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sir-silly · 4 years

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TWDG S2 First Playthrough

E1 - Omid’s death is always such a bitchslap. It’s so stupid. Literally, why did they send her in there on her own? Are you kidding me? It’s ridiculous. Omid didn’t have to die. 16 months later?? What??? It would have made way more sense to have made the DLC about those sixteen months and then start at Christa’s camp with no baby or Omid instead of what we got instead. Bull. AND WE STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO CHRISTA.

I think out of the entirety of season 2, Clementine and Luke’s relationship in the first three episodes is my favorite. He becomes an alien after episode two, but he becomes intolerable after three. He’s just such a big brother to her and knows that she can take care of herself. Their relationship is similar to what I think Clem and Ben’s would have been if they ended up alone together after season 1.

I stole Nick’s watch, I’m not sure if I’ll give it back yet just because I think it’s hilarious that you can take it and not give it to him. Speaking of Nick, he 110% sees you when you look through the kitchen door if you never back out and he doesn’t say anything. I decided to go with Pete at the end just because I’ve never seen it played out before.

E2 - Well, ironically enough I prefer going with Nick. The first few times I saw it, I hated it, but it’s really grown on me throughout the years. Pete’s just didn’t feel as emotional or like it had much of an affect on Clementine. I also prefer him telling her about his mom in that shed rather than later on.

Another thing I love about Luke and Clem’s relationship, even though he knows she can take care of herself, he still tries to protect her. He holds his arm out in front of her when Matthew is approaching them on the bridge and is the one that pulls her down to keep her from getting shot. The banter they have is just really sweet and I miss that dynamic between them, I wish it carried throughout the rest of the season.

I was thinking about a missed opportunity the writer’s had while I was playing. Instead of having Walter die no matter what and Nick either die in episode two or four, whether you tell him the truth and/or convince him to forgive Nick should have a different outcome. Only one of them makes it to Howe’s depending on what you decided. You couldn’t convince Walter to forgive him? Nick goes out of his way to save Walter and Carver kills him. You told him Nick was a good guy? Walter sacrifices himself for Nick and gets killed instead. It would give a bigger variety and it would be really interesting to see how Walter would deal with being at Howe’s.

E3 - Troy makes me so uncomfortable. I know they were planning to have him do a lot worse, but he’s still just so ugh, you know? I’m physically incapable of liking Bonnie the more I see season 2. I just know that literally everything is because of her. She finds the group at the ski lodge, she blames Clementine for Luke’s death if she shoots the walkers LIKE HE ASKED, and she’s fully prepared to fucking leave her with a couple maniacs and a baby. Just her presence pisses me off.

I know I’m talking a lot about Clem and Luke, but I don’t care because I just love their relationship before he becomes an alien. I had her hug him which was really cute but I also want to see his reaction if she hits him which I think I’ll do next time. I know he pushes her to do things like every adult in this season, but he still actually seems to worry about her because he is hesitant about sending her to turn on the PA and he stands up to Carver when he says that Clem has seen more things than they could imagine.

E4 - I had no clue what I was going to do with Sarita, but I did end up chopping off her arm. I will forever hate how the adults are like "Kenny's being so scary, he's yelling, I thought he was gonna shoot me" and then they force Clem to go over there even if she says she doesn't want to.

I didn't know this until I looked it up just now, but apparently Nick died from a bite on the neck? This whole time, I thought he somehow just bled out from the gunshot to his shoulder, and I honestly don't know which is worse. His death is such bullshit. You know what else is bullshit? Alien Luke. Literally Rebecca shows more emotion than he does, and it was for all of 2 damn seconds. You know what I would have preferred?

Have Luke start breaking down. Make him just as unable to move as Sarah. Let him lose his mind over the fact that he just lost his best friend of "damn near 20 years" and make us decide whether we convince Luke or Sarah to escape. It's not convince Sarah or leave her, it's you can only save one of them. Again, more variety for those who aren't a fan of Luke and actually make it a hard decision because I feel like I would have a WAY harder time with that than whether to leave Sarah (I didn't by the way).

When Clem looks at the cannon and Jane says, "check the muzzle, napoleon" I really wish there was an option to be like, "Jane, I have a first grade education. I don't know my times tables, who the hell napoleon is, or what the fuck versatility means OR how to spell it. Keep yo damn nail file."

Another thing they could have done with Sarah, is if you saved her in the trailer park, she could have potentially saved herself. And this would be a really interesting one, because the determining factor would have been a thing that appeared as a dialogue option, not a choice choice. In episode two, you can teach her how to use a gun if you pick the right choice. Instead of having her die no matter what, if you showed her, let her actually show that she learned something and is capable of learning how to survive.

Rebecca’s whole situation is bullshit, too. You know, I’d be okay with it if it was changed. If you didn’t give her the pills, the coat and you left the observation deck early, I could buy her dying from hypothermia, exposure, blood loss, etc. But if you give her those things and you stay a few days, I would rather her have died in the firefight. It would have made way more sense. Like, I know a hell of a lot of things can go wrong during giving birth, especially without medical care, but after THREE damn days? I don’t know about that. Whatever you wanna say it was, a placental abruption, hemorrhaging, whatever - she would have died way quicker, not taken three days.

E5 - The writers had two good opportunities to get a chance to kill Kenny before the rest stop was ever a thing. They could have made Natasha go for him and you have the choice of shooting her or not. The could have been done later on when they’re walking through the woods and one comes up behind him. So, say you don’t let him get bitten the first time, but you’re seeing how unhinged he’s becoming, so you let it happen the second time. After that, you don’t get another opportunity.

Another thing about the pills, they’re so annoying. Like, you can only give them to one person. Rebecca, Luke or I think maybe Kenny. Because apparently there were only two damn pills in that bottle that shook like it was full. It’s so annoying. You should be able to give it to whoever you want, not just one of them.

I have so many problems with the ice scene. Yes, Luke, there are in fact TWO ways around. You see those trees? There’s these things called GAPS between them and the lake isn’t so damn big that you couldn’t walk around the damn lake. GRRRRR. When the ice started cracking, where were the choices to tell Luke to throw his gun away from him and to tell Bonnie to keep her fat ass put? “The small child is light, let them do it!” small child: no “Guess I’m just as light as her!” FUCK YOU BONNIE! THEN YOU HAVE THE FUCKING AUDACITY TO BLAME CLEMENTINE WHEN IT WAS CLEARLY YOUR FUCKING FAULT! YOU LITTLE WHORE ASS BITCH-

Sorry. I’m never going to get over Luke’s death or how fucking pissed I am at Bonnie and Mike. They can get fucked for all I care. Can I say, it’s also BULLSHIT that Bonnie makes it out of the ice but Luke doesn’t. Are you kidding me? She can find the hole, but he can’t (😳)?! GRRRR.

I was dreading that rest stop this whole damn game. I had no fucking clue what I was going to do when I finally got there, but I did end up deciding to shoot Kenny and leave Jane behind. I really struggled with deciding and I almost ended up not picking anything (which results in Jane’s death anyway). As much as I despise season 2 Kenny, I also despise Jane for what she did. I kinda wish I had looked away and then shot Kenny afterwards, but it is what it is.

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thegeminisage · 3 years

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games i have tried on project 64 in the three days i’ve had it working, in order:

kirby 64 - this is why i downloaded the emulator to begin with. kirby 64 is the ultimate feel-good game and i was really surprised at how easy it was. there are 6 planets with 4-5 stages each and each stage also has the requirement of collecting 3 crystal shards apiece. in just two hours i breezed through the first three planets and got almost every single collectible along with way with no do-overs

snowboard kids - not just a favorite of my brother and me but THEEE heavyweight champ as far as n64 racing games were concerned, even beating out mario kart 64. i also have snowboard kids 2, which improves upon the original in every possible way, but if i started playing that i would never have gone back to the original. it’s basically mario kart without brakes; you ride downhill, you can shoot other players with missiles, etc. it’s also a lot fucking harder than i remembered. i have no idea how we beat this at age 10 or whatever. it’s amazing that two decades and change later my muscle memory still tries to hit the c buttons when i’m holding a ps4 controller (i tried to get my gcn controller working, but i have a shitty adapter :/). i had more luck going back to the early courses and replaying them; they were easier than when i started, so i guess it’s kind of like riding a bike. i still haven’t gotten the gold on the last course though which means i have not unlocked the three hidden courses. they look really familiar so my brother and i must have gotten them, and if a couple of elementary school kids can do it, i can do it. no snowboard kids 2 until i finish the original :| and no save states either!!! however tempting it is. we didn’t have save states in 1997!!!! what’s funny about this game is that my brother’s favorite character to play as (spiky haired kid) and my favorite character to play as (girl wearing pink) are siblings in-game.

aerogauge - basically a rip-off f-zero except you can play in first person and your car can fly. this one aged VERY badly...my brother and i LOVED playing vs as kids because of the aforementioned first person flying cars and it’s definitely the reason we got so hooked on the gcn f-zero later in life, but playing solo against the AI is a form of self-punishment. also, i don’t remember how to boost and the game won’t tell me LMAO so i keep coming in last place. i may google up an instruction manual later and give it another try, but all the comments on that youtube video say it’s a notorious dumpster fire (something i never suspected as a kid) so maybe it’s just better with another real human being to play with :(

bomberman 64 second attack - this is another one that might be better with a second real human. my brother and i used to do the co-op with me as bomberman and him as pommy (a BLATANT kirby rip-off) but it’s another case of me not remembering all the controls and the game not explaining them very well. so far i’m finding it tedious that you have to move very far away from your bombs after planting them but i seem to remember the gameplay after the tutorial level being downright addicting. will have to come back later

dk64 - absolute CLASSIC that i really wanted to replay ever since i got my hands on the dk dlc of mario + rabbids. dk rap is exactly as charming as i remembered. the cutscenes are HILARIOUS and i keep getting surprised by things like the word butt, the word hell, voice acting, etc - thank you, rare. so the experience is wonderful but i got a little frustrated with the constant tutorials and i’m having a lot of trouble with the controls. the stick feels way too sensitive and i keep falling, the x and y axis are reversed from what i’m used to, etc. i think i just need more practice. my brother beat this as a kid but i never did

harvest moon 64 - my first harvest moon game EVER. we used to rent this all the time from our grocery store’s rental area (lol yes really the 90s were a Time) and my brother and i kept getting devastated when other people who rented it deleted our files, so finally my mom gave into begging and bought us our own copy (probably saved her a ton of money). this one is like. it’s harvest moon, high king of farm sims, but also i never have enough time or energy to get anything done, which also makes it a very realistic mental illness simulator. it is INCREDIBLY tedious to take things out of your pack and put them in the little harvest box and the music restarts itself every time you change areas. it’s still fun as hell but the quality of life improvements made in the gcn version and other games like stardew valley means when i am playing this i kind of just want to be playing those instead. it did not age well. and there’s so much missable stuff!!! it makes me feel like i need to be having a guide out 24/7 and i can’t just...get lost in the game. i forgot what i used to name all my animals and the farm etc (except obviously the horse was epona) so i went with scooby for the dog and aces for the farm name (not enough character for rainbow, smh). may or may not go back to that one.

anyway so far i am unsurprisingly spending most of my time on kirby and snowboard kids but i’m really looking forward to some other platformers i never finished as a kid like the banjo kazooie games, rocket robot on wheels, and FUCKING glover. i remember dying a LOT on that one :|

#personal #liz plays n64 #i feel like it'd be stupid to have a liveblog tag for each of these games separately so...#hopefully i won't have to go back and make new ones later.

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steve0discusses · 4 years

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The Fullmetal Alchemist Live Action Movie Part 7: More Philosopher Stones than their PC Farm Can Possibly Render

So last we left off, a bunch of weird stuff was happening. Mustang just set Envy on fire, Lust and Gluttony kind of walked up from stage left, and Ed and Hawkeye just broke out of bougie jail and barged through a chain link fence on some Jeep. Good thing Mustang is here to explain it all to us:

(FYI I am so bad at spelling homunculus. I don’t even know which way is real anymore.)

What is incredible about this movie is just how much everyone else already knows, while Ed knows freaking nothing. Also, if you know about homunculi, then you know about sorcerer stones, and you’d know about...most of the things in Fullmetal Alchemist. Assuming that Mustang, who can look at a homunculus tattoo and be like “yep that’s a homunculus” doesn’t know anything else is kind of a big leap.

This actor had fun. I legitimately enjoy the actor who plays Mustang, I really do.

