#but like. its all thats keeping me going at this point

[kaletalecowboy]

1 year??? of playing this game????

[snekdood]

"if we make america worse and more of a dictatorship that will be even harder to unravel and make it the way we want the country to be, maybe then everyone will join our Glorious Revolution!" bb girl you cant even be in the same room with someone who thinks you should vote, how in tf do you think you're gonna unite people to fight in The Revolution with you? it's gonna be you and your 5 friends, i hate to break it to you.

[deoidesign]

Joked about Adam being divorced one too many times that now I'm getting anti-divorce ads

Adam think of the children... Please...

[starry-bi-sky]

i have... ✨Danyal Al Ghul Headcanons✨ but specifically for my yaelokre danyal oneshot

There's also the tumblr post here but I recommend the link in the title because its the ao3 version, and that one is edited and has some stuff in it that's not in the tumblr post, and will be the version I'm using.

So for summary: this Danyal is also from a Demon Siblings Au where Danny is five years older than Damian. However, things turned out a bit differently, and Danny and Damian had a fantastic relationship with one another. Danny loved music and regularly came up with songs to sing to Damian with. Specifically the folk band Yaelokre's EP "Hayfields" (seriously go fucking listen to it its sooo good. Harpy Hare is the second song but its my favorite. Special shoutout to @gascansposts for introducing the band to me)

He falls off a train when he's twelve and Damian is seven while the two of them and Talia are on mission. He ends up with magically induced amnesia and wakes up in Arkansas while the Fentons are on their yearly Divorce-iversary visit to Aunt Alica, and since he can only remember his name, he ends up being taken into their care.

---------------

Yaelokre Danny has the same facial scar as Things in Threes Danyal, since he was initially another version of him where things turned out better. I'm debating on whether or not I should take it away however, and give him a different scar (maybe from when he fell off the train?), just because the scar is a pretty key identifier for Ti3 Danyal.

-----------------

Danny frequently visits Aunt Alicia in Arkansas! Well, only after he gets settled in and stuff. He doesn't really like the city that much and prefers the countryside where Alicia lives. I know she lives in a cabin but I'm changing it to a farm, so she puts Danny to work and gets him to help her.

I don't want to confine his hobbies to only being star stuff, because people tend to have more than one hobby and I feel like it reduces him to one-dimensionality, so he likes to garden, and learns guitar. His room becomes filled with plants, and he turns their roof into a rooftop greenhouse right below to OPS Center.

He has a complex relationship with the weapons from his past, but he's not... like... appalled by it? When he finds his weapons in the Fenton attic all he thinks is that they're his weapons, and he starts carrying a knife on him afterwards. Essentially he becomes fascinated with weaponry because its one of the few physical ties he has to his past, and while he's not training like he is in the League, he allows his strong muscle memory to guide him through his katas.

Danny likes climbing things. This causes Problems For Everyone Else.

----------------

Danny was not the "kinder Al Ghul" in the League. His kindness extended to his brother and family, and that's it. To everyone else he had high expectations out of them, and the pride you'd expect from the grandson of Ra's Al Ghul and trained by its top members. While he wasn't like, unnecessarily cruel or anything, he wasn't merciful either.

This transfers post-train fall as him coming off as no-nonsense and unforgiving. He's not fond of the idea of giving people second chances, and is skeptical of the idea. He's disgusted by incompetency and views it as an unforgivable offense, especially if he thinks that the person should know better, although he's not sure why. Some egocentrism for the soul.

He doesn't like being touched by anyone who isn't family, and gets irritated when anyone grabs him or holds onto him for extended amounts of time. Dash has gotten hit so many times. With Jack Fenton's tendency for abrupt physical affection, it doesn't make it any better. I'd argue it'd make it worse because Danny doesn't want to be touched more often than not.

------------------

Danyal had a red scarf in the League that he wore on his last mission, it came off before he fell off and caught itself on the roof. Damian still has it and took it with him to Wayne Manor. He's got it locked in his room and takes it out when he's alone and missing Danny the most. One time he forgot to put it away before leaving his room, and Dick was visiting the manor for something and found it. Damian found him holding it and freaked out.

