#i think the other factor is that i'm starting to read/play genuinely good stuff and its making me reevaluate copa a bit

[shinozaki-ayumi]

i'm getting a bit jaded about copa and think i need to take a step back from it but my entire online persona is built around it. oops

[stylesclarified]

In the Louis/Liam Gallagher post, you mentioned writing a post on Louis being a homophobic bully

You then said this:

"Louis cheated on Hannah with Eleanor and at first Hannah didn't know, so she and Louis were on good terms, but she has been openly very negative about Louis ever since late 2011."

Do you remember Hannah's brother tweeted that Hannah had caught him cheating with a man? And before that, while Louis was on X factor someone tweeted that Louis had bullied another boy at the school for being gay. That, and your other comment below

"think he's still trying to market himself this way because deep down he still wants the acceptance of his high school buddies and other men like them"

seems to represent, in my opinion, someone who willingly mocks gay men, or those who don't fit into a particular role, because it's not deemed cool by his friends. I'm not trying to turn this into a "is he gay, is he straight" discussion but reading your post, breaking down his people pleaser personality in a way, has me thinking that if he was gay or bi, he wouldn't want to come out because it wouldn't be seen as "cool" by his friends, or fit in with his faux Liam Gallagher tough guy persona. I think the only reason he stayed close to his Doncaster friends is because they're the only friendships he had so he feels the need to impress them. He didn't seem to bond with or make long lasting friendships in his time in the band. Sure he had Zayn, Liam and so on, but there isn't a real genuine friendship between him and anyone outside the band from that time.... compared to someone like harry who was always networking

I think his sexuality is somewhat important in all of this Liam Gallagher wannabe character he's playing because it seems to mirror his behaviour in high school (bullying gay people to fit in with his friends and putting on an act, and now he's laying on this chav act very thick to replicate his friends' behaviours to fit in. Seems to be a pattern)

I understand this message might be crossing a line discussing sexuality, but I would be interested in your opinion on how he wishes to be perceived by his friends, and the bullying claims

I'm going to quote stuff you say to answer, because this is very long.

Do you remember Hannah's brother tweeted that Hannah had caught him cheating with a man?

This didn't happen. Louis cheated on Hannah with Eleanor, not with a man. How do I know this? Well, Alana Burton.

Harry started working at W. Mandeville, a bakery in Holmes Chapel, when he was fourteen years old. Alana also worked there, she's from a nearby town that I'm not gonna name out of respect for the fact that she's not a celebrity and is quite private (Larries have spread this, though). Alana is two years older than Harry, so after a while working together, she moved to Manchester to go to university. She met Eleanor Calder there and they became roommates.

Harry then got put in 1D, they came in third in the X Factor, and then they toured with the rest of the contestants of that season. These are some of the X Factor tour dates:

Harry invited Alana to go to one of their shows — we don't know which one (presumably one of the Manchester shows). Alana brought friends, Eleanor being one of them. This is why they've always said that Louis introduced Louis and Eleanor.

Larries interpreted Harry being uncomfortable about this as him being heartbroken or jealous... No, he was probably perfectly aware of the fact that Louis had cheated. Harry got along really well with Hannah.

Larries also lied and said that Harry didn't get on with Eleanor, but that's absolutely not true.

This is Harry and Eleanor hanging out a few years ago. And yes, that's Eleanor. This is the pub right next to Harry's house, which Eleanor is been known to frequent. You could also see her dad in the video.

Anyway, tangent over.

This is the story Alana herself tells to her friends. There was a Larrie here a while ago who openly talked about this because she allegedly met one of Alana's friends. She gave details that the fandom didn't have at the time, like the fact that it happened during the X Factor tour.

Why did she do this? Well, when confirmed that he was about to become a father, Larries created a disgusting blog with "receipts" where everyone would submit theirs. She tried to use this as a receipt against the validity of Louis and Eleanor (I don't remember what her logic at the time was) and it backfired. As far as I'm aware, the posts are deleted. I THINK this is the Larrie that spread the "receipt":

I can't find anything else about this on her blog, but I'm pretty sure it was her and she just deleted everything. This is one of the OG huge Larrie blogs talking about it years later:

I don't generally take what Larries say seriously, but the fact is that all of these things align with what members of the band have said, with Harry hanging out with Alana (even their families together, as per the pictures I posted above), and with things I detailed in a second.

I mean, Louis himself had already sort of said it to Seventen Magazine (July 2012):

He didn't tell the entire story because in March 2011, Louis was still VERY MUCH with Hannah. In fact, she posted this pic on Easter, a month later:

And they wouldn't break up until July. Hannah took a break from Twitter July 17. I can't post her tweets because her account has been deactivated for years but I can post fan reactions to her tweets:

This next screenshot I could find on Google. Read it bottom to top, it starts July 17 and ends July 24. But basically, after her Twitter break, on July 24, Hannah vaguely referenced that she and Louis had broken up but that they were on good terms, to which Louis agreed.

Obviously, at the time, Hannah had no idea that Louis had met Eleanor several months prior and had... let's call it "kept in touch." Stanley Lucas was one of Louis' best friends (Louis even bought Stan a car). This screenshot was taken in 2015, when Eleanor briefly reactivated her Facebook after she and Louis broke up. Stan had a private profile, but a fan had a friend in common with him and...

(Don't ask me for the source of the screenshot because it's completely lost to time. I just tend to save stuff. I actually found this buried in my Google photos account recently when I was cleaning up).

The timing is........ incredible. And to make matters worse, Eleanor's cousin, Emily, was a huge 1D fan since their X Factor days. She was kept in the dark about Eleanor and Louis knowing each other until after he and Hannah broke up and almost immediately:

I can't embed for some reason, but here's the link

He also followed her on Twitter and called her on the phone:

As far as she was aware, at this point, Louis and Eleanor were "just friends" and she wouldn't find out they were an item until it became public knowledge. Why? Because, well, she was a child, and she was a 1D fan, so she knew perfectly well that Louis had a girlfriend until LITERALLY two weeks prior to following her.

Larries took Emily's lack of knowledge of the situation as "proof" of it being all fake, instead of the fact that she was lied to and told 1% of the information. She was told that Louis and Eleanor had known each other for a while, but she didn't have the full context:

Sugarscape, a popular media outlet at the time that had a lot of interviews with 1D, said that someone spotted Louis with a brunette girl at V Festival (August 20/21 2011). I can't find the original article because Sugarscape has gone offline since then, but I can find an archived version of a second article where they reference it, a year later:

Eleanor confirmed it was her:

Sugarscape wrote this second article because Louis had given an interview where he said that he and Eleanor didn't know how long they'd been together:

Larries also used this as proof that their relationship was fake, but... he couldn't say how long they'd been together BECAUSE THEY CHEATED. Not because he "didn't know" or because "he didn't care" or any other Larrie-backward-ass-logic. He did know, but if he admitted it, he was basically spelling out that he had cheated on his ex for months.

Notice how Sugarscape corrects Louis, who said they'd been together for 6-8 months. They're like "no, actually, it's at least 11." And, no, actually, it's MORE.

So, when you say that Hannah's brother said Louis cheated with a man.... no girl. He cheated with Eleanor. At first, Hannah didn't know, but she probably did realize it eventually, and that's why her brother was upset. This is what he said (a year+ after the breakup, and a month after the Sugarscape article I linked):

He used a gay slur, and that's why Larries say that George accused Louis of cheating with a man, but that's... not true. You can see from his profile picture that he was a literal child. He most likely just used that slur because it was the worst word he could think of and had no idea what the implications were. Louis had been with Eleanor, very openly, for a year. They were first spotted together in September 2011. Eleanor then confirmed that they were together IN AUGUST.

You think that Louis not only had a parallel relationship with a man, but also that his ex girlfriend's little brother (I think he was literally, like, 12), knew about it and tweeted about it openly?

And the proof of this is one word that can be very easily explained with logic? As opposed the mountains of proof of the opposite? Not that OG Larry blog believed George was alluding to Louis cheating with a man, and she was so delusional, she believed that Hannah was "a friend who was doing Louis a favor."

And before that, while Louis was on X factor someone tweeted that Louis had bullied another boy at the school for being gay.

"Someone" didn't tweet this. Three separate people did, over the course of eight years, including the gay boy himself. One day I'll make a post about it.

That, and your other comment below "think he's still trying to market himself this way because deep down he still wants the acceptance of his high school buddies and other men like them" seems to represent, in my opinion, someone who willingly mocks gay men, or those who don't fit into a particular role, because it's not deemed cool by his friends.

Or because he's an asshole? Just saying.

I'm not trying to turn this into a "is he gay, is he straight" discussion

You absolutely are, babe. Own up to it. Louis has said he's straight, and there's literally no reason whatsoever to believe he's lying or that has changed.

but reading your post, breaking down his people pleaser personality in a way, has me thinking that if he was gay or bi, he wouldn't want to come out because it wouldn't be seen as "cool" by his friends, or fit in with his faux Liam Gallagher tough guy persona.

I know it's painful to accept the fact that an artist you like is an asshole, but you're doing too much. He's straight. He didn't cheat with a man — a child simply called him the f slur because he thought it was a good insult. He cheated with a woman, has consistently dated women, he got a woman pregnant. He used to pile girls into vans while leaving clubs wasted and high off his face. He's straight and he's an asshole. He's not secretly gay and trying to fit in.

What you're doing is called self-soothing.

I think the only reason he stayed close to his Doncaster friends is because they're the only friendships he had so he feels the need to impress them. He didn't seem to bond with or make long lasting friendships in his time in the band. Sure he had Zayn, Liam and so on, but there isn't a real genuine friendship between him and anyone outside the band from that time.... compared to someone like harry who was always networking

I can actually agree with this, in terms of him feeling the need to impress his friends. But this doesn't justify his treatment of that boy or make it any less embarrassing. He's a grown man. Can I empathize? Sure. Can I also say that he should work on it? Absolutely.

I think his sexuality is somewhat important in all of this Liam Gallagher wannabe character he's playing because it seems to mirror his behaviour in high school (bullying gay people to fit in with his friends and putting on an act, and now he's laying on this chav act very thick to replicate his friends' behaviours to fit in. Seems to be a pattern)

He's straight. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to think he's not straight. He's 100% straight. He bullied gay people because he's a dick. And it's not the only homophobic thing he has done. He literally kicked rainbow flags off the stage for no fucking reason in the middle of concerts, and his friends were nowhere near when this was happening:

This is a gay 1D fan who tweeted about it one of the multiple times it happened:

As I said, one day I'll make a post... this is just one of the many many things he's done.