Anyway, we do get a little bit more explanation at this point by going back to the part where Hughes dies and just...showing it a second time but with this extra reveal:

(see Hughes die yet again under the cut because this movie did it not just once but twice)

It’s at this point that Hughes turns to the phone and in his dying breath is like “It’s lab 5, go to the old POW camp, at lab 5” but not only did I think that the person on the line was the general (Because Hughes originally said it was the general) apparently now the person on the line is...Mustang? And that’s why Mustang knew about lab 5?

Like it’s...it’s just kind of confusing. I know this plot because I’ve seen the anime, but if you have not seen the anime beforehand or read the books, you’d be so freakin up a creek right now about why we saw this scene twice, and why it was completely different both times.

To make things even more confusing, that whole Tucker side plot is so random, that not even our baddies know what is going on with that whole Tucker side plot.

Anyway we have to give Gluttony and Envy have to do something in order to make their presence make sense. Honestly Gluttony just needs to have a single line in this movie.

Just everything is that same shiny neutral Phong. Look at all that Phong. Like other parts of this movie are passable, this was just so hilariously overlooked.

And like I dunno if this was a teeth harness or not but damn. Damn that looks stupid from the back, hahaha. He kind of lumbers slowly after these 9 dudes (same extras we’ve seen everywhere else, ps—this is still just the same guys) and it’s not all that scary because like...they can easily outrun him. The only way you can die to Gluttony is if you trip and then take a nap for a little bit.

Mustang gets hurt and it’s kind of funny how they shot it. It was actually rough to cap because they have to do so many tricks to not show us exactly what is happening, so they rely on sounds, on zooming in on people’s shocked expressions, because they Do Not Have The Budget to do more than this.

I don’t remember if this happened in the anime, too. Like from this point forward everything is kind of like “can you spot the source material?” because it’s just become so jumbled at this point.

Ed, who as you can imagine is a bundle of emotions by default, suddenly gets really protective of his mean Dad although like...we’ve barely made Mustang seem like a Father. Hell, we’ve barely made Ed seem like a kid. Why would he get weird and conflicted now?

Just the awkward teenage energy that only occasionally stems off of Ed is very unpredictable.

This is a full grown man.

Finally, we make it to Lab Number Five, the correct one this time. It’s got an alchemy circle…

It’s got a ceiling full of...zombie corpses, if you squint real good because I have to shrink all these images (Yes, they fit in the zombie corpses, but could not fit in the North or Father or Ling Yao or like anything Armstrong) It’s got everything that we need to put that nail into that Fullmetal Alchemist coffin, but ran out of time to fully explain or do.

It’s even got Al!

Yep, this is happening now, this part of the show. Ed is just having a WILD TIME trying to keep up with it and so are we.

So apparently Shou could just turn Al “off” this whole time. This explains why Al was just chilling under a blanket for 36 hours, but like...doesn’t really explain how Shou can do this or why he is bothering to do it right now.

But we need Shou because...well someone has to tell Ed what the plot is and what he should be doing at this very moment.

(Winry is here too)

So, with the threat of Winry getting shot in the head, Shou Tucker demands that Ed make it impossible to do any magic, because magic is very expensive and hard to animate. I could be wrong...but I’m pretty sure he also took off his right arm in the show at some point nearish to the end...I think? Forgive me, everything before 2020 is kind of a haze in my memory.

PS him ripping his hand off with all these sparks everywhere gave me serious Star Wars prequel vibes that I can’t explain. Something about the CGI, something about this contrived mess was like “Ah, I’ve felt this insanity before...long ago in a simpler time” and it was kind of nostalgic for me.

GOL LOOK AT THAT.

This Mickey Mouse glove just hot chilling on that sparking end. Hahaha I love it so much!

Shou just...delivers one of the most important reveals, sending Ed on a bit of a spirit journey because the stones he’s wanted for so long are actually very bad.

As you can imagine, because Ed likes to freak out, he has a big ass freak out, to top all freak outs. This actor spent like sooo much of his time just screaming at the ground. Which, I mean this is a shonen, so that checks out.

I’m just letting you know in case you decide to watch this movie and you have some epilepsy issues--skip this part. Just skip it. I don’t personally have it, but like...they went kind of extra in this part.

Now unlike the show, this movie has like...no apology for Dr Marcoh. Freakin stabbed him through the chest and was like “I don’t care if it means we can’t have the original FMA ending I freakin hate this guy” and you know...good on you, movie. Dr Marcoh was a really bad person. Thank you for not even attempting to justify this godawful man.

This crazy ass fanfiction movie.

Anyway, Shou directs Ed to look 10 feet up to get the rest of that juicy content. That Juicy FMA DLC that was within eye distance this entire time but youknow...cropped offscreen so it just didn’t exist.

Can’t believe this wasn’t the FIRST THING you’d notice when coming into this room, since Ed has been hardwired for red stones for like 10+ years. But youknow.

Anyways, we’re getting a ton of visual elements from FMA, just checking off that check list here in the last 1/3 of the movie. But wait, it gets weirder.

What I love about this is that Shou tells us all of this stuff because I guess Ed asked for Philosopher stones once, and even Shou is like...heyyy I figured it out! But like...hell would anyone even want to do this though?

Because that’s what happens when you have Shou freakin Tucker reveal the big master plan when he is not the big master. Like this explains nothing about Father, about Ed’s Dad, about the homunculi, about the corpses in the ceiling, like there’s just no explanation, other than just –“hey! Look at this atrocity I found just now!”

There is actually a horror element to that, where you don’t need to explain everything if you’re doing horror. If this were a horror movie, this would probably...be fine. You could have a fully explained movie by just saying “they turned POW camp people into rocks and now the zombies are here!” and that would be fine.

But it’s just...that isn’t this movie. I had so many expectations. And honestly...I expected way too much from 1.5 hours of content.

So Shou pulls a gun on Ed, which makes sense. Ed is lookin to make stones, and if stones are made out of people—then it’s time to kill Ed. First thing that make sense in this movie, but I don’t know if it makes sense coming from Shou freakin Tucker who made it seem like he just wanted to kill Ed because Ed got him arrested that one time.

It may have been just the translation on my end but like...Shou’s reason for pulling a gun out here was a little nonsense. But Shou himself is already a little nonsense anyway.

So we say goodbye, for the last time, being honest—he’s fully dead—he’s not coming back—to Shou Freakin Tucker. You were a mess Shou. I won’t miss you.

And if I forgot that this guy comes back, I fully apologize ahead of time, but I am 99% positive that I remembered that this guy never comes back.

(He might come back.)

And then Lust is like “Hakuro why did you do that? Like what are you even doing???”

And everyone else is like “Oh, the General. Of course. Why didn’t I uhhh….see that coming?”

Because they had to condense a whole bunch of corrupt Generals for this movie into one character, and so I guess Hakuro took it for the team?

Also these guys are here.

Just every single person standing in this room is pretty confused, as you can imagine. No one really expects to open up Volume 2 of FMA and it’s accidentally printed the last page of the entire series.

Anyway, that’s all for this 15 minutes (It was actually a little short 15 because there was ton of caps) I’m very tired because I did this workout routine with bro that was like 300 squats and I don’t know what day it is. I wrote “update blog” in my bullet journal (because it’s January, so I’m bullet journaling) so I’m just gonna do that because I want to use this green sparkly jelly pen and cross off all of today. Mm. Satisfying.

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/fma/chrono

#FMA #Fullmetal alchemist the live action movie #live action #fullmetal alchemist #recap #photo recap #ed elric #al elric #though putting al as a credit in this one seems like a stretch cuz he just freakin sat there the whole time #hawkeye #colonel mustang #maes hughes #shou tucker #just can't have enough shou tucker #Can you even believe that this went so quickly when I finally just did it? Amazing. Amazing how little productivity I had last year wow.#Hopefully this year I can get this blog back up to old productivity #we'll see what happens because it's still a bit of a weird situation outside

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justrandomselfships · 4 years

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My F/O’s but I rate how easily flustered they are (from least to most)

23 Kaeya- fucker definitely wouldn't let his guard down even for a second and even IF he still would turn the tables on his S/O. 0/10 why are you even trying.

22 Lisa- She'd be surprised that her S/O suddenly act a bit more "brave" but it wouldn't be enough to make her flustered, maybe blush a bit but in the end no strong reactions. 0/10 good luck next time.

21 Yasuo- He'd be a little caught off guard but in the end he'd just laugh it off and accept whatever. Expecially since thanks to the spirit blossom event we know that ✨ Yasuo is oblivious as fuck ✨. 1/10 one day he'll notice.

20 Tsuyu- come on! This girl most extreme reaction is slight blush and muttering "Cute" while she is somewhat flustered she isn't flustered easily. 2/10 she's still dying out of something.

19 Ryoma- He's still p shocked someone likes him but he still isn't flustered easily. He's more of a "Not used to someone loving me since I don't believe it". 2/10 he's slowly changing his mind.

18 Leon- It's his job to get his S/O swoon. So although he'd appreciate a compliment or someone taking the front wheel he wouldn't be much flustered. 3/10 good try but don't stop.

17 Yusuke- He is also oblivious but also his imaginations goes wild so it was hard to determine where to put him. Of course in the end it would depend on what his S/O does (aaand if he catches on). Remember that Yusuke is also pretty shameless so although he'd react it wouldn't get to him as much. 3/10 somebody stop this man from asking people to strip.

16 Sylvain- while yes technically he does the same thing as Leon he is a bit less used to genuine thing so he'd act a bit differently. 4/10 we're getting there.

15 Sollux- Depends on what you do honestly. He can take most of the things but not everything. 5/10 but please stop the dick talk it's just annoying.

14 Vera- She is a bad bitch but still a bit soft so if you manage to impress her good for you! You got a blushing Vera that can't think straight. 5/10 she's going to get back at you tho...

13 Zen- He'd overdo his reaction on purpose what a drama queen. But he enjoys it when someone takes his breath away so he's going to cooperate. 6/10 still expects it and enjoys it to the fullest.

12 Kirumi- She might try to act calm but if you talk to her while showing her affection in public she is NOT going to take it well. 6/10 she's just confused.

11 Jakob- While Jakob is rather bold in later stages of relationship his lover always will make his heart skip a beat. And in public he just doesn't know how to act. 7/10 give him a kiss and he won't be able to get enough.

10 Damien- Ah yes someone accepting his soft side can definitely use it to their advantage so he is fairly easy to fluster. 7/10 just like in the simulations.

9 Kayn- OH he's easily flustered but nothing will stop him from fighting back. Do you really think you can get away with teasing him? No you cannot but watching him try to counter attack while his brain processes what you just did is hilarious. 8/10 he forgets how to speak but once he calms down he will have his revenge.

8 Sett- He will get flustered only if he actually has feelings for you. Since if you were just strangers flirting back and forth it would never have any effect on him. But back to the topic if you are his lover it's fairly easy to make his heart rush. 8/10 he doesn't know why is that tbh.

7 Ibuki- She is open about being flustered and it's not so hard to make her swoon. She will obviously do so even when you just try. 8/10 give this girl a KISS.

6 Ezreal- Just by listening to his voice files its easy to determine that he is very easy to fluster even when HE'S the one trying. Like your reactions by themselves would kill him. 8/10 Still depends on his mood.

5 Kirishima- He just doesn't know how to react if you get him off guard, otherwise it's a no u card and YES he is still shocked. 9/10 give him looove 😳

4 Kiyotaka- while yes this man is pretty much shameless it's much different when it's about his lover. He can take things such as compliments and everything verbal without a problem (unless it's too flirty) but affection he doesn't expect will certainly fuck him up. 9/10 Hoo boy.

3 Mammon- Good lord he is easily flustered and we all know it. He catches on quickly but his tsundere nature still stays and he's going to be flustered easily no matter what. 9/10 please tell him how much he means to you.

2 Mineo- I'd give him the first place really but I did play the DLC and even though he gets flustered very easily in the DLC he was more bold and didn't shut down with a simple kiss on the cheek (but that scene was cuuuute). I mean he still is very akward (and I love he...) and if he wasn't the one who initiated things he was still flustered. 10/10 he is just too adorable but not enough for the first place.

1 Gundham- I don't even have to explain a thing just play the game. This boy is flustered easily by a compliment if he knows that it's genuine and just any form of affection. 100/10 but he still stays strong... Well tries to...

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emblemxeno · 4 years

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Xander Support Science Rebuttal/Review + How Mediocre Localization Could Change A Character (2/2)

Continuing From My Last Post (You can find my first post here with all of the links and citations referenced there also being applicable here)

This was originally gonna be three parts, but cutting down the rest of what I had, I don’t think I would have enough for three so instead you get a big second post. Please enjoy, and leave comments/asks one what you liked and what I could do do better in the future.

