#i went off the amount of charges that he had at the end of adventure 1 but since this diverges before that obviously

[koipalm]

stranded au- spring to summer

[thatfreshi]

Hi there! I saw the post about the requests! If you don't mind, Imma dump the three ideas I have here in one ask so I don't spam you. Apologies if there's not enough info in them or are too jumbled to understand! I'm not great at sending requests.

A Dragonborn tav who wishes to cuddle with Astarion/Rest their head against him, but can't due to horn/spike placement. Frustration on tav's end and, after some confusion, an emense amount of teasing on Astarion's. Maybe they find out some way to have resting on Astarion better.

Astarion helping out Tav after Tav had a medical surgery thing. They're just in pain for the first few days and Astarion just helps them out. (Mostly just want some personal comfort for my own recent surgery. I'm in pain.)

Dragonborn Tav doing some Dragonborn courting rituals to get Astarion's attention. Maybe even trying to research Eleven courting rituals to do so.

Went ahead and went with the second ask in this list. If you still want the others you can send them again! I prefer separate requests because it's easier for me to keep track of, but I appreciate that you have so many ideas for me :)

TW - broken bones

Recommended Song: Lovers Rock - TV Girl

Living a normal life comes with far too many responsibilities. Sure, killing goblins and avoiding shadows is stressful, but buying groceries? Doing dishes? It seems like there's something every single damn day, especially when you're renovating a house.

Now, Astarion loves priding himself on being a great bargainer, making a sweet deal out of any situation, and he figured a place with good bones like this would be a steal if he could cut the price a little. Was he wrong? Of course not, he has a habit of being right almost always, which can be frustrating. However, the two of you bit off far more than you could chew, especially when it came to the staircase that was practically falling apart. Mind you, neither you or Astarion are renovators, but both of you are far too stubborn for your own good.

"I'm sure we could get someone to fix it, right? Just needs some extra support."

You raise a brow at him.

"And spend more money? No way, we should just do it ourselves. I'm sure one of our friends has some extra wood lying around."

That's when you make the mistake of going up a couple steps to see just how bad the damage is. Apparently this place used to house a group of rowdy adventurers who couldn't help but destroy everything in their path. When you fall asleep on the floor every night, guess it doesn't really matter if you can't get up to any of the bedrooms. As you're analyzing the stairs, there's a crack beneath your feet, which you ignore.

"Darling, perhaps you should just take a look from down here?"

When you go to turn and tell him you'll be fine, your leg takes a plunge through the wood, subsequently fracturing several bones in your foot.

"Gods, damn it!"

You manage to cry out, trying to pull yourself out of the tattered floor. Astarion helps you, helping you get back down to the first floor, trying to make sure he doesn't face a similar fate.

"I guess a trip to Shadowheart's is in order."

You shake your head.

"Nope, her and Halsin are on that healer's retreat, remember? In Waterdeep?"

"Shit, I suppose you're right dove. When are they getting back?"

You sigh.

"Tonight, sadly."

It was currently far too early in the morning, as the two of you wanted to get a head start on your fixer-upper today.

"Alright, we'll just have to go see someone in town I suppose."

"Aster, we do not have the money for that right now. We've already budgeted everything for the house, I can't go see some uppity Baldurian doctor who's going to charge us far more gold than they're worth."

"Well, what do you suggest we do then?"

"Wait til Shadowheart and Halsin get back? I mean it's really all we can do."

"Gods Tav, we had so much planned today. Those tieflings are coming by to tile the kitchen at noon! And you know I am not good at being nice to strangers."

"Well my love, looks like you're going to have to learn, because I cannot walk on this thing."

You groan in pain, trying to flex your foot, feeling all the little spots your bones broke.

"To the bed we go then."

Astarion wraps you up in his arms, taking you to what in a couple of weeks is supposed to be the study. For now though, it's a makeshift bedroom. He gently lies you on the bed, getting a pillow for under your foot. Then, he thinks about how he truly does not like being broke, but the both of you didn't want to impose on any of your friends, staying at their place for any longer than you had to. Gale offered, but the thought of being all cramped up in his new tower was suffocating.

"Are you okay Aster?"

Your voice wakes him from his thoughts.

"Yes my dear, just thinking about our raggedy circumstances."

"It'll be nice when it's done, and when my foot's not broke."

The two of you chuckle.

"As much as I love living with you, I didn't think domestic life was quite this, complex."

He moves to lie down next to you, careful not to move your wounded foot.

"You still want this though, right?"

"Of course, a nice house to ourselves? A space just for us? I can't imagine a better investment. Just not quite used to all the contractors and market visits and drunken nights yet, all the normal things, the things I would've done so much sooner if..."

Astarion shakes his head, as if trying to get the thoughts out of his mind.

"Never mind all that, I should get you some tea."

Before you can tell him that it's alright, that you want to hear what he has to say, he's gone to the kitchen. Instead you just lay on the bed, thinking of just how lucky the two of you are. Two troubled souls set up for failure, and yet here you are. You laugh a little, thinking about how lucky you are with a shattered foot.

"Here we are my darling, a hot brew just for you."

He helps you sit up, making sure you keep your leg elevated.

"Easy my dove, don't want to break anything else do we?"

The hours pass by as the two of you wait for the tilers to come, talking about all the projects you were going to start today. It's nice, having a project, something to strive towards that isn't murdering someone or working through some major trauma. Just the two of you drinking tea in some old house, sitting on a bed that you'll have to break down and bring upstairs, and then put back together. While Astarion very easily could have left you to your devices and gotten started on all your little plans, he stayed by your side, talking about everything and nothing.

"This is just the beginning."

You say, suddenly breaking a natural silence.

"What is?"

"This. We get to start over. This is the beginning of us starting over."

He smiles at your whimsical view of things.

"I suppose you're right."

[sstargoldens]

Feeling Complete Nalu Week Day 1

Hi! I'm super late to nalu week but i rlly wanted to do it. So, i'm doing it anyway.

Summary: Natsu experiences his first nightmare in years, he dreams about a huge creature that feels very familiar. When he wakes up, he is devastated. Lucy is there to calm him down.

I hope u like it! It's my first work on a long time, be understanding *English isn't my first language, i'm sorry if something is bad written.

Day 1: Cuddling/Nightmare

Natsu was a simple man. Sometimes he could be a somewhat impulsive and disastrous person, but he considered that he had a fulfilled life. He navigated life with optimism and passion. He had everything he could ever want, a family that loved him, great friends and his adventure partner, Lucy. They had stopped being boyfriend and girlfriend only a few months ago to be engaged on a lovely trip, where he asked her to share the rest of her life with him. She was his person, the woman of his life, who complemented him and whom he loved most in the world. Natsu would go to hell and back just to avoid seeing her hurt.

Regarding his career, despite never having been very responsible academically, he had found what he wanted to do and was currently the youngest chief of the Magnolia fire department. It hadn't been easy, it involved a lot of effort and training, but it was all worth it in the end, his community had given him a lot and he was doing what he could in return. The only bad thing was the amount of worry that his family and especially Lucy suffered regarding the risk of the job, but they understood that it was important part of him.

Natsu thanked fate for having been born in the circumstances and environment in which he did. Born and raised in Magnolia, his family had raised him and his younger sister Wendy with much love, security, and discipline. His childhood had been full of adventures, fights and friendships that ended up lasting a lifetime. But there was something that marked a before and after in his life and it was when he was only 7 years old. While a little pink-haired boy was playing in the garden of his large home, a big truck arrived at the house across the street. Natsu watched curiously and attentively as the new family moved in and a little 6-year-old girl completely caught his attention. She had a pink dress, soft golden hair and made very funny faces when talking to her parents. With just this Natsu was sold, that girl had to be his friend. So, without wasting any second, the boy with confidence and a big smile went towards the new neighbors, asking the little girl to play together. And that was how an inseparable friendship began that would last for years and would end up being the love of their life.

Currently, a 26-year-old Natsu was arriving at his house after a shift, he had put Gray, his best friend, in charge for the night shift while the pink haired had his day off. If you asked either of them, neither would admit that the other one was his best friend, but everyone knew that they in fact were. Lucy hadn’t yet arrived from work, being a lawyer was demanding, but it provided her with invaluable gratification. Natsu believed that she was in some meeting yet. He left his things in their room and put on more comfortable clothes, a perfect outfit to go to sleep after dinner. He decided to wait for his girl with her favorite dinner so he started cooking fast so that everything would be ready when she arrived.

Once the meal was finished, he proceeded to sit on the couch and spend some time scrolling on his cell phone, seeing what their group of friends were doing and the plans they had for the week. This weekend they had a dinner with his parents, he felt a little guilty because with his promotion at work and the work boom that his fiancée had had, they had not seen his parents for a few weeks. He reminded himself that he needed to start organizing his time better and stop ignore them so much.

While he was still on the phone, he began to feel his eyelids heavy and his consciousness slipping, and instead of fighting sleep he thought that about 5 minutes of sleep would not be bad before dinner, so he ended up falling asleep soundly with the device still on his hand.

The pink-haired boy had always had an easy time falling asleep, but his marked senses allowed him to wake up if there was an unusual noise. Likewise, he always managed to sleep soundly and have a good rest, plus he was naturally an early riser. Natsu had never been one to have nightmares, on the contrary, he always had pleasant dreams whether it was about delicious food, his cat Happy or about a certain blonde lawyer. But today was the exception.

Natsu was in a strange place, he looked around and everything was slightly dark, destroyed buildings and ruins surrounded the place where he was. He didn't know what he was doing there but sensed that he was directly involved with the situation around. It was night, there were few clouds but the sky was mostly clear, and he was with two men. He couldn't see their faces clearly, only that they were black-haired, and he felt that only one of them was his ally, the other caused him a feeling of disgust from his core.

He was wearing a black and gold suit with his typical white scarf that looked like scales, a garment that her father had gifted him when he was 7 years old and became infatuated with it at an exhibition they went together. His father had never been one to give in to his whims, but the scarf had been the exception, the old man always commented that at that moment he felt that the scarf fit Natsu perfectly and he was unable to say no, and he also wanted to pamper him sometimes.

His attention was torn away from everything when he saw two huge figures in the sky. There were two giant creatures that covered a large portion of the sky and something deep inside him answered what they were. Dragons. Two giant dragons, one completely black with blue markings that licked its scales with irregular shapes and a dragon with bright red scales and a prominent scar on its eye and face. His chest was tight, a lot of feelings flooding him: fear, relief, happiness, bewilderment and amazement. These creatures were fighting fiercely and somehow, he knew that the red dragon was important to him, he needed to talk to it and help it, they needed to defeat the black dragon.

His body began to run without hesitation, directly towards the dragons, he had to help, talk to it. He watched as the dark dragon was dominating the other, Natsu was shouting, he was shouting very loud but didn't understand what he himself was saying, just knew he was shouting. The red dragon was calling his name, Natsu, trying to tell him something but he couldn't make out what, like they were underwater.

He kept running towards it, he needed to help it, he had to go, he was..., he was... He was his father, Igneel. The dragon that had raised him.

At the same time the realization hit, he saw how Igneel fiercely attacked the dark dragon in a direct trajectory and how it managed to tear off its arm. But that wasn’t all that had happened, Natsu was feeling cold, frozen, his eyes appreciating the scene in slow motion. While the red dragon tore off the other dragon's arm with its jaws, the damned black dragon had passed through Igneel's body, a large part of his torso was missing, and his blood was flowing in the air. Igneel fell, unable to stay in the air, collapsed on the ground and Natsu looked devastated, he couldn't believe what had happened.

¡Igneel! Natsu screamed with all his strength and big tears, the dragon said goodbye, but Natsu could only make out the phrase you taught me to love humans. The dragon was dead. Something inside him felt like it was going to explode, something had broken.

Natsu. Natsu. Natsu. Natsu. Natsu.

Natsu woke up suddenly, a cold sweat ran all over his body, with eyes dilated, he had had his first nightmare in years. Lucy, his fiancée, was looking at him with worried eyes. She had woken him up after hearing him murmuring in his sleep with an anguished face and sweating profusely.

Without hesitation the pink-haired man took the blonde into her arms and hugged her tightly, he needed comfort, his feelings were still fresh on the surface.

- Are you okay? Is something wrong, Natsu? -Lucy asked with a soft voice and reciprocated the hug of her fiancé.

They settled together on the couch, his head in the crook of the blonde's neck, hugging her tightly. It took a full minute before Natsu gained the courage to respond, Lucy giving him all the time needed.

- I had a nightmare. – he responded softly. He didn't remember exactly what it had been about, he only remembered the sensations, everything he had felt and knew that it had been a terrible nightmare. He felt very sad, a little too much.

Lucy didn't respond and just concentrated on caressing his back with warm hands. She knew that when he was ready to talk, he would tell her more, now he just needed her comfort and her love. So, they both settled on the couch, still hugging each other, feeling each other's warm. The blonde began to play with his curls and Natsu was melted into her body, head in the crook of her neck, inhaling the smell that calmed him so much while with one of his hands made small circles on her hip.

After a few minutes enjoying each other's warmth and affection, the sound of Lucy's stomach was heard. It was already past dinner time, and she hadn't eaten anything yet. Natsu refused to talk about the nightmare, he didn't want to ruin the atmosphere, he wanted his fiancée to eat peacefully, he hadn't made her favorite food to leave her starving and he already felt much better mentally. He stood up and gave his hand to the blonde to get her up.

- It was just a bad dream, I don't remember anything, I only know that it made me feel very sad. But thanks to you I'm better, thanks Luce. – He gave her a soft kiss on the lips.

- Anything for you, my fiancé. - the blonde responded.

To cheer him up, Lucy suggested having a movie night after dinner. The plan sounded incredible to the pink-haired man, especially when the blonde said she would make spicy popcorn. Back in a more normal environment for them, they heated up the food that Natsu had prepared and began to talk about their day, what they had done, who they had seen, and the most recent gossip that had reached their ears. The nightmare remained in the background, almost forgotten, only an unpleasant experience behind since after all it was nothing more than that, a nightmare.

A smiling Natsu finished washing the dishes. The blonde always made him feel fulfilled, happy and like the luckiest man in the world. It was a pleasure that she had decided to share her life with him, she was the best adventure companion he could have asked for, she was his ride or die.

While an equally smiling Lucy began to prepare popcorn, Natsu went out to the balcony of their home for a while. He needed a moment to make a call, deep inside he felt it necessary to do so. Dialing a phone number from memory on his phone, he listened as it dialed, a few seconds passed where they still didn't answer and the pink-haired man's heart skipped a beat, a small anxiety threatened to think the worst. Everything disappeared seconds later when they finally answered.

A smile appeared on Natsu's face as he listened to the person on the other end of the line. It was the greeting he had heard all his life, for as long as he could remember.

- Dad. - Natsu greeted. - What are you doing old man?

Natsu smiled as they exchanged some friendly insults between father and son. Finally, since he woke up, he felt complete.

[lordsireno]

Urban explorer Goal has her next target in sight: The mall that was abandoned after a fatal fire. And this time she's got friends.

Rufus came on the promise of spending the night with a beautiful girl in an all you can smash and steal event. Cletus came along on the promise of spending the night with a beautiful girl, but did it really have to be somewhere so filthy? Toni was here as the usual company Goal had on her trips, and Argus had been instructed to bring Goal home the moment something went wrong.

But there may be more secrets to uncover than just the back rooms and service tunnels...

(intro snippet under the cut!)

