#can't post to wiki without it getting removed??

[floofiestboy]

Daidaidaidaidaikirai by Amala - English Lyrics

I've failed to post my TL anywhere else so I guess I might as well put it on my Tumblr.

Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate You So Much - English Lyrics

It's all, all your fault. You're such a pain, it makes me wanna hurl. Clinging to things, fawning over things… I was stupid to think I'd get something out of it. I'm a people-pleaser coming to pay my respects, So gimme an hater life. I've got a shallow capacity, thanks for your patronage. Basically, my life's always been drab.

"How hateful! How pathetic!" The way I can't ignore you makes it worse- How maddening, how vexing. I've had just about enough of blowing my own horn. (Look around!!) The opposite of like is apathy ≈ proof that you're connected. A relationship I can't cut off… I'd love to just look away from it.

This is what you'd call hate speech. We're posting these anonymous declarations onto our very lives. We spasm every time those ceaseless sirens draw near. We've obeyed red lights all this time.

Point is, I absolutely- -hate hate hate hate hate you. OMG, how pathetic, I just wanna say- -bye bye bye bye bye already. Can't tell what's going on in that mind, and thus there's- -no no no no no solution. How's it? Do you absolutely- -hate hate hate hate me now? Ah, all pain and no gain, nothing, not see. It'd be like nicotine to think back on the what-ifs. Going back because I missed you was a stupid mistake, mistake. Thanks for being a great bad example. You've left an aftertaste that won't ever disappear.

There, there, what a good girl. Strewing your smile around, scatter scatter, what a good girl. But you know, but you know, what's your true nature? Can you even tell right from wrong? (lol) Sigh. Shrouded by an environment that traps people with demerits. "Ow! Ow! Ow!" you cry, "But no one asks!" you'll say for life, but- Serves you right.

People are mirrors. The truth is, it's codependence. Even if you shut it all down, it still sticks around. My weakness feels so cowardly. It's all, all your fault I say. It won't stop, it makes me wanna hurl. Rather, it would've been so much easier if I could've cut it off.

Point is, I absolutely- -hate hate hate hate hate you. OMG, how pathetic, I just wanna say- -bye bye bye bye bye already. Can't tell what's going on in that mind, and thus there's- -no no no no no solution. How's it? Do you absolutely- -hate hate hate hate me now? Ah, all pain and no gain, nothing, not see. It'd be like nicotine to think back on the what-ifs. Going back because I missed you was a stupid mistake, mistake. Thanks for being a great bad example. You've left an aftertaste that won't ever disappear.

[chenya-my-love]

Fictional Yuu

I see a lot of people basing Yuu off of characters on TV and in games. They'll have characters (usually Idia) make refrence to this fact but usually in just a throw away line. But nobody really leans into the idea of Yuu actually coming from some fictional media in Twisted Wonderland.

Like imagine some character like Cater, or maybe Vil while advertising the VDC, posting a photo with Yuu in it. Only for some random account to comment "That's an amazing cosplay, it looks so much like the character". And of course they're confused, they keep looking for who in the photo is cosplaying but nobody is there. Eventually just asking the commentor who was being cosplayed. The comment is simple.

"Right next to you. That's Yuu from (insert anime/game name here)". They don't believe it until they look up the listed media and sees the character they think Yuu is cosplaying and are shocked. They look identical to Yuu (except animated). Their name, looks, and personality are all identical to Yuu. It is Yuu.

I see two (techincally three) routes this could go. A RomCom route and an angst route.

The romcom route revolves around Yuu having a canon love interest making the boys jealous (regardless on whether they entered a relationship yet or the plot was still building it up) and trying to imulate them.

Like all the wikis say that Yuu's feelings blossomed after the love interest nursed them back to health when they were sick, so the moment Yuu gets sick the boy is just rushing to Ramshackle to take care of them. Or if Yuu caught feelings first and it was some romantic moment, the boys try to emulate that scene so Yuu will fall for them too.

But than we have the angst routes.

A scenerio where all the boys decide to watch the anime/play the game that Yuu is from. Only for Yuu to catch them, quickly learning that they're fictional.

Yuu realizing that all their memories were made up, and if their a playable character all their actions were being controlled. That all their suffering was pointless, that it was done simply to make them more interesting or to entertain a bunch of other worldly beings that Yuu didn't know existed.

Yuu having an breakdown over everything. Their life isn't even their own.

Or

While learning about Yuu's world and story, they learn Yuu dies. And not just a shock value death that could be removed from the plot without care, their death is important. Their death leads to the ending whether that be Yuu sacrificing themself for the greater good or Yuu's death motivating the protag to take down the villain.

All that matters is that Yuu dies and Yuu needs to die. The story can't progress without Yuu there.

The boys realizing that if they send Yuu back to their world, their pretty much signing Yuu's Death Certificate. And Yuu doesn't know. The boys now know that Yuu is doomed by the narrative and is destined to die in the end, but Yuu doesn't. They can't even tell Yuu cause Seven only knows how Yuu will take the news that not only are they fictional but they're also destined to die.

[spjohnv-blog]

If you're familiar with the South Park Archives, pretty much the only SP fansite still online - there's over eighteen years of history there, pages and renders for tons of characters and locations, thousands of screenshots, a pretty dedicated staff, transcripts of every episode, and so much more. When I made my start writing shitty fanfics, it was a super useful resource, and that was a small chunk of what it is today.

FANDOM has today unveiled a new Offensive Terms Policy which continues a trend in the last few years been suggested in events like Community Connect, where it has previously been suggested wikis avoid references to canonical sex. The avoidance of slurs is something I would be super supportive of generally -- we don't need to see that kind of stuff on Wookiepedia or like, a wiki for Bluey. It'll keep people from vandalizing children's wikis with adult content for kicks. I am generally in favor of content filtering, especially for family-friendly-oriented content.

...but, this is going to cause a lot of problems for the South Park Archives, a show with a major character who frequently uses slurs and is firmly anti-censorship. You don't need to be an editor to think about that. If you're a fan, you know what kind of show we're talking about.

This is a show with episodes called "The Biggest Douche in the Universe", "Major Boobage", "Reverse Cowgirl" and "Titties and Dragons". There are songs like "Fuck the Police" and "Jacking it in San Diego". There is a character called 'Retarded Fish'. The names of these songs and episodes, bear in mind, are legally registered copyrights, not our choices -- how do you change that? Move an article to Episode 1601? What about "Fuck the Police", which isn't even a South Park original song?

You can clean up a synopsis, and formalize language on a character page, I've done both of those things when I was an editor, but you can't undo all of this. How do you?

That's not even getting into the transcripts pages, which are intended to be 100% accurate to the actual dialogue, continuing the tradition from the good ol' South Park Scriptorium...

Within the day of the policy change, FANDOM has already started to make changes to remove slurs from the transcript pages that are unable to be modified as it is directly related to global policy. I don't know that the staff were communicated with about this personally either, but I'm not in the know like I used to be.

No doubt some of this move is prompted by advertisers - FANDOM previously cited advertiser feedback as a motivation for inserting all sorts of videos on top of wiki pages (similar to their later push to include AI-generated content) and understandably many advertisers may not want their brand name mere inches from a discussion of cartoon eight-year-olds using slurs. I mean, shoot, I wouldn't if I were in charge of a major company, and I get someone needs to keep the lights on, but...

I don't know man, it's a shitty position to be in. It's a well-intended policy that I'd support in almost any other context but literally this narrow exception, and I definitely hate the thought of looking like I'd be defending use of offensive terms, but like, how do you cover "everything" about South Park, an explicitly adult show that is so firmly anti-censorship, that builds entire episodes around these kinds of jokes, or even analyze it from a critical perspective, in such a family-friendly, sanitized way, without betraying its spirit and creative intent?

You can imagine how many staff members there are probably scratching their heads or bashing them into lamp posts, trying to figure out what to do or how to move forward after this. They could apply for an exception, but would it even be granted? What would the alternative be? Are restrictions like this worth it or do they render the whole thing moot? How much responsibility lies with FANDOM? Are advertisers forcing the whole internet down this road? There are so many questions in the air on this. I certainly don't have answers.

[yaeggravate]

brief post about kaeya's potential future arc (or why 5 star kaeya will totally happen 🔮✨️)

so something i noticed is that kaeya always removes or distances himself from the end of any situation he's in. (it's much more noticeable in his hangout).

first is crepus's death. he hangs back and doesn't get involved in his final moments.

kaeya disappears in the final section of the ballads and brews event. you can find and talk to every character except him.

in the venti route of his hangout, kaeya stays back when it's time to sing with everyone. venti then drags him back in. (what's odd is that venti didn't even notice he was gone at first 👀 "now you see them, now you don't")

Kaeya: Slipping away before the final verse is sung, before the poet has uttered the last line, before everything has concluded… I don't know, something about it just resonates with me.

klee says kaeya hasn't read her the end of the book series the fox and the dandelion sea yet, which is about a guy stuck in a loop. in somewhat the same vein, in the secret summer event, he tells her a story about the jinni and a shepard boy but changes the ending from what we know from the in game book…

and then we have the prince qubad play, where he quietly exits after it ends. he explains why himself (through nahida's auge):

(Use Nahida's All Schemes to Know on Kaeya, optional) Kaeya: (I always like to extricate myself before things start getting tedious.)

in the same route, kaeya quotes the character jaques from shakespeare's play as you like it

Kaeya: Let me think... "All the world's a stage, and all the people merely players."

which is very fitting considering, quote the wiki:

Jaques takes no part in the unfolding of the plot, and confines himself to wry comment on the action and exchanges with his fellow characters.

he also silently does things for others without wanting to take credit, i.e. being rewarded.

and i think i know why 😏

in his character story, kaeya is referred to as a chess pawn in CN, he then repeats this in his hangout.

Kaeya: But I shall not bow to the will of fate. I am no pawn in heaven's plan.

further emphasizing it's not a random throw away term.

i'm neither chess expert nor chess amateur. but anyone can pull up a wikipedia page 😤

pawns are the only pieces that can't move backward, pawns can get promoted to another piece when they reach the end of the board, and… pawns are expandable, made to be sacrificed for the kingdom.

he even expresses the desire to age backwards….which pawns can't do of course.

A very simple such analogy is the Pawn — the expendable, powerless, nameless foot soldier who may, if his actions are brave and his heart is true, become a Queen (although someone more practised at the game may note that the pawn is really a symbol of why you should never overlook apparently powerless people).

that sounds exactly like kaeya's situation, doesn't it? many people have questioned why kaeya is a 4 star given his importance to the main plot, but i think it could be a deliberate narrative decision. (at least i hope it is 😬)

if kaeya is a pawn he can be promoted to a queen when he reaches the end…. except kaeya doesn't want to, as demonstrated by his unwillingness to see things through till the end.

why would he do this?

simply put, it's foreshadowing 😏

kaeya will have his character arc eventually, where the only sensible path is accepting that he must reach the end because pawns cannot stay pawns forever

Promotion is mandatory when moving to the last rank; the pawn cannot remain as a pawn.

there is some sick sense of irony in him declaring he won't be heaven's pawn, when a pawn can only stop being a pawn by moving forward.

i think kaeya's birthday letter about tcg of all things is also hinting at his arc:

If you think about it, playing cards aren't easy at all — you gotta do the math before throwing the dice, and be extra careful with your every move. One step wrong, and the whole table is turned. When that happens, don't you think it's most amusing to watch your opponent's frustrated face, hmm?