Continuation

-At 20:57, Ghast talks about Xander’s final showdown in BR chapter 26, “Despite already establishing that Xander had his doubts about Garon and his way of doing things, calling his siblings naive is hilariously rich coming from someone who routinely overreacts and disrespects his own family members for making inarguable claims about Garon” Xander doesn’t say that in the original script. He instead says:

Xander: I see...So you deceived Camilla and Leo like that? However, that will not work on me. As the First Prince of the Kingdom of Nohr, I cannot allow those who threaten the Kingdom to exist. No matter what others may say, now...I will defeat Corrin.

Nothing to indicate Xander disrespecting his siblings by insulting them, it’s simply a matter of defending his country.

-Ghast then goes on to also mention how Xander defended Garon and told Leo to shut up in Rev chapter 14. To that, notice the difference in the conversation between JP and the localization.

JP version, english patch

Leo: ...Hey, Xander. We should help fight, too. Even if we become enemies of Nohr, just like Corrin…

Xander: What?! Don’t say such stupid things!!

Leo: !!

Xander: Understand? We have our pride as the Nohrian royal children. No matter what happens, Father… He won’t let anyone betray this country. Remember this fact.

Leo: ...Sorry.

Xander: ...If you understand, then it’s okay. From here on out... There are things that we must do for Nohr. Corrin and them will meet at the Bottomless Canyon, when the skies over Nohr and Hoshido switch. Until then... Gather all of the trustworthy troops you can find.

Leo: ...Brother? What on earth are you…?

Localization

Leo: Xander, I’m not certain we should be fighting the Hoshidan forces. Even if it means becoming enemies of Nohr…

Xander: Enough of this foolishness!

Leo: !!

Xander: Listen. We are noble princes of Nohr--loyal sons to King Garon. No matter what… We cannot betray Father or this kingdom. Remember that.

Leo: I apologize for my words, Brother.

Xander: No need to apologize, so long as you understand. You and I must do all we can to protect Nohr. Corrin told where and when to meet him/her. We need to be at the Bottomless Canyon on the day the skies change. We have until then to gather our most trusted soldiers.

Leo: What are you planning to do, Xander?

The JP version has Xander shift his perspective, because this is the point where he realizes Garon is not the man he used to be. When he tells Leo to “shut up” in the JP script, it’s because Leo mentioned betraying Nohr not anything to do with their father. The conversation goes onto paint Garon as a tyrant by saying “He won’t let anyone betray this country” placing the blame unto his father for being an asshole, rather than having Noblesse oblige towards BOTH Garon and the Kingdom. The localization makes this conversation worse by having Xander still vehemently defend Garon when it was supposed to subtly communicate that it won’t be the case anymore. It also makes Xander look like more of a dick than he actually is.

Line Changes

-At 22:15, he goes onto the Conquest chapter 27 line where Xander says Corrin will be punished like any other traitor if they are leading the Nohr family into a trap to do them harm. He also says that Xander believes that Corrin is leading them into a Hoshidan ambush, but I don’t know where he got that from? He says nothing about Hoshido, he only says if Corrin’s actually trying to harm their family. And again, this is another case of localization making Xander seem more harsh than he is. The original line was:

“Xander:..I understand. You’re the one who has led and fought with us the whole time. That’s why...I believe you. I believe in your words. But, if what you say turns out to be a lie...We will determine you as an enemy, and our entire army will turn against you. Prepare yourself for that.”

Nothing as threatening as the localized version, because Xander isn’t actually like that.

Xander’s Denial/Trust Issues

-Ghast goes on “While Corrin’s claim would be hard to swallow, without any context, Garon’s been a bloodthirsty monster the entire game (talks about Garon being evil and Xander witnessing it)...Xander even later says the war was pointless and that his real father, would never have started a meaningless war like the one they just fought in, showing that he knew from the start that what he was doing was wrong. So why would he threaten Corrin like that for suggesting disposing of Garon”?

Because, at that point, he was still in denial of Garon possibly being bad, clinging onto hope that his father would return to the way he was. As I mentioned earlier, it takes seeing Garon as a literal monster to finally push Xander over the edge, but it’s also why he and the other Nohr siblings are hesitant to fight against Slime Monster Dad, because they felt the exact same way due to how they grew up.

Following up, he says, “Why would he not trust Corrin, when at that point of the game they chose to return to Nohr and fight with them and they probably have an A support which shows he’s been doubting Garon for years” 1) As stated before, the support wasn’t translated well, he’s not actually the type to stand up to Garon even if he had his doubts unless you have some very definitive proof and 2) 9 times out of 10, Supports don’t affect the story in any meaningful way. At best it affects whether you can not have someone unrecruit themselves, or in 3H in order to get the CF route. I can just as easily have Corrin not support Xander at all.

Further on, Ghast says “Even after Garon being a complete dickbag, and Corrin showing unquestionable loyalty the entire game, Xander still trusts Garon more” No, he doesn’t. It’s not trust, it’s fear. He’s afraid of his father. He visibly recoils whenever Garon barks orders at him, he says that as a kid he was more scared of his father than any ghost in the Boo Camp DLC. Xander is fully aware of Garon’s atrocities and how awful he is, but he defends him because protecting Garon is synonymous with protecting his Kingdom and family, and because he’s in deep denial of Garon’s behavior due to growing up in a destructive environment, AND because he’s utterly terrified of him. It’s a complex way of thinking, and something that has shaped Xander up to that point.

Logic vs. Emotion

-He goes back to BR chapter 26 at with 25:17 “He doesn’t even take a moment to think things through and ask himself why all of his siblings have stopped fighting Corrin already, he doesn’t consider Leo and Camilla’s feelings at all, completely dismisses Elise’s plight, and instead blindly fights for Garon to win the war...Xander’s reaction to Elise’s final dying plea in his arms that he’s responsible for, to get him to listen finally is to continue fighting Corrin. Xander’s hubris has blinded him from seeing why Camilla and Leo could see reason, he pushed his agenda so far that he literally killed his own sister. At this point, Xander has absolutely nothing but his annoying patriotism to his country and his blind obsessiveness with pleasing Daddy Dearest, so instead of finally beginning to see the light, Xander instead spits on Elise’s dying wish, and forces Corrin to fight him, despite literally being told not to do it.”

Ghast’s incessant desire for Xander to have no personality except considering others feelings and be a pragmatist is what drags down this analysis the most for me. Besides already ignoring literally everything that was changed in the localization, as well as the more-than-implied undertones of an abusive/destructive childhood, he is under the impression that after killing his own sister, there should only be one reaction to it, to join Corrin and fight Garon. Completely disregarding the darkest part about Xander, his suicidal desires, most of which are delved into his Nyx support. You can’t get this support in BR obviously, and that route is where he is pushed to his limits and is suffering the most on the inside; when he kills Elise everything inside of him breaks and he thinks the only way to atone is to die, hence why he triggers a Suicide-by-Cop by forcing Corrin to fight him. This is reflected in gameplay where his stats are lowered and he doesn’t move, showing that he’s holding back and wanting Corrin to finish him off.

Ghast goes on to say “What were the writers hoping to achieve by making Xander completely disregard his little sister’s sacrifice and to continue fighting with absolutely no resolve or reason to fight? He couldn’t do anything else? Really?”

Uh, yeah. Really. At least that’s what Xander believed. Being suicidal does that to people. Context of the moment and not thinking rationally can really fuck someone up depending on what happens. It is an issue the audience can have, where doing the smart thing is obvious, and it’s bad writing when the character doesn’t do it, but 1) characters aren’t robots dictated solely by logic and 2) characters that always do the right/smart thing can get pretty boring, at least to me. It’s also why I enjoy Corrin as a protagonist and why Takumi and Leo work extremely well as Corrin’s foils.

-He then goes onto critique Xander claiming he didn’t have a choice like his other siblings, because of his responsibility as Crown Prince, saying that at that point, Leo, Camilla and Elise had left the war so what did he have left to fight for. And to that I say, he had the rest of Nohr to fight for, literally a bunch of innocents that he needs to protect. Meanwhile, his retainers are probably bleeding out, whoops.

-30:28 “Now Elise is dead. Her courageous sacrifice goes ignored by Xander, and the only possible reasoning behind his decision to continue was to keep fighting for Garon and Nohr” or, y’know, because of those not so subtle suicidal tendencies of his that were just triggered by him killing his sister, leading him wanting to be killed?

“But therein lies another problem, Xander’s responsibility is to his people, not to a megalomaniac king undeserving of his loyalty” Denial, fear, and a harmful way of thinking can do that to someone.

-Ghast actually acknowledges Xander’s suicide by cop thing with his stats and says it was supposed to be tragic but it’s not because he thinks Xander’s line of letting his feelings overrule my duty is baffling because “...he suppressed his real feelings because of his duty, there’s no instance where Xander’s emotions get in the way of doing what he should do as Crown Prince, someone who is to strive for the well being of his people” Chapter 2 he spares Kaze and Rinkah, and in chapter 3 he and the other siblings rescue Corrin despite not being ordered to. This is him doing what his feelings told him to do in spite of what consequence it might have for his country in the future. Not to mention a lot of his actions in Conquest have him do things based on emotion and feelings even if it might have ended the war sooner not to.

-34:55, “So guess what? He knew. He knew Camilla left for a good reason, he knew Leo was right to suspect Garon, he agreed with what Elise wanted the entire time, and he knew Corrin was right, but most importantly he doesn’t believe in Garon anymore. So what does he have left? His people. But how, Xander? How are you going to lead your people to the peaceful future you just admitted to always wanting as Crown Prince if you go ahead and throw your life away? So let me answer your question. Is that justice? No Xander, it’s karma, you colossal tool”.

People aren’t allowed to have feelings and who cares if he was suicidal and wanted his life to end because he felt like he didn’t deserve to live anymore, and most likely felt his people deserved better than him, yadda yadda. Again, it’s this desire to rope Xander into this box of not having a character besides being receptive to other people that makes this analysis worse. Because he’s ignoring intrinsic facets of Xander’s personality. Traits that really can’t be ignored when understanding the greater context of the siblings, Nohr, and the game as a whole. Unfortunately, said traits were also bogged down a bit by a bad localization.

35:37-”If this was support Xander he wouldn’t have done all of this and he would’ve made all the right choices” I don’t agree, for aforementioned reasons that I don’t wish to repeat again.

35:56 ”And if he can’t negotiate peace, Xander should bravely face his father like he said he did in the past and do the right thing for the countrymen he so devoutly serves. Stand up to the guy.” Basically the entire argument is based on one line that was never in the original script and therefore never intended to be something the audience would think. Xander never stood up to Garon directly before, the only real instance of that happening is chapter 27 of Conquest, where he finds his father is a literal monster. Any other time he tries, he recoils in fear. Even his line in CQ chapter 9 where Corrin might be executed for getting help from Elise and Xander says “Father, kill me or kill no one. That is all there is to it” isn’t in the JP script, it was literally just ellipses instead.

The Second Video: Xander’s Supposed Hypocrisy

The second video goes onto more story Xander and supports Xander stuff, once again closing Xander off into a box of just being selfless and being completely receptive.

-At 4:25 he says instead of letting the war be over quicker by letting Zola execute the Hoshidan royals Xander commits treason against his own army and people by destroying Zola’s company in chapter 18. Ghast makes this out as Xander being self fulfilling and not for the welfare of his people at all, despite this completely going against Ghast’s apparent need for Xander to consider his families’ feelings and wishes, and saving the Hoshido royals would what Corrin would want. I really don’t know what Ghast really wants from Xander sometimes.

-From 6:01 to 7:12, Ghast criticizes Xander’s way of doing things as hypocritical. “Xander acts like Garon (declaring treachery and using violence to get his way) to make sure the war is won in an honorable way”. Never mind the fact that since Xander is thinking about the future of Nohr, and he doesn’t want his country to be seen as deceptive cowards, and the fact standing by and letting a person like Kotaro do what he wants, despite being a greedy politician who destroyed a whole country in the past and can easily stab Nohr in the back later.

Further on, at 10:05, “It’s not enough to be a good person, you have to stand up to people doing bad things” ...that’s literally what he does against Zola though? Besides the aforementioned planned execution, there’s also the fact that Zola is committing a crime by instigating conflict in a neutral territory, why would taking him out be a bad thing.

