#how to create a metaverse
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maespri · 10 months ago
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okay but from a criminological standpoint, creating and enforcing laws involving the metaverse would be so interesting. they wanted to charge akira with a laundry list of crimes, albeit likely just for intimidation within the interrogation room, but on a real note- where is there a law being broken? there’s no jurisdiction with a palace, and even if there were, you cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any crimes were committed within that palace unless you witnessed it for yourself or somehow found evidence. and even then, does it count as a broken law if it doesn’t cause any harm to the owner of the palace? it’s not like every time you break an item inside a palace, the owner feels pain. i could see arguments about how changing somebody’s heart is a violation of their free will but like, good luck arguing that to a judge, seriously. honestly if akechi didn’t kill akira i would’ve loved to see how that argument would go down in a court of law. Your honor my client is sorry for going into this guys mind but he didn’t do anythinf I promiseeee. I pinky swear. can he go back to school now
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intelisync · 1 year ago
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Discovering Crypto Airdrops: A Step-by-Step Guide
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Envision stumbling upon a hidden gem that adds significant value to your collection. In the world of cryptocurrencies, this is akin to participating in a crypto airdrop, where you can receive free tokens and potentially enhance your digital asset portfolio.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago
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Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again)
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I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.
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Mark Zuckerberg has told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he's spending on AI: he's going to use it to make advertisements that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything. In other words, Meta will make an AI mind-control ray and rent it out to grateful advertisers.
Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a much greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth. This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta stops growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company.
So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow. After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock.
This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism – it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-shirt-latin-what-does-it-say-explained-words-2024-9
If Zuck is a boy genius, then Zuck's pronouncements take on the character of prophesy. When Zuck announced the "pivot to video," investors poured tens of billions into Facebook stock and into video-first online news production, despite the fact that Zuck was obviously lying:
https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html
The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."
Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
Now, Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-ai-revolution-is-an-advertising-revolution-morning-brief-100001467.html
This narrative is especially galling because it's literally the same story Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities
This is a facially absurd proposition. After all, everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control – Rasputin, Mesmer, MK-ULTRA, neurolinguistic programming grifters and pathetic "pick up artists" – was a liar. Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both.
But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype
The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod techniques and mass surveillance sold a hell of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has always been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost
Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers desperately wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department store magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted – I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting half of his advertising spending!
I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job – it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete
The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to an advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors.
AI keeps passing the worst kinds of Turing tests – for example, it's great at helping people who are prone to life-destroying hallucinations that they are talking to God:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/
Zuck kept up his growth story with this mind control narrative for more than a decade, got caught committing a string of spectacular frauds, and then lured investors back into his stock offerings by telling the same story. This isn't just an indictment of Zuck, it's a stinging rebuke to the whole idea that markets are a kind of infallible computer for assessing and operationalizing information. The market's "thought process" demonstrably lacks the object permanence that most babies acquire by the time they are a year old. You can tell when your child has acquired object permanence by the fact that they cease to enjoy "peek-a-boo" (object permanence means they understand where you have gone when your face is hidden).
In claiming that AI will give him an infinite growth mind-control ray, Mark Zuckerberg is challenging the market to a game of peek-a-boo – and he's winning.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts
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Image:
Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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p5-apotelesma · 5 months ago
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thinking. about rens first two months in tokyo and how hes basically internally screaming and also hiding his clenched fists in his pockets all the time HES SO PISSED OFF and hes SO good at repressing that shit as a civilian but my god... it comes out in the metaverse v heavily at the start
ren really went into their year on probation completely closed off. wanting to keep his head down. he didnt want to know anyone and didnt want anyone to know him. keep out of trouble. stay safe. trying to avoid pain from all directions. emotional or physical. real or imaginary. he would create a personality so cold and so distant. whatever he needed to do to.
and then the universe drops one (1) ryuji in front of them and that whole plan fell apart.
ryuji saw ren was alone and decided to walk to school with him. that one show of kindness in a world that had since become so unjust and so bleak -- ryujis concern for them, a complete stranger, when under attack in the palace. and ren decided he would die for him.
ryuji is the real heart of the phantom thieves and thats why hes ren's second. he was the one who gave ren hope when he came to tokyo all alone. thrown to the wayside by their parents and treated like garbage by everyone around them. ryuji was the catalyst for ren believing in people again. he and ann helped ren learn to trust again.
his relationship with the two of them is different than any of his with the other pt. because they're the OGS and they had to face the prospect that they could ultimately be collaborators in killing a man if shit goes south. the amount of trust you would have for each other in this situation is insane.
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p5x-theories · 2 months ago
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English translation notes from the official website:
The website calls him "Lufel". Who knows anymore?
It also calls his Persona "Robroy", which is a little weird? But also Morgana's Persona is referred to as "Zoro", instead of "Zorro", so maybe the site's just a little wonky in general?
Unsurprisingly, they're going with Shun Kano as his last name
Shun and Riko's codenames are being kept as Soy and Wind (I know some people were wondering about that)
Other notes from the video broadcast:
Apparently the English release announcement took so long because they translated the game from Chinese to Japanese, then translated that Japanese into English for the global version! They joke that if they hadn't had a simultaneous release in Japanese and English, the western fans would've rioted, haha
(They apologize a lot for how long it took)
Based on the subtitles, it looks like they may have translated Kiuchi's phantom name as the "Subway Slammer"?