(uh oh, celestia 🤭)

say he does reach this metaphorical last rank, what would that look like for him? gameplay wise it would mean a promotion to 5 star status. story wise? a magical girl transformation into the second coming of fischl.

haha ok but, unfortunately i doubt it's that simple.

something else that has been foreshadowed is kaeya's eventual fate…

Traveler: What did you think of the story? Kaeya: It was alright. I suppose the hero always has to sacrifice himself to save others, and it does make for some good storytelling. But it leaves you wondering how he really feels about the whole thing. Did he ever have second thoughts? Only he can know, I suppose.

Kaeya: My dear audience, I ask you this: Do you believe in fate? If fate decreed that your life was to end in tragedy, what would you do?

Kaeya: I, Qubad, will spend the rest of my days in a foreign land, till I breathe my last in a place far from home.

Kaeya: And anyway, life is short, so we should make the most of the time we have. Right now is the perfect time to relax and enjoy ourselves, and who knows how many other chances we'll get. So come on, what do you say?

Fallen I 还没尽…兴… Haven't enjoyed...to the fullest...

When It's Windy 真是和平啊、可又能持续多久呢？ How peaceful, but how long can it last?

Traveler: Good night, Kaeya. Kaeya: Is it that time already? I'm not sure I'm ready to say goodbye.

let's face it, these are death flags. no, kaeya is not going to perma die, but this might be what he has seen through the Auge der Verurteilung and why he's so reluctant to reach the ending of his story.

but in order to defy fate and become a 5 star you have to throw yourself into the embrace of the immernacht first 😈

[shaotie]

Where You Belong - Outline

**WARNING** for lots and lots of **SPOILERS** below

I'm the kind of person who likes to read the entire plot of a movie on wiki before deciding if I'll watch it, so for anyone else out there who likes spoilers here's the entire outline for my Where You Belong au 😃🐢💚

Arch 1: Can Nobody Hear Me? - Chapters 1-23

The story begins a few years post krang invasion, when the turtles are adults. After Leo saves the life of a deer yokai the villain (an all-black doberman pincer yokai named Excalibur along with his mystical pet yokai, an oversized gecko named Geralt) is enraged at his meddling and hits him with a mystic attack, depositing mystic energy inside Leo's head. As a result, he is left is unable to use his ninpo, wield any weapons, and stripped of his ability to communicate - both verbally and non-verbally - so he can't tell anyone about the wicked yokai or what he did.

A series of unfortunate events results in Leo being taken by the dog yokai, mystically afflicted so he cannot escape or fight back, branded as a slave, put to hard work, severely abused by the temperamental dog with a quick temper, and kept locked away in a location deep underground inside a pocket of mystical rocks that blocks the signal from the subcutaneous tracker Donnie placed on him years prior.

The harsh conditions he is forced to live eventually results in the rise of dissociative identity disorder (split personality disorder) and comes close to taking his life. Instead of tending to his injuries, Excalibur dumps him in a New York alley with the intent of purchasing another slave, where Donnie's tracker picks up on him and his family brings him home and does their best to help him heal from his many injuries - physical, mental, and emotional.

Although the mystic energy deposited inside his head was removed when he was left for dead, Leo is still unable to talk because of something else that mystical attack did to him, so his family learns sign language.

Meanwhile the alternate persona in Leo's mind (from the dissociative identity disorder) becomes an sentient life force connected to Leo's mystic powers (named May) who is evil because she was born as a result of the mystic energy Geralt deposited inside Leo's head and Excalibur's shocking abuses that tramatized Leo's mind, and she tries to take control of him so she can kill his family.

Arch 2: Twists and Turns - Chapters 21-40

A dramatic turn of events involving Excalibur and Geralt results in May taking control, but once disconnected from the inner broken recesses of Leo's mind she becomes her own person separated from the horrors that gave birth to her, and no longer wishes to harm anyone - instead she wants to enjoy the simple things in life like feeling the rain on her skin and gazing at the stars, but worries that she's taking away from Leo's quality of life because of how they have to share a body and feels she was a mistake and shouldn't exist at all.

Meanwhile Leo's family know about the dangers and when they realize she has taken control they do a mind meld to get her out of his head, refusing to listen to Leo's arguments that she changed and is good now - thinking he only believes this because he is under her evil influence.

After removing her mystic life force, May (who left willingly for Leo's sake) dies and Leo is left bereaved without the extra person he had grown accustomed to talking to him in his head, and he mourns her loss because of how she had been a constant in his life and had changed to become a better person (like Draxum, who is part of their family now).

Meanwhile, to cover the many scars on his face and body from Excalibur's attacks Leo asks Mikey to make him a black hood and a new mask - one that symbolizes his connection to his family and May (whose mystic life force was a bright pink).

When he is well enough, Leo insists on resuming his hero work, but does so with Donnie in the Hidden City, where he fulfills a promise he made to May before she died by doing good with his life in helping to free others who have been forced into the life of harsh slavery (which is legal in yokai society because the powerfully influential Big Mama pushed for it to have slave fighters for her Battle Nexus).

Because Excalibur reported him as a runaway slave, one of their Hidden City missions when Leo is by himself he is discovered by the police, tranquilized, arrested, and has his subcutaneous tracker and mystic powers removed by them.

Instead of being returned to that disgusting dog, Big Mama shows interest in the ninja hero and purchases him as another slave fighter for her Battle Nexus - having a shock device attached to the back of his neck (called a neuro-tech disruptor or NTD) as 'encouragement' for him to do as he is told and giving him the stage name Red Jitsu (while tricking his family into believeing the fighter 'Red Jitsu' is really a zebra yokai and not their missing son/brother).

Leo refuses to take the life of another but agrees to fight when he discovers killing in the Battle Nexus was made illegal by the Council of Heads. Now, when the killing blow was to be made, a mystical system automatically portals the loser out of the ring.

In the underground slave quarters, Leo befriends a fellow slave rabbit yokai named Usagi, who understands sign language (including his three-fingered adaptation), but is devestated when - a few months later - a fight is rigged and he is killed in the Nexus ring.

After that Leo become so despondent he gives up on life, thinking that his family weren't looking for him in the first place but not knowing they had been searching for him everywhere. On the night of a one-time-only Council-of-Heads-approved revenge match to the death against the yokai who killed Usagi, Leo gives up - deciding it would be better to die as an honorable hero than take the life of another and feeling he no longer has a reason to live - but his highly anticipated fight catches the attention of his family, who realize 'Red Jitsu' is really Leo and come to rescue him.

Leo can't simply escape with them however, because the NTD is programmed to repeatedly shock him if he tries (until he either returns or is killed by it), so their rescue plan ends up being foiled and he is sent away to a genius alligator by the name of Kaiman. But because he knows now that his family is out there searching for him, unbeknownst to Big Mama Leo has a renewed appreciation for life.

Arch 3: A Useful Warrior - Chapters 41-75

Since a 'broken' slave is not profitable in the ring Big Mama sends Leo to a business associate of hers named Kaiman to 'break him Big Mama style,' but the alligator discovers he is different from all the other slaves she sent his way because of retaining his Hamato honor. So he deviously keeps him for himself, separated from his family - not only on a different planet but in a different dimension - and forces compliance through such means as shocks, punishing hallucinations, and mind control (all from the NTD that is his creation), as well as manipulation and conditioning.

While there, Leo befriends an artificial life form named Cammie, who looks like a gray fox yokai and - despite being created by Kaiman - is a sentient life form who has free will and her own distinct personality, and is proved to be a living person (think Data from 'Star Trek: TNG' only female, a tangible holigram, looks like a cute fox yokai, and possesses emotions from the moment she was created).

Via a teleportation device of his own creation, Kaiman takes his ninja warrior on many dangerous outings to different planets and dimensions, resulting in them crossing paths with the 2012 turtles where he passes off the mute Leo as an associate by the name of Othello Von Ryan. But Leo manages to get alone time when he goes to the bathroom and secretly uses 2012 Donnie's security camera, revealing who he really is (via sign language) and that Kaiman is his captor but he can't escape because of the NTD attached to him. This results in an (unsuccessful) adventure where the 2012 turtles board Fugitoid's ship (2012 iteration) to try and save Leo.

When Big Mama discovers Kaiman tricked him and kept her useful warrior for himself she tries to get Leo back, but bumping heads with such an intelligent villain results in her death. Since the biggest avocate of slavery is now dead there is an uprising among yokai who are against slavery in the Hidden City, resulting in the Battle Nexus being destroyed and slavery abolished.

Although believing other life forms to be beneath his species and he harshly mistreats his warrior slave to keep him in his place, Kaiman views himself as an honorable person and releases Leo when he feels his services are no longer required.

Leo goes home but behaves differently as a result of the conditioning from Kaiman - who skillfully used his genius to force compliance. Eventually some problems on his home planet result in Kaiman making Leo assist him again, but he upholds his distorted sense of honor by not forcing him back into slavery providing he separates himself from his family and doesn't tell anyone about their arrangement. Leo feels he doesn't have a choice but to comply - partly because of his fear Kaiman will kill his family if he refuses and partly because of how he has been conditioned to obey Kaiman and doing so gives his life some sort of warped sense of direction and purpose (similiar to stockholm syndrome but not quite as severe).

Leo moves out of the lair to protect his family and in between doing Kaiman's bidding he starts fighting for a living under his Battle Nexus alias Red Jitsu in a place called the Cavern Games (communicating with those who don't understand sign language via a program in his wrist com Donnie made for him). But he can't keep his arrangement with Kaiman secret for long before Donnie finds out about it and his family fight to save him - ultimately resulting in the death of Kaiman and leaving Leo feeling like he is lost with no direction without Kaiman there to tell him what to do.

Arch 4: A Time for Healing - Chapters 76-89

During his time being forced to work for Kaiman Leo professed his love for Cammie, who returns the gesture and after Kaiman's death her program is downloaded into Donnie's systems (with backups upon backups as a precaution) so she can live with him and his family in their New York sewer lair.

Meanwhile Leo discovers that back when May was taken out of his mind Draxum found reminents of invisible mystic energy leftover from her death so he put that energy into a vat of mutagen to find out what would happen, resulting in May returning in the form of an inquisitive cute kitten yokai (around 5 years old) and Leo takes on a fatherly role in her life. But Karai comes to him in a dream and tells him to make the most of their time together because it won't last long.

Coming to the wrong conclusion that May was destined to die, Leo becomes overly protective of her. But one day as their family are all relaxing on a beach, an amphiptera (snake-like alien with arms, fiery wings, and fire powers) - who had been seeking revenge after Kaiman and his ninja slave previously attacked her people - finally finds Leo after searching through outer space for him, resulting in a fight that ends in his death.

