#guess or choice who they plan to kill lmao

[zhuoyichenpretty]

Ep 22-23 Commentary

Ha...I was inexplicably nervous for eps 22-23 and it looks like I was right to be (-: What a rollercoaster. Spoilers below!

I've just come out of ep 23 and uh????? holy shit????? ZYC????

Ok ok but to backtrack, let's do my comments semi-chronologically:

Ep 22:

A carry-over from ep 21 that I have to mention—heck yeah PSJ give WZY hell. She doesn't have all that many lines but she sure knows how to make them count. Also seeing PSJ and WX get screen time just the two of them makes my brain go "yay <3"

Back to ep 22, loved the fake-out sundial ayeee that was a nice Chekhov's gun that also brings the real sundial back into relevance for later. Also me eating up the PSJ and ZYC crumb of an interaction has brought to my attention how starved I am of their screen time together.

This whole ep was a great lament towards the feared inevitable. Every sad downcast look from ZYC, every complicated glance WX gives him. A wonderful, terrible crossroads for these characters. I love that for ZYC especially, it's such an incredible mess of emotion coming to a head. Bad enough that he's come to care about the demon who killed his family and ruined his life, bad enough that he's sworn a blood oath he regrets and tied himself to punishing someone he no longer finds culpable, bad enough that ZYZ's life or death depends solely on his choice and ZYZ is constantly practically begging for death when ZYC wants him to live. How much immensely worse it makes the whole situation that WX is literally ZYZ's soulmate. And obviously the whole team has only grown more and more attached to ZYZ, too. ZYC's personal turmoil aside, how heavy must that responsibility and guilt be? For the finishing blow that only he can deliver to also deeply threaten every other person he cares about? Everyone understands in the abstract what must happen and why, but just like seeing ZYZ lose control firsthand, the gulf between understanding and experiencing is so unimaginably wide. If he kills ZYZ, can there really be no resentment from his friends? From WX?

Also it seems ZYC only wears cloaks so that he can give them to other people lmao

Ah fuck, the farewell drinks. I didn't even factor in how ZYC might not survive the encounter (''': The drama truly was like hm can we possibly give ZYC a worse day than that night his whole fam died? Maybe give him a bunch of new family members and also the blade and the fate and the sole responsibility to potentially irrevocably scar said family members with? And he might die in the process too? (-: haha maybe? (((-:

Oh. Oh. Addendum. I forgot this til I saw it mentioned in another post—ZYC recounting his oath as he watched WX smile when they discussed reviving the tree...I could feel him weighing those words against his own life, against ZYZ's life, against WX's happiness. One way out of this impossible situation is indeed to doom himself. I'm in pieces.

Damn if WX isn't dedicated heart and soul, going into the sundial like that. I'm sad no one could keep her company for those 300 years but also I guess that's kind of an impossible ask (and maybe not survivable for the other non-goddess mortals? I'm admittedly very unclear on sundial time loophole logistics). It would have been nice to see someone offer though, even just to be turned down.

Ooh I like the soul needle fake-out, given this show's penchant for retroactive "actually we had a plan all along" moments. A good subversion of the narrative's own style.

Also I saved this for the end because it doesn't really fit the linearity of my comments but what the fuuuuuuuck oh my god I absolutely flipped out at this scene:

I am at once rabidly intrigued and at the same time not sure if I'll be satisfied with whatever payoff will come for this so I don't want to overindulge in theorizing and setting my own expectations too high. Maybe this is just a fevered hallucination, maybe it means nothing (I hope it means something). But damn!!! What a gorgeous man crazy scene.

In conclusion, ep 22 had some good stuff for me. Plot development and reflection and tension enough that I may have been satisfied with just that one episode. But they gave us two, so onward to ep 23 comments!

Ep 23:

I like how many solid reasons the team has to suspect ZYC being possessed. Even though I withheld judgment during my watch given how quickly the show usually confirms that kind of stuff with a possession mark, just simply casting that doubt made the whole build up that much more intense.

ZYC slowly walking down the corridor with the whole grounds lit a somber and haunting gold—*chef's kiss*

ZYC's monologue to a catatonic ZYZ is so important to me. The closest we'll get to his internal monologue about this whole situation. The kinds of things said when we think there's no conscious listener.

Okay so, having finished this episode and looking back, Li Lun's hands coming up from behind ZYC was not to denote possession (at least in this episode), potentially is a visual from ZYZ's POV, and seems related to the above screencap. I am so, so curious. Once again, I'm stopping myself from further speculation because I want to be surprised but ahhhhhhhhh

PSJ shooting at Ao Yin is so gorgeous. Her action scenes seriously never disappoint—the creativity of her fight choreos!! Also very cool that the whole team is getting to take part in the action, not just the two male leads.

Bai Jiu possession was not on my bingo card but I sure do love that we literally saw the possession take place and I still didn't connect the dots. Good shitttt. Also oh no ): ZYC was telling the truth about the soul needle, he was just tricked ):

Seriously from the Ao Yin case to getting PSJ released to reviving the Divine Wood to getting tricked by possessed!Bai Jiu to making pear soup to fighting ZYZ to fighting Li Lun—when will ZYC get a single goddamn vacation day holy shit.

Also when will WX tear up that contract so ZYZ can stop having a mild heart attack every time he wants to kiss her ): &I love that they saved the 300-year montage for this moment. While their ship doesn't give me brainrot personally, who could be unmoved by that incredible and undisclosed sacrifice? That's soulmatism.

Okay, I'd seen clips of them filming the ZYC and Li Lun fight but damn I did not expect it'd be happening right now!! Right after already taking damage from ZYZ? And my god is Li Lun brutal. The two actors did such an impressive job on this entire fight, what with Li Lun's ease and ZYC's suffering. I really appreciated the extensive hand-to-hand combat after Li Lun literally obliterated ZYC's sword. (Also though, given the origin of that sword, I kept hoping for a flashback to ZYC's brother once it broke, but alas, no dice.) Anyway, the show does not play around about ZYC whump it seems. I was very very shook by that throat punch; that shit legitimately looked like it hurt.

Honestly, I had a hard time with the extended ZYZ and Li Lun conversation at the very end because oh my god someone please heal ZYC lmao. But of course, that's the end of the episode~~

Y'all...check on your local ZYC stans because I was not okay after all that (': I need a heaping dose of comfort after all that hurt, but as always I'm cautious of hoping for much from canon itself. So yeah! Ep 23 was solid, but I would probably be in better shape if today's release just ended on ep 22 ((':

Time to go wait for the cast's Hi6 episode to drop so I can heal my battered heart ;-;

[martincart]

There is a trend on Twitter that is about drawing your comfort characters parodying this panel from a SU fan comic. I wouldn't say that Toot / Lulu is my comfort character, but what other character would be capable of killing his friend for economic interest??

[firestorm09890]

stray canto vii part 1 thoughts (warning: long)

so many cool new designs!! it made me realize how few of interest we got in Canto VI. Then almost everything was pretty standard (classic maid and butler outfits, lots of suits, Cathy had a fancy dress at least? and everything was brown. yes I know, T Corp color drain, but still. and Öufi came before season 3 ended so that didn’t count), but this time we have Camille, the P Corp guys, Fanghunt Office, Hugo I guess, Hong Lu’s sister, the firefist guy? if he counts? he barely appeared, Sansón, and all the fancy dressed up bloodfiends. woo babey!!

speaking of Jia Xichun, I like her! She’s cute! I didn’t expect to see anyone related to Hong Lu, but in retrospect I probably should’ve, since his turn is next and his family is massive. I hope nothing bad happens to her. I've never read Dream of the Red Chamber

also speaking of Hugo, lol. lmao. when he was talking about pressing the button to get the reward I was like “oh hopkins 2, got it” and then Ryōshū sliced off his hands so I guess… not hopkins 2

ALSO the blonde Fanghunt guy is named Romero, which is apparently the name of a character in Vampire: The Masquerade. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an intentional reference

Sinclair cursing that one guy out was so awesome. I remember when Canto V part 2 came out and he censored himself saying “Bitch Brother” people were worried that the new translators were making him softer than he actually was, but, nah, he tries his best to be a polite boy but when he’s actually genuinely pissed off he does not hold back. Ryōshū correcting him BUT THEN SAYING HIS INTERPRETATION WAS GOOD absolutely killed me. my son demands respect

it’s a good day to be a Leviathan fan

The scripted loss encounter was so cool. They set you to level 45 no matter what level your LCB Don is, and take away all your EGO except the base (which you can’t even use), and I don’t know how far you can actually get in this fight because I flipped tails every single time and lost every clash

let’s talk about the Barber! leave it to Project Moon to look at the character who didn’t have very much of a personality who stuck around with the priest and attempted multiple plans to bring Don Quixote back home so he could become sane again (and burned a bunch of Quixote’s chivalry books, also with the priest), and turned him into an insane vampire woman with big scissors and a shrill cackle who stitches masks onto people’s faces.

interesting choice to have Sancho and Dulcinea both named in a single line and then not acknowledged or mentioned again

Sansón! so based on his story log portrait background being bisexual, the blue name, and him resembling someone in Demian’s group in the Limbus Company PV, I feel confident saying he’s part of Demian’s Group. The spot where his Sign would be is covered by his mask, though, so no one in-universe knows