Dick could only say "I've never seen you wear this, Damian, this is really pretty--" before Damian shoved him to the floor and stole it out of his hands, before screaming at him; "Don't touch this! You don't ever touch this! This is mine! You hear me!?"

It caused such a commotion that the rest of the family present came to see what the fuss was about, and Damian kicked them all out of his room. Dick is the one brother Damian's the closest with, so the fact he reacted so strongly shocked them all.

This is likely what leads to the "Danyal" conversation.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

I'm surprised you haven't posted any Welcome home stuff recently! Honestly kinda makes me sad since I love your WH art and stuff

yea y'all are gonna have to be Patient w/ me bc

a) i have like. a week left to pack all of my stuff before i need to shove everything into a uhaul and leave, so its crunch time! leaving little to no energy/interest in anything else

b) to be honest my mental health is the worst its been in years - which is fine, its whatever, i can deal. it's not as bad as it could be and im handling it! like a champ, even! but also its leaving little to no energy/interest in anything else

c) had a minor crisis over my art and how i interact w/ WH, and i realized im not scribbling enough of what I want. ive mostly been trying to please people and do as asked and thats! not good! so i want to temper expectation & reassert that im Not a WH art blog - its just a hyperfixation / something i love rn. i draw what i enjoy & what i want in the moment.

[ra-vio]

semester is almost over. im dying

[bruciemilf]

slides into ur inbox as a tim-liker not to start a fight but to genuinely ask if i could gently change ur mind👀👀 bc tim's not that bad if you'd give him a chance (he is very cringe tho

It's not that I don't like him!! But sometimes it just gets exhausting to see "he suffered so much to keep the big bad bat alive" takes like Alfred wasn't right there

[packet-of-staples]

FALLEN IDOL WHAT THE FUCK!!!!! THE BROTHERS ARE FIGHTING!!!

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[secretlythatsme]

i really love dc x dp tbh but i hate how so many fics end up making the batfam dumb as shit. and i don't mean in a "loveable goof" kind of way but in a genuine "these people don't have the skills or intelligence to be heroes" kind of way. which is just antithetical to their entire thing

sometimes it's because the writer just genuinely doesn't know anything about the batfam or what they've been through so they come across as idiots. and other times it's because the writer is writing op ghost king danny or just generally op danny and they genuinely think he could outsmart or beat them. more often than not, it's a combination of the two.

it's just so sad. like not only is it disrespectul to the batfam, essentially getting rid of all the skills and experience they have just to prop up danny, but it also makes things a lot more boring imo. don't get me wrong, i don't mind the occasional "main character is super op" kind of story, but it's boring when like 70% of fics are like that and there's no real challenge or obstacle for him. part of why the show danny phantom was so fun was that it was exciting and chair gripping to see danny have to deal with his new ghost powers, figuring out how to deal with ghost attacks or vlad, and dealing with school and his parents on top of that.

but often, dc x dp fics just,, get rid of any challenge for him. sure batman is a skilled detective but danny will always be able to trick him! sure cass has been trained since birth to read people's body language but this random ghost teen knows how to conceal and control everything!! yeah damian has also been trained since birth to fight and kill but this random guy from the midwest who just started fighting in his teens is so much better!!! like, alright. it's fun every now and then but it sucks when so much of the dc x dp content is just people acting like the batfam are the worst vigilantes/detectives in the world.

and honestly i still feel this way even with the ghost king danny fics because how? he's never had to deal with people obsessively reading his body language or reading between the lines. he's had to deal with hiding stuff sure but his parents aren't the most observant people - their whole deal was being neglectful. even as a ghost king, why would he know how to outsmart, take advantage of, or beat the batfam in any capacity when he would still mostly deal with ghosts. it's a completely different skill set here - one that he likely wouldn't be prepared for. it'd be fine if they at least attempted to explain why danny would have those skills (like league danny aus) but most of them don't.

and i'm not saying danny couldn't do it at all, especially if it's a ghost king au, but i'm just tired of seeing the batfam constantly downplayed in these fics Just to make danny look better, smarter, stronger, etc. ik most people in the fandom are just danny fans but it really shows with how they treat, characterize, and shit on the dc characters just to prop danny up. it also serves to occasionally make danny look like an asshole when he intentionally messes with them and basically commits psychological torture for a goof.