I understand this message might be crossing a line discussing sexuality, but I would be interested in your opinion on how he wishes to be perceived by his friends, and the bullying claims

It's not crossing a line. You're fine. It's just that you're not well-informed, which I'll chalk up to the fact that disinformation runs rampant in this fandom. It's why I made this blog lmao. I can't blame someone who (I'm assuming) comes in later and sees all the random things people took out of context. But... yeah. Louis is not a poor self-hating gay. He's just a dick.

[ominus-potato]

Hi, just wanted some advice about fanfics on ao3, how do you write them? and how can I make my one shot fic impactful for the readers. I'm planning on making a fic but since it's my first time making I kinda don't know where to start.. It's fine if you don't know though! just thought of asking cause you're writing's really good imo.

Sneak peak of the next part of the Pining Mario series at the end!

Well when I write, I don’t do it on AO3. I draft my work on Wattpad and then cross-post it to AO3. This is because AO3 is a bit more complicated, can be dodgy with saving works and only work when I have Wi-Fi. With Wattpad, I can write offline which is very helpful. Some people also draft on google docs so there’s that as well.

In terms of ACTUAL writing, there are two ways to leave an impression on the reader. There’s the way liked with angst, pain and maybe a bit of comfort; and there’s the way of making a story so sickeningly sweet that the reader is gushing over every cute moment. The length of the story also plays a factor. If it’s under 4000 I’d recommend avoiding angst bc you don’t have much time to set it up and at it off effectively.

Personally, I pretty much never write angst unless I genuinely believe it’ll make a story better. I’ve read fics before where the author will just throw in a shit ton of angst for no reason other than to make the reader feel bad for the mc and it just feels really cheap. It’s hard to do angst right and it’s really tempting to just give everyone a super fucked up backstory and make them depressed or something but imo it’s just overdone to the point of exhaustion. It can make a story depressing and no longer a fun read.

Whenever I write angst, it’s a small part of a mostly fluff-filled story. Take the pining Mario series for example. 19,000 words of silly pining hyjinx with a few small drops of angst. Then have the angst bubble over a little in Shots and Cowboys, Mario has a small breakdown since we’ve been keeping up with the story from his perspective mostly. That then allows me to forward the story and give character a new motivation.

If youre going to use angst to get an emotional reaction, you MUST have good set up and pay off. Especially if it’s a longer story. Also, you don’t have to do this, but I’d recommend against adding angst unless it’s necessary. Don’t just throw it in there Willy nilly yk?

If you wanna know how I do my stories, I really enjoy making them sweet and adorable with a little bit of drama and comedy. Like “Love is not a foreign language” where it’s just Mario and Mr Puzzles being adorable as hell for 6000 words. Then the drama comes when Puzzles reveals he can understand Mario and that only leads to more cutesy love.

A lot of it comes down to the story you’re trying to tell and how you want your reader to react. When I write a story, I want my readers to be invested in the drama and rising tensions, enjoying the little spurts of comedy here and there and ultimately, finding the main ship really cute in the end. I try to make people happy with my work bc I write the kinda stuff I would love to read! Because if I would read it, someone else definitely would.

Also, I feel like I must add that I have only ever written ship stories. If you wanted advice on stories in general with no shipping then I wouldn’t really know how to advise you on that. I love relationships between characters. Whether it’s ships or friendships. It’s my favourite part of any fandom so it’s where I specialise in my work.

Sorry I don’t really have like a plan or anything. I just keep it all in my head, know a few plot points I want to hit, and write to them. I try to get around 3-5 plot points for my longer stories and then just 1 or maybe 2 for the shorter ones. I sometimes add them as I go if I think it’ll make the story better!

For example, my plot points in Shots and Cowboys were:

•Mario tries to buy Puzzles a drink

•Mario and Mr Puzzles are interrupted by Wren and Mario is jealous

•Mario and Wren do something to fight for Puzzles’ affection (IE, play pool)

•Mario looses Puzzles to Wren, sees them kiss and is devastated.

•Mr Puzzles thinks that Mario is heartbroken over SMG4 and promises to help him move on.

Then if I get any smaller points like certain ships, lines, dynamics or interactions I wanna add I just sprinkle them in where I can.

I don’t really have much advice outside of that. I tend to just think of a scene or an idea I’d love to write and then more ideas pop up around it. It’s just one major point that gets built around. IE, Mario being jealous was the premise of SAC purely just because there were a few jealous Puzzles stories and I wanted to see if I could switch the dynamic.

Sorry for the long wall of text. I just wanna make sure it’s detailed enough for you. Just make it up as you go along and write what you wanna read. I re-read my stuff all the time because I genuinely enjoy what I write and it gives me exactly what I want. Have fun with it!

And if you’re worried about it being terrible, I’d advise you to read my old Lego Ninjago fanfiction that I wrote when I was 13. My god it was awful. But it shows development!

First story:

Latest story:

Enjoy that sneak peak of the next part of the Pining Mario series :D

[oxeanic]

All right - I said I'd have some more in-depth thoughts, and here they are. Most of this post will have spoilers for The Reality War below the cut, but if you haven't yet seen it, still plan to, and wish to remain un-spoiled, here's a spoiler-free TLDR:

While there may be Doctor Who episodes that have worse writing on a technical level, I think that The Reality War contains some of the worst creative decisions in the show's history, and as such I'm extremely concerned about the show's long-term future.

Spoilers from here on out!

Before we get in to the meatier, long-term, stuff, let's just take a moment to note that The Reality War is, in fact, quite poorly written in the ordinary, mundane way as well. The Rani's (Ranis'?) evil plan is dealt with in about half an hour, and Omega - here represented with another bad CGI monster - only exists to eat the Panjabi Rani, say some generic monster lines, and be shot back into the portal with a laser.

There's also clearly been a throughline in Gatwa's era of children, babies, and parenthood, which this episode is very, very concerned with, especially in the latter half. This is something I can't really criticize, because I genuinely don't understand why Davies is doing all this. There isn't really a theme I could grasp, and I don't see why babies as a motif would be something to include. And in the absence of further understanding, that's really all I can say.

The end result of all this is an odd mish-mash: first half dealing with the Rani, Omega, and Conrad, followed by a rather sudden transition to Baby Stuff and Regeneration. Now, I don't think all of this is Davies' fault. I'd wager good money that Ncuti Gatwa decided to leave kinda-last minute to pursue other career opportunities (which in all fairness is a pretty wise move imo), and this necessitated awkwardly grafting a regeneration onto an otherwise complete episode.

But of course, the regeneration is the elephant in the room. Totally unannounced, the Fifteenth Doctor regenerates into the Sixteenth... who is played by Billie Piper. Who played Rose, way back when.

This, more than anything else, makes me very, very nervous about the future of Doctor Who. Not because I have doubts about Piper's performance - I think she'll do quite well in the part - but because this serves as the ultimate stunt casting. It's gimmicky. There's a few ways you can read this, none of them very good, but I'll just focus on one here.

To me, this represents a sort of unconstrained fan-pleasing. There was some of this in the rest of the episode, as well: time rings, Project Indigo, the confirmation of the long-standing fan theory regarding Time Lord sterility - not to mention bringing back the Rani, Omega, and Susan (who we still haven't gotten a resolution on).

Moreover, I think it rather significantly misjudges the core benefit of Doctor Who: that the show is, for all intents and purposes, an anthology series, able to try new things, to reinvent itself, free from canon. But this latest episode - and these past two seasons, to some extent, represent an attempt to change that, to turn Doctor Who into just another franchise, just another piece of intellectual property. Something so inward-looking, so concerned with it's own past, that it disappears into itself and becomes totally impenetrable. Lore builds on lore builds on lore until the entire edifice collapses under it's own weight.

More than that, this same attitude was a major contributing factor to why Doctor Who got cancelled in 1989. Stories started being being written with fans as the primary audience in mind, and the quality of the writing fell off a cliff. It wasn't the only reason, but it was a big one.

And from the outside? This looks desperate. If you're someone who stopped watching during the Moffat era, and you hear that the new Doctor is played by Billie Piper? You're not going to think "wow, that's the kind of thing I'd like to see, better tune back in," you're going to think "wow, really? They're really trying everything to recapture the glory days, huh." And you'd be right.

(What about bringing back Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor? Wasn't that an even bigger example of stunt casting? Indeed it was, but it was explicitly done only for the 60th anniversary specials. Still, it was a very worrying sign, as many noted at the time)

Now, with all of that said, I don't think the situation is quite yet truly dire. I do expect there to still be more Doctor Who in the near-term future, and that's ample time to turn things around. And as mentioned above, while this sort of nostalgia-first writing was a big factor in the cancellation of the classic series, it was not the only one. And, at the end of the day, I'm an optimist: I'm going to be holding out hope that the creative team is able to make something good out of this.

But if Doctor Who continues to stay on this course, the harder it will be for me to maintain that hope.

what the fuck

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Promptly eliminate unknown factors

Well, when I gave up on Marenian Tavern Story after a few hours I decided to try something else I didn't have much in the way of expectations for and ended up with Death end re;Quest.

I'm pretty sure I originally saw it in a post of recommendations that also included Blacksmith of the Sand Kingdom, which is how I found the post in the first place, but I mixed this one up with a totally different game. I was very surprised when I opened it and it was very not the thing I expected.

And then I saw the Compile Heart logo and fully expected it to be terrible. The only thing I've played of theirs was a few hours of the first Hyperdimension Neptunia, which just really didn't do it for me. It felt like there was potentially something decent in there, but what I saw wasn't super well developed, the humor wasn't really my thing, and the writers/artists really needed a cold shower.

So given that, I wasn't really looking forward to anything particularly good or interesting when I started playing, and while the prologue was a little better than I expected and had a much different tone from what I've seen of their other stuff, it didn't really grab me. I was skipping through the dialogue as fast as I could read it and ignoring the voice acting, but like five minutes before I was ready to give up entirely it started getting slightly more interesting.

And then totally unexpectedly it just kept getting better?

If you had told me the horny on main people who make video games about the personifications of video game consoles turned into anime girls actually made a horror/sci-fi/isekai JRPG/VN hybrid that has fairly compelling writing and characters and plot and a reasonably creative battle system too I would not have believed you. But there it is.

It's not perfect, and I do have some criticisms, but I genuinely had a pretty great time with it most of the time. They dialed back their need to sexualize everything by like 80% (it's still there in some aspects but reduced enough that I could get over it, and a lot of it is avoidable) and replaced it with a surprisingly well told story instead.

They pace the reveal of the mystery pretty well, and it actually manages to remain interesting the more they reveal about how the world works, which I can't say for some games (looking at you, FFX, which for me was just one disappointment after another as they revealed more info about what was actually going on).

And the characters are actually pretty fun too. Most of them are pretty likable, and there's a good range in tone from casual socializing to horrifying trauma so you get to see them in a lot of different contexts that show them and their interactions with each other in a variety of ways. I don't think any of them are really blorbo material, but I did genuinely enjoy spending time with them in the past week.

