#but im always lurking

[myriadxofxmuses]

I don't usually do this, but I had a couple decent pictures recently and figured what the hell, it's Munday.

Happy Munday!

[hookd]

hello....i've been here as always but i've gotten behind Again, i have so little interest or enthusiasm shown towards my blogs that it's hard to want to do much or be interested in anything. but i'm trying. i'm working on it. sorry to those who i've kept waiting.

[suddenly-frankenstein]

his guardian angel

[yennyinc]

Acceptance!

[holyfreaks]

sorry but the "trying to get rid of us" part.... like we were here from literally day one. you came into OUR house and decided the show was about something that it's not. also, even if we weren't here from the beginning, we deserve to be here every bit as you do. why are you trying to gatekeep fandom, when it's always been for the freaks. especially on the incest family horror show

[spnnps]

i would just like to confess I tried watching supernatural in middle school in an attempt to feed into the dean/cas scene because i wanted to read about gay people kissing in fanfic but cas and dean’s dynamic in the show was so fucking boring that it took several years for me to realize thats because the show is about incest

[blossoms-phan]

i've reached 200 followers?? 🥲

i'm always yapping about phandom love and just how much i've enjoyed coming back to this community so i'll keep this short and sweet but truly, i appreciate every single one of you so much. i've felt so accepted and appreciated on here and i can't even express how much fun it's been just to be *in* the phandom again, in this golden era after watching them for so many years and just being able to share this space with all of you funny, talented, wonderful people. i've gotten into creative outlets for my dnp obsession like writing, making moodboards, etc again + just sharing my rambles/dnp thoughts on here and i cannot emphasize enough the fact that i literally think about dnp 24/7 and share that with no one else in my life so being able to do it so freely on here is everything to me. ok enough sap. ty and can't wait to grow and practice more phannieism with you all 🌸💖🌸

special shoutouts to mutuals! and friends i've made on here ily, i love seeing y'all in my notifs <33

@jonsaremembers @trashcanfromgallifrey @phillieladybird @pinofdnp @add1ictwithapen @thighguys @dnpbeats @eddiesangels @phanbear @slutoast @notsosaucystuff @randomslinky @ghoulish-art-tendencies @wdapteo @astradyke @phantasticphizza @emotoangel @ingydar-phan @philshotcocoa @omatone-dnp @mouldywalls @spunkymalone @aterribleinfluence @flowercrownknight @dansendjumper @snailsandstrawberries @burningreddaylight @purpurussy @evermorepeyton @oldphanny @misfittoy15 @corgihill @comicphans @awkward-imp @honeypothowell @gamora-borealis @fields-of-ivy @gravitysembrace @phannie-historian @scuddleduck

[triona-tribblescore]

HI TRIONAAAA ajshdjkdhkj omg ur appearance and thoughts made me literally so happy!!!! hope ur doing well!!! lysm /p <333

NO BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH ITS BEEN MICROWAVING IN MY BRAIN THIS WEEK ISTG-

ARCHIIIEEE :'DDD <33333 Omg How are you?? I hope you are doing so so so amazing and that life is treating you so well and not too overwhelming or anything!! Devouring your art is my serotonin fr-

[silkysong]

the funny number

[heynhay]

i can't believe i've been uncovered i am in tears it's just that your art shows up and it'e like a lightning goes through my body and i immediately NEED to reblog and then i just HAVE to like send an ask to like externalize my feelings..... and to be fair i am not very good at being covered and i wouldnt mind sending my psychotic asks off of anon buuuut my klanceogies account is a sideblog so :( anon it is

i get u anon heynhay is actually a sideblog if u can believe it

[sasukeless]

back to complaining about translations but i just again came across an old post that basically was analyzing sasuke calling naruto his one and only and saying it was him being sarcastic/not truthful because he was throwing naruto’s previous words at him in this panel

and im just… this panel is wrong. the speech bubble and naruto’s thoughts are flipped. naruto did not call sasuke his one and only here, he was remembering sasuke calling Him his closest friend.

anyway it’s a tricky panel because it’s in many pages when you read the manga. like i’m not free of sin because i remember i have posted too when i couldn’t find one with the correct placement. (also i feel like naruto saying there’s no way he’d able to leave sasuke alone holds more meaning than i can’t let that happen but whatever Whatever details) but anyway this is also an scene you can watch the anime clip and see what is naruto saying. but my point is that One simple misplacement in the translation can literally lead to people misinterpreting something completely different and in this case denying sasuke’s feelings and characterization. and it’s just well. sad

[presiding]

I'm not a new follower and I've been here long enough but i do have a relatively bad memory

So I've wanted to ask, what's your opinion on "Dishonored: death of the outsider"?

