What made you start shipping IH? :) (if I can ask)
i got into bleach a little late, so by the time i was watching the hueco mundo arc, the manga had just about wrapped up the fullbring arc. BUT, i was binge-watching so many episodes a day that i ended up catching up to where the manga was a lot faster than i had anticipated 💀 the reason i mentioned this is because the way i binge-watched the series really affected my perception of the pacing, where yammy's attack and orihime saying goodbye to ichigo all happened within like. 2-5 days of each other in real time, just like in the anime. i remember going from not really paying attention to orihime all that much to having her be my favorite character overnight, simply because her lack of self-worth and her insecurities really resonated with me! i kind of had a gut feeling that ichihime would be canon when orihime had that talk with rangiku, but the moment i became really hyped about the ship was during goodbye halcyon days! orihime's speech really floored me, i replayed it like 100x times, i watched 100 AMVs of it, and i was excited to see ichigo go feral when he finally heard the news about her kidnapping, because that's like. a classic romance trope, right? one character not realizing how much the other cares about them? and then the other character proving them wrong in really dramatic ways? my brain had kind of divided the arc into two parts - a) orihime's confession and b) ichigo's response, so i did guess that they would get a lot of moments from here on, but boy i did not anticipate just how many moments that would be. bleach until that point had mostly just been about the plot for me, but that's when i started caring about the ship.
it was around this time that i got curious and went online to see if ichigo and orihime would have any more moments (i was so excited about the possibilities that i didn't mind seeing spoilers) and that's when i saw a clip of the infamous tower scene on youtube and i was like....wow....are you joking rn....is this for real....and then i continued watching the anime and i was like....it is for real and it's actually sooooo insane? my best friend at the time had told me to stop watching bleach after the arrancar arc ends because it gets really bad after, but i wanted to know where ichigo and orihime's relationship was going to go from here (after lust arc). i didn't have a tumblr account at the time but i did lurk around a lot of blogs for other fandoms (this was back when you could take a look at any blog without having to sign up), and that's when i realized that a) the manga was ongoing and i could read that and b) the manga had a lot more moments from earlier arcs that i had either completely glossed over or the anime itself had cut. as you can imagine, this delighted me, who casually shipped ichi/ishi because they were funny together but had no stakes in canon romances. i wanted to see ichihime grow, i'd become very fond of them almost overnight, and in the in-between periods where i waited for the manga to update, i read a lot of fanfic on fanfic dot net and began following people who liked the ship, but i was too scared to post/interact with anyone because the fandom was very different pre-2016 and i was scared of being bullied for liking ichihime lol.
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What frustrates me about the "but astarion is popular with women for a reason!" Is that it so blatantly disregards two key things. A) his flagrant racism often goes unmentioned in this scenario. Can you see why he would be as equally offputting to women because of his racism? Can you maybe see why people neglecting to mention this in terms of his "character design" have the privilege to disregard it because it doesn't personally affect them?
And B) what they're really getting at is that they resonate with his struggle for autonomy, particularly sexual autonomy, but... everyone's stories are about their own autonomy. He's not really that special.. Yes, I'm a survivor, yes I've been taught to use my body as a bargaining tool, yes I also personally have the same difficulties he has. I resonate with him a lot. But I ALSO resonate with Karlach! Who was physically altered w/out her consent, who was told she was only good for her body and the damage she could cause, who had to make sacrifices to stay alive but has worked on a truly radical kind of positivity so she can live her life the way SHE wants to live it. I also resonate with Wyll, who has been told his only worth is what he can offer to others, who has incredible burdens placed upon him that he tries desperately to fulfill, who has been sexually harrassed and violated by Mizora, who longs for romance and companionship despite it all. I resonate with all of them. The idea that somehow "well women like him" is a talking point at all simply proves to me that people are legitimately not understanding the actual content they've been given.
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page 1 | page 2 | page 3 | page 4 | page 5 | page 6 | page 7 (you are here) | page 8 | page 9 | page 10 | page 11 | page 12
image desc under the readmore
ID:
In the blue flashback, Tenzō stands with his back to a glass tank. He is narrating:
"While I didn't like the lab, I wasn't scared inside it. My emotion's felt quiet."
"Distant."
"It was like they weren't there at all."
A small red panel shows Kakashi looking down at Tenzō quietly. "...I see," he says.
Beneath that, a small red panel of Tenzō where his body is now, he keeps his head turned down and away, as if ashamed.
"It was only after returning to Konoha...that my body began to quake and shudder," he explains.
The fourth panel shows Rabbit-Taichō telling Tenzō "You look like you're gonna be sick, Cat. Go to the hospital. Make sure that wound isn't infected."
And Tenzō responds "Yessir."
A Narration-box from Tenzō rests above the fifth and sixth panels.