I think this is why Sinclair was cast in the role of the Knight of the White Moon: he also has the sign, which Sansón (who is the Knight of the White Moon) would be able to see, and even if other sinners have it too, they’re not Demian’s special guy. everyone else, though, seemed to be cast in the most humiliating role possible: horse to be ridden for Gregor, wild animal for Heathcliff, random peasant for Rodya, presumably homeless old person for Outis

ok Sansón. in the book, he’s a young college student who read the first part of Don Quixote and, in part 2, approaches Quixote saying he’s a big fan and encouraging him to go back out and do more knight stuff. However, he actually just thinks Don Quixote’s antics are very amusing and isn’t actually an earnest supporter, and is conspiring with the barber and priest to get Quixote back home to stay. the way they (priest and barber try to bring him home in part 1 is by tricking him with an adventure that’s conveniently in the same direction as their home village, but then they get sidetracked in an inn for a long time so they just put him in a cage and drive him home. in part 2, they want to play on Quixote’s terms for a more effective result. near the beginning of the second part, they have Sansón dress as a knight (called the Knight of Mirrors/Knight of the Forest. these titles have no significance in the book but apparently the mirror thing forces Quixote to see himself as the frail old man he is in Man of La Mancha), say his lady is fairer than Dulcinea to get Don Quixote to duel him, and then make Quixote promise to stay home for a year when he loses. however, Sansón is the one who loses, because he wasn’t expecting Quixote to actually be good at jousting. Later, near the very end, which iirc is 3 months after the first encounter, another knight called the Knight of the White Moon issues the exact same challenge to Don Quixote (it’s just Sansón again, and "White Moon" has no significance in the original book either), but this time Sansón wins, so Don Quixote goes home, dejected, and then becomes “sane” again and dies.

Since this Sansón is part of Demian’s group, I don’t think his intentions will be the same- the Barber was a bloodfiend, and he sees beyond the ambitions of the bloodfiends now- but it’s fun to know how he is in the source nonetheless

I really like how he didn’t show up after the Barber’s defeat to say something cryptic and then leave, he told us quite a bit, and though his methods were… questionable, he DID force the sinners to actually finally pay attention to Don Quixote

speaking of the stage play, I like the juxtaposition between Sansón’s play and the Barber’s. in a different context, what Sansón did might’ve been framed as horrifying, and we’d be talking about how uncanny and unreal this is, but I don’t think that’s the intention here. the sinners might be playing roles, and all the enemies are cardboard cutouts, but it’s better than putting targets on real people (though I guess they’re not “people”, they’re bad, bad, bloodfiends). the cheerful music in La Manchaland is distorted and out of place, while the stage play is nice in comparison. the music for the talking sections is a bit too upbeat for the situation, but the music during the battles really immerses you. guitar! trumpet! maraca! this music is clearly composed to emulate spanish music, and it’s very earnest, which I think is important, with how easily music sets tone in media.

in both cases, Don Quixote is in a delusion. nothing in the stage play of her adventures is real, but she’s also completely wrapped up in the narrative of evil bloodfiends without the knowledge that she is one. a violent nightmare and a peaceful dream, both of which she needs to wake up from.

they both do this thing with black-and-white thinking, too. there’s a difference between the “good” bloodfiends, which you should get along with, and the “bad” ones, which you need to kill (though Don sees them both as bad), and then the bandits in the stage play are cartoonishly evil and love to bully the weak. except it seems the first is the narrative the Barber wanted to sell, while the second is Don Quixote’s reality… I mean, the play is definitely inaccurate, but we’ve seen how Don behaves

if you follow me for kingdom hearts and are for some reason reading this you know how much I love Nobodies in kh. people who used to be human, but aren’t anymore, who look close enough but are different on an intrinsic and physiological level, that everyone automatically treats as unreasonable monsters that need to die when they’re more complicated than that… I love it so much, I’m cheering and clapping whenever bloodfiend morality is brought up. Moses said that Larierre was cordial and offered her a place to sit and talk, but then also said bloodfiends are insatiably hungry and you shouldn’t underestimate them. agh I love it

also THE MUSIIIIIC every fight theme so far has been a banger. songs that were already good but with typical carnival instruments, big brass swing, the aforementioned nice spanish music, and the fucked up and evil sequel to dubstep electroswing featuring evil laughter

and finally, the helm of mambrino. in early part 1 of Don Quixote, he sees a barber (COMPLETELY unrelated barber to the other barber btw) carrying a basin on his head, and thinks it’s the amazing mystical Helm of Mambrino, so he attacks the barber and steals the basin. Don Quixote wears it as a helmet a few times and everyone thinks it looks really stupid. they did not fight a bear for it, nor did they go into a cave. idk what this might actually be in the City. either we’ll see or we won’t

[oddthunder]

incorrect fnaf quotes (will be made into comics soon)

quote sites > https://perchance.org/incorrect-quote-generator > https://perchance.org/generator-incorrect-quotes i love all these and i am going to draw these soon!! let me know if you have any suggestions lol id love to see them! ALSO feel free to draw any of these in your own style!!! these are just ideas fam go nuts lol

BE WARNED, SOME OF THESE TALK ABOUT INJURY BUT MOSTLY ARE JUST HAHA FUNNIES

Quotes -

Freddy: We call that a traumatic experience. Freddy, turning to Bonnie: Not a "bruh moment". Freddy, turning to Chica: Not "sadge". Freddy, turning to Foxy: And DEFINITELY not an "oof LMAO". - - -

Foxy: Is stabbing someone immoral? Chica: Not if they consent to it. Bonnie: Depends on who your stabbing. Freddy: YES??!!

- - -

Bonnie: Small creatures are much more vicious because they have a smaller body to bottle up all their emotions. Freddy: Ridiculous. Give me some examples. Chica: Wasps? Foxy: Terriers? Bonnie: Foxy. - - -

Foxy, Chica & Bonnie: *Screaming* Freddy: *Runs into the room* What's wrong, Bonnie?! Foxy: Wait, why are you asking Bonnie that when Chica and I are also here? Freddy: Because Bonnie wouldn't scream unless it's an emergency. You two scream whenever you have the chance.

- - -

Bonnie: *Gasp* Foxy: What? Bonnie: What if soy milk is just milk introducing itself in Spanish? Foxy: *Inhales* Freddy, in another room with Chica: Do you hear screeching? - - -

Freddy: Dammit, Chica! Chica: What?! It wasn’t me! Freddy: Sorry, force of habit. Dammit, Bonnie! Bonnie: Not me either. Freddy: Oh...Then who set the house on fire? Foxy: *Whistles* - - - Looks like a cinnamon roll/Can actually kill you = Foxy Looks like can kill you/Is actually a cinnamon roll = Bonnie Looks like a cinnamon roll/Is a cinnamon roll = Chica Looks like can kill you/Can actually kill you = Freddy - - - Bonnie: I think we're missing something. Chica: Teamwork? Freddy: Cohesion? Foxy: A general sense of what we’re doing? - - -

Chica: Sometimes I wish I was dead. Bonnie: Chica… Chica: But then I remembered you wouldn’t be there if I were dead. Bonnie: Aww, Chica. *Meanwhile* Freddy: Sometimes I wish I was dead. Foxy: Good for you. - - -

*Chica is cooking* Foxy: Any chance that’s for me? Chica: It’s for Freddy. I’m planning on making some bad choices tonight, and I need them on my side. Bonnie: I never realized the forethought that went into being a disappointment. - - -

Freddy: *Staring at Foxy* Bonnie: What are you doing? Freddy: They’ve just been laying there. Not moving. For hours. Bonnie: That’s called sleeping… Freddy: What’s sleeping? Chica, who just walked into the room: *Concerned noises* - - -

Bonnie: My stomach growled super loud in French. Bonnie: I would like to clarify, my stomach did not speak in French. It growled during French class. Foxy: Bonjour. Freddy: Le growl. Chica: Hon hon hon, feed me a baguette. - - -

Foxy: *Screams* Bonnie: *Screams louder to establish dominance* Chica: Should we do something? Freddy: No, I want to see who wins. - - -

Chica: Isn’t it weird that we pay money to see other people? Foxy: Plane tickets? Bonnie: Concert tickets? Freddy: Therapy? Chica, holding their broken frames: Glasses. - - -

Foxy: *Is hugging Bonnie* Freddy: Hey! It's my turn to hug Bonnie! Freddy: *Grabs Bonnie* Chica: *Kicking down the door* What do you mean, "yOuR tUrN"? We agreed now is my time slot! Foxy: No, It's still my turn! Bonnie: *Suffocating* Guys, I love you, but just because I'm the tallest doesn't mean you can be hugging me constantly! Freddy: But we need the moral support! Foxy: And you're big! Which is cute! Chica: If I don't hug you right now I think the depression will kick in and my body will stop functioning. Bonnie: *Close to tears* Well- ok, I guess. - - -

Chica: We can bake these cookies at 400 degrees for 10 minutes or 4,000 degrees for 1 minute. Freddy: No, that's not how you make cookies. Bonnie: FLOOR IT!! Chica: How about 4,000,000 degrees for 1 second?!? Freddy: yOU'RE GONNA BURN THE HOUSE DOWN- Chica: I'M GONNA HARNESS THE POWER OF THE FUCKING SUN TO MAKE COOKIES! Foxy: DO IT! Freddy: NO- - - -

