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dustyisforever · 1 month

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A Shadow of the Colossus Review

by DustyIsForever This is a review. It's about a video game, which is a kind of movie you watch with your hands.

In 2012, Shadow of the Colossus became the first thing I ever saved money to buy. After watching the “Nerd³ Plays” video where he calls it a “perfect game,” I began to daydream about it obsessively. I stuck the facetious label “Ye Olde Jar o Talents” on a mason jar and brought it to school so I could beg my classmates for funds. This worked, however incredulous it was, but I didn’t buy the game. I didn’t buy the game for years, and even after that I didn’t play it for at least a few months. It was like an old Russian novel to me: something that always existed in the future for which I could never consider myself prepared. And then I did play it and it was great.

You can either read it here or on a published Docs page. But be careful. It's pretty long.

This is a review of Shadow of the Colossus. It will contain spoilers. I first played the game a long time ago, but I went back to it a few times over the years. Recently I watched a close friend play it. We had some conversations about it. Soon, I’d like to see my wife play it as well. She can’t read this review yet because she is, incredibly, going to be playing totally blind. You can imagine how rare it is to play something like Shadow of the Colossus without knowing anything about it beforehand.

As I promised not long ago, I'm going to start writing essay-reviews of many games I enjoy. But first, I'd like to elaborate on my method. I have a particular framework for expressing my opinions of these games that I've developed as an alternative to a 10/10, 5/5, 40/40, 100/100, or other numerical art goodness judgment system. The aim is to provide the foolish satisfaction of a number score while cutting back on its pitfalls and biases. Number scores are unhelpful. In a 10/10 system, one finds that a 10 means that the reviewer idolizes the work, a 9, 8, or even a 7 can mean that they enjoyed it, and anything below that might mean that they disliked it, hated it, thought it was tedious, or simply misunderstood it. Opinions don’t fit neatly on a graduated, linear scale. Our value judgments are relative, as in: I liked this more than that; never absolute in the way numbers would suggest. We know this but pretend otherwise. How fun to bestow a cherished piece of art the honor of your perfect number! We're all pleased to think that our opinion is intelligent. My goal is to indulge that, but with restraint.

The first principle of my system is that I only bother rating games that I already know I love. Though there is surely as much to be learned from "bad" art as "good" art, I want to avoid negativity. Also, I find it’s easier to assign a score with restraint and thoughtfulness when a bad score isn't in consideration at all. It also means that I, as a critic, produce fewer reviews overall, which should make each review more characteristic and the overall corpus more consistent.

My second principle is that the highest number I'll use is three. Mr. Ebert was onto something when he made the alluring choice of knocking the tail off of the five-star format. It made all of his ratings look smarter. Five stars was for the common people; real intellectuals expressed their taste in the glamorous new fashion of four. Now it's my turn. I've one-upped the fallen old man, who once failed to appreciate John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). I dare to fly with merely three. And no halfsies, either. No point to it if I’m going to decide to give a game a one-and-a-half because that would be a six-point system in disguise, wouldn’t it?

My final principle is borrowed in part from Famitsu's thing where they divide scores into parts that can be treated either separately or summed. They do that with four reviewers. In my case, I cannot judge the work from the perspective of multiple people (I am only one person). Instead, I split my score into two numbers representing two priorities. That’s two numbers ranging zero to three, written X-Y. For instance, Shadow of the Colossus is a 1-2 game.

The first number, on a scale of zero to three, represents the aesthetic merits of the game. This can include everything experienced by the player. It may consider the art direction, the sound and music, and the narrative design. It also may refer to the dynamics of the design and the "choreography" of interaction, in a very formalist sense borrowed in part from Graeme Kirkpatrick's Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Interactive design is just as much a part of the media content of a game as the audiovisual presentation.

To be less academic—I like to summarize the first number as the question: "does it make me cry?" because it captures that it's often a sentimental thing. High-scoring games on the first number tend to be tearjerkers.

Why should Shadow of the Colossus get a one out of three in this category? Well, a one isn't really a low score in the conventional sense. My system is built to specify why a game is great. A zero would mean "this game is great, but it has nothing to do with the aesthetics." I consider Shadow of the Colossus to be aesthetically great, just not as aesthetically great as a few other games.

I like to call the other score “does it blow my mind?” to highlight that it pertains to games that impress me. Expect more elaboration when I get to the second half of the review.

When I first made up this system years ago, I tried to list a bunch of old favorites as examples. At that time, I stamped a 2-1 on Shadow of the Colossus. Mark the difference! It means that now I appreciate its technical achievement more but have tempered my feelings about its content. This change of opinion came to me when I recently watched a close friend play through the game for the first time, hanging out over her shoulder. The banter we shared dampened the emotion of the experience—for example, she already knew Agro was going to fall off a cliff sooner or later and by the time she did, it affected her more like the punchline to a drawn-out joke. I was a little offended. Her more detached play experience exposed some of the game’s weaknesses to me.

My original rating of two reflected the beautiful score and the sublime desolation of the game, which inhabited me then as it does now. When I take a walk in the woods, I am visited once more by the mystery of “To the Ancient Land.” It’s a good season in my life to return to the game. I’m in a forest often.

But unrelated to my time in forests, I’ve spent the last year thinking a lot about fantasy. I fell out with it some years ago and only recently began rehabilitating my affection for it. Shadow of the Colossus belongs to that estranged clade of fantasy, the fairy tale, which has become my favorite.

Fairy tales are mysterious but well-patterned, made from a pool of common morphologies, which folklorist Vladimir Propp called “functions” with perhaps excessive precision. A glancing comparison will hopefully show how much like a fairy tale Shadow of the Colossus really is. Propp’s functions came originally from his syntax of Russian folk stories. Shadow of the Colossus is neither Russian nor folk, through it deploys several such functions in an identifiable and properly consecutive fashion:

Absentation, interdiction, and violation all before the prologue is over

Trickery as Dormin tells Wander what must be done to revive Mono

Departure, as Wander begins the quest to slay the colossi, and various functions of the Donor, who is also Dormin

Quite a bit of struggle and branding as Wander does his colossus-slaying and dishevels himself gradually with dark magic

Pursuit (by Lord Emon)

And then the punishment and reward are cleverly reversed, because of course in this special video game that people who don’t call all video games art sometimes deign to call art, Wander was in error all along.

I think that to leave the analysis at that would be a failure to appreciate the particular flavor of this story. There are many video game stories where the player character ends up ethically compromised for some narrative effect, but the aesthetic appeal of Shadow of the Colossus is grossly different from, say, Spec Ops: the Line. Wander is more like Hamlet; he retains his hero-ness the whole way through, yet still the fate of his quest is doomed by circumstance.

What he must do is awful and painful to him, but he’s stuck on this path. The closing of the door to the bridge out of the Forbidden Lands is a literalization of this. The inciting events of his journey—the superstitious sacrifice of an innocent girl—make his goals noble from the start, and because he does not have the information to understand the cost of his deeds until it is too late, we cannot say that he is ever malicious. The player is clued in that something is wrong through visual suggestions that Wander does not necessarily see or understand, including the doves and ominous shadow-people which gather at the Shrine of Worship. These devices are not employed in any way that comments specifically on the medium of video games; nothing about them is procedural. They are very conventional vectors of good old-fashioned dramatic irony.

Furthermore, we don’t textually know at all that Dormin is evil. The antagonist Lord Emon who opposes Dormin and Wander is possibly responsible for Mono’s death. He reminds us, if we have played ICO, of the people who unjustly imprison that game’s hero on account of his “cursed” horns. Once we abandon the idea that the Lord Emon narrator/antagonist character is a trustworthy authority, we lose the only voice telling us that Dormin is dangerous. And at the end of the tale Dormin, surprisingly, keeps all of his promises to Wander: Mono is revived and Wander’s body is returned to him. He even gets his horsey back! Very sweet. And the final scenes, which play out leisurely beside the scrolling credits column, show a bright and sun-dappled garden. Mono, robed in her white gown, comforts baby Wander while surrounded by wildlife and green trees. A fawn appears. The imagery is positively lousy with symbols of innocence and spring.

And, if we’re going to permit ourselves to get biblical, isn’t it a little like a reverse Genesis? Wander follows the instructions of a higher power despite a warning from Lord Emon, who has special knowledge. As a result, a woman is saved from her “cursed fate” and the only way out is permanently closed, trapping the woman and the revived hero in the garden of paradise.

Shadow of the Colossus tells a tragic and subversive story, but it does it entirely within the syntax of its folktalesy story genre. It doesn’t have the flavor of subversiveness which comments on other works or the conventions of its own medium. To understand Undertale’s project, you need to be familiar with other JRPGs. Shadow of the Colossus would preserve its message in any medium.

This point isn’t really doing anything to bump my score up or down, but it’s a line of thinking I’ve revisited many times while writing about this game. I think that what really took Shadow of the Colossus from a two down to a one was the inconsistency between encounter designs.

My friend caught on quickly to the first several colossi, even prevailing where I remember having stumbled (my younger self was completely stymied by the sixth, called “Barba” by fans). But as the latter half of the game wore on, she spent more and more time running in circles. Numbers nine, eleven, and twelve all exasperated her. Each of them involves a special trick that must be discovered before they can be made vulnerable. Colossus number eleven, for example, is covered in armor that can only be broken by using a torch to chase it off of a cliff. But no other encounter shows you that there’s anything you can hold in your hands besides the sword and bow you start with. To even get the torch, you need to stand on a plinth holding up a brazier such that the colossus charges at you and knocks the torch loose. But my friend did not even realize that the plinths were climbable; they can only be grabbed from the sides, which is difficult to see and execute when you’re constantly charged at by an enemy that stuns you on the ground for a few whole seconds whenever it hits you. The tedium was too much, and the game lost its magic and atmosphere. The battle against the last colossus was pretty disheartening. No sense of an emotional climax came through. Instead, as I watched my friend fall over and over from its hands and shoulders and whatnot with all the tenacity of a lint-covered novelty sticky hand, I could only hope desperately that she wouldn’t put the game down right then and there.