Right now I'm replaying Dishonored games not in the release order, i already finished DH2 and started Daud dlcs. Maybe I'll go for vanilla DH later

But thoughts about going through death of the outsider again makes me feel something that i can't explain... 😬

It has some interesting ideas but antagonists are underused. Locations repeat a lot. And Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

I'm genuinely debating if i should revisit *this* one or pretend that DH2 is the last game. I know that some people love DOTO but i can't find strength in me

love to chat about death of the outsider, ty for the ask!

i feel your pain. it's the one game i struggle to revisit. but! i was thinking about your points and how DotO has the feel of budget cuts.

it's been about a year since my last DotO post - so, essay time -

a measured response to common DotO criticisms

(the thousand bugs of dishonored 2 I had borne as I best could, but when doto ventured upon sidelining billie and retconning daud's arc I vowed revenge*

*can't resist a cask of amontillado joke

criticism is easy and creation is hard, so, if this isn't the type of response you wanted, you can read my other DotO posts:

how i'd write death of the outsider

that post i did after trying to play doto a third time and couldn't make it past the opening scene (you might like my tags on this re: your comment "makes me feel something i can't explain")

billie lurk as a nonprotagonist & misogynoir (more on this below...)

gonna leapfrog off your comments cause I agree!

antagonists are underused/locations repeat a lot.

who is steering the boat?

let's start up at the top; everything stems from there.

DotO was caught up in ownership/transition issues. here's an article about harvey smith and raphael colantanio at that time. if you didnt know, colantonio is the main founder of arkane (semi-related but just for fun look his appearance up then go through arkane's protags and tell me what you notice...).

quote from harvey smith re: DotO -

“Then, just as I move back, [Colantonio is] announcing that he’s leaving. Going forward, I’ll focus more and more on the Austin studio and what we’re going to do there. Death of the Outsider is my wrapping up with the guys in Lyon – the first half of that we planned together while I was living there, but the second half was worked on while I was living in Austin. I’ve been communicating with them through video conferences and stuff, so they carry a lot of the load of the second half of it.”

so the founder jumped ship and the co-creative director has to step away from his usual position (over to sinking ship Austin). meanwhile, DotO is still in development. i'm a big believer in people making art, and not companies (even in this article Smith acknowledges much of their "secret sauce" can be traceable to specific devs but i digress)

$$$ kaching - some speculation

on the note of founders - past this point in arkane's history (ie. the main founder stepping back), arkane would have been being primed for sale. this translates to high scrutiny on project expenditure (such as hiring cheaper early career staff, hiring less workers, denying your best staff raises causing them to leave and hiring cheaper workers in their place, etc) to make the company's EBITDA look more appealing to buyers (briefly, its the piece of paper that proves you're profitable). based on speculative timelines, from a purely $ perspective within the first year of dh2 being released is when you'd be looking to slim down your capitalised expenditure (aka: cutting staff while the revenue is at a peak to make number go brr and make your company look like a better investment) because to maximise the profit of a company's sale, you really have a great track record for a few years.

this is purely speculation based on timelines. companies are very careful to hide when they're doing this, ideally they want ~3 years of a great track record (and staff that will keep working their hardest).

big goals and no money

DotO was meant to be a two-part DLC like the Dh1 DLCs, so shout out to what could have been made if their original pitch had worked.

On locations & antagonists & budget - this dev's site discusses the Conservatory level in game AND specifies it was budget constraints being the reason for cutting off traversable area from that mission. Great link for comparing the original level & the DotO version, especially re: your point about reused assets/levels.