Freddy: Is there a word for angry and sad? Bonnie, pulling up a dictionary: Malcontented, disgruntled, miserable, desolated- Foxy: Smad. Chica: There are two types of people. - - -

Foxy: I give up. I am so tired. Bonnie: Get the emergency supply! Freddy: *Carries Chica and places them in front of Foxy* Chica: *Smiles* Foxy: AND I AM BACK BABY, LET’S GOOO. - - -

Bonnie: Chica, I'm sad. Chica: *Holds out arms for a hug* It’s going to be okay. *Meanwhile* Foxy: Freddy, I'm sad. Freddy, nodding: Mood. - - -

Chica: How did none of you hear what I just said? Foxy: I’ve been zoned out for the past two and a half hours. Bonnie: I got distracted about halfway through. Freddy: Ignoring you was a conscious decision. - - -

Freddy: You have friends and I envy that. Bonnie: You're welcome to share my friends. Freddy: *Looks at Chica and Foxy, waving dorkishly* Freddy: *shudders* I don't want those. - - -

Bonnie: Made you all playlists! Bonnie: Foxy, yours has only heavy metal, and is dark like your soul. Bonnie: Chica, yours has sad songs and blues to pair with your crippling depression. Bonnie: And Freddy has the ABBA Gold album. - - -

Bonnie: Why does Foxy have a black eye? Chica: They were saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ So Freddy threw your dictionary at them. Freddy: It was just to test a theory - - -

Chica: What do we think of Bonnie? *Pause* Foxy: *Sighs* Nice pal. Freddy: I think they're gay. - - -

Bonnie: Where’s Foxy? Chica: Freddy locked them in the bathroom. Freddy: Chica! You weren’t supposed to tell anyone! Bonnie: I’m cool with it.

[the-wolfbats]

Thoughts on Rakkety Tam

We have only two books left, folks :( Those will probably just be one post before I give my overall thoughts

I had to read this one because otherwise I would get through this entire thing and go “damn it did I forget that book AGAIN”

Lady Melesme ok let's see if she does anything “she's sending ye a drum!” I love how everyone is shocked when canonically, 1000 years ago or whatever, they used a log when the bells were being created. 

Immediately we have cannibalism and a character telling the main characters to go to hell lmao maybe I judged this too harshly at first. 

Bloodlight is mentioned twice at least. The first time I can understand bc it refers to Tam, who may not know the term bloodwrath, but the second is by a Long Patrol hare Fortindom. Non-badgers can get bloodwrath. Mayhaps this was the beginning of a lesser form of bloodwrath. 

I like how the hares don't adhere to the dichotomy and immediately thought squirrels killed their fellows, also the language barrier. Then this bird thinks Tam is also a vermin. So I guess the dichotomy was slightly challenged in this book, congrats to us!

“Only a fool rises to the bait of h’another fool.” things we all can learn. 

The map is facing...somewhat behind Salamandastron, with more focus on the land. Other maps face somewhat in front of it, with the mountain being on the edge of the ocean, and this is the map that has stuck in my head for decades. So when it said the Squirrelkingdom was South of Salamandastron, I was wondering how this grove of trees was just in the ocean.

I imagined Tam and Armel to be a bit older than the writing suggests. Not as old as Brag and Saro but older than the typical heroes of the books. They're maybe just entering their mid seasons. 

Brigadier Wotwot 💀

Tam’s personality is a little.overwhelmed by everyone else. Doogy is a delight.  That's an issue a lot of these paired up protagonists have (Triss and Shogg, Buckler and whoever that was) I like the focus on his heritage being stronger than others with his weapon choices, and more would have been nice. 

I think this is the most chapter art we've gotten with a villain. I guess Gulo was just that fun to draw!

This may be one of 2 books (I remember Doomwyte being similar) where the Abbeybeasts are pragmatic about the need to fight. Screeve was very casually “ya I just killed that bastard with a rake”

20 books in and I just now wonder: where do they go to the bathroom. 

“Doogy Plumm threw up his paws in resignation. “Och, that explains everythin’. He should’ve been called Martin the Destroyer o’ Weapons.” Legit had me laughing. 

This one is more tactical than others, focusing on the surroundings of Mossflower more than a battle at the very end. Look at how the foebeast had a plan to lock the hares out from Redwall that almost worked. As a whole, it's refreshing.

[thoughtspresso]

Predictions for Oshi No Ko Ending

1. Anemone will be the one to find Katayose Yura's dead body.

In Japanese flower symbolism, Anemones or Windflowers represent death, bad luck, and forsaken love. And it just so happens we have a character named exactly that, who happens to be the only other character apart from Katayose Yura who loves being in the mountains.

Anemone will likely be climbing the same mountains on Yura's wishlist, and just like before, The Crow might lead Anemone to the dead body.

It's like Akasaka-sensei decided Spider Lilies are already too obvious a deathflag so he chose a different flower.

I'm taking the bet that Akane might be the person who figures out the connection between Yura and Kamiki, or Miki-san might simply show up on the news as a statement about his "dear friend Yura" who "disappeared".

Akane might also give the head's up to Aqua that she thinks Kamiki murdered Yura, and that would be a reason for the two to spend more time with each other again. (Might shove a wedge between Kana and Aqua again, if Aqua isn't already doing that himself lmao.) Either way, it'd be a convenient way for Akane to attempt to both "save" Aqua and also help him accomplish his goals without killing himself.

2. The person who texted Frill Shiranui is Miki-san.

Sylvanes made a fairly solid guess that Frill Shiranui works for Kamiki Productions. Whether or not he was necessarily correct on this, I'm making the bet that Yura's "best drinking buddy" Miki-san is connected to Frill professionally, and goaded Frill into pushing Ruby into the spotlight.

Some speculators say this might have been Aqua's ploy, but I I think this was incorrect. Aqua agreed with Kaburagi that money comes first and Frill was a more reasonable choice commercially. He even said that Gotanda should "grow up" and not choose Ruby just because of his artistic integrity.

Apart from the friendly, casual tone of the text message that really sounds like the "Miki-san" persona and the image of decanted whiskey as his profile picture, I think Kamiki is actually praying for Ruby's success as a star.

In fact, I think people misunderstood why he killed Katayose Yura. He didn't kill Yura because his serial killer MO was simply because he liked killing up and coming megastars who shone brightly. He killed Yura because:

(a) He hates Stars who lie, who sell a persona to their fans that is vastly different from who they are as people, which is why he hated Himekawa Airi and Hoshino Ai.

(b) He killed Yura because he knew that the project being offered to her was the lead role in The 15-Year Lie. And simply, he wanted Ruby to play Ai's role.

In a twisted way, I think Kamiki believes he is protecting his children, and the public in general, from being lied to any further by celebrities like Yura who deceive the public with their feigned innocence.

Honestly? I think the reason he killed their mothers was to protect them from growing up with mothers who lie and abuse their kids.

3. Kana might play Hoshino Ai in The 15-Year Lie.

Okay, okay, okay, okay. I know. I know. Unhinged fan theory. I get it.

Even AquaKana stans think this is majorly unlikely to happen. I agree in that, I think it's insane. But I keep coming back to what Aqua meant when he said that, "Kana is so easy to manipulate", and "It's more convenient for me to build a good relationship with Arima right now."

People tend to say, he's making silly convoluted excuses again, he just wants to spend more time with her. But I think a man who is resolute in his goal to off himself by proxy of martyrdom doesn't care to date the person he was protecting from a love scandal anyway.

There are a few key reasons why I think Aqua's "using" of Kana will result in her playing Ai's role.

First of all, I think Aqua's plan is to play Kamiki, to portray him in the worst possible way, and expose him as the murderer through the film. Through this, Aqua will bait his father into murdering him too, and thus Aqua's death can be used as legal grounds for charging Hikaru Kamiki with Homicide.

As established above, I think Aqua doesn't agree that Ruby is the best choice for Ai's role. There are a lot of parallelisms baked in between Kana and Ai. Apart from the shot-by-shot remake of Sign is B, Kana is also the best person to get stabbed and deliver the lines, "Some day I hoped the lies would become true. / I did my best. I worked hard. I lied with all my heart. / To me, lies are love. In my own way, I thought I was showing my love."

Besides, you saw anyone else say these same things?

Uhuh, you guessed it:

So is Kana gonna get stabbed? Hopefully in a movie, yeah.

I think it could happen as a result of Kaburagi's dissatisfaction with Ruby's performance.

Kaburagi's "finalized" casting isn't final-final yet, really. We can see that he swapped Aqua to play Kamiki instead of Himekawa who will now play Ryosuke the university student/stalker here:

Which makes sense! Aqua looks like his father, is closer to his age during the time of the events, and Taiki's age and height also better matches Ryosuke.

And even though the paper says finalized on Ruby's casting, Kaburagi's still not completely sold:

I think the swap will come as a result of Ruby being severely overworked and unable to keep up with the demands of her role, and the Dome performance that she might want to prioritize. She may even outright collapse from exhaustion, as foreshadowed by Kana:

Apart from Akasaka-sensei absolutely trolling us to death by Ai x Kamiki on-screen romance being portrayed by twins, then just outright pulling the plug on that for fun, I think it'd just make sense for Kaburagi to say it's better if we pair Aqua with Kana for this role.