Justice Is An Illusion

-At 11:00, he goes on to criticize Xander’s Justice Is An Illusion speech in CQ 24, specifically the line “If we allow evil men to let their vision take precedence over our own, we all lose. Remember that, and find solace in it” He says this is hypocritical of Xander to say, as Xander had done nothing to stand up for his own vision of peace in the face of evil men at point. This is despite the fact that, as we know by now, Xander isn’t the type of person to stand up and directly fight back against his father, because of fear and denial. So despite it looking cowardly, it’s consistent with how his portrayal was supposed to be, which the localization fumbled on.

Also, the line that Ghast criticizes? Guess which line isn’t in the JP script. Actually the speech is a lot longer in the localization than the JP version, like twice as long:

The localized speech:

Corrin: ...Xander, what do we--?

Xander: I know. I don’t like this plan any more than you do. But we must stay strong. If we falter now, the whole world will pay the price. Corrin… Camilla told me you once asked her where justice lies.

Corrin: Yes. She didn’t have any more answers than I did.

Xander: Little prince/princess… The sad truth is that justice is an illusion. A child’s fairy tale. There is no light path that always leads to good, nor dark path that leads to evil. To believe that--to see the world in black and white--is missing half the picture. All that matters are the choices we make--especially the hard ones.

Corrin: But this? It’s too much…

Xander: Letting innocents die is a tragedy, but so is letting the chance for peace slip away. This is war. There is no such thing as a clean win when lives are on the line. Instead of clinging to a false sense of justice, hold strong to something true… The desire to do what you know is right and to protect the ones you love… And the ambition to see your vision of a peaceful future through to the end. If we allow evil men to let their vision take precedence over our own, we all lose. Remember that, and find solace in it.

Corrin: You’re right, Xander. I know in my heart that you’re right. Gods, give me strength...

The JP Speech:

Corrin: ...Xander. I…

Xander: I know. You do not truly agree with these methods. ...Corrin. Before this, you… I heard from Camilla that you asked where justice is found.

Corrin: Yes…

Xander: ...Things like justice, do not exist. This is war. In this world, there is no right or wrong way of being. There is only… Ambition and desire. Along with the expectations of the people who follow those emotions. You’d do well to remember that.

Corrin: …

I was surprised to see it was so short, so I double checked on a playthrough of the untranslated version to make sure it wasn’t a mess up with the patch, and it’s not. It’s actually that short.

Xander’s Honor

-At 14:22 he says Xander “Carelessly violates his code of conduct by dirtying his hands and by betraying his father and Nohr” What exactly does Ghast want, because Xander goes against Garon like he wanted, and allows his vision to hold precedence like he wanted (even though the line was a Treehouse add-on), yet this is apparently a bad thing because it’s contradictory to what he does later, when in the context of the situation, he literally can’t do anything because it would mean going against half the army as well as any Hoshidan forces. Xander says justice doesn’t really exist, because even when they did things like take out Zola and Kotaro for their scheming, who’s to say that was the most just decision, because as Ghast himself said, letting them do their thing could’ve ended the war faster. But on the other side of things, where would the justice be in letting people like that do what they want? That’s what Xander ultimately means when he says there’s no justice, further complemented by saying there is only ambition and desire; it was Xander’s ambition and desire to do what he thought was right, justice or not.

-At 16:03 to the end, Ghast concludes the video by saying that Support Xander and Story Xander may as well be different people. But the thing is, they’re not. Xander is in deep denial of his father being evil because he’s still latching on to what few good things there were about him, and Garon is what Xander is scared of the most. Xander’s multifaceted personality makes him out to be selfless and caring on the inside, whilst appearing intimidating, but none of this was intentionally cultivated, it’s just the way he grew up, and being a natural introvert, he’d rather not change how people perceive him because he’d rather not cause anyone trouble. And having a drive to do things for others, he also has personal issues and sentiments which influence his actions, such as suicidal desires and difficulty controlling and expressing his emotions.

This is shown really well, but mostly only in the original script. The grievous inconsistencies are a result of the localization adding in lines that contradict what was originally supposed to be conveyed. Apparently he stands up against Garon frequently, he fights for justice against evil men, and he doesn’t let his emotions rule over his logic. But none of that is actually true.

Conclusion

In general, I don’t really like either video because Ghast imposes what kind of character Xander should be like and doesn’t acknowledge (or outright dismisses as stupid) a lot of what could influence him. The final driving point is that it’s simply baffling that there’s no acknowledgement whatsoever of Xander’s story inconsistencies being possibly a result of bad localization (which they are) when Fates had one of the most controversial localization seasons in the past few years. Granted, yes, people were more up in arms about problematic content, the skinship, and name changes, but not many seem to recognize that maybe that it also extends to the script in general altering character personalities? It’s even more confusing considering Ghast’s main videos are about story and character analysis, yet doesn’t really seem to ever bring up how localization and translation can alter the script, thereby affecting the player’s reading of the plot.

Overall, what’s done has been done, most people see Xander as two (or three) different people because of Fates’ bad writing and not because messages possibly being misconstrued. I would like to say, that saying Xander was ruined was not the best choice of words, as even with mediocre translation, he’s still a fantastic character and not all of what makes him the way he is was lost.

It’s just I feel like we could’ve gotten better.

Anyway, thanks to all who read through this. Play Fates, it’s a good game, even though I think Treehouse fumbled a lot of it.

#fire emblem #fire emblem fates #fire emblem if #fe14 #xander fire emblem #marx fire emblem #fire emblem opinions

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redbelles · 4 years

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@anthropologicalhands here you go! thanks for the ask ✨

hilariously, i p. much can’t write unless i have a title in mind? it seems to shape the story as i go, so i typically end up stealing song lyrics as soon as i have an idea, if only to put myself out of my misery. anyway! atla, twd, rdr2, ac: origins, dc, and pitch under the cut!

in our bedroom, after the war

post-series atla zutara au wherein i geek about politics and reconstruction and consequences, and also break zuko into tiny sad pieces before katara gets to smooch him. also there is a dragon.

and wept for break of day

twd au: post-coda, (loosely) inspired by the short story “bullet in the brain”; eventual bethyl

Mass hallucinations, one broadcaster said. String theory. The collective unconscious. Just a whole buncha scared fools, grasping at straws while the world reels, trying to understand something too big and too ugly to ever understand.

She sits there in the dirt, numb and shaking, hands clenched so tight that her nails bite deep into her palms. She presses harder, carving sharp little crescents into skin that’s not nearly as callused as it should be.

The world feels like it’s falling away beneath her, spinning out wildly, carrying her someplace foreign and strange. Her skull throbs and aches. There’s no scar on her wrist. Beneath the dirt, her nails are painted cornflower blue, bright and vivid as a summer sky. The dead don’t walk.

But they did, didn’t they?

I lived it. I remember.

it ain’t no sin

twd au: beth wakes up during her abduction and it gives daryl time to reach the car, and then daryl and beth bang about it

She doesn’t hear the familiar twang of the bow, but when the word chokes off into a gurgle of blood and the graceless thump of a body hitting the ground, she knows.

Daryl comes sprinting out of the darkness, quiet as a hunting cat. The driver’s side door swings open, the cop’s buddy stepping out to try and salvage the situation. Daryl fires, reloads, and fires again, so fast her eyes can’t follow it. She’s so dizzy that it seems like one smooth motion. One breath, just long enough to aim, and then the arrows are gone and Beth and Daryl are alone in the night. The men are dead.

Good, she thinks fiercely, angry and shaken and still unable to stand. Good.

He goes straight to the bodies as she finally hauls herself onto the grass, listening as he yanks the bolts free. Three awful squelches; visceral, obscene. She gags again, and then Daryl is there, dropping to his knees beside her.

“Y’alright?”

late for the sky

rdr2 au: arthur/sadie, set immediately after the massacre at hanging dog ranch

“You didn’t have to stay,” she calls. There’s an ache in her voice he doesn’t know how to parse.

“Sure.” He leaves it at that, no fuss about letting Freyja rest, about needing to catch his breath, though neither would be a lie. There’s no room for chatter; the air between them is full up with grief.

“Sure?”

No meat on that bone, but he can see her chewing it over all the same, worrying at it. Sadie Adler, shaken. If he held a mirror up to her face, he’s half-afraid he’d see fire. Smoke, ash, the orange blaze of a cabin as it burns to cinders.

The memory sends a chill skittering down his spine, a cold knife that lodges somewhere near his heart.

He ain’t the only one held hostage by that particular cruelty. Still knee-deep in the river, Sadie shivers. The water keeps running red around her, blood flaking off her hair and skin, melting into the current, soft as snow.

this loneliness won’t last

rdr2 au: arthur/john/abigail post-game fix it fic

There was heat pouring off John. A droplet of sweat trailing down his cheek. He smelled like salt and sunbaked earth. The thought skimmed through his mind like a water on a pane of glass, crystal clear and out of reach all the same. Then John’s mouth crashed over his, and Arthur had no thought left.

He couldn’t help himself. He bent into John like a windswept tree, looking for shelter. Looking for relief. John pulled him in, held him close, hands fisted in the worn fabric of Arthur’s shirt. Need kindled in his blood, bright and sharp and burning, and he stiffened. Pulled away. John wouldn’t have it. He pulled him back in, nipped at his mouth, trailed fire over his skin, kissed him like Arthur was his to keep.

He wanted to run and hide. He wanted to stay right where he was and live in this moment forever. But then it was over: John stepped away, breathing hard. His fingers were still wound in Arthur’s shirt. He let go like it hurt.

“Don’t leave,” he said, staring at Arthur like he could sear the words into him. Make him stay through force of will alone.

And then he was gone, just like always, just like before.

pieces rendered

ac: origins post-game, post-dlc bayek/aya fix it fic

Amunet, he reminds himself, wincing at the cool bite of aloe against raw skin. It is hard to remember in moments like these, alone in the twilight dimness of the cave mouth, safe from the eyes and ears of those who have only ever known her as a Hidden One.

She is Aya in his thoughts, sometimes, no matter how well he guards his tongue. When the world slips and the ache of all he’s lost will not subside, that is the name that rises in his heart. Wife, lover, friend. Mother of his child, the woman he once thought would walk beside him in this life and the next. Aya.

Amunet is the shadow of a wild wind, always blowing away from him. “North,” she told him once, “to set the sea aflame.”

She did. She does.

Perhaps someday he will come to terms with that.

stolen car

sprawling fic series that explores the batfam universe through the lens of jacy petra todd, the second robin. the bad robin.

She holds a gun to a rapist’s head and presses the muzzle into skin hard enough to leave a mark, hard enough to make the piece of shit kneeling in front of her whimper.

They’re in a warehouse out by the docks, in the corner of a shadowy park, in some shitty back alley, trash piled up in careless heaps and the rats ignoring them. It’s nothing they haven’t seen before. There’s blood on the ground. There is always blood on the ground.

“Please,” they say, “please, don’t do this.”

“Come on,” she says, laughing. They hate it when she laughs. The helmet distorts her voice, turning it harsh and metallic, until the sound of it is like a knife under their skin. It is a weapon like any other; she is not afraid to use it. “Beg some more. See where it gets you.”

They cry, or retch, or shake, big tough men learning what it feels like to be powerless. Sometimes they piss themselves, the sharp odor of urine burning against the stink of blood and gunpowder.

The Bat may rule Gotham, but Crime Alley is the Red Hood’s haunt, and her lines are hard and fast. Everyone in the city knows what happens when you cross them.

“Please,” they say, staring up at her, searching flat red metal for an ounce of mercy. They never meet her eyes. Instead, they look where a mouth should be, and beg, just like she tells them to. “Please, please, I won’t do it again, I’ll never do it again, please!”

The gun doesn’t waver. Gotham beat the softness out of her wayward daughter years before Batman ever found her, before Robin ever fluttered into the Joker’s path, before she seared and burned and screamed her way back to consciousness in the Lazarus Pit.

“No,” she tells them, voice like a knife, gun steady in her hands—

stone by stone

sequel to no burden that will not float away featuring shitty coffee, former robins being bad at feelings, and the current robin judging them for it

[fire from fire]

[redacted] au where [redacted] dies and [redacted] snaps

She walks through the streets like a reckoning. She does not sing.

with a hawk above you crying

wonder woman fic inspired by emmylou harris’s michelangelo

last night i dreamed about you / i dreamed you lay dying / in a field of thorn and roses / with a hawk above you crying / for the warrior slain in battle / from an arrow driven deep inside you long ago—

Diana finds Antiope, and loses her, and finds her again.

you know the time is now

pitch, mike/ginny, mid-season onward au where they actually have to deal with their feelings

after all the bullshit surrounding the all-star game, mike decides he needs to take a step back, distance himself a bit from the ginny baker madness. so of course the first thing he does after the all-star game is get into a brawl. he can’t even blame it on some sort of convenient rage blackout. he makes a calm, rational decision to follow the fucker up the first base path, and calmly, rationally punches him in the face while ginny watches, stunned, from the mound.

varitek a-rod brawl whomst???

ask me about my wips!