"But I couldn't stomach the thought of the hospital..." it says.
The fifth panel shows Tenzō with his feet braced on the apex of a roof, as though he's inching forward, but his legs are wracked by tremors.
In the sixth panel, his feet are closer together, no longer inching forward on the roof, still shaking.
"I intended to stay in the barracks..." Tenzō says.
In the seventh panel, Tenzō has dropped down to a crouch, reaching out as if going to brace himself with his injured arm.
"Fuck," he says.
He thinks to himself, body swarmed with thin white lines to indicate shuddering, "I'll just kill myself if I try to shunshin while shaking this bad."
/end ID
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Would love to hear ur thoughts on Hades game sometime because I too loved but had beef with the game and I think we are the same ….
yessss, disclaimer I haven't played it for like 3 years and I only played 10 hours/got to the end once before I dropped it so i might be misremembering some things but I stick by my opinions! under the cut cuz this is long as fuck 🫣 my haterism has no limits
ok so basically my grievances w hades can be split into 2 main areas: gameplay + narrative, I'll break them down in that order.
firstly gameplay - roguelikes/lites are my fave genre so I was predominantly approaching hades from this angle + its failure here is the clincher for me.
I found the gameplay repetitive and stale. this isnt a criticism of its permadeath like ive seen some ppl make - I usually relish repetition/grind especially in permadeath-based games bc I find tactical challenge fun + love the learning curve, its soooo rewarding. but hades is ultimately just a glorified button masher. mob/boss movesets are boring + unoriginal, and can generally all be fought the same way. trying to do otherwise drags out fights; it actively discourages emergent gameplay so theres little variance WITHIN runs. the pool of rooms for procedural generation is far too small so theres little variance BETWEEN runs. there's no real challenge to combat, difficulty is mainly increased by heightened mob tankiness as you get further in a run. movement/combat doesn't flow well, its mechanically very weak, relying heavily on its permanent upgrade system instead of developing skill in the way you approach the game. all the weapons feel clunky and don't really offer any unique challenge/benefit so theres virtually no point switching between them and the grind to unlock them all is so pointless… god there are just SOOO many hack n slash crawlers that keep it fresh even for hundreds of hours and hades fails miserably at keeping it fresh for even 5 measly hours :^/
I didnt like the boon system either - its far too simplistic + shallow. its fine to rely on chance, this is part of the random generation, and I think it had a lot of potential in that it was a good way of combining aesthetic w gameplay itself. but this is pretty much the only form of resource management - and theres barely any management to it! theres no reward for exploring different builds, they dont really synergise BETWEEN gods in interesting or useful ways, so the game encourages you to just stick with one god throughout, and biases random generation towards boons youve already collected. part of the fun for me is learning HOW to design a build, and working with the randomiser to play flexibly, but hades just isnt interested in that at all...
also - I don't like the permanent upgrade system, I think this detracts from it as a rogue. every time you should be starting on square 1 - maybe you pick up health upgrades etc throughout each run, and maybe you unlock new weapons etc for the random generation pool, or purely cosmetic upgrades, but the point of permadeath is that it RESETS! zags base health + dmg should be the same 50 hours into the game as when u first open it. make a different genre of game if u dont wanna do that lol. I also think IF youre going to say fuck it and add a permanent upgrade system, you should also add unlockable permanent biome shortcuts bc ur just making it boring as fuck to have to waste time grinding thru earlier biomes with unskippable combat once youre op for them.
I GET that they did this to make the game more accessible* to players who dont typically enjoy rogues, but it just makes it really disappointing for those of us who DO love rogues, and it always feels cheap to me when games are like "well of you want challenge then set the difficulty yourself with these modifiers 🙄" like just make the base difficulty TOUGH up front and then add an easy/story mode and accessibility features* for players who don't want the challenge.. if you're gonna call yourself a rogue the gameplay should be the PRIORITY not a throwaway option
one of my biggest peeves with hades is how people now laud it as one of the best rogues - whenever I mention I like the genre I almost always get asked "oh, like hades?" and it pisses me off so much… its a rogueLITE not roguelike, ie. it has rogue ELEMENTS but its not a true one and imo, it does a pretty shit job implementing them! I would have a lot less resentment towards it if it wasnt marketed as the forefront of the rogue genre - frankly its a very basic rogue with very mid gameplay, its characters/design are by FAR its strong point and it should be sold as such. its misleading and makes me sad that this is what most people think of when they hear rogue :-(
*(side note - accessibility in this game is another major flaw. theres really no excuse for a game as popular as this to be so lacking in accessibility options. allow people to bind keys together or use coloured outlines or have colourblindness settings or alter font/text size etc - its not that hard! dead cells did a great job of this lol)
anyway... moving onto my second criticism - narratively, its also unsatisfying.
the hades plot is, loosely, about a cycle of abuse, so the 2 natural directions to go in with this are either: #1: escaping the cycle, or #2: continuing it forever.