Speaking of horrifying trauma, it earns its M rating pretty much entirely through that, and not through being horny like I'd have expected from Compile Heart. If you're not looking for terrible things happening to otherwise good people you've come to the wrong place. It's the "sometimes the world is awful and unknowable and bad things happen to people and make them suffer" kind of horror, not the jumpscare kind.

The combat is pretty silly too. It feels like the kind of thing where someone accidentally set some of the values very, very wrong, but then when they were testing it they realized it's actually awesome that way and then rebuilt the whole thing around it. Knockback on attacks is turned up to 11, and you can bounce enemies off each other, off walls, or off your other characters for extra damage, and if they collide with your characters they get an extra free hit. The first half of the game is basically "get pachinkoed idiot" and it's pretty great.

...but then around the middle when you start getting introduced to larger enemies it gradually becomes less and less fun until by the end it's just tedious. A lot of the bigger enemies are also a lot heavier and don't get knocked back very far, and a lot of the stronger attacks you get on some of the characters don't knock stuff back at all.

To make it more annoying, your attacks start missing more and more often later in the game, and it never explains why. Even with basically all my stats capped I was still missing like a third of my attacks in the last area, and I think stuff just has a fixed (and very high) chance to avoid attacks, which sucks and feels bad. Do not do this in a game. If you want to have some kind of accuracy/hit chance mechanic, explain how it works and give the player some way to work around it. It's very unsatisfying to constantly miss and not have any apparent way to fix your setup to do anything about it.

And then for bonus annoying points they took a perfectly good and unusual elemental system and made it way less relevant later on too. I was very pleased with them for making the elements moon/stars/sun instead of the usual fire/water/etc., and it was worthwhile using the right kind on the right enemies for a while for the extra damage.

And then at some point suddenly it stops mattering so much because the much, much bigger thing that affects it is that enemies have like zero defense against one of either physical or magical attacks and 90+% reduction to damage of the other type. Good news: there is no way to see this information anywhere in the game, although you can see what element they are. Knowing what element they are is great and all, but when you use the correct element they take extra damage from but they still take like 80 damage (and have 40000 health) because they're 99% resistant to magical damage or something and then you use the element they're strong against but in a physical version and they take 8000 damage instead it just again feels bad. And stupid. And don't do stuff like that in games. You just made one of your mechanics nearly irrelevant and introduced a new one that the player can only solve by guessing. No. Bad 🗞️

It's tolerable enough because the game isn't especially hard, but it was a bit disappointing that that aspect of the game went from way better than I expected to pretty mediocre and something I wanted to avoid by the end. There are various other mechanics you can screw around with, including (sort of) changing the genre of the game to a fighting game or a shooter or several other things, but the setup for that just isn't worth the effort 99% of the time when you could just win the fight faster without using it so I mostly didn't bother.

Also I played it on the Switch, and I have to say the Switch version is not a great port. All the 2D stuff is perfectly fine, but anything in 3D looks like garbage and runs like garbage, even with all the shadows and lighting effects turned off that they'll let you turn off. It looks like a low budget PS3 game and still struggles to hit 20 fps in some areas (but is 30 in others). Also the UI was clearly not designed with 720p in mind and some icons and stuff are pretty hard to make out (the text is all fine though).

I would say they should be ashamed of themselves, but they seem to have focused on making it nearly bug-free instead of looking good or running well, and I really do appreciate that. I only found a tiny handful of minor bugs, and nothing that really affected my experience of the game.

What they should be ashamed of though is the occasional intermittent horniness on the part of the writers/artists. Like it's fine if that's the kind of thing you're making and that's just what it's like and it's just not for me, but when that stuff pops up in this it just feels wildly out of place and breaks the tone they were going for with everything else going on. The characters having playful chatter with each other is actually good and keeps it from being too dismal the entire time (and makes stuff hit harder when it does happen), but it just gets weird when a character conspicuously tells people how bad they need to go pee enough times that it gets suspicious.

Sorry, otherwise good writer(s), I don't have a problem with you being into that, but I do have a problem with you inserting it into random scenes where it really doesn't fit with anything else going on where it's clear that it's either because you're into that or you're pandering to Compile Heart fans who are. Same with the glitch mode limit breaks where they lose 90% of their clothing. I was pleasantly surprised by their normal outfits being not overly sexualized beyond normal anime/JRPG levels, but those are clearly just there so people can see barely covered boobs and also feel out of place and are never addressed. Like the glitch mode itself existing is already contradictory to the story even ignoring that aspect of it.

And because of stuff like that and who it's made by I can't help noticing other stuff more than I maybe would've otherwise that's a bit more subtly misogynistic with how it's structured or framed, but it was at a low enough level and not so frequent that I couldn't look past it usually. It could've easily not been like that though without changing much.

Anyway, maybe I should end with something positive, because I did overall like a lot more about it than I disliked.

Oh, I can mention the voice acting. I wasn't really sold on it in the prologue and found it kind of annoying, but it got better as it went on in the first few hours, and at some point I realized it was overall actually pretty well done. It's criminal that only the Japanese VAs are listed in the credits, because the English language ones mostly did a great job. Lots of opportunities to get anywhere from slightly unhinged to completely feral, and they all went all in on it when given the chance. The localization in general was pretty good.

I would say more about the story too, but on the off chance someone stumbles on this post and doesn't want to be spoiled I won't go into much detail. There's a lot going on in it, but it mostly all comes together and somehow works. It's not on the same level as a really good VN like The House in Fata Morgana (which I really need to finish now that I apparently can read enough to make it through this), but I told someone a few days ago that I enjoyed the storytelling in this more than probably 90% of Final Fantasy games I've played, and I'm pretty sure I actually mean it. It's worth getting the actual true ending to see how it all turns out, even if they're very obnoxious and gate it behind NG+ (although since this is a hybrid VN it does have the skip features of a VN so you can do it in like two hours instead of the 30 it takes the first time around).

I hesitate to actually recommend it to people because of the intrusive sexualization that pops up at times, but if you know you can get past that and the death/violence/horror stuff it's a surprisingly good time. Unfortunately the sequel is supposed to be worse in every way, so it looks like I'll be going back to never playing Compile Heart's games ever again. I'm glad I accidentally played this one though.

[gofancyninjaworld]

Hello! I've been binging your posts abt opm and they're all so amazingly detailed and well written, there are some minor stuff I disagree with, but tbh that didn't lessen my enjoyment. Really, what makes opm so good is that you can enjoy it on a surface-level, but if you bother to prod and poke and investigate some more, it also greatly rewards the reader. Viewing it as a comedy or taking it straight as a bleak world, both could still work

Tbh when I read a part of Saitama's pov causing friction against the dog eat dog world of opm, from what I recall that you said something along the lines, if it's from Saitama's pov, it's a comedy, it's lighthearted, the monsters aren't threats they're annoyances (sure, some aspects of Saitama aren't always for comedy, but the point abt the pov still stands). It does serve as a kind of a break or at least a form of escapism that things would be ok, in contrast to whatever everybody else is experiencing (which is complete and utter hell). It was why Saitama could afford to be somewhat static in a sense

But I think 166 is such a crucial chapter, in that Saitama's pov greatly stops being comedic (there are some comedic elements still, but the lightheartedness has straight up gone and evacuated) and starts crashing and merging into the reality of the world of opm.

For once, we actually see some genuine, devastating consequences on Saitama's end, and it is something he is accountable for. I do recall that you said WC Saitama's issue is that no one really holds him accountable when it needs to (?). While manga Saitama gets a tasting dose of that from King countless chapters earlier, this time he gets a heavy and brutal dose of it. There's no sugarcoating this. While yeah I have no doubt the other heroes would come back, esp Genos, but the fact it escalated to this degree when it didn't have to, admittedly some of the blame fall on Saitama's shoulders. It may be God's will, it may have been Garou's fist that tore out the core, but it was also Saitama's carelessness that played a factor on why Genos is killed. For a man who can travel faster than the speed of light, was it really that impossible for him to arrive on time to stop Garou killing Genos?

He's not perfect. This is his lowest point as a hero — even a hero must be aware that people you care about can and will die in the field, but I guess Saitama got so swept up in his emotions and got his determination in his identity as a hero broken, that he pretty much said fuck it and tried to throw an earth shattering punch with everyone else as collateral. From what I can see it diverges from WC, this isn't really a "hero" vs. "monster" fight bc Saitama has stopped fighting this for the sake of righteousnes or justice or knocking some sense into Garou but rather bc it's personal and he's mad and he's grieving. Not to mention Garou has no agency here, his body hijacked by God.

By all accounts, I think Saitama genuinely wants to kill Garou — and I have no doubt Saitama will win the fight physically, ideologically... He may have already lost the moment he threw Serious Punch with complete and utter regard for those around him. The only thing I wonder if he'll lose again if he doesn't calm down and gets informed that Garou is being controlled by God.

On one hand, I'm sad that I didn't reply to this when you first asked this because my answer would have been very different. Still, events did unfold in an interesting way.

Thinking back on it, I agree that Saitama really did want to kill Garou. He might no longer remember this timeline, but we see it and we know that he can't claim not to understand where Genos is coming from on his revenge quest. He's the guy who would destroy everyone and everything.

The struggle he had with Garou was not so much to beat the guy down as it was with himself so that he did not lose who he was or what mattered to him in the process. That was a huge struggle for Saitama.

And that determination of his to keep Genos's core safe at all cost is probably going to be much more important than we realise even now but we'll have to wait and see what comes of it.

The fact that Saitama *did* come back in time in order to save everyone in time in the end would have totally pissed me off but for the fact that being able to do so came down to Saitama finding grace and empathy for Garou. That's what got through to him and got him to stop luxuriating in the bad guy who deserves to be hated schtick so instead he went '...but I can do better.' And did.

In a way, it's a shame that Saitama doesn't remember these events, or he'd realise that he also owes Blast his thanks for keeping the Earth safe from him. Hehe, instead he's slandered Blast, albeit without malice.

[aotopmha]

So, Metroid Dread's fairly minimalistic, but I think still effective storytelling got me interested in the series.

As I said, I don't think I have grown to care for many silent protagonists as characters (particularly in video games) because what you can do with a silent protagonist is limited no matter how hard you try and Metroid itself does have dialog in later games, it's just not voiced, so I'm not sure Samus technically even counts.

So it's, again, neat Dread managed to make me interested with just a few cutscenes where she's generally silent.

As such, I did some more reading on the series, looked up some cutscenes and it also turns out there is a short manga for the series, too.

Manga is definitely up my alley and this one looks briefer than playing 5 or more, I think, 10-hour or so games (something I do plan getting to), so I read the first few chapters.

I like how the manga seems to express Samus' vulnabilities because when it comes to female characters, an issue I've noticed is depicting vulnabilities by undermining or ridiculing the character.