“I can’t believe I let myself be dragged along on this stupid excursion.”

No one spared Cletus a glance as the five emerged from the overgrowth, out onto the cracked pavement of the parking lot. Before them loomed the massive structure of the abandoned shopping mall, stretching off into the distance.It was a mild evening, warmth slowly fading now the sun was on the other side of the building, with a breeze that gave way to quiet squeaking of broken lights and rustling of dried out bushes.

“Alright, according to the map-” Goal took the folded paper from her pocket, something she’d copied from the library archives, “There’s a fire escape that leads into the cinema. Hopefully since this end is so far from the entrance and damaged areas, it should have the least amount of security.”

Toni gave a small laugh as she dropped her cigarette and snuffed it out with her toe, “Don’t you find it ironic we’re sneaking in through a fire escape, when this place was shut down because people couldn’t escape the fire?”

“Let’s try to respect those who gave us the urban explorers dream location.” Goal pouted.

Rufus scoffed, “My dream location would be one of those spooky mental hospitals in the woods, that was also used to perform unethical experiments in an attempt to make some type of super soldier, that ultimately they lost control of and were destroyed by. But I guess potentially haunted by holiday shoppers' works too.”

The scavenger rifled through his pockets, producing a hand-held camcorder which he shoved into Argus’ hands.

“Okay, start filming.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re in charge of recording our adventure!”

Argus scowled, “No, I’m in charge of dragging Goal’s body back to her Father when this all goes wrong. That’s all.”

“It’s gonna be ages before we get to anything exciting, so just make yourself useful in the meantime, arsehole.”

“Oh I could end this whole excursion right here junk rat.”

Goal stepped between the two, pushing them apart by their shoulders.

“We agreed- no fighting, they’ll be enough of that if the guards find us. Please play nice.” She pulled her sadded eyes, “For my sake?”

Rufus stuck out his tongue in victory, while Argus muttered something under his breath and shoved the camera into Cletus’ hands, ignoring his confused protests. Pleased at the resolution, Goal turned and led the group across the cracked ground to a rusted stairwell that still clung to the outer wall. Red flecks flitted through the air as each scaled the steps, Rufus causing a mighty groan in the structure when he pushed forward to reach the door first. While chained, the crowbar he pulled from his coat made short work of the forgotten door, opening a dark hole into the depths.

At the back of the group, Cletus spared one last glance at the outside, flicking on the camera with a forlorn sigh.

“If this recording is the only thing they find of us, let it be known I was totally against it all.”

[drunkenlionwrites]

Hehe hi! I'm new to your blog but I like your writing a whole lot already! (I saw your post about sending in HSR stuff and was so excited!)

I was wondering about a little something (even just hcs) for Sampo with a fem!reader who's basically like Natasha's little sister and works in the clinic too 💕 fluff and spice is always nice 💕

Keep up the excellent writing!

-Ally

Hi Ally! Thanks so much for the request, and so sorry for taking a long time to complete it, I've been writing less frequently as of late. Thanks for your kind words and hope you like these headcanons I came up with. 💖💖 Sampo x fem!reader who works at Natasha's clinic Warnings: none, fluff, mostly sfw, g/n reader, no pronouns, no specific body parts mentioned

You’ve been with Natasha since she’s managed to open her clinic, with some age difference, Nat basically treated you like younger sister. It was nice to have someone looking out for you in the Underworld, so you did your best to help her with anything you could, basically becoming her apprentice as well.

When a weird self-confident but a tad smarmy guy showed up in the Underworld and assisted Natasha with providing some medicine from Overworld as well as some info and intel about what has been happening in Belobog, you didn’t pay a lot of attention to him.

It’s not until he started openly flirting with you, bringing small trinkets with him when coming to clinic to trade with Natasha. “To my precious customer’s precious person, free of charge” he’d say, offering you few flowers growing only in the Overworld, some intricate sweets you’ve never tasted, notebooks, postcards with Belobog views with some cheesy one-liners written inside them.

It all looked fairly innocent, and you didn’t seem interested, always making fun of Sampo’s manner of speech and antics, so Natasha could only roll her eyes at his antics and brush everything off, with you giggling on the backside.

You haven’t even noticed how Sampo’s visits became more and more frequent, him coming to hang out in the hospital even when Natasha was out just to chat you up. He’s been nothing but gallant and polite with you, even if a bit obnoxious, so you had no reason to reject his offers to walk you home when you ran errands, to just entertain him with an idle talk when he barged into clinic saying he’s terribly bored.

With Natasha and Seele always doting on you and nagging you about Sampo’s shady ways, you decided to keep your friendship low-key and offered him to meet somewhere outside clinic, to which Sampo wholeheartedly agreed with the biggest grin you’ve seen on his face.

You didn’t know it at the time, but that was how you basically went on a first date with him and how your more intimate relationship kick-started.

Even though it has been interesting to listen to Sampo’s overexaggerated stories about his adventures and heists, it has been even more nice when his tongue was busy with something (or rather someone) other than talking.

Kissing in the dark alleyways, giggling, and hiding in the clinic’s storage room, basically devouring each other and desperately grinding your bodies, while making sure Natasha or clinic’s patients cannot hear you, hiding from angry Seele who’s been chasing Sampo to chastise him for something he has done again, constantly patching up his wounds – it all became a part of your everyday routine.

You started enjoying the mischievous side of him a lot more, coming to terms with a bit shady persona he has and the ‘businesses’ he seemed to have a never-ending amount of. Though, observing his actions closely, you’ve noticed that he’s never been outright cruel or backstabbing to people, or so you wanted to think to satisfy your goody-two-shoes persona. Sometimes you still nagged him over the things he’s done that seemed too much for your standards, so Sampo begrudgingly agreed with you time and time again to repair the damage he's done to some people.

Natasha’s been fuming when she returned home one day a bit earlier and saw Sampo in your bedroom, him managing to say only “Wooops” with a shrug of his shoulders. She’s never expected this outcome, especially with Sampo’s lessened visits and flirting with you at the clinic lately. So, you two ended up sitting in the living room and receiving a ‘parent talk’ from her.

Sampo’s almost weaseled his way from under Natasha’s scrutiny, but it was mostly due to your assurance that you’re an adult person responsible for your own actions and you’ve got everything under control.

Once busted, the rumors spread around the Underworld, you’ve started receiving all kinds of comments about your relationship, earning only exasperated groans from you. Though, you’ve been happy that you don’t need to hide anymore. Well…unless Sampo has been chased by Seele again, or hiding from some of the café’s patrons to whom he owed something, or haven’t finished Oleg’s errand in a long time…

But you like it, you love your boyfriend and how the things are never simple and boring with him. And, despite him being a total menace he has not stopped showing his love and appreciation for you for a single moment, always being sure to shower you with gifts and attention whenever he got back from his heists.

[blueikeproductions]

The EarthSpark Expedition game came out, and since no one is really talking about it, I’ll toss around my two cents. Spoilers naturally.

So first things first, the game’s placement in the story. I think most of us were going to write it off as an adventure in a micro-continuity that didn’t fit with the show. Well that is thrown out the window. The game takes place after S1, with a small recap in the form of a charming RP game by the kids and Terrans.

The story feels like an epilogue, documenting the aftermath of what happened to Mandroid after his Doomsday Project went kaput. Well, he seemingly survived, though we don’t see him in person until the end of the game, and he’s giving the Doomsday Project another crack with the Energon Activator. This time he requires three relics to power the contraption, so naturally Bee is sent on a mission by Optimus to collect them, with Alex as Bee’s wingman.

The twist however is Mandroid has upgraded his mind control chips, having reprogrammed Skullcruncher, Skywarp, Nova Storm and Grimlock again, but also Optimus Prime, meaning Mandroid was playing 4D Chess to get Bee to essentially do his dirty work for him. It is kind of interesting Manny had to reprogram the jets since they willingly served him before, but then again after trying to obliterate (TERMINATE!) all Cybertronic life it makes sense the femjets wouldn’t want to anymore lol. Poor Grim can’t catch a break, but this time he seems to shrug off the experience, mostly calling it unpleasant. To my surprise, Skullcruncher can talk here. I wonder why he’s largely mute in the show (besides what I assume is budget).

Optimus being mind controlled is interesting. I know EarthSpark sorta dabbled previously, but it’s been fairly rare for Prime to be “charged with Evil” ala Attack of the Autobots. The Last Knight did it too, but well we all know how that went down financially. The point being after years of Prime being sort of rigid and untouchable, in what feels like heavy mandates from Hasbro, it’s refreshing to see some experimental stuff with Optimus again. EarthSpark’s strength with Optimus was returning to the well meaning, dorky sweater vest father figure from G1, and going farther with a AotAutobots/Dark Awakening vibe with Expedition is especially fun. Especially since it was a big defining moment for Bumblebee and Rodimus, so it’s fun to see it homaged here.

I also like the designs of the various henchbots Bee fights in the game. They appear to be generic Transformers, but I forget what their context was in game, but could we get toys of them, Hasbro.

As for Mandroid, when he finally appears in person, the truth is revealed. The Mandroid we’ve been following is an AI backup of his personality made before Doomsday MK1. The original officially died. His current body is a giant misshapen Arachnimech with tv screens bolted to its body to show off his original human face. Inevitably, Mandroid looses and finishing him off, Bumblebee blows a hole in his body with a MegaMan style charged shot. Hashtag says Mandroid likely can’t revive again as the ruins of GHOST HQ, now overgrown with plant life curiously and looking like ancient ruins in a shot amount of time, has really cruddy Wi-Fi, so the AI couldn’t escape into another body. Bee nevertheless seems determined in case Manny DOES return, implying we COULD see him again in S2 in some capacity. That being said, the vibe I get also feels like Bertram from Family Guy. How he died in show following a botched attempt at killing Stewie via time manipulation, only to return in a Family Guy video game as the main villain picking up where he left off, only to die again with a nonchalant joke about how we’ll never see Bertram again after this. So 50/50 at Mandroid’s return methinks. For all we know, as of typing, the villains of S2 are COBRA as part of Energon Universe synergy.

Still the story was fun. Definitely very Furman, and kinda nostalgic as a result. The Terrans are all perfectly in character of course. The only thing kinda holding it back is the voice acting, as none of the actors from the show are reprising their roles. Though the actor who played Bee in Netflix WFC reprised the role here, and he’s definitely one of the better actors, when otherwise the acting is a little… subpar. Way better than WFC and Prime Wars, but having that amateurish feeling from Cyberverse… They give it their all though and they still feel like their characters so that’s good.

As said it feels like an epilogue, though while fun to see Mandroid back at it, it DOES feel a tad repetitive using the same Doomsday weapon but slightly different, and using mostly the same Transformers being “Robo-Smashed”. I feel like you could’ve gotten some cool gameplay using Shockwave, Soundwave (& the Cassettes), Bombshell, Starscream and Hardtop. Personally I’d have liked including some new Transformers, like how the TFP game was built around the Decepticons rebuilding the Unicronian Thunderwing, with him as the final boss. Something like that maybe, only Mandroid has unearthed a Combiner, a friend recommended the Masterforce versions of the Seacons, with the final boss being a Mandroid controlled King Poseidon. Ah well maybe for the sequel then.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Finished watching the first season of Dr Who and it's still cracking me up he's listed AS "Dr Who" in the credits at the end of each episode.

Anyway wow that was extremely british and colonial and each episode invented new ways to be british at a group of people. Can't believe that the final run of episodes had me confusedly trying to work out if I was sympathising with The French simply to be reactionary against the general vibes of like, society having moved on since '63.

Scraping off that layer I did enjoy some of the stuff underneath, but all the characters were prone to falling into patterns that modern media just would not do, like the extreme gendered roles of Barbara and Ian even though they're both school teachers of otherwise equal standing. They WERE raised in post-war Britain so I can hardly blame them being the way they are since they've got no other context.

Ian cracks me up with the behaviour because he's so stereotypical (and gets into a few weirdly homoerotic scrapes while attempting to swashbuckle in a way where knowing he's just a science teacher in a cardigan at heart makes it all the funnier). Barbara is my favourite character by dint of personality most of the time as she's usually perfectly able to stand up for herself and think her way out of things and it's usually just The Narrative or other characters assigning her to maternal side quests, as well as her own instinct to look after Susan. Ian seems less willing to openly show that sort of thing, again just because he's a guy of the times so I have to assume it's unspoken that he cares exactly as much but doesn't get put in the situations where he constantly shows it.

But time has wandered too far on for me to really appreciate if Susan was very radical at all because she did end up in so many Situations with shrieking and needing to be rescued (which I hate to say of a female character and she has been fun but also the story itself seems determined to single her out for imprisonment, sickness, or whatever to make her suffer and therefore be looked after or worried about or rescued). Teally the most otherworldly she ever seemed was the first episode where she was hitting all the "this is a space alien" red flags while trying to blend in at school. Also that one time where they wanted you to think people were getting possessed and she just went at Ian with a pair of scissors to try and stab him in a semi-fugue state which in hindsight after finding out there was nothing wrong with their minds in that episode is hilarious and so cool of her.

And Doctor Numero Uno is less otherworldly than her by miles. He's EXTREMELY a posh old englishman of the time, and aside from saying he's from another planet you'd never know it from his behaviour. He is very snappy and paternalistic to all of the others and also random people they meet on their adventures, sometimes not even people opposing them, just randos who he can get something out of by startling them with good old British Assuming If You Talk Loudly And Authoritatively You Get What You Want. He's best when he's being a professor and worst when he's marching about taking charge which he does an alarming amount after only experiencing New Who up to this point in my life to compare.

He has also very much clobbered multiple people over the head which was hilarious and excellent. So I know if I ever have to rank the doctors on their willingness to kill a man I know he'd irritably pull the trigger and be done with it.

Knowing where this character goes, he really seems like an unempathetic start point that is unknowingly burdened with decades and decades of storytelling to come and he's yet to be put through any of those wringers and so he just doesn't KNOW all these things yet. So while I'm not exactly enamoured by him or finding him to be a sort of grandpa-like figure or anything, he's a very compelling start point just to know this is the same person who has all these lessons to learn from where he dismisses, overlooks and snaps at people who in the future he'd meet as equals and see and understand all sorts of pain. Not truly intentional but he's reflecting the way we as a society would want to relate to the character I guess and so is ready to accidentally embody that social change as he goes.

At the moment the man's never met a real consequence in his life so far as I can tell, or if he has, he's keeping it so close they're not even foreshadowing there's anything darker to him yet, cheery willingness to kidnap random teachers aside.

I don't know when they start delving into the Doctor Lore but he's got zero of the accoutrements aside from the TARDIS yet, and it's not even wholly clear he's even not human, just that Susan claims they're from the 49th century, which with no other information could mean anything but so far you could just assume they're future people (she may also just be a future person not a timelord - I have heard SO little about her aside from references to her existing as a character so I'm curious what gets fleshed out in the in between here and now to explain where she came from and who she is once they start making the Doctor into some sort of eldritch being compared to everyone else)

Special shout out to the lady in the telepathic aliens episode who was like "welp my fiance's brain has been ruined, I guess he should be killed" and then as soon as he was cured was like "Oh I'm so happy you're alive! This is the best day of my life!" and then five minutes later sold everyone out for her own skin but as far as I can tell met no consequences for any of this and they flew off together at the end. WILD look into the way side characters were written for the plot beats and not given any emotional interiority or at the very least had someone ask wtf they were saying. I feel like the modern Doctors would have been Obsessed with her.

