#and the interplay of those'

[mayasaura]

I've finally finished the six games in the main Ace Attorney series! That's right!! It's time for my review!

I think it's fairly common knowledge that Ace Attorney is a political commentary on the Japanese legal system as it existed in 2001. I know I knew that going in.

What I didn't know was just how topical the games were. I didn't figure that out until I started looking into what the fuck was going on in Apollo Justice, and what I discovered makes Apollo Justice my favourite game in the series.

At the time the Phoenix Wright trilogy was first being released, Japan did not have any form of trial by jury, and boasted a conviction rate to make Edgeworth and Von Karma's records look almost credible. Four months after the release of the third game, the Japanese National Diet passed a piece of legislation implementing judicial reform with the explicit intention of “the promotion of the public’s understanding of the judicial system and … their confidence in it.”

The next installment of the series—Apollo Justice, released in April of 2007—builds the themes of legal corruption explored by the first trilogy into a passionate argument for reform by restoring judicial power to the citizens.

Phoenix Wright, seen through the eyes of the new protagonist, appears to be a jaded shell of his former self: retired from the legal profession, beaten down by trying to champion truth and justice from within a broken system. The circumstances leading to his forced retirement come to light in the game's climactic final case, hand in hand with the revelation that Phoenix never really gave up on his ideals. He just gave up on the system. Speaking directly to the player, he casts the player as one of a panel of six civilian judges in a new reformed system of trial he and Edgeworth developed together. At the end of the trial, the player directly casts the final vote to decide the verdict.

In May of 2009, two years after Phoenix Wright handed the player direct power over the outcome of a trial, the real Japanese legal system conducted its first trial utilising civilian lay judges under the newly reformed judicial system.

I don't know nearly enough about how the current Japanese system works to judge the accuracy of Apollo Justice's vision to the final real result of real Japanese lawyers and judges' efforts, but from my casual perspective, it's pretty close. Close enough for it to be clear the game developers were following the progress of the real reform. Perhaps the game was meant as a celebration, or maybe they hoped it could work as an educational tool to introduce the concept to the public. Either way, these games were made by someone or someones who cared deeply about criminal justice, and I love them for it.

I also love them for their fun and immersive mysteries, of course, and their ludicrously charming cast of characters. It's no wonder the series has withstood the test of time, thriving on their own solid merit as games even far removed by both time and distance from the context of their social commentary.

[sysig]

For the last day of requestober, can you please draw something spooky/scary with Negative RGB? With all the cool lighting stuff you've been doing recently, I think it could be very dramatic, and I'd love to see him in your style!

Day 31 -Pl̷̼͙̯̼̟̈́͒̃̓͆e̵̢͔̞̤̯͗as̴̨͆̒̏e dö̸̧̢̝̳́͝ not̸̨̞͔̗͆̔͝ͅ ̶̦̋͒a̵̪͋̉̈́̒djus̶̪͔͎̘͈̍́̂̅̚t yö̶̙̺͎́͘u̷͚̙̿̓͆r sc̸̙͍͒rę̸̰̺̣̿̓͌̔̎en̴̏̈́͊ͅ

[kemendin]

Woven in the Storm

Dhamari/Gale playlist

All That You Are (Goo Goo Dolls) - Gale POV

Dust to Dust (The Civil Wars) - Alternating POV

King (Lauren Aquilina) - Dhamari POV

Hold Me (The Sweeplings) - Dhamari POV (boat scene specifically)

Long Way Home (Goo Goo Dolls) - Dhamari POV

Caught in the Storm (Goo Goo Dolls) - Gale POV

I do not apologise for the fact that fully half of these are Goo Goo Dolls (I do need to find more songs for these two that aren’t though xD) I have been listening to all of these on repeat for months now and I doubt that will change anytime soon!

[pocketramblr]

see the problem is that my quirk phantoms are Type 1 Invested Beings, while canon quirk vestiges are Type 2

[justsomeguycore]

idk if hornets nest baseball bat but i also get rubbed the wrong way by purely sexism based feminist lens analysis of tlt. like misogyny is very present including when it’s conspicuously ostensibly absent, but misogyny is also not the only form of oppression in the universe, ours OR that of the locked tomb. i just sometimes see posts that are so focused on the misogyny that their analysis in other critical theories are lacking

[kingofdinosaurs]

[cabeswaterdrowned]

“When Blue opened the front door, she discovered an Aglionby student standing in the glow of the porch light. Moths fluttered around his head. He wore salmon-colored pants and white Top-Siders and boasted flawless skin and tousled hair.”

The way I accidentally read the latter sentence first and thought Gansey had shown up again but no it’s Greenmantle this aids my Greenmantle looks like a combination of Gansey and Ronan theory (so of course Adam is hot for him).

[alto-tenure]

proposal for like, an AU concept to bring Duke into preboot continuity:

we are robin, but during no man's land

[sevenangrybees]

Sometimes things bother me

[xenon-demon]

cruel and unusual to make me pick between when you come back, it's gravity (kas!steve au) and boathouse wall slam 2: roleplay boogaloo so i simply shan't please tell me about both.

[also don't worry i also didn't make my wip wednesday word count bc apparently grieving makes it hard to function. or something. (but also sometimes life just Happens. it's fandom, no one's paying us for this shit 💜)]

Read you're amazing and I appreciate you so much <3 You are more than welcome to ask me about as many things as you'd like!!

[also thank you very much for the kind words & reminder not to take fandom shit so seriously it becomes stressful itself 💙 I hope you're doing a bit better now (since it's been a hot second since you sent this ask), life really does just fucking suck sometimes, huh?]