Leo is welcomed with open arms in the mystic realm by Karai, Usagi, and his ancestors, but despite having a place there and feeling a sense of inner peace (which he is told is a gift for earning a place in the mystic realm) he still misses his family on earth and longs to be with them.

His desire becomes reality when Karai discovers Raph and Donnie are helping Mikey open a portal to the mystic realm to get Leo back after Draxum helped them mystically heal the mortal wounds on his deceased body. Leo chooses to return with them and Karai sends him home with a gift, so that when he wakes up in the med bay he is able to talk again and the story ends with a happy reunion between him and his family.

🔹🔹🔹

🔹Where You Belong Masterpost

🔹My Main Masterpost

[moonlitcomet]

new pokemon fangame in my has-played list thanks to a recommendation from a discord member:

pokemon tectonic

please note this post is very long and very opinionated, but that's out of love for this game! pokemon tectonic has captured my interest and i'd like to see its devs improve in their next project.

my thoughts so far, after 21 hours of gameplay and 4 badges:

it needs a lot of polish, and a lot of QoL changes.

a lot of the choices made for gameplay in tectonic are really great and fun - every single pokemon getting rebalanced at least a little bit, all the new moves, the retypings and what not, that's all fantastic. i have no complaints there.

there are a lot of QoL features - such as easy move relearners and move mentoring - that make swapping your team's movesets around a breeze.

there is also an extremely expansive in-game documentation of everything - gameplay, battles, new moves and abilities, pokemon stats and learnsets, etc. you could make a wiki out of what's in here alone.

they encourage you to catch 'em all and actively reward you for it!

consumable held items will be automatically renewed at the end of a battle. you will never run out of gems or berries.

there are following pokemon, hgss style!

however, it fumbles in a lot of aspects.

gameplay

npc trainers will know your moves, and they will act depending on what moves are in your current pokemon's moveset- before any are made.

in the context of the game, this makes perfect sense. you are given an item that allows you to preview a trainer's pokemon before you battle. species, types, abilities, items, everything. trainers will react based on what they think you will do before have a chance to do anything.

but in the context of playing the game as a normal player, it feels either downright cheap or incredibly unintelligent on their parts. they will give you at least one free turn of setup, then get brutally swept by an attacking pokemon.

it would be a good idea to adjust this npc ai so you can disable use of the trainer x-ray for both battlers. i don't want them to know what i have just by looking at me, and i don't want to know what they have just by looking at them.

removing use of this tool for both sides would keep it fair. having to look at every trainer i fight in detail before i fight them is time consuming and removes a lot of the mystery and the fun of playing pokemon games to me.

trainers in this game will switch their pokemon as often as they can, and tectonic discourages you from doing that too.

a major part of pokemon's gameplay is knowing when to sacrifice a pokemon so you can bring in a waiting, healthy team member. a pokemon hanging on by a sliver of health is better to sack in the moment so your waiting team member doesn't take a strong hit, and has a turn to set up or retaliate.

tectonic actively punishes this style of gameplay.

trainers will constantly switch depending on what they think will counter your active pokemon. usually, this just means switching into a pokemon that resists your next attacking move. this is often at a detriment to them, and sometimes you can get caught in switching loops where you and the enemy trainer will change between pokemon every two turns -

attack, switch.

attack, switch.

attack, switch.

this wastes a lot of time.

an un-toggleable feature of this game is "trainer perfection". when you beat an average route npc trainer without having a single pokemon go down on your side, the trainer will run away and drop exp candy. this is a perfect win. by default, if you do not perfect a battle, the trainer will wait until you come by again to challenge you once more.

this can't be turned off except if you happen to have a special item called a stink bomb, which forces them to run away whether you've defeated them or not.

protip, you can open the debug menu using an application in your installation folder, and give yourself infinite stink bombs.

my suggestion for the perfection system is to allow players to disable it for average npcs, make it optional. or, at least, give us an option to *willingly* talk to npcs to rematch them. like the vs seeker in older games.

the devs intended this feature to not force you to rematch trainers multiple times, and instead plan your routes carefully. this has the unfortunate side effect of discouraging some players from fighting every trainer and exploring the game as they want, because the forced rematches upon coming across them again [unless you perfect them] waste more and more of their time.

also, some of these npc trainers are trainers that completely block your path - difficult ones at that. if you don't perfect or scare them off with a stink bomb, you'll have to go at them again when you come back around.

as of right now, the trainer rematches are as annoying as the pokemon breeders in gen 5. they are incessant unless you sweep them.

IVs, EVs, and natures are completely removed.

to most casual players, this would be a hooray! i'm personally happy about the removal of IVs, but it really starts to kick you in the teeth as you progress in the game. instead, what these things are replaced with are called style points. style points are minimal stat adjustments that allow you to set up different styles of battling for your pokemon.

think of it like skill points in average rpgs.

these are cool in theory. but the way they're set up is limiting and feels unnecessarily strict in application. for some unknown reason, both attacking stats are permanently linked, and you must raise both attacking stats at once. raising two attacking stats only removes one point from your remaining pool, but it feels pointless to have style points invested into a stat you will not use [ie, physical attack on a pure special attacker].

i can't believe i'm saying this, but i genuinely miss EV training over this. EV training feels like it has a much stronger impact on stats than these style points do, and you have far more control [with up to 252 in a given stat rather than 20]. it's a cool idea, just not particularly favorably executed in my opinion.

it is possible to have EVs and make them not a nightmare to deal with!

pokemon reborn has a system where all power items - anklet, lens, weight, etc - will increase its given stat EVs by 32 for every pokemon you knock out, regardless of the EVs the species naturally gives. with this feature in place, EV training becomes a breeze and you can have a fully trained 6 pokemon team in less than 10 minutes, rather than the potential hours it might take the normal way.

reborn's system is, in my opinion, an almost perfect way to do EV training. the only way to make it less hassle would be to turn EVs entirely into a menu, as tectonic has attempted to do.

you cannot use bag items - other than poke balls - in battles.

as a plus, enemy trainers cannot do this either. this is mixed based on how you like to play. i can respect this gameplay decision, as much as it very much isn't my style.

every pokemon is sorted into one or more tribes that have different effects on the battle.

honestly, i don't even use this feature. it's cool for team building i suppose, but feels tacked on and isn't my style. a point in their direction for making tribes a completely optional gameplay mechanic.

story

four out of eight badges in, the story is near nonexistent. you get scraps of it every now and then, teasing you for something large. you are wandering a world that has already been conquered. and honestly, i love that premise. people talk of someone who has already defeated the evil team in the past- you see remnants of what they did to the world around you.

this, to me, is very similar to what it feels like playing b2w2 without playing the original black & white, which i did as a child. i say this positively. traversing remnants of a world that was not yours to conquer is awesome. i'd love to see more of that.

however, halfway through the main story [i assume] and not having any of the story ramping up in any fashion feels slow. there's very little motivation for continuing aside from showing up your brother, which you are told to do before you even get your first pokemon.

everyone is just... so mean to you, for no reason. none of these characters feel particularly likeable, none of them are funny or kind as a motivation to fight for them.

[cain and hardy in reborn are my favorite examples for this, i would commit war crimes for them in spite of everything sucking early on. and it gets better. so much better.]

so you're just... trudging through a world that hates you or doesn't care about you, with no incentive to fix it from anyone you like. everything feels very obligatory, as if you have no choice in the matter, and there's no urgency at all to any situation. i'll reblog this post with an update if or when the story ramps up, but as of right now it's not hooking me too much outside of the initial concept.

final thoughts

Pokemon Tectonic is a somewhat long game with a very strong premise and unpolished execution. It feels like it's too big of a scope for how small it feels, and a lot of the effort in creating this game clearly went into rebalancing every single pokemon up to gen 8 [and some of gen 9].

What it suffers in the most is lack of accessibility and lack of options in terms of gameplay - a good game dev can add features that can modify or disable parts of their game that either make it easier or harder. Tectonic feels like it's trying to strongarm you into playing a nuzlocke or deathless run, with how it punishes you for letting a pokemon faint in battle.

I think this game could be made leagues better if it felt more customizable. As it stands, once I finish this game, I will probably not be revisiting it, as much as I like what it has going for it.

That is all I have for now. My favorite part of this game is that most avatar boss battles can be defeated with Fort Unfuckable.

[onepiece-oc-archives]

Oda-approved questions to help build your OC

If you head to the One Piece Wiki page of the Straw Hats and take a look at the Miscellaneous section, you'll find a lot of trivia questions about the Straw Hats that Eiichiro Oda, the creator of One Piece, has answered in the Q&A portion attached to some manga chapters, called an SBS. I like to call those answers "Straw Hat Fun Facts" and I love them, because they work really well if you want to flesh out your OC and give them a bit more life and depth.

So, even if you're not planning on making your OC a Straw Hat, these questions might still be helpful for you to think about.

The way I'm gonna structure this post for the sake of avoiding spoilers is I'm gonna list all current LA Straw Hats with their facts and all future confirmed Straw Hats will have their facts mentioned without their name, if it makes sense to mention them. That way you can avoid duplicates within the crew if you want to do that and still have no clue about who's gonna join. I'm also gonna comment on how the various fun facts apply to the live action adaptation wherever applicable.

If you're looking for people's birthdays, I'm gonna make another post about them, don't you worry. But you won't find them here.

Animal Resemblances

Luffy: Monkey

Zoro: Shark/Tiger

Nami: Cat

Usopp: Armadillo/Chameleon

Sanji: Duck/Bighorn Sheep

Others: Reindeer, Red Panda, Crane, Falcon, Bull, Rhinoceros, Horse, Giraffe, Whale Shark, Bear

I don't think any of them were mentioned or referenced just yet in the live action, aside from Luffy's name having the word Monkey in it, but that doesn't count. I'm pretty sure we'll get some hints in the future though since these just have such great potential for easter eggs.

Specific Numbers

Now, this is a category that's a bit more complicated because each Straw Hat has at least two signature numbers, for very different reasons. Everyone has a main number based on when they joined, with Luffy being number 1. The second number is the same but it skips Luffy, making Zoro number 1, but this version is rarely used, if ever at all. Then there's the possibility of a Straw Hat getting a number assigned to them based on a pun, whether that be based on their name, their devil fruit, or something entirely different. I'll explain pun numbers in a bracket.

Luffy: 01, 56 (go-mu)

Zoro: 02/01

Nami: 03/02, 73 (na-mi)

Usopp: 04/03

Sani: 05/04, 32 (san-ji), 59 (ko-kku = cook)

Others: 06/05 - 10/09, 110, 87, 26, 43

Now, you may ask: "Evie, I wanna have a pun number for my OC, how do they work?" I got you, buddy. You can make your own pun numbers using a technique called goroawase, using this handy chart I made based on a Wikipedia chart. Everything I added is in (brackets) and consists of variants that would technically be possible due to my own understanding of goroawase, but might not be commonly used.

On a very basic level, all you have to do to create your pun number is to grab the readings from this table and glue them together. I took some work off your shoulders by adding the phonetic changes you can use, indicated by the arrows. You can also only use the first syllable of a reading or add or remove an n at the end of readings that end in vowels or n's. As you can see whith Sanji's ko-kku, you can duplicate consonants, and you can also turn short vowels into long vowels (tsu -> tsū, for example), both for spelling reasons. If you need to transcribe a c, either use an s or a k (or whatever else fits), depending on the pronunciation.

