#but ive seen some spoilers

[wow-an-unfunny-joke]

Knowing Chilchuck is a dad really changes the tone of some of his interactions- he really does act like a tired dad sometimes

[hinamie]

9 / 266

[wienners]

"dude its not that embarassing to rewatch some creepypasta stuff you liked as a teenager" the character i imprinted on like a baby duck at 16 was a demon from new jersey that acts like the humanization of every offspring song and canonically listens to scissor sisters. His favorite color is purple and his favorite pokemon is gengar. He leaves people notes with emojis on them. He acts like a beetlejuice scare actor at halloween horror nights. His catchphrase is "feeling sassy?" Hes (allegedly) worked with every war criminal throughout history and been every serial killer. even the gay ones. he ate a baby. his animal motif is a rabbit. hes kind of based off donnie darko. he talks to his cats in a baby voice. he wears a white fedora that makes every video he wears it in feel dated by like 7 years. hes 5'3. he hacked a girls tumblr blog. he added a laugh track over a video of him killing people. he named a chainsaw rex. he torments people by playing frank sinatra at them. his name comes from an animal collective song. theres a canon blog entry where he makes the speakers blare rob zombie before he enters a room, then holds a guy at gunpoint to describe what he did to to him while "making sure to leave in all the cool parts". Hes like ten tumblr sexymen traits rolled into one. His actor has gone on record saying heath ledgers joker inspired his acting choices. Sometimes his voice gets distorted and it makes him sound like bill ciphers first year on HRT. Hes basically like my artistic muse. For some fucking reason i associate the song cake by the ocean with him. I unfortunately really need him carnally. I firmly believe that if everymanhybrid didn't require a masters degree in creepypasta autism to comprehend, he would've caused more teenage stabbings than the slenderman incident and more kin war tumblr scenarios than nagito komaeda.

[wispscribbles]

thank you for feeding us such quality ghost soap art mwah bye

And thank you for eating it up!! I love feeding you all w art of the murder lads - Here's some more to chew on :D Tarot Ghoap!

[pmpknsoup]

i am prepared to go to fucking war for alice rn. why are people acting like shes a bad person for ignoring colin when she knew sam was ACTIVELY BEING PURSUED by something she has KNOWN TO BE DANGEROUS!!! she lost sight of him and he wasnt answering her calls, ofc shes fucking worried.

[baba-yada]

i feel like sometimes people treat Dimension 20 as a normal TV show, and not as a improvisational show. like it's an 100% scripted, written show, that 100% of what is said has a deep, intentional, serious reflection of who the cast are as people

like yea, analysis and breaking things down is hella fun, fascinating and engaging. but it baffles me when people assume things about the players themselves as people, from something they said in the heat of the moment, or as a joke

yes, i know that doesn't mean we can't criticize the things people say, bc implicit bias and blah blah blah- but i genuinely think people's attempt to turn every little thing someone did or said into a big bout of discourse is just so genuinely exhausting

[medi-bee]

isat pokemon au, my liege?

my rambling in tags

[roach-works]

for all its (apparently many?) flaws, i really enjoyed the fallout show, and i'm ride or die for maximus, obviously. but one of the things i enjoyed about lucy's arc isn't that she wasn't necessarily proved RIGHT or WRONG about her own moral code, she didn't learn that either kindness is its own reward or that niceness is suicidal in a fight for survival.

what she learned, i am pretty sure, is that context matters. you can't actually help people if you don't know anything about them. you can't enact justice if you don't know what the case on trial is. you can't come in out of nowhere and make snap decisions and be anything more than one more complication in a situation that was fucked up long before you were born.

that's what we see over and over: she comes in out of nowhere, she makes an attempt to help based on her immediate assumption of what's going on, and then everything continues to be dangerous and complicated and fucked up. she doesn't let the stoners explain that some ghouls will genuinely try to eat you the minute they get the chance, and she pays for it. she jumps to the wrong conclusion in vault 4 because not everyone who looks like a monster IS a monster, and she pays for it. yeah a lot of the time cooper is abusing her for his own satisfaction, but when she's a free agent she's a loose canon and it's not because the show is punishing her for TRYING to do the right thing. it's because the show is punishing her for jumping to conclusions.

