#anyway check out my essay-length tags rambling

[yuribrd]

@forfodlan​ || [ FEAR ] : sender, out of instinctive fear, grabs receiver's hand for comfort. / from bernie Hand holding.

          Bernadetta had been running about for what must have been hours, with Yuri trailing along after her.  Today, they’re finding interesting-looking plants and leaves.  It’s a silly little game, Yuri thinks.  It’s a stupid—  albeit necessary for his purpose here—  waste of time, is what he tries to convince himself.  Yet, without even realizing, he’s having fun.  Never before in his life would he have imagined he could feel so pleased doing something as pointless as finding a leave covered in weird spots and holes for his friend to see, as he is now.

          Sometimes, he becomes almost aware of it, and it confuses him, but right now?  Right now, he’s trying to figure out where Bernadetta went, so he can hear what she’s got to say about what he’s found.

          Only, when he looks up, he doesn’t see her.  No, he sees the Count, who’s not far off, apparently also looking for his daughter.  Thankfully, the gardener’s assistant looking at a plant in the garden isn’t nearly notable enough to warrant his full attention, and when he doesn’t spot Bernadetta, he moves on.

          When he’s sure the Count isn’t coming back, Yuri sets to looking for Bernadetta again, and after a good few minutes checking all of their favorite places, he eventually finds her at the base of an old tree that’s surrounded by lush bushes, which create a perfect little hiding spot just at the base of the trunk.

          ❝ There you are, ❞    he greets, his voice sing-song with eagerness as he pushes himself partway through the bushes to fetch her.    ❝ Let’s go, we still have time before the gardener will be needing me. ❞    With that, he turns to leave, expecting her to follow, until he feels her hand around his.    ❝ H-hey— ❞    Unexpected, the sudden halting of his exit nearly makes him fall back, but when he looks at her, rather than being upset, he is only concerned; she’s scared, and he can see it clear as day.

          It’s no wonder why either.  Yuri has, a few times now, seen or heard her struggling to avoid being taken.  Witnessing it, even thinking about it, makes him sad and angry all at once.  He thinks of his own mother, and can’t imagine how a parent can bring themselves to make their kid not want to be around them that desperately.

          ❝ Hey, ❞    he repeats, this time soft, quiet,    ❝ Look, you see?  Everything’s fine now, Bernadetta. ❞    Still, he doesn’t try to pull her from their hiding spot.  Instead, he sits beside her  ( on the bare dirt, just for her! ), one hand still in hers, the other reaching into a small pouch at his belt.  From within, he pulls what must have been one of the flight feathers of a small bird, and holds it out to her.    ❝ Here.  It’s pretty much the same color as your hair, so I thought you might like it. ❞    It’s a horrible gift, he thinks, but all he wants is to take her mind off of her father.

[borzoilover69]

(tampers with the gas) dirkjake for the shipping bingo

as you can see my thoughts on them are varied and i can write entire essays. a gas leak made my obsession with them hit an entire level i didnt know was possible. They're everything and nothing to me and i dislike most of fanon abt it and i hate this ship but also i have never cared this much about a ship in general for the doors it could open into messy straight relationship type bullshit with they give me the mic. I find myself often looking thru the tag just to see what people say on it because either theyre completely annoying and wrong or relatively right it really depends.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING SECTION CONTAINS EXTENSIVE RAMBLING ON A TOPIC NOT MANY PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED IN:

i will both simultaneously defend this ship with my fucking life but also i will take any chance to shoot those two fuckers dead i genuinely wish jake english and dirk strider ill they are teens with attachment issues and i think the demonisation of it w/o looking at it as just a relationship that sort of is messy sucks and i think fanon should leave them the fuck alone. if given the chance i would kill both of them simply so i wouldnt have to see them at all but also i wish there were more meta writers for dirkjake bcus i find it so hard to find people that extrapolate at length abt it because its so wild to me the guilt and the feelings and the way they tear and grate at each other is so interesting to me.

every relationship is worse with them anyone that gets caught in the crossfires and tries to sort it out is basically doomed because whats probably going to happen is that dirk and jake are going to gang up to either a.) try to use the person as a weapon against the other or gang up to hurt this mfer theyre essentially doomed but in like a way that everyone is partying and those two are stuck together with awkward air.

im. not going to check over this ramble im just going to keep going. i have so much shit to say.