We could pick other examples here but this post is already long so -

Billie herself deserved SO much better than whatever is going on with her character

i would forgive this game anything if there was any good billie storywriting.

:')

its never just the writers

after revisiting articles to fact-check for this essay, i've seen a lot of articles blaming writers by name (you didn't do this anon which i love <3)

games are made by teams, and decision making is generally done top-down, so blaming individual contributors is shit. 1) writer's pay isn't good enough to cop this kind of abuse. 2) it's rarely in their control - you can write a beautiful scene only to have that level cut due to costs (etc), and then you need to work out how to make the story make sense. ideation & decision-making are separate and i guess 'this idea was [X]'s' should not be mistaken for 'this is the fault of [X]'s.'

on hiring fans (& imm-sim writing strategies)

the new writers [...] already had an idea of the world, as they’d seen it from the outside, as fans. “These are all people that knew this world we had created and they took it as canonical, as the gospel. Whereas, for us, it was bits and pieces we’d made up along the way.”

as someone who used to hire writers, and i promise this isn't in bad faith: don't hire fans unless your priority is cost then, sure, fans are likely to put in overtime (and not be in a position in their career where they can ask for higher remuneration - they'll pay the passion tax to be involved).

writers (esp new career writers) have to be open to receiving feedback assuming healthy/functional processes, and being a fan makes that harder because you care more. and, as a fan, you know what loose ends exist and that's where you'll naturally jump to, even though writers should start with target audience and branding, and build from there. if i expand on this i'll get offtopic so let's keep going!

DotO feels lifeless because it doesn't add anything to the DH universe, it only takes away by closing storylines without the satisfaction of closure. sure, stuff was added - the cult subplot, locations, some NPCs/enemies, etc. but they feel like part of the objectives, not part of the dishonored universe. you can feel the decision-making process when you play: there's a feeling that the priority was to finish the assets required for missions, instead of writing a story that feels immersive.

compared to standard videogame writing, where you can generally get away with "everything you touch and read relates to your objectives as the protagonist", as an imm-sim writer, you need to focus on:

how does this text build the universe so that the player feels like they're only seeing a small part of the world?

of course - this is difficult with budget/time concerns. i've said it before but this is part of why we rarely have games as rich as dishonored 1 & 2, because imm-sim design philosophy flies against the current videogame industry trends of microtransactions & cheap-to-make addictive mobile games. given a tight budget you focus on the high level story, but player immersion is a function of details.

most likely, dh2 was the end of an era. typing that out makes me sad.

what did the devs say about writing billie

*breathes deeply*

the death of the outsider protag was originally pitched as being about a regular human, someone not related to emily and corvo but instead an overseer or a brigmore witch. daud was also pitched.

this could have worked! really cool to have a nobody, or a heretic, or an overseer, be involved with the death of a god. and i've mentioned before that storywise DotO's protag could have been anyone (i think i made a joke about wyman? hah) and wouldn't change the story much, bar some daud bits.

quote from the same article:

eventually Arkane settled on Billie Lurk, Emily's companion from Dishonored 2. [...] Bakaba tells me that because Billie had already received her redemption arc in Dishonored 2, Death Of The Outsider's story could be about something more than that.

welp.

so there's two things here - a redemption arc claim, and DotO's actual story.

in addition to not being the first pick, the view was that billie's story was over. i question the 'redemption arc' claim - sure, billie helps the protag in dh2 but after her confession, if you tell her she's changed, she brushes it off and you part awkwardly without forgiving her... does that count? if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? if a character redeems themselves but the story never tells you, are they redeemed?

billie's role in dh2 isn't really that different to the dlcs, where she follows you around being Mr Exposition while withholding a LOT of information that could have actually helped the protag. given DotO's plot, going after the killer who shaped her doesn't scream 'reformed' either. ludonarratively speaking, the lack of chaos implies billie never changed from being a callous killer - which i'm not against, it would have been a cool story.

and! contrast this with daud who already had his redemption arc!