this show gets a lot of laughs from Fish Out Of Water situations, but i think that even though cooper explicitly says "you'll change up here and not for the better, you'll become corrupted and selfish just to survive" that's not the real message. what lucy learns is how important it is to hear people out, meet them where they're at, and get the full story.

that's why the final confrontation with her father is so important. she hears everyone out. she gets the full story. she listens to all of it. and then she acts with full knowledge of situation. that's what the wasteland taught her: not to be cruel, not to be selfish, but that taking the time to understand what's actually going on really matters.

this is a show that's incredibly concerned with truth and lies. everyone is lying to each other and themselves. scenes change over and over as they're recontextualized. love and hate and grief and hope are just motives in a million interconnected shell games, not redeeming justifications. maximus's many compounded falsehoods are approved of by his own superior, who finds a corrupt pawn more useful than an honorable one. cooper finds out his wife has her own private agenda and this betrayal keeps him going for centuries. lucy's entire society is artificial and from the moment they find out they're not safe and maybe never have been, all the vault dwellers are scrambling to deal with that.

ANYWAY. i just think it's neat. sci fi is a lens to analyze our present through a hypothetical future, and i think it's pretty significant for this current age we live in, where we're all grappling with misinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and deepfakes, there's a huge anxiety over how hard it can be to find the truth out about anything. i think the show suggests that it's always worth the work to try.

[lokh]

ive been thinking about this but. i think shuro understands laios' character pretty well, but he doesn't value his strengths or interests (monster knowledge). in the DVD extra where laios imagines what would have happened if they'd been on better terms, shuro STILL leaves because he thinks his chances are better with a trained crew (which....... is likely to be true but. look at how he ended up anyway lmao). meanwhile kabru recognises that while the party isnt particularly strong, the reason they get so far in the first place is BECAUSE of what laios knows about monsters. shuro seems aware that laios knows about monsters or has an interest in them, but views this as frivolous and a waste of time and doesn't seem to realise how much this knowledge carried them in the first place

[midnightdemonhunter]

HELLO G13? COME IN G13. C4N U H3AR M3?

[jounosparticles]

so. fyodor sees himself as a servant of god, as if he is a jesus like-figure. and nikolai was teamed up with fyodor but eventually chose to betray and try to kill him, much like judas.

and jesus knew he was going to be betrayed by judas, as fyodor accepted and challenged nikolai’s betrayal.

judas also felt great remorse and sadness as well as guilt for his betrayal after jesus’s death; similar to nikolai’s conflicted sadness towards fyodor dying.

this implies that fyodor and nikolai is a strange, fucked up version of jesus and judas. in this essay i will-

[slavonicrhapsody]

coincidence

OK SORRY you sent this when the first DLC trailer dropped and I never got around to answering it. I guess now that the DLC is out we actually have some more context to discuss… yay?

So obviously the columns in the Volcano Manor throne room look pretty similar in shape to Belurat’s columns — they’re both spiraled Solomonic columns. When I first saw Belurat’s columns in the trailer I IMMEDIATELY thought of Volcano Manor. Upon closer inspection though, they look pretty drastically different stylistically:

The Manor’s columns are very loose and naturalistic with very fancy, baroque ornamentation, whereas Belurat’s columns have a very rigid, geometric structure and a tighter coil. The design philosophy feels so different to me that it’s really making me doubt that they’re meant to be related? but let’s go through the design’s symbolism and see if Belurat has anything in common with Rykard that might link the design philosophies together:

According to the Spira sorcery of the tower priests, “The spiral is a normalized Crucible current that, one day, will form a column that stretches to the gods.”

Belurat is full of spiral designs… in columns, curtains, art… even the Tower itself is a spiral:

“Sacred seal of soiled amber engraved with a spiral tree design. The majesty of the white tower, stretching to reach the gods, even inspired a secret faith in the invaders, the people of the Erdtree.” (Spiraltree seal)

The Spiral is the central visual motif of the Hornsent’s faith… it represents the energy of the Crucible, which the Hornsent sought to harness with their Tower spiraling into the sky to touch the divine. I bet this spiral current of the Crucible is why the Hornsent revere horn growth: “Horns are sublime artifacts to hornsent, and their presence confirms the belief that they are a chosen people.” (Immunizing Horn Charm +2) …horns grow in spiral formations, and appear on beings that don’t normally have horns due to the influence of the Crucible.