In some moments, it’s plain to see that Shadow of the Colossus is testing the player’s patience with purpose and meaning. Each encounter culminates with Wander clutching to fur, often on the head of the colossus, holding on just long enough to get a good stab. The colossi shake and Wander dangles on, unable to get a steady hit. It’s frustrating to have to wait for a tiny window of opportunity to land a blow, but this is clearly by design. If the fight could be ended as soon as the player got into stabbing position, the anticipation would resolve too quickly. Giving the player sweaty palms, making them really clench the trigger button, serves to procedurally convey the ordeal Wander faces on-screen. You hold on (to the controller) to hold on (for dear life) in a very successful bit of hand-to-screen parallelism.

But at other times, the game slips away into pointless futility. In many fights, the trick that makes the colossus vulnerable is only effective for a short time, so the player must hurry to seize the opportunity. Often, the time window just isn’t long enough, and the player is compelled to retry, but the novelty of discovering the trick has already disappeared. The ninth colossus’s arena is huge, and when you knock it onto its side, you have to maneuver over to the far side of its body every time. It’s fiddly and protracted, and it’s a case where the game inadequately reacts to the player executing on what should feel like the turning point of the battle. It took my friend about four tries to ascend this colossus successfully. And it’s a turtle, so it isn’t even that tall. Really lame.

My own remembered experience, rooted in some British guy’s twelve-year-old YouTube video, is very different from the one shared with that friend of mine. I saw a game denuded of its majesty by our ongoing joke that Agro would be the final boss; a joke between pals on the proverbial gamer couch. A couch that, if it were not replaced in our case by the deep phenomenological chasm of several US states of distance and a Discord RTC, would be evocative of the one shared by Misters Cheadle and Sandler in the film Reign Over Me.

It’s a largely forgotten film, but consensus says it’s surprisingly well-regarded: Metacritic awards it an impressive 8.5 user score, which it labels “universal acclaim.” Adam Sandler plays a traumatized man who, after losing his family in 9/11, quits his dental career and whittles his days scootering around, playing the drums, and remodeling his kitchen over and over. Don Cheadle is his former college roommate, a successful dentist with a family, who runs into him late one night. The two rekindle their friendship and are both healed for it. This involves a lot of Shadow of the Colossus.

When Don Cheadle first sees Sandler, he can’t get him to stop and talk. Their second encounter happens when Cheadle drops off his daughter at a friend’s house. He intends to go back home to his wife to spend quality time solving a puzzle with her. Suddenly, Sandler flies by on his scooter. So instead, Cheadle gets him to stop and talk. He asks if Sandler is “practicing,” by which he means “practicing dentistry.”

“I’m practicing all the time, up in the valley. Took down twelve of the colossus so far” “The valley? What is that, is that a medical complex or something?” “It’s more… like another dimension. You take a journey, you discover yourself.” (Reign Over Me, 13:50)

He gets Sandler to sit down for Starbucks, where Sandler violates assorted social norms as per a 2007 movie’s notion of a traumatized person. Sandler acts as if he doesn’t remember Cheadle but they make conversation regardless and before you know it, Cheadle is at this guy’s apartment.

Cheadle needs to use the bathroom. Sad music begins to play. Cheadle briefly glimpses a room with furniture covered in sheets—evidence that this man once had a family. Then there’s a mournful-looking shot where the camera stares straight down Sandler’s darkened hall and distantly we see his TV. He’s climbing the first Colossus. That’s a funny thing to do if you’ve finished three quarters of the game. I guess he has more than one save file. So that he can practice more, of course.

As the movie goes on, the two intertwine into each other’s life in a conventionally dramatic way. Sandler is a broken man who throws tantrums and lacks responsibility and ropes Cheadle into a Mel Brooks marathon showing on the night Cheadle’s father dies, and in turn, Cheadle suffers various embarrassments to his career and family because he has compassion for his friend. And sometimes we get to see more Shadow of the Colossus, which Sandler often calls “Shadows” of the Colossus.

In its second appearance, Sandler is fighting the fifth Colossus—my favorite—and Cheadle takes the controller. We get a montage. He can’t put it down. Sandler teases Cheadle, he says he’s addicted (to Shadow of the Colossus). Cheadle jumps to his feet, paces around the couch in frustration: he demands one more try. He refuses Sandler’s suggestion to stop and “let it soak in,” he’s determined to get it this time. Number fifteen falls and Cheadle pumps his fist, shouting “co-lo-ssussss!” in a funny voice. The montage ends, and with it goes our brief window into an otherworld where playing Shadow of the Colossus actually looks like that.

Or, hey, that’s not so fair. Maybe, for Mr. Adam Sandler, playing Shadow of the Colossus is about practicing each fight over and over and pumping your fist triumphantly when you finally win. Maybe he got a New Game Plus save file when he picked it up on eBay that let him fight the colossi out of order. For his character—who, as I’ve neglected to mention, is named Charlie Fineman—the game is supposed to be a metaphor for 9/11, of course.

Back in ‘07, Kotaku managed to get in touch with Jeremy Roush, who worked as an editor for Reign Over Me. Apparently, the role of Shadow of the Colossus in the film was inspired by Roush’s father.

The Vietnam War left his father 100 percent mentally disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder... Unable to work, he spent the days and evenings watching sci-fi thriller Aliens over and over again until he actually had to buy a new VHS tape. "Aliens is a thinly veiled kind of Vietnam veteran kind of story," Roush explains, "and watching it is a way of thinking about it without telling yourself you are thinking about it." The movie was visceral therapy for his father… Refusing to accept the death of loved ones. Seeking out an escape from that truth. Giants falling in slow motion. "You could see where someone who was dealing with 9/11 would be engrossed by a giant that keeps collapsing over and over again," he says. Charlie's therapy was Shadow of the Colossus. (Ashcraft p.2)

Roush, who was responsible for the idea to include the game in the movie, had thought seriously about the thematics. In Reign Over Me, Charlie Fineman’s fixation on Shadow of the Colossus is a deliberate symbol of his grief, boxed into a safe and distant replica of tragedy which he can watch himself overcome again and again on the plasma TV.

Later on in the film, Cheadle manages to drag Sandler to weekly therapist sessions, but they go nowhere. Sandler refuses to speak about his family and leaves each session after just a few minutes. But he does say “I like to play Colossus!” (Reign, 1:13:29). In this movie’s understanding of mentally ill people, or at least in Roush’s, PTSD sufferers seek out proxy-triggers to act out the procedure of grieving with none of the pain. I think that I preferred the movie before I learned this. It just doesn’t make as much sense to say that the colossi are all supposed to be, like, the twin towers. Isn’t that bizarre? I mean, I had just assumed that the game was more broadly supposed to be a parallel to the ordeal of overcoming grief, and that the colossi were the grief. Grief is like a colossus, or like colossi, because it can feel so much bigger than the griever, so invincible and enduring. That’s why it was so strange to me that he never makes it further through the game over the course of the movie. In the very last scene, when he’s in his new and well-lit apartment, do you know what he’s doing? He’s playing it again, but he’s back to number thirteen. I really expected him to finish the game by the end, which would parallelize his grief struggle with a struggle to take down the colossi. It would represent something. However, the truth is that the colossus encounters are supposed to be 9/11, and he’s mentally recreating a facsimile of 9/11 every time he plays the game. Infinite, furry World Trade Centers getting stabbed by Adam Sandler over and over.

Sorry, that might have been a digression in poor taste. You didn’t expect to read a review of Reign Over Me within this review of Shadow of the Colossus and it was a little deceptive of me to jam it in there. But I thought about it so much, you have to understand! It’s fascinating to me how I could arrive at such a different interpretation of the movie than was apparently intended. The same difference goes for the game itself: Mr. Roush definitely got the gist of Shadow of the Colossus, but he applied the game to the movie in such a different way than I would have.

Let’s talk about the technical side of things instead for a short while. A nice palate-cleanser. It might seem unbalanced to devote one half of the score system to technology that is seldom appreciated by the audience—this score is more than that. Perhaps you were left confused when I didn’t explain it in much detail earlier, back when I was still laying out the way the system works. The slogan “does it blow my mind?” suggests that this category seeks to appreciate the craft of game development. A good example of something non-technological that “blows my mind” would be the dialogue system in Hades; the incredible effort of writing such a massive script and then organizing it so cleverly certainly does blow my mind, speaking as a game developer and a very slow writer.

Shadow of the Colossus is an exceptionally technically impressive game that deserves more than the 1 I assigned it on the spot so long ago. Through optimization, fakery, and creativity, it packs in the most sophisticated graphics the PlayStation 2 can handle, including HDR lighting, self-shading, long-distance level-of-detail mesh transitions, real-time fur rendering, volumetric particles, and anisotropic light scattering. Most of these practices were considered next-gen at the time of the game’s release. Some of them still feel shiny and new in 2024.

Team ICO accomplished this through ingenuity and strict scoping. Out of any of my sources, I learned the most about it here. Of particular interest to me is the usage of procedural animation and inverse kinematics, of which I’m a big fan. If you are one of the few beautiful souls in this loving universe who have read my blog(s) before, you know that I’ve been working on and off for a long time on a project that relies heavily on inverse kinematics called Flower Pot. The inexpensive algorithm I use in my own work, called FABRIK, was not published until 2011. Furthermore, Shadow of the Colossus has very complex character models and needs to clearly telegraph the movements of the player character and the colossi. For this reason it also dynamically combines animation data keyframed by an animator with the movements computed by the inverse kinematics algorithms. They did this on a CPU that clocked at about 294 megahertz (see Diefendorff).

I won’t reproduce diagrams here because they’re already available in the translated article on Léna Piquet’s website, which I linked above and which may also be found in my sources. To be honest, there is less for me to write in this section of the review because there is not much new to say. The achievements and process of Team ICO have been extensively documented and explained, much more than almost any other game. What is especially unique about Shadow of the Colossus is that much of this dissection and documentation has been done by outsiders: fans who never had access to the team or their materials.

Of particular note is Nomad Colossus. I found a Fandom wiki article about this guy. It says, “Nomad Colossus is a well-known figure in The Shadow of The Colossus community. He's most well-known for his insane dedication to the game and downright jaw-dropping data-mining” (Team Ico Wiki). Passionate! But the article has no comments. Yet on the other hand, a skim of the community message log page shows that at least a dozen users have worked on this wiki within the last several months. A tantalizing window into a community, or one of a million lost corners of the internet? I cannot rightfully say.