Same goes for the opposite: sometimes female characters are just tough, perfect badasses without nothing else going for them and I'd even argue Dread leans into this a little too much, only punctuating Samus' humanity with details in character acting here and there.

Turns out Dread actually seems to play up her 'cool' factor and other games have a little more emphasis on the 'empathic' elements of her character, like her sparing the last Metroid and like all of the stuff in Fusion with Adam.

My interest came from the fact that she is clearly a character with a whole lot of history behind her, that all of this strength came from not only her DNA, but everything she has gone through and is just as much earned as it is present because of her DNA and I think you do get that sense of progression from what she has gone through. She has faced Kraid before and faced many monsters at this point. Her efficiency against them all is earned and does come together into a complete character arc in its own right if you look at the basics of each main game's story.

The manga has a pretty well-paced start, too, where you immediately learn what's up with her and have a solid character arc set-up. This young version of her doesn't really like fighting and hurting the enemy and isn't as good of a fighter, so her very first big character hurdle is to learn she can't do good without sometimes causing hurt in return.

It's good! I'm 100% invested now and am planning on finishing the manga, too.

I think the only other 'silent' video game characters that come to my mind I genuinely care for are classic Sonic (the modern incarnations also aren't very 'silent') and Luigi actually (the Luigi's Mansion games are actually with really fun silent cartoon storytelling), but it's really hard to depict an actual arc/character development with very minimal dialog, so most silent characters are just vehicles for the player to get immersed in the story and not really fully fledged characters, even if the cast around them is great.

And hey, turns out, Samus is now one I like, but as I said I'm not sure she really counts because she gets pretty detailed thoughts in Fusion and part of my attachment also comes from reading these first few chapters of the manga, where she is a fully fledged character and not just given a few lines here and there.

I might also be forgetting other silent video game characters, so I'm not actually sure on the favourite claim.

What a neat little series this is, though (and here's more stuff added to my backlog to eventually check out).

[tennessoui]

I'm a huge fan of your prompt fills + the pretty bird posts!! if you're willing though, I do have a question. Reading through all the PBATMB stuff, it feels like you're not into having other characters be important to mobi-wan and anakin? like padme or the unnamed student of anakin's, and I don't get why from a story-telling perspective? shouldn't new characters be introduced to keep the story going?

hey!!! so i read this at a gas station last night and then thought about it for like. two and a half hours because i want to give you a good answer because this is an interesting, valid question. (this is going to be a long rambly answer though just btw)

so two things you gotta understand about what i love most about AUs of canon + how I write Obikin.

First, the thing I love most about AUs (mob aus, pirate aus, modern aus, canon divergence aus etc etc) is that i like that it's basically saying: "these two characters are so important to each other that their relationship transcends their setting. they'd have strong feelings for each other no matter what the rest of the context of the story is." i love that. I love that that's implicit in every AU ever.

And second, I've talked about this a ton (usually in tags or ask answers) but my favorite Obikin is the kind where they're just so obsessed with each other that there's no room for anyone else romantically in their lives. A lot of my stories have pining/mutual idiots in love/obliviousness as a major plot factor, but in all of them, once they realize they love each other and are loved in return, yeah!! it's over for them!!! in my mind theyre together f o r e v e r

one of the things that made me start writing PBATMB was because I was really interested in playing with that idea of mutual obsession. I think there's honestly healthy mutual obsession (though it probably definitely isn't called that) where they just love each other so much (Keeping Up With The Skywalker-Kenobis for example, where they're in love and get married but they have friends and kids and colleagues)

but I really wanted to explore unhealthy, extreme mutual obsession. so I chose an AU where some aspects of the characters (Obi-Wan's need for control and Anakin's anger/violence) could be explored in a world that's dark and twisted and operating just outside of the law. That sort of setting let me really explore and heighten the strong canon connection between obikin. and i really wanted to push it towards unhealthy, towards extremes, on the opposite end of the spectrum from KUWSK.

Even Use My Body To Break Your Fall, while heavily leaning towards unhealthy mutual obsession, falls short of PBATMB. Sith!Obi-Wan dials back and changes his behavior because of Civilian!Anakin's attachment to the people around him.

But in PBATMB, they don't need anyone else because they have each other. Sure, they came into the story with family (Ahsoka for Anakin and Cody(&Rex) for Obi-Wan) and that's respected, but they have each other now. they're each other's often highest priority and obsession. It's cloying, it's terrible, it only works because they're both equally terrible. In different ways of course, but in my mind their first and primary characteristic is that they're in love with each other to the point of absolute insanity.

So there can't be a Padmé for Anakin. He wouldn't want one. He doesn't need friends (and I don't think any Padmé of mine would become friends with PBATMB!Anakin. She's too smart. Something's just off enough about him). There's no Bail or Quinlan Vos for Obi-Wan. He doesn't need them. He wouldn't want them.

I'm not really into the idea of them showing people genuine kindness, not outside of their immediate circle of family (like not killing someone). I'm just honestly not sure if they're capable of it. Yeah they can fake it, but I don't think they'd be able to genuinely inconvenience/risk themselves for someone else, someone who will never mean as much as they do to each other.

And honestly that's probably really hard for a lot of people to read at this point, because there's no upward growth. They're terrible. They remain terrible. Anakin would do terrible things to ensure his and Obi-Wan and their family's safety. Obi-Wan would do the same. From the beginning, I've been trying to write a story about people who are terrible. Borderline evil but genuinely in love. I wanted to see if I could. I like what I've come up with, but I do understand why some people might feel like it's just the same thing over and over again and I 100% respect that.

[shadyb00ts]

A Chromatica Review

So I never really use Tumblr, but when I do go on here, it’s pretty much to review something long-form. As you can tell from my profile picture here, and from my glowing review of ARTPOP from 7 years ago, I am and have always been a Gaga stan. Just read the melodramatic first paragraph of my ARTPOP review and you’ll get the gist of how much I idolize this woman. Well, idolized. Past tense.

That’s not to say I suddenly hate Gaga–I’m still going to follow her career and listen to whatever she puts out. There have just been several factors this past year that have changed my perspective on how I view her, this album being one of those factors. But I’ll get to those later. First I just need to lay out all my issues with this album.

Yes, this is going to be that type of review, so if you’re a fellow Gaga stan that isn’t able to criticize her work, this probably isn’t for you. Otherwise please read to the end if you can, because this is honestly about more than just the album.

Issue #1: The Mismatch Between Music & Aesthetic

When the cover of the album came out, I was so gagged. Like, just look at it! It’s striking, and Gaga has rarely ever disappointed me when it came to visuals. Actually, I can’t even think of any visual choices she made in previous eras that disappointed me. Even in the Joanne era, the pink cowboy hat became iconic and all of her aesthetic choices fit with the overall vibe of that album cycle.

So naturally, when she revealed to us the new visual direction she was taking for Chromatica, I assumed it would give us some insight into how the music would sound. The aesthetic of this era always gave me grungy cyberpunk and heavy machinery tease. When I look at the album cover for example, I can hear a song produced by SOPHIE in my head, the clink-clank queen herself. (There were rumors that Gaga was going to or did work with SOPHIE but that was never confirmed, unfortunately for us.)

For those unfamiliar with SOPHIE, here’s Ponyboy, which was most recently used in the ad campaign for Beyoncé’s Ivy Park clothing line.

That was the kind of production I was more or less expecting when taking the visuals into account; dark, metallic, basically similar to ARTPOP’s production (to be honest ARTPOP sonically fits better with the Chromatica aesthetic; think about it). 

But what did we get? Light, garden variety dance pop, a stark contrast to what the album cover and the promo images teased us with.

In the album, we get these orchestral interludes that are beautiful but don't really mesh that well with the actual tracks. The songs don't have any orchestral elements by themselves, so the interludes felt a bit misplaced to me. I wish they'd incorporated more of that into the individual songs, so that there could be an orchestral through-line to give more cohesion, like what Ariana did in her album positions by using strings. However I will say, the transition from Chromatica II into 911 remains unmatched.

I get that the album is supposed to sound happy, that it was her returning to her “dance pop roots” and singing about serious topics like mental health over happy-sounding beats, because it’s supposed to reflect her current mental state. I get all that. But if that was the case, I think she should’ve gone with a different visual direction to match. Personally I wish she went a different direction musically instead, but even if it was just the other way around and she changed the aesthetic of this era, my opinion of the album would probably improve slightly, cause at least there would be cohesion between the visuals and the sonics.

I look at that album cover, and promo images like the one below, and then I listen to songs like Fun Tonight or Plastic Doll for example, and there’s a noticeable dissonance there. 

You might be thinking “why are you so hard on her for this?” and I guess it’s because I’ve always held Gaga to a high standard when it comes to how she links those two elements. Think of every era she’s had in the past, and you remember how the visuals always just worked with their respective albums.

And that’s before I’ve even talked about the videos. Oh lord, the videos.

Issue #2: The Videos Are Lackluster (Except For 911)

It started with Stupid Love, the lead single. I had mixed feelings about that song in the beginning, but because I was so thirsty for new music from Gaga at the time, I played that song like hell when it leaked and it was on rotation for a good while. But when Gaga premiered the Stupid Love video, I’m not going to lie; I really didn’t like it.

The whole “shot entirely on iPhone” schtick really did the video a disservice. I’m sorry but it had to be said. If I imagined the video with a higher budget and more of a plotline as opposed to just being a dance video, I think it could’ve worked a lot better and been a decent introduction to not only Chromatica the album, but this fictional world/planet that she’s created. Which by the way, she didn’t really deliver in that regard either. 

The concept of Chromatica being a fictional world could have been expanded on further; she could’ve showcased all of the different factions (I know they were called “tribes” at first but that’s appropriative so I’ll call them factions) and perhaps had an overarching storyline about how these factions are at war, and it’s Gaga’s job as one of the “Kindness Punks”, as she calls it, to bring everyone together for a rave.

This is why I will always say it: Chromatica needed to be a visual album. Just imagine the storyline I mentioned just now being turned into a full-length feature, and now imagine the album’s orchestral intro playing as they’re essentially opening the gates to Chromatica and Gaga discovers this world for the first time, and then it goes into the first song Alice where she’s meeting all the factions and getting acclimated to her surroundings.

Honestly I could go on and on cause I have thought about this for SO LONG now and I’ll never shut up about it. It’s just such a missed opportunity cause the concept was just begging for a visual album. Anyway sorry for my tangent: back to the Stupid Love video.

The whole “shot on iPhone” gimmick really was unfortunate. Like she really ruined the quality of a music video because she wanted that Apple check??? Come on, Gaga, there could’ve been some other way to secure that check.

And then there was the Rain On Me video, which definitely have visuals that are a massive improvement from Stupid Love because it was professionally shot and cinematic. But even that was another purely dance video with not much in the way of storyline. Not that storyline is always required for music videos, but I think specifically when it comes to Chromatica, not having storylines in the M/Vs does a disservice to the overall concept.