Pre-registration for the Japanese and English versions of P5X is open! Like with the other regions, it looks like there are various rewards you get for pre-registering
Cattle is also referred to as "Lufel" with "Robroy" here. Maybe Lefaye was the outdated English name?
Apparently they're translating is as "Leo" Kamiyama, not Reo! I think that's a slightly odd choice, but, well, I guess they're calling the shots here
It's outright stated that Phantom Idols' Metaverse outfits are based on "the protagonist's idea of how their Phantom Thief outfit would look", though of course Merope is still the one that creates them in the end
There will be an official English Discord server launched, though as of the video it wasn't up yet
There will be a P5X booth at Anime Expo 2025!
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anteakwa · 4 months ago
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okay my persona 5 hot take is that every time you replay the madarame arc you realize just a little bit more that the phantom thieves were kind of atrocious friends. exclusively in this part of the game
there is a LOT to criticize about the madarame arc but one thing i rarely ever see brought up is that the phantom thieves were actually just really awful to yusuke before he awakened to his persona. there were so many better ways they could've gone about navigating the situation and they chose the way that completely disregarded yusuke's feelings AND put him in obscene amounts of danger.
the constant question brought up in the madarame arc is "is it right to save a victim who doesn't want to be saved?". in this case, yusuke doesn't want madarame's abuses to be exposed, because that's the man who took him in when he had nothing, raised him, and (at least from yusuke's perspective up until this point) created the painting that drove yusuke to pursue art.
the problem is that yusuke's input is never valued by them until he begins to agree with them. they never stop for a moment to take into consideration why yusuke is so adamantly refusing their help, and then the game wants you to believe that he's the one acting stubborn and irrational for getting angry with them when they don't stop prying into him after he asks them multiple times to stop.
and then we get to the closet scene...oh boy.
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sure on your first time around these lines might just sound embarrassed or flustered but you see them in a very different light once you already know yusuke. he isn't embarrassed, he's scared. he's terrified that the man who is heavily implied to be physically abusive to him found him breaking a very strict rule he set. and no matter how many times he tells ann that this isn't a good idea, he's forced into this situation with her. this is an EXTREMELY dangerous position to put someone who you KNOW is being abused in.
but what really gets me?
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they were 100% ready to just leave him there. yusuke was forced into an extremely unsafe situation with the man they know is abusing him, ignored every single time he asked them to stop, and then they just...run away. not even concerned about what might happen to him if he's left alone with madarame after this. the only reason he's able to get out is because he chases after ann and morgana and happens to be close enough when they return to the metaverse.
and it's like, okay, they're teenagers. they're not going to know how to handle the situation perfectly. that's okay.
but what completely ruins that defense is the fact that not only do they never apologize to him for ANY of this, but HE'S THE ONE WHO APOLOGIZES TO THEM.
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listen i love the phantom thieves. i very strongly believe that this is an issue with the writing of the game and not them being intentionally bad people by any means. but my god it is SUCH a horrible miss when you go back through this arc and imagine it all from yusuke's perspective.
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gnosticjade · 10 months ago
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Persona 5's Beneath the Mask and how it relates back to Joker as a character:
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"Where have you been? Been searching all along" relates back to how Ren's identity is unclear and something he lost once his freedom was stolen. It's something he feels lost about and has a desire to reclaim it but is unsure where to begin. "Came facing twilight on and on, without a clue, without a sign, without grasping at the real question to be asked. Where have you been? Been searching all along" This further displays the lack of identity Ren has but also a desire to reclaim his freedom if he was given the chance. Ren is unsure of himself and how he fits into society. "I'm a shape-shifter at Poe's masquerade Hiding both face and mind All free for you to draw I'm a shape-shifter, what else should I be?"
Ren feels his identity is formed by how others perceive him. whether his parents view him as a nuisance and a mistake, or the 'hero' Akechi views him as in comparison to what he himself desired. Ren feels he doesn't have a say in who he himself should be but initially doesn't have a desire to go against that. He hid himself both in the real world through his calm, reserved demeanor and then in the metaverse as a 'suave, cool, hero'; his identity is fluid and shaped by others. "Please don't take off my mask Revealing dark Moments of calm Nothing left to be found" Ren is scared of letting people in and seeing his true self underneath the many Persona's he puts on. Ren feels he doesn't have a proper identity underneath the many Mask's he created and it scares him that others will see his lack of identity. "A mirror right in front of me That's where I find An empty glass Reflecting the sad truth It's telling words not to be told I need the mask" Ren has become emotionally dependent on his masks to function in society. Without them he feels too vulnerable and is scared he'll be taken advantage of again by others around him. "I'm a shape-shifter at Poe's masquerade Hiding both face and mind, all free for you to draw I'm a shape-shifter chained down to my core Please don't take off my mask, my place to hide" Represents Ren being too scared to change his habits, regardless of the people he ends up meeting who manage to change and develop alongside him. "I can't tell you how to see me. Just a cage of bones there's nothing inside, will it unleash me? Burning down the walls is there a way for me to break?" Ren describing his feelings of worthlessness and that he could emotionally break once someone (Akechi) opens up his inner true self. "I'm a shape-shifter at Poe's masquerade Hiding both face and mind, all free for you to draw I'm a shape-shifter, have no face to show Please don't take off my mask, my disguise" Ren being confident in his identity of that of someone who changes his personality and self depending on the people he meets and not breaking from his habits due to the way he feels society needs to be reformed before has the chance to be able to do that.
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emotional-engine · 2 years ago
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In case you missed - GREAT Neopets News!
