#it's kind of a major plot point

[agnesandhilda]

I'm on a classics kick on youtube and I just watched a summary of sir gawain and the green knight that didn't include the exchange game 🥺 sir you neutered my emotional support 14th century poem

[ganondoodle]

haha, oops

(uhm, ancient queen zelda and ganondorf backstory doodles- largely irrelevant to the totk rewrite since it would be purely implied in the environment and in a few lines of diary but it keeps spinning in my head so i had to make some doodles)

(want to make some doodles of it all falling apart too but i need to post these now- the summary is really just that the ancient queen and ganondorf were close friends (to lovers) in their youth until she has to marry a hyrulian knight, after which they barely see each other anymore and their relationship slowly turns sour as time passes (due to various reasons) and after her discovering the ruins the sonau protected speaking of an ancient evil she grows afraid of him and begins to enact a scheme to seal him away-)

(the doodle in the snow there is about the extra idea that ganondorfs first daughter is with her but since shes married to the knight at that point already it would be a scandal- so it is secretly brought to him to raise instead- its a .. kinda classical royal drama but i got attached to the idea bc it adds even more weight to their conflict and its escalation later... also a bit more .. human? like people and their relationships can be complicated and messy, it can make things more interesting .. but this is still all just a concept, havent decided to use it yet)

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

My biggest brainfart moment in processing the X7 news might just have been the "pale ending" with only Cuno alive.

Gee, I wonder what leads him all the way out there. That's a real big trip

Ambrosius who?

[blueskittlesart]

is detcon actually good

no <3 hope this helps

[vulpinesaint]

kind of unfortunate that so many fantasy epics are also war novels because i will be honest i just do not like war novels that much... the grand clashing of forces is compelling obviously but it requires characters to talk about so much practical battle strategy and while i can get my brain to comprehend all these fantasy maps and kingdoms and borders and battalions and front lines and army movements it takes up. so much space in the book. feels like i'm fighting a war of my own trying to get through it sometimes

[mmikmmik]

A lot of Undertale critiques playstyles that engage with the game solely as an exercise in killing enemies. A lot of Deltarune critiques playstyles that engage with the game trying to be a “nice” character.

Just off the top of my head: Ralsei’s character arc of understanding that friendship isn’t about putting in kindness coins until people like you. Susie and Ralsei bonding with Kris because of Kris’s personality and choices no matter how the player tries to make Kris treat them. People around Hometown being confused and sometimes put off by Kris suddenly going around talking to everyone and saying nice things, and some of them refusing to talk nicely to Kris because of Kris’s association with Susie. Queen’s original motives and character arc. The impossibility of the player character befriending Kris, or even interacting with them in a way that isn’t emotionally painful for Kris.

With all of that in mind… does that really work with the recruitment mechanic and the “better endings” you get through pacifist runs in each dark world? Doesn’t Castle Town feel a little out of sync with the themes of the game? Especially since it’s named after the player character, instead of the actual heroes.

I think we’re going to see a combo breaker eventually. I think something weird and meta and deliberately uncomfortable for the player is going to happen with the “pacifist route” in one of the final three chapters, and maybe with Castle Town in general.

[muffinlance]

I’m thinking about buying your book but before I do, are there a lot of scenes that give second hand embarrassment? I don’t know if that makes any sense but whenever social situations get awkward in books I just hide my head in my hands and flip past as fast as possible.

None that would have triggered my own second-hand embarrassment, readers feel free to weigh in

[rimmerslustmonster]

I really wanted to love Arcane but after watching all of it I still find the majority of it really unfulfilling. Like, the animation really is gorgeous (as in, I literally think it's the prettiest/most smoothly animated show I've ever seen in my life and the action sequences especially were incredible) and I found basically all of the characters and their relationships initially really compelling but ultimately it just felt really empty to me.

So many characters' decisions/motivations (not all--there are a handful of obvious choices) seemed to shift aimlessly depending on what music video the creators wanted to make at the time, and the fact that the vast majority of characters actions feels reactionary to whatever outside force (the arcane/hex tech/black rose/whatever) they decided to invoke at the time was really annoying to me. Reactionary character choices aren't inherently bad, but when you have certain characters that everyone in the show plays up as strategic geniuses or powerhouses or whatever and then they also end up just kind of drifting along with whatever is thrown in to get them to end up wherever they ultimately need to be like dust motes and they don't end up being the actuators of basically anything at all in the end it's just fucking irritating tbh. (Especially thinking of season 2 Ambessa here--so much of what she found/achieved was basically by chance and it didn't feel like a coherent effort of her own that actually ended up getting her anywhere and maybe that's a commentary on the opportunistic nature of power or something but it still sucked imo because of how often everyone talked about what a great strategist she is and how dangerous/formidable she was in her own right and she just kind of wasn't in the end because the things she consciously put such a big investment in immediately fell apart for her so it was like... what was the fucking point? she could've been so much fucking better).

It felt like half the stuff that happened didn't happen in service of some overarching message or story but to fulfill vibes and the drama of it. Which again isn't inherently bad but there was just so much of it. Too many things felt like they fell into place 'just so' despite nothing the characters doing as individuals really feeling like it earned them that place. I do think they managed to pull a decent amount of it together in the end, but frankly it's only out of spite I ended up watching the final episode anyway, and you really shouldn't be counting on viewers to do that.

