#mod neg

[summersunsetball]

Hello everyone! A bit of an important OOC announcement, hence the header graphic to get your attention.

For those unaware, southern California is due to be visited by H.urricane H.ilary tomorrow and Monday. On a super cool and unrelated note, Mod Neg lives in southern California.

I have no way of really being able to gauge how bad the storm will be when it gets here, whether we'll lose internet at all, whether living on a mountain means I'm fucked, so on and so forth. It's also been brought to my attention that other people are anticipating being affected by this.

As mentioned in the rules, this event is not chronologically locked, so you're welcome to have your muses arrive on Monday or Tuesday and still write them as being "on time" in-universe. But to account for the unpredictability of the current situation, we'll be starting the event off slowly. Provided that I or the other mods are able, we'll post a list of sentence starters for you guys to play around with, and the first day of the event can generally be a "get your muses to Insomnia and checked into their accommodations" type of beat. Specific IC events to react to and such won't ramp up until after the dust — erm, rain — has settled.

I see a lot of people posting in the event tag, and it makes me super happy that everyone is excited! I'm really sorry that Mother Nature has decided to literally rain on our parade, here. Hopefully the storm won't be a full-on hurricane by the time it gets here, and we'll be able to continue business as usual.

Thanks for understanding! Let's hope this doesn't get as bad as we think.

— Mod Neg

[alanide-arts]

TPOH x Sky: COTL

[Happy birthday, @modmad!]

[project-sekai-facts]

I'm just gonna leave this here because I feel like I should say something. Mizuki is trans, I still agree with the stuff I said a month ago. Did they say it in the story? No. Were they ever going to say it in the story? Well it seemed like I was but they just pulled the most insane 4 year queerbait.

Did people warn me? Yes, and I probably should've listened more, but from a writer's perspective what happened in Ena5 is very stupid so I had a little bit more hope for clpl. Confining any sort of actual coming out scene to a card story and fading to black over the actual reveal is honestly just cruel. Not to mention that Mizuki's bio is probably locked as "gender: ?".

Mizuki is still a trans character and trans representation, though the lack of actual confirmation really sours her story. Especially since the only indirect confirmation of her identity as a woman comes from student a talking to Ena about Mizuki (the whole Ena is a "normal girl" thing). Having Mizuki being robbed of her chance to come out by transphobes, and never resolving this so her bullies are left as the only credible source of her gender is atrocious. Mizuki being outed was a crucial plot point, to never resolve just leaves a bad taste.

It's still a glaring issue that clpl is trying to play both sides here. Which has always been an issue with things like white day and other marketing featuring Mizuki and the boys together. It's just gross that they're still trying to do it now, cutting off the actual reveal of Mizuki's secret and having the characters say "Mizuki is Mizuki", something that's often used by people who want to deny any trans reading, and a new area conversation about Mizuki's voice. Remember that old area convo about Mizuki having a lower voice. It gets referenced in a new one.

The reveal of the secret itself, transness aside, is comedically bad. Project SEKAI's writing isn't exactly amazing by any means, it's pretty basic in the grand scheme of writing, but this is worse than a lot of their other worst offenders. Building up to this big reveal of a secret that is incredibly important to one character's development, only for it not to actually be revealed, and probably never mentioned again, is ridiculous. It feels like a last minute change to ensure mass appeal but I don't know if it was. If it was, they still failed because some fans are dissatisfied that they never got told what it was, regardless of what they think it was.

And no, it's not corporate meddling. Probably. From colopale, maybe, from Sega, honestly probably not. Sega has other franchises and games with queer and specifically trans characters so it's not like Mizuki would be harmful to their brand image. If anyone interfered it was other staff at colopale.

Anyway, I'm not quitting the game and I'll still be running this blog for the time being. Not saying you have to continue playing and I totally understand people who are dropping the game over this. If anyone wants to add their thoughts to this post or send an ask freel free to.