#dash games #writing: best worst hobby #rape tw #rape mention #blood tw

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transmortifried · 4 years

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so i’m playing mass effect 3 for the first time for the second time (made some bad choices on my first run, starting over) and i’ve got some hot takes i want to raise about the “story and mission-based companion-focused rpg” genre

1. companion quests make any game with companions better by their inclusion. not all companion quests are good obviously, but it’s definitely something i miss in 3 that i loved in 2, where it was a prominent and vital part of the game. (there’s like 3 or 4 missions total in 2 that aren’t recruiting a new party member or solving their deep-rooted personal problems.)

2. how games let you romance your companions has problems.

2a. for one, hey devs i don’t give a SHIT if you think nobody wants to romance the awful crab alien or the robot detective, i GUARANTEE that your players do. (although i would personally hate a javik romance b/c he’s awful and terrible, the bit where you bang him in the citadel DLC is fucking HILARIOUS). also bioware, where’s the krogan romance options? if we can figure out how to bang the cute quarian without killing her with our terribly filthy human germs and incompatible amino acids, we can figure out how to bang a krogan without dying

2b. no het-only romance options pls. i’m okay with same-gender-exclusive romance options purely on the grounds of we (the gays (me)) are starving so badly for gay romance options, but you look at me and tell me that garrus vakarian wouldn’t bust it wide open for “one-man-cybernetically-augmented-superman” mshep or tali’zorah “hero-worship-sublimated-to-romantic-feelings” vas normandy wouldn’t let femshep turn that suit into a full-body dental dam then you are a coward. also jack is the most bisexual woman i’ve ever seen and bioware is too chicken to acknowledge it.

2b, subheading a. that said, i hate the bethesda route of “playersexual npcs” where the romance routes are totally identical regardless of player gender, but with mad libs style fill-in-the-blank-with-your-pronouns-here writing. idk if there’s an easy compromise to make here.

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jojolightningfingers · 5 years

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thought i forgot to do this, eh? nope! here’s the rundown on dual destinies!

- oof. where to start? as with most things there was some good and some bad. the good things kind of start and end with the characters, while the bad things permeate... much more than that. let’s see if i can stagger them.

- bad: the soundtrack. most of the AJ music is playing on repeat in my head months after the fact; meanwhile the only track from DD i can recall really enjoying is Reminiscence ~ A Sad Memory.

- good: athena. oh my god, athena. blithely honest athena, amazingly competitive athena, athena who busted her ass to become a multilingual fully barred lawyer in less than seven years and before the age of 19. athena who can flip a full grown man over her head on reflex. god bless her.

- bad: the models for phoenix and apollo are. so fucking stiff and ugly. all the ones that were made for DD like athena’s and the witnesses, those are fine, but when you start cribbing directly off of the sprites, it really shows, and it’s awful. the exceptions are klavier’s little laughing one that ends with a hair fwip and phoenix’s front-facing ones. and if you’re gonna have models snap from position to position with no inbetweens, why even have models? just use the sprites that are cleaner and better looking anyway. plus, the breakdowns.... let’s just say that kristoph’s doesn’t look so over the top anymore.

- good: the third case! I really like turnabout academy, even though it was HILARIOUSLY obvious that means did it. the one-off characters were delightful, it was just complicated enough to be a challenge without being too easy or too frustrating. klavier was there. the ending was heartwarming.

- bad: some of the technical writing is... really handholdy for lack of a better word. and in a game where that handholding necessarily has to be delivered by characters talking to other characters, or thinking to themselves, it comes off as the characters in question just sounding really, really dumb and lacking common sense and basic logic skills. characters who, i remind you, are not only just barred and competent lawyers, but REPUTED for winning cases by thinking outside the box and conjuring hope by grasping at the thinnest of straws. characters who, moreover, didn’t HAVE this problem in their previous appearances. it is a HORRIBLE thing to handhold a puzzle/problem solving game, i will die on that hill. it defeats the whole point.

- good: blackquill is godot, but from an angle that i like a whole lot more. oddly enough i think the localization helped this one: he’d probably come off as pretentious and annoying as i found godot if i were playing the japanese version, where ace attorney canonically takes place in japan (and so an old-fashioned samurai attitude would sound really hoity toity), but in the context of an american-based ace attorney, he just sounds adorably, passionately nerdy for japan. plus, samurai metaphors are just cooler than coffee metaphors. and he just looks cooler. and has a hawk with a little scarf. does godot have a hawk with a little scarf? i didn’t think so.

- bad: dual destinies is bad, so bafflingly bad at relationships that happened in the past. when edgeworth is first mentioned to phoenix in the first game, we get a couple subtle hints before we even meet him that phoenix already knows who he is, and it’s confirmed before the third case even starts. we go for three whole cases with blackquill, with athena being present in all of them, before suddenly being told ‘oh yeah, athena knew him when she was little’. and given that athena has literally the exact same ‘i want to save this person from himself’ motivation that phoenix does, you’d THINK that this would be made a bigger deal of. it’s ridiculous that it’s not! athena deserved better.

- good: what we DID get of athena and blackquill interacting on a personal level, i did like very much. what can i say? i’m a sucker for that kind of dynamic. athena’s bruteforce determination to save blackquill from martyring himself for her sake, using her own abilities honed by her family’s work? that’s my candy.

- bad: i could say lots of things about the climax of the final case but it’d basically just be a retread of this post so i’ll let you look at that one instead.

- good: the dlc case was well thought out and interesting, and more importantly, long and involved enough to be worth the extra money spent. good story too!

- bad: this one’s the really big bugbear for me. do you know what would have been better for the cosmic turnabout than what actually happened? switch the roles that clay and starbuck had in the case. it would have immediately improved the whole thing. there is literally no point other than cheap, easy-bake drama to retconning a childhood friend for apollo and then killing him before he says a word. it has no impact. if starbuck were killed instead of clay? clay could still be devastated and upset that his beloved mentor is gone, which in turn would upset and unsettle apollo. drama would still come about with clay being suspected of the murder, it would only exacerbate the whole situation! hell, it might even be a good starting point for hinting at athena’s black psyche-locks, i’m sure apollo losing his cool and shouting that clay didn’t do it would be similar enough to her shouting that simon didn’t murder her mother to pry open some nasty repressed memories. instead, the way apollo reacted to clay’s death was.... just really weird. this is a guy who broke down in tears (AJ literally lists three different sound effects for it, one of them being *bawl*) when he saw trucy alive and well after apparently having been kidnapped, and he didn’t even know her all that well yet! and dual destinies would have me believe that this same person’s reaction to his BEST FRIEND dying in a senseless murder is one frustrated angry anime scream and going off batman style? like hell.

- overall, i was fine with the game while i was playing it, but i think it’s really telling that it took me two months to get through the whole thing. not because it was hard, but because i just didn’t really WANT to. definitely a big step down after AJ and AAI2.

#dual destinies #ace attorney #phoenix wright #simon blackquill #athena cykes #aa #meta posts #bizarre adventures #other highlights of the game: the plot twist towards the end of case 2 and jinxie #anyways clay and apollo's alleged relationship deserved better

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wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years

Text

Witches, Chapter 19: yeah there’s actually still one last little bit of investigation left in this case. I’m sorry too. Now who wants backstory for side characters in a DLC case!

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

----

For all her bluff and bluster about getting back to investigating in the face of Blackquill’s disdain, Athena doesn’t seem to have a clue what they should do next. She tromps in stocking feet back into the aquarium, Phoenix and Pearl trailing behind her, and stares at a poster on the wall with life cycle facts about penguins for five minutes before she suggests that they go visit Sasha, because if Blackquill was here, then he had to be done interrogating her, right?

Pearl remains behind at the aquarium to get settled in, and Athena complains the whole drive to the detention center because Phoenix made her put her wet shoes back on instead of driving barefoot. “I’m wearing tights!” she insists. “It’s not barefoot!”

“Shoes, kiddo.”

“They’re wet! It’s gross!”

“Should’ve thought of that before you threw a bucket of water at a witch.” Or whatever he is. Fae-adjacent, the same vague broad classification to encompass Phoenix and Trucy and Klavier and Thalassa. Apollo’s not quite there yet.

“Wicked witch of the bench afraid he’d melt if it hit him, you think?” She steps out onto the parking lot asphalt and winces at the tiny rocks digging into her feet. “Okay,” she sighs. “Shoes.”

As they wait at the detention center for Sasha to be brought out, Athena turns, very seriously, to Phoenix. “Alright, Boss, we’ve gotta cheer Sasha up! If you’re feeling bad about the investigation, don’t you dare show it!”

The door on the other side of the glass opens and an officer escorts Sasha in. She wears a grin on her face but has a wild look in her eyes. “Ahoy, me buckos! Worry ye not about me! My spirits be good and ol’ Prosecutor Nostache won’t keep me down!”

“Uh.” Athena blinks and turns to Phoenix. He shrugs.

Sasha’s entire posture collapses. “Well that was an anchor,” she says. “Straight to the bottom. I wanted to make you feel better for all the trouble I’m causing…”

“We were hoping to cheer you up,” Athena says.

“Maybe you both can just act natural,” Phoenix says. Not that telling anyone to “act natural” ever leads to any normal or natural behaviors. Certainly not if he ever told Maya that, though after the first time he learned to add the qualifier “act what might be natural for a human”.

“Anyway.” Athena inhales deeply and the large, forced smile that she had put on calms down into something still friendly, still smiling, but closer to neutral, and much more natural. “What we’re here for, Sasha, is to tell you that we’d like to represent you in court tomorrow!”

“What!” Sasha shoves herself backward from the sill, her chair screeching horribly across the floor until it gets stuck, and she still pushing tips herself and the chair over backwards, thudding out of sight to the ground.

“Sasha?” Phoenix asks. “Is - is something wrong?”

She doesn’t stand back up. Athena pushes herself up on the sill and presses her forehead against the glass, trying to peer down to see if she’s okay. “Pros - Prosecutor Blackquil s-said--” Sasha’s shaking, shuddering breathing interrupts her words. “Said that you w-wouldn’t show up. You’d abandon me.” She’s definitely crying now, loudly and messily. “And you’re here! You - you’re - you’re h-here. To rescue me.” She rights the chair, rubbing tears off of her cheeks and out of her bloodshot eyes.

“No, Sasha!” Athena still has her face up close to the glass and she presses her palms up against it, too. “We would never! Even Prosecutor Blackquill should know that! I would never! Don’t cry!” The next loud sniffling comes from Athena.

Oh boy.

“These are happy tears.” And Sasha is smiling, beaming really, even blinking furiously to stop further tears from falling. “I’m so so glad I met you both! For Orla and me a-and—” Another shaky breath stops her for a moment. “Okay. I’m okay. I’m okay! You’ve probably got questions, right? Fire away!”

What she tells them of cleaning the orca pool that early morning is a review of what they’ve already heard, up to the point that she readily tells them she was arguing with the captain. She talks more about Orla’s tricks, says that the calendar with the seven am meeting with the captain is definitely not hers, and when they tell her that they dropped off her medications - it was Fulbright who tasked them with this, but it still had to be cleared with the prison so that they know no one is trying to smuggle in something illegal like white powder (Apollo is way too straight-laced for an Anything Agency and it’s hilarious every time he smacks inconsequentially up against that wall) - she starts getting weird. Like she’s trying to distract them from the fact that she’s on medication at all, which isn’t really working. “Are you sick?” Athena asks. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s all just peachy!” Sasha says with false, feigned cheer; the fact that she couldn’t drum up a fish pun to use really seals it. (Wait, isn’t a drum a kind of fish? Why’s he know more about fish than flowers? And seals - god damn it.)

Athena stares doubtfully at her. Her shoulders slump. “I guess I could just tell you, huh,” Sasha says. “It’s for a heart condition but—”

“A heart condition?” Athena cries, her voice high and shrill.

“—but it’s not that serious—”

“Not that serious!” Athena’s second echo isn’t quite as much of a piercing shriek, but it’s even louder, an angry yell. “It’s your heart! Don’t tell me not to worry!”

Sasha heaves a sigh. “This is why I don’t tell people,” she says. “Because you freak, and then I’m trying to reassure you that you don’t need to treat me like I’m fragile, and I’ve got to explain that I’m not dying, so on, so on.”