Ruby doesn't even have to collapse or anything. She's so loved up with the idea of Gorou-sensei right now, Aqua could literally just tell her "this is what's best for the plan, you trust me, don't you?" And she would absolutely just go with it.

I said before that I think up until Mem-cho pointed it out, Aqua was wholly unaware that Kana had a crush on him and joined B-Komachi just because of him. I think now that he has the awareness, he'll ask Kana to do it, first to help Ruby, but also because he can only trust Kana to play this role because she is "Special" to him.

A repeat of:

It really is the only way that this scene therefore makes sense to me:

Bonus: if the Shima D masterpiece film doesn't draw Kamiki's attention to her, Kana playing the role of Ai definitely will. And if she delivers the role with so much honesty, it might change the trajectory of the story altogether.

4. Aqua's plan will backfire.

I explained a little above and in a previous post that Aqua misunderstands Kamiki's motives.

While we all like to shit on Aqua for being the World's Nicest Master Manipulator, we have to give him credit for the fact that when it's used for saving other people, he's been really effective at spinning a public narrative in his favor. Like in the cases of Akane's suicide attempt and Kana's Love Scandal.

If the goal is to get Kamiki to stab him in plain view of the public, villify his father, and make it easy to convict him for homicide once and for all, I think he will fail.

Kamiki will not kill him or go after him. In fact, I think Kamiki will shed his Miki-san persona and reveal the truth: he was Himekawa Airi's rape victim, and Hoshino Ai was a manipulative person who seduced him with the prospect of true love, then abandoned him when she got what she wanted, which was a family.

In the absence of any evidence that he had anything to do with their deaths, Kamiki might even use this momentum of propaganda to make the public believe that he's happy to finally be reunited with his children that these terrible mothers took away from him.

Heck, Taiki might hate Uehara so much that he'd be relieved to learn about Kamiki? And if he really is connected to Frill, and if Kindaichi still cares about him, there might be real people who would back him up.

Then, it won't be until Akane works with Aqua and everyone to bring the murder of Katayose Yura to light that Kamiki would actually be brought to justice.

[piece-of-the-pie-if]

dunno if you've already answered this but they're about to graduate, so what are the ros plans and dreams? do they all want to go to college? if so, which ones are they aiming for? what subjects? or jump straight into a job? travel around a bit? i'm just curious about these characters, i love them lol

i love questions that make me think ! this one's a bit long, and I gave you a lil bonus at the end, but thank you for your interest in my babies <3 I twirl them around in my head like a microwave !

Dylan──artist! artist! artist!! mainly sculpture work but also trad painting and murals!

Dyl has quite a hard time in school to begin with so the thought of going on to do more school literally seems like torture to them. They already have a small commission based business with their art (mainly portraits but they've had some murals and two sculptures!) so all they'd really need would be a boost in outreach. Dylan might be persuaded to take community college classes for specific types of art if only for the experience and the qualifications but scholarly college/university? nuh uh no way!

Shay──head empty, no thoughts??? he's struggling to see sense in American colleges or universities... Not that English ones were any better... He keeps pushing the thought of it off but he knows in his heart that it won't be for him... but what else is there?

What is he... good at? He's good at maths, he guesses... Video games??... Making his friends laugh, helping strangers smile... Quite honestly I can see Shay stumbling is way into YouTube or TikTok stardom just by being himself! He's naturally charming (in a heartwarming way not a flirty way) and very entertaining. Lmao if C ropes him in to their gap year travel plans he'd be down for it─he doesn't really have a yearning for travel but spending time with his friends on what is essentially an extended vacation (which turns into a learning and helping experience he really enjoys) he's so down for it! Our boy's just a bit lost and clueless right now </3

Kinsley──her mother demands university classes in law... but her mama would've told her to follow her heart, right?

Kinsley has... Expectations... placed upon her. For her to go to university and double major in law and business so she has a choice in which avenue of the family she wants to continue with... And she might take on the business classes but not for law or accounting... She remembers when she was younger, when her mama was still alive (when her mother still cared) and they attended a fashion show─a runway─and she was... mesmerised. Kinsley doesn't know if she wants to design clothes or rooms or what but she does know that following her mother's path is slowly killing her... she just doesn't know if she had the strength to disobey.

J──if J could never work a day in their life they'd be just fine! Certainly not in law or politics, just to spite their mother they'd be a stripper!! (In reality J is very good with engineering and would do well with cars and motorbikes! The dream of all dreams is to actually design one under their name!)

J is very good at school, they simultaneously put the work in and are also an information sponge that doesn't need to work that hard at all... That doesn't mean they want to be in school more than they legally have to be! They're stuck in a limbo situation currently, between wanting to spite their mother (who wants them to clean their act up and follow her into politics) and setting a good example for their sister, Arabella, and not completely wasting away their education... They're not going anywhere until Bells is safe for their father's eye (and wrath) and no longer under their mother's thumb but they wouldn't mind travelling (especially going back to Italy to visit family!) J might go to university for a more in depth education in motor engineering─which is what they're both good at and really into, but most of all it's something that would just kill their mother's plans and spirits so... that might be the plan after all!

Theo──something to do with music... or! Yes, the environment! Theo knows that while their parents have cast dark shadows, they would support Theo with anything they want to do─so much that they feel like they could do it all!

The thing is, most of Theo's long term dreams all need some sort of further education and they can't do them all at the same time (that and they're still kind of scared of failure and their dyslexia only adds to their anxiety) but! becoming a Horticulturist or a Conservation Scientist or a Tree Surgeon may just be worth it! And hey, if C can convince them and MC into going on a gap year to travel the world then Theo gets to help the environment and participate in different music scenes!! (A plan seems to be formulating in their brain)

bonus!

C wants to take a gap year to travel (they will rope Theo, MC and Shay into it!) and when they come back they want to use their journalistic skills for good use and either become a travel writer or something like it but local!

MC has the option of taking over the family business but their family supports them in anything they want to do!

V has the wits to become a very good bio─physicist, it's only a matter of what they're willing to do to get there that's the problem!

[battleonthebigbridge]

Hey.

For Ace, 1, 11, 16, 25, and... 30. (Confession, that Hark, A Vagrant strip where Poe gets a letter from Jules Verne, I've got a version that lives in my Head that's Ace going "Ardbert! Who delivered this letter, it smells like catnip.")

*puts Dion in a jar and shakes him a little* 2, 9, 20

ASK GAME

GOD OK... Staring at all these numbers like bestie you've really cut my work out for me.

ACE

1 - She sounds like Alfred from Fire Emblem Engage. This is literally the only comment I can make on this topic. I can't describe it. They just do.

11 - I wouldn't say there was really an inspiration for Ace. Originally he was just the avatar I played XIV with, took me a long while before I actually started making lore for her. And it's changed A LOT since I first started. I guess my main inspiration of making lore for Ace was how much I loved the NPCs surrounding Ace, Ardbert in particular, and it made me want to make a character that could properly interact with these NPCs that I was so fond of.

16 - Ace's parents are both dead. His mother died during childbirth so he never got to meet her. She always carried guilt about it though, considering themselves the one that had killed her. Ace was raised by her father and loved him a lot, they had a really good bond. But he got ill and fell during The Naadam. While Ace carried the Dotharl belief of rebirth, the grief is what compelled him to leave the Azim Steppe and journey to Eorzea.

25 - Oh for sure. Ace is always humming away. She cannot sing for the life of him but she loves music and the festivities that it brings.

30 - (THAT'S SO CUTE HELP) BUT FOR FRIENDSHIP Ace is very good at it. She's a people person through and through so no matter who the OC is chances are Ace can pick them up and swing them around with a stupid big smile on his face.

DIAN

2 - Dian's best friend would be Arenvald! This is touched upon in his lore page but Dian met Arenvald after Arenvald had been thrown out by his mother. So, Dian took it upon himself to support and take care of him. They both ended up fleeing the city after Dian's Echo awakened by while Arenvald ended up with the Scions, they were separated and Dian ended up spending the majority of his youth in Little Ala Mhigo. But they were reunited later on after the plan to summon Rhalgr failed and Dian was taken in by the Scions as well.

9 - Lol. Lmao even. Dian's not too hopeless, he works hard to improve his physical strength and tends to eat well enough. But as a whole? No he does not take care of his health at all. I touched upon it in this answer where Dian is very much moving towards an early death due to the effect that his time magic has on his body and the density of his soul. It's a lot for him to carry and it has definitely resulted in a lot of pains and degradation.

20 - Dian's weapon of choice... That's a tough one tbh. Obviously he has a few magic staffs at his disposal, but he also has a lot of gadgets and firearms that he makes as part of his job at the Ironworks. Because of this his fighting style is kind of a mix of Black Mage and Machinist (by the game's standards) but Dian is also a believer that if you want something done right sometimes you just have to use your fists to fight it out. He doesn't really have a set weapon, it depends on what the situation calls for.

[wraith-caller]

Just to round things out... Fia!