Nomad Colossus uploaded their first Shadow of the Colossus-related YouTube video in April of 2010, four and a half years post-release. It’s been much longer than that since Breath of the Wild came out and I’m still surprised whenever I see someone running it in an emulator. The video is titled “Shadow of the Colossus - Through the entrance,” and it shows Wander on horseback in an area normally inaccessible except in cutscenes: the north bridge into the central shrine. He rides Agro through the narrow gate passage on the other end of the bridge. The path continues into a void for a long ways, but the horse stops as if running into a wall.

Since then, Nomad Colossus has published 346 videos (if I’m counting correctly) pertaining to Shadow of the Colossus, prying at it with camera hacks, model viewers, and data manipulation. He reveals mountains and plains and islands and ruins all inaccessible in normal play. Their work, comprising so many short, uncommentated videos, can be engaged with as a companion book to the game; Nomad gradually turns the elusive horizons of the Forbidden Lands back into data, into geometry stored in a file system. Numbers on computers permit no mysteries. A number is autological; before being applied to another end it represents only itself. A number is atomic, it has no secret compartments. Through the efforts of explorers like Nomad Colossus and their emulators, no pit has been left unaccounted for on the DVD-ROM. Nomad renders Shadow of the Colossus into a wholly unmysterious object. This is not a criticism of their work.

At the same time, the game continues to support an incredible abundance of perceived mystery. After all, this was why Nomad Colossus’s work began. The so-called Secret Seekers and their famous thread on the PSN forums were dedicated to unearthing what they imagined to be the mother-of-all easter eggs. They began with intense clue-hunting and then moved on to the less speculative arts of boundary breaking and data mining, albeit after dozens of pages of effusive discussion. The intentions behind the game’s design were a favorite topic. Their style of discourse was dense with wild, associative connections; the possibility of subtextual hints by means of biblical allusion was on the table before even the end of the first post (Quest for the Last Big Secret). “Fumito Ueda is infamous for his attention to the most minute, intricate detail,” this post says. But to say he is infamous for this—does that not suggest the consensus of many people? I suspect that the Ueda these individuals imagined was not an accurate model of the real one. There was no secret last colossus, after all.

These are only a few of many voices on the internet professing all kinds of opinions about the game, its content, its intentions and meanings and forms. A quick survey will show substantial diversity of interpretation: I found a passionate review on the “patientgamers” subreddit decrying Shadow of the Colossus as “one of the worst games I’ve ever played” for its “non-existent story” and “Genuinely awful clunky movement and controls” (AstraFuckingGooGoo). In “Shadow of the Colossus: a Retrospective View,” NoobFeed user BrunoBRS calls the game “a love story, of what limits can a man go for his loved one, but it is, most importantly, the tale of David and Goliath” in a passage of lavish praise for “what he truly believes is the greatest game of all time” (BrunoBRS). The similarly-titled “Shadow of the Colossus: A Retrospective,” an article on The Boss Key, calls it “a game all about and only about killing the boss monsters as a means to an end” (Koop). “Shadow of the Colossus Retrospective– A Tragically Beautiful Love Story,” brought to us by Taylor Lyles on DualShockers, says it’s “so much more than just a boss rush game; it is the story of a boy who cared so much for someone he loved that unleashed all sorts of hellish things to save her” (Lyles). Shadow of the Colossus retrospectives are, as they say, like assholes: everybody has one. I am included. Shades of consensus and contradiction are to be found in abundance in each discussion of the game.

And what of my own opinions? They depend on a perceived counter-opinion in many ways. My revised scoring suggests how I remember my past self. In my discussion of the aesthetic content of the game, I call for a new perspective that de-emphasizes the notion that Shadow of the Colossus deliberately works to subvert a convention of the medium of video games. But couldn’t I be accused of failing to establish that this notion existed in the first place? Let me provide an example of that notion, at least. Here’s another retrospective. It has the word “retrospective” in its title. It’s called “START/SELECT: Consuming Loneliness: A ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ Retrospective,” and it was written by Mac Riga for the Georgetown University student newspaper. Here’s Riga’s take:

Team Ico sought to make a game that laid bare the contradiction of video games. It held up this beautiful medium, the pinnacle of self-isolation and escapism yet one that fosters empathy and self-reflection more than any other, and begged the player to wrestle with that irony — to come to their own conclusions about what it means to be alone, what it means to consume video games and what it means to do both simultaneously. (Riga)

This is surprising. Riga isn’t talking about the moral irony of monster-slaying in video games, which is more or less the topic of the counter-opinion I imagined myself to be opposing. But he is saying that Shadow of the Colossus is trying to engage in conversation with a convention of the medium of games, and to me that was the important part. For Riga, it’s a game about “self-isolation” and “empathy.”

Maybe it would be helpful to check what Fumito Ueda has to say. Even if you’re the type to faithfully invoke The Death of the Author, you might still agree, I hope, that discovering the designer’s intent will provide a reference against which to compare other views.

“I’ve never thought that “cruelty” is something forbidden in video games. Video games seem to require cruelty as a means of expression, and that being the case, I wanted to try and present my own take on cruelty. That was really the seed idea of Shadow of the Colossus.” (Ueda)

Here in a 2005 interview with CONTINUE magazine, Ueda casts Shadow of the Colossus as a game about cruelty inspired by the cruelty he sees as required in games. My analysis is thrown into doubt even further! It was intended as a deconstruction all along. But wait—Fumito Ueda from 2019 might be here to save me.

Was the overall aim of SOTC to question why it is that most games are about killing and how we have grown so comfortable doing so in a virtual existence? Fumito Ueda: I play games where violence is a factor myself, so I do not dismiss such games. However, through the production of Shadow of the Colossus, I started having doubts about simply “feeling good by beating monsters” and “getting a sense of accomplishment”. I tried thinking if there were any other choices for different kinds of expression, then ended up with such settings and rules as a result. Rather than try to deliberately create some sort of antithesis, I focused more on the consistency of the design as a product and differentiation (from other products). (Taylor)

Apologies for another long block quote; I really think the context is worth leaving in here because it helps to illustrate that, while Ueda is not exactly contradicting himself, different circumstances have prompted two answers with very different implications. The interviewer in the latter source seems to be aligned with the popular view that the game narrative is chiefly an exploration of morality. Which I do not disagree with, either: I should reiterate that my disagreement is with the view that the game narrative is specifically an exploration of morality in the medium of video games. The interviewer suggests that by saying that “most games are about killing.” Ueda seems to dismiss the idea by going on to say that the game was not crafted as “some sort of antithesis,” but that those themes emerged simply by trying to make a unique story. But in the former interview, Ueda asserts that he was “inspired” by the prevalence of “cruelty” in games. We are deprived of an authorial view where we might find stability; such a thing would have protected us, maybe, from the wild menagerie of contrasting views we face instead.

And could it be possible, if you would excuse the sudden break, that Reign Over Me (2007) starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle might not have always been actively trying to frame Shadow of the Colossus as a pseudo-Freudian stand-in for 9/11? More importantly, do we have any meaningful way to be sure? No, I think it’s more likely that suggestive forces have moved in with us permanently and that their furniture is too numerous and heavy for us to kick them out. It is impossible to speak on the aesthetics of a work, especially one so widely critiqued as Shadow of the Colossus, without necessarily speaking on what was spoken before. It is impossible to even play the game without encountering these extratextual conversations.

When I watched my friend play Shadow of the Colossus for the first time, I must have already been faintly aware of this phenomenon. The process of finding an appropriate emulator and an appropriate ROM led her through websites already saturated with extratextual content that suggested certain ideas of the game content. She had heard me speak of the game before. She had already listened to much of its music, accompanied on YouTube by comments. Being someone interested in games herself, she had certainly already encountered discussions of the game content like this one. She knew damn well that Agro would fall off that bridge. From all of this it is clear to me that the “extratext” was always inescapable. If she were to encounter the game truly without prior knowledge it would still not have “saved” her because she would just discover the extratext afterwards.

And what of my wife? My poor sweet wife? Just as no dry beach is spared from the tide, she too will be inundated by extratext that will indelibly shape how she receives and interprets the game content. She will not be a source of a “pure” opinion, but only another source of interpretation. She will never play Shadow of the Colossus as it was when it came out in 2005.

The space in consideration is a “consensus blob.” It has no hard boundaries, but it has gradients. Within the blob there are many shades of interpretation, but few overt contradictions except when comparing extremes. The blob is uncentered because there is no single “correct” or most stable interpretation. Areas of the blob give the appearance of a “consensus,” a shared notion or common interpretation, but really the gradient is everywhere and always-changing, like an amoeba. Even the creator of the art object can sway from point to point in the blob, forgetting wherever it was they started. The consensus is heraclitean. The extratext is absolutely inseparable from the text.

Really, we shouldn’t be miffed about it. Shadow of the Colossus can be about a lot of things, it’s not like we need a single definitive analysis. It will be a joy to watch my wife play, and I will be delighted to see what she thinks. I’m sure it will be new and exciting.

Overall, I give Reign Over Me a strong 6/10.

Sources

AstraFuckingGooGoo. “Shadow of the Colossus (PS4)- one of the worst games I’ve ever played.” r/patientgamers. https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/ujnx5q/shadow_of_the_colossus_ps4_one_of_the_worst_games/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2024.

Binder, Mike, dir. 2007. Reign over Me. Screenplay by Mike Binder. Columbia Pictures.

BrunoBRS. “Shadow of the Colossus: a Retrospective View”. Noobfeed. 27 Sep. 2011. https://www.noobfeed.com/features/160/shadow-of-the-colossus-a-retrospective-view

Diefendorff, Keith. “Sony’s Emotionally Charged Chip.” Microprocessor Report, vol. 13, no. 5.

Koop, Brandon. “Shadow of the Colossus: A Retrospective.” The Boss Key, 10 Apr. 2014, https://bradenkoop.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/shadow-of-the-colossus-a-retrospective/.

Lyles, Taylor. “Shadow of the Colossus Retrospective -- A Tragically Beautiful Love Story.” DualShockers, 26 Jan. 2018, https://www.dualshockers.com/shadow-of-the-colossus-retrospective/.

Metacritic. Reign over Me. https://www.metacritic.com/movie/reign-over-me/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

“Nomad Colossus.” Team Ico Wiki, https://teamico.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad_Colossus. Accessed 8 Aug. 2024.

