own thing. but Clockwerk is the link that connects everything.

Morality: this one sneaks up on you in the game’s second half and just bites you right in the ass when you least expect it. Contessa, who until her boss-fight seems to be just another selfish spider bitch witch, manifests into this advocate for Sly’s inner demons through simple dialogue. fucking brilliant. ‘You’re an ignorant child playing dress-up in his father’s legacy’ (in my opinion, the best line in the entire series) kicks it all off. and then the theme becomes obviously present throughout. it explores the fine line that Sly walks between robin hood and scumbag thief, it shows how the villains are down-right criminals who want to benefit from their crimes, it cracks black and white into a million pieces because in a single game there are like a million layers of good and evil: Barkley at the very top as the authoritarian white, Carmelita as a sympathetic cop who tries to grasp onto her own code of ethics while occasionally running with the thieves, Sly and the gang as antiheroes, the villains as... villains, and Neyla as the embodiment of satan. it’s a scale and the game spotlights this. i had a different bullet point for Justice but i think it falls under Morality. basically, Carmelita’s story arc in Sly 2 deals with blurring her views a bit and re-defining justice

Sly 3: Honour Among Thieves (2005):

Ancestry (Cooper Vault): this is what the game is all about, or at least the premise. after stitching the cottdamn book back together by the end of the first game, Sly 2 doesn’t give any attention to the Thievius Raccoonus. in fact, Sly 2 exists on a completely different plane, using its amazing plot to elevate itself away from the lore of the first game. ancestry is rarely mentioned. flashforward to Sly 3, where SP takes us back to the mythos for a new caper involving a new reveal: the Cooper Vault. what we thought we knew about the ancestors is thrown out the window to pave the way for this mystical place where the Coopers buried their secrets and their loot. i’d like to point out that the theme of Ancestry is great and all but SP does a shitty job in spreading it throughout the game. whilst recruiting the new gang members we often forget why we’re doing so and it’s not until the last episode of the game that we get the fulfilment of the theme’s promise. it’s also worth mentioning that the theme pops up in A Cold Alliance when Tsao is comparing himself to Sly and he speaks of his ancestors but we somehow get the feeling that his ancestors were all colossal jerks like him and had absolutely 0 honour

Family: this is not the same as Ancestry. the new gang members could have very well been distant with each other if not for the adventures that made them bond. Bentley’s fascination with the Guru, Murray being the Guru’s apprentice, Bentley falling for Penelope, Penelope and Panda King helping Murray with the van, Panda King and Sly working alongside each other to kill vampire mantises and the Crusher. these are all moments that helped sell the ‘group of thieves’ aspect of the game. but Family also explores the bond of the original trio and how, even when they face their differences (Bentley and Murray living in the shadow of Sly), they can still make it through, even stronger than before. other references here might include: Panda King and Jing King, Dimitri and the Lousteau diving legacy, Dr. M and McSweeney being Conner’s “sidekicks”

Honour: this replaces the theme of Morality from the previous two games as the situations the characters face allude to honour (doing what’s right for the greater good) rather than morality (black and white, good vs evil). what i mean by that is SP making an effort to distinguish why Sly is a different thief and ultimately an antihero. this was sorta explored in the previous games by having Sly put an end to the villains’ various operations but the overall plot overshadowed those instances. Sly 3 on the other hand fully explores the theme of Honour by including the word in the title and having the gang save the day in every episode. stopping harm to the environment (polluting the Venice canals, destroying the Australian outback), helping Penelope come to terms with her inner demons by encouraging her to drop the facade of the Black Baron, saving Jing King from forced marriage, etc. the theme also ties into the theme of Redemption (below) but what i’d really like to point out is that Carmelita gets in on it as well. i can’t think of a more honourable moment than when she finally, after 3 games, puts the petty cop bullshit aside and comes to Kaine Island with her squad to save Sly from Dr. M. she makes Sly’s battle her own and doesn’t give up, showing up at the very end to save him from Dr. M’s horrific boss-fight (ugh)

Deception: although not as major as in Sly 2, i’ve said this time and time again: Flight of Fancy perfectly encapsulates the theme of Deception. Penelope dressing up as the Black Baron is not the only instance of deception. you’ve got Bentley and Penelope blowing their online avatars out of proportion, you’ve got Dimitri who was initially a villain finally turning sides, you’ve got an episode card full of sunshine and bright blue and gold fonts for a hub that’s all gloomy rainclouds. beyond Flight of Fancy, i can think of a few more instances: some Shakespearian shenanigans when Carmelita disguises herself as Jing King, or when the gang doesn’t reveal their Dead Men Tell No Tales plan to the player and we’re left thinking that Sly is going to get eaten by sharks

Redemption (Choices): speaks for itself, really. this one ties in with Honour and is a sub-theme, maybe a motif. we’ve got Murray’s desire to redeem himself for feeling guilty over Bentley’s accident. we’ve got Dimitri and the Panda King joining the gang after previously being villains in the series, and eventually redeeming themselves through helping with the heist. we’ve got Penelope redeeming herself as the Black Baron by joining the gang. i also named it Choices because these characters chose to redeem themselves. Choices are all over the game, whether its the lack of free will or the sacrifice characters make: Jing King isn’t in a position to choose whether or not she gets married during her capture, Sly sacrifices his cane at the very beginning of the game to save Bentley and then jumps in front of Dr. M’s shot to save Carmelita (!!!)

Closure: or the lack of, smh. SP’s trilogy comes to a close and therefore the theme has to exist even if the game doesn’t provide the player with mass satisfaction. Sly finally gets together with Carmelita, Bentley finally gets over his fear and self-doubt and lives the good life (with Penelope), Murray kicks off his racing career, and we get happy-ever-afters for the rest of the gang as well

#ya boi is FAMISHED #this beats any sly essay i've ever written #i'm exhausted bye #sly cooper #sly MF COOPER BITCHES

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enigmari · 4 years

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Oh my GOD Please infodump abt hatoful.... ive repeatedly tried to get into it but have no idea how/how to connect any of the lore. Thanos !

I SAW THE TYPO TOO LATE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO END WITH “THANKS”,

SKDFSKJSLKDFJ no worries anon, it happens to the best of us. Anyways, how should I start this…

So, if you’re totally new here, Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel dating sim whose basic premise is “what if cliched boyfriend archetypes… but birds?” And it takes this premise completely wholeheartedly, while still maintaining a comedic tone. You pick classes and club activities each in-game day to increase your skill points, and depending on your levels (and a few dialogue options) you’ll either successfully romance your birdie of choice or get a Bad End. Most of the birds make their interests/level requirements obvious from the start, and you have a bunch of save slots to work with if you wanna go the scum route. Pretty simple and straightforward.

(Actually, that’s a lie, it gets much more complicated later. Don’t worry about that right now.)

Most of HBF is framed through the perspective of the protagonist (I’m gonna use her canon name for convenience) Hiyoko, and she is… not the brightest bulb in the box. Especially in the first game, when events in one character’s route will be foreshadowed in other routes, she will rarely call them out or make note of them. Naturally, this also means some reveals will be spoiled depending on which order you do the routes in. You also unlock documents in the Archive section after completing each route, which adds another level of puzzle piecing to the mix.

(No, this is not the complicated part I was talking about earlier. Sorry.)

In this next bit, I’m going to briefly run through the routes of the first game from least to most complex in terms of lore, as well as what things are foreshadowed when. I’ll also toss in the archive documents when I feel they’re most relevant to the information you have. We ready?

Okosan’s routes: Mostly joke endings, unless there is some greater plot significance to pudding that I’ve missed for all these years.

Ryouta’s route: Mostly about character building, the only real hint you get is that his mother is sickly and it’s implied he inherited this from her.

Azami’s routes: You could get here with the same stats as Ryouta’s route, but then you fuck it up by taking this job opportunity away from him. How rude, Hiyoko.

Sakuya’s first route: He opens up to you about his abusive and bigoted dad, and with some encouragement you encourage him to run away and become a musician like he always wanted. Mr. Le Bel is very important to multiple other characters in this game.

Sakuya’s second route (needs perfect stats/dialogue choices): Same conversation about his dad, but he chooses to live with you instead. Your big hint is at the end, when Yuuya sends you a letter saying there’s “something he’s wanted to tell [Sakuya] for a long time. Something important.”

Yuuya’s route: You don’t actually get to find out what the "important thing" is, whoops. You do find out that Yuuya’s a spy for the Dove Party, Shuu is one for the Hawk Party, and the school has been increasingly influenced by the Hawk Party as of late.

BAD END: You may have gotten it earlier, but now you have context as to who’s killing you when you fail a route- it’s the Hawk Party. The reason why is still unclear.

[CW for gore, child death, medical abuse, suicide, and attempted genocide from here on! This game is a trip!]

Shuu’s first route: Absolutely not a romance route and if you ship Shuu/Hiyoko please block me and tab out immediately thank you very much. You learn that Shuu has been killing students for medical experimentation, confirming Yuuya’s suspicions about the quills in the student store and the food in the cafeteria.

Shuu’s second route (needs perfect stats/dialogue choices): Same ending where Hiyoko dies, but he’s attached enough to her that he takes her head in a jar when he goes on the run. You do learn that Shuu doesn’t care about the Hawk Party’s politics, just that they can enable his personal experiments.

Archive Note 11: Someone (Shuu) knew that Yuuya was a Dove Party agent from the start. He also notes that some of the students are “fascinating”, which you know from his route means they’re good experiment fodder. You learn that he has reason to believe his victims won’t oppose the experimentation, but not the details.

Archive Note 10: Shuu makes notes about human “adaptability measures.” Given that Hiyoko is the only human at the school, you can guess that this will involve her in some way.

Archive Note 06: Notes about the Spanish Flu, how deadly it was to humans, and the connection to an “Avian Influenza.”

Archive Note 04: Notes about a “Goodwill Ambassador” for humanity, who needs a strong natural immunity to Avian Influenza. Hiyoko’s stats show that she has a base level of 800 Vitality, so you can guess that she’s the ambassador. This is why she dies when you fail a route- the Hawk Party saw she didn’t build a good enough connection to the birds, so they take her as a lost cause.

Archive Note 07: Shuu makes notes about “carrier capacity” in the student body, inducing it in some way in a “normal” individual. You can guess this is the details of his medical experimentation, but not who the victim is. You can also guess that the disease to be carried is Avian Influenza.

Anghel’s route: It’s not actually that complicated, but I think you need to complete Shuu’s route before the “mad love of a fallen angel” option is available. (EDIT: you actually just need to complete one playthrough to unlock this option. Even the Azami solo ending will unlock it.) This ending seemingly undermines all the things we learned about Shuu right before, but this is just Hiyoko’s perspective.

Archive Note 01: A certain student (Anghel) has hallucinogenic properties that can affect bystanders, putting them in a trance-like state. This explains why everything went totally off the rails in his route.