YES the gang's all here now!!

favorite thing about them: Her scheming and careful manipulation!! So subtle apparently a decent chunk of fandom thinks youre crazy for seeing it lol Just she's so precise in how she goes about her plans. She tests the waters to find who she can trust, but even then makes sure she holds all the cards. The way she withholds info, and even outright lies to us("these grand affairs are hardly my forte..." sweetheart you are PLANNING A CORPSE UPRISING dont play with me!). I also really love thinking of how her and Rogier may share this similarity where they see themselves as objects to please others first and foremost, and that they're both entering their 'actually my needs matter too' era at the very last minute lol it's so tragic.

least favorite thing about them: that she had to kill darian TT_TT but it's fromsoft, and, to quote the lizard king himself, "No one here gets out alive".

favorite line: "I wished to be a mother to those Who Live in Death. So it is that any loathing, any hatred that overshadows them, I must bear with my own flesh, as a matter of duty." It says a lot about her own dedication to her cause, and her willingness to sacrifice for it. But it also makes me a bit sad in a way? The whole 'as a matter of duty' taken with her being born a Deathbed Companion speaks to this deep conditioning that she's been instilled with this idea that her own purpose is to always put others before herself. She gets to claw at her own wants a little here in reaching her goal of choosing her own noble to lay with, but she still operates within the framework of being born into and brought up to perform this duty that she never had a choice in accepting to begin with, from the sound of things.

brOTP: Fia/Rogier. And this is one of the few brOTPs where I mean brOTPs with benefits lmao I guess it's more like a secondary OTP?? I don't think either one loves the other, and I think their relationship is super fucking complicated, bordering on toxic and unhealthy. But it's endlessly fascinating and as I said up above, I think they share enough emotional issues that they might bond over that. Once they get past the whole 'holding everyone at arms' length' thing.

OTP: Fia/Godwyn. She got to make her own choice, and chose him. There's a kind of bittersweet nature to the pairing since, well, he's an undead freak of nature. But she still is so devoted to helping him and giving him 'a new life', and is willing to die for that.

nOTP: Her with the twins is a hard sell for me. Her with Rogier in a 'it's genuine true love' way usually falls pretty flat for me too.

random headcanon: Given how secretive Darian is about Devin's existence, and that Lionel may have been the one to take the dagger from Devin, and in doing so, sustaining mortal wounds, Fia might think Darian is the one who killed Lionel.

unpopular opinion: She's not a sweet, defenseless, helpless victim who is utterly incapable without our aid. She is manipulative and deceitful, driven and determined, and acknowledging her moral complexity is not a sign that someone must hate her. In fact, I think it's worse to DIMINISH that complexity in favor of a damsel/surrogate mommy stereotype.

song i associate with them: Devil's Resting Place by Laura Marling Fall Into Me by Alev Lenz Streets on Fire by Lupe Fiasco Deep Green by Marika Hackman (fia and rogier)

favorite picture of them:

Another zlofsky pic lol I like the framing and while I know it's just the mechanics of the game's idle animation, she looks so poised and composed even while casting a spell.

[hms-no-fun]

I hope this ask doesn't come off as rude at all-- and I apologize if it does!-- but as an aspiring writer, I'm honestly really confused by some of the early choices in Godfeels, and I'm curious if I'm just not "getting it". I saw some posts about it pop up in the tag (and they WERE very shitty and rude about it :/), but I'd love to hear your explanation/take on June's big character change immediately post-realization, and especially the... "Trickster Arc", I guess it could be called? The former I get to some extent, but I'm really curious about the choice to do all THAT so early in the story with the trickster candy.

Seriously love your work, your narration is honestly a big inspiration to me in terms of how meta it gets and how close it gets to communicating directly with both the main character AND the audience!

no rudeness detected at all! this is a great question, in fact it’s one i’ve been kinda hoping someone would ask because i’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot these last few months. but i get the sense that you’re at least a little new here, so uh, yeah, hello, when people ask me interesting questions i tend to answer at great length. so strap in for that after the break lmao. also as a note, there will be some spoilers for all of godfeels here but please don’t let that scare you away, they’re all contextless and, if anything, might honestly make the rest of the story *more* enjoyable as a result.

as far as "getting it" goes, i've talked at length about the how & why of the violence in godfeels in multiple places so i'll try to avoid rehashing that too much here. but one thing i want to emphasize right off the bat is that i never intended godfeels to be an ongoing thing. you talk about the trickster arc happening “so early in the story” but when i wrote godfeels 1 i didn’t plan on writing more. i didn’t even plan on making john trans! my idea of what the sum total of godfeels 2 would be when i started writing it wound up being completely different from the finished work. i didn’t plan to make this thing so long. i didn’t plan for june to accidentally on purpose kill her friends while drunk and then retcon it. i didn’t plan on turning the whole thing into a space opera. it all just happened to me, man. i kept writing because i kept finding more interesting things to say. and it’s important to specify that when i started gf1 i hadn’t written fiction in years. i think if you jumped ahead to godfeels 3 part 1 chapter 8, no matter how you feel about the content we’d at least be able to agree that in the years since 2019 i’ve become a much much better writer. if you want more insight into how my process has evolved, i’ve written so so so much about it, too much maybe even, in the #sarahposts tag.

anyway, now i want to talk about june's "big character change." the extent to which her trickster arc makes sense or feels in character seems to vary wildly from person to person. what always bugs me about "ooc" as a criticism is that godfeels starts six years and change after the end of homestuck. let's remember that the protagonists of homestuck were sixteen when the comic ended. now i want you to ask yourself if you as you were at 16 would think that you as you are now was "in character." or vice versa! probably not, right? it doesn’t even have to have been six years. i was STILL sixteen when i started to get embarrassed of who i was at sixteen!

that should be all i need to say, but it isn’t. and it doesn't really get to the core of the issue anyway. i am not nor have i ever been interested in writing "a sequel to homestuck,” even though it has kind of just become that anyway. godfeels has always been about the meaty existential drama you can tease out through the complicated character dynamics of these fucked up traumatized gods. godfeels has always been my way of analyzing the themes and ideas of homestuck, the existential ramifications of the mechanics of SBURB and the classpects and retcon (let’s remember that i wrote godfeels around the same time that i took over hosting duties on the perfectly generic podcast). godfeels has also always been about me and my trauma. i even used to joke that june was my self-insert character, though i've seen that line repeated unironically by enough people who haven't read godfeels that i've stopped saying it. because it's not true! june is very, very different from me... i just happen to see my life reflected in her eyes.

to immediately rehash what i said i wouldn't, june eg8ert arose out of my frustration with most versions of the june egbert headcanon particularly in the summer of 2019. let's call her "hairclips june." hairclips june is always smiling, usually with smiling friends, she's wearing hairclips and has nonzero tit and is A Woman Now. as i said in my video, while i don't begrudge anyone their comfort food, this simply was not my experience with coming out as a trans woman. and of all the characters, i’d always identified most with john. also i thought, you know, these kids are SERIOUSLY messed up, every single one of them has died multiple times, they've seen things and done things no one should ever have to. and retcon! god, what a mindfuck retcon is.

those are the primal ingredients of godfeels. what if june came out and everyone wasn't chill about it? some folks say that's out of character and, idk, i guess that's arguably true. but i had friends who were very vocal trans allies who’d been in queer relationships who still stopped talking to me after i came out. let me tell you i spent a lot of time fucked up in the head over how "out of character" that was for them, to the extent that i blamed myself for their reaction because surely they couldn't be so out of character. to which one might respond, well, why do this as a homestuck fic then? why not just do my own original thing instead?

and i guess the answer is that i didn't want to and i still don't, really. it's not just about the characters for me. i like the rules of the homestuck universe. i find it interesting how it mechanically reflects being a fictional narrative. and, you know, maybe it's easier for me to process violent intrusive thoughts through a character who is capable of acting on those thoughts and then immediately undoing them consequence-free. retcon is, in fact, sort of the perfect mechanism for exploring violent intrusive thoughts because it lets us play out the fantasy without lasting diegetic harm, such that we can just focus on the existential and moral questions of the phenomenon itself. and like, yeah, that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. but isn’t it still just as valid a topic to explore in fiction as anything else?

like em or not, people have intrusive thoughts. people have violent impulses. sometimes they even act on them. the unpleasantness of a phenomenon shouldn’t dictate whether it is acceptable to depict in fiction-- if anything, we ought to take our instinctive desire to look away as an urgent invitation to look closer instead. as i’ve been wont to say for years and years now, “problematic” implies a problem to be solved. that which is human is inherently complicated. to pretend it’s all good or bad excises humanity from the equation, or at least flattens the range of acceptable humanity. all of which is my extremely soapboxy way of saying (as i’ve said a million times by now), yes, godfeels june is problematic. that is in fact what godfeels is about.

there's an extent to which i think this can be blamed on how rooted we are IN june's perspective in gf1 and 2. i don't think people really appreciate the fact that godfeels 1 is john threatening to commit suicide and almost going through with it. that's the context in which her friends react poorly to her coming out; i mean, she's literally sleeping on rose's couch because everyone's so worried about her! i think that, by being completely within june's perspective for all of these events, we don't really get a good sense of the interpersonal dynamics at play (probably because i didn't even really understand them myself until later). instead we just see people who should know better acting like dicks.

i think whether or not june’s trickster arc is canonically palatable to you depends very much on whether or not you've had a dear friend disappoint you so much that you're no longer on speaking terms.