[du-hjarta-skulblaka]

So yeah avoiding my phone didn't work and also meant I sat on the kitchen floor staring into space for about 3 hours before Alfie woke up but hey at least I didn't break anything

Them being around is helping a little but they're also struggling and it fuckin sucks bc I know we're both just. Rotating money stress in our minds

[crypt1dcorv1dae]

Metalheads who don't like/respect Babymetal bc their "look" isn't, what? Traditionally metal? are so cringe. Like bro it's an alternative music scene we're supposed to say FUCK tradition????? What's wrong w y'all... Embarrassing

And also they are missing out bc Babymetal fucking rules

[waywardsalt]

thoughts on totk now that i’ve beaten it

under the cut bc of length and bc there is honestly a fair bit of negative stuff

i don’t really think i can say that i liked totk.

it’s fine, it’s genuinely fucking incredible from a technical standpoint with ultrahand, recall, the three map layers and with how smoothly it ran for me. as a game it’s fine.

i’ll start with the things i dislike and end with what i actually liked

i honestly didn’t really like ultrahand? i disliked how much the game leaned on it, since so many puzzles and whatever just boiled down to ‘make something that’ll work’ and it just... it was far too clunky for me to really enjoy using it, outside of using some of the same few designs for traversal. there were a few times when i could see what the game wanted me to do with ultrahand and the given zonai parts and sometimes it just... didn’t work at all. more often than not ultrahand was frustrating for me to use so the game’s reliance on it just made it into a chore sometimes.

in a similar vein the dungeons were serious letdowns. i mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re fine, they had good themes and (mostly) had good aesthetics and general looks and identities to them, but the fact that they were just... basically twenty-ish minute little things was kind of disappointing. i hate that they all had the exact same ‘go hit x number of switches’ gimmick. it really limited what you could do and fucked with the dungeon design, too. the only one where that really worked for me was the fire temple, which was my favorite overall. the water temple was especially dismal, with the least inspired look and just being an astoundingly easy experience. the puzzles in those dungeons were so awfully easy, too, especially since half of the time they just hand you what you need so you barely need to really assess the situation and put a plan together

i hated the water dungeon’s little mini-areas where you do a single piss-easy puzzle to automatically get your prize, i hated the wind temple’s god damn ‘pull a lever and get your prize’ kind of puzzles, i hated how soul-crushingly disappointed i felt when i took a look at the lightning temple’s map and realized that every fucking floor had a singular room just for the switch puzzle. god forbid it’s as fun as the lowest level of that temple. i really miss stuff like mini-bosses or rooms where you have to do a puzzle in order to just... progress, i miss dungeons that i could get lost in or spend a while in or just had... something more interesting or some more substance so that i can’t just breeze through like it’s a glorified shrine. most of the puzzles in those dungeons were simpler than some shrines i did.

i didn’t care to do much exploration since there honestly isn’t much motivation to explore the surface map if you’ve already played botw, and the scarcity of materials this time really got to me, it took me a while to have a half-decent stock of materials, and i still had trouble not running out of stuff even though i was using amiibos to stock up on some things. the money situation was rough, too... a lot of things are cheaper to sell, but some armor is still really expensive plus you have to pay the great fairies to upgrade your equipment in addition to having the correct materials. that especially felt odd- having to grab a handful of (goddamn hard to get) lynel guts is hard enough to upgrade the soldier’s armor, but you want me to cough up 500 rupees, too??