[sealsdaily]

People in comment sections on videos of seals in captivity are absolute haters when they release a seal they're like "oh yeah thanks for that it's gonna get eaten by sharks and orcas and beasts now" and when a seal is kept somewhere they're like "thats like a prison for it it should be free!" even when they say IN the video that seal is non-releasable and its overall safer and happier in humans' care

[aro-culture-is]

aroallo culture is having to act like you don't experience sexual attraction or have sexual wants in front of other people, other aspec people included, because of how heavily they demonize sex, especially sex without romance

it feels very like. what's that meme called. the greek philosophers discussing a-spec stuff with an understanding of the inherent neutrality of sex and romance and relationships and attraction, versus folks who like...

they're in the community but they don't engage with any theory or thought? so it feels like a conversational landmine.

and in my experience, to even accept that you are aro but not ace requires getting into that theory and into those weeds, y'know?

[nyaagolor]

One of the things I mourn in AA5 is the loss of what was shaping up to be an insanely interesting commentary about law enforcement. You have Bobby Fulbright— goofy, lovable, sweet, dedicated to the idea of justice more than anything in the world— and one of the first things you see him do in court is electrocute someone. It genuinely felt like it was the beginning of a commentary on the nature of power and the cruelty that people will enact on others when they think they’re justified (no matter how nice or well-meaning they might be). The treatment of prisoners and a discussion of what happens after court is adjourned is one of the few things Ace Attorney hasn’t touched yet and it really felt like AA5 was gonna test the waters of that kind of conflict and then they just. Did not do that. And the electrocution thing was just one clue in the tapestry of “he was secretly an evil super spy all along!” That we got but man. Fulbright you could have been everything

[oscconfessions]

Do people actually ship Silverbrush or is it a big inside toxic yaoi joke

does he mean nothing to you

-🫒

[dailybuffysummers]

i want to make something clear.

whatever you've read the articles or what you've 'heard' about the reboot it was only a pilot that was ordered.

all i've seen is negativity about this when for past years the idea of a reboot was that of excitement. now that it's actually a possibility -with female writers and director to boot- and joss has no part, no one wants it? (that's rhetorical)

and, yes, there have been many other preferences and ideas of what would have made a great reboot. we've discussed them in the reboot tag! but this is what they've decided on and that's mostly all we know so far.

as for the young woman that is playing this generation's new slayer? she's already shown her worth as an actress at such a young age -look up her credits. Sarah said herself, “From the moment I saw Ryan’s audition, I knew there was only one girl that I wanted by my side...”

this post was meant to be simple. just your basic 'keep your negativity to yourself' about the reboot, about who appears or about the new chosen actress. but as i was typing it made me remember when i first joined the fandom; how ugly things got/could get. for this younger generation and even who watched the original run: those who do remember the ship, character, etc. wars. i don't think we'd want that to start up again. it wasn't fun and only caused discourse that hasn't completely gone away and still pops up occasionally.

OF COURSE everyone is entitled to their opinions and i'm not telling you not to have them, just that they won't be here. for a lot of our little bubble the BtVS fandom has been a safe place for a long time, and it will continue to be here.

-liz

[cluster-b-culture-is]

Cluster b culture is being mad that your personality disorders are demonized in media and only portrayed as serial killers in horror movies,,,but also having those same characters being your favorites and projecting your disorder onto them anyways bc "omg they're just like me fr"

.

[shikai-the-storyteller]

People joke about MCYT fans having 0 critical thinking skills but hearing Quackity talk about how people harassed the admin team for Jaiden leaving QSMP when she literally spent 30 minutes on stream explaining why she was leaving and expressing her thanks and appreciation for QSMP + the admins shows that it's not a matter of no reading comprehension or 0 critical thinking, some people are truly just plain stupid

[summersunsetball]

Hello everybody! I know we're all excited and I'm happy to see the promo post get traction! But to make everyone's lives easier, please remember to send us an ask with the following in order to officially participate in the event:

Mun name: Pronouns: URL(s): Participating muse(s): Are you comfortable with non-mutual interactions during this event?:

This is so that the mods can keep track of who's participating and ensure this event remains a safe space, and other participants can check our #RSVPs tag and see at a glance who's writing whom, and who's open to non-mutuals!

If you haven't already sent us an ask with this information, please do so! Apologies if this information was unclear; there is a read more on the promo post with the OOC information and rules!