I didn't see anybody talking about the news here, so I thought that I could share a summary.
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The Neopets Team announced today that they're under new management. They're no longer affiliated with Jumpstart (which announced their closure back in June) or their parent company NetDragon.
In their blog post in the official Neopets Medium page, they confirm that they are now an independent company:
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(Dominc Law, worked for NetDragon and was an old school Neopets player. He put together a team to work on saving the brand.)
Also in that blog post the team talks about how they are well aware of the problems the site has been through in the last decade, they acknowledge the lack of resources which resulted in the Neopets website being left broken.
Going ahead, they are going to focus on community requests, such as speeding up the process of Flash Games conversion, clearing up the page conversion backlog, bug fixes, mobile compatibility issues and improving customer support.
Most importantly, in my opinion, they clear up that they WILL NOT go forward with any Metaverse bullshit, and will instead work on creating a game that feels like Neopets:
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At this point, they have secured $4M in funding from various (unnamed) investors with additional funding from the management buyout. For the first time in forever, it looks like TNT has the resources they need to move the brand forward. In the blog post, they mention they have already hired developers and artists to work on the fixes the site needs.
From what it looks like, the game will be a mobile social life-simulation, parallel to the current website. We don’t have to worry that neopets.com will be replaced by a mobile app.
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As of now, they have announced:
A brand new plot, scheduled for early 2024
A 2 million(!) NeoCash giveaway
More transparency with monthly updates from the team, scheduled AMAs
Neopets will be under the control of a new, unified entity: World of Neopia, Inc - the website will remain the same (neopets.com)
A Brand Ambassador Program
No longer going forward with NFT/Metaverse stuff
At the end, they published a FAQ with some answers that I found to be good and very interesting:
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You can read the entire blog post here.
Or watch the YouTube announcement (which is way shorter):
youtube
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marauders1971-1978 · 4 months ago
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Newt/Remus and how it slots into 1971-1978 'canon' and my other canon compliant fics (trying to create a metaverse here lol)
1946 (Autumn) Theseus is born
1953 (February) Newt is born
1957 (September) Theseus starts Hogwarts
1960 (March) Remus is born
1963 (June) Theseus finishes Hogwarts (September) Newt starts Hogwarts (Fic; Little Badger)
1964 (January) Theseus starts Auror training (Spring) Remus is bitten (Fic; Puncture Repair)
1967 (Autumn) Theseus becomes Jr Auror at DMLE
1968 (May) Newt is expelled in his 5th year (June) Dumbledore arranges Newt's apprenticeship at DMC/DDC (July) Newt and Remus meet for the first time (Fic; All Month Long)
1969 (June) Newt sits his N.E.W.T.s (September) Newt joins DDC Beast Division
1971 (September) Remus starts Hogwarts (Fic; 1971-1972)
1972 (September) Remus starts Second Year (Fic; 1972-1973)
1975 (Autumn) James, Sirius and Peter become animagi
1976 (May) The Prank (June) SWM
1978 (June) Remus finishes Hogwarts and joins the Order
1979 (Autumn) Remus goes undercover in a werewolf colony (Fic; Hunter's Moon)
1980 (Summer) Dudley and Harry are born (Fic; Same as it Ever Was Chapt 1)
1981 (October) James and Lily die (Fic; Same as it Ever Was Chapt 2 & 3)
1983 (Spring) Remus and Newt meet again (Fic; Facsimile of Kin & As Observed by Newt Scamander) (Summer) Remus and Newt go to Snowdonia (Fic; Our Paths Might Cross)
1985 (Summer) Dudley's 5th birthday (Fic; Same as it Ever Was Chapt 3 & 4)
1991 (Autumn) Harry starts Hogwarts
1993 (Summer) Sirius breaks out of Azkaban
1998 (Spring/Summer) Battle of Hogwarts
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autisticsupervillain · 8 months ago
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FTF: How Powerful Is?
A prolonged breakdown on a character detailing all their scaling, powers, stats, skill, and abilities to determine exactly how powerful they are.
This Week's Character.....
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Oz!
Power:
Oz is, quite shockingly, explicitly one of the most powerful characters across the entire Monster Prom franchise. Oz was one of the Ancient Gods created by The Nothingness and is the physical embodiment of Fear itself. His role, which they rejected to live as an ordinary mortal, was to destroy all of existence, wiping out all life across Monster Prom's multiverse.
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This means he scale's as a threat to Monster Prom's entire cosmology, which is absolutely huge. Monster Prom's multiverse contains infinite alternate timelines with several universal realms within each of them. Every timeline can contain the realms of Heaven, Hell, The Ghost Zone, The Human Realm, The Monster Realm, and countless others, all of which require interdimensional portals to be accessed. Even our own universe is secondary to the Monster Realm as the "main realm".
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Moreover, each pf these universes can contain countless smaller Metaverses, infinitely smaller digital universes layered within each other that one can travel deeper and deeper into for hours without ever hitting a limit, suggesting potentially infinite dimensional layers within each universe.
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As such, Oz is capable of posing a threat to an infinite multiverse, with each individual universe contain numerous realms the size of our own and thousands of, if not potentially infinite, dimensional layers. Keep in mind that digital universes being both actual universes and having different dimensional properties is consistent as a rule within Monster Prom, as shown in the first game where Calculester created a digital universe that he could alter the dimensionality of. This all adds up to Oz being High Hyperversal to two layers into Outerversal in sheer raw power for posing a threat to his entire cosmology, even if just over time.