Here are some examples with my OCs:

Cora: 96 (ko-ra) or 25510 (a-ka-i-to - would be very unusual due to its number of digits, but I think I'll use this as a plot device in a future fic!)

Luna: 67 (lu-na/ru-na)

Inari: 576 (i-na-ri) or 53 (ka-mi)

Create away!

Specific Colors

This was in the live action! And I think we'll definitely see something similar again later.

You can't really see it that well but here are Luffy, Nami and Zoro lit up in their respective colors - red, orange and green respectively! I tried to take a better screenshot but, alas, Netflix will not let me.

Luffy: red (aka)

Zoro: green (midori)

Nami: orange (orenjī)

Usopp: yellow (kiiro)

Sanji: blue (ao)

Others: pink (pinku), purple (murasaki), light blue (mizuiro), white (shiro), black (kuro), ochre (ōdoiro)

As you can see, we pretty much have the whole rainbow here, which makes picking a unique color for your OC pretty hard, BUT it's completely allowed to use different shades of the same color (see: blue vs light blue), which is why I listed the Japanese color names for you. I did some digging and it turns out that these are the names of some of Japan's traditional colors. Those traditional colors don’t always match up with what my impression of the character's color is, BUT I made this handy little graphic for you:

In case there are any animal-related characters around and for those of you who like describing smells in their fanfic (me too, me too), this might be very useful!

These are all of the Straw Hats' specific colors (top row) according to the overview of Japanese traditional colors I linked for you above, their color names underlined with my perception of what color Oda might actually have been referring to, in modern terms. As for the grey names beneath orange and pink, those are the traditional colors from the overview that I used to replace the romanized English colors, based on what the first translation that popped up was. The columns directly underneath are a selection of different shades of the same color, also with their names. It just goes to show that you have a huge variety of colors to choose from for your OC - Japan's traditional colors alone are about 1,000 different colors and you can definitely play with hex codes some more. So, go wild!

Specific Smells

Luffy: meat

Zoro: steel (and probably blood, let’s be honest)

Nami: mikan (tangerines, essentially) and money

Usopp: gunpowder

I'd say everyone smells of the sea at least a little bit, realistically speaking, since they are pirates.

Sanji: cigarettes and seafood (and I'm willing to bet he wears some type of cologne or aftershave or something)

Favourite Type of Island and Season

Luffy: summer but he also loves snow, basically everywhere with meat

Zoro: autumn on an autumn island

Nami: summer on a spring island

Usopp: summer on an autumn island

Favourite Food

Sanji: a spoilery gag, so get creative!

We either directly see some of these in the live action or can easily guess.

Luffy: any kind of meat

Zoro: white rice (specifically in the shape of onigiri aka rice balls), sea beast meat, any food that compliments sake (though he's also pretty fond of beer, at least in the live action)

Nami: mikans (tangerines) and most other fruits

Usopp: pike from an autumn island and other fish of the season

Sanji: spicy sea food pasta, food that compliments black tea

Others: not really relevant but maybe interesting; cotton candy, chocolate, sweet stuff in general, sandwiches, not-too-sweet cakes, food that compliments coffee, basically anything that you can find at McDonald's, curry, mozoku seaweed with vinegar and fruits

Basically, Sanji gets to juggle around a whole lot of different flavours and cultural influences - and he does it really well and finds a way to make everything special, by the way! He generally favors the ladies in his cooking though.

Least Favourite Food

Even Sanji can't make them like everything. Their reasons for not liking something are very different, so they probably still eat it, especially if it's used in something Sanji prepared because he's their cook

Luffy: Cherry pie

Zoro: Chocolate (yes, chocolate! Adds a lot more depth to the scene of him eating Rika's rice balls, doesn't it?) - it's too sweet

Nami: orangette (candied orange peels) - she prefers actual fruit

Usopp: mushrooms - he got sick once

Sanji: konjac (Japanese konjac gel is usually made by mixing flour from the konjac plant with seaweed; it pretty much tastes like nothing and is used mainly for its texture) - it's not nutritious

Others: anything spicy, chewing gum, marshmallows, lemons, parfait

As a Family

This is part of the reason why Oda said there would be no romances within the crew in canon - but this is fandom, he has no power here. Feel free to ignore any of these roles and substitute canon with your own

Luffy: fourth son

Zoro: first son

Nami: daughter

Usopp: third son

Sanji: second son

Others: another child, parents and grandparents

Real-world Nationalities

Now, this is interesting, because these played a part in how the Straw Hats were cast for the live action!

Luffy: Brazilian (Mexican in the live action)

Zoro: Japanese

Nami: Swedish (her actress is American, but she was kept as white)

Usopp: unspecified African (his actor is Jamaican-American, so it sort of checks out)

Sanji: French (Sanji's actor is very international, but he's not French - I do believe Sanji is still supposed to be at least part French in the live action though, at least he still has an affinity for the language and he may very well have grown up multilingual)

Others: Canadian, Russian, American, Austrian, Indian

Inner Brain

Basically: What are the five words their brain/subconscious circles around?

Luffy: meat, meat, meat, meat, pirate king

Zoro: sword, sword, strength, train, sleep

Nami: money, money, money, money, beauty

Usopp: warrior, lies, lies, run, run

Suited Flower

Sanji: You guessed it, it's a spoiler-y gag. But, to summarize, he thinks about cooking and women

These were actually answered by one of the voice actresses for the anime (except for Luffy and Zoro's alternates) but they're Oda-approved! I know fanfic writers love flower language, so rejoice!

Luffy: cosmos, sunflower

Zoro: thistle, wisteria

Nami: sunflower

Usopp: daisy

Sanji: delphinium

Others: tulip, casablanca, anemone, rose, peony

Blood Type

-> this is a topic for another post since it's more of a life fact than a fun fact, isn't it? Maybe, I'll put the blood types in with the birthdays and make a sort of Straw Hat info post?

How often do they bathe?

Bathe, not shower, I would assume. Zoro showers after training... right?

Luffy: once a week

Zoro: once a week

Nami: every day

Usopp: once every three days

Sanji: every day

Typical Hours of Sleep

The only reference to this we have in the live action is Zoro's habit of napping. An interesting thing to note is that the Straw Hats' sleep schedules largely coincide in just such a way that someone is always awake - except for during one hour. Maybe this really is a coincidence or maybe this is a habit they built while travelling together. They do still have night watches though, I believe. But that means there's usually always someone to keep the night watch company :)

Luffy: no set time, but usually sleeps around 5 hours

Zoro: 4am to 7am (3 hours) + naps

Nami: 11pm to 7am (8 hours)

Usopp: 1am to 8am (7 hours)

Sanji: 12am to 5am (5 hours)

In conclusion, more than half of the crew has no idea what a healthy sleep schedule is. This is a pattern that's gonna continue, by the way...

Suitable Careers

Basically what careers they would have if they weren't pirates. Their actual careers in-universe also don't count.

Luffy: firefighter

Zoro: police officer (I will not accept this slander)

Nami: childcare worker

Usopp: graphic designer

Sanji: beauty salon worker

Others: elementary school teacher, cabin attendant, pilot, detective, train station attendant

Cooking Specialities

What are they best at cooking? According to Usopp in the live action, none of the guys besides Sanji can even boil water, so I'm willing to assume Sanji may have taught them a little. A lot. Not Luffy though. He's still a disaster.

Luffy: raw meat on a plate

Zoro: sashimi - a dish consisting of variously cut raw fish and meat

Nami: roasted duck with mikan sauce

Usopp: fish and chips

Sanji: literally anything, but he prefers seafood

Who would win a 50m sprint?

Only the current Straw Hats count here.

Fifth: Nami

Fourth: Usopp (he's already fairly fast, mind you)

Third: Zoro, slowed down because he got lost (but I still don’t think he could beat the people ranked higher than him, I'm sorry, Oda)

Second: Luffy

First: Sanji

Alcohol Tolerance

Another very useful one for fanfics! Tolerance doesn't equal how much they like drinking, by the way. I'd be willing to bet that the Straw Hats' alcohol tolerances got toned down in the live action, or at least Zoro's, judging by him stating how he woke up under a table once. With his manga-level tolerance, he would have had to drink gallons worth of alcoholic beverages before that happened. Still, I think the ranking holds up.

Fifth: Luffy

Fourth: Usopp

Third: Sanji

Second: Nami

First: Zoro

And finally one last bit that doesn't really fit anywhere else:

Sanji is currently the most qualified to give the crew a haircut. This makes sense if you read about his alternative career choice earlier and due to him generally putting a lot of thought into appearances.

So, that's it! Hope these help you!

[beneathh-the-brine]

We're getting autistic up in this bitch!

IF YOU USE ANY OF THESE HEADCANONS DIRECTLY FROM THIS PAGE, LINK BACK DIRECTLY TO THIS POST AND CREDIT BOTH ME AND ROBOTMAGGOT/HOLLOW BY @ ING US. THANK YOU!

Have specific questions? Don't be shy, shoot me an ask, I encourage it! Currently this isn't an actual fan rewrite/entry, however I may reformat it/improve upon the writing and turn it into one in the future!

LONG TEXTPOST AHEAD

______________________________________________________________

A LOT of these are shared with @robotmaggot and I [@ophiu-chuss] believe a few were created by it, so I'm also crediting it!

Mini-rant, feel free to skip this: I'm deeply saddened by how basic and bland the new writer for the fandom wiki articles made Partygoers and Partypoopers, (Reducing Partygoers to human zombies and making Partypoopers human militia.) and how they took a lot of the monster/entity aspects from them. I am not afraid to admit I dislike both entries and that they're all fancy writing and no longer carry the charm that made both but especially the Partygoers as interesting as they were.

You can't just rewrite something and take away every single feature that made it special or caused it to stand out, even if you think it's "cringe". Sure, the original wasn't a Mona Lisa, but there was an idea there. An idea that's creative and interesting, it just needed a bit more love, not to be stripped away of what is is.

ONTO THE HEADCANONS! CLICK THE LITTLE LINK BELOW TO KEEP READING!

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SHARED BY BOTH SPECIES:

True sentience, sapience and intelligence. Both Partypoopers and Partygoers are incredibly intelligent beings, perhaps even more so than wanderers.

Ability to noclip voluntarily.

Slight muzzle/curve to their face instead of a nasal ridge. Partygoers have it more noticeably.

Mimicry of wanderer voices they've heard previously. Cannot mimic entity calls without significantly more effort. Partygoers cannot mimic how they sounded pre-assimilation. "Your voice is unlike before. Twisted and mangled."

Night vision. Partypoopers have a drastic upper hand with this ability. Partygoers have poor night vision, but can see better in the dark than wanderers. (Footnote: Despite this, neither can see in Level 6 as it's pure, true vantablack.)

Vague mammalian attributes such as warm bloodedness. (And Partygoers' direct connections to wanderers.)

______________________________________________________________

PARTYPOOPERS! (Or as I prefer to call them; Moonfolk!)