Kazuaki’s route: Again not a romance route (no matter what he says about “waiting”, ew) because the whole point is that Kazuaki is afraid to open himself up to love of any kind. You learn he had someone he cared deeply about in the past but lost, and now he’s been soured from the experience. You also learn that he smells like bleach.

Nageki’s route: You learn that he’s a ghost, that he killed himself in the school some years ago, and that he doesn’t have all his memories. He disappears before you learn anything more, but he’s happy so it’s okay and why am I crying agai-

Archive Note 02: Someone (Nageki) writes about how they are trapped, and can’t remember what happened to them.

Archive Note 05: Nageki remembers he made a promise to someone very important, but he can’t remember who or what it was.

Archive Note 03: Nageki once woke up in a place that wasn’t the library- somewhere with bright lights and a white ceiling. He’s not as trapped as he first thought.

Archive Note 14: Nageki notes that he can move between floors, going from the library to the chemistry lab below. You can guess that the place with the bright lights is somewhere below these two rooms. This also reveals that Nageki knew the layout of the school when he was alive.

Archive Note 12: Nageki notes that after meeting Hiyoko, he feels fulfilled “just as he did back then.” He still can’t remember everything, though.

Archive Note 08: Notes about an underground facility, a fire, and a Subject 00 whose remains are in storage. You can guess that the facility is the place with the bright lights, and Nageki is Subject 00. You can also guess that Nageki set the fire, since he said that he killed himself.

Archive Note 09: Notes about Subject 00′s relative, whose remains are also in storage. You can guess that this is the “important person” that Nageki made a promise to a long time ago.

At this point, the only documents left are Note 13, which is about a terrorist incident at the Heartful House orphanage in which only two birds survived, and Note 15, which is about another terrorist incident some years ago in which the Ave’s High City building was bombed. Nothing in the main routes hints at these notes, so it’s a good time to move to…

Bad Boys Love route: This route is literally the length of the rest of the routes combined, so we’re doin’ more sections, baby!

Kazuaki’s lost loved one and Nageki’s important person turn out to be each other. They were the survivors of the Heartful House incident, and Kazuaki (real name Hitori) took care of his little brother by himself. Nageki was sickly, so he volunteered himself for a medical experiment at the school that could potentially cure him to take the burden off of Hitori.

Unbeknownst to them, the Hawk Party was already in control of the school and their real motive was to investigate the disease Nageki was carrying- Avian Influenza. Shuu was specifically the lead for this project, and he also witnessed the Heartful House incident when it happened. At the time, he went by the name Isa Souma and was a medical researcher. He worked with Ryuuji Kawara, Ryouta’s dad, until Ryuuji’s death from disease.

Ryouta and Hiyoko were also there, because her parents were former human ambassadors too. Unfortunately, they became some of the casualties, which left the two kids heartbroken. Shuu, seeing them and recognizing Ryouta, offered to grant them a wish. They both wished for a world where humans and birds would never fight anymore, which Shuu took to mean “kill all the remaining humans so they can’t fight the birds” because… he’s like that.

Shuu decided that the easiest way to kill all the humans would be to spread the Avian Influenza, and this is why he sought out Nageki. Nageki was forced to kill humans as part of the experiments, and this traumatized him so much that he set the lab on fire to stop it, trapping himself inside. Hitori witnessed this too, and swore to get revenge despite Nageki asking him to destroy his remains and live a happy life. He bleached his feathers and swapped identities with another bird to fake his death, and applied to the school as a teacher under his new name.

Nageki’s plan didn’t entirely work, and the Hawk Party was able to store some of his remains for future experiments with Avian Influenza. This brings us to the timeline of the main routes, where Shuu took advantage of Ryouta’s sickly constitution to make him a new carrier for Avian Influenza. Yuuya tried to interfere on behalf of the Dove Party, but Shuu blackmailed him with the knowledge that he killed his real half-brother because he hated Mr. Le Bel and wanted Sakuya to live instead.

The new strain of Avian Influenza that Ryouta carried was enough to make Hiyoko sick and kill her. The death of the Human Ambassador kickstarts the beginning of this route, and Shuu planned for the humans who would retaliate to also be infected. It doesn’t go as he planned, of course, but that’s laid out pretty well in the rest of the route so I won’t re-summarize it here.

Aaaand that’s about everything for the first Hatoful Boyfriend game! I’ll gladly do infodumps/lore summaries for Holiday Star or the other side materials if anyone wants, but this took almost three hours to write as is so I’m going to give myself a break.

#anonymous #ask me #mari.txt #hatoful boyfriend #EDIT: THIS IS VERY SPOILERY. I HOPED IT WAS OBVIOUS FROM THE LORE REQUEST BUT YEAH.#i don't think it'll spoil your enjoyment of the game bc i didn't go into that many details (also experiencing =/= reading) but yeah.

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pepperstrawberry · 5 years

Text

Verdant Flame (working title)

Okay, I’m running with the suggested title.

This post is going to be just putting thoughts out there about how I’m going to do this project, possible ideas of how to publish, and what major changes I’m going to roll with.

I’m going to put it all under the cut so I’m not wreaking havoc on your dash. X3

Before the cut: For those somehow not in the know (like, how could any of my followers on Tumblr or Twitter not have caught wind of the bonfire of gnashing teeth much of the Magic LGBT+ community is dealing with right now, I don’t know, but just in case, and especially if this post is seen later): WAR Forsaken dropped and with it Gruulfriends went from canon to retcon in a way I didn’t expect: Biphobia and erasure among other issues. I’ll talk about the mess itself later, but for now, lets adress what we are doing as a community and what I”m doing in particular.

The basics is that we are kinda rebelling against Wizards in what small way we can; but being creative, interesting and having fun with the canon. Take the means of production, canon is ours now!

But for me in specific, I’ve been playing with using Chandra and Nissa as well as the world of Magic to create frame works for stories I wanted to tell, but until now I boiled down everything to its basics because I just wanted to use frame works and use tropes as jumping off points. But now? Fuck that, I’m thinking about pulling an E.L. James, but good.

What does that mean? Well, E.L. James literally wrote a fanfic, changed some names, and published it. So screw it, going to do the same over here. I’m going to take a step or two further back then she did, since 1) Wizards/Hasbro might not be as nice as Stephenie Meyer and 2) I feel like I can be a better writer then E.L. James.

So, how will this project play out? This is where I make a cut and we get down to business:

First: How to publish?

I think if I’m going to make this a thing, I’m going to have to go with self publishing and do these in short stories. I’m not sure how short, but I feel like once I get the ball rolling, I want to just keep going. If I’m taking years to put out one book and you guys are waiting that long for it, I’m going to loose steam and you are going to loose interest. This is definitely a ‘strike while the irons hot’ situation.

And the iron is near melting right now.

Second: What is going to be the basics and how will it differ from MtG Lore ‘Canon’?

First and most obvious is that I need to figure out what I can keep and what needs to be changed.

As I said above, while I am definitely in the mood of ‘you know what, this is ours now, fuck off’, the fact is, the law is the law. If your work is too similar to another, you can get in some heavy trouble.

I’ve covered some of this in my other posts about this, but I’m pulling this into one spot with the new info to make it easier for me and others to find.

World: I’m going to use analogs of each of the planes of MtG to make countries and kingdoms. It’s a lovely short hand and will make the world building go that much faster... Tricky part (much as the characters) is renaming things and setting it enough apart that it isn’t exactly the worlds and what not from MtG.

The main ones I’m going to use are:

Zendikar: Still going to be the land my ‘Not-Nissa’ hails from. First step is to just fully expunge the eldrazi history and effect. I am thinking about having some sort of ancient thing buried there, but in a very adventure-y feel of like an old dragon or some other powerful creature.

Kaladesh: Still home to ‘Not-Chandra’, still a place of one-ness with nature and artifice. Debating on how much I should carry over the sense of Indian aesthetic. Like, I don’t want to be window dressing like the actual Kaladesh is, but at the same time I’m not sure how well I can make it feel ‘right’ in that regard. I think I’ll keep the plot idea they started, but carry it through right.

Theros: Not-Gideon and Not-Elspeth will definately have history here. There won’t be actual gods, though a great power they attribute -to- gods will exsist. Which brings me to wonder how I should handle the cosmology... especially when we are talking about

Innistrad: I envision a very gothic, germanic country side, probably bordering Not-Theros. There will be a cult that worships a great power hidden on the moon. I’m going to use this as an opportunity to do a thing that came to mind when Emrakul locked herself away...

Vryn: I’m not sure if or how I’ll use this since we know so little about it. Might just cut it and have my ‘Not-Jace’ come from somewhere else. Hell, might just cut to the chase and make him connected with my Not-Ravnica. And speaking of...

Ravnica: Obviously a major trade hub and likely a center piece of the setting. Not-Jace, Not-Vraska, Not-Kaya, and Not-Ral all would be seen here. I think i’d also take all of the Fiora stuff and fold it into this so that I don’t have too much going on in the world and can pull together a lot of neat characters from that set too. Not-Marchessa might be fun as a side... well not ‘villain’, but definitely not helpful to our heroes... usually. X3

Ixalan: Pretty easy; coastline adventure. Just use any ideas from the block for pirate based shenanigans. Not sure if I will write enough to get to this sort of craziness, but it would be a lot of fun if I do.

Amonkhet: Not sure if, when, or how I am going to use this. Though a desert region might be fun. Might combine this with Regatha and that plan that Teyo comes from.

Kamigawa: I mean, really, this is ‘japan: the setting’. They went so hard on the Japanese lore here that it’s not going to be hard to make my own with little effort or consideration. Do expect there to be a Not-Tamiyo. X3

Alara: To be honest, I was never too big on this plane, but then it was a big deal years ago and I never really ‘set foot’ there. I mean if I did use it, I could use it to sorta map the bigger world’s zones? But that feels too much like the silly ‘elemental nations’ angle. Worked well for Avatar, but won’t work here.

Eldraine: I’m thinking about using this as a rough overlay of the main areas and goverment and what not tied to and surrounding my not-ravnica. Not sure. I haven’t finished the book yet, and it’s hard to get a solid bead on the details of the world without the old uploads, the clear posting of lore that used to happen (remember how we all knew what was going on with the color pie/race spread of Kaladesh?) and just having mostly the cards to go one leaves me wanting a bit. Not to mention they aren’t making the art books anymore. FUCK. I liked those. They needed to be improved not canceled T3T ... anyhoo...

Dominaria: Given what Dominaria now is to magic lore, I think I’ll set it as the history past. This world IS my Not-Dominaria.

I’ll figure out other planes as I go along, though I might just stick with what I got here. Adding in more is going to muck up the world I’m crafting. I may be taking parts that aready exist and remixing it (which, if we are honest with ourselves, is really how we tell stories in the first place, I’m just leaving my ‘mix’ lumpy XD), but I do need to concetrate more on the characters. I can’t introduce a new land every book. I need familiar ground, routes that readers can follow, places characters can be from that matter.

