#or lack thereof in this case

[gwarden123]

Like, you could say that the game does give you a choice. You can stop playing. But games are generally considered to be over when the final credits roll, not at a random point with no other markers to say that you can/should stop.

I do think it's a valid choice to say that Captain Walker and his team die if they don't commit a war crime. Like, there's no other, easy way out. But I think I just wish that the screen you get when you die multiple times, "do you want to change the difficulty setting", had maybe been changed to match the context? "Do you want to stop?", or something like that, that engages with the interactive nature of a video game and maybe puts it on the table that choosing when to end the game is an acceptable part of the player's agency.

Games typically don't let you commit suicide whenever you want and declare the game over when you feel like it is. No, death is something to reload and avoid, not to treat as a stopping off point. If you want it to be otherwise, then you have to bring it up.

I feel like there is a politeness games forget exists that allows games as a concept, including sports games and boardgames, etc, to function that means everyone involved silently agrees to operate within a set of rules and ignore what reality would normally be. People aren't stupid or complicit for not turning off a game to avoid committing a fictional war crime, because the silent rules are when you press New Game on a video game, you play the game until you get to the ending. If you want them to do something different, you need to give them some hints that the silent rules might be different this time. A soccer player isn't stupid for not petrol bombing the stadium at the start of the game.

[darkdakota8998]

THE TWIDDIES ARE COVERED NOOOOOOOO

[bloodfreak-boyking]

do you ever think about how much easier their hunts would've been if sam and dean wore silver and iron rings? like all you'd have to do is accidentally brush your hand against someone or give a simple handshake and you'd know if your suspect was like a myriad of different supernatural creatures. two hearts one braincell <3

[somebluemelodies]

i always love when we get large order meetings like this and the lore implications but there’s something so funny about visualizing them talking about this Evil Cucurucho and q!Forever being in a coma and whatever happened to the eggs… in the Mexican attire

[ferronickel]

Looking Glasses Page 83

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Next page Thursday May 30th

[gorillaz-girl]

Noodle copying the boys’ hairstyles

bonus

[uncanny-tranny]

It's okay to want to pass or to bind or tuck or things like that, and it's insensitive to imply that trans people doing so is proof they are trying to "conform to cissexism". It is okay to want to transition "traditionally". It is okay to not want that, too. What isn't okay (and will never be okay) is to degrade other people for the choices they make or for the choices they have to make.

[zer0point5ive]

doctor complimented my gag reflex today and i couldn’t not think about those freaks from the saw bathroom. at the endof the day it always comes down to those two freaks from the saw bathroom ..

[roachliquid]

I cannot believe it took me THIS LONG to realize that Danny Phantom's outfit is a recolored Fantastic 4 uniform.

I will never be able to unsee this.

[laurfilijames]

I'm considering writing a fic from the reader's POV to go with Wish You Were Here.

Good idea or bad idea? Is that too much angst?

[moon-mirage]

Marie Antoinette

[inspired by the 2006 movie]

[mumblesplash]

one funny fandom thing that i always love is when adult male characters are shown to have grown out their hair bc of an extended survival situation and/or some kind of mental health crisis but they barely have so much as a 5 o’clock shadow. he said ok i can forgive long-term neglect of most of my appearance due to extenuating circumstances but i draw the line at shaving less than four times a week

[paxesoterica]

It baffles me that, in a fandom that seems to generally understand moral ambiguity, complexity, and nuance, there is nonetheless a (thankfully small but obnoxiously vocal) subset of Gundam fans who will see a teenager whose love of (and fears for) her love interest get weaponized against her by an adult who's spent literal decades honing her skills at mind games, get manipulated into betraying said love interest, and then fall into a depressive state when she realizes the enormity of her actions, and aforementioned subset of Gundam fans will somehow conclude that the teenager is obviously an unfeeling monster and deserved even worse than what she got.

This same subset will also get mad if you bring up the subject of media illiteracy.

Still, I suppose there's a silver lining of sorts: ya see someone opine that Miorine Rembran is the devil, and ya know to not even bother recommending Revolutionary Girl Utena, because there's no way they'd understand Anthy Himemiya's character.

P.S.

For context, I should note that this experience came from browsing Reddit threads, and that a lot of the Gundam folks there (including, from what I'm aware, all the ones that also frequent Tumblr) seem to be way more thoughtful than that.

Also, if any more experienced Gundam fans thought I was talking about a *different* character in the series that they've seen a similar dynamic play out with, feel free to share, I don't mind spoilers, and would like to hear about it.

[ehlnofay]

19! :)

19: sea change

In the last few days of the year 200, Torr kills the Emperor. In early 201, a war breaks out.