Identified with the wanderer-given scientific name populus lunae, meaning 'moon people' or 'people of the moon'. The moon can often be associated with mourning and sorrow, and the land which they populate is basked in longer nights than days.

Their masks are considered sacred to them.  The blue color reflects their strong association with the night sky and the moon.  Not all wear them permanently due to their importance, preferring to hang them on their walls or stow them away in their bags or pockets.  One is never seen without their mask somewhere on their person, regardless of how shattered they become.  When one dies, their mask is placed upon their face out of respect and used as a ceremonial mask, herbs, bones and other materials placed underneath it and on the deceased's face.

Partypoopers and Partygoers are unrelated to one another other than conflict, however it's assumed Partypooper's masks are to mimic Partygoers subtly, however, make them stand out in their own way. A sort of "stay away I could be dangerous!" (Note: Their masks are not attached to their face, nor are these masks part of their face, as a result, they cannot emote with them, masks staying stagnant. Masks are obviously capable of being removed, and many do this to avoid being identified as Partypoopers.)

Partypoopers have weak paralysis venom. Their teeth are semi-blunt with slight sharpness, and their fangs are stubby.

Partypoopers are also called 'Killjoys' and 'Moonfolk', the latter being the term they refer to their own species with.

Usually passive unless provoked, preferring to flee rather than fight due to their limited number of ways to defend themselves when not backed into a corner and able to bite or slash. More likely to stand their ground if armed with a weapon or two (Or in numbers.). There are a few notable exceptions to this.

In headcanon @robotmaggot and I have mixed the new and old Level 52 [Wikidot], giving them the names "52A" (The snowy forest area) and "52B" (The academy). Because of this combination/hybridization of the two levels, Partypoopers, considering they're level natives have certain adaptations as a result! They are the farthest from looking human and have zero human aspects aside from their bipedal stance.

When not speaking, Partypoopers communicate through trills, chirps, growls and hisses. They also have the ability to purr similarly to cats.

Thought to be extinct, however 'sightings' of them have been reported by wanderers.

ADAPTATIONS/KEY FEATURES!

Short but double-coated, mid-shade to dark grey in saturation fur. Can have other colors subtly added in, like blue-greys. This fur is both soft and warm, allowing them to stay snug in their natural environment, but also keep cool in hotter ones, just like double-coated animals. Any 'hair' they appear to have is actually specialized fur!

Floppy or pointy, slightly furred ears. Their ears are very expressive and allow for a wide range of emotions. Partypooper ears are always on the sides of their heads, not on top. These ears are very sensitive and can pick up higher frequencies than wanderers can.

Whiskers on their chins exclusively, which are easy to miss if you aren't up-close.

Claw or paw-like hands.

Their nostrils are not present on their face, rather directly beneath the base of their lower jaws.

Tails of varying lengths and fur types. Partypoopers are never tailless unless via mutation or a result of the appendage being cut off.

Eyelashes meant to keep cold snow off their eyes, not unlike a camel's but shorter.

Round/doleful looking eyes and pupils, larger than a wanderer's. Most Partypoopers always look sad, upset, worried etc.

Pale blue-grey to sapphire irises (Any shade of blue or purple, or any mixture that still shows the blue or purple.). Sclerae can also be colored.

Blood varies from red to blue/purple! Similarly to how wanderers have different blood types, but more literal.

______________________________________________________________

PARTYGOERS

Wanderer assigned scientific name venenatum hominem, meaning 'poisoned man'.

Partygoers are amalgamated ex-wanderers contorted and changed into something wholly unlike them. Despite trace DNA and some aspects of their humanity remaining, Partygoers are not classified as wanderers.

Partygoer can be shortened to just 'Goer or 'Goers for convenience.

Partygoers are found throughout all Levels but are only native to Level Fun.

When not communicating via spoken language, Partygoers huff, hiss, growl and cackle. They're said to sound similar to hyenas. Like Partypoopers, Partygoers can also purr. (Note: It's rumored they have their own spoken language as well.)

ADAPTATIONS/KEY FEATURES!

Partygoers can be any color, both eye and body. They can be multiple colors as well. No coloration is rarer or less common than another (With the obvious exceptions of melanism, albinism and leucism.). They may retain traits from when they were wanderers, such as freckles or heterochromia.

They have two ways of afflicting their targets with venom; their hand mouths (Attached at the thumb and running directly to their wrists. These mouths have no connection to their digestive tracts, only used for infecting.) and their true mouth via large fangs that sit where their upper canines would've.

Bone and cartilage have fused over some aspects, such as their feet turning to hooves, legs bending to be digitigrade and their facial nostrils becoming ossified. To remedy this, Partygoers have hole-like nostrils beneath a thin membrane (if more plush-like in appearance) or open/exposed nostrils (if fleshier in appearance).

There is no connection to method of infection and subtype.

Non-wanderers can be infected by Partygoer venom as well; however, this is incredibly rare, and those particular Partygoers are considered outliers. They also are often plagued by sickness and deformities, and don't last long compared to wanderer originating Partygoers. Note: Only one legitimate example of this has been recorded.

Their slit-like eyes are normal sockets covered by muscle and skin. These cuts in their face are incredibly expressive.

Most if not all of their original organs are partially decayed or assimilated. Most have a desire to consume flesh regardless.

Spines of differing appearance, length and sharpness running along their backs and shoulders. These can sense subtle changes in vibrations and temperatures.

EXTRA, PARTY HOSTS:

They communicate via the computers, it's advised to not trust any active connections. Use at your own discretion and use unique signoffs if coming across computers. Computers are not connected to the outside world, only other computers on their own individual levels. It is unknown how Party Hosts access these databases.

Party Hosts are predecessors to Partygoers (Similar in appearance, far taller in height and more disturbing in proportions.). They have a specialized form of venom that connects themselves to the entities they control. It's presumed only Partygoers can be afflicted by host control, however no one has seen a host and lived to tell the tale, so this fact is unfounded. When a Host dies, the most powerful Partygoer in the Host's hive is forcefully changed to a Host via the active venom in its system.

Even if you're dying of hunger, it's ill-advised to feast upon the corpse of a Host, no matter how fresh.

______________________________________________________________

ADDENDUM:

Field sketch of Partygoer skull recovered from locked off study room on Level ▇��, pictured below. Partypooper skulls have never been obtained due to their scarcity.

[psychic-refugee]

I saw WSSF and I’ll have a separate review of that in another post. (SPOILER: It was great).

I think we now have concrete evidence that Jenna lost her EP credit for WSSF.

As of this post, everything looks to have updated to remove her as the EP.

Wiki, IMDB, and even the details on Amazon (below) have removed her name.

The controlling document, the movie itself, does not list her as EP.

I am now comfortable enough to say definitively she is no longer an EP for the film.

All we know is that Jenna is no longer EP, we do not know the particulars of how she lost it. Only she, her attorney, and the other producers know for sure.

Personally, I think it has something to do with her fuck ass fans, who have a documented history of sending her costar death threats, and of them “crashing out” whenever there might be a hint she may be heterosexual/is attracted to men.

For a group that LOVES ad hominem attacks, she is avoiding being called a “predator lover” because she does not condemn a coworker/friend because of unsubstantiated rumours starting and ending on twitter.

These idiots on social media really act obtuse to their own fuck ass behaviour. As if they aren’t specifically on an ongoing smear campaign with no proof of wrongdoing on Percy’s end, and as if there isn’t a well documented history of hate towards her male coworkers that act as romantic interests.

Their justification really is: Surely we aren't abusive enough to actually have any effect, we're just normal twitter abusive. tee hee hee

We have no proof she removed her own name to spite Percy, especially given that she a) has never said a bad word about him and b) is still friends with him on social media. No idea what she does in her personal life outside of social media.

Her fans are such fuck asses, she had a whole relationship start and end without them knowing. She KNOWS how they'll act, especially if her partner was male. She wants to give the bare minimum she can, I don't blame her.

Losing this credit is a monetary hit as well as potentially souring professional relationships with other producers and the director. Being an executive producer was a financial investment into the movie, that investment she no longer is entitled to.

You will never convince me that Jenna took a professional and monetary hit to remove herself as EP, and fail to unfriend him or make any real, meaningful attempt to make it clear why she did it.

If my money and reputation was on the line, I sure as shit would not take a hit on behalf of someone I hated/thought was guilty of a heinous crime. ESPECIALLY when I have more power, money, and resources to kick him out. JENNA is the star powerhouse, it would have made more sense to kick him out of promo, distance him from the movie than remover herself.

She could have distanced herself from him for free and had a lot more impact by rebuking him publicly.

Any insistence that she purposefully removed herself is not only nonsensical but cut out of whole cloth. All we know is that she is no longer the EP. We have no record of her explaining why she was removed.

We don’t even know if it was her choice, people can be fired or kicked out of a project they failed to keep their end of their contract.

Jenna is not untouchable in terms of being held accountable for her contractual responsibilities. She can't bring herself to promo because of the backlash from her abusive fans? Understandable, but she also can't get the rewards from it either AND she has no say in how the movie is promoted or released.

Obviously WSSF is moving on without Jenna, she never had the power to stop it even if that was her intention.

Whatever the reason she lost the EP credit, there are others on this project that deserve praise for making such a cute and fun movie.

[city-flag-tournament]

In advance of the nominations closing in about 48 hours and needing to get the flag information together for the tournament, I'm going through the entries more in depth, checking for inconsistencies and such. I may run into information that I'm unsure on how to proceed on and will ask for clarifying information on this post here.

In the event the person who submitted it sees one of these asks, please reach out so we can figure out what the best information is to proceed! Otherwise I will try to correct the information to be as close to what I can confirm is accurate and as similar to the submitted information as possible.

I recognize that some of these were submitted over 6 months ago, so the chances of everyone seeing everything is a little low, but I'd like to do right by your submission!

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia - I can't figure out where the light blue flag comes from. Though it's the one given on the city's page on Wikipedia, digging through the city's website (though the images only go back a few years), I'm only able to find images of the dark blue version with gold outlines on a white figure in use. (You can see it in the background here.) I've been trying to determine if the submitted version is an official version or historical version of the flag so I know what to put it down as, but I haven't had any luck. Even the FOTW version appears to potentially be an interpretation of a written description (though it does note that a dark blue variant with colors on the garuda appears on government websites in 2008). (As a note, the Mongolian description of the flag FOTW refers to uses the word "хөх" which, according to Wiktionary, is exclusively for dark blue.) I'm...not sure how to proceed with this. I guess the options are 1) use the dark blue/gold/white one (current official flag) 2) use the dark blue colored flag (variant of the current flag) 3) use the light blue flag (variant but of ambiguous legitimacy).

RESOLVED

Brocēni, Latvia - The submitted flag does not seem to match what Wikipedia claims is the current version of the flag. This was changed on Wikipedia back on 30 July 2023. The white version of the flag was not explained nor can I find any information myself. If you happen to know if it was an old version of the flag or if you'd prefer for me to use the current flag please let me know!