#2 is the easiest to do with a rogue format - bc of permadeath the game is already cyclical, so all you have to do is create an ending which loops perfectly back to the start (smth like 'its impossible to truly defeat/reconcile with his father so even after zag beats him, hades drags him back to the start again). obviously this is a miserable story to tell, but tbh I think it wouldve been interesting + fitting - so much of greek mythos is about cycles and the unchanging nature of the gods, and they LOVED eternal cyclical punishments. plus theres smth rly tragic about zag gradually helping everyone else while no one else can save him from his family LOL
#1 is a bit harder to do - this is the story they WANTED to tell but I just don't think it worked… the driving force plot-wise is his desperation to escape. realistically for this to happen the game needs to be finite, which it can't be due to its rogue nature - somehow you have to end up at the very start again. the main solutions I can think of for this are:
a) after the final boss, insert some time travel shenanigans (easy to fit into the worldbuilding using a character like kronos) and all of zags progress with hades is unspooled. this can be completely out of his control, or it could be a choice the player makes (to end the game here or choose to go back and relive zags past in order to progress npc questlines). eg. what happens in dead cells. again, tragic but it makes more sense to me
-or b) bite the bullet and give the game a completely finite ending after beating hades. if players want to go back and play more to complete other npc questlines, they pick up play from before they beat hades. this isnt explained "narratively" bc the plot is already concluded and now theyre just playing for fun (eg. what going under does)
I also think for a character-focused story-rich game, roguelite was a really terrible choice of genre as it locks every interaction behind pure chance and hours of grinding - just really baffling why they decided to do this, especially when theyve had such success previously making games within different genres (transistor, bastion, pyre). the core of the issue for me is that the devs wanted to create a game that was both story rich AND a rogue - and these things arent mutually exclusive, but the best features of each contradict each other when you try to balance them in a way to appease their respective fans (ie. the challenge/complexity of the gameplay is heavily restricted by keeping it easy for ppl unfamiliar with rogues to pick up, but the strength of the narrative arc is simultaneously weakened by the fact that as a rogue it has to be perpetual bc of permadeath + you're working with procedural generation…)
I'm not going to beef with the artstyle or music bc I rly loved them both (even if I wish the body diversity was better!), or with the interpretations of greek gods bc literally every piece of media abt greek mythos has to decide how to interpret them and I think its silly to be like "this isnt CANON" - since we actually dont HAVE a strict "canon" for many of these stories bc theyve been retold/translated in so many conflicting ways lol. I've just heard ppl complaining abt that and I dont think its worth complaining about 🤷♀️
ANYWAY tl;dr: hades should've been an action-heavy isometric metroidvania… it wouldve made it far easier to focus on character questlines (ie. with respawn points + a fixed map), unified the story they wanted to tell with the gameplay SO much more effectively, and allowed them to reach the full potential of both, whilst also playing up to supergiant's previous game-making strengths. but thats my 2 cents!
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also why is that whenever non WOC vent their frustration, White women think they're doing something by being like "b-but MEN oppress Women more than any fellow woman would!!!"
uuuugh THAT'S NOT THE POINT AND THAT'S NOT FRICKIN CONTEST
First of all why is she making shit up saying that Menalez said she hated White women "more than men"???
Just because something isn't at the top of the nuisance pyramid that it's still not detrimental to our existence and experience within social communities
White women will NEVER be able to handle accountability without deflecting towards men. Yeah Stacie, men are those who raped and killed women for millennias. It was still a racist White woman who harassed me in my workplace (along with other Muslim colleagues). Could we finally able to freely talk about it without any of you coming with their heavy boots to silence us under the "BUT MEN DID WORSE!!!!" sorta deflection???
"snarky about other women" calling out straight up racist women isn't being "snarky" Stacy but ok. Damn, some of you can be so frickin dense. Homegirl is out there preaching for more girl code when the issue is RACIST WOMEN literally treating us like shit, I-
As a Black woman, this kind if tactics is exactly the same as when Black men try to silence us whenever we try to speak about colorism within the Black community. They go like BUT IT'S THE WHITES WHO KILLED US AND PREJUDICED US THE MOST OVER OUR SKIN COLOR" yeah ok, but how does any of that negates the existence of colorism within our community and its insidious consequences on dark skin Black women and Black women representation in media (Black women are basically erased by racially ambiguous exxoticals & biracials e.g Zendaya)
TL;DR: tbh both White women and Black men can be so dishonest and deflective about WOC/Black women expressing they're struggle and I wish they would learn to shut up for once
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