but if we want to reel this back from the abstract philosophical, maybe it’s enough to say that we just have different interpretations of these characters? they’re not monoliths, you know. different people see different things in different characters. some folks get a lot out of hairclips june and that’s okay. maybe i was a bitch about other people’s headcanons back in 2019 when redditors were calling me and my friends abusive pedophiles for liking vriska, but i gave up that fight when the redditors got what they wanted (to harass a group of queer creators offline and out of their jobs). if someone wants to woobify gamzee, whatever man, go right ahead. that ain’t my cup of tea and i personally don’t think that’s very in character either, but that’s why i don’t read it. it ain’t for me and that’s fine. i like homestuck BECAUSE these characters can mean so many things to so many people. is this variability not precisely the thing that makes the postcanon era so interesting?

i have my idea of who these characters are based on who they were in the comic and i work very hard to keep them in character, but i also don't want them to be trapped in amber. i want them to grow and change and become different people, because homestuck itself is obsessed with inescapable absolute archetypes (ie the ultimate self, or the captchalogue system) and i enjoy troubling that. i enjoy swimming in a sea of weird problematic dilemmas. that’s what’s fun about fiction for me, you can think about and write about all the most difficult and even fucked up things you like, and it definitionally cannot cause real material nonconsensual harm to another human being. and yet we get so tied up in the question of harm anyway! maybe that makes sense when talking about marvel movies, but this is fanfiction we’re talking about. this is HOMESTUCK fanfiction. if i were to go on twitter right now and post “homestuck is good” i’d end the day with at least five comments saying “lol no it’s not.” SOME OF THOSE PEOPLE WILL HAVE HOMESTUCK AVATARS. there are few things as cringe as liking homestuck even among people who like homestuck, so who cares? i like homestuck, i like the epilogues, i like hs2, and i think a pretty gargantuan majority of this fandom are subliterate babies. that’s why i don’t engage with them or make much of an attempt to bridge the gap. i think godfeels and its cool little fandom is all the better for how much work it requires of the reader to “get it” as it were. i wish more people would give it a chance, or at the very least not immediately throw me and a lot of my friends under the bus at every possible opportunity, but what can you do? i just write. people will react how they will react. what matters to me is that it stays true to itself as a work, and that it grows with me and my audience and my collaborators. trying to backpedal or soften the edges would just ruin the whole thing, likely alienate my current readers and inevitably invite even more bad faith readings. no thanks!

some folks stop reading godfeels after june's trickster arc, and i can respect that. if you get to that part of the story and don't like it, chances are you're not gonna like the rest of it! and in that sense, i guess you could say i “chose” to have june’s trickster arc happen so “early on” as a litmus test for the reader. as annoying as it can be feeling like i’m constantly having to address this exact issue, i vastly prefer it to a bunch of people hate-reading something that wasn’t made for them. but again, i didn’t know this was “early on” when i wrote it, because i didn’t plan it to happen. i didn’t intend for june to go on a killing spree, she just did it and i as writer decided, you know what? this is way more interesting than what i had planned. and then dirk became the antagonist because, oops, june coming out fucked up all the schemes he has that play out in the homestuck epilogues. and i guess in THAT sense, the palatability of godfeels depends on whether or not you liked and/or tolerated the homestuck epilogues and homestuck^2. these, too, are not for everyone. but godfeels is not a replacement for them, as some folks like to claim (god bless them). i’m not interested in rewriting homestuck or fixing its sequels. ok well that’s not entirely true, i think the epilogues did jake REAL dirty and that’s become a big focus of mine going forward. but even then, i don’t pretend the epilogues didn’t happen. in fact if you’ve read all of 3.1, you know just how cosmically important they end up being.

but this is, i guess, kind of the crux of the issue for me. june’s trickster arc happens very early on in the story, yes, and that’s deliberately challenging on a lot of levels. june spends a great deal of time being challenged by it herself! but folks who stop there (if they even make it that far) often act like the whole story is grimdark wish-fulfillment violence or me airing out my irrational hatred of Boys (????), and that's just not true. i don’t give a shit about that. we get to june's trickster arc at around the 25,000 word mark, out of the current grand total of over 400,000 words. her violence is functionally the prologue, and she spends the entire rest of this story suffering the consequences of those actions. so if i am frustrated with this line of questioning, a lot of it comes down to the fact that if you just read the rest of the story you’d see that i have in fact had all of the same thoughts you’ve likely had. i know people who think i did dirk dirty in gf2, and i actually kind of agree! which is why dirk comes back and has a difficult, complicated relationship with his past self. people complain about certain characters being ooc, which i can certainly understand because when i started godfeels i really did not have a great grasp on them! but also, if you kept reading godfeels you’d know that the tension of whether or not someone is cosmically “in character” is a huge running theme of this story. june’s friends react poorly to her coming out in part because it seems out of character for her! hell, phenomenologically how *could* june be in character after coming out when she barely even knows who she is yet? her whole thing in gf1 is that she doesn’t know who she is anymore! just realizing that you’re trans changes you, changes how you see the world, how you relate to other people. or it did for me, anyway. risk, dare, X, angel dirk, and silverbark are all sorts of caught up in this question. and if you’ve gotten to the end of 3.1 you’ll know about the concept of denexustic radiation:

and that’s just the tip of the metaphysical iceberg. all of which is to say that this is a feature, not a bug. so it’s always very funny to me when people drop out so early on only to complain about the very same problematics that i’ve spent three years and 400,000 words exploring.

BUT. but. yeah godfeels 1 and 2 are messy. the gf3 prologue is very messy. it’s a serial narrative that has changed shape multiple times over the years, and barring a bit of polish on gf1 around when i started writing gf3 i generally refuse to go back and rewrite things. there’s a lot i would do differently today, but if i had done it differently then the story as it is today would not exist. and i love this story! i might look back on gf2 and feel like it’s rushed and messy, but i know that it was the best i could do at the time. it’s a reflection of who i was as a writer then. i live with the ramifications of that for the same reason i don’t delete the old videos on my channel from before i came out/learned what communism was: because i don’t like to pretend that the present was always present. i’m a different person now, a different writer. i made mistakes, i learned, and i changed. i will continue this process for the rest of my natural life, as will you.

ultimately i guess my answer here is that godfeels is a flawed work written by a flawed person, and the extent to which readers relate to it seems to have a lot to do with how much their flaws overlap with mine. i get lots of people telling me my characters are in character. i get people telling me they’re more in character than some canon! and it’s not that i weigh those comments as more valuable, i just see it as an indication of who my audience is. i’m not writing for people who want more hiveswap, and i’m certainly not writing for people who dismissed hs^2 out of hand. i’m just writing for myself and my friends, and it just so happens that some people seem to get a lot out of it.

i’m gonna close out here by actually finally directly addressing your question with what i think you were ultimately hoping for: some writing advice.

the rules don’t exist. there are things that can make some art better or some art worse but they are not universal. the rules are fake and if you hold every story you touch to those rules, you’re gonna have a bad time. a story is not static and it is never truly yours. you discover it. sometimes you can expand it or alter it in ways but, at least in my experience, doing so more often than not just kills the whole thing-- or at least demands a complete reconceptualization. all of which takes time, and we live in a world where taking time to get in touch with and hone your craft is considered sort of a bad economic decision. but art is what it is and it does what it does and we can either play with it or we can put it in a cage.

what i like about making art is that i am not entirely in control. i have my plans, my schemes, my ideas, but the fun of writing is just putting a bunch of characters in a room together and seeing what they do. quite often they do things i would never expect, that are far truer to their character than i anticipated. my experience has always been that the more you outline a story before you write it, the harder it is to actually write that story. when i know everything that’s gonna happen on a moment to moment level, the whole thing falls dead on the page. but obviously you need to know SOME things! and i’ll say that from the inception of gf3 back in december 2019 to now, very very few of the broad strokes of my plans have changed. if you’ve read all of 3.1 you know there’s a very specific timeline at play in the backstory of a group of characters we’ll be spending a lot of time with in 3.2. there are no questions or mysteries or whatever else i’ve introduced to this story that i did not have at least the sense of an explanation for. but these are simply bullet points that dictate the endpoint of a path and suggest something of the moral/philosophical/emotional arc that needs to occur in order to get there. the real meat of it comes out in the act of writing itself, and that’s what i’m here for. it’s a gamble that doesn’t always pay off, and it does mean that i have almost 80,000 words of material i ended up rewriting or cutting sitting in a doc somewhere, but that’s worth it for me.

if art is to be relevant, it must have the capacity to make an audience uncomfortable. if art is to be essential, it must have the capacity to demand a strong reaction (positive or negative) from everyone who sees it. if art is to be true, it must have the capacity to reflect the disquiet contradictions of simple existence that we desperately wish to ignore in our daily lives. that doesn’t mean everyone has to or should read difficult art, or like it, or make it. but it has always existed and it will always exist, and i think it is essential for writers and critics alike to learn to stop themselves from mistaking a common storytelling method for THE storytelling method. and frankly, most of the art i love most in this world is art that i didn’t particularly like the first time we crossed paths.

and lastly, never forget the inarguable truth that the audience bears quite a lot of responsibility in this equation. you are never, as a writer, inflicting anything on your reader, because your reader can always opt out at any moment they wish. if something doesn’t work, yeah, that’s a problem you can fix. art is a conversation in that way, or at least ought to be. but at the same time, art has no obligation to be perfect, or smooth, or easy to consume. the rules are fake. they exist to be broken. the pursuit of perfection is a dead end. just make shit

okay this one has gone on QUITE long enough lmao i hope there’s something useful in there for you somewhere and uhhhh i hope you enjoy the rest of godfeels if you haven’t already read it!