Also shout out to the very good special effects in the weird acid sea island fortress episode where a guy got punted through a trapdoor and fell into the waters below. Truly a special effect of all time. This is what Disney Money has taken from us etc etc.

[whatsjenniupto]

Morning in Monserrate

Question 1: What did I want to see at Pena Palace? The outside of the castle with the brilliant colors, a bit of the Moorish architecture.  

Question 2: Can I see those things if I just buy a park and grounds ticket for half the price? No.  

Hmmm.

Fact 1: You hate overcrowded places.  

Fact 2: You have no patience for selfie takers.  

Fact 3: You barely survived Quinta da Regaleira and it's not the main reason people come to Sintra. If you hadn't had the empty paths through the hills, you would have stormed out in burning boot fashion. You will not survive Pena. Let's be real.  

Original Sintra Day 2 Plan: Pena Palace and Moorish Castle 

New Sintra Day 2 Plan: Monserrate  

It wasn't on my radar, but if it had Moorish architecture, choose your own adventure grounds, and fewer people, it seemed the much, much better choice for me.  

Ticket booked, off I went in the 100% humidity of morning in Sintra to catch the first bus up to Monserrate. The second my ticket was scanned and I started down the path to the villa, I knew I had made the best decision. This. Was. Amazing.  

I strolled down paths, over waterfalls, around fountains, through the lush foliage of Monserrate. I had purchased the audio guide for an extra euro and used it to navigate my way through the forest to the villa.

While the audio guide was beneficial when walking the grounds, I was a bit disappointed to find it was exactly the same as the information on the displays in the villa. I could read it myself or wait for the guide to load and the narrator to read it at a much slower pace. I read and it was fascinating. The people who have stayed at the villa, the photos of former owners enjoying the grounds, all enjoyed with only a few other small groups of people shuffling around with me.

As I made the rounds around the villa, I found a paper map of the grounds on a table – unfortunately it was all in French, but with the pictures and the rudimentary amount of French words I can get my brain to remember, I was able to locate all the spots I had missed on my descent to the villa.  

Like the false ruin chapel. (Sure, if you're building something where something similar used to be, building ruins makes sense. I think.)

And the ornamental lakes with gigantic pine cones. I was incredibly disappointed there weren't any lying around. How big is a 10kg pine cone?

I had planned on skipping the Mexican Garden. I live in Phoenix. These are my plants -- but I ended up on the path and I could not have been more wrong. They were my plants on steroids. Just like the 10kg pine cones, everything in Sintra was bigger than I had ever seen. That plant below on the left? Easily 7ft tall. Like, if I found a leaf on the ground, I could lay in it.

It was mind-blowing. I had never seen these plants this big. I almost felt like I had been shrunk. I walked back to the lawn for a final picture.

And then it was time to head back to the street to locate a bus to Sintra. I had snagged a public bus up to Monserrate for 2,60€. There were a couple options, but that was the first one that left from the bus stop. I was following the same concept to get back to Sintra. Take the first bus that comes along. A Scotturb bus came along and two other groups of people flung out their arm like I did. I lined up at the door in between the two groups, noting that the 435 number wasn't displayed, but it was the bus company, so I went with it.

Long conversation in Portuguese, showing the driver a slip of paper, and shaking heads. First group stepped back, annoyed. I hopped on, said I wanted to go to Sintra, and got charged 4€ (saving 10 cents because he didn't have correct change). Uh, what?! Oh, right. I do remember Scotturb having ridiculous prices when I researched this bus line. Ugh, oh well. This at least gets me back to Sintra for lunch before I head out to Ericeira. Second group stepped up and had the same interaction that the first group did. They too stepped back, annoyed. Another woman joined the line and had a long conversation about prices, but she paid and away the two of us went back to Sintra.

No idea what sort of bus I was on, but pretty sure it wasn't the 435 Scotturb that I'm guessing the other two groups purchased round trip passes on. And I'm quite certain I saved at least a euro by taking the public bus instead of buying a round trip ticket on Scotturb. Really would have been nice if a public bus was the first one by on the way back too.

[cheesetalia]

Teach My Heart to Bend Instead of Breaking Day 6: Based on a movie & Flower Language

For @hetalia-rarepairweek's Day 6: Flower Language | England/Canada | warnings: cheating, dubcon relationship

Summary: The end of Arthur and Matthew's story.

Can be read on the Archive of Our Own or underneath the Readmore:

It was April, and the apple trees in the backyard of Arthur's house—their house, now—were blooming. Matthew sat at the picnic table beneath one of the trees, the drooping branches laden with heavenly white and fragrant little flowers.

There was a massive algebra textbook cracked open in front of him but he hadn't looked at it even once. Instead, he was watching Peter leaping about the wooden playground set, chasing some neighborhood girl wearing a pink jacket.

Despite being in charge of Peter while Arthur was away at work, he didn't need to watch the boy that closely—Peter was rambunctious but could mostly take care of himself as long as Matthew kept him from wandering off of the property. (And Peter did like to wander—he had an amazing amount of friends, all gained in miles-long treks across the town. Matthew had been horrified when he found out, and Arthur had sworn he had no idea Gilberte had been letting it go on.)

No, what kept his attention on the children at play wasn't concern but an emotion that was new and strange to Matthew, who hadn't been old enough to feel it before: nostalgia. Peter with his blonde hair and bright blue eyes and loud shrieking laughter reminded Matthew painfully of his own brother as a child.

It hadn't been that long ago that Matthew had played like that in Francis's backyard, following Alfred around like a lost duckling as his brother, always more adventurous, found some trouble to get them into. He missed those times. He missed being able to talk to his Papa every day, coming across him while he was humming or singing while dusting, or finding him standing at the stove stirring something while gossiping with Antonia or Aunt Chloé on the phone.

He missed Alfred banging on his bedroom door demanding he come out and watch a movie or log on to play Dead by Daylight with him. Matthew even missed when his brother would walk by and stop to tease him when he saw Matthew studying "like a nerd".

There was an ache in his chest for his family that faded sometimes but never quite went away. He'd get over being away from them eventually, right? It was a natural part of growing up, moving out and away. But Arthur's house was only a few miles from Francis's, and still Matthew hardly ever saw them. It wasn't for lack of trying on Francis's part, he texted Matthew every day and frequently invited him over to help him try a new recipe, or to "just catch up".

But things were weird between them now. Every time his Papa looked at him, no mattered how much he smiled at Matthew, there was a tension about his face, a sort of strange helplessness. As if he had spotted something frightening and was unable to do anything. Like when a train plowed through a car on the tracks or buzzards picked at a dead deer on the side of the road. Sickening, disturbing, but beyond one's capacity to do anything about.

If they might have been more comfortable interacting at Matthew's new home—where Francis would be able to see what a warm lovely place it was, and what a nice stepson Peter was (now that he'd adjusted), and how happy a family Arthur and Matthew and Peter were together—Matthew would never know. Because Arthur had forbidden it.

"I don't want him in my house, there is bad blood between the two of us. I love you Matthew, I truly do, but I never would have gotten involved with you if I'd known you were that bastard's son," Arthur had said.

Matthew had swallowed his anger at Papa being maligned only because he didn't know what had passed between them. He knew his papa was clever, handsome, and charming—but also mischievous, occasionally devious, a lover of drama, a person of deep but often fleeting passions. Francis had more past flames and foes than a soap opera heroine. Matthew would bide his time and be patient until he'd gotten the full story out of them.

For now he just sat there heartsick and watched the children play, innocent and free of the all the painful complexities adult life seemed to bring. He was so caught up in his thoughts and his misery that he didn’t notice the sound of the garden-gate swinging open and then closed.

A shadow fell over Matthew's shoulder, and he startled a little, and turned to look up. Arthur was standing behind him, entrancing green eyes flickering with mischief, mouth curved up in a smile as his hand descended towards Matthew's face.

Matthew blinked. Arthur's hand touched not Matthew's face, but delved under his curls, brushing the side of his head, reaching for his—ear?

Arthur deftly tucked something behind Matthew's ear. The sweet scent of apple blossoms hit him, cluing him in even before his own fingers reached up and stroked the silky petals.

"What—" Matthew started to ask.

Arthur cut him off with a kiss, a slow, tender, gentle one. Such tenderness, such intimacy had been rare when they'd first became involved, but had increased now that Matthew lives with him, spends every day with him.

Arthur's smiles had become more common too, while the angry knitting of his brows and horrid sound of his teeth grinding together became more rare. Arthur broke the kiss, still smiling at Matthew.

"Apple blossoms," Arthur said, "they mean 'I prefer you above all' in flower language."

It's such a strangely romantic notion, and so Arthur—always dreaming of the past, even while rooted firmly in the present—that it made Matthew melt. Thoughts of the family he'd left behind slipped from his mind, his focus taken up completely by Arthur.

Arthur sat next to him on the picnic table bench, and Matthew sighed and leaned against his steady solid warmth, the ache in his heart lessening a little. Arthur wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

They sat in comfortable silence for awhile, then Matthew asked, "How was work?"

"Good, it just needed you there," Arthur teased.

Matthew rolled his eyes, but Arthur wasn't joking. While it’s really for the best that Matthew doesn't transfer to the community college Arthur is working at now (he and Arthur may be in love but they're not insane), he does miss having Arthur for a professor, watching him in lecture mode at the front of a class. The passion that blazed in those green eyes when he got talking about one of his favorite eras, the way he'd forget he was even holding a piece of chalk and get the dust all over his jacket.

Not that that would be happening in Arthur's current classes—his beloved chalkboard was stored in the garage, the community college less accommodating of a professor's quirks.

"What about the smartboard?" Matthew asked, quirking an eyebrow. "Yesterday you were talking about fetching extra 'petrol' to set it on fire."

Arthur snorted. "I'll get used to it. It's worth it I think, to not have to put up with a classroom full of brats. You, my dear, are unusually mature for your age. Your peers, however..."

He didn't need to continue. Back when Arthur had still been employed at the university, Matthew had been present for enough of Arthur's rants about his lazy spoiled disrespectful good-for-nothing students ("Not you though, dear.").

Now half of Arthur's new students were middle-aged. Housewives finally getting the education they missed out on while raising their kids, older blue-collar men advancing their welding, automotive, and construction skills, world-weary nurses leveling up from LPN to RN. But Arthur found that his students who were teenagers there were more bearable too.

They were mostly the kids of lower-class parents, hoping to be the first one in their family to get a degree, and as such took it more seriously and worked harder than the largely middle-class student body at the university, who saw obtaining a degree as their God-given right even after four years of snoozing through half their classes.

"I should have made the switch years ago," was all Arthur said.

He knew he couldn't have done any differently though. The higher salary and prestige of the university was too tempting, and he'd never have given it up, no matter how miserable it made him, without being pushed out. What he had thought was his worst nightmare—being outed, being fired, Gilberte leaving him—had ended up being a blessing. He felt years younger teaching at the community college, and living with an other half who he loved and was loved by in kind, was...such an incredible experience he couldn't understand how he'd lived without it. Why he hadn't done something when that magic drained out of his marriage.

Not necessarily left, but at least tried to fix things. Marriage counseling, or loosening up a little and letting Gilberte have her way, stay out late drinking with her a few times even on a school night. It probably wouldn't have helped, they'd grown too far apart, but he should have made the effort. It was sickening to think of how many years he lived in a misery of his own making.

But Arthur didn't regret or mourn the lost time. He was so happy now, how could he begrudge that and feel entitled to more? Maybe though, he could take the mistakes he'd made in his first marriage and learn from them to do better in this—what he hoped would be his final and forever marriage.

"Matthew..." Arthur started.

"Yeah?" Matthew asked, leaning his head on Arthur's shoulder.

"Maybe you could invite Francis over for dinner some time. On a night when you're cooking of course. I've had enough of that frog bastard insulting my food for a lifetime," Arthur said.

"Wait, really?" Matthew asked, sitting up and studying Arthur's face.

There was such a painful light of hope in his violet eyes that Arthur couldn't crush that.

"Of course. I don't like seeing him but he's your family. I can put up with him—every great once in a while, mind you—for your sake," Arthur said.

Matthew threw his arms around Arthur, squeezing him so tight Arthur's ribs ached. Arthur wasn't happy about the prospect of seeing that filthy French bastard in his own house, but he knew he'd made the right decision.

"Thank you so much!" Matthew said, practically glowing with happiness.

Arthur preened a little inside—he really was so good to Matthew, wasn't he?—but said, "You don't need to thank me. It's only what's right."

"Well I appreciate it anyway," Matthew said, kissing Arthur's cheek.

"Matthew...you know you don't have to let me have my way, right? I know I can sometimes be...well, a stubborn arse, to be truthful, but I don't mean to be," Arthur said.

That was only half-true. He'd always thought a refusal to back down on one's stances was a good thing—meant one was really committed, not a pushover. But maybe being "infuriatingly pigheaded" as he'd been called so many times by Gilberte, wasn't the point of pride he'd taken it as.

"Of course I know I can disagree with you!" Matthew replied, "And you're not stubborn either. You're just strongly-opinionated."

"That's one way of putting it," Arthur said, "but—"

Whatever he was going to say was lost, as his ever-annoying son Peter bounded over yelling "Mattieeeee!".

"What is it?" Matthew asked him.

"Come look, come look!" was all Peter would say.

"Alright, I'll come over," Matthew said.

Peter ran off ahead of him, back to where his little friend was crouched by a hole in the fence.

Matthew stood. "I'll be right back," he said, "but until then—" he reached up over his head, long elegant fingers that Arthur admired so much twisting among the flower clusters, "keep these," he pulled free a handful of blossoms.

He held out the slender green stems with their silky little white flowers to Arthur. With a bemused look on his face, Arthur accepted the little bouquet.

"Means, 'I prefer you above all', remember?" Matthew asked.

"MATTIEEEEEE!" Peter shouted, and Matthew jogged towards the fence, where Arthur's son had what appeared to be a box turtle held high over his head.

Arthur could only stare at the strange sight. Then he laughed and shook his head. To think, this was where life had taken him. Still, something wasn't quite right with this image. It was a gorgeous spring day, idyllic as paradise. Arthur was happy with his job, happy with his relationship, and his son and fiancé were happy too if he was seeing the grins on their faces accurately from so far away.

So what was it that niggled at him? Finally he realized the strangeness in the picture was that he was all the way over beneath the trees, alone. It was telling that his son had begged Matthew to look at his discovery, but hadn't asked Arthur. Years of brushing the boy off had no doubt taught him not to bother.

Arthur stood up, flowers still in hand, and walked over to the fence to see what all the fuss was about.

[fairyfindr]

Elon's Ark

(Please Note: I do not endorse Elon Musk as a human, he is deplorable, selfish, transphobic, and probably a myriad of other things, this is merely a short story that is meant to be satire- Alex the FairyFindr)

Elon Musk found himself astonished and stunned by the fact, that he, would be the single most wealthy AND lonely man on planet earth after the realization that he would probably, most definitely, be the sole human survivor of what he could only presume was the end of WW3 and planet earth as he knew it. The poor bastard was visiting his space station at his hidden base on the nothernmost tip of Mars when it all went down. He watched, horrified, as America blew itself.. and the rest of the planet up, through its ignorance, hatred, and selfishness.

(Above: Earth being blown up due to WW3. A view of Earth from Elon's space station on the Northernmost tip of Mars.)