Paging @sidekick-hero who also asked me about boathouse wall slam; seeing as both of you asked about the same two fics, I'll use this ask to talk about boathouse wall slam and the other one to talk about gravity!

boathouse wall slam 2: roleplay boogaloo

Okay first of all this DOES actually have a title - strange love (won’t you give it to me?) - but I love the placeholder meme title way too much to change the file name. There's also about 2.5k words written in this document, but many of those words are Horny and thus I do not feel comfortable sharing them lmao

Also my "can't shut the fuck up" disease struck again SO this is going under a cut (which is also probably not a bad thing considering I'm talking about sex lmao)

AS THE MEME TITLE IMPLIES this is about Steve having Many Thoughts about Eddie shoving him up against the wall of Reefer Rick’s boathouse, to the point where he eventually caves and asks Eddie (his boyfriend of ~2 months, after about that much time again of fooling around together as friends) if he’d be willing to re-enact that moment with him. But this time they won’t have an audience. Because it's a sex roleplay. The surface level concept for this fic is just a smutty pwp revolving around re-enacting The Wall Slam™, because neither Steve nor the audience were being normal about that when it happened. The roleplay set-up was going to be something like Eddie just chilling and smoking out in the boathouse undisturbed (because Reefer Rick skipped town after Vecna was defeated, so the place is now unoccupied), Steve "accidentally" stumbling across him, Eddie thinking "oho the popular jock is here to beat me up, I'd better make the first move before he can" and throwing Steve up against a wall only to find Steve Really Likes Being Manhandled, and he's suggesting they maybe have a little fun with each other instead? (This part would not require much acting from Steve.) The roleplay aspect of it is basically them reaching back for their high school personas and acting as if they'd gotten into this situation with each other whilst still in school, before they became friends and certainly before they had any history together.

The original version I started (and got 2.5k words into before realising I wouldn't feel comfy posting it anywhere lol) was written... around this time last year? Like 10-12 months ago? And so it was very much coloured by the prevailing Fandom Opinions & Content™ at the time, aka this was a sub!bottom!Steve and dom!top!Eddie affair (with that being the Prevailing Pattern of their relationship thus far in the fic). I wasn't writing them as having an Official Established Dynamic™, I was just writing it as Steve having an inherent tendency to be submissive/give up control to Eddie during sex. Steve's nerves around asking Eddie about this particular fantasy are just due to Steve being nervous to ask for what he wants; he's not worried at all about asking Eddie to be a bit rough/dominant with him because really, They Do That Anyway.

While I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with approaching this concept (or Steddie!) like that, and I'll still read pretty much any flavour of Steddie (ultimately I think they're switches/vers, and also I don't care that much about who's in what position as long as they're in character), the way I view them & their dynamic has definitely changed since I came up with this concept. THEREFORE, here is how I would approach it if I were to write this as a oneshot now:

They're still newly dating at the start of the fic (only a month or two in), except the prevailing pattern of the relationship so far is service top/soft dom!Steve & bottom/ever so slightly sub!Eddie. This is mainly because a) that's what they're used to from previous partners, and b) Steve's got some Issues around giving up control in bed/feeling like he's not doing enough to please his partner (aka "I must prove my worth sexually or else they'll lose interest in me").

Steve has, however, been plagued with visions of Eddie throwing him around the boathouse like he was a small twig, and he is very quickly losing his sanity about it. Eddie could absolutely manhandle Steve the way Steve manhandles Eddie, if he wanted to. If Steve let him.

After a couple months of dating Eddie, Eddie can tell something's up, so he asks about it. Steve cracks like an egg the moment Eddie asks, confessing he keeps thinking about The Wall Slam. Eddie - who has already sniffed out Steve's issues around being Enough and Worthy for his partner - asks if he'd like them to recreate that moment. Steve agrees (while blushing so red he looks like a tomato).

CUE THE ROLEPLAY SMUT. This proceeds pretty much the same as the original version, complete with sub!bottom!Steve & dom!top!Eddie, but this version of Eddie is a much softer dom & this Steve takes a bit longer to really get into the swing of things. After the smut they have a cute little heart-to-heart about how Eddie's not going to leave Steve just because he wants a turn being looked after for once, and that Steve is going to make more of an effort to prioritise his own wants and needs sometimes.

Essentially, were I to write this now, I'd make it a smutfic character study of Steve & how he has issues around being vulnerable and letting Eddie take care of him, instead of him taking care of Eddie all the time. You know how it is, you go to write porn and it ends up growing legs and also a deep emotional core about the relationship between characters and their psychological issues.

Send me an ask about my WIPs!

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

having a lot of thoughts about how people use 'normalize' when they mean 'destigmatize' or 'make the nature of into common knowledge,' and how they conflate 'the perception of this thing as normal' with the thing actually being a normal occurrence, and how it is in fact incredibly harmful to try to convince people that an ideal situation is normal when that does not map onto their lived reality or the dangers they need to be aware of to avoid. it is 3:33am though so writing up an actual poast about it will have to wait for later

[flying-potato2]

hey hi everyone needs to see this right now (it is 40 minutes if you skip the qna part)

[agnesandhilda]

imo the batman/robin dynamic is best served with the implication of child abuse looming over it like a cartoon piano

[audliminal]

Vaguely defined squirrel fursona is OUT I just realized I could make my fursona a wolpertinger

[fruitsofhell]

Hashtag NotAllSonicGames - but it's been 7 years and I'm still floored by how Sonic games can be like the most breathtaking thing to look at and listen to, with like the style and charisma of a game that should be an absolute modern classic and then you pick it up and it plays like dogshit, like this should be studied

[readymades2002]

im still in the first arc so i havent even MENTIONED SURGE MY FRIEND SURGE!!!!