i hate the villainisation of dirk i hate the villainisation of jake they both suck in the way that teens and most young adults will theyre both at fault i hate the "jake never felt anything towards dirk because hes aro" yes he fucking did aro people can still feel levels of attraction and its very fucking obvious how tied up in each other they are and there are like a million and one reasons i could name it if you gave me a day and 15 pages of text.

i hope they both kill each other the idea of them being happy together is endearing but i dont want that for them most times unless im feeling especially sappy the fandom sort of ruined dirkjake for me heres my big old fuckyou to OD anyways heres a few song lyrics that make me think of them

They would literally be the subject of so much fucking talk in publications because theyre never over not even close theyre stuck together theyre going to be doing this dance for fucking years and either end up as the strangest but happiest freaks in some janked up mansion with a million different things that the normal person would think is fucking weird and strange and unnerving but which they think is completely normal or theyre just going to end up killing each other and nobody is going to be safe in the crossfire theyre going to key each others cars and send pipe bombs and poke at every single hole and flaw in the others facade blah blah blah.

people who just focus on the good parts of dirk and jake dont get it people who focus on the flaws only dont get it i think there should be more discussion but also the idea of being exposed to someone who doesnt get it is hell for me ive read their pesterlogs like so many fucking times and ive written extensively abt their selves and what flaws they have and i could prolly kick the shit out of them anyways mic drop im done.

[onebizarrekai]

v3′s art is comically terrible for a professionally distributed game in a series: a compilation

in this not-essay I will list all of the mistakes and problems I have spotted in v3′s art. don’t worry, it’s entirely for fun and I’m doing this on a whim, so please feel free to not take this seriously but also it’s hilarious and embarrassing how ridiculous this is like what happened did they speedrun the whole production or what

see, there are some things you can take as meta like “they made it bad on purpose to allude to the downfall of tv shows that have been on air for much too long” but I have a very strong feeling this is not the case due to the nature of some of these errors

disclaimer, the more I study this art, the more I fear that the artists were underpaid and underslept, so if this is in fact the case, I am so sorry to all of them but also I’m going to make fun of the art anyway

anyway let’s get started!

if you study this image for longer than 5 seconds, you will see that kaede is the only one fully shaded and keebo is literally just his normal sprite pasted into the image. every other character is just an ordinary ref, hence most of them facing the exact same direction with neutral expressions on their faces. it looks like a bad edit, and is probably one of the worst pieces of art in the game. it kind of gets better from here on, but my roasting will not.

with that out of the way, here’s the problem that officially bothers me the most and clarifies my viewpoint of “this is not meta and an actual lack of company communication”

this freaking cg, which seems normal at a glance, but some wiseass was like “oh, kaede is a girl, so obviously she’s going to be shorter than the Male Protagonist™” ah, that’s funny. because if you look at the character bios, kaede is, in fact, one inch taller than shuichi and not like 6 inches shorter as she is shown here.

also shuichi’s shoulder is disproportionate and horrendous and he looks vaguely like a jojo character, but I wasn’t even thinking about that until right now.

thanks guys, 50% of the fandom who has never bothered to check these bios thinks that kaede is like 5′3 (did the developers really put so little thought into her to the point where drawing her correctly in the game didn’t even matter??)

also I would like to point out that, even though this isn’t related to the art itself, yes, a character kaede’s size being only 117 lbs is unfeasible, but this applies to literally every character in danganronpa ever and it’s not new news that it’s unrealistic

update: someone in the tags informed me that in versions of the game that use centimeters, like the japanese version, kaede is actually shorter than shuichi, which just adds another thing to the list of weird decisions the localization team made for no reason. that said, after confirming this, kaede is 167 cm in the original, while shuichi is 171 cm, which are approximately 5′6 and 5′7 respectively, but one inch is still nowhere near as drastic as it is depicted above. (in spite of this, I would rather depict kaede as slightly taller, so I’m probably going to keep doing that.)

the journey continues!

bro if you want kaede to have shoulder length hair then stick to it to begin with

you can pretend this is at an angle all you want but they definitely committed the shorter kaede sin a second time

wait a goddamn second.

DO YOU SEE THIS

no………… it wasn’t kaede who shrank. it was shuichi who got taller

speaking of which, can we talk about how shady the perspective is in this elevator pic? look at shuichi and kokichi in comparison to kaede. kokichi, who is canonically 7 inches (edit: or 5, if you’re loyal to the original) shorter than kaede, looks taller than kaede. he’s growing too. what steroids are these gays taking

running into the room, electric boogaloo: I don’t think tsumugi is supposed to be the same height as kokichi

gonta… gonta you’re lookin a bit like a jojo character there

I love how kaito’s head looks kind of like it was pasted onto his body. why is he the same size as shuichi? shouldn’t he be high school bully size or something? his torso is teensy

ah yes, white angie.