Speed:
Speed is thankfully a lot simpler. The Ancient Deities explicitly predate Time itself and Oz can easily process the entire history of the universe is seconds.
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This is pretty simple immeasurable-infinite speed.
Powers:
This is where shit goes well and truly off the rails.
Magic:
Magic in Monster Prom is an omnipresent energy source the permeates all of existence. Only the Human Realm is beyond its grasp. This is because Magic is created as an after effect of the sheer raw power Oz and other ancient Deities emanate at all times.
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As such, any ability that can be archieved with magic if something that Oz should be able to do, as any magic that a character uses is something that simply pours out of him passively.
Keep in mind, magic in this franchise is capable of doing some utterly ridiculous things. The feat where Oz experienced the entirety of time was as a result of a spell cast onto them. People have created interdimensional portals, summoned demons that warped the fabric of reality, transmuted people and objects, sent the moon crashing down to Earth, and even folded time itself, turning several years into just a few seconds.
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Eldritch and Abstract Physiology
Scaling to Zoe, Oz power's border on the completely absurd. From the power to eat sanity and concepts to the ability devour souls and reduce people to atoms. Both Oz and Zoe may have stopped living as Gods, but Zoe can still lean into the eldritch horror from time to time.
As for the "reality collapses when it loses an embodiment of an abstract concept" thing.... I've since changed my mind on that. While the True Power thing is still just a rumor, Hope's death causing the end of reality seems majorly contingent on.... well, Hope. It's because without Hope everything gives into despair and everything dies. It's a rule of the Hope concept specifically and runs counter to Oz emboding a different concept entirely. Not that it should matter, as Oz should be able to just create interdimensional portals like anyone else, so removing them from reality still shouldn't matter....
Protagonist Powers
All of this combines into some truly ridiculous Toon Force to turn Oz into a truly unstoppable monster.... when he wants to be. Which is generally never. From stealing a character's relevance to the plot to turning reality off and on again and even willingly becoming one with all of existence.
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Thankfully, Oz is held back by a mixture of overwhelming social anxiety, an insatiable horniness for his fellow classmates, and a genuine desire to no longer be the monster they once were. Living as a mortal gave them genuine connections and friendships that they've never gotten before and Oz would likely never be willing to give those relationships up.
But, if you threaten any of their friends, or worse, stand between him and his comedic sexapades, then watch out! Because you're boxing with one of this dating sim's all time heavy weight champions. An eldritch dork with unfathomable power.
Conclusion:
Truth be told, I wasn't as able to go into detail on this one as I would've liked. Tumblr's picture limits really did a lot to hinder me from going in depth on Oz's powers this time around. I have the scans for every single ability I mention here, I just can't post them because ten picture cap.
His standing in the wider cosmology made going into detail on lower ends of the verse meaningless. Who cares if Damien can punch the sun or Calculester can nuke the moon when we're talking eldritch abominations. Depite being by far the most powerful and versatile character to get one of these rundowns to date.... Oz didn't need much explaining.
How Powerful is Oz? Yes. What can he do? Yes (So long as it's funny). Funny how that sorta paradox works out.
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snowdinstars · 6 months ago
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i am curious about the 11/20 slay the princess au, yap all you want my friend
HELL YEAH!!! thank you anon OKAY. slay the princess spoilers. be warned. also persona 5 spoilers but i feel like thats obvious
slay the princess is a game where you. slay the princess.
[SPOILER TERRITORY!!]
for those who have not beaten stp. you are the long quiet, a god of stillness and unchanging eternity. the princess is the vessel of the shifting mound, a god of endless change who contains death within her multitudes. both of you have been created and placed within a reality called the construct by the game's narrator, who attempts to guide you to slay the princess in order to rid the world of death and change. (to varying degrees of success. most of the time you die horribly in one way or another)
the game tells you from the very beginning that it is a love story, and it's true. you can only break the endless cycle of violence and death together
its complicated and im bad at explaining it
SO. with that VERY VERY CONDENSED summary of stp out of the way.
THEMATIC PARALLELS! (im going somewhere with this. maybe.)
god of stillness sent to kill god of change / puppet of the god of control sent to kill (in essence) the chosen champion of human rebellion. i have something here. i promise it makes more sense in my head
the whole deal with the princess is that she changes depending on how you perceive her. the metaverse is all about cognition and perception. this might be something.
something something duality... something something hegel said both thesis and antithesis... [EXPLODES]
its mostly vibes rn. and its really hard to explain without going super in depth about my thoughts on both games. but i DO have the sketch of a fanfic outline in my head. timeloop shenanigans with metaverse weirdness or something. idk if ill ever write it because it would be so unbelievably niche and also i suck
none of this makes sense probably but thank you for letting me infodump. colon three
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katsona-the-katsequel · 8 months ago
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In-Universe Weapons
What kind of weapons would each Persona team realistically use? I'm ignoring what the game makes available to you and making in-universe assumptions for fun.
St. Hermelin Kids
Their adventure takes place in less than a week, so there would be no need to get a supplier. Idk how any weapon stores managed to exist during everything, but I'm removing them from the equation. They did rob a police station. Aside from that, I'm guessing they're picking things off the street as they go, apocalypse-style.
Their arsenal would consist of basic guns they barely know how to use, and make-shift weapons one can find or create. Like kitchen knives, school club equipment, baseball bats with nails, metal tubes, etc. I don't doubt that after defeating human enemies they proceeded to rob them as well. Anything is fair game in Maki's Mikage-cho.