Speaking of characters:

Characters: Again, the idea here is that you should be able to recognize them to some extent, but I sitll have to work with the ‘legally distinct’ Not-Gatewatch... So here is what I got so far:

Chandra: What we keep: Fire based magics, brashness, cute. What we change: Not much. Most of her changes are going to be involved with the way I change the world around her. I think the big difference is instead of having her ‘planeswalk’, when her family gets hunted, they end up traveling toward the border, and she ends up running, getting lost, and finding herself on the steps of a (monastery). Also... no one would hate me for going ahead and making her trans, would they? Like, by the story proper’s start, she’ll have a woman’s body (or maybe that could be a part of her quest?), but I do like the idea. X3 It adds more of a personal touch to my Chandra.

Nissa: Debating on if I should keep her an elf. Keeping her an elf AND keeping the nature magic might be too alike. If not Elf, what should I make her? Still, the basics of her story are that she is looked down on, shunted to the side. stuff that leads her into being more comfortable on her own. Chandra is going to help her out of her shell, but only due to her honesty and clarity.

Gideon: No inviciblity. But definately going to keep him being the classic hero type, but with a genuine heart of gold. Going to change up his armorments from the sural to a short sword, buckler, and a lance/javalin? something like that. Hails from Not-Theros, has taken residence in Not-Ravnica

Jace: Trans man. Doing that right from the start. I know it was some folks head canon for a long time, and I see nothing wrong with making it canon here. Going to have to play with his past a bit. I think I’m not going to bother with the memory erasure. Instead, he trained as a spy with some mental powers and illusions. After betraying his original handler (someone that was a part of a different country), he defects to the not-ravnica and gets wrapped up with that stuff, eventually going out to help other nations in an effort to unite the continent or something... I’m kinda forming stuff as I write this. XD

Liliana: Still a necromancer. Going to cut out the deals with the devils. Maybe one, but not four. Might still have marks, but it will be more from her own magics rather then a contract. Still served a terrible master, but maybe with less strings attatched (or at least she thinks so). A friend in a discord suggested I have her have a binding on her bother as a lich vampire hunter. I’m warming to the idea, but still need to work out the details. I like the idea of her regaining her youth, that might even be the first story where Not-Chandra and Not-Nissa interact.

Vraska: Will end up in a relationship with Not-Jace... but I’m not too keen on keeping her a gorgon. I like the look of her ‘hair’, but I might just go with straight up dreads. Someone suggested making her some form of Naga, and though I’m not big on taking away her legs, the idea of some snakish relation is not out.

Ral: Inventor. Jackass. Friend of Not-Jace, has a Gay lover? yep, keeping all that. I think most of his changes, like Chandra, will be more about how the world around him shifts do to how I write rather then actual character changes.

Kaya: Keeping the Assassin, and can fight Ghosts. Still fleshing this one out. Likely to have ties with whatever I do with the Orzhov still. I adored the whole being hired by Teysa and ending up in charge thing, though I’m not sure I’ll go quiet that far? Mmm

Jaya: Still a mentor to Chandra. Less mystery around her though. It’s going to be less ‘she was the founder of our group’ and more ‘an adventurer that chose to settle down in her old age’ or something. And yes, the cookie scene I drew a comic for a while back will be in the story X3

Karn: Golems are a thing in fantasy, I don’t see a reason to stop now. But the Urza history is going to be retired. I think he might be an invention of someone in the current world and ends up as a helper to Not-Chandra and Not-Nissa at some point.

Jhoira: I’m thinking grand daughter to Not-Jaya. I like her and I want to keep her, but I like the adventure her. Might have a rivalry between her and Not-Chandra. like a friendly one. She might even have a bit of a chip on her shoulder as she doesn’t have fire magic, but Not-Chandra does.

Rat and Teyo: Might might not. The cast is getting big already, we’ll see. Might have them as a duo from the start with a sort of ‘adventures in the sewers’ thing going on.

Ugin: Not a dragon, but definately a powerful being. and still has that stick up his ass. Often wrong about what he thinks should be done, but his heart is genuinely in the right place. Going to make Not-Mizzet his son maybe?

Nicol Bolas: Bastard, got a plan, and it will be similarly a slow build, but he is going to be less ‘has his hands in everything’ and more a ‘mmm, I could use this’ sort.

Alesha: Fuck timelines! This woman is a friend of Not-Chandra and helped her discover herself. Whether she rides with her people near... wait... OH GOD I LOVE IT: Something I literally thought up while writing. She and her nomadic bandit team travel the roads between many lands, and they find young not-Chandra. After coming out as being a girl, Not-Alesha is what helps solidify her sense of Identity. After showing off her fire magics and how uncontroled they are, adding in how young she still is, they drop her off with the (monastery) XD I’m loving this change already.

Oviya: Still Chandra’s Auntie. Big change? Her lover is still alive, because fuck that noise.

Olivia: Plans. Hungry.

Avacyn: Doesn’t exists at the start of the story, but thinking about having her be created during it.

Sorin: Not sure....

Still thinking about a lot of other characters. I’ll get to them as I go.

There is also the Guilds of Ravnica to consider... With those, I think I’m going to keep the identity but not quite the orginizations. At least not so directly. Like not all of them are absolute ‘guilds’. There is less straight up organization. But there are definately a strong sense of jobs and a loyalty to those you work with...

Story:

And then there is the story itself. I think I’m going to start it with Not-Chandra meeting Not-Gideon much like before, but the goals are that he is traveling on a mission to see what is going on in Not-Zendikar. The seers/mages/whatever have been sensing some shit going down in that area and it’s close enough to the boarders of not-ravnica to check out. He and Not-Jace pass through and Not-Chandra gets curious and follows. She is going to meet Not-Nissa on the way. The four become a team and face down a nasty threat to the land and uncover a old history of Not-Zendikar that might need to be followed up on.

That can be book one.

Book two can be Not-Liliana’s introduction. The four, having worked so well together, are made a team by Not-Ugin and charged with trouble shooting all around the realm and seeing about maybe making more allies for Not-Ravnica. They find an old woman and they help her regain her youth... and in her they find an old villain. But the world has changed since last Not-Liliana walked the lands outside her keep. And it turns out that Not-Olivia, a vampire queen, has been making a name for herself. There are other darknesses afoot in her territory. For now, she would offer the team aid... as long as it suits her.

I think that can be book two

A return home would be the third story. Yes, this is kinda following how the stories were flowing at first, but after this one things are going to shift. The return home will bring Not-Chandra in direct confrontation with her past. The big changes I made to that and to Not-Kaladesh become big here. I’m thinking this is also where Not-Jhoira hangs out. The war behind the scenes is brewing, but it’s only starting. The all out mess won’t be till a later book.

What will happen in the story though is the confrontation with Not-Baral, Not-Chandra almost nuking herself in grief, and Not-Nissa being the anchor she needed. This will be the point of confession.

And so on... I’m not sure how far I’m going to go with this, but I want to try to push as many stories, but with as high quality as I can. Can I do it? I have no freaking clue.

I’ll post more as I go. For now, the working title is Verdant Flame. If I change it, I’ll continue to use the title to tag all the stuff I do till I go back and add the new title to old posts.

Now to transfer these notes... and figure out names. you don’t know how tiring it was getting adding ‘Not’ to everything.

And for those really keeping score: Why yes, some of this -was- what Dragon Quixotic was. There is enough difference between the two worlds that I feel confident that I can keep them as separate stories now.

#Verdant Flame #Gruulfriends #fuck canon

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jcmorgenstern · 5 years

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3x12 “review” (aka whining)

Okay so 3x12! First the things I liked, so this doesn’t come off as a gigantic whining list of things I hated. (I feel kind of bad I didn’t do a 3x11 review because I actually really liked that one, but I guess I have more motivation to whine than anything else).

readmore for length and sanity.

So things I liked:

Luke and Jace interaction! Though the pacing was absolutely insane and I absolutely refuse to believe that the Clave has the infrastructure in place to take detailed barometric readings in the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE SIBERIA, so detailed that Jace can easily pinpoint exactly where the apartment was. Like I wouldn’t believe they have that kind of detail in rural Iowa, let alone a place that’s colder than balls.

That last point was all whining.The Morgenstern sword!! Y’all have NO idea how long I spent being mad that Valentine didn’t have it in the first two seasons. It now seems a bit odd to introduce it now considering Valentine didn’t in fact ever have it, but whatever. Also Clary being like “fuck Morgenstern weapons” was kind of funny considering her kindjals are waiting at home.

Magnus’ storyline. Though it’s kind of weird and rushed and confused, I’m just glad my man is getting some real focus on him as a person rather than a love interest or idk some overblown “son of Edom” thing.

Cain was, I admit, a really cool and interesting concept, and I already really like Pasha!! I hope he’s continuing to get better after his surgery. Don’t love as much how they’re mainlining Lilith as the Biggest Bad Ever and a Whole Evil B*tch (more on that lovely term of endearment later).

Mirek was really cool, kind of had to laugh at the “demon middle class.” Can’t help but wonder if the “status quo” thing was a deliberate political joke or not. Either way, Jonathan has never met a structure he doesn’t want to overthrow. Does the Clave spark joy? Apparently not.

MELIORN IS BACK!!!!! And wants a threesome, apparently.

Jonathan peevishly being like “I forgive you for trying to kill me, btw” and Clary just rolling her eyes and ignoring him.

Jonathan’s fucking GAAAY. (Or bi. pan. whatever. You do you. All I’m saying is THIS BITCH RAINBOW). I do not care what the intention was, that’s what I’m choosing to get out of it.

Things I didn’t like:

the plot of this episode is pretty much enough material for an entire season. They compressed it so much people are calling it a filler episode. Jace and Luke figure out the secret of the apartment (which is untraceable), go to Siberia, figure out Jonathan is alive, find Clary and rescue her and that’s only about 15 minutes of footage overall. That could be spread out over 15 episodes.

On the Simon side: they find the first fucking vampire, become his new bestie, get the only thing in the world that could rid him of the mark without any sort of price or even really having to ask, they get back into Faerie without any problems, Meliorn takes them right to the Queen despite knowing Simon has a weapon of death on his face, she agrees without argument to unmark him not even knowing if he’ll explode or what, the mark is off in about 14 seconds, the FUCKING DRUG PLOTLINE IS BACK AG A. I N. And then rose petals. That could have been the entire SEASON.

No Maia. (I know she’s in the next ep I just want to complain).

It’s also weird because it seems like Malec is progressing on normal time and the other two story strands are progressing on some extreme kind of fast-forward. It gives you all kinds of whiplash. If there was any kind of thematic overlap or even an attempt to connect the strands thematically it might work to ground the other storylines but it. Does not.

I hate that the apartment is Lilith’s and not Valentine’s, and that apparently it can only go to a few select spots now. NOT. THE. POINT. Point = missed.

And onto the things that bothered me the most: the whole treatment of Jonathan and Clary, and the Sizzy. For which I need an entire section to bitch.