I guess my issue with these two music videos, but mostly Stupid Love, is that Gaga isn't fully utilizing her COIN. Like she's successful enough to the point where she has budgets for these videos and can go all out, but doesn't. She has the capacity for extremely high production value, but up until 911, the last video she did that had that level of extraness was G.U.Y. I miss the days when her music videos were an event. I still remember where I was and what I was doing the exact moment the Telephone video came out. That's impact.

Taylor Swift I think is somebody who really knows how to blow her budget on a video. Look What You Made Me Do may have been a terrible song, but I always thought the video was sickening.

Anyway, I have no notes on 911. She's a masterpiece. If there was a music video category at the Oscars, I'd be campaigning for it right now.

Issue #3: Any Other Girly Can Do This

The thing I always loved the most about Gaga's music was that nobody was doing it like her. Everything she put out always felt like it was distinctly hers and hers alone, it's unmistakable. Even in Joanne, despite that album being a major departure from what she normally did.

I know Joanne is a very polarizing album, even for Little Monsters, but personally I've always loved it. Joanne was an album that I always knew she would make and I thought was essential to her career and body of work. Despite her straying away from pop for a more earthy, grass roots sound, it still sounded very much like her music. Even from the first track, Diamond Heart, her DNA is all over that.

It's difficult to explain what exactly I mean when I say there's a certain signature "Gaga-ness" or that she has a very specific DNA injected into her songs. If you've been a fan of hers for a long time or followed her career, you probably understand what I'm referring to. It's the way she laughs maniacally in the beginning of ARTPOP on Aura, how she says "I don't speak German but I can if you like, OW!" and proceeds to recite broken German on Scheiße, how she invented the phrase "disco stick", literally the ENTIRETY of The Fame Monster.

These examples probably give you the gist of what I'm trying to convey. Gaga is fucking weird. She has always been fucking weird and I love that so much about her. And her brand of weirdness was so specific that if any of the other pop girls tried to do what she did, it would have been cringey as hell. To me, the most disappointing thing of all with this album was that this weirdness that was so uniquely hers was missing.

It's there in brief moments, in tracks like Sour Candy, 911 and Babylon, but most of the album doesn't really sound like her music. It sounds like songs that she wrote for other people, like her old unreleased stuff. OG Little Monsters probably remember songs like Second Time Around and No Way. These were leaked unreleased songs that Gaga had written for other artists, and even though they were absolute bops, they didn't sound like her. They weren't supposed to.

A similar feeling I had was when her song The Cure came out a few years ago. I genuinely thought that was something she wrote for someone else, cause even though it was a solid pop song, it absolutely had zero Gaga-ness and any current pop girl could sing it. This pretty much encapsulates how I feel about the majority of Chromatica.

I was gonna say it sounded like songs that were written for Ally, her Star is Born character, but I think even those pop songs from the soundtrack sounded more Gaga than Chromatica does. 💀 I can easily imagine Hair Body Face being on The Fame.

Final Thoughts

It's funny that the last review I had posted on here before this was my review of Kingdom Hearts III. The Kingdom Hearts game series is something that's very near and dear to my heart, and I waited a wholeass decade for the third game to come out. And then it did, and I was so disappointed.

So you know what happened after that? What helped me deal with my disappointment of that game was my anticipation for Chromatica, or at the time it was still called LG6. I had no idea I would feel the same exact way about this album the way I do about KH3. Now when I think of both of these things, I'm mostly frustrated by all of the potential and the missed opportunities, but I also look at them with a certain fondness. I had fun playing KH3, and I also had fun listening to Chromatica, despite both of them disappointing me overall.

In the beginning of this review I said that there were certain factors that have stopped me from idealizing Gaga too much. Firstly it's because I'm much older now, and secondly it's due to the sheer state of the world this past year. The pandemic really precipitated the fall of celebrity culture, and all of that made me really examine how putting someone on such a high pedestal can be damaging in the long run.

Gaga is a human being and I haven't agreed with everything she's done, particularly how she handled the whole R. Kelly situation back in 2013. And also the simple fact that she's a white woman, we know how a lot of the time they can't help but show their asses and are bound to disappoint us in some way. I'm forever grateful for her artistry and how she saved my life when I was a suicidal little eighth grader, but I'm also going to hold her accountable for any of her mistakes, and I'd be ready to stop supporting her entirely if anything she does ever goes too far.

Now I stan artists for fun. It's not healthy to idolize them to the point of revering them. I mean, I like to make jokes like that about Beyoncé, like "no way on Beyoncé's green earth", etc. But even she is just a person that we shouldn't deify for real.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Chromatica being a lackluster album and era ended up being a good thing, because it helped me grow out of idolizing celebrities too intensely. Chromatica was pretty much the best disappointment I've ever listened to.

If you've read all the way to the end, thank you! Writing this was very therapeutic but also stressful; this is a second draft cause Tumblr fucked up my first post. 😭

Anyway, SAWAYAMA & Ungodly Hour are albums of the year. Argue with the wall.

[jlf23tumble]

Hi! I'm the girl direction anon, i just finished reading the fics and i just wanted to say thank you so much!! They were amazing! I loved all of objectlesson's fics! so great! one of my favourite authors for sure! Also you were right, reading about all this body positivity was so nice! it's way better than what the 'media' is trying to do now because it feels genuine and real! Really loved it! I was wondering if you have any recs with nonbinary/genderfluid characters? It's nice seeing those too

Omg, that’s the sweetest thing ever, I passed along your kind words, and she sends you oodles of love back! I absolutely *do* have some great fic recs for you...it’s a slightly tricky request in that having, say, a story with Harry in panties doesn’t in and of itself mean he’s a genderfluid character in it, but I think I know what you’re getting at, and I’ve definitely got you covered. Some of my very fave fics fall into this category, actually, which means this is gonna be kind of long, so under the cut we go...fingers crossed you haven’t read them all yet!

“Hush.,” by @wankerville, 41k words (E). “I don't like you like that, Harry.” “See,” Harry starts, Louis can hear the smile in his voice, “that's where I think you're lying.” An American high school AU where small towns suck, louis is losing it, and harry’s just too perfect. (This is right up there in my top five all-time fave fics, it’s just luminous, goddd, required reading; the author also wrote the strawberry milk series, which is similarly achingly good, but it has some heavier, abuse-related themes that could be triggering)

“Grenadine Sunshine,” by objectlesson/@alienfuckeronmain, 18k words (E).  He wants to taste the faint, sugary ghost of lip gloss, he wants to cup Harry’s face between his palms and swipe the shimmery wet shadows from beneath his eyes. He wants to show him everything he knows, even though he doesn’t know anything about this, about kissing boys or flirting with them or doing their makeup or even showing them it’s okay to want to wear makeup in the first place. (Phoenix wrote this story as an homage of sorts for Wankerville, and it’s a beautiful one of acceptance, love, and support)

“Chapter 4: Braids,” by objectlesson, 14.9k words (E). Timestamp for Grenadine Sunshine. (Part of a larger drabble collection, but a direct relation to the story above)

“Vinyl and Lace,” by objectlesson, 7.5k words, (E). Harry tries on a skirt in the X Factor dressing room as a joke. Louis doesn't think it's very funny. (While we’re hanging out with Phoenix, lol, an underrated beaut!)

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” by loadedgunn, 7.5k words (E). "You…" Harry touches his own mouth, teasing. "You ate her pussy?" "Yeah." Louis stops playing with Harry's cock and gropes his arse again, pulling his cheeks apart and pushing them back together over the thong. "Want me to eat yours?" Louis reenacts his first time, and Harry wants to be his good girl. (another one in my top five all-time faves, I’m always amazed at how “short” it is because JESUS, it’s so good, so complete, so beautifully characterized and written from beginning to end, LoadedGunn’s best work, come fight me)

“genderfluid!harry verse,” by istajmaal, 33.9k words (E). harry is a girl sometimes. louis loves her all the time. (This three-part series is old but GOLD, god, the characterization in this one...plus, this author is my hero for writing it in 2013, and I go back to it all the time)

“Nothing You Can Do (But You Can Learn How to Be You in Time),” by Teumessian, 28k words (E; needs ao3 account). Louis braids Harry’s hair. There are good times, bad times, fancy houses, supportive bandmates, secret boyfriends, small rebellions, bigger revolutions, some nail varnish, ribbons, cute clothing, and a Pinterest. (Awwww, the pinterest fic, one of my faves to rec, this author had me with the way they described Louis pushing up his glasses after a particularly difficult braid)

“She Feels So Good,” by Zedi, 4k words (E). That’s the voice that comes out when Harry’s in a skirt, nails done and gestures soft and flirty. That’s the voice Louis is a sucker for every time, even now when it’s coming from a prerecorded segment playing off a monitor. That’s Louis’ good girl. (A look at the Late Late Show appearance, and I love the way this authors switches pronouns when Harry switches gender)

“Warm Glow That Lingers On,” by Blake/@newleafover, 8.5k words (E). If Harry wants his nails painted red, he's got to earn it first. (It’s Blake, nuff said...god, I miss their writing in this fandom)

“it’s you i want to take apart,” by orphan_account, 6k words (E). He will readily admit that he likes to make Harry squirm sometimes, but this actually isn't about that—he just wants to help him get past whatever issue he has here. And, okay, he also really wants to see what Harry would look like with lipstick on, because he bets it would be really pretty.  (Read the author’s notes about the inspo on this one...2012!!!! Wow!)

“weird honey,” by orphan_account, 5.4k words (E). They fuck, kind of a lot. It started out as just something to do, to wind down or pass time. Now they do it at least once a week, and Harry’s not sure if that means something. It’s not as if they only fuck each other, but-But there’s no one else Harry could imagine bringing this to. (PWP where Harry is not 100% at home in his body and he and Louis use a sex toy to help work through the problem.)

“I wanna see the way you move for me baby,” by Tomlinsontoes, 3.3k words (M). Louis walks in on Harry all dolled up. (LBD is literally about Harry, and this author...and a lot of others...knew it all the way back then)

“if they find out, will it all go wrong?” by blankiehxrry, 3.4k words (NR). Madison square garden shenanigans. (This one’s from a long time ago, part of a series where the author explores a bunch of things, and here, Harry has a panic attack, and Louis helps him out)

@vondrostes​ writes AMAZING genderfluid/trans Harry, usually in a variety of pairings; I’ll put the h/l ones here, but go check out his work...especially the newer stuff from hs1, god, it’s so good!! 

Made of Lightning, liam/harry, louis/harry, liam/louis/harry, Harry has a secret that could tear the band apart if the truth came out. But keeping it might be even worse.