Peeren, Esther. “Compelling Memory: 9/11 and the Work of Mourning in Mike Binder’s Reign Over Me.” Cultural Critique, vol. 92, no. 1, Dec. 2016, pp. 57–83. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2016.a617380.

Piquet, Léna, translator. “The Making of ‘Shadow of the Colossus.’” Froyok, Dec. 2007, https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/2772150/175939_PUBLISHED_Peeren_617380.pdf.

Quest for the Last Big Secret / Mysteries of SotC. PlayStation Community Forums, archived May 2013. http://web.archive.org/web/20130505104658/http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/Shadow-of-the-Colossus-PS2/Quest-for-the-Last-Big-Secret-Mysteries-of-SotC/td-p/20178777

Riga, Mac. “START/SELECT: Consuming Loneliness: A ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ Retrospective.” The Hoya, https://thehoya.com/guide/start-select-consuming-loneliness-a-shadow-of-the-colossus-retrospective/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2024.

Taylor, Jay. “Interview Extra: Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian).” Cane and Rinse, 27 Aug. 2019, https://caneandrinse.com/fumito-ueda-interview/.

Ueda, Fumito. Interview for CONTINUE Magazine, vol. 25., 2005. Translated by shmuplations, https://shmuplations.com/ueda/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2024.

#essay #game criticism #game critique #game review #video games #gaming #shadow of the colossus #team ico #review #dustyisforever review

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variousqueerthings · 9 months

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This is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me in my life. The only exciting thing!

Bill! I've been writing with a friend while watching s10 and this friend really doesn't like m*ffat, and I think by s10 all goodwill had run out and they do tend towards the most negative read of every episode, and bill as character generally

and look, bill is introduced with a truly stupid, fatphobic, rambly-in-a-bad-way bit of dialogue. we breathe deeply. we remember that we're here to do a rating and so this will be included in that. but also that there are many many facets of bill's character that are very interesting, fun, and different to anything we've seen since m*ffat took the helm on this show, and that this line -- while fucking... argh... is not repeated. but also just never should have existed to begin with

(also oh gosh, fatphobia as sexism and/or as political... it's really both isn't it, it's going on both, y'all making your first lesbian main character say fatphobic shit, c'mon!)

sexism rank objectification (female character is ogled/harassed/turned into a sex joke by the doctor and/or a lead we’re supposed to root for and/or the camera): 7/10

sexism rank plot-point (lead female character is only there to serve plot, not to have her emotional interiority explored, or given agency to her emotional interiority): 10/10

interesting complex or pointlessly complex (does the complexity serve the narrative or does it just serve to be confusing as a stand-in for smart, this includes visually): 8/10

furthers character and/or lore and/or plot development (broader question that ties into the previous ones, at least two of these, ideally three should be fulfilled): 7/10

companion matters (the companion doesn’t always have to be there, but if the companion is there, can they function without the doctor– and overall per season how often is the companion the focus or POV of the story): 8/10

the doctor is more than just “godlike” (examines the doctor’s flaws and limitations, doesn’t solve a plot by having it revolve entirely around the doctor’s existence): 7/10

doesn’t look down on previous doctor who (by erasing or mocking its importance, by redoing and “bettering” previous beloved plotpoints or characters, etc.): 7/10

isn’t trying to insert hamfisted sexiness (m*ffat famously talked a lot about how dw should be sexier multiple times, he sucks at writing it): 10/10

internal world has consistency (characters have backgrounds, feel rooted in a place with other people, generally feel like they have Lives): 7/10

Politics (how conservative is the story): 7/10

FULL RATING: 78/100 (if I can count….)

m*ffat where was this energy five seasons ago???

OBJECTIFICATION: I knocked a whole three points off just for that "joke" to be honest. this episode is otherwise pretty good at writing its female characters, bill and heather

it's especially as a counterpoint to the paternoster gang, where lesbianism = sexy master/servant powerplay in leather, and look- look I am not averse to that as concept

but written my m*ffat on doctor who? yeurgh

point is, that's not bill and heather

PLOT-POINT: bill is the POV character in a way none of the other companions were in their first episodes (barring amy as a kid, but as an adult, not so much anymore). the doctor is some weirdo but compelling professor at her college, which she works at and secretly goes to classes at, her potential relationship with heather is what sets off the plot and carries it throughout, and is what drives the ending

it's pretty neat on the whole. my friend's main angry point about this episode (well one of them) was that bill was totally unconcerned with what happened with heather/that it should have had a bigger effect on her longrunning and... yehhh I'm not not in agreement but I do think that with doctor who being a bit of a bullshit-science type show in which characters don't die in a number of ways + that I know heather comes back at the end + there's that setup that they'll probably see heather again + the focus on bill's character as being in the closet to her foster mum (foster or adoptive, I've forgotten now) and working in a canteen and just not really knowing where her life is going and all of that wrapped up in meeting heather and that adventure with the doctor... it does work on the whole

it could have been more I do think that, especially heather's character, whom we know basically nothing about other than that she was probably depressed and wanted to travel places, but I think bill's emotions are far more grounded and long-reaching and important to the story than amy's or clara's ever were and this already in episode one

maybe I'm just happy to see something but I do think it's also something done -- for the most part -- quite well

COMPLEXITY: this plot as a mystery is quite fun. bill is just as much figuring out the doctor as she is the mystery of the puzzle. as such, it's kind of a slow-burnish that's not massive in scope, but I think it's rather delightful

CHARACTERS/LORE/PLOT: new companion called bill whom we already know a fair bit about, woman in a puddle, mystery in the cellar, nardole is still there, the doctor is having a bit of an emotional Time (when are they not -- but it's an evolving emotional Time)

COMPANIONS MATTER: bill does a lot in this episode, which is extra great because she's so new. it's a lot of questions, but also a lot of proactive behaviour, and it's also questions that are about bill learning and not about acting as a sounding board for the doctor all the time

“GODLIKE” DOCTOR: the doctor is mainly trying to stay out of things, and then bill drags them into things, and it's a bit about emotions and a bit about becoming a (grand)parental figure to bill, who needs some support, I like that this is the impetus that gets the doctor involved in the story... well, that and can't resist a mystery of course. and boredom. multitudes

also a defining thing the doctor does is go back in time and take some pictures of bill's mum for her. this is simply done out of kindness (and it doesn't hurt that it affects a later plot)

PREVIOUS DOCTOR WHO: I really like the callbacks in this one, it really says some stuff about the doctor-as-character where they currently are -- that is, looking with melancholy at the past. funnily enough, with river and susan on the same desk, it kind of ties river to that past more effectively than the show managed to do during her actual episodes, I feel

also by putting susan there, it says a lot about how the doctor is going to be interacting with bill. a very different kind of dynamic to any we've had before on nu!who

“SEXINESS”: I've put this highly, as I don't remember anything. generally this season I haven't remembered if there's anything (actually no lies, one thing just popped up, but not this episode), so I'll just have to operate on that assumption and... maybe take notes for the latter half. but I think we're relatively free of this anyway, considering a lot of the heteronormativity has been removed from the show at this point

INTERNAL WORLD: there is a university and bill lives with her foster mum because her mother is dead, and she works in the canteen and sneaks into lectures. honestly an old university is the perfect place for the doctor to hide, tenured professors are like cryptids

there's a biiit less on the queer side of things, and there will be throughout the season. this not to say that bill is not definitely a lesbian, in a way where I'd say (controversially perhaps) that clara never felt queer to me

but simply that it doesn't seem like bill's involved much in queer culture, and that culture doesn't affect the plot as such. I'm okay with this, I think there's still a lot to be said for how bill's lesbianism already affects the text for the better, but it is the point and I am doing this particular rating, so it should be said

POLITICS: I mean to strip bill to box-ticking (not in a bad way) for a second, but she's a black, working-class lesbian who's living with a straight, white foster mother, whom she's not out to

and she is the hero of the story. she's funny, she's kind, she sees things, she asks good questions, and she remembers very very well and applies what she learns to the situations she's in. while one might ask whether some of these aspects of her could have been explored more throughout her run, it's fair I think to say that they are explored and are recurring parts of her story and affect how she sees and moves through the world

I also think there's just something about this weird professor type seeing her in turn, singling her out as special, which is such a different way to how m*ffat has written the doctor opposite women since s2, in which only women who are suitably Special in particular ways (through being "well-bred" and "highly educated" and essentially very classist ideas of being from the right background, or by first being introduced as a mystery and then later as a character)

dare I say... he might have learnt something?

which is why, to bring the mood down for a second, her fatphobic ramble feels out of character for who we later learn she is, and just feels more like a throwaway joke on the side of m*ffat to show that... idk actually what it's meant to show. that bill rambles? that she's slightly awkward? and of course m*ffat doesn't know that fatphobia is a thing (I imagine) and so wouldn't have wanted to write it to show that bill has unexamined bigotries (which could be interesting, but not done in this way or with this character or with the themes of this season), especially is we're kiiind of seeing bill flirt with that woman in a later scene?

(I also think this ramble is weird in terms of how it describes the doctor, it's so nonsensical. is it implying the doctor was essentially sexually harassing this unknown woman? this unknown woman that she also objectifies before we even get to the fatphobia???)

I should actually just include it as a reminder to people, because it really does suck: "Okay, so my first day here, in the canteen, I was on chips. There was this girl. Student. Beautiful. Like a model, only with talking and thinking. She looked at you and you perved. Every time, automatic, like physics. Eye contact, perversion. So I gave her extra chips. Every time, extra chips. Like a reward for all the perversion. Every day, got myself on chips, rewarded her. Then finally, finally, she looked at me, like she'd noticed, actually noticed, all the extra chips. Do you know what I realised? She was fat. I'd fatted her. But that's life, innit? Beauty or chips. I like chips. So did she. So that's okay."