“Oh,” Athena says. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah, it’s okay.” Sasha shrugs. “I’m sorry for snapping at you like that. It’s not you. It just gets a little tiring going through the same song-and-dance every time I tell someone. Much less fun than putting on the same song and dance with Orla every show!” Athena laughs and Sasha sticks her tongue out at her. “And I’d just had that argument with the captain the other night, too. The one that came up in the trial this morning. He knew about my condition, and I’d told him that I’d scheduled the surgery that would fix it, and he was worried and he told me that’d been thinking, and he was taking me out of the show. You saw the new flier, right? That I’m not in it?”

Phoenix nods.

“And it was supposed to debut yesterday. But I needed to go out there and perform yesterday. It was the anniversary of Azura’s death, and I had this crazy idea that I would go in front of the audience and tell them all that her death was just an accident, that Orla didn’t kill her, and now the captain wasn’t going to let me out there. So what I did” - her smile is somewhere between devious and sad - “was move the skull rock from the show stage. Put it back in the orca pool, figured the captain probably wouldn’t look there, and if he couldn’t find the major prop for the new show, we’d have to do the old one again, right? Marlon gave me a hand with it, while he was watching Orla at the stage pool.”

It was a bold plan, is about all Phoenix can say to that. “Azura is the orca trainer before you?” he asks.

“Yeah. Azura Summers. She taught me everything I know - she was a year older than me and we were like - anemone and clownfish. Remora and shark!” Phoenix doesn’t speak marine biology but Athena is nodding in solemn understanding. “She was a year older than me. She was the best - you ever meet someone and just, hit it off immediately, you just know that they’re someone who’s gonna be so important in your life?” Sasha stares down at her hands, fiddling with something. “And then she was gone.”

“That must’ve been awful,” Athena says. “Losing someone you loved, and then having everyone else say that your friend was the one that killed her, and no one believes you when you know otherwise.” She sniffs again. Poor girl and her sensitive hearing and hyperempathy.

Sasha nods. “Azura was like family, since my own family was never exactly supportive of my career path.” And not that Phoenix wants to downplay the severity of family disapproval, how much of a mess of hurt their influence can make, but he can’t exactly say he’s surprised to hear that a selkie’s family might think that her getting a career with an orca was bad news. “I can only imagine what they’re saying now after the captain’s death now too.”

He doesn’t want to pick at a reopening wound, but he never knows what strange little pieces of information will help, and so he asks, “Were you and Ms Summers - involved?”

“Huh?” Sasha blinks at him. A moment later the meaning clicks. “Oh! No, she was straight. She had a boyfriend that I never got to meet, but I’d help her send him videos of some of our orca-training sessions, because I mean, getting to see your cute girlfriend hanging with a cute orca, what could be better?”

“Toss a cute penguin in there too!” Athena suggests. “And then you’re golden!”

“Athena, I love the way you think!”

Phoenix clears his throat. Something more for his “legal etiquette Athena needs to learn” list: the detention center is not a place for hitting on people. Or maybe it’s more Sasha hitting on her. Or maybe they’re just like this.

Sasha’s face falls and her eyes turn downcast. “She had this matching charm with her boyfriend that I’d wanted to return to him after she died, but I didn’t know enough about him to find him, so I just hung onto it myself. Swore on it that I’d become the best orca trainer ever, for her.” She holds up the charm; it hangs from a cord with a bead strung on it, and looks like a little talisman or envelope one would find at a shrine. “Just like the captain always used her walkie-talkie after that. It had teeth marks from Orla in it, when she brought Azura back up from the water…”

Jack Shipley’s death must be like reliving a nightmare for her.

(But also, remembering the photo of the body, Phoenix did not see a walkie-talkie in the victim’s holder for it.)

“Wait, you didn’t even see her boyfriend at her funeral?” Athena asks.

Sasha shakes her head sadly. “She didn’t even have a funeral. We held our own memorial for her at the aquarium, but her family just sort of - showed up and took her away. I’d suggested that we get an autopsy or something done, to know how she actually died and that it wasn’t Orla, but we needed her family’s permission for that and they wouldn’t give it.”

Her face is turned toward them, and her eyes are, or should be, but she has the spaced-out look of someone not seeing what’s right in front of her. “They had this huge row with Dr Crab about something, too. I wonder if that’s part of what changed him. He and Azura were pretty close, and he started acting so different after she died - talking about how he was going to euthanize Orla, when before he said he’d never do such a thing. He thought she did it! He still always keeps poison on hand, ready to put her down at any moment! If she’d been found guilty today he would’ve just done it, right then!”

Phoenix has a very good idea of who they need to talk to again, next.

Back at the aquarium, they find Dr Crab in his laboratory, with Pearl, who is holding a furiously a squawking Rifle in her arms. “—correct, she does hate me. Since this little annoyance” - Dr Crab gestures at Sniper, who is for once free of the nest of his hair and waddling about the lab - “imprinted on me right out of the egg, she thinks I stole her baby. I didn’t want to steal her baby! But I guess she feels like the human parents of a changeling would.”

“That’s very sad for both of you,” Pearl says seriously. Rifle’s wings flap against her hands. “Your job involves inducing animals to vomit a lot, doesn’t it?”

The doctor snorts. “Today’s just been a hell of a day.” He squints down at the strange machine in his hand, something too boxy to be a regular tablet, with a small screen that flips back on a hinge. “Now let me see if I can find out when she ingested that foreign object.”

“Hi Mr Nick!” Pearls releases Rifle to the ground and the penguin makes an immediate beeline for Dr Crab’s shins. Absorbed in whatever he’s looking at on his machine, he doesn’t seem to notice. “Watch the penguin vomit! It’s for Sniper to eat!” She directs his attention to a pile of, yes, penguin vomit, that he doesn’t want to consider any further, but that Sniper is pecking at. “Mr Doctor told me that mama penguins partially digest and regurgitate fish for their babies to eat, because it’s easier for them to eat that mush!”

“You two seem to be getting along well,” Phoenix says. “You and Dr Crab, I mean.” They already knew that Pearl hit it off with Rifle, somehow.

“Rifle ate something she shouldn’t so I was helping him get that out of her.” Pearl gestures now at the corner of one of the lab tables, where an object, familiar though it’s partially covered in mushed-up fish, lies. Phoenix takes a few more steps forward. The mess doesn’t smell as fishy as he expected, or perhaps he’s lost all sense of smell, and yes, whatever it is that Rifle ate looks a whole hell of a lot like the little talisman Sasha had, that once belonged to Azura. And there was supposed to be a second one, that Azura’s boyfriend had, wasn’t there?

“Excuse me, Dr Crab?” Phoenix says. He grunts. “Can we take a look at that charm that Rifle swallowed?”

He grunts again. Phoenix decides that’s a “yes”. Investigations don’t get anywhere fast, otherwise. He gingerly picks up the cord on the charm and lets it dangle. Yeah, that’s definitely the same thing as—

“Hey! What are you doing with that?” Dr Crab snaps out of his reverie, with all the anger of a man who’s only just realized something is happening that he would’ve liked to have stopped sooner. “Put that down! That’s Azura’s!”

Phoenix drops it back on the table. Dr Crab, with no regard for penguin barf, snatches it away. “What the hell was it doing in Rifle’s stomach?” He drops it back into the pocket of his lab coat.

“Would this one happen to have belonged to Azura’s boyfriend?” Phoenix asks.

“I don’t make it a habit to discuss the affairs of the deceased! Especially not with you people!”

Bit of a fraught subject, there. Sasha did say that they were close. “Yesterday was the anniversary of her death, right?”

Dr Crab’s sigh sounds more like a growl. How close is Phoenix to being kicked out of the lab? “That’s right,” Crab says. “A year since the orca killed her.”

“You really think Orla did?” Athena asks. “I don’t believe it!”

“And I was there, Ms Lawyer. I saw Orla bite her. Maybe she didn’t mean to kill her, who’s to say - but what I do know is that Azura is dead.” The point he puts on his last several words closes down the topic even more firmly than his outraged yelling did. Satisfied that he’s shut Phoenix up - for the moment, because Phoenix refuses to be done until he’s run out of questions and he’s still got plenty - he returns to studying the data on his machine.

Who knows what might be important information for a trial? “So what’s that there?” Phoenix asks.

“Monitoring system. Collection of medical records for all the creatures. Between it and the cameras I can monitor them all constantly, twenty-four/seven. Company secret, that’s all I’ll tell you.”

“Really?” Phoenix asks. “Aren’t medical records just like - past exams and stuff? How can you get present, constant data from that?”

“Good point,” Crab says, after a slight pause. A sneered, thin smile stretches out across his face. “I can see there’s no fooling you.”

“Are you trying to fool me?” Phoenix asks.

The two Psyche-Locks that clang into place answer that question for him.

“You tell me,” Dr Crab says.

“Clearly,” Phoenix says.

“Excuse me, Mr Doctor?” Pearl asks. She scoops Rifle up into her arms to stop the penguin from resuming an attack on Dr Crab’s shins. “Mr Nick is a very good lawyer who always finds the truth but he needs to know everything he can to do so. Even if you don’t think your monitorings have anything to do with the case, it might be the information that Mr Nick needs to bluff himself into a better position to win!”

Dr Crab stares at Phoenix, his eyebrows raised. Phoenix wishes Pearl had found any other way to phrase that. “And it would be very kind and helpful of you to do,” Pearl adds.

The lab is far from silent - the hum and murmur of computers, Rifle’s struggles to break free and attack, Sniper eating, Athena cooing at Sniper. But it still feels quiet and empty as Pearl waits for any response and reaction at all from Dr Crab. He says nothing. She narrows her eyes, glancing from Rifle to the floor, like her next step in convincing him will be to sic a penguin on him.

Instead she simply readjusts her hold on Rifle, pulling the penguin up further in her arms, and says, much more seriously, no longer with any sort of pleading edge, “You asked for my help to examine Rifle and I gave it to you, remember? It was just a few minutes ago, right before Mr Nick came back, but I didn’t just offer that on my own.”

“Son of a bitch,” Dr Crab hisses. “That’s exactly what happened, isn’t it? I asked her if you could grab her for me and - damn, now I owe you, don’t I?”

He and Athena both glance over at Phoenix’s sharp intake of breath. Pearl doesn’t do this; she cares about human standards of fairness and tends to cancel debts made out of careless words of people who don’t know better and don’t know what she is. This situation, this case, she thinks is desperate. And Dr Crab saw what she is. It’s fair.

Pearl, unblinking, hollow-eyed, nods. “And I think you should answer Mr Nick’s questions about your monitoring,” she says.

Dr Crab shakes his head. “Well,” he says. “Shit. I got careless and that’s on me - to the victor go the spoils. So if I answer whatever questions our Mr Lawyer here has about my monitoring equipment here, then we’re settled, yes? No debts after that.”

“No debts after that,” Pearl agrees.

They both wait for Phoenix to say something; it’s a bit tricky, he thinks, to follow up a top-tier negotiation such as Pearl’s. “So. Twenty-four/seven monitoring. How’s that work?”

“It’s an ecological data organization system developed in Europe. Teleobservation Realtime Pertinent Data Organizer, TORPEDO for short.”

Phoenix decides not to try and suss out how well that acronym actually fits it, and not just because the whole name has already been ejected from his brain and he couldn’t repeat it back if he tried. Tele-pertinent real-time data what?

“It records information on its subjects constantly - heartbeat, vocalization, movements, temperature, and so on - through sensors placed on or near the subject. All that gets sent to me and my equipment here. Rifle has her sensor attached to her flipper ID tag.” Pearl takes Rifle’s wing in her hand and holds it out to examine the tag in question. “For Orla and the fish, it’s attached to the side of the tank. Now here we go, what’s it say about Rifle’s feeding?” Dr Crab glares down at the terminal in his hand. “Four am on the nineteenth is when she swallowed that. What a weird time. And - shit, Orla didn’t eat at all that night until the next afternoon.” He shakes his head. “What is going on here?”

“Maybe that’s why Rifle wouldn’t eat my fish but Orla would.” Athena sounds slightly cheered at the prospect that it wasn’t her causing personal offense to Rifle - Rifle just wasn’t hungry.

Phoenix clears his throat. “Why keep it a secret?” he asks. “This monitoring system - it’s clearly helpful and it’s not like we’re competitors trying to come in and steal your secrets.”

“Let me preface this by saying” - nothing good ever starts that way - “that this system has been tested rigorously and approved as safe and legal in many countries. Just not this one.”