Tifariti, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic - It seems like this is not an official flag, and one of (many, unfortunately) proposed flags made and uploaded by Wikipedia users without being associated with the region or labeled as such. At least, I have not seen any evidence to prove that it's real... If the person who submitted it happens to know more than this, please let me know! [For reference, the flag was crossposted to Reddit before it was deleted.] (If evidence is not provided I'll have to remove it, which is a pity 😔)

San Francisco, Antioquia, Colombia - The Wikipedia upload was provided for this flag. The comical bird faces prompted me to dig a little deeper, especially because FOTW provided a different design. While the official San Francisco govt website does use the Wikipedia image here, it does seem in practice that they use the design FOTW provides, evidenced here and here and here. To the submitter, if you see this -- would you be okay with me switching to the actual proper design? I'll vectorize it myself so the quality isn't poor. That being said, there is a somewhat silly but technically defensible argument that the presence of the wiki version on the govt website is enough to justify using that version, so while it's not my personal preference, it is up to you. (If an opinion is not provided, I will switch to the more official version.)

Santa Cruz, California, USA - I'm not sure if this is notification or a request for response, but Wikipedia is not very clear on the usage of the Santa Cruz [County] flag. FOTW confirms that it's for the county only and not the city, and provides this page for the city itself. (For me, images on the page won't load, but they linked the image of the new 2020 flag on the city's website.) I can't find evidence for historical use of the county flag for the city, otherwise I would simply just include it as a past flag... Unfortunately I think Santa Cruz County itself is a bit too large to qualify for this. My current plan is to omit it. Please let me know if you'd like me to do anything else!

[fictionfixations]

Out of Context TWST

imgs are from:

Prologue Book 1 Fan translation of Cater's ceremonial robes vignette Rook's ceremonial robes vignette Book 5 Book 6 Book 7 Spectral Soiree Tsumderland 2 A Firelit Sky Jade's Halloween Groovification Message

and then i gave up (was gonna go in order after laughing at the first img. now its a mishmash of me randomly remembering some bits i wanted to add, and removing the ones that didnt mesh too well)

recently finished book 6 and starting book 7 so there's a bunch of book 6 imgs in here

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

(note: I can't find the lashing of love line when we encounter Crowley for the first time?? I swear it was there before but now its just not??)

[Lilia: What's this? You'd really turn down my juice?!]

[Vil: WAAAH!]

you get no context whatsoever except that he's sobbing (for three long hours.. its funny i swear). i refuse to show you the visual if you haven't seen it yet.

["I shall even spare it from being served as dinner."]

[Crowley: If you're not satisfied with my offer, I can arrange to have you thrown out again.]

[Grim: Not more lashings of love! We gotta get outta here! Ace: OW!]

[Deuce: Because I'm going to launch you.]

[Epel: You're...hurting me. Please, let go?]

*proceeds to beat everyone up* /hj

[> Then it's kill or be killed!]

[Grim: I'd recognize that collar anywhere. It's the same one that psycho stuck on me at orientation!]

[Cater: Aww yeah, I am getting my paint on!]

[Cater: Even so, he'll have a mom.]

Context because I can't share more imgs: In his Ceremonial Robes vignette, he's basically guessing what people's dorm will be with Trey. When they get to Epel, he goes,

[Cater: He's by far the cutest~! If he had an older sister, don't you think she would be a total stunner?

[Insert Trey's response]

Cater: Even so, he'll have a mom.]

He clarifies that he's joking but still LOL

(this was changed in the eng localization to a comment about washing dishes)

[Vargas: Great sorcery begins with a great physique! Behold the muscles you can build with a diet of raw eggs!]

[> Muscly dog man, sure why not.]

[Ace: A painting? Hard pass! I don't care how cute she is if she's two-dimensional!]

[Riddle: It's not absurd! It's literally the law!]

[Leona: Hey, I'm into it.]

[???: *sniff* *sniff*]

[Floyd: Whaaat? Sorry, can't hear you, man! Hair dryer go brrrr!]

[Deuce: You don't get to call my eggs stupid. You don't get to call ANY eggs stupid!]

[Grim: So you were only a little more annoying than you are now? > I did notice you had that vibe...]

[(Jade) "Oooh, I love it when you flee in terror. It makes me want to chase you!"]

SS from:

But I found what card it's actually from by the wiki

[Malleus: Oh, now I have to clean up your waste? You little scamp.]

[Deuce: For sixteen years, I was so sure...]

[Cater: Ooh, it's almost time! Okay, all you sexy body doubles, that's a wrap!]

[Deuce: I fell and got a boo-boo. Ouchies. *sob*]

[Jade: Oh dear, how did I get into this mess? Don't tell me you planned for me to get caught this whole time...!]

[Jamil: So I made wet burgers.]

[Grim: What if there's an assassin out for our blood?!]

[Lilia: "Lilia. When I woke up this morning, Drago was gone. Now there's this egg in his place. What should I do?"]

[Vil: EEEEE HEE HEE! YEEESSS!]

i cannot explain the utter joy contained within that one voice line. It's just pure exhilaration.

this lives rent free in my brain (along with the kiss. you get no more context besides that)

(it looks funny without the voice attached tho LMFAO. it's like a "Kyaa~! Yatta!" as in like a scream/yell and then 'hurrah/I did it/yes/sweet'! ehh, basically joy when things go well)

there's a limit to how many images you can put in one post. oops.

[kingwuko]

this ship and fandom has not died i discovered this ship a while ago and im obsessed. Also have you seen that in the wiki wu has a cousin named shihan who is dean of republic city university.

This ship is still afloat! I'm doing my best to keep it alive haha but I can't do it without you guys!

I did actually talk about Shihan in a post here:

She is introduced in the newest book for the Avatar Legends tabletop roleplaying game. The book is the Republic City Setting Toolkit, and it has a ton of delightful information about the city and all the people within it.

Shihan is described as a vivacious woman and she is Wu's 'distant cousin', which upon googling the definition of 'distant cousin' is, at a minimum, a third cousin-once removed. I've personally headcanoned that she is a 4th cousin once removed, and that her family branched off before the ruling of Kuei.

She also helps Wu write policy for his plans to democratize the Earth Kingdom, which I think is a fun way to keep Wu coming back to Republic City often (and spend some time with Mako too..?).

And, the book also confirms that Wu went to school at Republic City University, so Wu, at some point, was going to school that was run by his (distant) family member. Nepotism? Idk. Lots of fun things to play with if you want include Shihan in your headcanons and fics!

[asimpledreamwanderer]

i'm a little ill right now and honestly don't have motivation to make sketches (i haven't posted my art here in a long ass time- and honestly good for me because i look back to those pictures and think damn, was that me??) so here's some little emily headcanon / backstory thing i came up with based on these facts about her on the ttte wiki and the official wikipedia page about her basis:

so without furder ado, my emily backstory headcanon(s):

so we all know that emily is the safety engine- and compared to the other members of the steam team, she doesn't get herself into very silly accidents or derails often- sure, sometimes she can't read the atmosphere or does gestures that aren't exactly helpful to a specific situation (such as getting mavis flowers when she was down), but she's very introspective, often being able to tell what's up with her friends and frankly, doing odd jobs until she becomes the safety engine- but also having a bit of a bossy attitude about her when it comes to such things, like bossing around thomas and percy following a storm, and becoming impatient when she feels as if the other engines have little regard for their work or her work- but the question remains- why?

it's known that emily's engine class faced issues with traction and staying smoothly on the rails- something that we see frequently in the model series, she lightly "rocks and rolls" on the track- additionally, her engine class got into two big derailment accidents- one where the engine derailed on broken rail, killing a passenger, and one where the removal of a speed restriction on the track caused the engine to derail and kill two people

additionally, only the first of the class is left preserved in the current day- i headcanon that in ttte, this engine was last minute bought by the fat controller to help out on the northwestern railway- something that emily remains thankful for, but unused to.

i headcanon that since most of her class was removed from service around the 1890's (just around when edward was born), emily has little to no experience about railways in the more recent times, and that emily remained pulling passenger trains on her former railway with an "engines are seen, not heard" attitude- similar to what duke says to peter sam and sir handel about his younger days. additionally, since emily was the first of her class, i would assume she would be subject to more experimentation and/or exposure of what actually happens to engines rather quickly, given her curious personality- she would probably spend a lot of time at the steamworks on the gnr, with the workers there adoring her curious personality and her desire to be learning new things- leading to them talking to her through any and every modification she might receive, any repairs she might receive, any repairs that other engines might receive- the works. the workers there treat her very humanly, almost as if she's purely a human without arms or legs- they let her smell and experience the texture of human food and drinks (receiving some funny reviews from her in the process), read the paper out loud to her, teach her how to do things such as mathematics and telling her about literature- you get the point. around when her class became decomissioned and the railway preparing to send the other engines for scrap, the workers talked to her about it- and her reaction was very very human. more human than most other workers had seen throughout their lifetime.

while emily was devastated over her siblings' deaths, she also remained confused- she had not officially been named by her controller at the time, and she experienced the same issues as the rest of her class did, but up until then was lucky to never have derailed or killed another being in the process. the engines on the gnr were given numbers after older locomotives- essentially taking their places on the railway as the older locomotives would soon be forgotten- making emily wonder "why? why do i deserve to stay and be preserved and restored to working order while all my siblings are sent for scrap?" this also made her feel queasy about being a new engine and/or about seeing new engines on the railway- she began to worry about how it was unfair, that older engines would be sent to scrap as newer ones came, but also terrifying her to realize that they didn't even stand some sort of protection in the process, and that the vast majority of steam locomotives would eventually face the same fate as their predecessors (additionally, i like to think the gnr had a "no-fraternizing-during-work" policy for the engines, and most of the engines would be too exhausted at the end of the day for deeper conversations with one another- also leading to emily panicking about who even are the engines she worked with, what are their likes/dislikes, etc- this also leads to why she got frustrated at thomas when he slept with her in the sheds in calling all engines but that's a point i'll get to later)- sure, she spoke to the engines while they worked, and in fact sometimes told them what was going on and tried to reassure them while she was in the works- but it was never enough to keep the guilt about her being chosen to be preserved and an engine's life cycle away.

due to all of these things- most of emily's relaxed conversation occuring with humans, the majority of her knowledge coming from humans and their perspective, and the lack of fraternizing with other engines while at work, emily became somewhat stunted developmentally- sure, she's older than edward by a good twenty years- but she doesn't even know how to act on a running railway anymore- after all, the times have changed. this leads to emily's occasional short temper with the other engines, and even leads to the events when we first meet her, where she takes thomas' coaches on accident- she was not used to asking, she simply did as she was told on her own railway- twisting her attempts at becoming friendly with the engines on sodor at first

when sir topham hatt first bought her, the workers at the steamworks were delighted that emily would not only be able to run again, but that she would be in a place that she would be cared for, that sir topham hatt would be able to put the time and energy into repairing her and taking care of her that the workers at the gnr were beginning to lose access to- this led to a little "going away" party for emily- many tears were shed, and many memories were shared- even if now most of the workers are gone, emily looks back at them fondly, probably telling the engines about her times with them, and her times on the gnr.