I am not negating that this was terribly written and offensive, but I do think it's also at odds with later bill and I don't take it in as part of her character, so much as a massive bit of bad writing on the m*ffat's part, same as, say, when the doctor grabbed jenny and kissed her without her consent, which would be a character-ruiner for me if I decided that that was part of my canon. this isn't quite as bad as that, but it's not a great way to introduce a character that you're meant to root for, and also just... I mean not that there aren't fatphobic lesbians but c'mon, you're showing an ostensibly queer perspective and you're turning her into a bloke????? nah nah nah, fuck right off with that

FULL RATING: 78/100 (if I can count….)

it's frankly wild how far and fast this jumped for the first episode of the season. its main detractor, really is that joke, and perhaps the general limitations in including a queer culture to bill's queer identity, but bill is -- on the whole -- fantastic and immediately shifts the show into a completely different gear

I feel like it's a shame she came here at the end, after a lot of people had dropped off, not just for one season in and of herself, but the final season of this entire era. it's a lot of weight to carry and I think pearl mackie does a fantastic job

#im watching nu!who #im watching capaldi who #episode the pilot #the measurement

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hazelplaysgames · 11 months

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following up on a clip from yesterday, a bit of a look into the armor provided by the Squid Roll, and by extension, the Surge. the first two bits here are proving that Splat Bombs and Autobombs do the same damage in turf war, which is relevant to yesterdays clip more than this topic as a whole.

@ladydraconian9 suggested, based on the damage fade-in on the side of the screen, that these armor effects provided 150 armor, making me take 30 after shield. i threw myself into the training lobby, and if this was the case, then clip 3 would see me standing: standing in enemy ink makes you take up to 40 damage with no ink resistance, so tanking it would leave me somewhere in the ballpark of 70. however, i perish. clip 4 shows me pulling off two in a row, and i also perish on the second bomb. we're looking at at least 50 damage to the player, easily more depending on healing rates, which looks to be a huge factor there.

since there's only so much i can test on my own, i decided to do a little digging since i doubted we were the first to ask these questions to solidly answer this. it seems like this armor is largely based on Ink Armor from Splatoon 2: it can tank a minimum of 30 damage, to a supposed maximum of 100, at which point any excess damage would be directly dealt to the player. however, Ink Armor had the gall to cap overflow damage: if you took a 200 damage blast in S2, the Armor should only handle 100 of that, and then deal 100 to the player. however, they made it so that armor effect meant you couldn't be splatted by others, so the overflow damage would get reduced to 80, and you'd be left with 20 health. effectively, this means that S2's ink armor takes 100, then deals up to 80 to the player, then any and all further excess is taken by the Ink Armor. this makes it so clear to me why it was dreaded so much.

no such cap exists in S3, so if something does 200, like Reefslider or Tri-zooka, while you're Rolling, then you're as good as dead.

so there's the answer: Squid Rolling and Squid Surging can tank up to 100 damage! it doesn't feel like anything about this changed for Salmon Run, so you can tank Steelhead bombs, Flopper splashes, and Flyfish missiles! just one at full health, really, don't get carried away trying that with two Steelies. otherwise, the need to know this armor stuff is... kinda limited for Salmon Run. no enemies hit more than 100, but less than 150, so the armor effect is to either negate a hit, or barely survive an otherwise killing blow with practically no inbetween.

by the by, the Lids' direct hit slam attack and Cohozuna's splashdown do 400 and 1000 damage. Rolling will never save you from taking those hits.

#video #splat series #splatoon 3 #mechanics testing is always fun.#on a vaguely related note can you believe E-liter still only does 180 damage in turf war?

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bcbdrums · 2 years

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I think my biggest unpopular Kim possible opinion is that the live action movie wasn’t bad, it wasn’t the greatest thing ever, but it wasn’t the worst thing ever.

There’s a lot of things I liked about it, I liked that Kim had a little arc and that she was allowed to be insecure and be more opens about her doubt and fears, Shego and Drakken were the best parts of it hands down (and they helped revive Drakgo 💙💚), Ron was great as well.

Some people said it was cringe that he referenced memes, but for Drakken that is completely in-character. Drakken would 100% try to use slang and fail miserably.

I’m also appreciate that the live action showed us what Kim and Shego’s age gap actually looks like.

I never thought of it that way, but maybe that also contributed to the movie falling in ratings? It really puts the ship into perspective and I bet some people didn’t like that.

drakken DID try and fail to use slang miserably in the cartoon! they even used the same book cover that he used in the cartoon in the final shots of the live action when shego is driving mini-drakken to high school:

the live action should get a LOT of credit that it doesn't. the canon references are...profound. I mean, that bueno nacho set! wade's striped cup. the grappler. the original mission outfit. I could go on for a LONG time about how very much IN the world of Kim Possible they tried to make us believe we were with numerous background details and references like the aforementioned, and even deeper nuances about the characters and story. but I'll save that for another time if anyone is interested.

I loved that Kim got her identity crisis. I just didn't like how it ended, as I've addressed in other posts. but the cartoon dealt with that very thing in the series' soft-finale episode of Team Impossible. that episode did the same thing: if she's not saving the world, then who is she? and it felt much more Kim-like than the movie did... but you can read my past posts about why I didn't like the end of the movie.

Drakgo. were. awesome. everyone agrees. and they perfectly transplanted them from early 2000's to late 2010's. I very much believed that if those characters lived naturally in that year, that's how they'd behave. that was another win for the movie. they weren't trying to make it like...the cartoon chars had time-traveled, but as if this is their normal world, and it worked perfectly.

part of me wants to rant about the character slaughter of James Possible, but...I'll save that for another post.

and of course, as I've said, I loved that the show distinctly showed the age gap between Kim and Shego. but in doing so it also kind of...broke the suspension of disbelief you need to believe in a...teenage world-traveling crime-fighter who goes to public high school. it's kind of in the same vein as.... Spy Kids, if anyone remembers that franchise. great fun, but wholly unrealistic. and we're not expected to pretend it is! we know we're living in a fantasy world and they don't try to make us believe otherwise... and KP is wholly unrealistic if you take it out of the cartoon world and put it in the real world... ultimately I think that's why the movie didn't launch into something more. some things are simply suited for animation, and do not work in live action without...eh...well, without the grandiose technology it takes to make a Marvel movie. I was just looking at clips of WandaVision a few days ago and thinking how these women just...flying, hovering in the air, with no visible power source... just magic... this sort of thing you don't believe in live action. our logic won't really let us if we're adults. but they had enough high-budget CGI, enough incredible photography direction...they made it more believable than Kim and Ron on the jetpacks. and even so, the world is so grandiose that we don't really believe the marvel world is the real world either. so yeah...the KP live action tried to make us believe it was the real world, and we just...couldn't.

some things simply aren't made to be on film. some things are meant to be cartoons, and should stay cartoons. in my opinion the superhero genre is one such thing, but... that's another topic.

#queued post #kim possible #ron stoppable #Drakken #shego #Kim Possible live action #Kim Possible 2019

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arizonaconservativegal · 2 years

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Hi there. Californian desperately looking to flee this coming summer. Was once considering Arizona but I’m concerned that the election chaos of CA is in AZ too and now you have a Democrat governor. Is this still a place I can safely flee or is AZ lost like Cali now? Honestly asking. I don’t want to absorb the work and expense of relocating just to be in the same place.

I might give it a year and see how much Katie Hobbs is able to bypass or bully the legislature. I think they'll be able to keep her in check but they have an unfortunate habit of being certifiably insane so I hate to put all my hopes on them. In general, I don't expect the next four years to be super fun here but I wouldn't say the fight is over yet. Our state party doesn't know what the fuck it's doing but if they get their shit together, the state is very winnable. We may have had a big influx of Californians moving here since covid but this is still a slightly right of center state.

I'll give you my usual warnings about moving here:

If you're renting, you should know that housing prices in the cities / larger towns have shot up about 50% in about four years and show no signs of slowing. Be ready for that. I don't know offhand what the trend has been for the more rural areas, but I imagine it's gone up a fair bit too. Still much, much cheaper than California though.

If you're buying, you need to very thoroughly dig into the water rights where you buy or you might find yourself in a lot of expensive trouble very quickly. This is especially true if you are looking at a rural area but several unincorporated areas on the edges of Phoenix have learned the hard way recently that hiring water haulers isn't cheap.

In most of the state, illegal immigration tends to be more of a political issue than a daily life issue but for areas on the border and along major drug corridors, it is a very serious problem. Good luck getting into a hospital in Yuma - they're overflowing with illegal immigrants. I also personally know people who cannot go outside on their own property at night because the cartels use it to traffick all sorts of things and they will shoot you if they see you.

We did manage to hold on to the corporation commission, which regulates the power companies, so I'm not too worried about this unless the legislature does something dumb, but we do need a new power plant soon or we may be looking at rolling blackouts in the not super distant future... I think it'll be okay but it would have been good to have a Republican in the governor's office to smooth that process a bit.

We have a very low income tax and property taxes tend to be low for primary residences. People think this means we are a low tax state. What they forget is that we have a very high sales tax - nearly 10% in some areas. All said and done, we're fairly average for total tax rates when compared with other states. It's still a lot better than California, but I don't want you to be surprised.

You need a car to get around here. Public transportation exists but isn't very functional and nothing is close enough to walk. Make sure you get a new Arizona plate (you only need one) because otherwise everyone will see your Cali plates and automatically hate you.

And the last warning I have is that yes, it really does get fuck-off hot here in the summer. Expect temperatures to never fall below 100 for the entire month of July. If Phoenix doesn't get a straight week of 115+, that's a mild summer. If you're from LA, you probably know what to expect. Otherwise, make sure you have a good AC system - and you want AC, not a swamp cooler. Trust me.

All that said, it's really a great state to live in. It's raining today and that's a rare enough event that everyone gets excited for it. There really is nothing like a southern Arizona sunset. Jeans and a button down shirt count as formal attire in half the state, especially when paired with cowboy boots. Most of the population is from somewhere else so you can find restaurants with quality food from anywhere you like. In most of the state, you will literally never have to shovel snow or scrape ice off your windshield. We have all the major sports franchises so you can go to big games when you want and they don't totally suck but none of the teams are good enough that anyone really expects you to root for them over your home team. We have more biomes here than any other state in the country so whatever kind of environment you want, you can get. Natural disasters don't happen in most of the state - the worst thing is forest fires in the north which are usually manageable. We have a weirdly huge historic car community because our climate is so dry that the cars don't rust. People put Christmas lights on cacti. Haboobs look like the apocalypse is rolling in but are really just a funny word for the newscasters to say a lot. You will see people wearing a bolo tie unironically. I once saw a woman put a tumbleweed in the back of a minivan. I love it here.