(the scarcity of monster guts also got on my nerves, but i’ll just chalk that up to just some kind of really weird difficulty thing. it was annoying until i tracked down the stronger monsters.)

the story is probably the weakest part of the game to me. it’s really hard to have a baseline investment when you don’t care about these characters, anyway, and what i saw in this game’s story still failed to endear me to hardly any of them. link’s role frustrated me; he just comes off like a tool rather than a character this time through, he barely has any actual relevancy to the story segments beyond being the guy who can use the master sword and being the player’s vehicle to get from point a to b in the story. the blank stare and limited emoting worked in botw because... there’s a given reason for his lack of outward emotion in the past, plus he has no memory in the present. it makes sense. but this time around, he’s gotten memories in the years between this and the last game, but he just feels like a background character in most of the story beats. 

he has no role in the memories and in the present just exists to gather some stuff for other people, he gets the master sword from zelda and then helps the other sages get their secret stones, but he’s barely addressed as his own character in the grand scheme of things unless he’s being directly spoken to. he’s just the swordsman capable of wielding the master sword and zelda’s chosen protector as far as the story is concerned. he has no opinions outside of doing what he’s told and looking for zelda. at least not as far as i could really tell. at least in botw, the story directly concerns him, and it’s his story we’re following. this time around zelda and the sages seem like the most important characters, link’s just... there, doing what he’s been told to.

the new sages are fine, none of them really endeared themselves to me, and i will say that making the player watch essentially the exact same cutscene each time you finish a dungeon was BAFFLING. they were long and you learned almost nothing new after the first one, and there was nothing done to make them very distinct to each individual pair of sages or their respective regions; at the very least, it could have been interesting to meet the ancient sages not in the exact same stone garden, but perhaps at the top of a snowy mountain for the rito, near a volcano or something for the goron, maybe in a shallow pool of water for the zora, and in the desert for the gerudo- but no, they’re all effectively the same thing just with the speaking character swapped out with some minor changes.

(the sages themselves are a pain in the ass to use, having to chase them down to activate their power or accidentally activating a power when you don’t want it; yunobo was honestly my favorite, but because i generally defaulted to having them all activated at all times, i had a lot of trouble with tulin blowing shit away from me when i was trying to grab it while midair. they’re half-decent for combat)

i didn’t really care for rauru or sonia, either. rauru in the present as a ghost was fine, he was kind of interesting and seemed to have changed from his time in the past, but he never managed to be a character i particularly liked. i wasn’t really a fan of his... arrogance? or something in the past scenes, and he never really came off as very interesting. sonia was nearly completely uninteresting which is a shame since she has an interesting design, she just felt delegated to the role of supporting rauru and zelda and then dying to motivate them.

ganondorf is a character i was really looking forward to seeing, and it really fucking sucks that he’s so god damn one-dimensional this time! the story can’t be fucked to delve into him beyond just giving us scenes that just tell us that he’s evil and wants to rule hyrule and get the secret stones and nothing else because fuck having complex villains, i guess. especially frustrating because within the game itself you can draw more interesting motivations up for him, but the game really just doubles-down on him being evil for the fuck of it and wanting to end the world because uhhhh... he’s evil don’t fucking worry about it

the ignoring of the triforce in this game sucks in that way, too, because the way the triforce works and how it can grant wishes made it a much more interesting goal for ganondorf to attain, rather than some poorly-named ‘secret stones’ that do nothing more than just amplify power or something. it sucks how black-and-white this damn story is and how it seems like it just wants to do away with any possible nuance or gray area. no one but the bad guys or side characters are flawed in any actually interesting or significant way.

at least ganondorf was still the most interesting character in the flashbacks.

and then zelda, oh god ZELDA. i honestly really liked her in botw. i liked how you saw her as a flawed, insecure, pressured teen, and how you saw her struggles to relate to link and how she eventually warmed up to him. you saw her as a flawed person who develops and as someone who cares deeply about her friends and her duties and gets frustrated by her failings.

and then in totk a lot of her more interesting traits- her interest in sheikah tech, her excitement over field study and research, her more defining traits as this incarnation of zelda- are basically sanded down and she’s just this perfect flawless princess with great power and an insanely passive role in the past beyond finally taking some kind of action after one of her friends dies and she’s pushed to the brink. cool. great.