Jonathan and Clary: why god have you abandoned me

* Ok so honestly, I had to go and check to see who wrote 3x11 and 3x12, because it had to be different people. 3x11 was by Todd and Darren, and 3x12 was by Alex Schemmer. Schemmer has only written one other episode in 3a (3x03), which explains to me why he seems to have missed a fair bit of lore. To me, the huge difference between 3x11 and 12, which basically deal with the same plot line (Clary kidnapped by Jonathan, wary of him, trying to escape) but in hugely different ways and different focus.

In 3x11, the focus is all on Clary. Her initial confusion, her fear, anger, the attempt to escape, the attempt to kill Jonathan. All shot from her point of view. She takes more action than he does—she runs away, she grabs the knife, she stabs him. He is mostly reacting to her, running after her, offering her soup and tea and trying to win her over. Even when he does talk, the scenes where he talks about himself are brief and she shares equal part in the conversation.

This makes sense, as she is the main character.

In 3x12, everything is about Jonathan. From the first shot everything is about him, the camera focusing on him even when Clary is the focus of the scene (i.e., when she’s finding new clothes—and was a shirtless scene necessary? Like we get it, you nearly killed poor Luke in a gym somewhere, thanks for the update). Every time he and Clary talk, it’s just him talking at her. “I forgive you for killing me.” Telling her she’s good at art. Telling her there’s an Institute nearby. Telling her he likes art. She can barely get a word in edgewise from the get-go, and it only gets worse on the hot chocolate “date.”

He says the whole point is to get to know each other better, but he LITERALLY talks about himself the whole time. Clary barely even reacts, just makes eyes at a phone. He doesn’t even seem to notice she’s not listening. Like guys, this is every bad tinder date ever. Then they go to to the antiques store, and even then she’s shuffled off—shoo! Get out of the scene!! Even the French guy interrupts her at every turn and she gets shuffled off like a sack of potatoes *again*.

Like don’t tell me Clary couldn’t kick his ass and then explain things to him when he’s pinned to the ground. It would be faster, safer, and if Jonathan shows up again she can be like “ohh he was threatening us!! Look, I beat him up to keep us safe!” and Jonathan would buy it hook, line, and sinker. Since killing people in broad daylight is ok, clearly the show isn’t worried about the realism of fighting in the streets.

And then she’s shuffled off AGAIN, and although the show clearly understands that being kidnapped and controlled by your dangerously unhappy brother who seriously has the creepy hots for you is a pretty freakin SCARY situation, it still shows all this from Jonathan’s point of view, teasing the “romance” of it all and giving us hehe teehee little slips of it (like the shirtless scene). And then when she finally is able to break free and actually do something, he yells “BITCH” at her and runs off, and she falls into Jace’s arms, completely forgetting to act like a real human being.

The reason why 3x11 works so much more for me is that Clary is at least an equal partner, and is given space to react and actually do things; in 3x12 they seem to take any excuse to bundle her off, keep her out of frame, mute her reactions. Jonathan and his feelings take center stage and suddenly Clary is a side character in her own story. 3x11 is more compelling because Jonathan is legitimately trying to win her over, trying to connect with her, personally. It’s obvious he cares about her opinions as a person and her as a person—you couldn’t replace her with a cardboard cutout and the scene would read the same. They actually interact. In 3x12 he’s just ranting at her about himself while she sits there. On no narrative level is there any sort of connection or interaction.

Like imagine the situation differently. They’re in art store, because lbr the real museums prolly wouldn’t let them shoot there, and Clary is talking to Jonathan about her favorite prints and artists. He’s listening, maybe a little too intently, maybe talks about a piece he likes and what it means to him. She looks unnerved. As they talk, the camera follows her gaze, and we realize she is trying to find someone’s phone to take it. She’s pretending, of course, but there is something charming about Paris. Jonathan keeps offering to buy her souvenirs, very awkwardly, trying to find something to please her. She picks something to make him happy. He returns from the register just before she can make a grab for someone’s phone and bolt for the door. He suggests they go to the cafe across the square. We cut to where they’re sitting down, she’s tearing into a croissant. Jonathan is wearing a “I <3 PARIS” cap, which is a bit jarring and distracting. Clary tells him it looks silly and he takes it off. He mentions in a forcedly offhand way that this is where he met Sebastian Verlac, and seeing her expression, quickly adds that he knows what he did is wrong. She says something along the lines of “do you, tho” and he launches into his monologue. She tells him that she liked Sebastian Verlac, even though she never met the real him. He looks happy at first, then seems to understand what she means, and his expression darkens. He tells her that that’s exactly what Valentine said she would say—that she likes Sebastian, not him. She looks disturbed at the mention of Valentine, and he takes the opportunity to tell her the whole thing about not wanting to hurt anyone and the whole thing being about killing Valentine.

And yada yada yada you get the idea.

Honestly the whole rescue felt very contrived—how convenient Clary has been posthumously pardoned one day before her rescue! And then Jonathan calling her a bitch—haha no thanks. The entitlement is uhh Not Great.

Anyway tldr @ Alex schemmer Clary is not a sofa pls give her some human emotion pls and thanks

Sizzy: why god have you abandoned me, the sequel

Honestly writing that entire wall of text wiped me out but ill try

The drug arc is the bane of my existence

Im so tired

I thought we’d be done in season 2 yet here we are at the end. Drug arc: 1. Actual character development: 0.

Why is this the ONLY plot line the show can remember or keep running for more than 2 episodes. WHY

Why does she even like Simon. They never interact. They don’t even know each other. Everything is just an excuse to get them together. it’s forced and leaden.

Playing her and Raph off as badwrong and her and Simon as rose petal romantic is weird af dude. Izzy has just been the tail end of male characters’ storylines for so long and I’m tired.

If they’d played it off as a sacrifice on her part I might be less mad, like paint her as a hero but it just felt like this was expected of her. It was romantic because there was nothing else to do and OF COURSE she couldn’t refuse!!! Please be realistic, she’s a woman. Think of herself even a little? Impossible!

Never mind she could have easily used her medical training to open a larger artery, pour the blood into his mouth, and iratze herself as soon as Simon was cogent enough to be out of danger. He was already woken up enough to drink the blood she poured from her hand. No biting/venom necessary. Lmao.

Stop treating Izzy like shit just to force a romantic storyline seriously lmao

Aaaaanyway lol that was like 20000000 words but those are my thoughts if you made it to the end you deserve a trophy or smth

#sh spoilers #sh salt #im really sorry i just. did not like.

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pomegranate-salad · 5 years

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Seeds of thought : DIE #1

Been a while, uh ? I missed you too. But before we start, we have to adress the horrible, no-good, terribly misguided elephant in the room : I am currently working on solutions to keep posting my work outside of tumblr before it pulls the carpet from under us, but nothing concrete yet. As soon as I have my new internet home, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting here. If all else fails, I’ll migrate on the Wicdiv Discord server. I’m Pom there too.

Alright ?

Alright.

Let’s do this.

IS THIS THE REAL LIFE ? IS THIS JUST FANTASY ?

Metaphors are like elections : the quickest way to ruin one is to call it early.

Even now as I’m doing this write-up, I am kind of hesitant : do I actually want to pick apart this debut, or do I want to let the rest of the comic do it for me ? There has to be some equivalent of a love bubble for art, this fleeting period before you get one of those “oh… that’s where they’re going with this” moments, before potentiality unravels into concreteness, before, like in the garden of Destiny, you look behind you and only see one path leading to where you are despite seeing so many crossroads ahead.

That’s why, paradoxically, beginnings are also the most liberating moment to write about stories, because there is a round 100% chance that you will get it wrong. The further the story goes, the least margin of error you have, and you find yourself in a situation where you HAVE to get it right, because you actually have a chance to get it right. But now ? I do not know what DIE wants to say. Not yet. If I did, there would be no point for me in reading it, and if we all did, there would be no point for them to write it. Of course, even on first read, I feel like I might know what the master word is – just like wicdiv’s was “Death”, DIE’s is “Time”, which is nothing else than the slowest sort of death – but this master word is, at best, a key without a lock. The door is further down the path.

So let’s talk about DIE – not to decrypt it, not to crack it open, not to judge it even, but maybe simply to enjoy it.

The first thing DIE is, is a voice. It emerges from the intricately painted pages in its concrete boxes of black circled with red, in a way that you almost resent it from breaking the perfection of the page, what with its eye-grabbing crude colours. Unsurprisingly, given Cowles’ always excellent work, the content of the text soon comes to match perfectly this first impression. Dominic, our narrator, is dark, jaded, and he knows how to grab his audience. But on the other hand, he’s never being all that smart and elaborate. He’s a big box of black. Even his own hindsight, the way he looks at his younger self with this mixture of indulgence and pity, is nothing that original or ground-breaking : it’s basically the way any adult might look at their own self-important teenage persona. And of course, nothing about that persona is really gone : Dominic, as an adult narrator, is still the self-important, quiet kid with just enough self-hate to balance out feeling better than everyone else half the time.

In fact, every main character in this first issue is the sketch of their own teenage stereotype, whose attributes are listed out by Dominic on our introduction page. There’s a transparent parallel between that page and the spread a couple pages later where each character introduces their game persona. Dominic’s description is just as much of a character sheet as the ones they hand out to Sol. And by way of that parallel, there’s of course the one between the cast’s game personas and their real life personas : the character they are playing, half-consciously, half-unconsciously, just enough to believe it, just enough to call it their identity. This was already a theme in Wicdiv, and it’s not surprise it shows up again here. Between the characters’ former selves, their current adult selves, and their RPG avatar, DIE sets up a game of mirrors, almost daring us to find the real Dominic – or is it Ash ? – the real Angela, the real Isabelle.

Does fantasy escapism allow you to be someone else, or does it do the opposite, and brings you closer to yourself than you’ll ever be in real life ? That’s a question asked by the text, but also by the art. Now there’s nothing I could say that wouldn’t undersell just how gorgeous Hans’ art is, but for all its merits, it’s actually its one limitation that hit me the hardest : its inability to evoke the mundane. The issue is pretty clearly divided between a flashback portion in sepia hues, the real present in bleak red, blue and black, and the fantasy world with its warm tones. The first two parts are designed to come in contrast with the third one, but for all the supposed triviality of those scenes compared to the fantasy world, nothing in the way those parts are designed resonate as ordinary. Everything is bathed in light in such a way that everything always seems to be moving, from the complex hues of the evening skies, to the shadows on the characters’ faces. The smiles are big and toothy, the eyes are either glimmering or deep and sunken. At every moment, everything in the art works to indicates that something is happening, something big. Hans’ art is out of this world, in a very literal sense : it is somehow unfit to depict our reality. And so when we finally move to the fantasy world, it’s as if pieces finally fall to their righteous place and the world is finally set right side up. Everything about the way DIE depicts our reality feels deeply unreal. And because meta is never far when Gillen is writing, this probably says something about the way we think of comic books, and all escapist media.