When first conceptualising Death Of The Outsider in around 2014, Smith and Duval knew they wanted two things: Billie Lurk being used to get to The Outsider himself, and closure for Dishonored villain (and later ally) Daud.

in the two DLCs, as we know, he comes to realise his actions sucked, and as the player you actively make things right (related: my post about ludonarrative dissonance in dh2). so if billie had "already received her redemption arc", why was this another daud story?

imo this isn't a budget issue but a misogynoir issue. "we want this story to be not about the protagonist so any random NPC will do, how about we go with billie lurk and get a black woman as a dishonored protag?" this logic, which is what i'm reading of the above two quotes, feels frustratingly tokenistic when she's an established character with a rich background. it's an example of surface level diversity because DotO is not about her by arkane's own admission. it's a similar vibe to the companies who say they have a diverse team but you check their staff page and all the people of colour have 'assistant' in their title and the board is all white, so it's not people of colour who are driving the business. maybe this was entirely by accident but these accidents add up to systematic failure - billie gets her own game but never her own story. it feels like she got assigned the caretaker role for these two guys. great.

for fairness, let's compare to dh2. corvo & emily are relatively hands-off protags in terms of their ongoing thoughts about their surroundings and the lore placement about them specifically is sparse, and this style continues in DotO. the issue is the core narrative: corvo & emily are both the protagonists of their story in the sense that dh2's story reflects their goals ("take back what's yours"), whereas Billie is an established character who has arguably little reason to go along with each mission. worse, the main plotline she's literally forced into going along with. in the opening scene billie gets assaulted and still helps the guy who assaulted her.

fundamentally, DotO's narrative is not about billie but about daud and the outsider, and this article makes clear that was by design.

whats the takeaway

DotO is the weakest entry in the Dishonored series for most people, and blaming budget & a corporate changeover makes me feel... uh well it doesn't really help me tbh but your mileage may vary. it does interest me to think about what we could have had!

for me, my opinion is that if writing billie was a priority (link to my own post where i describe the feeling of playing doto as someone interested in billie) arkane would have made it a priority, even amidst constraints. billie's redemption arc was not resolved imo, and putting her in a game without a chaos system feels like as much a backwards slide for her as daud's plotline to kill the outsider was for his arc.

we absolutely 🤝 on not being in a rush to play the game again.

on the upside. dishonored 2 is a really wonderful game and i love it very much.

[ruicchiii]

IM SO SOFT FOR BAXTER LIKE LIKEL LIKE

IM IN LOVE WITH THE IDEA OF HIM BEING IN BETWEEN GAMES ?? (like shiloh and jeremy i found their concept so Neet) LIKE AAAA !!!

ESPECIALLY SINCE OLBA CAME BEFORE OLNF SO YOU'RE JUST LEFT WONDERING

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED ???? WHY DOESNT HE WANT TO COME BACK TO GOLDEN GROVE

WHY DID HE AND THE BOYS CLUB HAVE A FALLING OUT

WHY !!!

also

i think about this olnf tease. i see you, baxter. i see you i also see you in olnf HAHAHAHAH

everytime a question that might might might be related to olnf pops up to ask baxter i go "CRUMBS OLNF CRUMBS CRUMBS" it gets me SOOOOOOO ecstatic LIKE AAAAAAAAA

i was losing my SHIT everytime baxter would mention smtg about olnf and it SHOWED like TELL ME MORE !!! but it leaves so much more questions than answers like WAKSGHBHISEOH anyways thank you for coming to my ted talk ; im in love with Our Life and im OBSESSED with it oh my god (i talk about it more on twitter but my twitter is a fandom mess!!)

[alwaysxyou]

[possamble]

yes!!! getting good grade in farcille!!!

[hellsbroadcaster]

I feel like a ghost in most cases. if I scream loud enough, or get angry enough to move something maybe someone might notice. Or maybe I'm being dramatic lol. either way, feeling invisible sucks. this isn't me feeling inferior btw, its just me having a hard time getting interactions. i know in which cases are my own fault, I am slow. but idk. i am struggling. so I'm gonna revamp, start freshy and new. i've been wanting to redo my graphics for this blog anyway. i think it'll help. i just can't keep up with my dash, idk half of you and, its suddenly getting hard to really wanna be here when it feels like nothing you try works? if you wanna follow the new blog just like this, and I'll send it once its done. but im gonna try and remain lowkey. keyword try.