Tatsuya's Squad
Thanks to rumors, there are suppliers willing to sell weapons to teens (+2 adults) with no questions asked. Unlike the St. Hermelin kids, Tatsuya's squad actually had the time to learn how to use them. The same will apply for the rest of the teams in this list. The thing about rumors is that the quality of their weapons can be anything they want them to be, an ability that will only be rivalled by the PTs. That and they were also given some legacy weapons by the former St. Hermelin kids.
Basically, any kind of weapon available in the game, from swords to flowers of death, to guitar cases that double as gun machines, to plush unicorns for all I know.
Maya's Squad
Same rumor advantage, only a bit more grounded due to the team being all adults. Except Baofu who decided that he would throw coins at enemies. Go off, king.
SEES
The team with the most formal and standardized equipment thanks to the Kirijo Group and their suppliers like the Officer Kurosawa. Anything that you can imagine can be gained by either of those two channels, SEES has. Nothing too crazy.
Aigis is a whole other can of worms.
Investigation Team
Less crazy than the first three teams but more unique than SEES. At first they relied on what they could find or make like golf clubs and fans (could it be? The return of the nailed bat!).
But at some point they got enough money to begin buying things from Master Daidara. Almost all their weaponry would come from here for the rest of their adventure. In fact, the IT's weapons would be the third most personalized of all the teams (it's hard to beat the rumor-based ones. Those are bullshit), a combination of Daidara's personal touch and whatever commissions the IT asked of him.
Phantom Thieves
Ever since the beginning, the PTs have gotten everything from Iwai. If he can make it, the PTs can use it. All models, of course, until they enter the Metaverse, which would be a huge disadvantage if they confronted the other teams in the physical world. Iwai seems to have his own suppliers, which would make his weapons more standardized than Daidara's but way more personalized compared to SEES. Their true strength comes from whatever the PTs made of them in the Metaverse.
I'm guessing that it wasn't until Akechi came barging in with a fucking lightsaber that the PTs got more creative and alternated between Iwai's weapons and Futaba's anime merch.
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leonawriter · 8 months ago
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Ok so you know how during the school festival, when Akechi blackmails the Phantom Thieves, he shows them photos of them fading into the Metaverse?
Well, to state something that may or may not be obvious: That is not the same time as when we see him come across them onscreen.
Akira and the others couldn't possibly know this (or, they might have put it together later), but there'd be no time for him to both take photos, and also get dragged in himself.
Those things would have to have been done on different dates, possibly after he's realised where they'll be, started following Joker, and made sure to stay far enough away that he wouldn't get dragged in.
Because:
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Here he is approaching from behind the huge sign. It's possible that he's realised the others are there, but is trying to keep his distance.
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Here he is only seconds later, and notice that he's got the "?!" over his head. He's confused about what's going on.
Honestly, he's probably internally going "What the fuck, I did not just activate the nav, what is even going on here?!" because he wasn't there when they accidentally dragged anyone else in. He's never dragged anyone in himself. He must be very confused that it's even possible.
Which makes sense, because Yaldabaoth wanted him to be isolated, and wanted Joker to have a team.
So, yes, he almost certainly spent the time after getting dragged in silently cursing like a sailor because "Fuck fuck fuck what if they see me they are NOT allowed to see me like this" and hiding on the other side of a door (that you, the player, cannot go near, as Joker and the others aren't interested in heading back in that direction) until it's safe to get the hell out of dodge.
And then after that, he - as said before - probably waited around a bit further away, to get the actual photos. And video.
So just... imagine him keeping track of every time they go into the Metaverse that entire month. He's got to either be creating evidence against them and/or for blackmail purposes, or keeping tabs on them to know when he needs to go in after them-
Because, and this is important - remember that he did not know that the Phantom Thieves need a calling card to steal a heart.
So, although to US it feels obvious that he'd only have to wait until there's news of a calling card? In actuality, he's most likely keeping tabs on either the PT or Okumura's Shadow the entire time, in preparation for getting the timing right.
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[ID: Akechi during the blackmail scene on 10/26, saying "Hahaha... There's certainly no way anyone could figure out such an MO." He has a dejected expression on his sprite.]
So, yeah. Thinking of it that way, I can easily imagine this is also his way of saying "If I had known all of that, it would have saved me SO much time and energy."
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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months ago
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What the fuck is a PBM?
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TOMORROW (Sept 24), I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!
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Terminal-stage capitalism owes its long senescence to its many defensive mechanisms, and it's only by defeating these that we can put it out of its misery. "The Shield of Boringness" is one of the necrocapitalist's most effective defenses, so it behooves us to attack it head-on.
The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire's extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can't hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this "MEGO," which stands for "My Eyes Glaze Over," a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, "a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it."
MEGO and its Shield of Boringness are key to all of terminal-stage capitalism's stupidest scams. Cloaking obvious swindles in a lot of complex language and Byzantine payment schemes can make them seem respectable just long enough for the scammers to relieve you of all your inconvenient cash and assets, though, eventually, you're bound to notice that something is missing.
If you spent the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis baffled by "CDOs," "synthetic CDOs," "ARMs" and other swindler nonsense, you experienced the Shield of Boringness. If you bet your house and/or your retirement savings on these things, you experienced MEGO. If, after the bubble popped, you finally came to understand that these "exotic financial instruments" were just scams, you experienced Stein's Law ("anything that can't go forever eventually stops"). If today you no longer remember what a CDO is, you are once again experiencing the Shield of Boringness.