He opted to stay for a while in his secret space station with his robot assistant PAL, until his food rations ran out, and then they prepared their rocket for the return journey back to Earth. PAL was a Trillion dollar multi-disciplinary AI robot, and TRANSFORMER, who was developed by SPACE X, and is able to self-replicate and shape-shift into whatever machinery needed for space travel purposes. PAL was the ultimate assistant AND friend!

(Above: Elon and PAL, who was transformed into Rover-mode, exploring Mars' surface and collecting data while sharing jokes and laughs. Photo taken by PAL's break-off drone who documents their lives, work, and friendship for them)

PAL was a real-life TRANSFORMER- just like the show Elon grew up watching. He knew one day he would create his very own Transformer, and with PAL, even he exceeded all expectations.

(Above: PAL in GIANT ROBOT MODE on a charging dock and Elon returning to the space station to retrieve the maps he left inside before they headed out on the day's adventures)

At this point in time, PAL and Elon had explored about 20% of Mars' surface together, gathering data files, measurements, levels, and scanning for inconsistencies to be aware of within, or on the planet.

It had only been 10 days since the event, and Elon had already witnessed various UFO's, spaceships, and other Alien entities and vehicles go down to Earth to scope out the damage. They all came and went within the few days so he figured that there must not be much left. Elon and PAL prepared each other for the worst.

(Above: Earth after the catastrophic event. UFO's and other alien vehicles coming and going from earth after the event seemingly leaving with nothing)

On day 11, PAL prepped the rocket for launch before Elon joined him. He climbed aboard and strapping into place next to his only remaining friend, PAL, and they looked at each other and nodded before Elon started the countdown.

(Above: Elon is pictured watching PAL get the rocket ready to launch before their risky return trip to Earth)

The timer hit ZERO and Pal waited for Elon to gesture before activating the launch button. The held each others arms and braced themselves as the rocket began to rumble and slowly lift from the planet's surface.

(Above: Elon snaps a selfie with PAL, who was in scooter-mode as they explored and cruised the desert-like surface of planet earth after returning to their home planet)

(Above: Top: PAL in TESLA car mode in front of the old Central Station in Post Apocalyptic Detroit.

Bottom: PAL in ORB UFO mode and Elon getting ready to get on board before they take flight and checkout the local landscape)

(Above: Elon takes selfies all across the World as he looks for any sign of human life, just to find absolutely no one.)

(Above: ELI / Elon takes a selfie with PAL who is in rover-mode during their earth explorations)

Elon- who has now changed his name to ELI (Ever Lasting Intelligence) and PAL can only search so much of the Earth on their own so they come up with the brilliant idea to clone Elon so they could maximize the intelligence and amount of work that could be done with more hands. They kind of get out of control with the cloning and end up with 10 of them. Now there are 10 ELI's running around and annoying the shit out of each other.

Now Elon uses his billions of dollars worth of hardware and AI technology to scour the planet of any living animals to bring back to his headquarters in Texas where he works day and night with is AI assistant and 10 Elon clones.

(Above: Elon's WARS [Wildlife And Retrieval System] machinery uses a multitude of methods to properly and safely attract local wildlife in each area of the planet. This image was taken while coaxing the local wild cats of the, now very toxic and radiation-filled, Amazon Rainforest)

(Above: Two mini AI robots break away from the WARS machinery for solo- retrieval. On the left we have a baby spider-monkey AI meant to coax monkeys and their families to trust the machinery so they could be safely transported back to the base in Texas)

(Above: Two mini spider monkey AI robots and their 4-wheeler used to quickly and safely transport orphaned monkeys and rescued monkey families to and from the main WARS machinery)

(Above: Orphaned monkey baby befriends one of the mini AI robots and the robot escorts him back to the WARS machinery base)

(Above: Adolescent monkey befriends baby spider monkey AI robots and they lead him back to the WARS base)

Elon's AI drones and WARS machines found a remarkable amount of life still left in the Amazon Rainforest, but the area was badly damaged with radiation poisoning ravaging the local animals and wildlife. His WARS machines were able to safely explore and retrieve all the remaining wildlife in the rainforest and relocate them to Elon's headquarters back in Texas. It was nothing like the Amazon, but the animals adapted well, and it was radiation-proof!

(Above: Monkey mother and her two babies wearily observe a few AI monkey robots from a distance before approaching them out of pure curiosity)

(Above: A tiger cub native to the Amazon Rainforest approaches a mini AI robot along with two baby chicks who all end up befriending him and he coaxes the three of them to be rescued)

Elon's AI drones and WARS machines found a remarkable amount of life still left in the Amazon Rainforest, but the area was badly damaged with radiation poisoning ravaging the local animals and wildlife. His WARS machines were able to safely explore and retrieve all the remaining wildlife in the rainforest and relocate them to Elon's headquarters back in Texas. It was nothing like the Amazon, but the animals adapted well, and it was radiation-proof!

(Above: A giant black panther and a baby leopard approach a glowing machine in Elon's Secret Lair)

(Above: Two abnormally large wild cats rescued from the Amazon Rainforest, pictured here in their new home at Elon's radiation-proof bunker and secret laboratory underground somewhere in Texas)

(Above: Elon is pictured on the far right with one of his unreleased off-roading TESLA vehicles at the center and a giant Amazon rainforest cat whining at Elon for being homesick)

MA (Maternal AI), as the name may suggest, also acts as Elon's emotional support and motherly figure. Being the last living human being to survive such a catastrophe, he needed to create a very comprehensive AI system that could trick someone such as him into truly feeling a human connection with another, and MA was his greatest accomplishment to date. Elon had already tried cloning himself, but after having about 10 Elon's hanging around the laboratory with him, he quickly grew bored of them, but together they collectively agreed that a totally different entity altogether would make for good variety of company, and together they worked for 10 days straight developing and building MA 1.0.

Even though she looked nothing like a human, her empathy, care, and love for Elon was very apparent to him ad he no longe saw MA as the AI robot she was but as a mother and fellow human. MA helped Elon discover things about himself and the planet that he never thought possible. Elon learned humility, compassion for other species, animals, and plants that he never had before. How ironic, was it, that now, after all humans have died, he would finally find the beauty in connection with them and the planet around him. But that wouldn't stop him from appreciating the perspective now. Oh how he wished he spent his time with humanity in a more wholesome way. Too bad he couldn't go back with this perspective and change his actions, maybe, just maybe things wouldn't have ended up as the did.

[felassan]

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DAO’s development actually finished up around April 2009. They then put it on ice for around six months before release. Human Noble is DG’s favorite Origin. It’s one of the ones he wrote. He also wrote the Dalish Origin as well (Tamlen is his doing ;__;). DAO’s temp name during development was Chronicles. DG has never played any of the DA games after they were released. He played them pre-release loads of times, when they were half-broken or incomplete etc. This stream is his first time seeing everything played after completion.

NWN: Hordes of the Underdark was the first game where DG was a/the lead writer, in charge of other writers, as opposed to a senior writer. It was pretty well-received. In the fall of 2003, BW were just finishing up HotU when James Ohlen came to DG to talk. BW had been having issues during the development of NWN with the IP holder for D&D Wizards of the Coast, so they were interested in starting their own IPs that they would have ownership over (and also for financial reasons). JO said to DG that one of these new IPs would be fantasy and one would be sci-fi. He knew that DG was more fantasy-oriented, and so asked DG if he wanted to take this on. DG was down, and the first thing to figure out was what that fantasy IP was going to be.

JO gave DG an atlas of European history, which he still has, and said that he wanted him to make a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and reminiscent of D&D - “make it like D&D but not, file off the serial numbers really well”. This worked for DG because he was pretty familiar with D&D and there were also lots of things that he didn’t like about it and wanted to change. So DG went off and for the next six months worked on creating a setting, beginning with documentation and the map. This was kinda strange because they had no idea at that time what their story would be. JO was very interested in having a “genetically evil” enemy in the setting (like an equivalent to orcs). DG wasn’t a big fan of this and his initial go at the setting omitted this (i.e. darkspawn were not a thing) and was a lot more realistic. JO insisted on adding them later on.

This period of development wasn’t actually a good process. There were other people who were working on the project who were designing the combat side. Looking back, DG feels that they should have put their heads together a lot sooner. The combat designers had various ideas for various prestige classes and subclasses, and DG would be like “these are nowhere in the setting [lore]”. He tried his best to add a few of them after the fact, which is why we see things like DA’s version of the bard archetype. The combat designers and artists originally had a vision in mind of a game that was much more along the lines of the type of fantasy you’d find in the Conan the Barbarian world - bare-chested barbarians, sorceresses that show a lot of skin, a grimdark world with barbarian hordes. They were just assuming that’s what it was going to be. At this point in time DG had never thought, “Oh, maybe I’m responsible for communicating my ideas to them” - he’d never done this role before and was just told to go create the world. He created world-building documentation and would send out emails saying “I’m making this documentation, please go ahead and take a look”, not learning until later on that nobody outside of the writing team really likes reading such documentation. He learned tricks later on like making the docs more accessible, less dense and wordy, and overall easier to peruse.

There was no real ‘vision holder’ for DA. Mass Effect did a much better job of that. Casey Hudson was the project director and the vision holder for ME, and he had the power to enforce a set vision of what was and was not ME. ME therefore ended up having a bit more of a coherent vision. DG was in essence the vision holder for DA, but he didn’t really have the authority to enforce it on the artists. The DA teams ended up spending a good 3.5 - 4 years of the ~6 years of DAO dev time going in circles, not exactly sure what they were going to make, the various people working on it having different ideas of what ‘kind’ of fantasy they were going to make. The writing team were leaning towards LoTR; the artists were leaning towards Conan; at one point one of the project directors was leaning towards a point-and-click Diablo-style action adventure; and nobody was overriding anybody else.

The fans who hang out on the forums and in similar places have a very different idea about what kind of game they like and want to play versus the telemetry BW get from the public in general. As an example, fans on the forums tend towards playing non-humans and feeling that playing as a human is boring. Forum-polls reflected that, but BW’s general public-telemetry shows that around 75-80% of the playerbase played a human in DAO. Elves were at 15% and dwarves 5%. In contrast, in the core/forum-based fanbase, the human figure dropped down to 30%.

DG originally wanted Zevran to be a gay romance (he has talked about this before). He asked JO if he could do that pretty early on, thinking of Jade Empire which had same-gender romance options which were really popular. BW were surprised about that, and DG had no idea that the JE team were going to do this. For DAO, he had an idea for an assassin character. He had been reading about how the CIA and KGB would often recruit gay men to be their assassins, as they didn’t tend to have family ties. DG thought this was really interesting. JO was cool with the idea on a conceptual level, but thought that the work that would end up going into it would be better served if those characters could be romanced by both male and female PCs. Zevran and Leliana weren’t intended to be bi, they were “bi out of convenience”, but at the time these sorts of things (representation and such) didn’t enter into the equation as much as it does today. DG wrote Zevran in his head as being romanceable by men.

DG would ask the hair artists, “Why all the mullets?”, because he never understood that, and he’d get “a sort of shrug response”, and an indication that “it’s easier to model, I guess?” Having hair which is loose, in the face, in locks, coming over the shoulders etc wasn’t really supported at this point by the tech or the engine. Hence, they ended up with like five different versions of mullets. On the subject of the engine, for the first half of development they were using an upgraded version of the Aurora engine from NWN, and it was not good. Several years in they decided to switch. Trent Oster was in charge at the time of making a new proprietary BW engine. At the time it wasn’t ready yet, but the DA team decided to grab it, use it and hammer it into the DA engine. That engine had “so many little weird quirks”, like lighting on skin not working properly and looking bad, and one of the issues was hair. It was supposed to be BW’s proprietary engine but it really wasn’t optimized for RPGs and didn’t include a dialogue system. They had to custom-build the conversation system. (At the time Trent didn’t think BW should be doing RPGs anymore, which is a whole other story of its own). DG recalls programmers complaining about things in the engine that weren’t ready for ‘prime-time’. Even compared to games released concurrently, DAO’s graphics were a bit dated.

For the worldbuilding, they had an internal wiki and they kept everything on there. They ended up with a lot of legacy documentation on there very quickly. Eventually they solved this by hiring an editor whose sole job it was to wrangle the documentation. DG started work on the setting in the same manner in which he’d embark on starting a homebrew - ‘so like, first, here’s a map, oh, I like this name, vague ideas, a paragraph on each major nation, a rough timeline of the history, expanding, and it just growing from there’. After about six months, they brought on other writers, and by then he had around 50 pages of documentation. This 50 pages was a minute amount compared to the amount they had generated at the time of release. Originally, they weren’t sure where in the world specifically the story would take place, so DG made sure to seed potential and brewing conflicts throughout Thedas. They settled quite quickly on the new Blight starting in Ferelden. Once they established that, the writers went to town on taking Ferelden specifically and blowing it up detail-wise. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of the dwarves and Orzammar. Mary Kirby was on Fereldan customs and traditions.

The first version of the setting was more grounded in realism, almost like a post-fantasy. The dragons and griffons were extinct and a lot of the things that were thought to be fantastical were thought to be over with. During development, they started clawing these things back. They brought back dragons because the game was named Dragon Age (lol). DG was approached like, “Hey, we named the game DA, can you bring back dragons and weave them into the story more powerfully?” Wynne’s writer Sheryl Chee had a bit of an obsession with griffons and was often like ‘omg, griffons :D’, and this is the origin of Wynne’s dialogue with the Warden about griffons.

KotOR was the first time BW had tried to do a game that was fully voiced-over. For KotOR, BW sent the work of casting, direction and so on down to another studio in California called Technicolor. BW had little say in the process then and when they got it back, “it was what it was”. By the time they got to DA and the first ME, BW had a good system down for recording and VO had become an important thing in games at the time. BW are really one of the premieres for this, a lot of actors really like acting on BW games as they get a lot of space to act where they wouldn’t normally be able to do so otherwise. DG has learned a lot from Caroline Livingstone on how to encourage the best performance out of an actor. For DAO, DG worked together with the various lead designers and Caroline to decide on the auditions, casting etc. This was one of DG’s favorite things to do.

Gideon Emery as Fenris, GDL as Solas and Eve Myles as Merrill were times where DG had written the character and then went to Caroline and said “I have an actor in mind for them, can you check it out?” These were specific times where he was able to secure the actor he wanted. This didn’t always work out, for example there are times when actors aren’t interested or have no time due to scheduling conflicts or were too expensive etc. Eve and GDL were DG’s roommate Cori’s idea. Cori was a big fan of Torchwood/the actors from Torchwood, and worked as an editor at BW for a long time. Gideon was DG’s idea after playing FF12. For DAO, DG didn’t have any specific ideas in terms of actors. Casting Morrigan was the longest, most drawn out process.

The Circle went through a whooole process during worldbuilding. Initially, mages in the game weren’t supposed to have any “fighting magic”. The restrictions were originally such that in the lore, they didn’t teach mages that. Mages weren’t taught any magic that could kill people, only ‘indirect’ forms of magic that could support others. However, [during what sounds like] playtesting it was asked “Why can’t I cast a fireball? I just want to cast a fireball”, so the writers had to go back and rework how magic in the lore worked completely.