Wait and See, lots of harry pairings, Cara and Harry are trans, “I’m just—” Harry said, pausing to smooth out the wrinkles in her skirt. “I’m nervous,” she admitted. Cara reached out to tug at the hem of her skirt, guiding her over until she was stood between his legs. He pulled her down for a quick kiss, not wanting to mess up her makeup. “You look perfect,” he reassured her.

Second Spring, harry/louis, a continuation of the Pussy Pride drabbles from June, an expanded series of an American Larry AU where Harry is trans (it is SO GOOD AND GRAPHIC AND THOSE DRABBLES KILLED ME, I CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS SERIES TO FINISH SO I CAN RANDOMLY REBLOG IT ALWAYS)

And finally, dear anon, this is not at all part of the previous list, but it’s all about body appreciation/worship, so I figured you’d enjoy! “I Can’t Hear You,” by kikikryslee, 9k words (E). The one where Harry is self-conscious about his body because it's not the 'typical omega body' and Louis shows him why he loves that.

[youtubetheories101]

Roman Analysis

If I am going to be doing analysis of the sides why not start with the noblest Roman of them all! Let's go plebs.

We're going to analyze and sort things into 4 different categories which. They'll probably overlap like a lot but it's fine. (ihope) So the categories are going to be

Moral Alignments/Standards

Social Standing/Interactions

Personal Issues

Use/Goals for Thomas

Ready? No? Me neither but let's dive in.

Moral Alignment/Standards

Neutral Good

I debated with this and Chaotic Good a bit, however, Neutral Good fits better.

Roman would prefer to follow the law but only if the law is just and upholds to his moral standards.(kinda funny he was a judge.) He wants to help and while he can be self righteous at times and prideful, he generally tries to treat people well and uphold a standard of purity.

He may have moments of doubt such as in SvS. He was the judge because he was the one who was in the most agreement with Deciet, however he chooses what he believes is best for Thomas in the end.

Social Standing/Interactions

This one is an interesting one for Roman. He is generally respected among the other sides, however he is somewhat antagonistic. He tends to but heads with Virgil and Logan most, because of their criticisms of his optimistic attitude, and at times his input will be ignored.

His antagonism to the other sides has improved however it seems. He's genuinely making an effort to be more understanding, lessening the nicknames and trying not to judge people because they don't agree with him.

(ex: SvS "Are you seriously so close-minded to think that everything said by someone you don't like is automatically untrue?" and DWIT "Oh, shut up, Nerdy Wolverine. No! Ugh! I mean-*sighs* I'm sorry, Logan. I didn't mean that.")

Now to analyze interactions with specific sides:

Patton & Roman: A friendly interaction, mainly positive, however Roman has belittled Patton before. They do care about each other which has been shown and will often agree on matters of Romance and Dreaming. There doesn't seem to be any antagonism between the two of them besides sometimes not taking each seriously.

Roman & Logan: Friends however, they argue plenty. They can be annoying to each other, and fight over ideas over Thomas's future and what he should do. That is also, oddly enough what they agree on the most, even creating alliances against the others when arguing over it. They are both critical of each other but will support each other in some of their pursuits. They have been trying recently to understand each other and be more kind.

Virgil & Roman: They started off really rocky. Really rockily. However over the episodes they get better, and are friends now. At the beginning they mainly fought and didn't find a common ground until The Dark Side of Disney and even then it didn't really relive the tension between the two until AA. They tentively became more aware of each other, and Roman even started including him more in videos such as the Christmas episode.

Roman & Deciet: Roman and Deciet actually seem to get along fairly well. Deciet plays to Roman's sensitivities and desires, advertising to his ego I suppose. Roman even comes to Deciet's defense, probably because he's trying to be more... trusting? Less judgemental? Not sure which exactly but he's trying. They're an odd duo but they seem friendly.

Remus & Roman: They have literally interacted twice and Remus knocked him out twice. They're definitely more of Cain Instinct siblings than anything else. And from what Roman has said on Remus, he dislikes him, due to him being like a mirror image of everything he doesn't want to be. I want to see more of them because I love sibling dynamics and I want to see if they could ever be nice to each other but I don't think we will. :(

Personal Issues

Oh this is going to be fun because Roman still hasn't had his issues resolved. We've had an episode on his issues (Am I Original?) but it didn't really address what was wrong and it's ending didn't really... fix anything. Roman was still dissatisfied. And it didn't address all of them. But I think it's coming up because at this point it's been lead up to for so long that if it doesn't I will be very surprised and riot. Help! Him! So what are these issues?

Well the one addressed in An I Original was his dissatisfaction with his own work and perfectionism because he can't let Thomas down and while it was,,, handled? Sorta, it felt like it was putting a bandaid on a bullet wound. Roman still seems to be disappointed in his work and instead of well, dealing with said issue, internalizes it.

He also seems to be disappointed in... well himself and Thomas's relationship status. He's lonely, and his view of his own worth seems to... be lacking.

Examples of said thoughts:

Am I Original?

[Roman]: No! If I can't think of an original idea, what would you think of me? I can't.... let you down.

[Roman]: It's just... I only ever pushed you toward your dreams, Thomas. And I never said a bad word about you. Why don't you want to listen to me more? This whole thing could've been avoided if you did.

Moving On Part 2/2: Dealing With Breakups

[Roman]: Possibly because it reminds you of a time when you felt... worthy of someone.

Crofter's: The Musical

[Roman]: Roman, you dunce! You made a joke and now they'll think that everything is fine.

Learning New Things About Ourselves:

[Roman]: I'm sorry that everything I make isn't the Creation of Adam...

[Roman]: Earlier. I made you angry. I do that quite a bit actually... I provoked you and you retaliated with violence. (Under breath) Like a stupid caveman.(Aloud) But! I am responsible for my actions and my actions alone...So, I'm sorry

[Virgil]: You feel low.

[Roman]: That's not true!

[Patton]: It's okay!

[Roman]: Don't assume!

[Thomas]: You don't need to save face.

[Virgil]: In almost any case,

[Patton and Virgil]: We'd embrace you.

[Roman]: That's rich...

[Roman]: -sighs- It's so hard to create anything that I'm proud of when it's critiqued, so harshly... by you.

[Logan]: What?

[Roman]: Nothing ever seems to be good enough, professional enough... Serious enough for you.

Selfishness vs Selflessness:

[Deceit]: Wow, guys, it's so cool how you never listen to Roman.

[Virgil]: Why is he still here?

[Roman]: Why am I still here?

[Deceit]: Wooow.

[Virgil]: I meant Deceit!

[Roman]: The one and lonely! What? Freudian slip.

[Roman]: It's my sworn duty to help Thomas achieve his hopes and dreams.But Thomas wouldn't dream of attaining his hopes through deceitful means.

[Deceit]: Sure, and you want that stuff that makes you happy, right?!

[Patton]: Do I!

[Roman]: Do I...

Dealing With Intrusive Thoughts

[Roman]: *sighs* Yeah. It's a little like looking into a funhouse mirror, but instead of a giant head, or, like, long legs and a tiny torso, ... it shows you... everything you don't wanna be.

His self worth is... lacking in many aspects. But I don't think it's what's going to be addressed next, I think that's going to be Virgil being an ex-darkside. So hopefully it's soon but... I'm not sure. And I'm not sure if the others are noticing this issue.

Use/Goals for Thomas

He is "Good" Creativity, Ego, Dreams, Romantic aspirations, and Passion. He also is the embodiment of his femininity and masculinity at the same time? Fuck gender roles is what I'm getting from this. Of course he is still a "Manly man, a man who is Manly!" but Thomas has said he represents femininity in a Q&A. So.... fuck gender roles. That's the answer right? Probably.

What he aspires for Thomas to do is to be able to persue his dreams and goals, as evidenced with "I only ever pushed you toward your dreams, Thomas." (AIO) and "It's my sworn duty to help Thomas achieve his hopes and dreams." (SvS) Roman typically goes after this by pursuing a new role, a new romance, or encouraging Thomas to try things to expand his career. Since Thomas is an Actor/Youtuber, Roman is able to influence a lot but seems to be willing to take the side line if Thomas doesn't feel comfortable following said dreams in the way he intended.

He's a dreamer, through and through, complete with the idealization factor. He encourages Thomas to accomplish his dreams but only if Thomas is willing to do so in the way purposed. Which makes sense seeing as he is,,, Thomas.

So that is my Analysis for this week, and until next time, it's just a theory.

A SANDERS SIDES THEORY.

Thank you for reading. Peace out!

[elizabethrobertajones]

Suddenly I'm getting these psychopath!dean thoughts after reading the new buckleming interview. God help me

I need to preface this with a signal boost of @justanotheridijiton‘s gif request :P

https://justanotheridijiton.tumblr.com/post/179162557389/alright-i-need-me-a-gifmaker-willing-to-make-a

Anyways after that completely irrelevant thing I put here, and, weirdly, an aside that I swear I remember her talking a lot about how Dean was going to be affected by like… tentacles of trauma or something afterwards at SDCC, here’s the interview:

https://tvline.com/2018/10/17/supernatural-spoilers-season-14-big-bad-not-michael/

As for the beloved Winchester trapped inside Michael, if/when Dean is eventually freed, he won’t be as traumatized as one might think by the horrible things the archangel did while sporting his vessel. “Dean’s been contaminated by Cain. He’s a tough guy,” Ross-Leming notes. “His body’s sort of accumulated a lot of, I think, antibodies against evil, so he’ll be OK. He knows how to handle himself, even though he’s been altered. But there is a little bit of a surprise, in terms of this semi-possession, which I can’t tell you about. There’s a little bit of a twist.”

Given that I’m at an all time low for thinking she knows what she’s talking about after watching so many interviews with her in a morbid attempt to learn anything I can about this fascinating and terrible person, I can barely lend any credence to what she says, whether these are points that will be discussed in the show or things that she has thought for herself at random and may or may not be the subtext to her specific chunks of the show and nowhere else :P That lack of faith in this specific writer makes it super hard to engage with the commentary.

She says he’s been contaminated, which is more of a poisoning which would imply ongoing damage that creates ill-effects, and also that he has antibodies, which are positive and good things in the body that are created to protect us from the bad, and would be making the opposite point that instead of him picking up more and more badness to the point that it affects his personality, that his experiences have given him a stronger immunity to lingering corruption and that he will survive relatively intact.

(vaccinate your kids)

Which means she’s literally saying he’s altered, he’s semi-possessed, he’s fine, and that somewhere in that there’s a twist. And this also:

Plus, this ordeal with Michael “doesn’t take as big a toll” on the hunter as, say, his experience in Hell did, the EP reveals, “because there’s something else that’s going to happen that will take a bigger toll on Dean, and he has to pay attention to that.”

reads to me as another instance where she has her focus on what she herself is writing, and not particularly on what the other writers might do. I doubt that in a season where Dean started off possessed, that the other writers will not want to tackle the rich, rich psychology of post-Michael Dean, whether she has thought it was interesting or not. 