The entire issue is building up to that fall back into the fantasy world – to the point that I thought they’d make us stew even longer for it – but we’re not the only ones intently waiting for something that, from the very beginning of the comic, is ineluctable : the characters, too, were waiting. They were waiting surrounded by characters who feel like NPC – we never even see the full face of Dominic’s wife – waiting while marrying women who look like their high school boner and having jobs serving as constant reminders of their past. They were waiting to the point that the first sign they get of the fantasy world of their youth, they immediately all show up to the reunion, and play around something they should know damn well is going to drag them back to it.

That’s not to say any of them “wants” to go back, per se ; such is the nature of trauma, that you want to get away from it as it prevents you from totally moving on either. DIE’s characters are stuck in that in-between, as if none of them had ever really left the fantasy world – and by extension, their teenage years.

This is also why I’ve been uneasy with the reviews of DIE out there linking its storyline to “nostalgia” ; for something to be about nostalgia, that thing has to, you know, be over. But none of the characters is even close to being done playing the game they were playing in their youth. And that for the fantasy murder game as well as for the game they played in reality, the game everyone plays. As teenagers, they push each other around about elitist fantasy books. As adults, they pretend not to know what “woke” means. The codes switch, but the game is still the same. Maturity can be a persona, too. They lie. They deflect. They follow their character sheet. And that’s fantasy for grown-ups.

That’s not to say that these characters aren’t genuine – as I’ve said, it might be precisely because they’re constantly playing that we can get a better picture of who they are – or that we can’t connect with them. In fact, one of the many feats of this first issue is how immediately touching each of these characters is, both in their efforts toward pretend and genuineness. Well, with the one exception of the character who both seems the most dedicated to the game and the only one who doesn’t seem to be playing at all. Even as a teenager at the beginning of the story, Solomon is that one kid who seems uncomfortably comfortable in his role as the star his friends revolve around, vying for his attention. When he drags his former friends back into the game, is he looking for revenge, or has his world simply become boring without the rest of his party to move the story along ? This is where I should mention that the tabletop RPG hobby is one that is completely foreign to me – it’s just not my scene. And I think part of the reason why is that I’m too fundamentally selfish in that regard to share my imagination with other people. Playing RPGs implies losing part of your control over your own stories. Again, I have no idea how RPGs are supposed to work, but being both the gamemaster and a player strikes me as a fundamentally selfish move ; the move of someone who expects his friends to play their part perfectly, only giving them the illusion of control. For a RPG-themed fantasy, quite a fitting portending villain.

If I can be honest : I hope he’s our villain. I hope there isn’t some dark lore that’s manipulated all of them, and that it’s really just the story of how some teenage bullshit got gloriously out of hand. DIE’s premise is a simple one, just like Wicdiv’s premise was a simple one. But two hundred and a half plot twists later, it can be hard to remember just how fucking awful people can be to each other even when they’re not under the influence of some millennia-old force working in the shadows. I hope we never learn where the dice come from. I hope we never get an entire arc explaining how the fantasy world came to be. I hope it remains just as inexplicable as real life is, with its posture, its pretending, its own unreality, its game you can never, ever stop playing.

And that’s DIE so far. I loved it. How does it compare to the first time I’ve read Wicdiv ? Beats me. The first time I’ve read Wicdiv, I majorly skimmed through it thinking it wasn’t for me – just like comics weren’t for me in general - until maybe issue #11, when I finally slowed down and started again from the beginning. First impressions. I was wrong about Wicdiv, many times, and there is definitely ways in which I am and will be deeply wrong about DIE. And I like that. So join me, if you will, in future write-ups of DIE, where we can be wrong, be surprised, be amazed, be disappointed also, and have ourselves a party.

#diecomic #seeds of thought

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why-this-kolaveri-machi · 5 years

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everything’s out of order.

titans is fantastic when it’s taking its sweet time reinterpreting characters we’ve only seen as comics/cartoons, letting them occupy a moment until it turns uncomfortably big, bringing in hints of real-world traumas consequent to being a lifelong vigilante/super-powered being. it’s great when it’s dissecting one inch of a facet of a dynamic between two characters in a particular situation. when it suddenly remembers that there’s an overarching plot that’s quietly simmering on the backburner... well.

well.

SPOILERS

1. the first thing i thought of after watching titans 1.10 was: this isn’t how we were meant to see this show. again, i do think this show was meant to be binged in one go before it got chopped up and the pieces shuffled around. the pacing is weird. we’ve had maybe three whole backdoor pilots for other shows in an already short season that’s trying to get us to know and love not one but four characters. the plot is brought to a screeching halt and then suddenly sped up and resolved half-heartedly. i’m very sure an entire episode has been cut out of the season. it’s frustrating, honestly, to feel that a potentially great show was mangled somewhere on the way to our screens, and i’m beginning to think that the announcement of a second season before this one even began is part of the reason why this happened.

1.25. like. some of the choices in this episode are weird: the fact that angela was evil was telegraphed way too early, so the slow, atmospheric scenes in that ohio house trying to build up suspense and doubt seemed like a waste of time. meanwhile, the reveal that kory is an alien with a cosmic/supernatural mission--a genuine surprise to people like me who aren’t all that familiar with teen titans comic lore--is almost dismissed to the wayside. can you imagine if we had been in kory’s head for most of the episode, discovering who she is along with her instead of just being told? if the show had given us a chance to feel her disorientation and shock? not that we don’t get a sense of it--she seems far away when she’s explaining her mission to dick and donna and there is anguish when she first wakes up after donna puts her down--but still. to put that patented titans glacial focus on a character we’ve known for two episodes and not really built an emotional connection to... is odd.

1.3. maybe spreading the events of this episode over two, maybe three episodes would’ve been good. there are kernels of great character moments here: gar trying to comfort rachel even while he’s struggling with his own trauma (there’s a whisper of if you agree with everything they say, they’ll leave you alone here, and god, my heart aches for this kid); dick realising just how deeply and unflinchingly he does trust kory; donna dropped into this hot mess by dick and trying to deal with it coolly and calmly; rachel trying to convince herself she deserves happiness but being beat down by the world around her over and over again to the point where she’s willing to embrace the one thing she thought she wouldn’t do just to save her friend; angela using gar to manipulate rachel into doing what she wants. these are all such great character beats when examined in isolation, but feel very rushed in this episode.

1.5. i feel titans is teetering on the edge of the trap that the dceu movie-verse fell into: trying to build a universe and trying to tell an emotionally-involving dark tale about characters and trauma at the same time and failing at both. i hope it’s not the case and s2 gets better at this balancing act because this show is just honestly too good to go down that route.

1.8. (some character moments did feel weirdly rushed and unearned, tho? dick asserting that rachel can ace some kind of weird demonic trials because she’s strong enough was odd. maybe if they’d fought together a little more this statement wouldn’t feel so out of place?)

2. oh but i love the ongoing theme of characters running from literal and metaphorical darkness and their trust in each other to help them do it. i love that the first explicit expression of love on this show is when kory talks about rachel (and i love that dick understands that without kory having to say it, because he loves them both too). i love that the team doesn’t have clear delineating lines and a ‘leader’ and a ‘mission’ but is just this damaged little family trying to help each other sort out their messes and just--loving and trusting each other. honestly sometimes this is all i want out of this show, and i’m almost, almost, willing to forgive it of its other sins.

3. i know it’s too late to expect to see Nightwing, Starfire, Raven and Beast Boy in their full glory before the end of the season, but i was hoping for something of a character arc for all of them. like. the slow burn is fun, and fascinating, but also. um. excruciating.

4. i am very excited for the next episode, tho. dick (with kory) literally fighting through his personal demons to save their kids from a very literal one? BRING IT.

#titans #titans spoilers #dick grayson #rachel roth #koriand'r #garfield logan #donna troy #meta

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ladala99 · 5 years

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Spyro Reignited Countdown - Spyro the Dragon

Hey, as someone who only owns a Switch of the current console generation, and as someone who grew up playing Spyro on the PS1, I’m super hyped for the return of the dragon!

And I thought up yesterday, what better way to do that than by reviewing every Spyro game I’ve played.

Well, I’ve played... *counts* 22 Spyro games. Counting the 3DS ports of Skylanders games which are different enough to talk about separately.

Alright divide the number of days left until it comes out and...

Uh... one every two days, huh? Guess I better get started! (May space them out or have bonus comparisons/recaps at the end to deal with the extra days)

Spyro the Dragon

The first Spyro game! Also the first video game I ever played. One day, when I was 3, my dad plopped me down in front of the Playstation, gave me the controller, and started up some demo disk. The first one on there was this game called Spyro the Dragon, and he told me what the buttons did (since I couldn’t read the screen that told you), and let me play.

I told my mom about it (divorced parents), and we rented the game from Hollywood Video. *She* played it. She loved it. And I loved watching. And pressing buttons on a controller put into slot 2. I had a fancy Barbie controller. I don’t know what eventually happened to it.

Eventually the Hollywood Video lost the disc and we bought it for ourselves. We were renting it every week, anyway. I remember us going up to the video game counter and my mom going “We’d like to get this game, it’s about a dragon...” and I shouted “And he’s purple! And his name is Spyro!” I loved him so much.

Now I didn’t play through the entire game myself until I was a teen, but unlike any other game, I did see the ending as a kid because my mom was able to make it through the game, into 100%. It’s a series we bonded over, and I have so much nostalgia for it. I can’t wait to play it in Reignited and see what she remembers.

Anyway, stopping with the memories and onto the review! It’s just... really hard to be fair for a game like this. I have too much nostalgia related to it. Honestly, though, that’s the case for a lot of the series.

Gameplay

Spyro the Dragon is an early 3D platformer. Despite being early, though, it controls really well. I’ve played a few others from that era (Croc, uh... Crash? Maybe not a few) and none of them control quite as well as Spyro does. Spyro is extremely responsive, stopping and starting on a dime.

You have two attacks, spitting fire and charging with your horns. The latter can be used to move quicker, but you don’t turn as sharply when running. When to use each attack is well-conveyed, as large opponents are immune to your horns, but weak to your fire, and opponents with a shiny metal shield are the opposite. There’s a few enemies immune to both, but they can be beaten by ways that are broadcasted well.

Collectables

One of those ways is the dragons. There’s three main collectables in this game: Gems, Eggs and Dragons. Gems are everywhere, Eggs are only in a few levels, and Dragons are placed in key locations in each level. The Dragons are I suppose the main collectable, but all three are needed for progress. Dragons in particular also double as tutorial and lore pieces, as each tells you something when you free him. They also all look unique, with each of the five species having their own general look and each individual having his own textures. I go into a lot more detail in this blog post. This really makes the dragons in this game stand out amongst the series, as no other collectables are nearly as unique.