Feel free to share this post around to help out anyone you feel might have missed the memo.

Thanks for your cooperation!

— Mod Neg

[royalarchivist]

QSMP is a global community with a variety of people from different backgrounds. Miscommunications may occasionally happen because of cultural differences and/or language barriers, but we should use these moments as opportunities to learn and engage with other people rather than assuming the worst about them and starting fights.

Although certain issues can be resolved with communication, if toxicity arises, sometimes it’s better to block and move on.

There’s a lot of love and passion for this project, from fans and creators alike. We’re all here to have fun, so please remember to be kind!

[project-sekai-facts]

Maybe I'm a hater but I feel like expecting clpl to make Mizuki say "Ena I'm transgender I was a boy but now I'm a girl" was a little too much hope for a rhythm game but I did think they'd be more... Subtle, I guess. Like they wouldn't use the words boy or girl or transgender but maybe something like "oh, I wasn't always like this Ena... I wasn't always "cute" (a girl)" but well. What did we expect.

I do think clpl still has the capacity to redeem themselves a little by finally changing Mizuki's boku to either watashi (in hiragana perhaps?) or atashi, if they really wanna make it "feminine". However, I suspect they won't do that, either.

In conclusion, let's throw rocks at clpl <3 I was also wondering, how are the japanese fans reacting to the event?

yeah i kinda didn't think they'd ever say trans outright, but maybe like, a vague description of sorts. and i think the whole idea of "it's a gacha game they would never be that explicit" is kinda void here as well since, they absolutely can, and other games/franchises absolutely do. prsk is much more mainstream than the stuff that is more explicit though, which probably plays a role.

their one source of redemption is probably gonna be hiichan/minoringo dropping something during the talk show or mizuki's ? in bio getting changed, but as for anything in the text it's not exactly looking great. kanade and mafuyu know now, and an and rui already knew, so we've already ticked off most of her closest relationships before her next event. i mean idk really what they're gonna do for mizuki now since she's a year younger than the other n25 characters who are all having arcs about growing up and thinking about uni/jobs, so maybe they will have mizuki6 being about her coming out to people like airi/shizuku/akito/toya etc. i dunno. there's still room to. try and fix things.

as for how jp fans are responding i'm not really sure since i haven't been hanging around the prsk fandom much for the past month, but i've seen a couple tweets about people being dissatisfied about the fact there's no clear resolution to what her secret is. which, yeah it's kinda wack to spend 4 years reminding the audience about mizuki's secret that is one day going to be revealed only to fade to black when the time comes lol. not sure what the most common response is though.

also yes we should throw rocks at clpl. in fact let's do pipebomb #5

[thsc-confessions]

"I never liked stickrose/rosemin"

"I'm already feeling sick because many YouTubers always called her Henry's girlfriend." submitted by anon

[a-student-out-of-time]

Episode 13 was...something

I have to be real with you all: I don't think I liked this episode very much. And no, it has nothing to do with my theory. This is a lot more serious than that. But hey, we're actually moving forward with the plot, and there's a lot to discuss about this episode

Let's cover the big things in detail, shall we?

Levi the Moral Sociopath

So let's get this out of the way: yeah, I was probably wrong here. I thought maybe Arei had talked to Levi about his secret and they reached a mutual understanding, and that turns out not to have been the case. In ways that NOBODY predicted.

See, we were all under the impression that Levi had moral reasons to kill and that's why he holds "no remorse." Turns out that interpretation was meant literally; as in, Levi doesn't experience remorse. Or compassion. Or empathy.

From the way he describes it, it sounds like Levi has Antisocial Personality Disorder or something similar, something that impedes his sense of empathy. See, there's two types of empathy to consider: Cognitive Empathy and Affective Empathy.

Cognitive is where you can interpret the emotions of another, while Affective is the ability to share in emotional experiences with others. Low cognitive empathy is what autistic peeps (such as myself) experience, while low affective empathy is what one would associate with sociopaths. They recognize emotions in others and mimic them accordingly, but they're not able to share or really understand them.