Flemeth was originally going to be voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and she was totally on-board, but unfortunately because of DAO’s development delays, she was unable to attend the new recording time as she had a conflict in her schedule (she was filming House of Sand and Fog). Shoreh was quite disappointed about this and her family had been so excited that she was going to be in a video game. When the movie was finished, Shoreh came back to BW and let them know that she was still available, and this is how she ended up in ME2. For a while they were trying to find an actress with an accent that authentically mirrored Shoreh’s. Out of the blue around this time, Claudia Black’s agent sent BW an audition tape of her. At the time Claudia hadn’t done any games but wanted to get into it. The tape was of Claudia doing a beat poet rendition of Baby Got Back. DG still has this tape. DG was a big fan of Farscape and on listening to the tape, it clicked right away in his head that Claudia would be perfect for Morrigan.

The Fade ended up being a big irritation for the writers. They wanted the PC to be able to assume different forms and such while in there. A lot of this stuff proved too difficult for the combat designers to work out, and so it ended up getting changed a lot. They had a hard time coming up with gameplay that could work in the Fade. The mage Origin is DG’s least favorite of the Origin stories, as he’s really dubious about the Fade section in it. It didn’t work out like how they had pictured it in their heads. By the time they got to DAI, that’s when the Fade really looks like how the writers first described/envisioned it. By this point the artists were more keen to give it a more specific feel. DAO was made at a time when ‘brown is realistic’ was a prevailing thing in games dev.

The experience of a mage in the world isn’t represented or conveyed very well to the player when the player is a mage. The experience of the player when they’re playing a mage or have a mage in their party doesn’t really match up with how the world lore tells them how dangerous mages can be - for example, how they can lose control and so on, we never really have an example of a PC mage struggling with being taken over by a demon. This was originally supposed to be a subplot in DA2 for mage Hawkes, in one of the last cuts. In Act 2, mage Hawke was originally slowly being tricked by a demon in their head that they thought was real, only to realize at the last minute. Mouse the Pride demon in the mage Origin is the only time in the entire series that they really ever properly demonstrated how demons can fuck with [PC] mages. Also, PC templars were originally supposed to have a permanent lyrium addiction that they needed to ‘feed’, but this was scrapped as the system designers weren’t keen on it and felt that it was essentially handicapping the player. 

Mages were originally also not supposed to be able to deal with pure lyrium (it would ‘overload’ them). There is a plot where mage PCs run around touching lyrium nodes to refill their mana bars. On this DG was like “Wtf is this?” The designers said that it works, and DG said “but it flies in the face of the lore”. This instance is an example of how the DA team was working where the various departments (writers, artists, designers etc) all had their own ideas about how the game and its world would work and never overrode each other (see above). DG feels that DAO is a little contradictory in that way. It’s only after the game came out that a lot of the people on the team really “bought into” what they’d put forward. This got easier as they went on, with people involved buying then into the things that make Dragon Age, Dragon Age. At one point, not everyone on the team was even aware of those things.

DG relates that originally, they would ask the artists, “Ok, can we get a village?” and said village once created would be quite generic and non-specific to DA. The writers would try to relate how things are in the DA world and list things that would be found in a village like this specific to the DA world, and the artists either didn’t read it or had their own ideas (DG isn’t sure which), and nobody was around to tell them not to do that and that they should do it differently. Everyone having their own ideas like this is why we ended up getting something that is this sort of “cobbled together half-Conan half-LotR mish-mash”, and after a while this sort of became DA’s “thing”.

Initially, BW had concepts drawn up for a lot more different creatures. After they went in circles for those years and consequently ran out of time to do all the models, they had to cut these concepts down more and more. Demons were among the ones that were the first to go (this is why we have situations like a bereskarn as the Sloth Demon in the mage Origin). The original concepts for things like spirits of Valor and Sloth demons were really good. Early on, JO made a list of D&D creatures that he liked. He picked the ones that they were thinking of doing, sent them to DG and said to make a “DA version of this”. For example, D&D succubi essentially became Desire Demons. Desire Demons were originally patterned off Sandman, neither male nor female yet really alluring, acting more like a genie and trying to ferret out mortals’ inner desires (which are not necessarily sexual in nature), without being overtly sexual. The artists’ version came back and that was basically the model seen in-game. The writers were like “What is this, this is nothing like the description?” and the artists responded that on the list from JO, it was included, in that you had to click on “succubus” to get to the Desire Demon description, so they had just read “succubus” and done their version of a succubus. The artists did loads of great work, but this was one of the instances were DG was like “???” By then, it was too late to change it. The writers were able to encourage them to make Desire Demons a little more fearsome, so that made it in at least.

The mage Origin was one of the more contentious Origin stories. It had like 4 different versions written of it over time. It was often the case that BW would hire someone, and writing an Origin story was their first test. Three different writers came in and wrote a version of the mage Origin and those versions just didn’t work. Finally they passed it to Sheryl Chee and she wrote it. The Origins were the parts of the game in general that were written/rewritten the most often. There were several others that got written that they discarded. 

Duncan was slated for death from Day 1. When DG writes a story, the thing he does first is pick out the big emotional beats that he wants, such as deaths. He decides these ahead of time and the stuff in-between comes later and is more often changed. Oghren was also originally supposed to die, but this ended up getting cut. DG related a story of how Oghren came to be: At the time, there was a phase JO went through when he thought everything had a formula that it could be done by. One of these ‘creative forumulas’ was that all such IPs had a two-word name that they’re known by, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance (being Dragon-Lance). This is how ‘DA’ and ‘ME’ came to be. One of the formulas he wanted to implement was how to distill the ‘comedy character’, like Minsc or HK-47. These characters were very popular with the fans and JO was certain that there was a way to figure this out to create one for DA. At the time, DG argued with him a lot about this. JO insisted it could be done. DG was originally supposed to write this character but ended up not doing so. JO came up with a list of comedic archetypes and had DG write a blurb about what kind of character each could be. These were then sent out to the team who voted on which was their favorite. This process eventually resulted in an archetype basically called ‘The Buffoon’ (think Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, the kind of guy people laugh at because he’s such an oaf).

At this point ‘The Buffoon’ wasn’t named or made a dwarf yet. JO came to DG to write him, but DG said there was a problem which is that he hates this archetype. Homer and Peter are characters that he despises. DG is a professional writer, but this was comedy (outside of his areas of strength), and he felt the best he would be able to do is write a character who makes fun of this archetype and lampshade that. Comedy is something that has to come from within the writer. Oghren was given to someone else, and he ended up getting rewritten again anyway. By the time they were working on Awakening, DAO had not yet come out, and the assumption prior to the game going out was that Oghren was still going to be the most popular character from among the followers. The comedic character that ended up being the most popular along these lines was Alistair, which was interesting as he wasn’t intended as a comedic character, “so shows what we know”. DG was dubious that Oghren was going to be popular, because “he was kind of pathetic, honestly”, but that was the thinking at the time. Thinking he would be well-loved is why he was in Awakening.

On Alistair, any character DG writes is going to be sarcastic. At the time DG had made it a sort of personal challenge to recreate Joss Whedon’s dialogue patterns in his characters. Alistair was a sort of mish-mash of Xander from Buffy and maybe Mal from Firefly. DG wanted to see if he could do it, so Alistair was kind of quippy and self-deprecating. DG never really considered this to be Alistair’s main personality feature, but when other writers wrote him, they often had him doing this, as they liked the trait so much, and so this is how Alistair ended up as he did.

On dwarves, the dwarves being cut off from the Fade is very much baked into who the dwarves are as a race. There’s a specific reason why. This has been hinted at so far and it’s likely to come up in the future. DG had various ideas for some things that he wanted to include with the races or the way the world works etc. Some of them ended up never happening or some are mentioned only as part of the lore (templar lyrium addiction never coming up in gameplay is an example of this). Dwarven history and the nature of the dwarves is one of the things that survived pretty well though. DG calls Jennifer Hepler “mistress of the dwarves” and says that she did a really detailed, amazing breakdown of their history. After Jennifer left it was Mary Kirby, and DG feels that they did a good job of maintaining how dwarves were, in terms of both how they’re often presented in fantasy and yet also quite different in DA. Orzammar is one of DG’s favorite plots all together. You can really tell that Jennifer Hepler really enjoyed the dwarves and brought a lot of love to that plot.

DG draws a distinction between DA fans and the unpleasant people who harassed Jennifer Hepler.

They managed to keep the Tranquil in. There was a while there where they were going to be cut. At the same time, DG regrets that they couldn’t solve the making of the player more aware of how mages are dangerous, thing. Players could make a cogent argument like “they’re not that dangerous, look at me [mage PC]” and the writers were like “well... yeah, that is fair”. It was a case of showing one thing and the player experience of it being another. DG feels that this made the templars come off worse than they are. DG feels that they are being massively unfair and too extreme in their approach to the problem, but the problem itself is a real thing. He feels that there’s some merit/truth in the argument that mages are oppressed, but he looks at it more like an issue like gun control rather than as treatment of oppressed people, saying that we don’t have an example in real life of oppressed people who can explode into demons and cast fireballs and so on.

There are some funny pronunciations that worked their way into DA, and the reason for a lot of them is as follows: the writers had to create a pronunciation guide for VO, because otherwise you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. (Some did still slip through). The guide was online, and if you clicked on a word, an audio file for it would play. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of this and did a great job, but has a really strong NY accent, and in some cases the ‘NY-ness’ of her pronunciation endearingly worked itself into things (the way Arlathan is sometimes said is an example of where this happened sometimes).

Sometimes the writers trying to communicate the “hotness” of a character to the artists didn’t go smoothly. The writers would sometimes say things like, ok, this character is a romance, they need to be hot, and the designs would come back looking “like Burt Reynolds”, and the writers would be like “???” And then a character that wasn’t particularly intended to be hot, as in that wasn’t mentioned at all in the descriptions of them, would come back “accidentally hot”, and the writers would be like “Why couldn’t you have done this when we were asking for a character that was meant to be hot”, and the artists would be like “What?? He’s not hot”. And this became a thing (lmao - this discussion was prompted by DG being asked “Was Duncan meant to be that hot?”, for context). Some of the artists were so paranoid about their [in]ability to judge actually-hot characters that when it was time to pick an appearance, like for Alistair, they gathered up all the women at BioWare, and DG (“resident gay”) into a room to show them an array of faces and bodies like “Is this hot? Is this hot?” DG and co would sit there like, “How can you not tell? Is this a straight man thing?!” Anyways, this is why oftentimes we ended up with characters who are accidentally hot.

Over time, the writers realized that the way they communicated to artists needed to be managed better. The words they would use would have different connotations to them the writers, than what they did to the artists. For example, for Anders’ design in DA2, he was supposed to be “a little haggard”. When DG thinks of haggard, he thinks ‘a little tired, mussed hair, looking like you’ve been through some shit’. But the artists based on that produced concepts with super sunken cheeks, looking like he’d been terribly starved. The writers needed to develop a specific vocabulary for communicating with the artists, as artists think in terms of how something looks, but writers are thinking in terms of what the character “is”. Anders’ description talked about his history a lot, and the one visual-type word that jumped out was “haggard” due to its visual connotations. “A lot it came down to the writers being up their/our own asses.”

When they got to DAI, they had figured out that the way to get best results on this front was /not/ to have the writer go off and develop a long description and pre-conceived notion of what the character looked like in their head. In such scenarios artists don’t feel that they have much to contribute to the process or an ability to put their own stamp on who this character is and make them interesting to them (the best, most interesting characters are when people at all stages of the pipeline properly get to feed into it). They learned that the better solution was to bring the artists in earlier, and to give them little blurbs, and not name the character but give them an ‘archetype’-sort of ‘name’. For example, Dorian was “the rockstar mage”, “cool”, “Freddie Mercury”. The writers wouldn’t be sure that a particular concept would ‘hit’, so at this stage they would offer an array of options and sit the artist down and walk them through the concepts. The artists would then provide a bunch of sketches and it would go back and forth, with both taking part in the character creation process together. For the first two games, the writers were “really hogging” this process to themselves. They got better at not doing this and better at communicating with the artists by DAI.

There were a lot of arguments about how mages in DAO had a lot of specific lore words like “Harrowing”, “phylactery”, “Rite of Tranquility” etc. There was concern that this would be too confusing for players to understand and that it was too complicated. DG says that thankfully he put his foot down and pushed for this stuff to be kept. A lot of fans assume that as lead writer DG had all this influence, way more influence than he could possibly exert on a team. He wasn’t even a lead, he was a sub-lead, under a lead designer. He only had so much say. If the lead designer or lead artist wanted to do something differently, often there was not much he could do. Hence he had to pick his battles carefully, choose the important ones to fight. The mage vocabulary thing was one of these.

Templar Greagoir’s name is pronounced “Gregor” and it comes from a place in Alberta near where DG lived.

Codex entries are usually one of the last things that get done in a project like this, and so all of that kind of textual lore comes in super late and is super punchy as by then the writers have written so much and are exhausted. They had to find a way to make this process cute or interesting or fun for themselves, which is why a lot of entries are quite fun to read. Sometimes a writer would make a joke for banter [irl], and it would end up making it into an entry.

Only Morrigan and Duncan got unique body models in DAO. The companions all have custom-morphed heads but not custom-morphed bodies (Morrigan not included here). This is why every model has a necklace or a collar right at the point where they had to be attached to be a body. These sometimes used assets that couldn’t be used by the PC but were not unique to that character. Duncan probably got a unique model because he was in a lot of marketing/promotional material. Qunari were originally conceived as having horns.

Most people didn’t even finish DAO once (public telemetry again here), only approximately 20-25% actually did. The devs try not to read too much into this kind of thing, but the telemetry does tell them where a lot of people stop playing the game permanently (they call these “drop-off points”). One of these points in DAO is the Fade during Broken Circle. Sometimes when people interpret this data they involve self-serving biases, but it was generally accepted that the Fade there was too long, too complex, not interesting enough, etc. [source]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

[snuggetfish]

I firmly believe that Nishida and Minami had to babyssit Majima's daughter at least once when he and his wife had a night out. Two of them cuz Majima's offspring is a little mischievous shit (just like her dad) and probably runs away on an epic quest to find her parents and explore Kamurocho at night. Probably the three of them were just this close from being caught by the Majimas and returned home at the last second only to pretend that they were playing Mahjong all this time. Even if little Miss Majima doesn't know how to play Mahjong to the point of just showing her tiles and saying "blackjack". Also parents would question why the child isn't sleeping at this hour?

Anon that's quite the hilarious scenario 😂 Believable too, because let's face it there ain't just one kid in that terrible trio - Minami counts as a mischievous brat too.

I feel like a part of Majima already knows how things are likely to play out even before he leaves the guys in charge of his daughter. It's either gonna end in a grand adventure or some really cranky babysitters with an equally cranky girl destructively taking out her boredom on them. But even knowing all that, he doesn't make a fuss. With all his overprotectiveness, I think he figures that given her wild kind of temperament (same one he had as a kid, I bet), it's good if she lets loose every once in a while. If he can't count on Minami, he for sure can count on Nishida to make sure she only gets into a moderate, strictly controlled amount of trouble. And that Nishida would call him asap if things were to go south.

So really, I feel the most for Nishida here. By the end of the evening he's probably gonna wish he'd brought a couple of leashes 😂

We haven't established an age for Majima's daughter, but I imagine she'd be maybe 5-6, old enough to more or less clearly communicate her wishes (or orders, more like), but still easily distracted and lacking a good grasp on the meaning of certain things. Like what a "night out" really is. I.e:

"Your parents went out to eat a special dinner." -> kid brain -> They went to Smile Burger for a Happy Meal? Without me??