Gems I don’t really know what to say about. Many collectathon platformers have collectables like them: something spread around every level so you need to explore the entire play area. Gems are special in that each one has a different value: red being 1, green being 2, blue being 5, gold being 10, and purple being 25. And this spread shows approximately how common each was, with the lower values being more common and spread around, and the higher values being rewards for going into more out-of-the-way areas. Collecting them is satisfying, especially in larger amounts. Just watching the numbers spin is one of the highlights of this game, especially at the end of the bonus level.

Eggs are special. They come from chasing down blue thieves, which are the most annoying enemy in the game. Sure, now I can get them in one try, but back at the beginning the ones that don’t have a full circular path were the most annoying things, since if you got to the end, they’d just jump out of reach and taunt you.

Powerups

There’s two main powerups in this game: Superflame and Supercharge. Both have a couple of levels that use them extensively.

Superflame definitely is the weaker of the two. You get kissed by a fairy, turn red, and then for a limited amount of time you can use your flame breath to destroy metal objects and enemies. In the two levels it’s in, there’s an enemy you specifically need to use it on: the terrifying spiders and the enchanted suits of armor. The thing is, Superflame otherwise looks and works exactly like normal flame, just is usable on more things. While it’s cool to get the limitless one in Haunted Towers, overall it’s not a very memorable ability, and is improved dramatically in the sequels.

Supercharge you get from charging over lit arrows, and it enhances your charge to work on larger enemies and makes you go really, really fast. It takes a bit to master, but once you do, it is a very satisfying skill to use. Too bad none of the levels in this game have a limitless track to use it on. The levels that use it use it in very creative ways, including the one where I’m not even sure how you’re supposed to know the path you’re supposed to take. It really spices up the gameplay, to the point where Tree Tops feels like an entirely different game. And if you know me, you know that I love games that spice up the gameplay.

Bosses

The one weak point of this game is its bosses. They’re basically normal enemies, just with a slight gimmick. And that gimmick usually involves a large battlefield where they will run away from you. It does make you feel powerful: after all, they’re running away from the fire-breathing dragon attacking them. But at the same time, they offer very little challenge. The only really interesting one is Metalhead with his electric-guarded power generators, but even then, it’s not like he can hit you or anything unless you’re standing completely still. And the final boss is only hard because of how many holes the stage has in it. Not at all because of Gnasty. He’s still the most likely to directly hit you of all the bosses, but that’s not saying much.

Levels

The levels are all themed to their world, which is pretty neat, but does get repetitive at times. Still, it made each world feel more real.

Speaking of things feeling more real, something I’ve noticed is that Spyro the Dragon doesn’t fall into the same pitfall of having platforms that are just platforms because this is a platformer. Every piece of land is connected to something, oftentimes even in Dream Weavers which is literally floating islands. Moving platforms are caused by wizards, dangerous platforms are caused by Gnorcs zapping them, and often random platforms in the middle of the level are themed to it, like the stumps in Beast Makers.

The game progresses from easy to hard very smoothly, adding more gimmicks and platforming challenges as it goes along. This is also shown by the Gnorcs getting more competent as the game goes along, beginning with no weaponry in Artisans, getting cannons in Peacekeepers, electricity in Beast Makers, and finally machine guns in Gnorc Gnexus. Too bad Gnasty never learned to use a gun.

Story

Gnasty Gnorc turns all the dragons into crystal for insulting him on live TV. And if you read the instruction manual you learn that he hates gems because he hates his own reflection because he is too ugly. Really, there’s not too much here, but that’s not the point of the game. At least it’s not a save-the-girl plot. You don’t really see save-the-adults too often.

Unique in the Series?

Truly what makes this game unique is the fact that it’s completely platforming-based. No minigames, few gimmicks, just the entire game is platforming and collecting stuff.

This comes with a lack of real NPCs, which many people find makes the game lonely, but I don’t mind at all. It’s definitely a different feel from later games, but it’s not in a bad way.

Also something I’m surprised is unique to this game is the fact that many of the secrets involve going onto parts of the level that look like they should not be accessible. You glide onto the surrounding hillsides in Stone Hill, you climb up nearly-invisible steps in Terrace village, and you use the walls that look just like random scenery to fully explore Misty Bog. This type of thing isn’t used in future Spyro games, and rarely (if ever?) in video games in general. Truly a unique experience that has since turned me into an accidental bug hunter because I keep trying to get out-of-bounds just in case in other games.

Conclusion

All-in-all, Spyro the Dragon is tied for my favorite video game of all time with its sequel, Spyro 2. I compare everything I play to these games. They’re just the standard. I love them. Nostalgia-bias? Maybe. But despite there being a few flaws, I can’t really find fault when I play it. It’s too fun.

#spyro #spyro the dragon #video game review #spyro reignited

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gascon-en-exil · 6 years

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I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Revelation Part 2

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Revelation Part 1

Chapters 13-19, in which everyone’s going to Valla even though half of them suck.

Chapter 13

Hey look, Hoshidan scum!

Ok, meme comedy done. This is in my opinion the first really strong chapter of Revelation, with satisfying gameplay, escalation of the threat posed by Valla, and some good character development. It’s an utter tragedy that it takes place against the literal backdrop of Cyrkensia’s ruined opera house, but I can (mostly) live with the destruction of my favorite setting in Fates when it’s so effective at getting results. Azura still gets to sing here after a fashion, and although there’s no cutscene to go with it the results of this particular show do a good job of subtly foreshadowing that Azura and Mikoto use similar pacifying magic from the same source.

After Kaden and Keaton are done lampshading why the party always runs into shapeshifters in Cyrkensia, it’s time for Corrin to step between Xander and Ryoma as they left them back in Chapter 6 - at each other’s throats in a conflict ultimately engineered by Anankos. It’s a good demonstration of what the war between the two nations would look like without Corrin’s intervention, and the crown princes’ characters logically follow from their behavior as antagonists in the other routes. Xander is resolved that Corrin is a traitor and merits only death, whereas Ryoma is more hesitant to accept Corrin’s choice and, unlike in Conquest, willing to listen to their stated motivations when he’s not on the verge of death. Ryoma’s mellower outlook may be attributed, oddly enough, to the strong intimation that he’s got something going on with Scarlet, something I completely forgot about until I replayed this chapter. I don’t blame myself for doing so; in an Avatar free-for-all dating game romances between the other playable characters are naturally going to get short shrift in the story, and it doesn’t help that Birthright doesn’t suggest this relationship at all even though it’s the one route where both characters to survive to the end. And...yeah, there’s that part, but that’s for a bit later. It’s interesting to imagine how the different circumstances of Revelation could have encouraged Ryoma and Scarlet to grow closer in Revelation than they do in Birthright, though realistically it probably just boils down to Corrin not being there for most of their time together.

In any case, Ryoma shares what he knows about the Rainbow Sage - odd how the fourth person to visit the Sage is still Xander on this route when in the others it’s unsurprisingly the opposing older brother - and Corrin and co. are off to follow the path of Conquest 10 and 11. At least there’s no sequence-breaking teleport books this time.

Chapter 14

This time I’m not focusing on the cutaway to Garon and co., because his obvious gloating has reached such alarmingly stupid levels that I have nothing more to say about it. The payoff, such as it is, to that plot thread is still a few chapters away anyway...as is the appearance of Iago and Hans, who have yet to do much of anything on this route and yet get to appear as bosses at a plot-critical moment. Boo.

Let’s talk about unit balancing instead. Elise shows up with her she’s-legal-we-swear panty shot, and one look at the stats of her and her retainers showcases another glaring problem with the gameplay of Revelation. From this point onward, there’s really no point in training any of the numerous unpromoted units the game throws at you, because there’s no time to raise them up to par unless you do a lot of grinding. This is one instance where Revelation’s similarities to FE10 are more superficial than they first appear, because

1) when compared to just one route of Fates Radiant Dawn is a much longer game, and in fact at 43 chapters still holds the record for the longest individual story campaign in the series. Revelation’s pacing and design suffers terribly from the requirement that it cover the same number of chapters as the other routes.

2) Radiant Dawn also has a massive roster (second largest in the series behind New Mystery) with several units who come behind the level curve, but they’re spread across the course of the game rather than lumped into a span of a few chapters. Examples vary from earlygame recruits just a bit behind (Meg) to underwhelming midgame units (Kyza and Lyre) to a bonus run Est type in lategame (Pelleas).

3) and most notably, units in FE10 are divided into separate armies with different resource pools until lategame. While the balancing between those is infamously unequal, this setup almost requires that you train more units than you’ll ultimately be sending into endgame, giving even the lesser ones a small chance to shine.

I imagine that the design philosophy behind Revelation is that the player would be expected to spend a lot of time grinding on this route to get its numerous unique supports and raise a much larger army. It seems intended for a slower pace, particularly as this also helps with building up the castle base when you’ve got duplicates of most buildings to upgrade. I still don’t care for it though, because I don’t feel like taking that extra time to raise an oversized army and because some of the recruitments continue to be unexplained in story. Why would two border guards join in the invasion of a foreign port? Revelation doesn’t know or care, but it’ll make you run your new underleveled healer to both sides of this large map to recruit them regardless. At least Elise is mounted....

Chapter 15

Seriously, look at this. These two join in the same chapter, what the hell. This isn’t even mentioning that these are also some pretty random recruitments. Shura is awfully nonchalant on hearing that Corrin got his revenge for him, and Nyx has no more reason to be here than she did in Conquest 9. With her it really feels like the writers had a great (if highly fetishistic) concept for a character and came up with a plausible backstory only to find that there was no way to fit her into the plot, so...here she is. On a related note, Nyx is the only first generation character other than Gunter to outright not appear in one route, and at least there’s an explanation for Gunter’s absence in Birthright. Her presence really is just that random.

Before doing the write-up for this chapter I read back over what I’d written for the Sevenfold Sanctuary in the other routes. The gameplay of the Revelation iteration offers nothing really to speak of, lacking either Conquest’s class and skill-themed rooms or Birthright’s power jump. The Rainbow Sage uses an alternate old man sprite initially to make it less obvious that he’s repeating the same trick he pulled in Birthright, but his exposition at the end is worth the trolling for finally confirming that he is indeed a dragon and giving us the obligatory Fire Emblem name drop. Fates’s cosmology reveals itself to borrow mostly from Jugdral of all places, though I’ve never yet seen anyone try to piece together the scattered hints of worldbuilding to link the twelve dragons of the two settings. I’m certainly not going to attempt it, because even with divine weapons and draconic-blooded families in the mix there’s remarkably little to conclude definitively that the First Dragons of Fates are/were the dragons that appeared to Jugdral’s Crusaders. My pet theory aligns it a bit more with Tellius because of certain other observations about Fates’s setting and because something is going to have to connect the dragon laguz to the rest of the series’s lore eventually.

Chapter 16 + 17

I’ve been pretty down on Revelation thus far, and at first I was fully prepared to rip into these two chapters in similar fashion...and then I finished playing through them and changed my mind. If I had to pick one moment from FE14 to represent in miniature the beautiful mess that is this game, with all its inventive concepts and missed potential, its stirring emotional moments and lazy copouts, I would choose these chapters. In spite of everything they nail the very best of what Fates offers on an emotional level, and as a midgame climax they land almost as well as the Branch of Fate lands as an establishing moment.