As bad as 2008 was, it wasn't even close to the end of terminal stage capitalism. The market has soldiered on, with complex swindles like carbon offset trading, metaverse, cryptocurrency, financialized solar installation, and (of course) AI. In addition to these new swindles, we're still playing the hits, finding new ways to make the worst scams of the 2000s even worse.
That brings me to the American health industry, and the absurdly complex, ridiculously corrupt Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), a pathology that has only metastasized since 2008.
On at least 20 separate occasions, I have taken it upon myself to figure out how the PBM swindle works, and nevertheless, every time they come up, I have to go back and figure it out again, because PBMs have the most powerful Shield of Boringness out of the whole Monster Manual of terminal-stage capitalism's trash mobs.
PBMs are back in the news because the FTC is now suing the largest of these for their role in ripping off diabetics with sky-high insulin prices. This has kicked off a fresh round of "what the fuck is a PBM, anyway?" explainers of extremely variable quality. Unsurprisingly, the best of these comes from Matt Stoller:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-lina-khan-pharma
Stoller starts by pointing out that Americans have a proud tradition of getting phucked by pharma companies. As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world.
But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high, ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly's Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn't your grampa's price gouging!
Where do these absurd prices come from? The story starts in the 2000s, when the GW Bush administration encouraged health insurers to create "high deductible" plans, where patients were expected to pay out of pocket for receiving care, until they hit a multi-thousand-dollar threshold, and then their insurance would kick in. Along with "co-pays" and other junk fees, these deductibles were called "cost sharing," and they were sold as a way to prevent the "abuse" of the health care system.
The economists who crafted terminal-stage capitalism's intellectual rationalizations claimed the reason Americans paid so much more for health care than their socialized-medicine using cousins in the rest of the world had nothing to do with the fact that America treats health as a source of profits, while the rest of the world treats health as a human right.
No, the actual root of America's health industry's problems was the moral defects of Americans. Because insured Americans could just go see the doctor whenever they felt like it, they had no incentive to minimize their use of the system. Any time one of these unhinged hypochondriacs got a little sniffle, they could treat themselves to a doctor's visit, enjoying those waiting-room magazines and the pleasure of arranging a sick day with HR, without bearing any of the true costs:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/
"Cost sharing" was supposed to create "skin in the game" for every insured American, creating a little pain-point that stung you every time you thought about treating yourself to a luxurious doctor's visit. Now, these payments bit hardest on the poorest workers, because if you're making minimum wage, at $10 co-pay hurts a lot more than it does if you're making six figures. What's more, VPs and the C-suite were offered "gold-plated" plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays, because executives understand the value of a dollar in the way that mere working slobs can't ever hope to comprehend. They can be trusted to only use the doctor when it's truly warranted.
So now you have these high-deductible plans creeping into every workplace. Then along comes Obama and the Affordable Care Act, a compromise that maintains health care as a for-profit enterprise (still not a human right!) but seeks to create universal coverage by requiring every American to buy a plan, requiring insurers to offer plans to every American, and uses public money to subsidize the for-profit health industry to glue it together.
Predictably, the cheapest insurance offered on the Obamacare exchanges – and ultimately, by employers – had sky-high deductibles and co-pays. That way, insurers could pocket a fat public subsidy, offer an "insurance" plan that was cheap enough for even the most marginally employed people to afford, but still offer no coverage until their customers had spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket in a given year.
That's the background: GWB created high-deductible plans, Obama supercharged them. Keep that in your mind as we go through the MEGO procedures of the PBM sector.
Your insurer has a list of drugs they'll cover, called the "formulary." The formulary also specifies how much the insurance company is willing to pay your pharmacist for these drugs. Creating the formulary and paying pharmacies for dispensing drugs is a lot of tedious work, and insurance outsources this to third parties, called – wait for it – Pharmacy Benefits Managers.
The prices in the formulary the PBM prepares for your insurance company are called the "list prices." These are meant to represent the "sticker price" of the drug, what a pharmacist would charge you if you wandered in off the street with no insurance, but somehow in possession of a valid prescription.
But, as Stoller writes, these "list prices" aren't actually ever charged to anyone. The list price is like the "full price" on the pricetags at a discount furniture place where everything is always "on sale" at 50% off – and whose semi-disposable sofas and balsa-wood dining room chairs are never actually sold at full price.
One theoretical advantage of a PBM is that it can get lower prices because it bargains for all the people in a given insurer's plan. If you're the pharma giant Sanofi and you want your Lantus insulin to be available to any of the people who must use OptumRX's formulary, you have to convince OptumRX to include you in that formulary.
OptumRX – like all PBMs – demands "rebates" from pharma companies if they want to be included in the formulary. On its face, this is similar to the practices of, say, NICE – the UK agency that bargains for medicine on behalf of the NHS, which also bargains with pharma companies for access to everyone in the UK and gets very good deals as a result.
But OptumRX doesn't bargain for a lower list price. They bargain for a bigger rebate. That means that the "price" is still very high, but OptumRX ends up paying a tiny fraction of it, thanks to that rebate. In the OptumRX formulary, Lantus insulin lists for $403. But Sanofi, who make Lantus, rebate $339 of that to OptumRX, leaving just $64 for Lantus.
Here's where the scam hits. Your insurer charges you a deductible based on the list price – $404 – not on the $64 that OptumRX actually pays for your insulin. If you're in a high-deductible plan and you haven't met your cap yet, you're going to pay $404 for your insulin, even though the actual price for it is $64.