[imekitty]

☁️/🎨/🕯️/🧃- i can't choose haha, so now you have ✨️options✨️

🕯️-on a scale of 1-10, how much do you enjoy editing and why

🧃-some lore (bonus points of it's from Disillusioned) that we dont know about yet [bahahaha im just thirsy for some more Dis spoilers XD]

☁️-what made you choose your username? my guess is that you like cats. am i close?

🎨-link a phan art you rlly like, and explain why u like it

(ask game)

🕯️- I'd say 7 to 10 depending on what I'm editing! I'm an editor in real life so I very much enjoy it!

🧃- Hmm, not entirely sure what it means by "lore," like behind-the-scenes stuff? Something else?

Behind the scenes, something interesting is that I basically winged the entirety of Disparaged. I had no outline at all, I was just writing what I thought sounded like a good thing to happen next. I didn't expect much to come of the fic, so I wasn't really trying that hard with it.

Now Dissembled, Dissembled I planned out from beginning to end. Same with Disillusioned. While winging it was fun, it's not something I would likely do again, and I do not recommend it to anyone who is serious about getting good at writing.

ALSO I am not against giving anyone spoilers! All you have to do is slide into my DMs and I will tell you anything and everything you want to know lmao.

☁️- My username of choice as a kid was Empress Kitty! Because yes, I love cats lol. And then to make it look a little more "grown up," I came up with "imekitty" (which means "I am E. Kitty").

🎨- I don't keep up with Danny Phantom fanart mostly because I don't want to risk seeing something that might relate to what I'm writing and I want as little outside influence as possible (I try really hard to make my vivisection fics unique since there are already so many!). But I love everything drawn by my friend @chintadraws! And I especially love this Kill Inviso-Bill series she did:

Someday, I'm hoping she'll do one for Maddie.

[half-truths-and-hyperbole-louk]

Louk's Bad Batch rewatch part 19 AND 20 😳

straight into it again batchers 🤟

The Bad Batch 1x15

Crosshair coming to visit Hunter how sweet 💕

Echo teaching Omega to stay focused while being stressed 🥺

every time I see Rampart I wanna smash his face in a little bit more

Omega with her secret base 🥷

her wet droopy hair 🥺

Tech looks like Korkie rn he's a ginger in the light

Echo checking in on Omega 😭

Crosshair you need to listen to Hunter he's right

Hunter: "we didn't have a choice" Crosshair: "and I did?" 😭😭😭😭😭

Omega: "experimental unit 99 began right here" Wrecker: "is that true?" Tech: "how could I possibly know that?" 💀

where are all the other clones "reassigned and transferred offworld" ??? op what does this mean

"guess you were wrong about that" lmao Wrecker

Crosshair listen here you sassy little-

siblings always know when you're lying 🤭

Crosshairs whole speech in the training room....

"I'm going to give you what you never gave me ...a chance" 😭😭😭

"we're not like the regs, we never have been" - this line sounds the most like a reg Crosshair has sounded was this on purpose ??

Crosshair cutting the binders with Hunter's knife AJDJSKAJFL

Tech spotting the discs and silently telling Wrecker !!! I'm jumping over my couches

BDIWOANSHWUAALLDNFIWIANFJEK WHEN CROSSHAIR SHOOTS ALL THE OTHER SOLDIERS WHEN HE- WHEN I- I'VE GONE INSANE-

Crosshair never wanted to kill them he wanted them back 😭😭😭😭😭

THEIR FACES THE MUSIC THE ENTIRE SCENE THEYRE WORKING TOGETHER IVE SURPASSED INSANITY

Tarkin 🤢🤢

Crosshair's holding his head 👀 Chips still there !!

them fighting about the chip 😭 Tech scan his brain pls

Omega hugging Hunter 🤲🥺😭🥰

the completely empty rooms I can't

the regs who open fire 👀 Slip???

I can't deal with watching tipoca city fall 😭

I can't deal with them watching it fall 😭😭😭

THE OUTRO-

The bad batch 1x16

the silence after the blast knocks them down

Crosshair woke up as they slid and I think Echo was out 🥺

that poor reg with the status report I wanna hug him so bad 💔

oop they were all out not just Echo

Tech: *can't hack the door* Wrecker: "I can" kinfe knife knife knife knife

Tech is pulling the door with his fingers 🥺

Wrecker gently catching Omega and passing her to Echo who just holds her for a bit 🥺🤲🥰💔😭💕

then Crosshair just slides into Hunters foot lmaooo

I don't think Crosshair knew what the empire was planning ?? he just wakes up and blames the boys for it ??

them all stopping to look at the water filling up in the baby clone room with all the empty tubes 😭

Omega catching AZI 🥺

DID CROSSHAIR JUST CATCH ECHO 👀

the last time they're all in their room together 💔

lmao Echo with the smell 💀

SHE just saved your ass Crosshair settle down

sibling squabbles turning into heartfelt convos 🥲 Wrecker missed Crosshair so much

theres always a bigger fish

they're all just sitting together to catch their breath 🤲

all back in the lab together 🥲

mhm Crosshair she's your BIG sister show her some respect

CROSSHAIR THIS IS NOT OMEGAS FAULT YOU BUTTHEAD

you sound an awful lot like a clone with an inhibitor chip rn buddy 👀

also sounds like Saw Gerrera which is never a good sign

"all you'll ever be to them is a number" ~ Hunter, then Crosshair's head immediately starts hurting hmmmm 🤔

I think it's still in there and its starting to stop working similar to Tup... possibly bc he got a little fried on that side of his head...

ptsd for Echo being in that tube 🥲💔

Omega doing the blasting instead of Wrecker !!

They're hugging in the tubes I know it

Omega's worried voice 🥺

"I'm going after AZI" 😭

CROSSHAIR 💕💕💕💕

Hunter's nervous hands tapping waiting for Omega to come up 🥺🥲

then him picking her up out of the water and his "I've gotcha" 😭😭😭😭😭

Crosshair handing over his rifle while the other three are ready to shoot him 🥲

Hunter holding Omega's hand- I'm gone y'all

Crosshair refusing to look at them while they're looking at him 💔

the sun shining on kamino after all of that, like the calm *after* the storm... which is unsettling bc it's usually the calm before the storm

Hunter picking Omega up again 🤲 he's so gentle

them all just staring at where their home used to be 💔😭

Wrecker holding AZI like a baby 🥺

they all look so dad (I tried to type sad but both works)

Hunter's soft smile telling Omega it's time to go 🥰

Hunter watching Omega and Crosshair talking

"you're still their brother, Crosshair. You're my brother too." star wars wants me to never stop crying as if I'm not already dehydrated enough

not thinking about how that was the last thing he heard for how many weeks??

FKN TANTISS

all the clone commandos everywhere 👀 the rest of delta squad when

WE DID IT !!! WE FINISHED SEASON 1 💕

Now I'm going to speed watch s2 in the next 2 days omg my emotions won't survive lmao

thanks everyone who's followed along and interacted so far I love seeing love for tbb so seeing people enjoying my responses makes me super happy 💕 I hope tbb3 is good to us 🙏

[beevean]

Honestly all the Omori talk makes me feel bad for Basil in the sense that he is a character who is loyal and worries about his friends to the point of committing horrible actions that eat him up inside for them like covering up a murder, yet said friends either dont give the most minimum shit abt him and his feelings or straight up use him as a punchbag. Even if woobified by the writing, he seems like a more interesting chara than the protag by accident

@woodchipp and I compared him to N!Hector, because while he is morally questionable and no doubt he should have suffered the consequences of his actions (bro really came up with a multi-step plan to pretend a girl hanged herself, at 12, that's sick when you think about it), he becomes automatically the most tragic character of the story because he gets beaten to near death, both metaphorically and literally. (and that's when the story doesn't forget about him lmao, because he's actually missing for a good 80% of the plot)

His logic is twisted in an intriguing way. He's so loyal to Sunny that he straight up cannot imagine that he could do a bad thing such as push Mari down the stairs. He's so in denial that not only he came up with that plan, but he also hallucinates Something, the real culprit, the real entity who pushed Mari, because Sunny is a good person and Sunny would never do anything bad! It's a very sad form of denial.

But then you ask yourself, what exactly did Sunny do to earn such trust?

I guess being the pet of the gang was enough to convince Basil that his bestie would never do anything wrong.

And then you add all the stuff that we mentioned in that long post, such as Basil being a victim of unfair bullying by Aubrey (who blames him for ruining their photos, while it was Sunny when possessed by his depression - yes really), nearly drowning because Aubrey pushed him into the lake (neither she nor Kel cared enough to rescue him), the gang not bothering to check on him while he was visiting his grandma in intensive care (instead having a nice picnic near Mari's grave), the gang forcibly having a sleepover in his house while he was locked in the bathroom grieving for his grandma, Sunny leaving him alone while he was having a breakdown (you cannot comfort Basil, but you can run circles around him), you player having the choice to leave him to kill himself...