here's where emily's safety engine backstory comes through- remember how her engine class used to derail and "rock and roll" quite often? this led to her become a worrywart- not just about herself, but about the other engines and their safety as well- she was concerned about henry when his tubes were leaky, she stood up for salty against thomas and percy's teasing, she looks at james and thomas almost like her little brothers (because obviously, they get into some of the dumbest and most careless accidents- and in the earlier series, don't really learn from it)- the list goes on, but she essentially ends up worrying about herself and the other engines A LOT. however, deep down this is because of her revelation about scrapping while she was at the gnr- she herself does not want to be scrapped, but she doesn't want any of her new friends to be scrapped either- especially since many perfectly working steam locomotives would be sent to the scrapyard at alarming rates.

now this is where her probably not socializing with many other engines whilst working or resting during her time at the gnr comes in- remember when thomas sleep whistles, keeps chatting off to her, and snoring when they shared a shed together? and just how annoying she found it? i believe she was overstimulated by it, seeing that she was still a rather new engine at the time, and slept by herself at knapford sheds. secretly, she was probably scared thomas' sleep whistling might send her away, or distract her from her rest and cause issues tomorrow- when she realizes that that isn't the case, when thomas leaves she begins to feel lonely, having enjoyed the company of her friend and realizing that nothing was going to happen to either of them after all- and when she was invited to take a berth at tidmouth sheds, she was delighted- with some learning curves, obviously- after all, she's very new to this

i imagine that edward would take to her endearingly, realizing that she's probably having an inner conondrum she doesn't openly speak of, thus being easier on her- he would also probably wonder how he ended up being an engine younger than her by the years but older in personality, but chooses to not mention it- sometimes they get along talking about their days on their old railways, and it would imagine they can get into pretty deep philosophical conversations (do engines have philosophy?) if emily ever lets her guard down

similarly, henry would probably look to her for advice and learning how to stand up for himself, and being kinder- not only was he more of a cynical character in the early series, but he was also very very ill- and that combined with his desire to prove himself past all his ailments probably turned him into a very harsh person- something he originally couldn't really understand- and something that emily was able to help him through, talking about his feelings

obviously in the series she also has her bossy moments, being impatient when clearing up the rails from a storm and taking gordon's express- i imagine that it was taken control of by sir topham hatt in a much different manner, remembering how emily was at the gnr's steamworks- he speaks to her almost like a teenager about her actions, letting her bask and self reflect instead of immediately assigning her to other work until she can be trusted again- thus making her one of his more sensible engines

however, emily does have her own moments of not being so sensible- for example, when she wished to be streamlined like caitlin, admiring her (and victor was basically like nah you don't need that 💀)- insecurity from her old age and wishing to be something more than just an odd jobs engine probably made her a little bit insecure. another great example is when she's with whiff- obviously, she's not one for smells, but to go on and laugh at him and be frantic about being seen with him just because her peers laughed at him? clearly she had a moment of smokebox fog there.

i imagine that emily actually wouldnt have much prejudice towards diesels- sure, she got mad at him for taking the coaches when being ill, but that was because he was ill and pushing himself- it has nothing to do with him being a diesel (something i assume would surprise diesel, especially for such an old engine like emily)- i believe that she wouldn't even know what diesels actually are for a while, but she would see them as any useful engine, and that once she did learn about the steamie/diesel conflict she would try to calm her inner crisis about scrapping- sir topham hatt wouldn't do that, and they're only doing their purpose after all

additionally, emily probably doesn't take kindly to hearing about engines getting scrapped- in her younger days, she probably remained blissfully unaware of the mechanics of it, but as she got older and learned more about scrapping it probably terrifies her, and she believes that all engines can be useful and don't deserve to be damned to the scrapyard for any reason

back to thomas and james? yeah. she probably sees them as her "annoying little brothers" that she loves very dearly- which is confirmed for james in a magazine story- but it's definitely a much different relationship than what she had with younger engines at the steamworks, with her relationship with the two being more freeflowing. i assume james has some sort of insecurity about being a "failed prototype" and an experimental engine on his old railway, and emily manages to help him get through it while talking about the positives and the actual mechanics of it, and reaffirming that he still is a really useful and really good engine.

and as for thomas? playful banter. so much banter. sometimes they act silly and fight like actual human siblings would, but at the end of the day they do care for eachother deeply- think of her having to hold a metaphorical leash on him, at times 😭

back to emily's conondrums- this leads to her being a very safe engine- in fact, being one of the safest on sir topham hatt's railway- initially i imagine she wouldn't care much for not being numbered, as it soothed her inner panic of not taking a scrapped engine's place, but over time as she began to heal i imagine that she would desire it in some way- and experience such delight when she is numbered and given the position! she wears her number very proudly on the nwr and is very very proud of being the nwr's safety engine :)

sheesh, this was LONG- i'm taking some time away from the phone- if you managed to make it this far i hope you're having a lovely day :) (also can you tell i'm an older sister 💀💀)

[whostoleallthecookies]

ok as promised here's the post about botw-adjacent hyrule castle's theorized main entrance

so: as anyone who's explored the castle in breath of the wild or tears of the kingdom knows, there are limited entrances to the interior of the castle. there's the docks, some tunnels, the balcony of the observation room, etc. then there are a couple of side doors, like the ones to the guards' chambers, the library door that leads outside, the door(s) to zelda's room, etc. but like, none of those is a *main entrance*. you'd think it's obvious, duh, it's the door to the sanctum!

but here's the kicker. the sanctum doesn't lead anywhere.

you can't actually get anywhere else from the sanctum. you can get on top of the sanctum, sure, and you can get outside, but it does not connect to any other parts of the castle. There aren't even rubble filled doorways that would indicate that you could! (this is Very Likely so that you wouldn't accidentally end up in the boss fight in botw while exploring the rest of the castle, and like, that makes sense from a dungeon design point of view, but not from a *liveable castle* point of view.) this is ESPECIALLY frustrating because Creating a Champion literally states that Zelda's room is where it is so that she could get to the sanctum in less than 5 minutes without going outside. SHE CAN'T, NINTENDO, BECAUSE YOU REMOVED ALL INNER THE DOORS TO THE SANCTUM!!

so this creates the question: where was the main entrance before calamity then?

well, youtuber banan039 has an answer: under the observation room balcony! genious, i thought, that makes so much sense omg why wasn't that in there in botw. (by the way i'm in love with banan039's pre-calamity mod's progress videos they give me so much strength on my harrowing journey to trying to figure out intact hyrule castle's layout please go watch them and support the creator if you have the means.)

but uh yeah anyway turns out the door isn't there in botw because there's a cliff like right in front of it. well that's inconvenient, i thought, but idk, maybe the calamity caused it and collapsed the door.

NOPE! that door was never in there even pre-calamity in breath of the wild canon!

(https://www.reddit.com/r/Breath_of_the_Wild/comments/7xkavh/hyrule_castle_town_on_its_prime_before_the/)

this screenshot is from the cutscene in champion's ballad where king rhoam appoints the champions. if you look closely, you can see that the area underneath the observation room (right above the castle gates) is the same texture as the cliffs around it, and you can see the bit of grass there, yeah, that would block the front door.

(also, minor spoilers for tears of the kingdom: you couldn't have anything under the observation room anyway because of the royal secret passage.)

and actually then i got to thinking: if the front door was under the observation room, what would be the purpose of the gatehouses??? and, as a friend pointed out, the narrow winding path that would be difficult to climb, heightening the castle's defenses????

so what makes the most sense is that the main entrance would be in the sanctum after all, especially since it was said in creating a champion that it would have had an indoors access to zelda's room. my current working theory is that there was a spiral staircase in one of the corner towers of the sanctum's lowest floor, but i have not yet been able to explore that area in depth enough to confirm that it could have been possible. however, it seems... plausible, likely even if i happen to find a spot with a lot of rubble on the floor, because that could be a staircase hole filled up. it's not the most conventional castle architecture but eh, it makes more sense than the front door being before either of the gatehouses, straight on the line of attack after the castle gate gets broken.

except.

THERE'S A FUCKING FRONT DOOR UNDER THE OBSERVATION ROOM IN AGE OF CALAMITY

(https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Hyrule_Castle?file=Hyrule_Castle.jpg) (and a bunch of aoc cutscenes, though i wasn't able to find the one this screenshot is from.)

sigh.

[iviarellereads]

My reasons for reading the Wheel of Time

Are you unsure about reading the Wheel of Time? Whether or not you read along with my blog project (explainer here and WOT link index here), this post may be for you!

If you don't want any spoilers before experiencing it yourself, I will just say: watch the first two seasons of the TV show, first. The adaptation changes a lot of the details, but the show is taking elements Robert Jordan wrote 30 years ago, more than a generation removed from today's sensibilities, and he changed his mind on a lot of things as he went on. Rafe Judkins is doing an incredible job of adapting to accommodate changing sensibilities/expectations, a change in medium, and the things RJ didn't decide to make part of his world until later books.

If you don't mind some light expectation-setting spoilers, I'm going to lay out why I love the Wheel of Time, some reasons to pick back up and/or keep going with the series if you ever started and fell off, as well as content notes by way of the downsides so you know what you're getting into.

I can't say whether any of my cons will be dealbreakers for you, or if the pros will make it worth the cons for any individual reader. All I can say is, knowing the bad, I still reread this series because it was worth it for me, and a lot of folks like me agree. If you don't think you can do it, full respect, hopefully I'll see you when I take breaks from this series. 🫡

My rationale

This is probably one of the dearest stories to my heart, and the one that I started refining this format with. I've been in this fandom for almost 15 years, and I wouldn't trade… well, maybe a second of it, but not much.

One of the most chunky fantasy series that exists, the Wheel of Time was begun in the late 1980s by Robert Jordan. When he passed in 2007, his wife and editor chose Brandon Sanderson to complete what they thought would be the final book (but ended up being three books) series with the help of extensive notes he left behind about his intentions for the story.

Even though it's over 30 years old, and there have been active discussion communities on just about all the social interactive platforms you can think of in that time, the Wheel of Time lacks a lot of spoiler-free resources. There are a couple of attempts to make spoiler-free wikis, but they just can't ever quite compare to the full-spoiler ones. There are Discord servers with first-time-reader channels, but not a lot of options for double checking what's safe to say at any given point for full-readers, OR ways for first-time readers to double check information, like if they think they misheard something, without asking and potentially getting spoiled by someone who misinterprets.

So, besides having keyword searchable notes for myself, my ultimate purpose in creating my notes in the first place is to help folks who haven't read the books, to have access to that sort of summary without having to search and get major later-plot spoilers. And since that led to everything else that led to this blog, I think it's only appropriate that I do, eventually, revise my notes and post them here.

I will probably be taking breaks between books. Most of the books in this series have 40, even 50+ chapters. I've already gone and entered it in my Google calendar for tracking (are you really surprised I do that?) and the first book will take me two and a half months to cover, all by itself, though the chapters only average out to ~15 pages each. We're going to be here at least 3 years, and with breaks between more like 4 or 5. Even so, I think it's right for me to do this one more time.