And yet there’s so much wrong with them! Hans and Iago have never been flatter or more inconsequential antagonists; note that before this point in Revelation they’ve done nothing aside from knock Gunter off a bridge and use an illusion to piss off the Wind Tribe. The Ryoma/Scarlet angle is abruptly dialed back to the friend zone, presumably to make it okay for the Avatar to bone them, while Hinoka abruptly joins in the action after having been forgotten about for eleven(!) chapters bar one throwaway mention in Chapter 13. Xander and Leo’s apparent betrayal of Nohr has little bite to it even from Iago as Garon might as well not exist by this point, and their retainers fail so hard as backup I almost always just send them to a corner to wait out the battle. Speaking of which, the trend of underleveled units reaches its zenith, here where maybe four of the eleven units obtained in these chapters can reasonably be used without grinding after this point. It’s even worse than the torrent of garbage units the Archanea games throw at you, because at least those sometimes come with nice stuff in their inventories (hence the “Free Silvers” tier jokingly used on some of the DS tier lists back when those were popular). And to cap it all off the ticking timer that’s been running from Chapter 7 up until this moment, of the skies over Hoshido and Nohr switching as the moment that the portal to Valla will close, makes no sense either (meteoro)logically or narratively except to add unneeded urgency and entice a few of the characters to the Canyon. For that matter, since Revelation appears to take place in the same time frame as the other two routes it’s baffling that this bizarre bit of worldbuilding goes unmentioned in them. Wouldn’t it be kind of a big deal for Nohr to get a normal sky every few decades, and for Hoshido to get a bad one?

But somehow despite all that when the Nohrian brothers show up in Chapter 17 and the music switches to “A Dark Fall” (quick aside, but one thing I love about Fates as a whole is its soundtrack) I fully got what the developers were going for, and to see all the royals finally interacting with each other - something sorely missing from Chapter 6, if you recall - and calling a truce to face whatever awaits them in Valla together just sealed that feeling. The Hoshidan and Nohrian contrast to these two chapters followed by a scene of Corrin’s families united for the first time really sells the main draw of Revelation, even if for some of them the buildup to that moment was rushed (Takumi, Camilla) or just not there at all (Hinoka). Yeah, it comes with the distinct aroma of Avatar-centered plotting like everything else on this route - as Ryoma actually points out in Chapter 16, funnily enough - but even though some of the particulars are undercooked and most of the circumstances are downright silly I can completely get on board with this group of people in this moment banding together to, uh, jump off a bridge before an interdimensional portal closes because the sky is changing color and...ugh, never mind.

Chapter 18

I will say this for Valla: I really enjoy its visual style, a sort of supernaturally-ruined pastoral idyll that resembles nothing like the world above. It also helps that it’s not tied directly to any real-world cultures like Hoshido and Nohr are, and its nods to Middle Eastern, Indian, and exclusively in localization (I think?) Greek cultures come across in the series’s more typically understated fashion. Of course that otherworldly quality lends itself to more frustrating map mechanics, so it’s not entirely a positive. This one isn’t so bad provided you’re fielding a bunch of royals to activate all the Dragon Veins - and really, it’s not as though the player needs another excuse to use them to the exclusion of almost everyone else.

But of course the big moment of this chapter is Scarlet’s death. The bit with the flower is a painfully obvious hint to recall when it comes time for the reveal of her killer, but nevertheless the sequence does well despite that and some awkward staging with battle models. What doesn’t work quite as well is the reintroduction of the Ryoma/Scarlet angle just to add more punch to her death...completely ignoring the possibility that Corrin might be married to either of them (and Scarlet just undergone what had to have been one of the most hyper-accelerated pregnancies in all of fiction, if you want to be really sadistic). Because of their earlier buildup this may be the most egregious example of Fates needing to ignore its own support mechanics for the sake of the main plot. In any case, if Corrin didn’t shack up with one of them the scene after the chapter is pretty solid. I consider it comparable to Lilith’s death scenes on the other routes, since she also dies taking a hit for Corrin, but as the circumstances are less random and Scarlet actually gets most of her characterization outside DLC it’s much more effective overall.

Chapter 19

Enter the strange child with the oversized forehead. At least it’s not immediately obvious that’s he’s evil, I guess?

It’s interesting to note that the Valla chapters are structured almost as a route unto themselves, having to establish a new set of characters previously unseen in Revelation and not seen at all in the other routes. Although in terms of gameplay they function more like an extended endgame in the vein of Radiant Dawn’s Tower of Guidance, bizarre architecture and all. I’ll be talking more about Anthony and Arete and the others later on, but I wanted to note the setup for when I talk about it in the next post.

The intro to this chapter also delves into a bit more of Fates’s cosmology, specifically its deified dragons. Xander asks what only Iago thought to question in Conquest, namely why Garon would worship Anankos and not the Dusk Dragon, only to get the obvious but still technically necessary reveal of Garon’s true nature. I do like that the First Dragons are vague enough in their presentation that I could believe either that the Dawn and Dusk Dragons are just different interpretations of Anankos or that they’re all separate entities. As I recall however this is somewhat muted by the knowledge that the emotional payoff re: Garon is going to be rather muted when it finally happens, so this really is just more vague worldbuilding.

Oh, right, the chapter. It’s Conquest 15 with a bigger party and entirely too many items drops on the optional path. Why the developers think the player needed so many items thrown at them in a game with no durability and a route with no shortage of funds I’ll never know.

Next time: Revelation Chapter 20 - Endgame

#Fire Emblem #Fire Emblem Fates #Fire Emblem Revelation #FE14

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des-shinta · 6 years

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Source: Adi Shankar (Power/Rangers) interview with Comicbook.com

... "Power Rangers is not about good versus evil. It's not and never has been.” ...

It’s Called “the morphing Grid” It is literally one of the most basic pieces of franchise lore, telling that power ranger’s powers are created and maintained through the literal conflict of good and Evil; Superheroes rising to bring back balance to the Universe and counter the forces of evil, and their journey is how they are supposed to become paragons of righteous justice, heroism, Compassion, and most importantly...GOOD. Also known as that exact thing Shankar says makes star wars terrible. (we’ll ignore how he doesn’t seem to Understand how star wars has the heroes fighting literal space nazi’s, and why space nazi’s, totalitarian regimes and domineering control over every one and everything is bad...though they all are. or the fact it’s a literal ‘love conquers hate’ story told in the framework of spirituality, selflessness, and the consequences of your actions when they are solely self-motivated out of fear, anger and spite.) It has been a facet and mentioned in multiple entries in the franchise, has been a mainstay to it since it was first elaborated on in the second season of the show. It has Had additional details and fleshing out about it has time moved on. Every single ranger powerset is inevitably connected to it in some way, shape or form; even if it seems to take another name (RPM’s bio field, not that Doctor K would’ve ever been able to get the name, she just called it that) or it’s connection given through an interim physical empowerment (The Power coins, Zeo Crystal, The quasar sabers, the Dino gems, energems, etcetera), it’s long been established to be intimately intertwined with Every Single power ranger. hell, some series Like Jungle fury have even simplified it down so that all the villains plots revolve around them solely being Evil for the sake of the power of Evil, and to spread evil’s totalitarian Reign. Rita was the Empress of Evil, Zedd the emperor of Evil, Astronema the PRINCESS of Evil. Lightspeed’s villains were literally Evil Demons, Time Force’s antagonists criminals, SPD’s a Space despot not unlike the empire in Star wars. Sure, many of the villains had complex motivations to them (Ransik in Time Force, Astronema in In Space, Trakeena in lost galaxy), but that’s what made them good villains; they had NUANCE to why they became bad people and the antagonists of a given series. NUANCES are not grey area’s, moral or otherwise. A Moral grey area is when someone does something Bad to bring about something good. Like, say, Andross Killing Zordon when Zordon offers his own life to end the conflict at the end of “In Space”. But that was ultimately a heroic sacrifice who’s intents were not morally grey, merely the action needed to carry it out that was. Hell, what he’s describing isn’t Even grey area’s, it’s Character Complexity. Which is something EVERY series should have. Sure, again, Complex people have moral grey area’s they end up faced with as a balanced person is a mix of good and at times malevolent impulses, but what makes a good (light aligned) person is the ability to resist the temptation to do bad crap. So...yeah, power rangers is not actually a morally grey series. It never has been. it pops up from time-to-time like any series Should, but you look closer at it you see how it’s still tinted too brightly to be just a momentary dark spot. Hell, it’s at times tinted so brightly as to be blinded by it. Such as in the case where that one team committed planetary genocide, and yet it was colored as being a good thing to unlock a time travel ability they didn’t even need had they done their job correctly. You couldn’t even say “maybe he only saw a sentai series” or something on that either; as while not as blatant there’s been shows like, say, Gokaiger that showcase that all sentai hold a common spirit that connects each of them to the others that transcends the standalone-in-story nature of their series which acts LIke the morphing Grid. it just isn’t a named concept over there and more chalked up to comradery the sentai teams are supposed to embody. You would literally have to have not seen a single power rangers series to have not only learned this, but ignored that entirely to be this oblivious to the VERY BASICS of the franchise It’s like he’s another creator that doesn’t seem to understand what the hell Heroism is and supposed to be represented as as well. Though in a way, it explains why Power/Rangers was so utterly repulsive to a significant sect of the fandom and gotten worse with time in reflection on it; he actually doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Seriously, Stop giving this man attention.

#power rangers #adi shankar #this man is a moron #power/rangers #You betray the lore

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violethowler · 5 years

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What the Kingdom Hearts Series Means to Me

Holding the physical copy of Kingdom Hearts III that I pre-ordered and paid extra to have delivered on release day is a surreal experience. It feels like a dream in all honesty. Kingdom Hearts III used to be a formless thing. A cryptid that fans hoped to catch a glimpse of but didn’t really believe existed. To put it into perspective, Kingdom Hearts II first released when I was in third grade, and I’m currently approaching my graduation from college. Six games have been released in the last decade and a half to expand on the series’ lore and set up the major pieces for the next “main” installment, but only now are we getting Kingdom Hearts III. This franchise has been with me through middle school, high school, and college. It’s a big freaking deal.

I had never been passionately into video games as a kid. My first game system was the Nintendo GameBoy Advance, and the only games I was interested in playing were movie tie-in games that adapted the plot of a specific movie. The Incredibles. The Polar Express. Ice Age: The Meltdown, Madagascar. The only other game I can remember that wasn’t an adaptation of an existing film was a weird 3D Pacman game, but I don’t remember ever playing it as fervently as I did those old movie games.