Levi...seems to be lacking in both. He has trouble interpreting emotions and he admits he doesn't really feel anything when it comes to the others; their deaths might as well be the deaths of complete strangers on the other side of the world. He murdered three strangers and his own father, yet he barely remembers them because he's moved on since then.

But Levi is not an evil person. Quite to the contrary, he still believes in doing good and helping people, even if he has no emotional attachment to doing so, because it guarantees him a better and easier life than continuously being a delinquent. He may not really be able to feel compassion for others, but he'll still try and help protect them. That's such a rare presentation of a character with low empathy, especially compared to the more common stereotype that they're all serial killers, and I just think that's really neat.

Way more interesting than him being the volatile, crazed murderer so many believed he was.

2. Hu, Veronika and Nico

So while it was largely skimmed over, here's what I did get right: Hu is the one who's attempted suicide three times and Ronnie has engaged in self-harm in the past. The latter didn't share because she decided it would be more interesting to hold onto it, and also because she considers suicide a boring motivation. Concerning.

And as it turns out, we finally discussed the murder method and they managed to draw an important conclusion: Nico's attempted murder of Ace and our current murder do indeed have a connection. That entire scene wasn't just there to happen, I'm still willing to believe that it was due to David's influence and that was the first attempt.

Because, again, the last people we saw with David before the attempted murder were Nico and Hu. And then Nico tries to kill Ace. And then Arei apparently dies in the same method.

Does that mean Nico is the culprit no? No, probably not. As I've said many times, we have to consider that rule that the Blackened doesn't have to be the murderer, they have to be the "most mastermind-y." Nico also really doesn't seem to have any motivations, at least at this point in time. Levi seemed like he did, but as he explained it, it became clear he had even less reasons to do so than we thought. Nico already has very few reasons themself.

This isn't us zeroing in on the culprit, just moving the story along. And boy did we REALLY need that. Now time for the part where Mod complains.

3. The Wheel-Spinning Is Becoming A Real Problem

Now, one thing I've praised DT for in the past is how well it handles foreshadowing. Small details always come back, no matter how seemingly innocuous. It really gives the impression that everything in the story matters in some respect, which is what good stories should do.

...But we've only just NOW started discussing the murder plot, and it took only a couple minutes to say what many of us have been saying: they used the carousel the hang the victim and snap their neck using the trash and the rafters. We're on Episode 13 of this chapter. It took us 5 episodes and 17 months to get here.

That's what's made this trial and this chapter in general so frustrating to me, because most of our time hasn't been spent on what's relevant to the situation at hand. Most of it has been spent on tangents about secrets, or just pointless nonsense and comedy hijinks. And I get it, this is DR, that's to be expected. But at this point? We should have more information than we do, because we only have a handful of episodes to work with and so many things left unexplained.

I harped on the smaller details because time was devoted to them, attention was drawn to them, and I refused to believe they're going to be totally irrelevant to this chapter. Now I worry they are and I have to wonder why time was spent on them this chapter and not the one(s) where they'll actually matter.

There were so many tangents this chapter and so much time spent on discussing them, I want to believe we're building to something for the climax.

"You mean your theory, right?" You may ask.

And I have to be honest, the theory is barely on my mind at this point. My concern isn't just the many, many tangents that don't seem to add anything, but the direction DT seems to be heading.

4. What even was that scene with Arei?

I have...so many questions about David's flashback.

To immediately dispel the obvious question, no, he's not lying here. If we're allowed to see it, that means it's what actually happened. What Arei said in that scene was what really went down. And I'm not really happy about that.

Now, I'll admit, I had a very negative initial reaction to that scene. Arei confronts David about his secret, and it turns out...she's relieved that it's true. My initial reading of that scene was that she was giving up on being a good person because David being a liar has proven it's pointless. She then goes on to say that Eden's probably done something terrible as well, so there's really no such thing as a good person, and it really felt like a cynical, mean-spirited undermining to everything that came before.

But revisiting it, that's not really what happened. TA and Poi pointed out how, no, what she really seems to be saying by "there's no such thing as a good person" is there's no one who's just naturally morally upstanding. And that it's okay, because it means she's not too far gone.