Now, you'd think that your insurer would put a stop to this. They chose the PBM, the PBM is ripping off their customers, so it's their job to smack the PBM around and make it cut this shit out. So why would the insurers tolerate this nonsense?
Here's why: the PBMs are divisions of the big health insurance companies. Unitedhealth owns OptumRx; Aetna owns Caremark, and Cigna owns Expressscripts. So it's not the PBM that's ripping you off, it's your own insurance company. They're not just making you pay for drugs that you're supposedly covered for – they're pocketing the deductible you pay for those drugs.
Now, there's one more entity with power over the PBM that you'd hope would step in on your behalf: your boss. After all, your employer is the entity that actually chooses the insurer and negotiates with them on your behalf. Your boss is in the driver's seat; you're just along for the ride.
It would be pretty funny if the answer to this was that the health insurance company bought your employer, too, and so your boss, the PBM and the insurer were all the same guy, busily swapping hats, paying for a call center full of tormented drones who each have three phones on their desks: one labeled "insurer"; the second, "PBM" and the final one "HR."
But no, the insurers haven't bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they've bought off your boss – they're sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you're being suckered into paying. There's so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot.
That is how the PBM scam works: they're fronts for health insurers who exploit the existence of high-deductible plans in order to get huge kickbacks from pharma makers, and massive fees from you. They split the loot with your boss, whose payout goes up when you get screwed harder.
But wait, there's more! After all, Big Pharma isn't some kind of easily pushed-around weakling. They're big. Why don't they push back against these massive rebates? Because they can afford to pay bribes and smaller companies making cheaper drugs can't. Whether it's a little biotech upstart with a cheaper molecule, or a generics maker who's producing drugs at a fraction of the list price, they just don't have the giant cash reserves it takes to buy their way into the PBMs' formularies. Doubtless, the Big Pharma companies would prefer to pay smaller kickbacks, but from Big Pharma's perspective, the optimum amount of bribes extracted by a PBM isn't zero – far from it. For Big Pharma, the optimal number is one cent higher than "the maximum amount of bribes that a smaller company can afford."
The purpose of a system is what it does. The PBM system makes sure that Americans only have access to the most expensive drugs, and that they pay the highest possible prices for them, and this enriches both insurance companies and employers, while protecting the Big Pharma cartel from upstarts.
Which is why the FTC is suing the PBMs for price-fixing. As Stoller points out, they're using their powers under Section 5 of the FTC Act here, which allows them to shut down "unfair methods of competition":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
The case will be adjudicated by an administrative law judge, in a process that's much faster than a federal court case. Once the FTC proves that the PBM scam is illegal when applied to insulin, they'll have a much easier time attacking the scam when it comes to every other drug (the insulin scam has just about run its course, with federally mandated $35 insulin coming online, just as a generation of post-insulin diabetes treatments hit the market).
Obviously the PBMs aren't taking this lying down. Cigna/Expressscripts has actually sued the FTC for libel over the market study it conducted, in which the agency described in pitiless, factual detail how Cigna was ripping us all off. The case is being fought by a low-level Reagan-era monster named Rick Rule, whom Stoller characterizes as a guy who "hangs around in bars and picks up lonely multi-national corporations" (!!).
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The libel claim is a nonstarter, but it's still wild. It's like one of those movies where they want to show you how bad the cockroaches are, so there's a bit where the exterminator shows up and the roaches form a chorus line and do a kind of Busby Berkeley number:
https://www.46brooklyn.com/news/2024-09-20-the-carlton-report
So here we are: the FTC has set out to euthanize some rentiers, ridding the world of a layer of useless economic middlemen whose sole reason for existing is to make pharmaceuticals as expensive as possible, by colluding with the pharma cartel, the insurance cartel and your boss. This conspiracy exists in plain sight, hidden by the Shield of Boringness. If I've done my job, you now understand how this MEGO scam works – and if you forget all that ten minutes later (as is likely, given the nature of MEGO), that's OK: just remember that this thing is a giant fucking scam, and if you ever need to refresh yourself on the details, you can always re-read this post.
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The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen
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Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
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p5-apotelesma · 4 months ago
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AS I SAID I WOULD: heres the post yapping about how Makoto's Career Choices have Ren Putting Her At A Distance
by no means do they stop being friends. she just ends up drifting a little further away from him in his circles of intimacy. they raise their walls around her a little. there's some part of him feels betrayed but. he'd sooner let the earth swallow him than bring it up. ren feels like an asshole for feeling uncomfortable about their friends goals.
what right does he have to tell her what she should or shouldnt do. he just doesnt. (especially when he already made the call to take a happy future away from her once. a future with her dead father. who she wants to honor by becoming a cop in the first place)
i think it would have potential to come up during strikers. because. (looks at the circumstances of strikers through the lens of rens trauma)
yeah.
they've essentially been blackmailed by the police again. who are out to arrest ren and his friends for shit they didnt fucking do. and they have to put their trust in one of them. and ren is Really Not Doing So Good But Hes Repressing That. and meanwhile makoto's over here talking to the cop whos infiltrated their group about what its like being on the force. and ren wants to start slamming his head through the walls
ren, who has spent the past 4 months living with their shitty parents and has fallen back into old survival patterns is. REALLY not up for creating a situation that could create potential for confrontation. but makoto is no dummy and can probably tell that hes really not comfortable (in general) but that. particularly. the ways they interact have changed. and she would want to get to the bottom of whats bothering them
and god, what hasnt been? had the metaverse not come back maybe ren would have been able to relax enough to talk to his friends about what hes been going through at home. but theyre tight lipped about that now. his problems arent as important as everything else going on. but i can see ren cracking.