It’s not wholly unexpected, at least not by those who know where to look. The Emperor’s death is no small blow to Solitude, the city that sent him off on a voyage he would only exit under a pall; especially considering that the guard had patted itself on the back for successfully foiling an assassination attempt right before his ship left, only for his throat to be slit under their noses, anyway. The head of Skyrim’s Penitus Oculatus appears to have vanished. No-one reports seeing anyone out of place on the boat until they started stumbling over the bodies. The Empire mourns through all the official avenues as the heir prepares for succession; Solitude’s government is busy trying desperately to smooth it over, putting out excessive bounties on the assassin that failed and scraping up intel on the one who succeeded. Not that there’s anything much to find – it’s a locked-room murder, and every logical suspect has an alibi that holds up to interrogation. There are no leads to follow.

And Windhelm is a powder keg.

It always has been, ever since the Great War, as long as Torr or any of his kids have been alive. Short-fused and disillusioned, crowds moving hot as blood through its winding stone streets, it’s always been something tough, hard-throated, splintered into careful lined sections. Torr walks whatever lines he wants, but not everyone has the energy to straddle them; not everyone can.  The upper city is all harsh-cut stone and ice, the bricks ancient, the crowds in a hurry, even though none of them seem to know where they’re going; the Grey Quarter is where the snow runs when it turns to slush and the walls are stuffed with rags. The planks keep snapping with dry rot, sharp and gaping as broken teeth. They need to be filled to keep the cold out. The Cornerclub keeps the fire roaring. Talres goes there to work most days and doesn’t come back up to the house until the streets are empty. No-one knows it’s going to happen, not exactly, but there's no way anyone couldn't know. There are a lot of people who have been waiting on an opening, and all eyes are pointed elsewhere.

With little fanfare, the Jarl and his entourage leave Windhelm.

The city stops being a fuse and starts being the wreckage after it’s blown. Torr is told that there’s a span of a few weeks where Talres stops leaving the house completely. Katla gets arrested again and weasels out of it on her own. The ill-drawn posters of something approaching Torr’s face stuck up over the walls of Solitude are covered up with announcements and calls to join the Legion. Windhelm floods with bodies ready for the rebellion. Aventus’ house is already crowded; in a few months, Torr hears, it’s nigh impossible to walk in for the bedrolls and blankets spread over the floor. The city has never been a warm place in any sense of the word; Torr’s siblings are inundated with more kids and more kids with nowhere else to go. They don’t know if Solitude is much better; they look different now than they did on the night of the assassination that wasn’t and then was, hair cropped shorter and uneven, face gaunter, the weight they’d managed to gain over their comfortable months in Falkreath sloughing off them like a spider’s old skin, but even so it’s a bit much to step foot in there so soon, some of the bounty posters still mouldering on their posts. One of the kids says something about needing a whole other house. They’ve only got the one. Still, it makes Torr think.

(Skyrim has one orphanage, a little wooden hall down on the banks of Riften’s canals. And now there is a cursed house in Windhelm.)

Torr doesn’t go to Solitude. They only occasionally go to Windhelm. When they’re not on business, they stay on the outskirts of Danstrar; the Pale, all frozen winds and snow high enough to ice a horse’s knees, is an unappetising enough target that aside from an announcement of alliance with Windhelm’s Stormcloaks the war has not truly reached them yet. Which is ironic, considering.

(If prompted, Torr probably could have seen this coming – Torr, who spent years with his finger on Windhelm’s pulse, moving through the people and hearing endless talk about the government. It was going to happen sooner or later. And of course the Empire reeling from the assassination of its Emperor – the first since around the time of the Oblivion Crisis, which no-one is anxious to repeat, and the reminder of which put plenty of important people quite on edge – is enough of an opportunity to weigh heavily in sooner’s favour. If he’d thought about it with his blade set beneath the hairs of the old man’s beard, he would have known he was setting a war in motion. What Torr doesn’t know is if he would have cared.)

(Probably not. He still doesn’t, after all. Not enough to regret anything.)

Dead winter bleeds into spring; a little ice melts, and the sea begins to change. Torr’s shoulder aches when the weather is bad. There are clashes on the roads, outside cities, described in newspapers and word of mouth. Cyrodiil ships off heaps of soldiers to spill into Solitude’s ports. The house in Windhelm is overrun. But the nightshade kept in the temperate corner that Babette has transformed into a garden begins to bloom months early. The tides still come in and out.

The old Emperor is dead. Skyrim is tearing itself apart. Torr cleans his knife after use with a soap that smells like lavender and tries very hard to dredge up any guilt.

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

i think its fun to imagine the survivors littered with scars after their countless years of surviving in the constant. but i also like to imagine that scars are specific from survivor to survivor. not in the sense that they've gotten into different situations and acquired different injuries, but in the sense that things that would haunt a particular survivor are more likely to remain on the body of that survivor than compared to another one.

webber's body sporting an array of bite marks from hounds and vargs and giants alike (and one tinier set of teeth marks that've been there for longer than he can remember). wx develops the nasty habit of picking at rusted parts of their 'skin'- blemishes that never go away, even post reanimation. winona with inky dark claw punctures that dance across her back, and a permanent scab at the back of her throat. their own personal scars, mental and physical.

[fitzrove]

Sometimes I wish I had less cringe hobbies