Even after receiving a PlayStation 2 for either my birthday or Christmas in 2006, the only games I would play that weren’t movie adaptations were the NickToons crossover games like Battle for Volcano Island or Attack of the Toybots. But I only played them because they featured my favorite TV character. I was never interested in the storyline. That would change one day in late-summer/early autumn 2007, when, after seeing an advertisement for it in my old Disney Adventures magazines, I rented a PlayStation title I’d never heard of called Kingdom Hearts II.

In the beginning, I didn’t pay attention to the story. I just skipped through the cutscenes and focused exclusively on the gameplay. But as I got to the more difficult portions of the game, I started to watch the cutscenes and pay attention to the story. And the more I did, the more I fell in love with it. Once I had fully digested the story of Kingdom Hearts II, I wanted more. I went back and played the original Kingdom Hearts, then I bought Chain of Memories for my GBA. I was hooked. I started buying and reading the manga adaptations of the games. I bought a couple of collectible figurines. I. Was. Obsessed.

I spent much of my computer time in those days scouring the internet for every scrap of information I could find on the next games in the franchise. Kingdom Hearts III wasn’t in the cards yet, so I focused my attention on the three titles that I vaguely recall being collectively referred to at the time as “the handheld trilogy”: 358/2 Days, Birth by Sleep, and Coded. I searched with a fine-tooth comb on websites dedicated to gaming news in general and Kingdom Hearts specifically, hoping to find out more about these next three games.

In many ways, Kingdom Hearts helped me take my first tentative steps into the wider community of fandom. My search for news on the next games in the series unearthed funny fan-made comic strips about my favorite characters. Even though Kingdom Hearts III was still a fantasy by that point, I found people using Photoshop, or whatever image-editing software was popular around 2008 or so, to create ideas for what the cover art would look like. I found detailed fan art of potential new outfits for all the major characters. I found theories and ideas and the ever-raging bonfire of speculation that grows larger with each new game released. I found fan-made music videos and fanfiction to sate my hunger for more content between games. I wasn’t as involved in fandom to the extent that I am today, but my experience with Kingdom Hearts helped me dip my toes in the water, so to speak, as I started to engage more with my favorite media beyond simply consuming it once and then going back to watch/play it again when I needed something to do.

And what makes this day so much sweeter is how much effort Disney is clearly putting into promoting this game. Almost a decade ago, and the most advertising any Kingdom Hearts title got outside of dedicated gaming magazines or events was maybe a single tv commercial per game. The only way to know a new game was coming otherwise was if you were actively following the development of each title before they even locked in when it would come out. In the last six months of waiting for Kingdom Hearts III, there’s been a concert tour, multiple commercials and advertisements on both TV and social media, and even ads playing before the previews at movie theaters. After years of trying to share my love for this series, only for a handful of people to have ever heard of it, it’s a tremendous thrill to see the games I love finally getting mainstream recognition.

It’s because of this series that I even consider myself a gamer in the first place. Before Kingdom Hearts, I just plowed through every game I had, treating each level as just another puzzle or challenge to complete. But Kingdom Hearts II exposed me to the possibility of video games as a medium for storytelling, and it was through my engagement with the Kingdom Hearts storyline that I found myself seeking out other games with their own compelling stories. Final Fantasy, The World Ends with You, Horizon: Zero Dawn… These are some of the many games with stories and worlds that have enthralled me as someone who loves to both experience stories and create them. And without Kingdom Hearts, I would probably never been enough of a gamer to know or care that they existed.

When I was younger, I was only interested in games if they were available on the systems I had. But Kingdom Hearts wasn’t limited to only one console. In the early years of the franchise, the series was spread across the GameBoy Advance, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and smartphones. So, whenever my research uncovered that the next title would be on a console I didn’t own, I would go out of my way to get it, either by putting it on my holiday wish list, or by saving up the money for it myself. And usually, I would buy these platforms years in advance of the Kingdom Hearts game I’d got it for came out, so I would search for interesting games to play on it while I waited. And unlike before, now I was actively looking for things to play.

When it was just my GameBoy, PlayStation, and a handful of movie/TV show tie-ins, I didn’t go out of my way to look for new games. I relied on advertisements in my trusty Disney Adventures magazine to tell me what games that were out that might interest me. Nowadays, I annually watch live coverage of E3, the entertainment expo where game developers show off the status of their current projects or unveil their next main title. And I keep my eyes out for every title that looks entertaining from both a gameplay and story perspective, whether I see ads in a magainze, footage at E3, a trailer on YouTube, or fanart online.

Before I realized that animation was what I wanted to do as a career, my first dream job was to be a game designer. And if your first guess as to why I wanted to pursue that career path isn’t Kingdom Hearts, then in the words of one of the franchise’s original villains, “You have come this far, and still, you understand nothing.” While I ultimately realized that animation was my true passion as an artist, it was Kingdom Hearts that set me on the idea of turning my art skills into a career. Without Kingdom Hearts, I might not have ended up where I am today.

Most of the fandom knows that Kingdom Hearts III isn’t the end of the road for the franchise. Even aside from its immense popularity, series director Tetsuya Nomura has spoken about the fact that the series will continue beyond III, but that this represents the conclusion of the current story arc that has been going on since the original Kingdom Hearts game back in 2002. It’s fitting that this arc of the series is ending the same year that I graduate from college. This series has seen me through multiple chapters of my life. Middle school. High School. College. And in May, I’ll be a college graduate looking for a job. Each time I moved from one stage of life to the next, it always felt like the end. But it never is. But life goes on. The story will go on, but this chapter of it is over.

You can imagine, then, why today is such a big deal. This series has been with me for more than half my life. These games, and other media I obsess over to a similar degree, mean so much to be precisely because the story and characters connect with me on such a deep emotional level. My opinion on storytelling in any medium is that the ones that put your emotions in a blender and take you from screaming in anguish to crying tears of joy in the span of a few hours or less are the ones that deserve to be remembered. The best stories should leave you wanting to know more, not just out of curiosity over what happens next, but also for the satisfaction of knowing that the characters you’ve grown to love will be alright.

Kingdom Hearts has consistently checked every single one of those boxes for me for as long as I’ve been playing it. Even the prequels and midquels that ended in tragedy and heartbreak still had a note of assurance that there was still hope. Even if the games that inevitably come out post-KHIII hypothetically don’t have the same emotional impact on me that the pre-III ones did, I will never be able to stop loving the series I grew up with. I’ve been invested in it for so long that it feels like it’s woven into my DNA. This series has grown over the last eleven years just as I have, and whatever the future holds for the franchise, good or bad, I will never regret the time I’ve spent with this incredible saga.

#long post #kh fandom #kingdom hearts 3 #personal anecdote

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find-your-rp-partner · 7 years

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Looking for longterm roleplay partner!

Hello everyone! I thought I'd try my hand at posting some roleplay advertisements on tumblr as well as Livejournal, in the hopes that someone with similar interests might see this! Name: Ellie, or Pharaoh if you prefer to call me that!

Age: 25

Timezone: EST

About Me: I've been RPing for 12 years now. I have mostly been a fandom writer, but I have also taken on many AU's, as well as started writing more original content. I aim to find a partner that I can bounce ideas off of easily. Having that connection and ease of conversation can be one of the best things about finding someone! For those interested in fandom related roleplays, the following universes are ones I am most knowledgeable about, and I will list the characters I have used, or would be willing to use from them.

Fandoms or Originals:

SGT FROG/ KERORO GUNSO: I have the most experience playing Keroro, and am up for any AU's or various plots. For you alien lovers out there, this might be up your alley! BATMAN/ GOTHAM: I have seen a lot of various media portraying Batman and his rogues, including The Animated Series, Nolan films, Burton films, comics, the Arkham video games, and the television show 'Gotham', and so I am quite familiar and comfortable with this realm. I have experience playing Jonathan Crane, Edward Nigma, and would be willing to explore other characters as well if a plot was interesting enough. YU-GI-OH: I am only familiar with and interested in the original series, not the spin-off shows such as GX or 5D. I have the most experience playing Seto Kaiba or Joey Wheeler. Not interested in any plots focusing on the shipping between the hosts and their yamis, sorry. DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION/MANKIND DIVIDED: Love this world and the characters to pieces, but I've never gotten a chance to truly flesh out an RP for this. I'd really love to take another shot at this with someone equally as interested. I usually play as Adam Jensen. If anyone played a Francis Pritchard and wanted to write with me, that would be fantastic! SUPER MARIO: I really love the RPG's and Paper series especially, for their more in-depth look into the lore of the worlds. It might seem like a simple, lighthearted series at first glance, but I've RPed and read some really great plots for this. Don't knock it till you've tried it, right? :) I'm most experienced playing Bowser, some of the koopalings, Fawful, and Count Bleck. I also have original characters for this realm, and am welcoming of any of yours as well, of course! ALICE IN WONDERLAND: I have the most experience playing Time, from the Through the Looking Glass film. I've seen both Burton films, the animated film, a handful of other adaptations, read the novels of course, and have played the McGee games. I can create AU's or pull plots and characters from any of the above to create something original if it's preferred! As for genres, I enjoy romance, horror, angst, and tragedy the most. I rarely get to write darker plots, and would be interested in doing so in order to flesh out my writing ability. The following mentions will probably get my plot wheels moving: Scientists Kidnapping Overprotective Luxury Business Doctor Any shipping or plots encompassing one or more from the above list would be fantastic.

What I’m Looking For/What I'm NOT Looking For:

Please do NOT contact me if you are looking to RP kinks that fall along the lines of watersports, underage/loli, adult diaper, scat, incest, bestiality, lactation, feet, etc. If you're unsure, ask, and I'll tell you what's comfortable. I ask that my partner is 18+ ONLY, or I will not roleplay with you. Mature writing is not necessarily a must for all roleplays, but I would rather myself and my partner be comfortable with corresponding and plotting together, and being close in age is a must for me. I am perfectly fine with self-inserts, or the addition of original characters in fandom, but please do not simply use me as a romantic interest for your character. This has happened to me far too often, and it's not that I don't want my writing partner to be happy, but it should be fun for both of us, and if our characters mesh naturally, then I have no problem with it, but if I'm solely used as someone to fill the place of your favorite character, then it should either be equal in that we both play each other's favorite, or we should simply settle on a different plot. I cannot play your favorite if you're not willing to reciprocate though, writing has to be inclusive for both of us. Finally, I would prefer my partner to be as literate as possible. Of course I'm not harsh, but the flow and content has to be proficient enough so that I can work with it. I don't have a limit as to how little or how much you can write, but please do not offer me three sentences if we're trying to work with a grander plot. I like to know what other characters are thinking, so please feel free to reflect on their feelings and thoughts. I don't mind one on one roleplays, or ones that have us playing multiple characters, just so long as the work is spread evenly between us. Contact: I prefer to RP through Skype, but please send me an email first at [email protected] to see if we are compatible, including your age, roleplay experience, and tell me what your favorite color is, so I'll know you read most of this. I look forward to writing with you! :)

#rp partner search #rp partner ad #rp search #fandom #original #anime #dc #cartoon #videogame #email #skype #submission

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