The Pros:

WIDE cast of characters, including women who get their own deep personalities, motivations, and arcs. Women are often in compare-and-contrast mirrors to men's similar experiences happening in parallel, and only rarely rewards or prizes to be won. (Caveat: even some people who have read the series may scoff at this one, but part of my efforts will be to help make the subtextual things a little more noticeable, because a LOT of character is in the subtext in these books because of the close-third unreliable narrator effect. It's fair to interpret them more shallowly, hell I used to, but then I started looking deeper and found so much more than I expected.)

Setup, foreshadowing, and payoff. Many plot seeds are planted, nurtured, and harvested at perfect ripeness. RJ was a conoisseur of foreshadowing in the subtext, text, and supertext of the story, and when each was most appropriate. Many of the old web rings, forums, and fan sites are long, long dead, but I can attest that this series does some absolutely incredible work with giving readers plenty of information to theorycraft widely and wildly. One particularly (in)famous mystery lasted 8 books across 17 years, and that's not even the longest one, just the easiest for us to point at.

Rarely introducing a new character where an old one will do. While there are over 2700 named characters, a lot of comparable stories would have near doubled that to tell this much story. It's really fun to see names pop back up in unexpected places, and track people who don't get POVs across the world as they say hello from different places and nudge the background plot along.

Evil is no simple thing. It's kind of a spoiler, yes, but I think it's fair when you look at the landscape in which it was written, and if we have a different standard today, it's due in no small part to the Wheel of Time's influence. The 80s and 90s in the fantasy corner of the publishing industry were not bastions of moral complexity. The Wheel of Time has the big literal supernatural capital-e Evil, and the humans who sign on to support it for their myriad reasons, but there are also multiple acknowledged human evils in opposition to it. The heroes and villains get a similar treatment of depth. Some people are nearer to the unquestioned poles of Good or Evil, but your fave is probably a war criminal at some point either way. This story goes on for 14 books plus a prequel, and that sort of simplicity doesn't inspire the sort of deep fandom these have. Nobody is as shallow as they seem at first glance, and most long-time fans have faves in the Light, the Dark, and everywhere in between.

Unreliable narration means there's a LOT more to this series than a surface reading indicates. There's a lot to the surface reading, and there's nothing wrong with it, unless you count "you don't really, fully understand a lot of the characters until you understand the discrepancies between their thoughts and their actions". My first reading was completely superficial and I still had a blast. But my second, and third? Especially after interacting with more of the fandom and honing my skills at media analysis, there's SO much more there to discover. Hopefully this read will help surface-readers get a bit more of the deep understanding, and if your surface reading previously felt unsatisfying or left you hating a lot of the characters, maybe this will help you better appreciate what's going on.

The Cons:

The sexism and gender binary. Gonna level with you, there's a lot of very heteronormative and gender essentialist vibes in here. It's cis binary genders only (with a singular terrible exception we'll deal with when we get to, but know that it's coming and it's handled pretty dreadfully even though you could give it a more charitable reading if you wanted to) and no matter the country or culture they're from, women and men each have very strange ideas about what the other gender is about. Robert Jordan was a US Southern cishet baby boomer Vietnam veteran, he almost certainly had some really unhinged ideas about gender relations. (Why it's not as much a con: two reasons. First, see unreliable narration above. Second, I think that one of the themes that really gets missed by a lot, a LOT of readers is that imposing binaries divides and weakens us. I will be exploring this whenever I remember that it's relevant to talk about and you may get real sick of it by the end. But, I think a lot of RJ's writing in this direction was intentionally drawing attention to how destructive it is. It's just never really stated out loud, it's once again in the subtext, and it doesn't always land the way I think he hoped. I promise, I will have the citations to back up my assertion by the end.)

Queerness: none good. There's one sweet sapphic relationship which is relegated to "gay until graduation" status at what amounts to a girls only boarding school, and never spoken of again except as friendship. In the encyclopedias, the characters in it are explicitly defined as straight. There are several lifelong lesbians who are explicitly one or the other of the kinds of evil. There's the one singular bad trans rep character. After the Sanderson portions start, there's one man who's said to be gay. RJ maintained in interviews that of course gay people existed, the story just wasn't any of theirs, which still burns me. (The show is making this MUCH better. I genuinely had faith in Rafe Judkins's adaptation after something he does in season 1 in this vein, and I have zero problem adding a little queer goggle view to all the interactions.)

We go six books where sexual assault is barely a concern, then get a handful of them all back to back in one book, with a few more sprinkled through afterward. There's a particularly troubling one against a male main character that a lot of the fandom doesn't even acknowledge as having happened. I'm not even gonna try to defend this, it's inexcusable, and if I'd known, I might not have read it, even if it's one of my favourite stories today. (Hashtag Please Fix It In The Show Rafe Judkins.)

The start is rough. The first book is very much a Lord of the Rings homage, where RJ hopes you'll see the places he diverges and stay along for the ride as he defies the standard fantasy outline of his day. The "come play with me in this space" of it means there are a number of potentially really interesting things that are just abandoned and never mentioned again, in alongside the things that were refined along the way. I won't always point these out because spoilers, but it's good to be prepared for some level of disappointment that the thing you want to see explored, isn't. (And hey, you can always explore it in fanfiction!)

And the series remained a work in progress to the end. RJ always thought he was just two or three books from done, ever since book 3. He wrote book 11 believing there would be just one more after it, but after his passing, his wife/editor Harriet McDougal, Brandon Sanderson, and the rest of what we call "Team Jordan" decided there was no way to fit what was in his notes into a single book, so they split it into the final three (books 12-14). So, sometimes things will feel like they're hurtling toward a destination that you know, from the rest of the stack, has to be several books off for a satisfying arc of it. Alls I can say is, at least we know the series has an end that it seems most people who reached it found fairly satisfying.

Adjacent to this, The Slog. There's a plot slowdown in the middle, not unlike the "middle of a trilogy" problem but it goes on for, at least for some readers and by some reckoning, 6 of the 14 books. Readers who like a fairly dry focus on politics and subtle character interaction more than plot will find this less painful. Readers like myself who need a plot to keep us hooked and moving forward will feel like the series drags its wheels in the mud for a couple thousand pages. This is anecdotally where a lot of readers quit the series, and they often cite this as a main reason. I can promise you the ending is worth the Slog to get there, if you're like me. But, my notes go from over 100 pages in Google Docs for book 4, to 57 for book 5, and just 12 pages for book 10, if you want a comparison of how thin the plot gets. (A lot of long-time readers will try to gaslight me about this, because they come out of the woodwork every time it comes up, and I'm telling you now: that's a great way to get blocked, because I have the receipts. I'm not saying the slog exists as a moral judgement against it or anyone who likes it. I'm literally just stating provable fact that the plot slows down and at least this reader feels it really hard.)

[fluffyblue-multifandommess]

Torrenting 101

I've been meaning to make a post like this for a long while, but the recent removal of many shows from streaming platforms prompted me to finally get it done.

This is a long post, so check out the TL;DR at the end if you don't have the spoons to read the whole thing

What is "torrenting"?

From Wikipedia: "BitTorrent is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a decentralized manner."

In layman's terms: When you're torrenting something, you are connecting to other people who have the file you want, and downloading it from them. This does mean that if few people have the file you want, the download may take a very long time. (I've been stuck at 41% of an anime OST for almost 2 years now) BUT it also means that if many people have the file you want, the download may be completed in just a handful of minutes.

This manner of downloading files also allows you to stop the download at any point and then simply resume it later, whereas downloading through a browser often requires you stay connected the whole time, or else have to start over.

Why torrent instead of streaming?

Permanent availability: once you've torrented a file, it's on your computer. This means you can watch it any time you want without worrying about your internet connection crapping out, or the streaming platform suddenly deciding to pull your favourite show.

Torrenting sites also generally don't ask you to make an account just so you can access files, and they usually don't make you click on a bunch of links that pop out ads - all things I've had to deal with on many streaming sites (much to my annoyance).

Also torrents are free.

How torrent? Much confused

In order to torrent, you'll need a BitTorrent client. Your search engine of choice can give you tons of sites with suggestions, but my personal favourite is Transmission. It works on MacOs and Windows (and Linux distros), and is very simple and easy to use. (You can get it here: https://transmissionbt.com/)

In order to find torrents to download, you simply go to a torrenting website (or you can search "Supernatural season 1 torrent" on your search engine of choice). The ones I use the most are rarbgmirror.org (good for TV shows and films) and nyaa.si (good for anime). But there are tons more.

Safety

Any time you download a file off the internet, there is a risk of downloading malware. Before opening any file you've downloaded, you should make sure it's safe to open. Check whether the file extension matches the expected filetype. For example, a video file should end with .mkv, .mp4, .avi or other file extension used for video files. Music files will usually end with .mp3, .ogg, .aac, or .flac. If you're unsure what filetype a file extension is for, you can look it up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_formats.

On Windows, you need to look out for any file that ends with .exe. .exe are executable file types; in other words, programs/apps. Now to be clear; a file that ends with .exe isn't necessarily malware. Your browser app's file name ends with .exe. Your art program's filename ends with .exe. All .exe files aren't malware. But if you're downloading an episode of a show, and the file name is the.owl.house.s02e20.exe, don't open that bitch.

If you're on MacOs (or a Linux distro), you don't need to worry about .exe, because those files won't be able to run.

Checking file types: By default, file extensions are often hidden in most systems, because most users don't care/need to know them. You can see the full file name in your BitTorrent client, or you can right-click a file in the File Explorer/Finder and click "Properties"/"Get Info".

As a rule, I don't download software, because avoiding malware is much harder with those. So I can't give much advice on how to do so safely, except to use virustotal.com, which checks for malware in the file/link you feed it. It is generally reliable, though it can turn up false negatives (and false positives). I'm not responsible for any malware you get while trying to play Dragon Age for free.

Sidenote: Some torrent file folders will have an .exe with a name like "RARBG_DO_NOT_MIRROR.exe". Those aren't malware, they're not even proper executables. They are just there to prevent mirroring to other sites.

On a different note, please make sure you have an adblocker installed before going on a torrenting site, particularly if you are a minor. Some of them have explicit ads.

Legality

Downloading copyrighted files is completely illegal in most places, while in some places, only sharing files to download (aka 'seeding' if you're using a BitTorrent client) is illegal. Check your local legislation, deactivate seeding in your torrenting client if necessary. Sail the high seas at your own risk.

VPNs: a friend wisely suggested I mention VPNs here. VPNs may protect you from legal consequences of torrenting, but that is only if the VPN company is one that will not give your data to the authorities when asked, so choose your VPN wisely. I don't use one, so once again I cannot give specific advice on this topic, but https://www.privacyguides.org/vpn/ may help you choose a VPN.

TL;DR

Install Transmission via their website.

Find torrents on one of many torrenting sites such as rarbgmirror.org or nyaa.si.

Click on "download torrent" or "magnet" or corresponding icon

Open With Transmission

Do not open any file that ends in .exe.

Run any games/software you've downloaded through virustotal.com before opening/launching them

Et voilà, you can watch Infinity Train as many times as you want.

Final Note

Please remember to support indie artists whenever possible - they have bills to pay, same as you. 💙