I kind of feel like whatever she’s trying to say, the message is that she hasn’t focused on Dean’s post-Michael trauma, is interested in something else, and has written him coming out of it relatively unscathed and focused on something new, which is actually fairly common for Buckleming episodes, to fling us to a new event and not focus on what had been previously traumatising the characters, as they’re kind of terrible at doing deep introspective episodes with the pacing to allow for that :P 

But away from all that… Yeah, I have always liked the whole Mark of Cain destined for Dean stuff from back in season 9/10 and find it really interesting even if it was wearing by the end of season 10, I had a lot of fascination in the character study of Dean, the psychology behind demon!Dean, and all the stuff that was brought out over the seasons of how the Mark affected him, that there was a connection back to Michael and Lucifer, and how it seemed like Cain was the Dean mirror who would have been the more natural Michael!vessel and Abel the Lucifer one and so on. And in 10x14 the interest in Cain decimating the planet because he believed his descendants were inherently killers, and how he identified Dean as a killer. 

Which is a struggle Dean has had for a long time through canon, especially since 2x03 when Gordon showed up to highlight the difference between killing monsters for bloody minded vengeance and pleasure, vs being heroic and making the good calls. And I think why Michael has symbolically ended up with vampires as his choice of monster to play with now, because Dean’s struggle is so tightly wrapped up with vampires, whether it be turning into one, or befriending Benny and clinging to the purity of Purgatory. Which is a state very similar to what Michael identifies in the vampires as a good motivation and something admirable to spread and remove all this dumb human confusion. 

In every way Michael has been designed from the start to be the worst!Dean, all his struggles with being the elder son and dealing with Lucifer. His dialogue especially in 5x22 is anvil heavy to make him a Dean parallel, except showing where he lacks love and compassion and forgiveness, the traits that make Dean show up to Stull to save Sam, while Michael is banished for being terrible, and symbolically was a moment where we could see shunning of how Dean was raised (it was “jacked up” Dean says in 2x03 when he first reflects on how the world wasn’t as black and white as he thought) and all this is blamed on John, or in Michael’s case, on Chuck.

They’re both given the same burdens of killing their brothers, and Michael goes so far as to make that awful spear (which was his reintroduction into the narrative - the toxicity of his choice to kill Lucifer enacted on Cas as an innocent bystander to all this, one of Michael’s former underlings being stabbed by one of Lucifer’s former underlings). Michael has already banished Lucifer to the cage once, and is fully committed to the apocalypse and killing his brother a second time. For all Lucifer’s flaws, I think he would genuinely hesitate to try to kill Michael in all the iterations of these fights, which is how in this fable, that we know at least 4 enactments of JUST in the primary set of Michael vs Lucifer before we get to all their mirrors in Cain & Abel, Gordon and his sister (and Jake from 2x22 and his) etc, and Sam and Dean… Michael kills Lucifer almost every time unless stopped, and many of the worst mirrors do too. Cain asks Dean why he didn’t kill his, as if fully aware of the weight of how every Michael has his Lucifer, and Dean says you never give up on family, ever. Dean has love, and that is why he said yes to Michael.

So it’s that balance that there’s a killer streak in them, that Dean can descend into states of killing for purity, for the mindlessness of it, that he becomes a tool, a blunt little instrument, and finally the Michael Sword, and yet he also has this ultimate power of love that the universe literally turns around and has shifted on its axis multiple times because of, because of all these people, Dean is the one who never gives up on family. So the issue of how murderous Dean is is REALLY REALLY interesting, like how they got him to break in hell, bookending his power of love saving of the world in 5x22, from his worst to his best. And then on it’s “oh you’re torturing again!?” as a sign that Dean is in a bad place. And of course now Michael in Dean is torturing vampires, so this is the absolute culmination of all the darkest parts of the symbolism and themes that make up Dean’s darkest side, and he’s being made to live through all of them right now. 

However, I expect Eugenie to consider maybe like 2 facts from that whole thought process while writing because she’s just so wildly bad at this whole thing… So, yeah. I’d like to see what Meredith does with this instead, by a factor of millions. 

[aviewfromtheclouds25]

I've missed your Rebecca theories! Not that there's been anything to salivate over lately. Her sketchiness has died down a bit. I still think she's sketchy but that may be residual bias. But this rebooted Ross connection is suspicious. Did they really need her to be his unsuspecting drug dealer? I'm sure he can steal pills from other people who he didn't sleep with and possibly fathered a child with. Had no idea she even took painkillers.

I’m glad you sent me this, anon, because I have too many thoughts on all of this right now so was planning on making a post anyway haha!

I just want to note first though that I’m actually really enjoying everything with Ross and Rebecca these days - individually and together. I’d always liked them as a pairing (admittedly they were never on the scale of Ross and Donna, but they worked far better together than Dross ever did for me), but I’m genuinely loving this dynamic of these two lost souls supporting each other right now. It feels very natural and I feel invested in both storylines. I think Ross’s storyline has been really strong and moving, and Mike Parr’s been giving some really compelling and heart-wrenching performances. It’s nice to see him be given something proper to get his teeth into again.

And as for Rebecca - theories aside - I’m actually really enjoying / appreciating the direction they’re taking her character in nowadays. (I’m not saying I’m suddenly a Rebecca fan haha, but I’m appreciating her as a character nowadays.) Again I feel invested in her storyline and it’s actually really nice to see Emily get to do more, she’s having to highlight all these different sides to Rebecca’s personality right now and I think she’s doing a really good job. Because you know what they’ve done, anon? By actually taking Rebecca’s character in a direction, rather than just leaving her floating neither here nor there because they just never committed one way or the other, they’ve actually given the character some substance. And that’s why I’m now able to enjoy / appreciate her as a character. Because now she actually feels like one. To me at least. That substance, however, still doesn’t seem to extend to Seb and this brings me to the theories…

So this is where I currently stand on Theory Realm - I kept saying before that I’m not going there because personally I’m enjoying the narrative the way it is and have never wanted a twist for the sake of it. For me, a paternity twist and The Theory always went hand in hand as it was the decision to make Robert cheat in the first place (rather than the presence of the baby) which I found disappointing because I just didn’t feel like that was Robert at that stage (although a couple of days after The Incident, I wrote a mammoth post trying to get into the mindset of the storyliners/writers as they got into the mindset of Robert in order to make sense of why they felt like it was how Robert would handle the situation - yet another post which was never posted but I found it helpful at the time to understand the decision haha.). But I’ve also always maintained that the best way, for me, for The Theory to play out would have been as part of Robert’s breakdown and therefore by Christmas. So personally I’m quite happy for the narrative to continue the way it is now - saying that, I poured so much into the theories they’re always going to have a little piece of my heart and part of me can’t help but still want The Theory as @itwasjustmisplaced and I dedicated so much to it and of all the theories we discussed constantly, it’s the only one not to happen onscreen. So for the sake of myself and Taryn, and our sanity, it would still be quite nice and exciting haha! So that’s where my confliction on Theory Realm lies and why I’ve said I wasn’t going there, but it’s all still been going on in Theory Realm throughout and with each passing episode it feels like the show itself is literally trying to drag me back there… So, here we go, anon…

Rebecca’s relationship with Seb. I said her character feels like it has substance which it was lacking before - which is evident just in her interactions with other characters being far less about plot, but this doesn’t extend to Seb. Apart from her breaking down when she handed Seb over to Robert, we didn’t see any more of that time from her perspective - and we are actually seeing her perspective these days, so why not with Seb? Why not show her struggling without him, particularly as he was the one constant in her routine and structure which would surely be crucial and have a big impact on her symptoms? Instead we got Robert’s perspective and Aaron bonding with Seb, while Rebecca disappeared until she popped up in the pub (wearing that grey jumper) looking for a job (with Charity commenting on her lack of blinking, I hope you all picked up on that haha)… So is this because Seb is staying as a permanent fixture with Robert and Aaron, or because he’s going to be taken away from them and therefore it was necessary to build that bond as a family (which was always part of The Theory and one of the reasons the break-up parting didn’t make sense to me at the time.)..? (Or alternatively was it a simple matter of timing because look at Vanessa - she got suspended but we haven’t seen anything since of how she’s coping with being in a different role, how Paddy and Rhona are coping with the workload without her etc. Sometimes it is just down to screentime and other storylines taking precedence at that point.) Because what we are getting with Rebecca and Seb is Lachlan feeding her the line that Robert would still try to take Seb away from her. Are we due that custody battle that was prematurely speculated about after all..? And if so, will Joe Tate play a role as - sadly - he’s also been a poignant connecting factor in all of this…

The Ross connection. (They had already planted the painkillers seed by the way - when she left Seb on his own it’s because she’d run out of painkillers for her headaches so went to get some from the shop, but forgot when she was there and came home with only a magazine and some chocolate.) Now, on the surface, it kind of looks like they’ve just re-established the connection between Ross and Rebecca but actually their storylines have been connected throughout. Even as far back as January, when Robert was planning on taking Seb, Ross was there (with Moses) buying into the situation with his quips about Adam not being able to run forever… Also note, Ross has actually only been onscreen with Seb once - helping Robert with the pram and his stuff outside the café. That’s it. But actually, the biggest connection is that they’re both going through health storylines right now and these have been intricately linked from the start…

Ross hanging around making jibes shortly before the crash;

The day of Ross’s attack, Rebecca had a turn and fainted;

Which brings me to the first point of the Joe factor - obviously it was Joe who was supposed to be in Ross’s shoes, but instead it was he and Graham who found and helped Ross;

The day Robron reunited - alternatively known as that time Robert left the front door open for a whole night - Ross was alone at home, unable to open his front door and afraid when the pizza delivery guy came knocking, while two (I think) doors down we also had a shot of Robert closing the door, not wanting to open the front door on which Aaron was knocking - except eventually he did, and he left that door wide open (intentionally or not haha)… The door to Rebecca and Seb’s home…;

Point two of the Joe factor - Rebecca went and attacked Joe - who was the one supposed to be on the receiving end of the attack on Ross - and when he discovers the cctv footage of Graham with Simon (aka clues to Ross’s attack) we think this is the footage he’s about to show Graham but instead he plays Rebecca’s attack on himself;

Point three of the Joe factor - Joe had Rebecca arrested to get one over on Robert. Note, Rebecca was wearing her blouse from The Incident night for the first time in a long time and obviously there was quite a big focus on it at the police station… Now, Robert went after Joe for this, as predicted, so does that make the speculated custody battle seem more likely..? Personally I don’t think Joseph Tate is above manipulating an ill and vulnerable Rebecca (with the help of Lachlan’s whisperings of course) to try to take Seb away from Robert and maybe due to the legality side that’s how the paternity test finally comes about to prove Robert’s rights - imagine Joe’s delight if it turned out Seb wasn’t Robert’s son at all…