Ah, that would do it. “You’re breaking the law?” Athena asks, startled.

Dr Crab grimaces but it ends as something more like a grin. “That’s why I keep this terminal with me at all times. Lucky, else the police might’ve been poking their noses into it yesterday. None of the rest of the crew knows - keeps them safe from the legal repercussions, but I had Jack’s permission for this. He felt, and I agreed, that giving the best care possible to our animals was more important than legality.”

“But - but you’re breaking the law! And that’s—” Athena sputters, searching for a solid objection. “That’s breaking the law!”

Yeah, she’s a smart kid but hopefully she’s not going into a trial without a co-counsel any time soon.

“And if breaking the law betters the lives of our animals? Are we supposed to just sit and wait for the law to change, when in the meantime we can have more information and act quicker to help them - to save their lives?”

“But…” Athena glances to Phoenix for backup she won’t find. Not that he’s not a hypocrite, but he’s not going to step into this debate just to be one. It’s disconcerting, again, every time he realizes that part of Athena’s admiration of him comes only from the fact that she doesn’t know him as well as Apollo does. She’s arguing against the logic that bore him his ace in the hole. And he can’t blame her; it took him a long, bad time to get there. “You’re just - twisting it around, now.” But she looks rattled, not sure how to square this away with the foundation of her career.

“Dr Crab,” Phoenix says. “I might need to use this information in court tomorrow. But that would obviously cause serious problems for you and the aquarium.” He isn’t asking permission, but this isn’t quite an apology, either. It’s just a statement of what it is, regrettable, inevitable.

“You’ve gotta do your job, Mr Lawyer, and I do mine.” Dr Crab shrugs, more resigned than bothered. This must be a prescient concern, for however long it’s been since they installed this system at the aquarium. Maybe it’s even a relief by now, to no longer be hiding. “I stand by my convictions and don’t have regrets, and I hope you won’t, either. I can’t blame you, or her, for that.” He nods at Pearl.

“I appreciate it.” Nice to not have a witness biting his head off, even if in this case it would be - not deserved, he’d like to think, but understandable.

“Hmph. Any last questions on that or can I—”

A loud peeping begins, like the chirps Sniper made but louder and constant. Dr Crab frowns and slips a phone out of his pocket. “Hello? Crab here.”

“That’s a ringtone?” Pearl asks. “That’s adorable!”

“I don’t think Maya’s gonna let you change mine,” Phoenix says to her.

“I didn’t think that Dr Crab liked the penguins that much,” Athena whispers. “But I guess he’s just a big softie, really!”

Were he actually listening to them Phoenix has no doubt the doctor would consider those fighting words. As it is, his fighting words are for whoever is on the other end of the line. “Son of a bitch, you people again! What more do you—”

He storms from the lab and slams the door behind him. Athena looks at Phoenix. He nods. She creeps closer to the door to listen, crouched with her ear by the crack where it closes, though Phoenix isn’t sure she needs to be that close to actually hear. “He’s saying that Orla was found not guilty,” she says, “and that should be enough - stop harassing him, he knows that - if it comes to it he - Mr Wright!” She tried to spring back up but smacks her head against the bottom of the doorknob on her way up, and wincing and grumbling to herself, stands tall again. “He said - that if he has to he’d euthanize Orla!”

“No!” Pearl gasps. Rifle wriggles around in her arms and Pearl sets her on the table. “She’s not guilty! In a court of law! She can’t be punished!”

Knowing that the whole orca pool can function as a faery ring makes Phoenix even more nervous that she’s going to commit larceny as soon as anything starts seeming tense. Grand Theft Orca. This is not something he ever thought he would have to consider.

The door swings violently inward, banging hard into Athena’s shoulder. She stumbles away, cursing under her breath again. Phoenix picks out pieces of several languages. (He really should ask her how to say “fuck you” in German. It would be funny.)

“Where’s my goddamn calendar?” Dr Crab storms back in, sweeping a dozen takeout containers from the desk in front of the largest screen into the trash can strategically positioned right next to it. A few fliers for the orca show drift to the floor. “Son of a bitch, where did I leave it this time?”

“Calendar?” Athena perks up. “It wouldn’t happen to be one of those cute penguin ones, is it? Mr Rimes found one in the nap room and—”

Dr Crab snatches it away from her and scans the mess of his desktop for a pen and scribbles something on it. “Yes, that’s mine. It was a gift, all right?” He sighs. “From Azura. She designed the calendars for this year and this was the prototype.”

“Oh.” Athena’s smile vanishes. And then, seeming to take a cue from Phoenix’s line of questioning of Sasha back at the detention center, she asks, “Did you and Ms Summers happen to be, erm, romantically involved?”

“Of course not!” He bristles at the suggestion, almost weirdly defensive, so while he sees no Psyche-Locks, Phoenix still won’t take it as the end-all-be-all. Maybe he’s defensive about the calendar for what’s written on it, that meeting with the victim at seven am. Could he, at that time, have committed murder? “Were I even so inclined to partake of ‘romantic feelings’” - he doesn’t make them with his hands but Phoenix can hear the air quotes - “I certainly would not involve myself with—” He stops. He glares at Athena and Phoenix in turn. “What business of yours is it, anyway?”

“I just heard a lot of sadness in your voice when you mentioned her, and the calendar,” Athena says. “And I wondered—”

“She was a good friend and now she’s dead, of course I’m sad!” Though he’s probably not sad now, just mad at them and their prying questions. “How can you possibly think that’s related to your defense of Sasha, or do you like using the excuse of being lawyers to pry into people’s personal lives?”

Seems like it’s time to redirect; this thread when pulled on isn’t going anywhere good. “Your phone call just now - what was that about?”

“Heard all that, did you now?” Dr Crab sighs. Phoenix skips the part where he clarifies that Athena did, because she has better hearing than the human and fae also in the room. “That’s the Center for Dangerous Animal Control, insisting that if Orla ever attacks anyone again, we’d better not bother with this rigamarole and just put her down immediately.”

“But that’s not fair!” Athena has her fists raised, ready to fight the shadowy specter of this vague organization. “Did you agree to that?”

Dr Crab is quiet for a very long time. “Sometimes,” he says finally, “unfortunately, things happen. As a veterinarian, I am prepared to do whatever needs to be done.”

“Sasha says you keep poison on hand to always be prepared to put Orla down!” Athena levels the accusation with fury that Sasha would be proud of.

Dr Crab reaches into one of the pockets of his lab coat and pulls out a tiny plastic bag that contains within it a red and yellow capsule.

One that looks exactly like that they found mixed in with the contents of Orla’s stomach.

Phoenix is very, very glad they didn’t show it to him.

“That’s awful!” Athena says. “How dare you!” She’s livid enough that Phoenix isn’t sure she realizes this pill is like the other one, and while that’s something they’re going to have to work on - making sure she’s clear-minded enough to make all the connections that matter, for now she’ll have him or Apollo with her, and Phoenix is just glad she won’t blurt it out to Dr Crab. He wants to keep this one close to his chest until he sees the best opening to play it.

“Sasha thought the same thing.” Dr Crab drops the pill back in his pocket. “When security around Orla was tightened last year, she insisted that I not be given a key card to access the orca pool room. Thinking, I imagine, that the chances of Orla having a medical emergency when either she nor Jack were here to let me in were lower than the chances of me doing something to her.” He huffs derisively, Athena still seething.

“Dr Crab, I have a last question for you,” Phoenix says. “This - Center for Dangerous Animal Control.” Or however the words were ordered. “Ms DePlume told me something interesting earlier today.” That the Center had made this same demand a year ago, and for some reason relented, but the aquarium has been making large monthly payouts to someone or somewhere ever since. Phoenix repeats this fact to Dr Crab’s expressionless face, and adds, “It’s clear that there’s something going on behind the scenes here, and I suspect that it has something to do with this murder.”

“Do you.” He’s good at responding by saying nothing, but any words at all are sometimes enough to trip the trap, let Phoenix know exactly how much a witness is hiding.

Five Psyche-Locks this time, the appearance punctuated a moment later with loud footsteps and a louder yell. “Dr Herman Crab! Sorry to interrupt, but Prosecutor Blackquill wants to speak with you!”

“Son of a—” Dr Crab punctuates his speech by smacking his calendar down hard on the the table. “What the hell else could you possibly have to ask me?”

“We were hoping to have Mr Rimes testify at tomorrow’s trial, but we’ve been having some trouble getting him to cooperate. As such, Prosecutor Blackquill would like to call you instead!”

“Hmph.” Crab takes a moment in which he clearly is sizing up and assessing Fulbright, deciding whether he can get out of this and if he wants to tangle with Blackquill in that way. Surprising that he didn’t manage to coerce (or threaten) Rimes into talking and has to go for a backup. “Fine. But I’m not giving my opinion on what happened. I’ll tell you what I know, but I’m not taking sides.” He turns to Phoenix. “Until tomorrow, Mr Lawyer.”

Neither Trucy nor Apollo notices when the office door opens. Trucy has her laptop in her lap and is furiously scrolling, glancing between the screen and the notebook Apollo is still trying to write it. It’s a silent and periodic scuffle between the two of them as Trucy grabs it and yanks it toward her to check something, and Apollo pulls it back to continue writing. Phoenix shudders to think how unreadable his handwriting is from this. “Commonly for a number of heart conditions,” Trucy mutters. “Is this relevant, Apollo?”

“Of course it is!” He reaches across her keyboard and turns her screen toward himself. “Go back to the book - the picture. If she had a heart condition and a physically intensive job—” He taps his pen against the screen. “There’s no visible injury, look, wouldn’t you think a killer whale could cause some damage—”

“Oh! You think that—”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, guys,” Phoenix says. “What are we working on?”

They shriek in tandem, Apollo flinging the pen and Trucy knocking the notebook to the floor and almost dropping her laptop. Athena claps her hands over her ears, belatedly, and braces herself against the doorframe. “Yes, we’re back now,” Phoenix adds. “What’ve you got?”

“First: the capsule!” Apollo moves his hand like he means to gesture with the pen to the capsule in a bag on the coffee table, except the pen is no longer in his hand, so he’s just sort of waving, and his voice still as enthusiastically loud as ever. “It’s a sleeping drug! That’s the brand name on it, ‘3 Zs’. The Shipshape Aquarium vet recently bought a bunch of it from Hickfield Clinic - it’s meant for people, but apparently would work on other mammals.”

“A sleeping drug?” Phoenix repeats.

Apollo nods.

That had been Phoenix’s first thought, when he first saw that capsule, but Dr Crab called it poison - sure, enough of it could certainly kill, but he’s a veterinarian. He’d be legally able to get some kind of actual euthanization drug instead of trying to overdose an orca on sleeping pills - if that was actually what he intended with it, and not something else. Why pretend it’s poison?

“And the other thing - Shipshape Aquarium had the woman who died last year, Azura Summers, right?” He doesn’t wait for Phoenix to confirm he knows and barrels on, “She was getting medication prescribed by Hickfield Clinic to help her manage a heart condition.”

“I found an illegal download of that writer lady’s book!” Trucy pipes up. Bless that girl.

“A heart condition?” Phoenix can’t do much but echo right now, but his mind is racing. What was Apollo saying when they walked in? Jack Shipley removed Sasha from the show for fear that she would come to harm because of her condition - theoretically, that could’ve already happened. “Do you know what the medication she was on was called?”

“Uh…” Apollo glances down at his notebook. “I wrote it down? It’s like—”

Phoenix takes the notebook from him. The writing is exactly as messy as he imagined, jagged pen lines trailing off across half the page when Trucy grabbed it. “That’s the same medication that Sasha is taking,” he says to Athena.

“So what’s that mean?” she asks.

“I have no idea.” That’s a hell of a coincidence, but he doesn’t really see how it could be anything but an unfortunate coincidence, even as a man whose policy is to not believe in coincidences. Orla isn’t on trial now, and wasn’t on trial for Azura’s death, either, yesterday. But maybe this information could offer some reassurance, and closure, to Sasha and the rest of the aquarium crew. “But that capsule, now that’s something. Nice work, Apollo.”

Apollo gives Phoenix a wide-eyed, startled look. Has Phoenix really complimented him so rarely?

“Where’s Pearly?” Trucy asks. Her face falls. “Did she go back home already?”

“She’s staying at the aquarium to help out with Orla, with so many of the staff dragged out to testify and everything.” There she goes again, slotting herself perfectly, naturally, in somewhere, like she’s meant to be there, so that no one even questions letting a strange little faery girl in so far behind the scenes.