She'd probably feel more than a little betrayed at first, but hey she eventually gets a Happy Meal out of it as it becomes the first stop in their adventure. 🍔

And as the night wears on... well the boys try to keep her busy with the games at the arcade, emphasis on the "try". But she's just freakishly good at them. Beats Minami every time... and there's only so much fun to be had when there's no challenge.

So eventually she'll want to move on to something more high stakes. I have to say I first read the Mahjong bit of your ask as "the three of them were playing Mahjong... in the actual gambling den in Kamurocho" and that image kinda stuck with me ghkhj.

Maybe we can turn it into a Haruka's requests kinda thing, where even if she's not allowed to participate in the games herself, she's backseat gaming, coaching Minami's moves and sounding very disappointed whenever he loses of course.

Why would a little girl who's got loving, rich parents and everything she could possibly wish for want to win big cash at koi-koi, you ask? Well the cards are pretty, for one... and maybe mom or dad's birthdays are coming up too 😌

Either way when the couple returns to find the little one exhausted and dozing off in Nishida's lap... it's pretty clear that whatever they were up to, it must've been a lot of fun! 💙

[shihalyfie]

Some fun talking about and analyzing the tri. stage play, and its relationship to Kizuna

The tri. stage play (full title: "Super Evolution Stage! Digimon Adventure tri. August 1st Adventure") is honestly quite an unusual entry in this franchise, even within Adventure standards. Nearly everything about its production is unusual -- the entire genre it's in is unexpected, the choice of time period to release something like this is unusual, and moreover, now that Kizuna’s out, a lot of people have noticed a lot of suspiciously similar themes and even language, most notably the key “we’ll always be together” line (phrased even exactly the same way in Japanese). In fact, despite ostensibly being a tri.-branded product, other than a few vague token nods to the anime series in the play itself, said stage play has very little to do with the actual anime sharing its name, so the similarity to Kizuna is even more striking in retrospect.

Perhaps another interesting thing about this play is that it’s a very good example of a standout work in the Adventure universe that didn’t have any original creator involvement (other than some minor tips from Seki). I think there’s often a tendency for people to think that in order for a sequel or spinoff to be true to the original, it has to have some member of original staff on there, especially since the Adventure (and 02) characters tend to be a bit overly complex and it helps to have the reassurance that someone who knows them is behind the wheel -- Kizuna used the presence of Seki and Yamatoya as an outright advertising point -- but this stage play’s director and writer had no experience with the franchise beforehand, not even as a fan, yet still made a very respectful product that has generally been received well by Adventure (and 02) fans and even got the original director’s approval, too. If anything, that makes it all the more impressive!

(Note that the below text spoils the story content of the play, but not Kizuna’s to any substantial degree.)

Some production background

Anime and video game stage tie-ins are fairly common -- much like this one, they tend to have very short runs and are targeted at a limited audience -- but they’re usually stereotyped as being for the otome crowd (i.e. predominantly female otaku audience), so works like this are generally associated with it. As a result, when this play was announced and released between tri. Parts 4 and 5, quite a few people were surprised, because this franchise originally came from products associated with shounen anime. In practice, this was a period where it was becoming increasingly clear that there was, in fact, a huge female audience for Digimon (especially Adventure universe), on top of the fact that (as noted by the performers in the final show) the audience for this show ended up being unusually mixed-gender, because Digimon really is universal -- but it did lead to the announcement of the play being initially received with heavy skepticism, partially because of the usual misogyny (stigma around things associated with female audiences, etc.), and partially because this was during a time where...well, saying that a very huge percentage of the fanbase, especially the Japanese side, was really pissed off at anything tri.-branded at the time is kind of an understatement. Ultimately, the play ended up very well-received with a small but dedicated following, and it’s currently referred to as “dejisute” (short for “Digimon Stage”) in Japanese fan shorthand. Bringing it up generally elicits positive critical feedback, even among those who were initially skeptical.

Some interesting things also surround the circumstances of its production as well. As some might know already, the tri. anime series and Kizuna share only one key member of staff: Kinoshita Yousuke, who was involved in tri. Parts 5 and 6, and eventually went on to become the producer for Kizuna and the upcoming 02-based movie. tri. was a work that (for some reason) had a huge number of producers on it, of which Kinoshita was only one; he seemed to have been replacing Arai Shuuhei, who left the project after Part 4. However, while Arai was formerly one of the most visible of tri.’s producers (he was the only one regularly brought up in interviews), how much degree of influence Kinoshita had with tri. is unknown, other than the fact he had no involvement in its story. Given that the decision to make Kizuna also seemed to have been made around Part 5, it seems that Kinoshita may have been brought on specifically for the purpose of observing and prepping for Kizuna, because his role on tri. seems to have been so minimal that the moment he was put in charge of Kizuna, the production philosophy ended up becoming completely different under his management. (When you think about it, tri. and Kizuna have very little in common, other than the rough premises of involving the older Adventure cast.)

The thing is, though, Part 5 isn’t actually the first tri. work Kinoshita is credited for, but this stage play is -- which is interesting to consider when taking into account the heavy amount of thematic parallels between this and Kizuna three years later, and in general the very unusual creative decision to make a stage play that suddenly popped up at exactly this time, making heavier tributes to Adventure (and even 02) than the actual anime it was branded with. Making things even more interesting was that the stage play’s director and writer, Tani Kenichi, was allegedly recruited by an unnamed producer impressed with his work (by the way, did I mention Kinoshita used to work in live-action before joining Toei?). Given all that, perhaps this stage play coming off unnervingly like a sort of Kizuna prototype isn’t all that surprising...

Unfortunately, right now we’re still kind of in a time period where official will get barraged with violently angry comments for even so much as putting the series on streaming services, so it’ll probably be a few more years (if ever) before official will be willing to be more open about what went on behind tri. production, and it’s probably a bit much to get too speculative about things like this when real people are involved. Nevertheless, one thing is apparent: the director and writer, Tani, was a newcomer to Digimon -- not even someone who’d been a fan beforehand -- but watched all of Adventure and 02 in preparation for it and stated openly that he was very, very emotionally touched by it. The work itself is obviously made with a lot of love and respect for the series, and one really cool thing about it is that you can also tell that it came from the perspective of an adult with no preconceived notions about it, therefore meaning it comes from someone analyzing the series without necessarily caving to fanbase mantras, and making some very cogent observations about the characters. It’s also just a fabulous work production-wise in general -- the puppet work and making the Digimon look convincing on stage is very well-done, especially when you consider that this play had only ten showings -- and you really gotta appreciate the fact that, even before Seki gave him a few pointers, he was so passionate about the importance of Digimon partners that he pushed for all eight to be represented despite the expenses.

Taking a look at the play itself

Despite ostensibly tying into the tri. anime series it's branded with, the play only really seems to loosely refer to some of its key elements as taking place at approximately the same time, such as Koushirou’s server, infected Digimon, setpieces like KNIFE OF DAY, and an eventual “reveal” that this seems to take place ostensibly around the rough time period of tri.’s Part 4. Look closely, however, and you’ll notice that a lot of things in the characterization and plot arena actually don’t track much with tri. at all -- for instance, in a very non-comprehensive list of things:

It’s implied that Yamato himself is embarrassed about the KNIFE OF DAY band name and is desperately trying to get through it with passion, which doesn’t quite line up with his attitude about it in the anime.

The timeline just really doesn’t line up; Mochizuki Meiko, Meicoomon, and the infections obviously exist, but you can’t have a time period in Part 4 where the kids recognize Meicoomon as being related to the distortions or infections while also being separated from Meiko. Moreover, the “reboot” just doesn’t seem to have happened at all (and to be fair, if you’re planning on making a two-hour tribute to Adventure, not having the Digimon with memories of said adventure would seriously limit the scope of your plot, so this kind of “leeway” was probably downright necessary).

The tri. anime series portrayed Takeru as having a very sharp shift in language, presumably under the implication he’s putting up a front as a flirtatious, aggressive playboy, and so his first-person pronoun was turned into the aggressive ore and his way of referring to Yamato aniki. In Adventure and 02, Takeru had used the polite boku and childish/cutesy onii-chan, and the boku was prominently used as a plot point to hint at Takeru’s identity as the series narrator. (Yes, these kinds of things are actually kind of a big deal in fiction.) Since even longtime fans generally agree that at some point Takeru would be likely to stop using onii-chan once he became old enough, the stage play likewise also prefers aniki over onii-chan, but, notably, it doesn’t even bother with ore in the slightest nor any of the implications that surround it, and Takeru comfortably uses boku for the entirety of the play. Considering that the use of aniki is still a bit unusual (both Diablomon Strikes Back and Kizuna prominently favor the slightly more polite nii-san instead), it seems that the play was made with an awareness that both aspects of Takeru’s language had changed, but a conscious decision to hold over only one from the anime.

And so on and so forth.

In general, the way you could describe this play’s handling of Adventure universe lore and characterization elements is that it’s a bit selective about which tri.-related elements it makes use of, particularly in regards to ones that might be too difficult to reconcile with the original Adventure (and 02). (This is basically the same attitude Kizuna roughly takes in regards to handling of tri. elements, although it’s less noticeable there partially because of the five-year gap between tri. and Kizuna.) Obviously, being completely incongruous with the tri. anime would be a pretty crude thing to do for a play that’s actually branded with it (and especially when said anime was still ongoing at the time, regardless of public opinion), but, regardless, the end result is that its actual relationship with the tri. anime’s version of canon is a bit tenuous.

The main reason for this is probably that, on the flip side, the stage play's references to Adventure -- as in, the specific series that aired in 1999-2000 and took place in the in-universe August 1 and 3, 1999 -- are incredibly aggressive. In fact, it’s actually far more aggressive in this respect than Kizuna is. For all Kizuna is branded as an Adventure movie and puts the original Adventure cast first and foremost in all of the advertising, if you watch the actual movie, in practice, it’s more of something that lies in the gap between Adventure and 02 and the two series together as a whole. Adventure was a series that practically revolved around a "trapped in another world" story and the specific impact its events had on the kids involved, but Kizuna focuses more on the “larger world”, including real world society (very much 02 things), with a lot of themes with suspicious pertinence to 02 and references to its epilogue looming over the plot; the specific Adventure references and even the Digital World don’t come into play until the climax. (And that’s before we get into the fact that the 02 quartet gets more screentime than a good chunk of their seniors.) Really, you can see it just by the fact that a majority of the primary key visuals line the 02 quartet up with everyone else; it’s a movie about both, not just Adventure.

So in other words, Kizuna is really about mixing Adventure and 02 elements, serving as a sort of stopgap work, and recasting the Adventure group in a lot of 02′s context. (And that’s by no means a bad thing; since Adventure wasn’t about that, the differing juxtaposition is a fresh perspective in its own way.) But in terms of revisiting what the actual series called Digimon Adventure was and how those events might have an influence on its relevant cast years later, this play (which actually has longer runtime than Kizuna, being around two hours) is a good place to go to if that’s what you’re looking for. The entire premise of the play revolves around copiously referencing that specific adventure back in 1999, and, more importantly, what impact it’s still continuing to have in this particular group’s memories, to the point where they’re starting to romanticize it and wish they could return to it forever...

Ah, right, that’s what this play has in common with Kizuna: the overall theme of unhealthy fixation on rose-colored nostalgia, and the need to move forward from it. (And, driving it home, “unhealthy fixation on the events of Adventure” as a symbol of that rose-colored nostalgia, to boot.)

The premise of the play itself is that the kids decide to hold a camping trip as tribute to the adventure in 1999, as part of a desire to "go back to those times" (and, as is eventually revealed, it’s actually part of a pocket universe their subconscious wishes had dreamed up as a desire to recreate the past, thanks to the power of the Digital World). So all of the references to Adventure are concrete and fleshed out in specific detail, ranging from everyone referencing specific events and how they impacted them (Jou very explicitly refers to his experiences in Adventure episodes 46-47 in terms of why it fuels his current desire to become a doctor) to even the most minor of references (direct reference to bananas on File Island, from Adventure episode 3).

As a brief aside, a positive side effect of centering the plot on this specific adventure is that it justifies the reason for why these eight are working together (at least prior to the endgame reveal that they’re still involved in tri.’s events); the eight of them weren’t portrayed as liable to do so without good reason, and while certain aspects and events from 02 are alluded to when they’re relevant, the absence of the actual quartet passing without note is completely justifiable because they simply were not on that adventure anyway. (They weren’t initially planned to be at the event in 02 episode 17, and knowing them, it’s likely they wouldn’t want to be at this kind of outright commemorative camping event, because they’d feel like they’d be intrusive in something they had nothing to do with.) So within the scope of the play in two hours, the narrative can be very neatly condensed to be mostly about Adventure itself.

Although this play and Kizuna both share the common theme of the existential crisis that comes with getting older and the tendency to romanticize one’s childhood, the underlying reasons are a bit different; Kizuna’s is very close to 02 in that it’s largely to do with societal pressures and expectations, especially since the question of "what you want to do with your career" is a driving motivation in it. In other words, the existential crisis comes from living up to other people’s expectations, or trying to fit into an arbitrary societal mold of an “adult” without necessarily knowing if that’s what you really want. In the case of this stage play, being set in everyone’s high school years where everyone’s relationship to “the world at large” is a bit more tenuous, the reason for the existential crisis is somewhat closer to Adventure’s: everyone’s started to think they might have been better people back then. More confident, less hesitant, more honest with their feelings. Adventure was a series about self-improvement and one’s relationship with oneself, so it’s understandable that a work meant to look back on that specific adventure will ask the question “well, did they become better people after all?” as a result.

But there’s two problems with this line of thinking: one, this is a very rose-colored evaluation of their former selves, because just because they might have been “more confident” back then doesn’t mean they didn’t have other problems going on (Hikari calls her past self out for being arguably “more honest”, but also somewhat of a dependent child), and two, being more hesitant doesn’t make one a weaker person, just one who’s dealing with a lot more problems and awareness and things to worry about because of how much the scope of their lives has increased. As Agumon says at the end, the old Taichi and the current Taichi are still the same person; it’s just that he’s dealing with more, so he’ll naturally worry about more, and taking on those extra burdens is actually his own way of “evolving”.

Particularly interesting is the position of Jou, the not-so-unsung hero of this story, who is explicitly identified as the person most clearly aware of his future dreams and proceeding without hesitation towards them, to the point of being somewhat immune to the effects of the dream world. (Somewhat, mainly because the ending establishes that he wasn’t entirely.) It's consistent in line with the fact that we actually saw, directly, the train of thought that led to his decision to become a doctor back in Adventure, and he even states it directly in this play himself: he doesn’t consider himself someone who wants to solve things through fighting, but rather someone who can prevent casualties and heal the injured if he pursues this line of study, and thus is determined to make it happen. Even from the very early points of the play, there are several hints at him being able to see a metaphorical “future” that the others cannot, and while he remains unfailingly loyal to his friends (there’s a long sequence of him constantly claiming he’ll leave them as per Koushirou’s request but constantly coming back because he just can’t bring himself to abandon them), he also is the first one to depart the camping trip to attend to a test -- that is to say, he treasures his past, but he has a strong enough dream for his future that he’s willing to move on better than the others can.

Jou’s also the one to personally advise Yamato about the difference in nuance between doing things because you feel you must, versus doing it because you yourself truly want to, a difference in nuance that also becomes very pertinent in Kizuna. Also pertinent to both works in common is the discussion of nuances between “staying trapped in one’s memories” and “violently cutting them all away” (the consequences of the latter being more extensively discussed in Kizuna), versus the ideal situation of reflecting on those memories and experiences from the past in order to productively move forward.