Anyway. Ultimately I guess it's just not for me I think, and the parts of it I did like (style, animation, themes, certain characters) didn't make trying to internally patch the parts I didn't (what felt to me like inconsistent characterization, mishandling themes/messages) to make it work for me feel like it worth the effort so in the end I really can't be bothered to care about it beyond just finishing the series and that makes me kinda sad.

As a show it was fine. The finale did a pretty good job of wrapping some things up mostly satisfyingly enough but damn it was hard to get there.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I'm so heavily anti-advertising that all pitches sound goofy silly to me/I can never take them seriously, so I have no idea how I'll manage to to advertise my game even if I do finally finish it soon-ish lol...

[daisywords]

hello daisy daisywords i was wondering !!! if you could tell me your thoughts about the assassin's apprentice i have been Considering reading that book/the series and i trust your book judgement

hello julia liuisi :)

I really enjoyed it! I am a political fantasy enjoyer and it's a very political fantasy–type book. I would recommend it to fellow political fantasy enjoyers and those who are fans of character-focused meander plots (in book 1 we are basically just coming along with the main character as he grows up from age 6 to I think about 14??) This is not to say that it feels slow—I personally found it very compelling and was impatient with other activities because I wanted to get back to reading

All that said, I have only read the first book (so far) so I have no idea where the series goes from there and thus cannot give it my endorsement. who knows; maybe I'll be disappointed as it goes along. But hopefully it will keep being really good!

In terms of the substance:

lots of elements are very generic fantasy (european-flavored medieval-esque monarchy etc etc) but there are a few fresh/unique elements with the worldbuilding/magic that were really interesting to me

I think the characters are very well done and there are a lot of interesting character dynamics

The story is structurally loose and not too predictable while still retaining a good amount of cohesion

The main character's position (illegitimate son of the king's first son who abdicated) is used very well to keep the character involved in lots of situations without it feeling forced while also maintaining a degree of tension—he could turn out politically problematic, so he has to prove himself useful and loyal to the throne or risk being killed as a precaution

But anyway in general I would recommend! I liked it and I can't wait to get my hands on the next one!

[keyleth-clay]

Been seeing a bunch of takes about the Raven Queen "recently" - from CR themselves, not even from the fandom - that have been making me incredibly salty (example 1, example 2), but I don't know if I have the patience or brain power to write a whole rant about my perspective on this and also I don't particularly enjoy being salty...

So, I'll just link this excellent post by @your-turn-to-role instead 😊

[loveletterworm]

Calling Homestuck required reading for Undertale/Deltarune is crazy considering the only "theme" Homestuck and Undertale have in common is like, naming the player character I guess? And while Homestuck and Deltarune share a lot of themes like control and the relationship between a story, its author, and audience, the ways they engage with these themes is so entirely different that calling one required to understand the other is lunacy. If you went into Deltarune expecting having read Homestuck to have taught you anything besides "There's a bucket with a spade on it in Homestuck too." I think you'd just be confused.

I think one of the people I saw was saying that like to understand the exact mechanics of how Dark Worlds work in deltarune you had to read homestuck so that you would know about some random homestuck plot point i've never even seen mentioned before and then I guess become able to assume that Toby Fox will be exactly copying the homestuck thing without altering it or differing in any way. Which seems like an odd thing to say in such confidence to me. Like I guess maybe it would be required reading to understand deltarune if that did turn out to be the case, but I think usually most people try to give Toby the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is capable of having ideas that are not exact 1:1 matches for a webcomic he made music for 15 years ago, he seems to have been doing a decent job at that thus far for what i'm able to tell

[skrunksthatwunk]

miraculous world: new york asks the bold question: what if batman and superman were lesbian married with children

[yekokataa]

i watched the new jacob geller video and he talked about this game who's lila where the only mechanic is manipulating the main character's features and i knew i had to buy it immediately

[fox-guardian]

I wanna draw a comic of my ocs

[radio-free-beth-sarim]

Tired: Cyberpunk fiction describe having cyberware and body modifications tearing away the essence of your soul or driving you inevitably toward madness as it alienates you from yourself and all of humanity.

Wired: Cyberpunk fiction describing cyberware and body modifications as THE MOST human thing possible, as it is a human thing to modify ourselves and the world around us for any number of reasons, but pointing out that we live in a system where the people who need these the most are the ones who can least afford them.

Hey, chummer, check out my cyberarm. I got it after I lost my arm at my extremely dangerous job site that only exists as it does because the corpos have either ruined government oversight or outright act independently as its own government and therefore have no safety regulations. So I got this cyberarm because I'll lose my job without it and have to constantly pay for maintenance and repairs (because it's almost entirely non-user serviceable) and expensive anti-rejection drugs. I sure do hope this model continues to be supported by the manufacturer for at least a decent amount of time and that the supply chain for my meds is constant! Otherwise I'm up shit creek! But all that's fine! The real problem is that I feel like I've lost an essential part of my soul...