The only thing to put him slightly at ease is that she said she would be ready to call in, from the aquarium, through video phone during the trial tomorrow, which holds the implication that she’s not going to spirit Orla off to the Twilight Realm in the middle of the night to keep her safe.

Though she didn’t promise for sure that she wouldn’t, so he should probably call her and extract that promise from her, before he ends up defending in a case of orca larceny.

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

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cruddyborderlandstheories · 5 years

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all the theories i never got to elaborate on

may you rest in peace you beautiful sons of bitches

minor spoilers regarding the cloth map.

this is it!! goodbye until I beat the game!

finish mask of mayhem!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (lol i never did)

That one about the Meta Guardian (Sentinel) being called the ‘meta’ guardian in the game files

Make a post on people who could get artificial siren powers from Tannis/Athenas, including, but not limited to: Maya/Lilith getting their powers back, Moze, Ellie, Moxxi, Lorelei, Ava unlocking her powers, Tannis herself, etc. Also, if the ‘universe-destroying power’ is creating more than 6 sirens, that’d be awesome. I do wish there was a scene where the entire party gets a new power/action skill for the final battle.

analyze all the new merch + maliwan joining the cult

all the cool broken shit you can do in bl2 like letting zer0′s hologram ragdoll and leaving claptrap to dance in captain flynt’s boss fight area without activating the fight (and breaking the game!)

also punk girl masterpost because... lord knows she’s a conundrum

The preview of the art book, notably the page describing the twins as being opposite color schemes (cause THAT’S not suspicious or foreshadowing in any way, im sure) i mean COME ON

think about how the twins got their siren powers bc apparently they were born into a ‘cage’… a vault... or a testing facility... two options here. maybe both tbh lol. compare the likelihood of hyperion testing (e-tech/slag experimentation/siren knowledge/old color scheme) vs atlas (color scheme matches more with white, typhon deleon connection, secret gortys project to open the vault of the traveller could have sister projects). also if typhon is their dad... that’s hilarious lol

and i know it’s been confirmed that the twins were conjoined and that’s probably how they got their shared powers/tattoos, but lemme ask something:

Troy’s tattoos appeared after birth. that’s been pointed out not only by me, but a bunch of other people in the fandom as well.

Tyreen says that “when we were born, our father had to cut him off me. now i’m the only thing keeping him alive”.

so what’s the truth?

Tyreen says they were separated at birth. Troy’s tattoos would argue a completely different point: if Ty was a Siren at birth, you’d think her tattoos would have spread to Troy while they were conjoined. but clearly that’s not the case- since Troy has a full sleeve of normal tattoos that were overwritten by his red ones (of course we don’t know the details of siren tattoos interacting with normal tattoos. maybe they just don’t get inked because of the glowy/power/ethereal aspect of them. but there is the fact many of the cultists are mimicking troy’s tattoos on his arm, which makes me think they had a reference at one point)

now, i know that cut content is non-canon until confirmed by the devs, but given that we know the entire commander lilith dlc was written with borderlands 3′s plot in mind, i don’t think it’s coincidence we found that Angel’s powers/tattoos didn’t manifest until she was five.

maybe tyreen made troy and herself get these powers so she could heal him easier thru her knowledge of the vaults

or like as an experiment they (whomever they actually are- atlas, hyperion, undisclosed evil science company) forced siren powers to manifest in tyreen to see if she could keep her brother alive/to see what would happen and it ended up being she had to keep him alive because they were killing him

troy did a no no and touched a vault thing and got some powers and blew his arm off and tyreen now has to take care of him with her new siren powers like a disgruntled older sister

actually now that i think about it you’d think troy is the one in charge here because tyreen has to take care of him lol

plot twist troy becomes the leader and ty fucking hates it

either way i still would not be surprised if she kills him because... i mean. he’s the brains of the operation, yes, but once she wins, she doesn’t really need him anymore.

double plot twist she goes for the kill and he stabs her with his kickass sword and she’s all like :O

and the VHs are in the background like *sips juice from juice box awkwardly*

maybe when tyreen got her powers, troy got his even though they were seperated (or the other way around), since they had been conjoined at some point (even if they had been separated at the time).

“im the only thing keeping him alive” is making me do a thonk.

it does make me curious to know if he’s a new breed of Siren, like a different eridian timeline version. if the Eridians locked away all the Eridium and junk in the Destroyer’s vault, then maybe they needed a different power source for these kinds of Sirens (either before or after Eridium).

something like… idk… lifeforce..? being bottled into energy shots that can be shared amongst people, so it’s not entirely like siren powers (troy powering up enemies) which are unique to sirens. (i get the feeling the expanding health bar mechanic isn’t unique to ratches) (s- seraphs??)

And maybe Tyreen is dying similarly to Troy (be it from their powers being split up, complications from birth/surgery, weird experiments when they were kids), but she’s getting all her energy from the eridium in the background and thus doesn’t really feel it

meanwhile, Troy has to live off the red energy and that’s only obtained through tyreen atm. maybe the crystals are like an emergency supply, too. no- he won’t use it right during the intro cutscene, because Tyreen is Right There and she JUST absorbed someone’s life force. she can give it to him right away. no need to waste the ones around his neck. also to power up other people

Did the twins use the Eridian temple stargate system™ to get to Promethea faster than Sanctuary-III?

Cause i can’t imagine Lily would be so surprised the twins beat us there if her teleportation powers allowed for bigg space travel… unless they have their own ship (and if they do, is it that blue and yellow one with the red symbols/writing?), but then, we probably would have seen it in orbit around the planet like we did the CoV satellite on pandora. unless the asteroid belt made them force land? but then wouldn’t sanc-iii have to land, too? is that an old moon of Promethea’s, by the way? it looks like someone just took that giant space gun and blew up Promethea’s moon. i feel bad for it :(

anyway

i would not be too surprised if the temples (we’ve seen one on Pandora, one i am guessing on Eden-6, and i am guessing one on Athenas- given the map i would guess the symbol indicates a temple so we can say Promethea, too) were a teleportation network so the twins could get from planet to planet quicker than we can. kinda explaining how they seem to be always 1 step ahead. i mean that and also they have typhon’s notes im assuming so of course they’re going to be one step ahead at all times.

#borderlands #bl3 #borderlands 3 #borderlands spoilers #spoilers #this is it folks #goodbye

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sulevinblade · 6 years

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DA Question

Tagged by: nobody, I just wanted to play

Tagging: @gremlinquisitor because I haven’t seen you do it yet

01) Favorite game of the series?

Inquisition, hands down.

02) How did you discover Dragon Age?

Fun story, I first played Origins somewhere between seven and nine years and never got my Brosca out of Orzammar. It was on PC and I just couldn’t get used to the controls. Then I made a friend who is a hardcore Bioware fan. Xe got me invested in Mass Effect first and I marathoned all three games (almost, I haven’t actually finished me3) then got stubborn and refused to play Dragon Age, but xe sent me Origins and I had no reason not to at that point. I still held out till this past summer, but once I started I never looked back.

03) How many times you’ve played the games?

I’m on my second Origins playthough, DA2 only once so far, and uhhhh technically I’ve only finished DAI once but I have three other playthroughs I intend to see through to the end.

04) Favorite race to play as?

I love dwarves, oh my god. There was never a question that my first Warden would be a dwarf, and I only waited as long as I did for a dwarf in Inquisition because I don’t like the Cadash origin. Bring back my Orzammar dwarves!

05) Favorite class?

Warrior, always. I have a couple of mages and enjoy them, but I am a warrior player at heart always, my first protag will always be a warrior, and I tend to love warrior characters too.

06) Do you play through the games differently or do you make the same decisions each time?

So far in Origins, my choices have been largely the same, though I think I’ll try to save Conner this time. I have a Hawke right now who I’m trying to play as red but it’s SO HARD, I just like being nice to people and making friends! So far many of my Inquisition choices have been the same, except for romances, but Varevas is going to drink from the Well where Ghilanel let Morrigan do it, Astoria’s going to conscript the templars where both of them recruited the mages, Varevas will disband the Inquisition while Ghilanel kept it going, there are a lot of changes coming when I get time to play through stuff.

07) Go-to adventuring group?

Origins is always Alistair, Zevran, and Wynne, no matter how hard I try to make myself mix it up. I was warned about DA2 so I changed it up for maximum friendship but if I had my way, it would’ve been Jonah, Aveline, Anders, and Fenris or Varric. Three guards and a healer meant leaving a lot of chests unopened so I tried to bring Varric along when I could. Ghilanel’s go to was Solas, Dorian, and Varric, and so far Varevas’ has been Dorian, Sera, and either Bull or Blackwall.

08) Which of your characters did you put the most thought into?

Ghilanel has the most time and creativity invested in her at this point. I didn’t put much thought into any of them going in beyond appearance and who I wanted to romance (though Ghilanel was originally going to be a Cullen or Blackwall romance, fucking egg ruins everything) but Ghilanel grew and grew as I played and thought about her. Leohta, Jonah, and Varevas all have a lot to offer, but in terms of being developed and able to support a story of their own, it’s definitely Ghil.

09) Favorite romance?

Dorian, oh man. I just swoon, he’s perfect.

10) Have you read any of the comics/books?

I’ve read almost all of the comics (I’m halfway through Knight Errant) and I have many of the books but haven’t actually started any of them yet.

11) If you read them, which was your favorite book?

I enjoyed Magekiller a LOT!

12) Favorite DLCs?

Descent. The Wellspring is possibly the most beautiful environment in any of the games, I almost cried when my party got there, and everything leading up to that was also visually stunning as well as exactly the kind of lore I live for. It also features my beautiful wife Valta and her perfect husband Renn which is just a bonus. I will say, though, Jaws of Hakkon could easily surpass it if they’d like, put out a novelization of Ameridan’s Inquisition. Trespasser was incredible too but sadly I was spoiled and that took a lot of the fun out of the end of it.

13) Things that annoy you.

Little things like not being able to swim and not hearing banter when you’re on a mount. Bigger things like the fact that in order to make an informed decision about Orlais (as a player) you have to have read an entire other novel because the game doesn’t give you the information you need, even if it’s also not necessarily things your character would know. All the sort of stock things, like Cassandra not being bi (among other characters but she’s the one that makes me the most angry), Bioware whitewashing their own characters, no dwarf romances. Not even touching on fandom stuff.

14) Orlais or Ferelden?

Ferelden always.

15) Templars or mages?

Templars, to be contrary (by which I mean I have Opinions about this and while in general I side with mages in all things, I still say Templars).

16) If you have multiple characters, are they in different/parallel universes or in the same one?

I only really have one complete world state right now, with Leohta romancing Alistair and putting Anora alone on the throne, and Jonah romancing Anders and running away with him at the end of the game, but within that Ghilanel is the Inquisitor with Varevas as her clan’s First who survives the Conclave with her; Astoria as a rebel mage who joins up before even considering going to Redcliffe because her nephew is the Inquisitor; and Leohta attending the Conclave undercover as a Carta member and trying to maintain that cover after Haven.

17) What did you name your pets? (mabari, summoned animals, mounts, etc)

Leohta and Jonah both named their mabaris Leon, and Buian named hers Taz.

18) Have you installed any mods?

PS player, no mods here

19) Did your Warden want to become a Grey Warden?

It beat the alternative. Die in the Deep Roads now, or die in the Deep Roads later. Leohta chose later.

20) Hawke’s personality?

Blue as the summer sky over Lothering, Jonah is a pure child.

21) Did you make matching armor for your companions in Inquisition?

Only for their love interests; Ghilanel and Solas were all green and gold until the breakup, then she dyed her armour deep red. Varevas and Dorian are white and red. Leohta’s all warden armour, just like Alistair. Astoria would match Bull if Bull wore more clothing...

22) If your character(s) could go back in time to change one thing, what would they change?

Leohta would’ve been more careful with Zevran’s heart to avoid having to dump him right before the final battle.

Jonah would’ve investigated the alleged serial killings sooner, to possibly save his mother.

Ghilanel would’ve worked harder to make something of herself before the Inquisition knowing she’d need it later.

Varevas would’ve... I dunno. Probably flirted harder with Cullen, he’s hilarious when he’s all out of sorts over it.

23) Do you have any headcanons about your character(s) that go against canon?

I’m sure I do but I can’t think of any just now, which is odd.

24) Who did you leave in the Fade?

JONAH BABY I’M SORRY I DIDN’T KNOW so from now on it’s gonna be Stroud

25) Favorite mount?

Ghilanel liked the Royal Sixteen and Varevas loves his Dalish All-bred but in general I don’t bother with them, I like the banter more than getting around faster.

#meme #gremlinquisitor

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