(Golden Horn Tender)

So… does the spiraled Crucible current have anything to do with Rykard, or if he didn’t build the throne room, whoever did? Well, Rykard does have a Crucible knight in his service, which might indicate that Rykard has some kind of allegiance to Crucible concepts… the spiraled columns are really serpentine looking, and I think serpents could also be related to the Crucible because like horns, scales are also evidence of the Crucible’s primal influence:

“A talisman fashioned from a scale that embodies the aspects of various creatures. Said to have grown on the human body long ago. A vestige of the crucible of primordial life. Born partially of devolution, it was considered a signifier of the divine in ancient times, but is now increasingly disdained as an impurity as civilization has advanced.”

so maybe serpent worship is just another way of revering the Crucible, different from how the Hornsent worship the Crucible? (they don’t revere snakes in any way… we don’t see any snakes in Belurat)

Ok but honestly, I don’t really believe that the Volcano Manor columns are so important that they’re meant to represent the Crucible current in the same way that the Hornsent’s entire city is meant to… you only ever see these columns in this room. I think that they’re just supposed to be decorative because Rykard was a fancy guy, and because the spiral motif evokes the Manor’s whole theme of serpent worship.

TL;DR the columns in Belurat explicitly represent the spiraled Crucible current, and the ones in Volcano Manor’s throne room are probably just decorative and totally unrelated

[sonknuxadow]

something so beautiful about how shadow with huge demon wings is probably something that would have been widely made fun of a few years ago but the general consensus on it now is that its the coolest thing to ever happen . peace and love on the black comet

[extravalgant]

i looove azteca from like. a narrative stand point

because we have this hero and thats you. were practically the stuff of legends by arc 2 just because of what kind of experience we have under our belt. we've never lost a fight, and it's assumed that we never will. that's how powerful the wizard is—everyone expects them to win, expects light to triumph shadow

and when we fail.... well. it shocks everyone doesnt it? people get angry. people get disappointed. to the wizard, who has never known failure or disappointment, it must feel like an entirely new thing. this culture was here for thousands and thousands of years—a culture and a people you never knew about until you were brought into the spiral.

and now because of you its gone. because you failed to save it and stop morganthe, its gone. and i think merle's passiveness about this situation hits a little differently this way—i read it more as disappointment, anyways. and to someone who has never known defeat, not to this capacity, with this many casualities and victims, the disappointment feels a little more crushing, doesn't it? the wizard is supposed to be a hero summoned from the legends, from a place not beyond a spiral where they had not heard of magic, and it feels like they let everyone down.

this imo is where morganthe truly establishes herself as a villain. i mean she already was a villain before imo BUT bringing a grieving man back from the dead to puppet around AND destroying a world is just straight up evil (and i love that). people like to complain about the malistaire bit which is valid in some cases but i think it really does sell the frivolity in which she chooses to go about things. like hey heres a man you killed with your own hands. probably when you were young. i brought him back from the dead to use as my pawn and now you have to fight him again btw. using a dead grieving man for my own goals. and then the fact that we cant beat him at the end, to 'send him back', is just another way she gets a leg up on us. she leaves us with unfinished business and xibalba destroying azteca is just icing on the already fucked up cake she's given us.

shes TAUNTING us. and this is important because it does come back to us in khrysalis—no doubt the wizard is still haunted by the sins of their past; their failure to save azteca. they have to get through this bit, to learn to let it go, before they can learn shadow magic. after all this, it's still stuck with us—our failure, one that she spearheaded.

dont even get me started on the wizard learning shadow magic maaaaaan because now they share one thing in common—they know shadow magic. they wield shadow magic. and shadow magic is so reviled that it's forbidden. no one else but her can really understand the isolation that comes with learning shadow magic, and it parallels the wizard and her even more because neither of them had a choice! the shadow magi turned morganthe into the shadow queen she is today, and we are subsequently forced to learn shadow magic and do the same if they ever have a chance at defeating her. i love it. i LOVE it. i love azteca... i love khrysalis....

[moonselkies]

thats his fursona!!!!

[delicatetaysversion]

so many thoughts but i CANNOT stop laughing that all that time we thought louis had some elaborate mind control type reason for staying with armand and it was really just.. HIM TRYING TO MAKE HIS EX JEALOUS SLSKSKKSKSKS