I love this cg but why is shuichi’s right hand so much bigger than his left hand

I also love how this cg looks like they literally took pictures of trees and pasted them into the background, especially on the left. the shadows are so weird, especially closer to the ceiling, it’s difficult for me to believe they didn’t do exactly that.

return of Enlarged shuichi

puberty update: kokichi is now taller than shuichi in spite of shuichi never missing leg day. what crimes will he commit

I have to mention it, guys. this has to be one of the worst danganronpa cgs. kokichi’s facial proportions look atrocious. look at the way his face sticks out like his jaw is in the wrong place. his scarf is a pasted texture. that’s it. this moment was so iconic but the cg just looks so… so… off. like something is terribly wrong, but you can’t put your finger on it.

you know what? let’s get into that ‘pasted texture’ thing.

let’s imagine you’re an artist working on a professional game. you’re assigned to draw cgs of kokichi ouma, who has a checkered scarf from hell. sure, it will be terrible to draw, but you only have to draw it once at a time! plus, perspective is pretty important, right? can you be bothered? nah, actually. let’s just copy paste a checkered pattern into the cg, because I’m sure nobody will notice. it’ll blend right in with the other cgs that someone actually put effort into drawing his scarf in, right?

no. the answer is no and I very much noticed. this genuinely looks terrible and I would understand taking a shortcut like that in fanart or even an indie game but this is a full price pc and console distributed game

(an addition: look at kokichi’s TINY HANDS in that last one)

meanwhile, they straight up forgot to color in kokichi’s scarf in this cg.

dude. I forgot about whatever the hell this cg was. anyway look at keebo please just look at him

lovin kaito’s baby arms

real talk, maybe you could argue that he’s missing muscle because he’s deathly sick, but most of his cgs don’t line up with this, and his arms just look disproportionate to his torso size (granted this is a consistent problem across all danganronpa games and a lot of characters have this weird problem, like hajime, but also kaito is bigger than hajime so I kind of have higher expectations of him) maybe it’s his stupid goatee and the way he reminds me of yasuhiro?? it creates this illusion that he’s older than he is and so I keep expecting him to look more like an adult

oh, also rantaro is missing some of his accessories in that video he made–you know the one–but I don’t wanna go back and screenshot it

also you may have noticed that I’m skipping all of the monokub cgs because I literally do not care about them and I’m not even bothering to check and see if they have artistic mistakes in them

JIMMY NEUTRON???

hey um uh kaito you seem to be missing your neck

hey guys do you like my pregame fanart

so, that done, the sprites are also pretty terrible at times. they’re not as interesting to go through, however, and downloading the full sprite sets for every character and studying every single one of them will drive me insane, so I’ll just sum some of the ones I noticed up. I made things for kaede and shuichi before deciding I wasn’t going to get into it, so here are these.

that said, other mistakes include kokichi missing his purple highlights in all of the sprites encompassing a specific pose, stray pixels all over the place on everyone, and everyone also has heavily inconsistent shading, but literally all I think about is how pregame shuichi is unshaded and two of kaede’s pregame sprites have glaring outfit change mistakes in them

anyway, thank you for taking the time to read my ridiculous ramble. in all seriousness, there’s this looming presence of some lack of communication in the development team, like with all the art and design inconsistencies, pieces and sprites that look rushed, stray pixels, and missing basic proportional stuff. these are the kinds of things that you supposedly have to pretty much have in the bag in order to get jobs in professional businesses, so it’s really weird to me that this game suffers from so many of these problems. it’s like they tried to make the art so much more crisp than the other games, but it fell on its face as they realized it was going to take longer to draw everything and they started to rush. it’s weird, because the coloring itself looks normal–it’s just sloppily drawn, and the proportions are a mess once put into the context of perspective. many of the cgs look like they were drawn by different people, and I’m still not over the fact that half of kokichi’s cgs have his scarf pasted in as a texture.

the moral of the story is that if you’re selling a game at full price that also happens to be in a series that has had 3 very good games in it already the stakes should probably be higher than this. v3 has been out for more than 3 years and it’s still $40 (did it cost more than that before? I sure hope not), and the overarching quality of the game is just not as high as the other games. I’m not saying that the other games don’t have any problems with their art at all, they’re just not as glaringly obvious and every artistic choice in those games feels intentional.

regardless, I had a blast roasting the art at 2am, so maybe you got a kick out of all this chaos.