Yes, Basil is technically a criminal, but much like N!Hector, the things the plot puts him through far outweigh his crime. And I guess that in this comparison, Sunny is N!Isaac, who is a terrible person who has hurt many people but we're supposed to root for him because he found Enlightenment or some shit :)

[simlit]

All odd numbers for Kyrie!😁

What memory would your OC rather just forget?

I think he'd wish he could forget that he was given to the church as a baby. Not necessarily because he wants to reunite or even know his birth parents, he doesn't. But it's a constant reminder that he, quite literally, doesn't belong there. That he was given away as if he was a tool or some material good. It's just a lot to carry around with you.

What is your OC's fatal flaw? Are they aware of this flaw?

Fear of failure. Something that has only recently made itself evident to him (and me lol). In a way, he's a people pleaser. He doesn't want to disappoint those around him. He fears the ripple of consequences that might stem from his domino falling first, and doesn't want to be the person responsible for a larger collapse, so he sort of keeps to his duty as a cog, despite how he might not align with the objective.

How far is your OC willing to go to get what they want?

I would say... not very. He's lazy, certainly, but he's also sheltered, incredibly inexperienced, and lacks the means to get what he wants through pure brute strength, power or smarts. That being said, if the obstacle is something he can overcome, I think he'd be more inclined to actually try.

What's one way your OC has changed since you first came up with them?

I made Kyrie almost as a blank slate so that I could easily adapt him to the circumstances of the story. Because CotS is both interactive and filled with characters I didn't create, he had to be someone who could blend well with all types of people, and not have many "hardstops" so to speak, morally or otherwise. But along the way I've tried to make someone who is an "open template" entertaining, and I think Kyrie's almost lackadaisical unbothered humor emerged from all of ~that~. I didn't go in planning him to be such a huge fucking troll, but I'm glad he has his "thing". In a story with so many strong personalities, it would have been easy to get overtaken by the other cast members.

Do you have a specific lyric or quote which you associate with your OC?

"That's abominable." Because it's just so damn funny.

What is your OC's weapon of choice? Have they ever actually used it?

Yes, he has one, and no he doesn't use it. And it's been called into question multiple times in the story, and I still don't think a damn one of them knows the actual truth yet lmao. It's funnier that way. It wouldn't save him from getting murdered, obviously. It would probably just get him murdered faster.

If you met your OC, would the two of you get along?

Absolutely. If he wasn't so hot. Because honestly every time I look at him I just want to punch him in the face so 100% the conversation would go no where and I'd get arrested.

Does your OC have a faceclaim? If so, who?

No he doesn't.

What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise?

I kind of... took his sister. Mean Jade go grr. I have this terrible habit of killing off loving sisters. I leave the bad ones though. Elsera says hi.

How does your OC behave when enraged?

He's one of those awful people who just gets stoic and civil when angry. As Tay said while having the absolute pleasure of being on the other end of it: that's probably worse. He's not been confronted with a situation that would make him exceptionally angry though, i.e. nothing life or death, so maybe that would change.

Does your OC have any illnesses or disorders? How do they handle it?

He doesn't.

What emotion is the hardest for your OC to process? How about express?

I think it would be loss. Which I guess is a generic answer, since it's pretty typical of human nature not to handle loss well. But I think when you have so very little in your life that is truly meaningful, then you're grasping at straws and have nothing to distract you from your grief. I think in the story currently, he's in a constant state of bracing. Trying to remain outwardly hopeful even though his body is already starting to reject the premise that things will turn out well, and that putting so much mental strength into denying it, degrades his focus in other facets of his life. Outside of the few moments where he's truly and genuinely amused, I do feel he's starting to lose himself under the pressure he would have, otherwise, been able to stand against without hesitation. I can't really imagine him in a place where he has to accept that loss is real, and I don't know how or if he can cope with it when it does.

What is your favorite thing about your OC?

I love what a huge fuckin TROLL he is. Sorry, it's so entertaining to me. It's one of my main reasons for preferring him with ~certain~ members of the cast. Mostly the ones who are ripe for riling up ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[vermillioncourt-if]

Shen just feeding into our need for court drama is so sweet.

First killing siblings and now we are planning to overthrow people. 🤭

I love it!! ♥️👀

Okay anyways this is a question for both iFs regarding the age rating. How physical.. is physical we can get? Is it gonna be all fade to black or................😏😏

Dear friend, I am a smut writer first, angst writer second! I think you can guess 😏! 🤣❤️

Anyway! I am glad you're enjoying the court drama! Kicking out Consort Xing is completely optional, but I have a feeling all of you guys will do it anyways LMAO! And I'm glad you asked about the 18+ scenes!

For Under the Eyes of Themis, it's currently rated 17+. I might run a poll later to see if people want the rating to change, but for right now, all physical scenes are fade to black/heavily implied. If it goes up to 18+, the choices will be the same as in the Vermillion Court.

For The Vermillion Court, it's rated 18+! You'll have 3 options regarding the physical scenes: you can skip it, you can get a lighter version (think published smut), or you can get the down and dirty version (think ao3 smut)!

Of course, I do feel like this goes without saying, but all physical options ARE optional, just highly recommended ;). So those who don't want to have their MCs have sex can do that! ❤️

[shimmeringweeds]

(Written between s2 episodes 9 and 10)

"The foundation of the game is mutual trust, fairness, and equality."

Part 3 of my "this game and its rules" theory: Part 1. Part 2.

This theory will be much less put together, as I feel I am not seeing the whole picture here, but maybe another set of eyes can spot what I've missed. I want to put this out there before episode 10 destroys everything.

Li Tianchen is a complicated character. He is a someone we inherently cannot trust. I'm sure I'm not the only one who found it comedic how quickly Li Tianchen took total control over the interrogation (CXS never stood a chance, the Coca-Cola tactic was brilliant.)

Why come in disguise as his sister? To gain sympathies, I suppose.

So then, did Li Tianchen know about the photograph?

Let's break the scene down:

-Li Tianchen introduces himself as LiTianxi. Cheng Xiaoshi is visibly taken aback. 1pt to LTC.

-Li Tianchen gives Cheng Xiaoshi a choice. Turn over all listening devices. Cheng Xiaoshi lies = feeling of unease. "The foundation of cooperation is mutual trust" says LTC. Minus 1pt to CXS. He's already in the negatives.

-Interrogation begins. Cheng Xiaoshi asks, "Why did you come and what do you know?" -

-Li Tianchen repeats, "The foundation of the game is mutual trust, fairness and equality. Did you forget this so soon?"

A connection is made in Cheng Xiaoshi's mind, this is Red Eyes! He then says:

"Why did you turn out like this?"

The conversation went directly from "The foundation of the game..." to "Why did you turn out like this." YEAH. That's one way to be suspicious CXS! -1pt

Cheng Xiaoshi knows about LTX's past and recognized her name. Li Tianchen doesn't know that Cheng Xiaoshi knows this. He is guessing based on Cheng Xiaoshi's reactions. (CXS wears his heart on his sleeve and I love him for it.)

Li Tianchen calls him on it, "How did you know?" The ball is back in LTC's court. + 1pt.

Cheng Xiaoshi tries to take the ball back. But the revelation that this is red eyes is too much. He cannot lie. So he speaks the truth and the ball stays firmly in LTC's court for the rest of the match.

The following Coca-Cola chugging relaxes the mood (+1pt LTC) and the sympathy building begins.

This plan of Li Tianchen's really hinges on building sympathy. He can't just grab CXS and go. He has to make him go "willingly" in order to not draw attention. This game is of mutual trust.

Li Tianchen needs (or at least wants) Cheng Xiaoshi to trust him.

Cheng Xiaoshi reaches out in a moment of sympathy... and gets possessed. Match won.

There is no evidence that Li Tianchen knew about the photograph before Cheng Xiaoshi willingly confirms it. But if Cheng Xiaoshi hasn't seen the photograph, then isn't this plan way more risky? Did LiTianchen really take that risk?

I know a lot of people are thinking that Li Tianxi is the one who delivers the photograph. That's very difficult to refute. But I cannot think of a reality where Li Tianchen doesn't know that the photograph was given. That was played.

Food for thought: the twin that delivered the photograph, and the twin that took the phone. (please note: the yellow on the jacket in relation to color of the hoodie. Thin as ice, this one. But I can't stop thinking on it.) EDIT: lmao I went a took color samples in procreate. Both hoodies are purple/red. Color theory can you believe.

I really, really believe that Li Tianchen is crying out for help as much as Li Tianxi is seems to be. Everything he does is to protect his sister. He's a hunter yes, but--

"Some (predators) are born as bloodthirsty beasts. But some are special and learn to evolve. They evolve, and they grow. Until one day in this jungle of men, they become...a hunter. So which one of those do you want to be in the future?"

vs. the English dub which chooses to take things a little farther....

"Someone to kill and eat everything. Not everyone stays the same as they were born. Some people will evolve, become something new. They're the ones who hunt predators. They learn to fight and protect. What kind of person do you want to be when you grow up?"

Li Tianchen is a hunter, a provider, a protector.

So who is Li Tianxi?