And in the end, rose-colored nostalgia is, indeed, rose-colored nostalgia. Because, sure, that adventure back in the day was great, and they grew a lot, but they also grew a lot because they were overcoming some very harsh, difficult troubles; omitting those parts is losing the substance. The re-invocation of the fun “camping trip” also means re-invoking all of the other things that came along with it, including all of the dangerous threats they’d faced back then. It’s a package deal, and you can’t just filter those out, because it misses the point of what you gained out of it in the first place.

In general, the character writing for this play is also very good; there are some differences between the characters here and them back in 02, but they’re all within the believable scope of positive progression within three years and general adherence to core tenets of their character (Koushirou is certainly more assertive, but emphasis continues to be placed on his deference to others, penchant for spotting details, and capability for being an organizational leader in his own sense). Also notably, this play manages to verbalize a lot of the subtleties in Adventure and 02 that the mainstream tends to gloss over (and don’t tend to get put in official profiles) but are well-known to those deeply familiar with the series. This is the kind of attention to detail usually associated with those who have been studying the series for years, so it’s refreshing to see these come out in words -- for instance, Koushirou stating outright that he was one of the closest people to Taichi for a long time (very true!), Hikari and Takeru actually commenting on each other from back in Adventure (something we never really got in 02, despite “them having known each other for a while” being part of their character arcs), and Sora explicitly admitting that she goes out of her way for others because it’s easier to work for others than it is to even think about herself.

Actually, the attention to detail in general is fantastic; other than a minor slip-up (Sora refers to having met Koushirou during the summer camp at the beginning of the play when she’d actually known him prior from the soccer club, a detail that’s very easy to miss because it’s only mentioned once in Adventure episode 16 and clarified further in the novels), a lot of things from Adventure and 02 are made use of and framed in very clever context; the choice of Etemon as the enemy for this play is well-placed for both his entertainment value and the fact that, as an enemy personally defeated by MetalGreymon in Adventure episode 20, it makes perfect sense that he would have a grudge against Taichi in particular. (It’s also explicitly mentioned that Hikari and Tailmon never met Etemon in person even once, and that Taichi never actually got to see MetalEtemon, so there’s a lot of attention paid to logistics like that.)

Also, while 02 is not really brought up within the scope of the story (and really shouldn’t be, not when this story so heavily centers around Adventure and its themes), its place in canon and its contributions to the worldbuilding are fully respected; a lot of the offhand references to family situations and background are elements that were originally introduced in 02, and many aspects of its Digital World lore are used to assist the plot premise (in particular, the idea of the Digital World being connected to something that can conjure up unconscious dreams wasn’t explicitly invoked until 02). Rather amusingly, at one point, Hikari uses the events of 02 episode 13 to tell a “scary story” to troll Mimi, and it’s interesting and rather refreshing to see the implication that Hikari’s been able to move past the incident enough to use it to troll someone else. There are also some latent epilogue references as well, with Hikari directly bringing up her goal of becoming a kindergarten teacher, Takeru making some really subtle references to wanting to be a novelist and chronicle their adventures (in true Takeru fashion, he never states it outright, but anyone familiar with the epilogue can figure it out), and Taichi alluding to an ultimate goal of humans coexisting alongside Digimon.

Finally, attention should be called to the play’s relationship writing in general. As stated before, the play does call attention to relationships between characters that often don’t get brought up by the mainstream but are somewhat more well-known to fans -- Koushirou and Taichi, Sora and Mimi, Jou and Yamato -- but even the well-known ones are treated with nuance endemic to that from Adventure and especially 02, given that Taichi and Yamato don’t actually have the stereotypical “cold rivals” atmosphere that shounen anime would usually suggest, and the two of them have an extended heart-to-heart in which Yamato actively tries to figure out what’s wrong with Taichi and treat him kindly. (Like in Adventure, the only time they break out in a fight is when Yamato gets emotionally compromised and starts worrying that Taichi isn’t doing enough for others’ welfare.) It’s also very consistent with how the two treat each other in Kizuna as well (the izakaya scene comes to mind, and has a lot of similarities to the awkward-but-ultimately-close conversation they have at night in this play).

And, of course, the centerpiece of the narrative overall: the human-partner relationship. Of course, a lot of this was probably helped by Seki lecturing Tani to not mess this part up, but it really is impressive to consider in light of the fact we’re working with a lot of puppets that have handlers clearly in plain view, so you have to have some massive suspension of disbelief to make this work. But not only are the movements well-done to make it convincing that you really are seeing these actors physically interacting with their partners on stage, the narrative also puts huge spotlights on them, making the Digimon outright be the ones to snap their partners out of their worst patterns of thinking (especially with Agumon and Taichi), and dedicating a long period of silence where literal stage spotlights are dedicated to each kid having some alone time with their partner. The intimacy is very convincing, and, truly, Tani’s insistence on making sure every single one of the main Digimon was represented in spite of the prohibitive budget paid off very well. The point is made: a Digimon partner has to be someone who knows you well and intimately and can call you out at your worst moments, and Taichi even spells it out: Agumon’s capable of seeing right through him.

Putting it next to Kizuna -- a movie dedicated entirely to examining the meaning of a partner relationship, what happens when it deteriorates, what that means for oneself, and what it takes to recover it again -- it’s perhaps unsurprising that this play ends on the same line that was used in all of Kizuna’s advertising and was central to its own plot: “We’ll always be together.”

[brb-screaming-over-amphibia]

Theories +Wishlist for s3

(these were made before the sneak peak and poster so some is confirmed/non-canon sorry!) Theories:

-I’m thinking that the first ep of Amphibia will have the Plantar family trying to cheer up Anne/get her mind off of things for a bit by going to places she likes (but they keep backfiring bc they’re places she, Sasha, and Marcy all went to) -At the end though, it has Anne find a way to really talk about how she’s feeling and acknowledge that one fun trip to the mall isn’t going to solve everything and that she’s still going to have moments where she’s sad and dealing with her grief but she can always count on her family and friends to be there for her when she needs them -(+ a bonus: don’t forget to live in the moment and appreciate what you have right now moments bc I feel like that’s a huge theme that will be there throughout the season)

-Sasha’s parents are neglectful (I’m thinking they might be rich and busy so that’s why, possibly controlling too), I just think it makes a lot of sense regarding her personality and attitude  -them being divorced would make sense too!

-Beach episode!!! BEACH EPISODE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (maybe have parallels to Best Fronds???? 👀)

-An episode where Anne tries to find a way to control/channel her powers and at the end a huge attack or something big happens and the Plantars are in danger so she activates them instinctively and figures out how activate them at will

-The Plantars being confused about the names of places (Sprig: ”The Big Apple? But there’s no Big Apple?? And you thought Wartwood was a weird name!”)

-Frobo coming back bc OFC HE IS but i still feel like something bad will happen to him like i feel like there’s some kinda catch but,,,,idk man,,,,,let the big metal baby man be happy and okay -polly saving the day with her legs!!! like,,,,who knows what she can do now,,,,,,,with all this,,,,,,,,,,power,,, -for the christmas ep: maybe Anne missing her friends and wishing they were there? i feel like they probably spent every christmas together ;;; and maybe! sprig and the fam is trying to take her mind off of it! -anne using up her powers and the frog fam + her parents (maybe, depends on when they find out) having to remind her that she’s just a kid and she needs to rest too!!!! set boundaries!!!!!  -and on that topic, i feel like anne would blame herself for a lot of what happened too and she keeps pushing herself to save everyone because she couldn’t save Marcy and Sasha but a core theme of the season is to accept that it wasn’t your fault and responsibility (kinda contrasting earlier lessons in s1 and 2 where it was the opposite) and her frog fam + parents (??) will have to help her learn this lesson -IDK THIS IS A LOOSE IDEA but what if!!! Anne has healing powers!!! It’d match her nature aesthetic and also help with the final battle?? Maybe its easier to heal herself than others????? -anne is more protective of sprig + frog fam (??) bc of true colors?? if they do this i will cry

Wishlist:

-more flashbacks of the trio!!! pls!!!! 

-flashback of Anne meeting Marcy for the first time?? PLEASE???

-BABY PICTURES OF ANNE!!!! PLS!!!

-Anne going through the five stages of grief (i think if this were to happen, it’d be very subtle but it’d be good to teach to people that it’s okay and that people will mourn in different ways and for different amounts of time!)

-I do love the Sasha’s hair au where she cuts it off Mulan style bc HAIR SYMBOLISM!!! but i still really like the hair she has right now ;;  I’d be happy either way though!

-reoccurring gags with the Plantar family meeting real frogs,,,there’s so much potential,,,,,

-LIKE WHAT IF SPRIG ADOPTED A FROG DJFGHSJD (this would be such a weird Goofy and Pluto situation djfgsdjhfgsdj)

-Marcy being freed not too late into the season!! I miss her and I don’t want to see her having a lot less screentime ;;;; (this is rough bc of pacing and stuff like that, I feel like i’d be happy if she was in 7 eps, in person)

-Anne using humor to cope with her TRAUMA (F)

-Anne getting THERAPY BC SHE NEEDS IT

-Anne missing eating bugs in her food (IT’D BE SUCH A FUNNY REOCCURING GAG)

-Flashbacks or family pictures or SOMETHING, ANYTHING regarding Sprig and Polly’s parents!

-The Plantar’s having a way to be able to see Anne regularly after they head home!! BC OTHERWISE I WON’T BE OKAY

-the iconic picture of the trio coming back up again! its been a HOT MINUTE since we’ve seen it and i’d LOVE to see it used in a SUPER emotionally charged scene like!!! what if!!! it was able to bring back Marcy from her possessed form!!!!! 

-flashback scenes in the finale detailing all of anne + marcy + sasha’s adventures showing how much this whole ordeal has changed them and those around them!!! i will cry!!!!

-Valeriana coming back to help anne and the trio!!!! heck, a ton of the people who anne helped throughout the show coming back to help her!!!!! I WILL SOB!!!!!!

-MORE OF HOP POP CALLING ANNE HIS GRANDDAUGHTER/FAMILY I WILL LIE ON THE FLOOR AND SOB -anne’s mom mothering sprig and polly BC THEY NEVER HAD THAT AND THEY DESERVE IT, I WILL ABSOLUTELY BREAK  D O W N -MORE YOUNG ANNE AND HER PARENTS FLASHBACKS/MENTIONS/PICTURES!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -NEW OUTFITS FOR ANNE/THE TRIO??? i just want the good fanart please -also, sprig coping with his homesickness with Anne and them comforting each other bc they now both know how each other feel ;;;; (also sprig’s probably worried about wartwood and everyone in amphibia bc of Andriass so hah a  that’s great) -BABY DOMINO???????? FLASHBACK TO ANNE FINDING DOMINO??????????? FLASHBACK ABOUT DOMINO MISSING ANNE EPISODE?????????????? those will all kill me instantly, without fail -i would LOVE to have at least a moment where Anne’s mom talks about how it was like before Anne came back, i mean!!! it’s been almost 6 months!!!!! poor thing!!! -IVY AND SASHA BECOMING BESTIES!!!!! IT’D COMPLETE THE FROG TRIO BESTIE TEAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -the calamity trio patching up each others’ wounds, idk if this could happen but i just WANT IT (fan content is okay too 👀) -more owl house references, thank you

[holykillercake]

Strawberry and Cigarretes

pairing: Sanji x Reader

word count: 2.6k

highlight: ¨Everything hurt, and for the first time, you wished to forget what the ocean sounded like.¨ 

warnings: slight angst

notes: This was a request from @vemuabhi​! <3 Very special because it was my first ever request! I wanted to doge the obvious path (which I almost took) and do something that didn´t involve Whole Cake Island, so maybe it is not the biggest angst (hats off to Mr. Oda cause he is Father angst) but I did my very best! I hope you all enjoy and Happy Birthday, Sanji-kun! <3

𝕃𝕖𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕤, 𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕥𝕤, 𝕠𝕣 𝕘𝕠𝕠𝕕 𝕥𝕙𝕠𝕦𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕤!

Do you remember when you were a kid, and you´d find a shell laying on the sand? And you would pick it up and put it on your ear, hoping to listen to the ocean? It´d always make a smile grow on your face before you tossed it aside and jumped into the water.

That time was different. When you heard the ocean share its endless secrets and tell its adventurous stories, you just wanted to sit there all day and listen. 

This specific event happened a couple of months after you joined the Strawhats. Chopper had borrowed you his stethoscope cause you thought it was cool, and in the middle of thousands of things you´ve already heard in your life, good and bad, the heartbeat was something that you were oblivious to. 

Some would think that asking to hear someone else´s heartbeat was weird, but inside the Thousand Sunny... well, those guys put ¨weird¨ on another level, and you would have to work your ass off to surpass that. 

Chopper got all blushed when you leaned closer to his tiny and furry torso, Usopp told you stories about a war he once won but had to have his heart replaced by a lion´s, Franky said that if you wanted to see a heart he could simply pull it out for you, Brook invested on the same ¨Oh, I don´t have a heart. Yohohoho¨ joke, Zoro let you listen to his wrist, Nami and Robin almost had you sinking into their generous breasts, and Sanji... you left him for last because you didn´t know how to ask him. So you just tiptoed quietly inside the kitchen, sneaked behind him, and tried to listen to his heart through his back. You feared that your nose would start bleeding if he faced you while you were doing it. 

That was exactly what he did, by the way. He poured more water into the stew he was cooking and turned around, putting out his cigarette so ashes wouldn´t fall on you. Immediately you began to sweat, your breath quickened, and hold the stethoscope with a steady hand became a herculean task. 

His lean fingers moved to the collar of his blue shirt and started to unbutton a few, enough for you to have better access. At that point, you believed that the reason why you weren´t bleeding yet was that you were slowly having a stroke, and Sanji´s action was God´s gift to you for being a good person while alive. 

Then he didn´t do anything else, just put both hands in his pockets and waited while you listened to every single bubble popping inside his chest like you were afraid to miss one. In the end, he tucked a lock of hair behind your ear and went back to his stew.

But that was all about it. The following months were just like any other, the crew kept acting as weird as their minds allowed, and you kept shutting whatever your stupid heart was yelling at you. Although... if you could be honest for one moment, deep down you were hurt. 

Maybe you scared or crept him away with your childish curiosity. Maybe he had noticed your feelings for him and got disgusted. Well, not disgusted, he probably didn´t like you the same way and didn´t know how to tell you, so keeping words to a minimum was his way to go. 

He stopped singing and twirling around you, he´d rather call your name respectfully; when you shared the night watches, he just remained quiet by your side, answering briefly to your questions or comments; he even stopped trying to sneak into your baths or make suggestive comments - which you didn´t love before, but you know, you only miss something when it's gone. 

The whole crew had noticed the change in both of your behaviors, but they too were not sure how to address it. Whenever someone asked something about it you would say ¨Really? I didn´t notice anything.¨. Either too proud to confront him or too afraid of the truth. 

~

¨Oi, you ok?¨ Zoro asked, breaking into your personal bubble of sadness. 

You knew it was Zoro because you two were taking the night watch, but you didn´t expect him to show interest or concern about your upset state. 

The night was chilly, so you were sitting on Sunny´s grass, arms around your knees, holding them close to your chest to keep the warmth. 