[waveypedia]

omg a video about animal jam would be so interesting!! i played it like a lot back in those years and man the game changed so much these days and i also remember when all the new features like parties or diamonds were introduced and a new animal would come out it was a wild time and my first ever account got hacked and the hacker deleted everything haha anyways yeah animal jam is pretty interesting to talk about haha

yeah!!! oh man you were around for the introduction of parties and diamonds? that was before even my time :0 i remember new animals and parties coming out though! oh shit you got hacked? that sucks :( i got scammed a whole bunch, but never outright hacked. that's one of the things i would probably research and talk about in my hypothetical video essay.

what really interests me is the way influencer culture and a fully functional economy naturally spawned in a kid's game, to the best of my knowledge. everything seemed to stem from a furious desire for clout - the economy revolved around coveted items like spikes, which were just status symbols at the end of the day. they don't get you any money or anything, so... more obviously, the rise of youtube around that time also saw the formation of many animal jam youtubers, many of whom became very famous very quickly in animal jam circles. people would literally send them all their rare items that they would open in glorified unboxing videos where they would read an obviously rehearsed thank-you and the gifter's name, which i guess gave people the illusion of clout, even though i highly doubt anything ever actually came to the gifters. (my brother and i watched them for a time, since we were like "hey, new aparri upload" or whatever, but even back then we mutually agreed they were boring as fuck and stopped watching!) people would flock to their dens and around them in the hopes of getting their tag in a video. on the flip side, there were, of course, a bunch of small youtubers vying to hit it big and a bunch of people who pretended to be filming in certain situations. people would say they were filming to get clout from the players around them or to scare off potential scammers/hackers. and then there were scammers themselves only looking for clout! aside from trying to get good items, which ties back to clout, my brother did have a yt channel for a bit to very little success (which, looking back, was probably a good thing) where he exposed a scammer. the only audience engagement was the scammer themself commenting frustratedly on the video. since the chance of them finding this video naturally is extremely low, they probably searched their username in hopes of clout.

my brother and i went back and looked at some of the old animal jam youtubers we used to watch back in the day and see what they've gotten up to in the seven-odd years it's been since we checked up on them last. wisteriamoon, who's now in her mid-to-late twenties from what i could discern, became a regular influencer/vlogger. julian2, who was involved in a ridiculous amount of youtube drama (which is fairly par for the course for influencers but not so much for the animal jam community, especially the animal jam community of that time. i think it got worse after that.), no longer uploads videos, but his channel and more notably his merch store are still up. he also is active on a second instagram account to keep in touch with his fans. (this is worrying to me because he is a university student and most of his fans are much younger than him. besides they have no reason to be fans anymore since he's not actually uploading content?? it's very suspect.) that brings me to another interesting point - most of the majorly successful youtubers were older teenagers, which is much older than animal jam's target audience. it got to the point where animal jam created an entire spinoff game, fer.al (which is actually kinda fun), aimed at an older userbase. the majority of their fans were probably mostly preteens.

then there's the economy system, and the strictness with which the players upheld it. people would go to such great lengths to game the system and cheat other players out of good items, such as scamming and even hacking. although other games like this had items you could buy and even trading systems (iirc), i cannot recall any other game with an economy and culture of this significance and scale. (of course if this were a real video essay i'd need to do a lot more research on this claim.) it consumed most players to the extent where almost no one played the game for its intended purpose - learning about animals and nature, hence the partnership with national geographic that eventually got terminated because kids weren't engaging correctly (i'm guessing). after that, it mostly went downhill, with ajhq trying to varying degrees of success to mine money through memberships and diamonds off of their userbase. it went to the extent where animal jam went through a real-life equivalent of inflation when ajhq reintroduced spikes to circulation in adventure prizes. that sparked a massive negative reaction. it's kind of crazy how passionate we all were about it.

there are also other things, like the really extravagant and serious warrior cats and general anthro roleplays (that seem to have died off in recent years for some reason) and all the notorious hackings, like fman122. there's also probably a whole slew of recent (as in, the past five years) stuff i have no idea about. it's just fascinating. and this is literally all from memory. god an entire, fully-researched video essay has so much potential.

sorry for rambling haha