And then of course Rebecca and Ross finally started sharing scenes together again…

Rebecca and Charity defending Ross against those awful girls - two exes: one, the mother of his son who was revealed to be his as a “Who’s the daddy?” twist and who has proven to be Ross’s anchor and purpose to get him through all of this right now (there’s been such a heavy focus on his relationship with Moses and lines of dialogue like “Am I still your daddy?” which could be read into if you want to go there, but personally I don’t want to detract from the actual story they’re showing with Ross as I’ve found it all heartbreaking.); the other, the mother of a son who could have been his except the question of “Who’s the daddy?” never came…

Their bonding and hanging out together, so supportive of each other, but Ross alluding to something more happening and saying “It’s not like you’d remember it anyway.” Which on its own doesn’t seem like anything more than a Ross quip, but this was while Rebecca was wearing The Incident blouse…

Now, add all of this to the fact that Lachlan used the line the other night about “all of our secrets” - plural, not just the truth of how the crash happened… And remember Rebecca said, “The thing about secrets is you have to be comfortable keeping them.” Well Rebecca isn’t comfortable with that anymore, she no longer has that level of control over the information she reveals… And on that front, isn’t it cruelly ironic that we, the audience, are being treated to a trip down memory lane for Rebecca while she herself is struggling to remember anything? Not just with Ross, but with Debbie (responsible for Ross’s attack and discussing Joe - connections) and also bringing up Vic’s “obsession” with having a baby… If there was to be a twist, they’ve set it up perfectly to allow themselves to be a bit creative with it… Maybe we will get that Memento style flashback we all asked for after all. :P But if that were to happen, why not go a little further and give us an extra big twist? Maybe Rebecca’s initial injuries were sustained much earlier and the crash exacerbated them - perhaps that bonfire night when she was knocked out and Chrissie left her for dead was the start of it all, maybe this is why there has been inconsistencies with her character, maybe this is why she regularly told people different stories, maybe she never slept with Robert at all but like him she just assumed because she couldn’t remember..? And maybe this is why she keeps wearing that black and white coat again which she wore that bonfire night but hadn’t actually been around much last year… I mean, this is just a wild bit of theorising for fun, but with the situation they’ve put her into almost anything is possible haha.

So yeah, I still don’t know how I feel about the prospect of anything happening, anon. Literally all the signs are still there, it’s just how we choose to interpret them. And I’m just not sure at this stage because I’ve moved on with the narrative, but still there’s a niggle. Alas.

[phantastus]

Hi Kit!! I was thinking about Shattered Memories for the first time in a little while and so I decided to search your blog about your opinion on it and you said it frustrates you, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it if you're interested? :)

Oh man, what a coincidence. I was just talking about this with @dunglizard.

Hmm… to condense my thoughts on it, my basic opinion is that while I did enjoy playing the game, there was a lot ABOUT it that was frustrating. Most of my issues with it have to do with wasted potential and the disrespectful attitude of the people making it, and then also there were gameplay aspects that were frustrating too. Of the two, the gameplay aspects are more forgivable imo, because like, no game is perfect and they really were trying to do something new, which is risky and doesn’t always succeed even with the best of intentions.

But to be clear– I had fun playing it! The story was compelling, the character writing was great, and the entire visual makeup of the game was haunting and beautiful. There was a LOT about it that I find really commendable!

And, really, what made it so frustrating to me was the fact that those aspects of it… deserved better, and were sorely let down by the things that WEREN’T good about the game.

I’ll put my negativity under a readmore because it got really long.

(disclaimer: I’m an angry old Silent Hill fogey and while I think I’m generally more reasonable than a LOT of fans, I’m still exactly the kind of person that Tomm Hulett likes to chortle about never being able to please, so like… keep that in mind.)

So uh, we’ll start with the gameplay I guess!

I love the idea of a no-combat Silent Hill game, and I remember when the game had only just been announced, I spent so much time chatting with friends about how a Silent Hill game featuring a protagonist who had a valid reason not to be able to fight the monsters (such as a small child, or an elderly or disabled person) would be really, REALLY cool. But even with Harry 2.0 as the playable character, I was still looking forward to what I thought was probably going to be a stealth-based Silent Hill game, which was SO exciting for me because the most scared I’ve ever been while playing games as a kid were ones where you had to sneak, with no option for combat (guess who nearly had a fucking heart attack every single time I had to sneak out of the Slytherin Common Room in the Harry Potter + the Chamber of Secrets PC game? spoilers it was teenage me). If you were caught, that was it. And the trailers for the game seemed to indicate that this would be the case, with mechanics for hiding from the monsters so that they wouldn’t find you. You know, like what would make sense for a no-combat horror game. This is a common mechanic for horror games both indie and mainstream NOW, but at the time, the only major one I remember knowing about was Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which blew everybody’s MINDS with how pants-shittingly scary it was, and the thought of an SH game trying the same thing was like:

But then when the game came out, that mechanic wound up being… kind of broken. Maybe the AI for the monsters was just ramped way up or something, but hiding essentially felt useless, since there was basically never a time when the monsters WEREN’T chasing you. No matter how far ahead of them you got, they still seemed to know exactly where you were and would catch up to you within a few seconds. If you DID manage to hide, most of the time they seemed to telepathically know you were there anyway and would drag you out. Not to mention, since you pretty much had to run the entire time without slowing down or stopping, there was no time to check the map and, as the courses got more and more difficult, they basically stopped being scary. 

There was no time to actually breathe and build up that apprehension of “Will it find me? Did I lose them? Is it safe to pull out my map and figure out where to go?”– instead it just became an obstacle course race where all the other participants were not only more in-shape than you but also knew the course by heart and wanted to eat you. What should have been heart-stoppingly terrifying and dread-inducing just turned into “oh FUCK now I have to run around at breakneck speed for twenty minutes and hope that I’m going in the right direction”, and that just got… really aggravating after awhile. It could have been really good, and it just… wasn’t. 

Pictured above: me thinking I’ve taken a new path for the 20th time only to emerge directly into a Raw Shock army who already  knew I was coming.

At best, watching Harry get repeatedly dogpiled by Raw Shocks every time my thumb faltered was pretty funny. But they were going for adrenaline rush and instead wound up with yackety-sax. Not a good move for a game boasting about how damn scary it was. The non-chase portions of the game definitely had a lovely, dread-filled atmosphere, but the fact that you were never in any kind of danger until the scripted events where the Obstacle Course Race From Hell happened kind of dampened their effectiveness, too. 

ANYWAY, onto the other stuff, which I concede is more personal than objective. But I do feel really strongly about it, so here goes.

Originally, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was going to be an entirely new entry in the series, not only featuring a new story and characters but also the first female protagonist since Heather Mason. Between THAT and the unique atmosphere that SHSM had, I really, REALLY think that it would have been an awesome entry to the continuity, and GOD does Silent Hill need more female protagonists!

But somewhere down the line, that idea was scrapped in favor of the “re-imagining” idea, so instead of a new entry to the series, instead we got… a new entry where the characters had the same names as the ones from SH1, despite resembling them only in the most superficial of ways, and also you’re playing as a dude instead of a girl because of course you are. The honest truth is that if those familiar names were filed off and only a few minor tweaks made to the story, it would STILL be a completely original entry, which makes the re-imagining aspect feel jarring and cheap– the game really felt like it was banking on the shock value of Harry Mason Actually™ being an alcoholic womanizer and Dahlia Gillespie Actually™ being a hot sexy twenty-something, etc more than anything else– when the truth is, if they had just trusted in the story they were telling and the genuine emotional impact of the characters’ problems, they would have had an equally (if not MORE, imo) impactful and memorable game.

Instead, the SH1 aspects felt forced and ugly, and when you factor in Kaufmann 2.0’s smug soliloquey at the finale about accepting that your [Cheryl’s AND the player’s] perfect image of Harry Mason was wrong~ and unrealistic~, the entire story felt like a smirking hamfisted dickpunch aimed at people who enjoyed the original Silent Hill story about a diminutive and flawed (yes, even in the original canon, he WAS flawed) but determined man who rescued his child from a nightmarishly abusive home situation. 

Reading Tomm Hulett’s opinion (pictured above: me reading almost anything Tomm Hulett says) on the game only reinforced that impression– I honestly don’t feel like going and looking up the interview because it pissed me off but it mostly consisted of insisting that SHSM was “as canon as any of the other games” and was supposed to be considered a viable in-universe ending to SH1 (despite… literally being an alternate universe BY DEFINITION and not being continuity-compatible with the other games). Given Hulett+Co’s consistent obsession with “fixing” the original games (see the HD collection debacle, during which the original voice actors/actresses were mocked rudely and key dialogue changed to be “more believable” despite the new dialogue being totally deaf to narrative, characterization, and tone), it’s really hard not to take the “We fixed Harry Mason to be more realistic and the entire message of the game is about how silly and fantastical the original character of Harry Mason was, hohoho” attitude as being deliberately condescending and self-masturbatory.

Not to mention, while I have NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER with the characters of SHSM entirely on their own (hence why I’d honestly be all for filing the names off and treating them as entirely-unique characters in their own story, which I feel they absolutely deserved), I personally find the whole concept of… ‘fixing’ an everyman hero by ‘revealing’ him to be an unfaithful, child-abusing alcoholic, and a delightfully sinister and brilliant villain to be a Sad Mom ™, AND a troubled and traumatized but ultimately heroic young woman to be a Daddy Issues Stereotype who was also Crazy The Whole Time ™ to be…. just repugnant, in the same way that I find overly-grimdark versions of superheroes repugnant.

Pictured above: me when people take pre-established characters and make them edgier for shock value and not much else.

For me, that was what took an otherwise interesting and poignant story and cheapened it for the sake of beating a dead horse (because they’d rather SHATTER our MEMORIES of those silly OLD games, lol cry moar babies!!! than take the plunge and try doing something that could stand on its own).

The characters of SHSM deserved so much more than to just be a “fuck you” to SH1, and the characters of SH1+3 deserve more credit than to be considered flimsy and unrealistic just because they didn’t fit into someone’s approved level of Grimdark. Given that, after all the smirking and hullabaloo and Problematic Decisions ™, the game’s connection to SH1 was still so, so superficial, it went from being just a questionable storytelling choice to actively making the game worse than what it could have been, for virtually no good reason.

And final footnote: These are my opinions, and obviously there are ample reasons for people to like and enjoy SHSM! I also in no way think that writing characters with the issues presented in SHSM is bad or “edgy” by itself, it’s purely the reasons behind doing it and the fact that it denied me a bona fide in-universe canon Silent Hill game with a new female protagonist that puts it in that territory for me. Nobody has to agree with me if they feel differently. Thank you for reading.