she has practically no flaw in totk. if anyone in the present talks about her, they have nothing bad to say and just want to please her and follow her orders, she is right in telling the gerudo how to train their troops she is right even when misheard to tell people to put themselves in danger and she is hardly meaningfully questioned when her imposter is doing very clearly suspicious shit. neither the story nor any of the characters wants to let her be flawed. she’s just perfect in damn near every way and barely retains any interesting characterization she got in botw. there are some interesting snippets in her being a teacher and setting up memorials to those who died in the calamity, but there’s hardly any more than that, and it makes it really hard for me to give a damn about her. she’s not interesting this time.

the whole thing with zelda becoming a dragon too, is... it’s fine. it’s ok. but the fact that she turns back at the end with no problem whatsoever is one hell of a fucking misstep. why talk about draconification being forbidden for a good reason anyways if it doesn’t actually matter anyways??? if you never actually see any of those fucking repercussions why even bring them up??? i really feel like it would have been more effective for there to have been actual consequences for zelda beyond just fucking flying around half-conscious for a millennium or whatever- have her lose her memory when she’s brought back! there you go! there’s the reason why draconification is forbidden! there’s the thing about losing yourself! plus, zelda losing her memories as a result would mirror link having lost his memories in botw! that has so much more weight and significance then ‘oh uh ignore the warnings from a while back she’s completely fine dw abt it’ i hate that she’s back just like that without any of the consequences that the game suggests.

the dragon’s tears in general kinda just felt weaker than botw’s memories anyways bc you’re more just. watching stuff happen then actually learning anything. it has less characters and yet i feel like you only get to know like half of the important ones. like three of them are all about the same event. a few times they just replay parts of old memories in new ones. if they ever reference a past memory they just show you what they’re referencing instead of leaving you to piece it together. just play the voices or something don’t break the flow of things to play a clip of something i’ve already seen.

plus the fact that totk... barely acknowledges that it’s a sequel to botw really rubs me the wrong way. i understand that loz is extremely loose with its lore, but totk is a direct sequel set in the same world a few years later, and yet the events and characters of botw have might as well been forgotten and its all either ignored, brushed aside, or straight up replaced by something else for no good reason. the continuity between these games is absolutely dismal and to see the different ways in which the events and concepts or botw are just... disregarded really just left a bad taste in my mouth.

just- i love good stories and worlds in video games, and while some games can coast by for me by feeling good to play, having a good and engaging story and characters is usually essential to my enjoyment of a game, and when i don’t care about to the point of disliking the story and characters, and when none of the important areas are fascinating or distinct enough from each other, and when the game even fails to really reel me in with the gameplay...

i wanted to like totk, but it really just did not work for me. i just ended up feeling frustrated and disappointed and even sometimes bored with all of the major stuff and man. totk is really, REALLY, not for me, and it just left me wanting to play older zelda games instead.

...

HOWEVER! there were actually some things i really loved about totk! it’s not all doom and gloom! (well, not all doom, at least)

so! the music was great! not all of it really fit or made a lot of sense with the context in which they played or failed to evoke the feeling they were meant to, but the new tracks in this game were great! i especially love the first two phases of the fire temple’s theme, the depths music, and most of the new battle and boss themes. zelda games almost never fail when it comes to the music.

i did genuinely like the fire temple- yunobo’s ability was used the best in this dungeon, and it had the best five switches gimmick, i loved how you had to hit the gongs (sometimes having to construct a path to account for the weaknesses of yunobo’s ability) and how it then ‘scared’ each of the five statues holding a part of the gate- it was very cute and fit in very well with the general feel of that part of the story. it was the best in terms of difficulty and complexity, but it didn’t have the best boss- the lightning temple had the best boss, and i will admit that even if most of them were easy, i really enjoyed the mirror puzzles, as well as the process to unlocking the dungeon. the wind temple had my favorite visual identity and aesthetic, though, i liked it being a part of this old rito song, and how it was the most distinct in looks from the other dungeons.