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jungjangnim · 2 years

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ajumma chameleon

i promise you all, it's not what it seems. a non-mania au story.

Well, this is Iron's house, alright.

Yoo-jung took a few breaths before ringing the doorbell. Anne wanted her to babysit Alaina and Victoria for a while. All three were on 26-hour shifts at Banyan, and Yoo-jung was honestly sorry for them. She could never stand that kind of stress; talking to people daily, taking care of sick patients, handling the loss of some… yeah, no.

Besides, she has met Alaina and Victoria before. She knows where to take them now.

Kyung-mi greeted her at the entrance. "Hello, Yoo-jung," she said in Korean; bows were exchanged between the two. "Welcome to my humble abode, I suppose."

"Damn, Kyung-mi, never thought your shared fuckhouse would be this simple," Yoo-jung commented.

"Not a fuckhouse, Yoo-jung. We’re too busy for that. Come on in; Iron and Anne are waiting for you."

And sure enough, they were. All three were dressed in coats—look, it's winter, we're all freezing here—but she was sure enough that their scrubs were underneath. Alaina and Victoria played a bit of Just Dance in the living room per Yoo-jung's recommendation. It seemed Yoo-jung would be shelling out money for Just Dance 2023, but hey, anything to keep her godchildren happy.

"Chateau Banyan, absolutely beautiful," she commented. It was genuine. "Any specific instructions for the two, Iron?"

"Is 'don't let them die' an appropriate instruction?" Iron replied.

"Iron, you know your daughters have special needs that I need to take care of, otherwise I'll make them go ham on the house and destroy everything."

Iron sighed. "Well, you know about Victoria's chronic illness. Just make her take these medications at the appropriate time. Alexa will sound an alarm when it is time." She hands over Victoria's pill box to Yoo-jung. "And Alaina... she'll know what to do. Just remind her to take her supplements from time to time."

"Copy that, Doctor."

"Ajumma will discuss your wages next," Iron said, gesturing to Kyung-mi. The latter decided to whack the former. "You! I'm not that old, you piece of shit!"

"Well, you definitely look older than the rest of us," she quips.

"You--"

"No fighting in front of the guest," Anne's voice rang from the kitchen. "Honey, the rates. Yoojee deserves to know her payment for babysitting our kids."

Yoojee?

Kyung-mi sighed, then turned to the poor Ph.D. student. "Here's your rate. I'll pay you 30 DisCoins an hour, with an additional 100 to forget where I live."

"Mrs. Young," Yoo-jung replies, "I am good friends with Iron. I unfortunately know where you live."

Silence. "I'll bump it to 350."

"Ajumma, I can teach Iron more Korean to spite you."

Kyung-mi takes a deep breath. "You're lucky Anne likes you. Okay, fine. 30 an hour, plus 500 as a convenience fee. If you stop teaching Iron anything terrible, I'll take you to a research seminar."

"No promises."

"You--"

"Camille, my love! We're going to be late!" Anne shouted from outside. Kyung-mi replied with a loud Coming! before grabbing her stuff and rushing out.

"Alaina, Victoria, let's see your parents off," Yoo-jung said, and the two readily complied, grabbing her hands before she led them outside. "Kyung-mi ajumma, I'll take care of the kids!"

"Fuck you, Yoo-jung!" And off they went.

Yoo-jung let out a bit of a snicker before turning to the kids. "I have a big surprise for the both of you. Get changed."

It was the first-ever Korean kids' cafe in DisCity.

The owners were famous in the vlogging world; they have always visited kids' cafes in every city they go to. DisCity was one of the few metropolises that didn't have such facilities. Yet, they couldn't just broadcast it to the world. With Keylan being a haven for runaways, the government made it imperative that nothing about the country gets out and that everything sent outside must be done through secure channels.

It might sound like hell, but it's heaven on earth for the lost. Yoo-jung knew it well, and so did her hosts. And she will do anything in her power so that Alaina and Victoria will also partake in heaven's blessings.

Which led them to this kids' cafe.

Alaina and Victoria's eyes widened once they saw the colorful cafe. It's a mini-city with a hospital, supermarket, mall, and anything you might ever need. The place is a bit empty, considering they went out on a Wednesday. It is perfect for Alaina and Victoria with their physical limitations.

(Yoo-jung paid extra for the staff to sanitize the place beforehand. It was a steep price; luckily, a quick call to the Countess was all it took.)

"Yoo-jung eonni, this place is beautiful!" Alaina exclaimed before hugging her. "Thank you for taking us here... never saw this kind of place before..."

"It's so... colorful..." Victoria spoke in hushed tones. "We'll get... to have fun... right?"

"Of course, darling." Yoo-jung pulled Victoria close to her. "I brought you here so you can taste what the world has to offer." So that you may have the childhood that I never had.

"But... Mommy gets angry when we get noisy..."

"Shh." She pats Victoria's head. "Go crazy. Just remember to be mindful of your health. I'll be watching."

And after that, they're off.

(Iron, Anne, and Kyung-mi came home to the three passed out in the living room at six in the morning. Perhaps they had loads of fun... It's indeed an excellent idea to let Yoo-jung lose with childcare.)

#path to nowhere #yes. i started ajumma chameleon #at least on tumblr #my friend eggy actually started it #im just being an agent of chaos #無期迷途 #무기미도

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incarnateirony · 2 years

Note

Regarding the CW bankruptcy - do you know if WB deciding to pull out of the CW had any part to play or was it a combination of that, the boycott and other factors I'm probably not aware of? I ask as an old friend who spent many years working in costumes in L.A. cited WB wanting out of the CW as a major factor in all of that. From your posts you seem to have some knowledge about it - hence the ask.

CW was always "in debt." Adam Ruins Everything essentially explained why the boycott worked, or more, how CW used to work.

CW and WB/CBS cycled money into what they wrote off as a tax hole/loss every year to reduce taxes and royalties. Then, while paying chump change, they'd bulk out the licensing internationally.

So like he says, even Star Wars "never went into profit" despite being what it is for similar hollywood accounting, but it was the backbone of the CW.

WB didn't "want out" of CW as much as. Hm. Well there's a reason they kept minority share. TV struggles to keep up, and its international marketing game -- well--

So when I released the boycott instructions, it was targeting that they hadn't renewed their Netflix deal and were instead leaning on stacking rights and individual sales postmarket, which is why we dropped property values and travelability censoring names out, cutting all streaming, viewing, etc etc and numbers went into the hole.

Now that wasn't just a fake tax game loss of a targeted amount. Suddenly WB and CBS both got kicked in the nuts because the money they were throwing into the CW tax game hole wasn't coming back to them. CBS is like, why the fuck did WE get dragged in to your mess. And WB was already wobbly from everything else.

So yes it absolutely had something to do with it. Nexstar, Gray and other syndicates were themselves losing billions in profits by proxy because of how bad CW crashed out. CW always ran low, but not as low as post-SPN. So nexstar literally built it to try to make their own stations profitable again because they're the first largest owner of it (second being Gray, and the syndicates have a bit of a handshake going on.)

WB crumbled out a lot of its divisions and fell into renting from Gray's Studio City, so basically, Gray is WB's landlord henceforth (along with Netflix, a corner of CBS, and a sizeable partnership with NBC as a pipeline), while Gray is WB/CBS' airspace landlord and the two cooperate. That gives Atlanta back the entertainment industry that used to be TBS, hence the installation of Miller and Schwartz at CW and makes Nexstar stop going down the potty hole, makes WB and CBS have to invest less and stop going down the potty hole, etc. But now they have to target for first market results, not aftermarket bulk licensing.

TLDR we broke it and that's why it needs 18-49 now, and this is exactly what the boycott was SUPPOSED to do so idk why everyone chicken littled, I'm not sure what they pictured happening like a comet hitting the cw office if they boycotted hard enough, this is it. This is why we did what we did how we did when we did and it's 100% why.

This is why WB and CBS studios have been bitching that "the network as we know it is gone." Yeah. Saturn ascends, motherfuckers, and TBS just ass smashed you and took its airspace back. Meaning their properties need to like. Be. Good. Otherwise NBC or someone else gets the slot. lmao.

WB still wants airspace but it saw CW going under and going under pressure as ratings declined. Then we glass cliffed it to half of even that, and went from them being uncomfortable to their ass being on fire.

TLDR of the TLDR you guys kinda lined up team peachtree to catch the shards of Supernatural, WB, CW, flip airspace back to themselves and take the bridles off the creatives.

Cough. Hence Rockin Roxxy broadcasting from radio stations that would soon become TBS in a few years, and were already building into the national broadcasting system. Like Savannah, etc. It's a TBS joke. We're coming to you with the stories from between the cracks again that corporate god ignored, that's the joke.

(Ofc it has its own in universe connotations like Chuck, but you get me.)

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that-fema-corps-blog · 1 year

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Day 7

August 9, 2022

Got up at 6:00 to eat before physical training at 6:30. Ugh. We took a walk and it was cool outside, so I wasn't too upset once I got out there. We returned to the dorms and changed into the AmeriCorps T-shirt and shorts for the next training. Now that we have uniforms, we are expected to wear them every time we're accruing service hours, and training counts.

We walked to the main room at 8:30, and the presenter informed us that shelter-in-place is over early! Our team is now considered a "family unit," and we are now allowed to be unmasked when only our family unit is present. We are also allowed to enter other team members' rooms (with permission) and leave the campus with our team. This city still has a high COVID transmission rate, so we must wear masks when around people outside of our family unit, even when outdoors.

We each received an AmeriCorps Member Handbook and our team collaborated to fill out a worksheet based on the information in the handbook. Turns out leave days are less restrictive than I thought. A couple members asked whether being at an event or protest during a leave day would negatively impact them, but it turns out it's probably fine as long as you aren't in uniform. So it looks like I'd be able to use a personal leave day to go to pride next year, if I'm in an area where they have it. I've never been to a pride march before, so I do hope I get that opportunity.