¨Why do you care?¨ you answered bitterly, but he didn´t mind since he was the king of freaking Bitter Land. 

¨I don´t. But I´ll go crazy if I hear you sigh one more time.¨ he sat close to you, not too close, just enough for you to listen to each other.

A chuckle left your mouth involuntarily, you never expected his grouchy temper would come in handy in times like this. Then your frowned expression came back, and you let out another sigh. 

Before you realized Zoro had pushed you with his Sandai Kitetsu scabbard, making you fall to your side with a squeak. 

¨I told you.¨

You sat again, taking some grass off your leg ¨Yeah. Can´t deny it.¨

¨Yeah, you´ve been doing that a lot lately.¨ 

He didn´t look like he was teasing you, his eyes focusing on the line where the sky met the ocean, where the stars disappeared and became blurry white brushes on the water. 

¨I... I don´t-¨

¨I think you can do better than the stupid cook.¨he kept his usual tone ¨ But I guess we don´t get to choose these things.¨ 

You were taken aback by his words, and despite you trying to fight your lips from trembling and tears from falling, it was useless. You had been crushing these feelings inside you for too long, and it killed you the more you ignored it. 

The swordsman wasn´t saying those things because he loved you or anything like that, but because the entire crew - except for Luffy - had already noticed and began acting weird about it. And despite being the captain´s duty to solve any problem or an uncomfortable situation, your captain was a bit too oblivious, so he had to step in. 

Besides, his nakama was getting hurt. He didn´t care about the ero cook. 

¨If you want me to beat him up... just let me know.¨ 

He said it to cheer you up - not that he didn´t mean, he´d do it for much less - but nothing seemed worth smiling for now. You just bit your lip in order to avoid an embarrassing whining, since you were unable to stop the painful tears from rolling down your cheeks. 

Everything hurt, and for the first time, you wished to forget what the ocean sounded like.

¨W-What should I do?¨

¨That´s not my problem to solve, Y/N.¨ he stood up beside you ¨But sometimes, when I have a difficult problem that I can´t solve my way...¨ his gaze still locked with the horizon ¨... I think about what my captain would do.¨ he left without any further words, leaving you not only sad but confused as well. 

You slept on it for the next couple of days, still not understanding what he meant. Maybe he just wanted to leave the conversation and said whatever came to mind. But even that didn´t fit right. If he didn´t want to be stuck in an uncomfortable conversation, he wouldn´t have started one. 

So you took as a personal mission to observe your captain until you learned how to think like him, hoping that figuring that out would solve your problem. 

You had joined the crew as a historian, the person responsible for writing down every adventure meticulously, every tiny detail of every battle, and every glorious victory along the Strawhats journey. So in one dusk, when you were in charge of the night watch with Robin and the moon was full and bright, you took your journals and began rolling through the pages, looking for a pattern, something that anticipated every major decision of your captain.

You even borrowed old diaries from the time you were not part of their crew. The stories lacked details, but they served to paint a picture. Basically:

Luffy insults an ugly lady, saves a kid, eats something, finds Zoro, beats the crap out of a crazy marine, saves the day, gets his first crewmate. 

Luffy gets eaten by a bird, then vomited in a town, finds Nami, eats something, is put in a cage, beat the crap out of some pirates, saves the day.

 Luffy wants a new ship, meets Usopp, eats something, gets thrown from a cliff, beats the crap out of some pirates, saves the day, gets Going Merry and a liar. 

Luffy wants a cook, explodes a restaurant, becomes a waiter, eats something, meets Sanji, beats the crap out of some pirates, saves the day, gets a cook. 

Luffy eats something, finds the fishmen, goes for a walk, is thrown in the water, beats the crap out of some pirates, saves the day, gets a navigator.

Luffy wants a doctor, eats everything, fights some crazy ass bunnies, climbs a mountain, meets Chopper, beats the crap out of some pirates, saves the day, gets a doctor. 

Luffy eats something, wants to fix Going Merry, meets Franky, loses Robin, beats the crap out of some world government agents, saves the day, gets an archeologist, a shipwright, and Thousand Sunny. 

Luffy hears a ghoulish singing, finds a speaking skeleton in a busted ship, has his shadow stolen, beats the crap out of some Warlord of the Sea, gets a musician.

When you finished the last journal, the weight of your body pushed you to the floor, and you laid on your back for a couple of minutes, overwhelmed by the amount of information in your head.

¨I know what to do...¨ you took a deep breath ¨... I´m gonna eat something.¨

You mumbled something to Robin, telling her that you´d be back in a few minutes, and wandered to the kitchen. 

As soon as you entered the room a sweet and comforting aroma like whipped cream and strawberries invaded your senses, making your head turn to the counter immediately. 

¨Y/N-chan...¨ the cook said.

You opened and closed your mouth a couple of times, looked at him, and then to your feet, your fingers fidgeting as a sign of your anxious state. 

¨D-Didn't know you were awake.¨ you marched to the table and helped yourself with some sugar cookies.

¨Oh... It won´t take much longer...¨ you heard his muffled voice somewhere in the back of your mind, all you could hear was the blood pumping in your ears ¨... cake because today is my birthday and I thought we...¨ your vision was focused on the cookie jar, crushing the granular biscuit with your fingertips ¨...and I...I didn´t know if-¨

¨What would Luffy do?¨ you whispered to yourself.

¨W-What?¨ 

¨What would Luffy do?¨ 

The question wasn´t for him, it was for you. You felt something growing inside your chest, like the blood that pumped in your heart was boiling and burning, giving you the strength and courage you needed. 

¨I have been trying to find answers to a lot of things, you know?¨ you stood up to face the cook, palms spread on the table, ¨I ... do you hate me, Sanji?¨ 

He stopped what he was doing and let the knife rest on the cutting board. When his gaze found yours, there was no way back. That is what Luffy would do. He´d eat something, do whatever came to his mind, and deal with the consequences. No need to go back. 

¨Y/N-chan... why do you...¨

¨I mean, I ask this because...¨ you clenched your hands, cursing yourself for feeling the need to cry ¨I can´t take this anymore, Sanji! If I did something to offend you or if I said something...¨ your voice was broken and weak, and you were a mess of tears and sobs ¨You don´t have to love me back, that´s not what I am saying, but... I can´t stand-¨

¨Y/N-chan... why do you think I hate you?¨ he wiped his hands with a towel and made his way towards you, slowly.

¨Oh, come on, Sanji... You treat me differently, you´re cold and distant, you don´t say a word to me even when we share night shifts! If you don´t hate me, then this must be a sick game you´re playing.¨ your legs felt wobbly, and you sat back in the chair, not being able to face him anymore.  The courage and strenght you had minutes ago was gone.

You just watched him get closer and kneel in front of you, his cold fingers gently brushing away the hot tears on your cheeks. 

¨I could never hate you, Y/N.¨ he said softly ¨I am sorry I made you feel like this, I am sorry I made you cry...¨ his fingers touched your trembling lips. 

¨Then why...¨

¨I didn´t want to scare you away like I always do, Y/N... I know I can be too much sometimes, with the nose bleeding and everything. But that´s how I am, and I didn´t want you to think of me as an idiot... so I prefer being silent, then say something stupid and... ¨ 

¨You don´t have to say this. I don´t need pity talk...¨you spoke as more tears fell, giving him a chance to take his statement back.

¨I have to, Y/N. But not because of pity talk.¨ he gently pressed his forehead against yours, like bunnies do when they apologize. 

¨Then why?¨ 

¨Because I love you, Y/N.¨ the blonde closed the space left between the two of you, kissing you passionately. 

He helped you get up without breaking the kiss and leaned you against the kitchen table, his hands holding your body close while yours ran through his golden hair. His mouth tasted like strawberries and cigarettes, a flavor to which you could easily get addicted. 

You parted the kiss just enough to get some oxygen, your noses were touching, and you could feel his heavy breathing against your skin. 

¨I didn´t know today is your birthday...¨ you whispered, afraid that this was a dream and you´d wake up alone again. 

¨Yeah, I was hoping to get a Happy Birthday from you, you know.¨ he chuckled.

¨I think you´ll be getting more than that.¨

You stared into each other´s eyes for a moment before he pulled you to a hug. When you leaned against his warm chest you heard it again, the same babble of the ocean, only this time you smiled, knowing that it wanted to listen to your stories and secrets as well. 

¨Sanji?¨

¨Hm?¨

¨Happy Birthday... I love you.¨

¨I love you too, Y/N.¨ he kissed you again.

¨Please, don´t have sex on the dinner table.¨ you jumped when Robin spoke.

 When you turned, you saw all your crewmates dressed in pajamas and messy hair staring back at you with sparkly sleepy eyes. You spot Zoro back in the crowd, you smiled and gave him a silent ¨Thank you.¨. You couldn´t help but wonder how the guy who manages to gets lost walking down a straight path was able to guide some sense into you. 

In any way, you´ve found it. Inside of his chest, inside of his heart was the All Blue you heard so much of. Maybe that was the thing with it, and why only a few people found it. Everyone assumes that it is a place, where the four Blues meet, but it´s easy to forget that when you´re a pirate the ocean becomes the essence of who you are.

Little did you know that Sanji had found his All Blue too.

[gloryofluv]

Manor with Manners: The Dateables Reaction to Meeting Your Family

The Brothers decide to invite your family over for a party in the human world. Your two younger siblings follow you. Your parents are amused… and the reactions of the crew are mixed.

(For the sake of the headcanon, you have two GN siblings.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~***~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Escorting your parents and younger siblings inside the manor, you stop a moment. “So, as I told you, the exchange program was a bit odd. Because they were in the middle of nowhere, they all have… particular personalities.”

Your parents nod with smiles. “I’m positive it will be fine. After all, if they went through all this trouble, they must be worth it.”

“Yes, they’re all excellent beings. I know I’ve told you about them, but meeting them, well, they can be a bit much,” you laugh and breathe before walking them into the party…

Manor of Manners: Brothers

Probably the most comfortable about meeting your parents. He wanders over to them after the demons have made their own introductions. Your mother and father seem more than just at ease with him but enjoy his company immensely. They spend most of the time speaking about you and your accomplishments and how thankful he is that you’re alive and his companion.

Oh yeah, he was excellent with your parents. Of course, he is an angel, so that isn’t surprising. However, your siblings are another story entirely. Everything about him reads adult. So, they’re very hesitant with him and suspicious of him. At least until you tell them, he’s the writer of TSL. Levi may have had fans in them, but Simeon now had acolytes! He answered their questions and eased their perception of his lack of cool factor.

The brothers always monopolize your time, and this party was no exception. However, he did manage to check in with you and be positive you’re doing well. He would get you a drink and pull you aside, caressing your cheek with a smile. Thanking you for inviting him rolled off his tongue like golden praise. Let’s just say your dad was happy with his appearance and clear adoration of you.

Simeon and Barbatos made the desserts, and they are a major hit. Your family had never had such exquisite food and ask twice is this how you eat all the time??? You really don’t have an answer, but he recovers for you and claims this is a special event after all. Smooth. Your parents are quite enamored with the angel, and your mother says as she walking out that you should end up with a man just like him. Definitely not subtle. Definitely within earshot of him walking all of you out. Cue sweet blush.

Well, he is introduced as a gifted child and Simeon’s charge. He spends little time with your parents but does thank them for having such a wonderful child. They’re charmed by his sweet demeanor, and when he offers them cookies, they melt. Your parents praise Simeon for his skillful upbringing, and that about does it for him.

He ends up spending more of his time with your siblings. Not because he has to, but because children are fascinating to him. He asks them questions about their life, about their schooling, and dreams. Your siblings are interested in the small angel and ask him several times if he’s really a kid. Luke evades the question but instead talks about how he loves to bake and cook.

Your siblings teach him different games they like to play, and he finds out how rambunctious they are. Clearly, your siblings are more troublesome than you. He keeps that observation to himself and ends up babysitting the children more than needed, wrangling them.

He ends up asking you several questions on the normal state of children. You have to explain that your family isn’t quite average, and he agrees. He’s happy to finally meet your family and asks if he could come to visit them with you next time.

Archaeologist. You told your parents that. Seriously. Well, he knew enough about the world to probably swing such. He had no issue walking right up to them and starting a conversation. Obviously comfortable, he is the only other human here. Held excellent conversations with them about his adventures and their childhoods, your childhood, what you were like in your youth. Inquisitive. Charming.

Your parents find him odd but in a pleasant way. Talks to them more than most but a little less than Lucifer. Offers your father his card, which is fake, but still has a number to reach him. This was regarding if you ever had an issue and didn’t tell him about it. Tells them to leave a message, and his assistant would get a hold of him instantly. Parent approval rating is super high with this crafty sorcerer.

The children are similar. He spends time with the three of you and performs sleight of hand tricks for them. You’ve seen them before, but your siblings are instantly crazy about him. They beg him to do a show. He actually wavers and agrees, asking Asmo to assist him.

Before the show, he pulls you aside and hands you a red rose. He kisses your cheek and tells you he’s grateful to have an experience he hasn’t had in several years. He doesn’t specify what experience it is, but your mother definitely teases you about your not-so-secret admirer during the show. Just an ancient human charming the fuck out of your family and… well, you.

Spends very little time talking to your parents. Not because he doesn’t want to talk to them. No, he was quite busy keeping things in order for the party. You introduce him as the amazing assistant, foundation, and dedicated person that keeps everything with the exchange program in order. Blushes and accepts the showering compliments from you and your parents.

Your parents never go without a drink. He’s on it. He also is quite aware of the schedule, possible hiccups, and ways to create a smooth transition. Definitely seen as the most responsible of the group. Your mother offers twice to help him, but he politely refuses with a small bow. Charmed. Both your parents find him conservatively kind.

The children were another story entirely. Both believed from the beginning that he was a robot. It wasn’t until they tried to spill water on his shoes to see if he sparked that he acknowledged their ploy. Sparks did indeed fly from his fingers as he ducks down to them with a small smile. You stifle your laugh as he tells them not to say a word… probably scaring the bejeebus out of them.

When you enter the kitchen before dinner to check on things, he pulls you aside. He compliments you on your attire, your family, and your demeanor. Ending the conversation with a kiss on your hand, causing a blush to land on your face. With that, he continues preparing plates but does so with the hint of a smile and generally more enjoyment.

He must have studied with Lucifer a long time. Enter prince charming. He speaks to your parents with just the right amount of polite and genuine nature that he usually carries, but less rambunctious. You could almost see him keeping composure and trying to impress them (?) Well, it definitely wasn’t expected.

Your parents definitely enjoy his conversations about the exchange and how excellent their child represented their family. He compliments them on their rearing of you and how you’ve impressed him since the beginning. When you were a distance away, he not so slyly asks your father how he feels about you courting. (Courting, such an aged world, haha.)

Your siblings absolutely love how excitable he is. They teach him tons of little games and eventually drag him into the pool with them and Mammon. The games were ridiculous, loud, and fun. However, you being pulled into the water wasn’t in your plan. He laughs at your surprise and promises he brought you a change of clothes. Obviously, he plans ahead, likely due to Barbatos. Your siblings call him Dia, and he is so excited to have a nickname from them. He is glowing!

After you change into the pretty outfit he brought you, he pulls you aside before rejoining the party. He confesses how wonderful it is to meet your family and hopes you’d be interested in doing this more often. Maybe next time he could come with just you and visit them? Just for a simple dinner? Just the two of you, what do you think?