the sky islands were honestly fun, even if they weren’t all that interesting. getting to some of the harder-to-reach islands were some of my favorite times i had to use ultrahand, and stuff like the zonai forge island and the one orblike island with the mirror puzzle, and pretty much all of the more complicated parts of the sky islands were a lot of fun to explore and figure out.

being able to ride on the dragons was just really cool, and the fact that they come out of the chasms was fun.

the new horns for the monsters were cool, it helps differentiate the different monster strengths and i just thought they were really neat.

the quest with lurelin village was fun, even if the pirates just being monsters was a real let-down.

the stable trotters were also a fun bunch of characters, that was a good, new way to open up fairy fountains.

all of the new stuff with the yiga was really fun, like getting their outfit and being able to pretend to be one of them and learning the blademaster attack- so much fun it was so cute.

most of the new outfits are really good and useful, and while a bit janky and not that great, the house-building bit near tarrey was endearing.

while none of the main characters interested me, i really, especially liked tauro and yona and penn. for some reason they just appealed to me and i really wish they had bigger parts in the game because they’re interesting and they have good designs and i’d really like to know more about them.

the underground gerudo shelter was pretty cool, to be honest, and the look of the caves was really cool.

i adored the proving grounds shrines- easily my favorite shrines in the entire game, i had no problem spending a decent amount of time in those kinds of shrines, they were fantastic.

the new ingredients and recipes and new weapons were cool.

the way you basically return to the area you started at on your way to ganondorf is pretty cool, that whole path is really neat.

ganondorf in general was a pretty cool boss, even if he ended up being kind of easy for me. the whole final boss sequence was neat.

by FAR, though, my absolute favorite part of this game was 100% the depths. the fact that there was just an entire second layer to the map that was the same size as the surface, just inverted and dark and filled with new bosses and locations... i spent hours down there without going back up to the surface and absolutely had a BLAST screwing around in the dark, lighting up my path with brightblooms and tossing together little vehicles with lights so that i could get to the next lightroot off in the distance. the depths was probably where i ended up using zonai vehicles the most, and it was honestly pretty fun to go around spotting and reaching every lightroot, coming across different mines and weird little landforms and coliseums and yiga camps. the music and plantlife and look of the depths were so good, and it really felt distinct from the rest of the game in a very good way. doing all of the lightroots and getting enough zonaite to max out link’s energy cells was definitely a good move since it made finding shrines and dealing with later zonai machine stuff easier.

overall, tears of the kingdom was a severely mixed bag for me, and while there was stuff i did like, i don’t think it’s enough to really get me to say that i really liked this game overall- after all most of the stuff i disliked was unavoidable parts of the games, and it definitely put a hamper on my interest in the rest of the time. totk is fine, but it’s really not my thing. 

[potted-cilantro]

god who invented this 'friends can't be affectionate' shit and 'romance is a necessity and the default so we're treating every single relationship as a binary' and 'the words in your language only support this binary it is impossible to describe a relationship outside it' bullshit can we get rid of it please

[the-gayest-sky-kid]

You can in fact do whatever you want forever!! If it's not as convincing when you say it to yourself, here I am saying it to you as well. And it's cute to see you expressing yourself comfortably, even if you were contradictory, who cares. Kill the identity police inside your head or whatever

you guys are going to have me crying like for real

[themyscirah]

This is technically a Diana's age poll but I framed it partially around Julia's rescue because that's the event I need to contextualize and whether or not Diana is a thing yet is p important for my purposes. I would keep the Pérez run and postcrisis continuity in mind when answering this bc that's when this is relevant but I'd keep in mind that even though Diana is very young there (like early 20s) we don't know I don't think if she ages differently as a child (esp as a themysciran AND being made from clay) and in some versions she is older than she looks and was made earlier

Edit: I accidentally logic-ed this out in the tags lol 🤦‍♀️but feel free to still vote however you want. Going to publish this anyway bc I think I made some good points later in my tags