REN: i dont want to convince you to abandon the path. you want to travel. i know your dad. means. a lot to you. you want to honor him. because of what he stood for-- he was a hero to you. REN: but your dad is gone makoto. REN: while i-im still here. and i almost wasnt. i could have--- i almost died. i wished i had. (i was in so much pain i just wanted it to be over) REN: all because of people who you would end up having to answer to. i dont (god breathing is hard) REN: understand. how you. can reconcile with that. how you can try. and comfort me. when im in the crosshairs of the police. and then turn around and chat with the guy. who threatened to arrest me. about how you want to join the force REN: i know you makoto. and that's why i dont understand. and i dont. know how to be okay with that. im not. im sorry but it just makes me sick to my stomach every time it comes up
honestly whether rens feelings about it would come up during strikers or not til Rens Distortion Arc. she would be like. oh god he thinks i dont care. and it would BREAK HER HEART. like. especially because i think makoto could feel some guilt about the plan she primarily helped throw together to trick goro so last minute that. put ren through what he considers the worst day of his life. the ren that went into that concrete room did not come back out.
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lacystar · 11 months ago
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some of my favorite and least favorite details from royal:
when you go with sumire to the shrine and bump into the rest of the thieves, they basically say they all agreed to go together. this is backed up by futaba saying she's going in the morning. this means they specifically went out of their way to not invite you. either theyre shady as fuck towards joker or they knew you were gonna be on a date and didn't want to bother you, but I think its funnier to go with the first one
most of the people in Tokyo's dreams coming true bc of the actualization are met with some doubt or confusion from family members, as seen in passing conversations and the loading screens. this is to show the cracks in the plan and how the actualization hasn't been . well. fully actualized yet. however, the phantom thieves told maruki what they want directly and therefore have their realities so tailor made to them that you have to go out of your way to break them out of it. this includes Morgana. but the only ppl who can hear Morgana are people with personas. this means that some time between Christmas and new years, maruki heard Morgana saying he wanted to be a human and decided to go "fuck it, sure, the cat that the weird kid owns but that ive never met can have his wish too". this tracks because maruki has a persona and is not shocked or confused when he sees Morgana in the metaverse.
Yusuke did not wish for his dead mom to be alive again. just for her painting to hit the trending tab 😭
even if you are dating sumire, like I was, she will not say goodbye to you or give you a parting gift. this creates the awkward situation of her saying goodbye to you at the station with an unusual coldness and disassociation from you, even if you and her are boyfriend and girlfriend. I actually hate this. why the fuck isn't my girlfriend saying goodbye to me.
the winter outfits are the best designed outfits in the game. ann and makoto are in ugly 2010's H&M shit for 90% of the game and then get a fresh wardrobe for the new years.
in contrast, maruki's villain outfit is so fucking ugly. he looks like a golden toenail. the final villain in your game and you have him looking like that? come on man.
not royal exclusive, but Morgana has a talking sprite of himself in his cat form. for some reason, they refused to use this until the end of the game when he "loses" his metaverse form. this makes absolutely no sense, as the talking sprites of every other character changes on their clothes/appearence. why doesn't Morgana's change to his cat version in the real world and why doesn't he just have his "true" form in the metaverse. for some reason, this frustrates me to no end.
when you date sumire, she will not shut the fuck up about her dead sister. also, 90% of your relationship with her is based around her false identity she assumed of her dead sister. you are basically dating this girl's dead sister.
^^^ this is not helped by the fact that her "sumire" sprite looks ugly as fuck and she only looks cute when she's cosplaying as her dead sister. the devs even knew this and changed her back to her Kasumi sprite as soon as they justifiably could 😭
speaking of, royal REALLY REALLY makes it obvious that they see joker x sumire as the canon romance. in the base game I think they saw it as makoto or Haru, but in royal its uncanny how much they push you into dating her. however, she's objectively the worst girl to date because you can only date her at the very end of the game, and therefore only get to experience valentines and white day with her, whereas with most of the other girls you get Hawaii, Christmas, the school fair, etc.
^^^ however, this makes sense, as the realization that you were never dating sumire and instead were instead dating her dead sister would probably come as an uncomfortable surprise to the player. atlus had no choice but to wait until the truth came out to let you date her. they wrote themselves into a corner and then were unable to show off the character who has the biggest model on the poster 😭
when you go around and get goodbye gifts, you cannot say goodbye to certain phantom thieves members if you haven't maxed them out. this resulted in a weird situation where I hadn't maxed out makoto, Haru, and ann, and therefore joker, despite that in universe having helped them through trauma and loss and difficult times, did not say goodbye to some of of his closest friends and teammates . I understand not getting a goodbye gift from them, but its SUPREMELY weird that you dont get a one-on-one goodbye if you dont max their confidants 😭
not royal exclusive, but shinya Oda's voice acting (English) is so fucking terrible its actually laughable. in a game with outstanding voice acting, the fact that this 12 year old sounds like a 50 year old woman really sticks out. this is unfortunate, because Oda is one of my fav confidants and makes him hard to take seriously, but also fortunate because its fucking hilarious.
Akechi's evil Loki costume is ugly as fuck, but is saved singlehandedly because he's wearing thigh-high boots. if you dont believe me, look closely at his thighs. you'll see it.
maruki looks like wilbur soot and it really unsettles me.
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