We got a short break (unfortunately not enough time to eat) before one of the benefits staff gave a presentation on what health benefits we get through NCCC. This AmeriCorps insurance is through the International Medical Group, and you must use Teledoc or go to a doctor's office that is in network with First Health Network (if one is within 35 miles to get coverage; otherwise any office can be visited). Private insurance is considered primary, and AmeriCorps insurance secondary. If one only had Medicare or Medicaid, then AmeriCorps insurance is treated as primary. Pre-existing conditions are not covered, although some prescription medications for them are. I imagine several of these policies change frequently, so who knows what it'll be like in a year.

We got off early for lunch at 11:30, and returned to the other side of the main building at 13:30 for a presentation about the vans. Each driver must be NCCC certified (driver's license and 3 years clean driving record alone won't cut it). Every corps member must drive with a "safety," the person riding shotgun who will keep a lookout for the duration of the ride. The safety will also stand outside and direct the van driver when parking, backing up, or making other tight maneuvers. Team leaders are allowed to drive alone in a pinch, but it is not recommended. The maximum driving time is 550 miles or 10 hours per day (whichever comes first), with drivers needing to swap out every 2 hours. Each time the van is driven, it must be logged.

Each team will keep their van for the entire year, and usually one person takes on the role of the vehicle safety tools and checks that the van is being properly maintained. All maintenance is paid for using the General Services Administration (GSA) card, which only allows $100 per transaction unless approved by the GSA (larger repairs require a call and authorization). In addition, every time the van needs gas (which will be frequent; not supposed to go under 1/2 tank), the gas station must be able to accept the GSA card, and the van ID and the odometer reading must be reported. Yay bureaucracy. We took a quiz on what we had learned and had a short break.

Then we listened to a 40-minute driving safety video. This was...a very slow presentation. I almost fell asleep, and upon getting out, immediately made my way to the dorms to take a nap. There wasn't anything else I needed to do afterward, so I made some dinner with a teammate and relaxed for the rest of the night.

#fema corps #corps training institute #onboarding #food mention

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edelfie · 3 years

Text

#PEEK-A-BOO! oikawa + akaashi + kozume.

#summary. haikyuu boys and things they do w/ their s/o on halloween

#tags. fluff, established relationship, post-timeskip

#pairing. multi x gn!reader (you/your pronouns)

— oikawa tooru, akaashi keiji, kozume kenma

#warnings. minor manga spoilers (kenma), possibly ooc

#note. happy halloween! i wasn’t planning on writing anything, but halloween hit me with sudden inspiration. so cheers to my first official post on this acc!

: NAVIGATION & MASTERLIST !

?! OIKAWA TOORU, "trick or treating"

he is a child stuck in a grown man's body

wdym it's not appropriate to go trick or treating in your 20s??

convinces himself that he's just youthfully spirited

but surely nobody would mistake a 6'1 man as a child, right?

right?

you'd be surprised how often it happens (or how little the people handing out candy care)

maybe it's a tad-bit unethical for an adult with a job to participate in a kid's holiday when he can just buy his own candy

but does he care? no

honestly, he just really likes the dressing up part (and showing off)

why he doesn't just go to a costume party is beyond you, but anyways—

wants to do all those corny couples costumes

like an angel and a devil or ketchup and mustard

(i saw a couple dressed as a hotdog and buns and it was giving me second-hand embarrassment)

you always shut him down for how ridiculous his ideas are

"ok, hear me out—what if we're two halves of an avocado??"

"absolutely not"

for the longest time, you just assumed he was pulling some elaborate joke on you

like, there's no way he seriously wants to dress up like this

oh no, he absolutely is. 100%

he'll make a powerpoint and pitches his ideas to you like an episode of shark tank

"i just know you're going to love this one,"

"tooru, you've said that about the last 3 already."

"it's just a delayed reaction!"

one year you actually did agree to dress up with him

and you regretted it immediately

he refused to tell you what exactly you were going as until the day of, which was a mistake in of itself.

of course, he just had to pick the worst one possibly for maximum embarrassment

when you got home from work, all you see is a giant body-covering costume of a shoe

yes, this man is asking you to dress up as a shoe

it got worse when he walked out of the bathroom with his part of the costume already on

you think a pretty boy like him would care more about his image (he does), but apparently he has no shame on halloween

so here you were, a 20-something year-old with a job, a boyfriend, and some ounce of self-respect, walking around in a shoe costume

you swore you saw one of your coworkers out of the corner of your eye

of course, going from door to door was a bit fun (mainly because tooru kept cracking jokes to lift your mood)

most of the people just gave you candy and a look, sometimes a laugh if you were lucky

some just refused to give you candy all together

you weren't too upset, but tooru was absolutely devastated

"why didn't they give us candy??"

"look at us, tooru."

all in all though, it wasn't too bad of an experience and you did have a lot of fun after getting over the embarrassment

just never let him pick out the costumes ever again

extra: hanamaki saw the two of you while you were wearing your costumes and did a double take, before taking a picture and sending it to all of your high school friends

?! AKAASHI KEIJI, "haunted houses"

ok, i don't care if you are a total scaredy-cat or stone cold

this man cannot handle horror and you can't tell me otherwise

you didn't realize it because of how subtle he is

like how he suggests another movie instead of watching a scary one because "the ratings are bad"

or how he's always conveniently busy when you're playing a horror game

it was something that happened sparingly, so it never crossed your mind that he was scared of it

so when your friends suggest going to a haunted house the weekend before halloween, you immediately invited akaashi

but when he tried to turn down your offer, you were very confused

"huh? why not?"

"oh, well—"

please stop with the puppy eyes, you're making this hard for him

after some convincing (read: begging), he agreed to come

only for an hour, he said

to say you were excited would be an understatement

him, not so much

the car ride was filled with laughter and fun between your friends, but you noticed akaashi bouncing his leg nervously

you worry that he really didn't want to come—

maybe he doesn't like your friends, or he really is busy today and you're forcing him to hang out with you

though, ever perceptive, akaashi notices the frown on your face

"what's on your mind, love?"

why is he so kind ??

he reassures you that it's alright and he doesn't mind coming

(me when i lie)

when you actually do get to the haunted house, he looks composed and unafraid

little do they know that he's nearly pissing himself

the guy watching the entrance splits your group into pairs

all your friends enter, leaving you and akaashi last

he lets you go in first, he's just such a gentleman

if you're also easily scared, he'll hold your hand and rub circles with his thumb to soothe you (and himself)

if you're not, then he'll just silently follow behind you like a lost puppy

one bad thing about being in the back is that the scare actors will absolutely pick on you

akaashi, having never been in a haunted house before, did not know this

you couldn't believe your ears when you heard a loud scream coming from behind you that sounded oddly like your boyfriend

you actually didn't until you turned around and saw akaashi with a petrified look on his face

the clown that scared him looked very pleased with themselves

needless to say, after that incident, he stayed very close to your side for the rest of the tour (and night)

he was practically glued to the hip, not leaving you for a second

if you were also scared by the ordeal, the two of you will comfort each other on the way home

if not, then you have a very depressed akaashi on your hands to deal with

extra: you wake up in the middle of the night to a still-shaken akaashi asking for cuddles after a bad nightmare with a clown trying to kill him, ala 2016 style.

?! KOZUME KENMA, "scary movies"

now, unlike akaashi, this man is perfectly comfortable with scary stuff

he practically lives for it (which is scary in of itself)

he's not really that into holidays, so it was a given that you two would stay home

originally planned to play scary games with you until you complained that it'd feel like work

especially since he just finished streaming a horror game the night before

so you both settled for scary movies instead

obviously, you go to his house since he has money

what you weren't expecting was his large library of movies

whatever genre of horror you're into, he probably has a movie for it already

like psychological horror? don't worry, he's got carrie, us, and the haunting

found footage? he's seen the blair witch project ten times over

he's not that into heavy gore, but he does have a few for when kuroo visits

needless to say, you aren't lacking options

whatever you choose to watch (or re-watch), he's cool with it

prepares plenty of blankets, snacks, and other comfort items beforehand

also, cuddles are not optional !!

this man will suffocate you in his arms whether you like it or not

anyways, since he doesn't get scared by horror, he watches the movie like he would a documentary

he doesn't even flinch during the jumpscares and/or gore

if you're not that big on scary stuff, he'll keep an eye on you and comfort you during the scarier moments

he'll hide your face from the screen during the more intense scenes and offer to turn it off entirely if it becomes too much

"it's alright, i'm here."

if you can stomach it, though, then the two of you will just cuddle and vibe

he'll point out some of the interesting bits and make commentary here and there

maybe point out a few plot holes to get a laugh out of you

although that's nothing compared to when y'all watch actually bad horror movies

he has plenty of those and will tear every single one of them to shreds

expect lots of snide remarks whenever you watch one

"why did she do that? she literally watched the killer go in there??"

"i don't know, babe."

sometimes you'll predict what happens next

or play a drinking game for every character that dies or every cliche line they say

it's a lot more fun than being scared to death with the other films

eventually, one of you will fall asleep (most likely you, since he's a professional gamer after all)

in that case, he'll just wrap the blanket around you and fall asleep with you on the couch

he's not one for holidays, but he definitely would consider spending them with you

extra: you wake up in the middle of the night with the tv on static and kenma cuddling into your side. right as you're about to go back to sleep, you see a figure of a girl pop up on screen. sweet dreams :)

— ( #note ! )

i was at a loss of what to write abt kenma, so sorry that his is shorter! also, don't expect much after this, since i'm currently working on a long-fic for obey me.

NAVIGATION + MASTERLIST

#?! — edelfie #//#haikyuu headcanons #haikyuu hcs #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu reader insert #haikyuu imagines #hq x reader #haikyuu scenarios #haikyuu drabbles #hq imagines #oikawa x reader #oikawa tooru x reader #akaashi x reader #akaashi keiji x reader #kenma x reader #kozume kenma x reader

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haru-desune · 3 years

Text

A3! Fic: The Morning After (The Night Before)

Rating: T

Relationships: Tasuku Takato/Tsumugi Tsukioka

Warnings: None

Tags: Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Boys in Love, Boys Kissing, Warm and Fuzzy, Implied/Non-explicit sex, emotionally aware Tasuku, Domestic Fluff

Summary: Tasuku oversleeps and is also very in love with his boyfriend.

Read it on AO3

A/N - We’re only two weeks into 2022 and it’s been AWFUL so I wrote something to make myself feel better! I see a lot of really gorgeous Tsumugi-centric TasuTsumu fics and while I love them, I wanted something where Tasuku is just stupid in love with Tsumugi. Disclaimer: Not my characters but 100% my blorbos.