What came off as her giving up really seems to be more of her deciding not to live by some arbitrary standard about who isn't and isn't a good person, because everyone's probably done something they really regret. Her saying Eden's probably done something terrible isn't dismissing all her good efforts, since she still considers her a friend. It's her accepting that labels like "good person" are meaningless, and that it shouldn't stop you from trying to be better.

And she extends a hand to David, hoping that maybe both of them can be better in the future.

And David...doesn't share a word of this with anyone, especially not Eden. That means that scene only exists for the audience's benefit. We're meant to consider what she said for whatever reason, and while my initial interpretation wasn't wrong, I do have concerns about that.

First of all, while this could still work with my theory, this is probably the biggest factor that changes things. At this point, I'm willing to accept there's an 80% chance I'm wrong. The problem is, theory or not, I worry what exactly showing us that scene is meant to suggest. Why did we as the audience need to see it for dramatic irony purposes?

There are only three interpretations that really come to mind, and I have to say, I'm not fond of two of them:

My theory is correct and this is all part of Arei's 4000 IQ play.

My theory is wrong and that scene only exists to twist the knife for our sake, especially if David is the Blackened.

My theory is wrong, David is the rival, and that scene exists to facilitate his future character development.

And that last one is fridging. Like, it's blatant fridging, where a (frankly more interesting) female character dies in order to spur development in a dude. I'm going to be genuinely pissed if that happens, because it renders her entire character arc this chapter pointless and ends it in such poor taste. It's also a very dumb course of action because why would you ever say all this to someone you know is a MANIPULATOR WHO TAKES ADVANTAGE OF PEOPLE?!

The second one is just poor writing, where it's only there to hurt the audience a little bit more. It's unnecessary and ends things on such a pointlessly bittersweet note. But I'll take that over option 3, because I genuinely don't give a shit about David and I really don't want Arei's death only happen to focus on him more. He doesn't want to change, he believes it's better to sacrifice everyone's lives for some cause he refuses to disclose.

And at this point, I'm pretty sure I'm wrong. Whatever, I expected to be wrong anyway, but that's hardly my biggest concern.

My biggest concern is that DT is resorting to genuinely bad writing decisions and it's going to have a lasting negative effect on the story. I don't understand what other interpretations there could be with that scene, and I really don't like the possibilities we do have. Everything I point to as a basis for my theory could end up being completely pointless to the story, and I have to ask what the point was.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm reading all this in bad faith and something else will happen, and we'll spend the remaining episodes discussing everything I've brought up in detail. I've been burned a lot by stories I've enjoyed going in very poor directions and characters I got invested in bore the brunt of it. Regardless of my theory being true or not, I don't want the same to happen to DT.

And I can see reasons why I may be wrong here: David only really gives a damn about Xander, for instance, and we've yet to really discuss the hows and whys of the murder. And I still wonder why J has been getting so much focus when she was barely in Daily Life.

Overall, while I got really negative here, I hope next proves me wrong and things head in a new direction.

[nyaagolor]

I was talking with some people about Dual Destinies today and hear me out: i don't think Athena should have been a lawyer (yet). Athena's lack of agency is kinda frustrating to me, and oftentimes she felt like more of an assistant than a lawyer, which got me thinking Hey. What if she WAS an assistant?

Rather than a new but fully fledged lawyer who ends up pushed to the backseat during cases, instead she's an intern for Phoenix who hasn't quite gotten to the bar yet, but who shows such talent and passion for the job that she ends up butting in and taking charge more than she reasonably should be as an assistant. The actual course of the trials doesn't really change much, but it reframes how it goes down from "Athena's trials are always co-opted" to "Athena is the one co-opting the trials and the others are happy to let her". Sure, she's just an intern, but she has someone to save within a time limit so she REALLY has to speedrun this whole lawyer stuff, and Phoenix in particular is pretty sympathetic to that so he lets her push the boundaries of what an intern can and should be doing. He knows how badly she wants to save Simon and that she'll never be able to pass the bar before then, so he (and by extension Apollo) takes any case she asks him to, acts as the "official" lawyer but lets her more or less run the trial, and basically just gives her a legal loophole to save Simon in time

Does this make sense is anyone else seeing the vision