⋇⋆✦⋆⋇　

The gentle warmth of the mid-morning sun on his face tells Tasuku that he overslept, and he can't even bring himself to be mad about it. Because when he finally blinks open his eyes, that same glow frames Tsumugi's sleep-tousled hair, giving his inky locks a golden tint. Tasuku is the last person to give into poetic turns of phrase, but even he has to admit that it paints an angelic picture.

(He sometimes feels that even if Godza hadn't forced their hand, Tsumugi would have debuted as an angel on that stage because how could he not. It’s unfathomable to think otherwise, even as he’s faced with a mischievous smile and coy glance beneath thick lashes.)

("Tsumu, we're not going to fit on the bunk like this" he says, more amused than anything else. Tsumugi smiles beatifically and wraps around him like an octopus. He can feel soft lips quirk against the sensitive skin on his neck and briefly looses any ability to have a coherent thought. "Don't worry Ta-chan, it'll be fine" he replies, voice honey sweet.)

He should get out of bed now that he is fully awake. His morning run might be a lost cause but he still has time to squeeze in a quick work out and some extra practice for his latest guest role. All he has to do is untangle himself from those slender limbs, slotted so exactly against his own.

He should get out of bed and start the day. He watches Tsumugi's chest rise and fall evenly, and traces the curve of his cheek with hungry eyes. He reaches out slowly, reverently, to rub his thumb against the angry, red patterns imprinted into that soft flesh by a creased pillow cover. It should be a jarring contrast to the gentleness of the scene, but to Tasuku it seems to fit right in with his kiss-bruised lips and the purple marks peeking above the collar of his night shirt.

(Tasuku has never been so hungry in his life. Tsumugi lies above him stealing his breath with every press of his lips. He's too lost to do more than surrender as a tongue swipes his bottom lip and probes curiously into his mouth, a drowning man just barely staying afloat. The gentle scrape of nails against his scalp brings him back to reality, and he breaks the kiss to get a taste of Tsumugi's neck, his chest. He feasts on the moans that escape his throat.)

He runs a thumb over Tsumugi's cheekbone. He should get out of bed. He traces chapped lips with callused fingers and is rewarded by a sigh of pleasure. Tsumugi, always slow to wake, presses into his side, sleep-dazed and pliant. Tasuku ghosts over the shell of his ear and finally, he blinks awake - languidly, reluctantly, and with his whole face scrunched in confusion. His eyes meet Tasuku's own and immediately his expressions clears.

(He finds himself caught up in bright blue eyes. Arctic ice, one article had described them. Tasuku disagrees as Tsumugi gasps and arches underneath him, pupils blown wide. Ice could never burn so warm and alive.)

"Good morning, Tsumu." His voice is raspy with unuse.

"Good morning, Ta-chan." Tsumugi smiles sleepily at him and he bends down to kiss it before he knows what he's doing, greedy to the last. When pulls away, Tsumugi looks significantly more awake.

("You're sure?" Tsumugi asks as they lie spent, basking in the afterglow "About me, about this?" He wants to say that he has never been more sure of anything in his life. He wants to say that he's already lost him once and never wants to feel that emptiness again. He wants to say that there's no one with whom he'd rather share his stage, his dream, his whole being. He's never been good with words. He closes his hand tight around Tsumugi's wrist and kisses him deeply until they both break away, panting. "Yes.")

Tsumugi turns his head so he can press a kiss to the palm still cradling his face. It's barely a brush of the lips, but it makes his breath hitch and sends his pulse racing. Something of it must show on his face because Tsumugi, still haloed in sunlight, looks at him with a question etched on his features.

(Sloppy kisses, fingers entangled, breathless confessions repeated into ears and necks and hair I love you I love you I love you I love you)

Tasuku is the last person to give into poetic turns of phrase, so he simply grins.

"You're beautiful." He says, and leans down for another kiss.

(It's late into the night when Tsumugi grips his hand like a lifeline, presses his face into his chest, and tangles their legs together. Tasuku turns off his alarm and falls asleep in the too-small bed with the world tucked beneath his chin.)

⋇⋆✦⋆⋇　

A/N - The TasuTsumu brain rot is real friends. I opened my notes app at 3:30 am and came out of some kind of fugue state 2 hours later with a fully written fic. Anyway I love these two they drive me insane on the daily.

#a3!#act! addict! actors!#tasuku takato #tsumugi tsukioka #tasutsumu #tatsumu #tasuku/tsumugi #a3! fic #a3! fanfic #my fic #fan fiction

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troped-fanfic-challenge · 3 years

Text

*This event has ended! Click the links in the Timeline to see individual rounds, prompts, fics, voting, and results!*

Hey, Tropesters! It’s time for another TROPED event, but this time the prompts will be in the form of MOODBOARDS! Made by yours truly, the moodboards function as the inspiration for the fics written for this event! We've got four exciting themes picked out, and the boards are already looking great, so we hope you're excited! This event will be a little different from the others that we have put on, so keep reading for more info!

How It Works:

Firstly, this is our first ever TROPED Multi-Fandom event, so share this around! We would love to get fics from fandoms we've never had for TROPED before! All Fandoms are welcome and there is in no minimum participation required for this event!Because this is a Multi-Fandom event, the voting process and the overall event structure will be a little different!

No Sign-Ups Required! We will release the prompts right here on the TROPED tumblr and you will submit your fics to the AO3 Collection! The Writing Periods will be on a rolling basis, with a moodboard dropping every ten (10) days, but fear not! If you are inspired for a round later in the event, you can still submit a fic to be included in Voting! We will simply drop the next board, but nothing will officially close or end until the end of the full Writing Period, on August 25th! Fics will be accepted into the official collection for the entirety of the event! **You will write four or more (4+) separate fanfics inspired by each round, but you do not have to participate in each and every round.**

Moodboard Prompts! As we said, the prompts for this event will be in the form of MOODBOARDS!!! Because photos are open to such a wide range of interpretations, and inspiration from a moodboard can come in all shapes and sizes, this event is much less strict in terms of 'sticking to the prompt'! We will be releasing the moodboards with a little blurb about what it is we envisioned when putting them together, but if inspiration strikes and takes you in another direction, go for it! Pretty much anything goes, as long as it fits with our standard rules! As a general rule, we'd like you to take each of the nine (9) photos and find a way to include that imagery in your fic in some way. Try to find a way to incorporate the concepts and inspirations you get from each photo into your story! Similar to the tropes used in our traditional TROPED format, the photos in the moodboards should matter to your story. You should try to have the photos not be inconsequential moments within your fic, but rather make the moments in the moodboard plot relevant!

All Pairings Allowed! TROPED is always a neutral space for any and all ships! We encourage [and sometimes require ;)] rare pairs, platonic pairings, and other out of the box dynamics within our fics! TROPED is, by design, a positive fandom space for everyone, and focusing on allowing and celebrating any and all pairings (that are allowed within the rules) is a big part of that! **Please feel free to write any pairing (within our rules) from the Fandom of your choosing. You do not have to write the same Fandom/Pairing for each round!**

**As a note, the photos in the moodboards are not definitive! A lot of stock photos are white, and straight, but we chose photos simply for the ✨vibes✨ of the photo, not the pairings themselves!! You can implement those scenes into your fics with any characters or combos, as long as it complies with our relationship rules!!**

This event will be Optionally Anonymous! Because the voting for this event is much more chill, and the writing period will be open for over a month, we will not require this event to be anonymous! However, if you would like to have your fic be anonymous, we will be sharing a small tutorial on how to make your fics anonymous and how to remove them from being anonymous sometime before the event starts, so keep your eyes peeled!

Voting! The voting for this event will be pretty simple! We will keep a list of all fics submitted for each event, and then at the end there will be a "best overall" poll for each round, along with some bonus polls! The voting will be based on the fics as a whole, and will include all fandoms together! If you do not want your fic included in the voting, you can let us know, or you can simply upload your fic to our non-anon collection instead! We will still share it along with the other fics and it will be included in all masterlists! We will provide a link to SurveyMonkey when voting begins.

For the OG Tropesters: As an added bonus for our long time The 100 fandom writers, we've cooked up an extra special little challenge for you! We will be including a special tenth (10th!!) photo, just for you! The 10th photo will be of a character of our choosing from The 100 (obviously) for you to include in your fic! We will be releasing the character we've chosen for each round when we drop the moodboard, so keep your eyes peeled!

Timeline:

Writing Period Dates: July 15th - August 25th!

Moodboard for R1 : July 15th at 12:00am

Moodboard for R2 : July 25th at 12:00am

Moodboard for R3 : August 4th at 12:00am

Moodboard for R4 : August 14th at 12:00am

End of Visual Writing Period: August 25th at 3:00am PST/6:00am EST [EXTENSION UNTIL SATURDAY, AUGUST 28TH AT 8:00 AM EST!]

Voting: August 28th at 12:00pm - August 30th at 11:59pm

Winners: August 31st!

*All times are in Eastern Standard Time (EST) unless otherwise specified!

Rules:

If you are a veteran to our TROPED Challenges, the rules below are mostly the same as before, but any newbies joining the fun should definitely take a look below!

This competition was created to get creative and put out different fics into the world, and to create a fun, positive fandom experience for everyone! In order to ensure that we achieve that goal of a positive experience, here are a few rules and guidelines that must be followed!The requirements for the fics entered into the competition will be:

Must include Characters from your specific chosen Fandom

Must try to fit the Theme of each round! While this event is a lot looser, each board will have a clear concept or theme for you to use in your fics!

Must try to use ALL of the pictures selected for the round. Each of the 9 photos are meant to be taken and turned into scenes, images, or themes within your story! This isn't hard and fast, but we encourage you to try to utilize the boards in a specific way, beyond just the general ✨vibes✨ of the board!

All fics must be 10,000 words or less! (We have allowed a 500 word buffer to allow for fics that are not quite finished at the 10k mark to get wrapped up!) There is no minimum word count.

All ratings G through M are welcome, but E Rated fics are not allowed. Please be aware that some fics may not be everyone’s thing! Write what you like, but the voting is public so just keep that in mind!

Multiple Entries Allowed. We love when authors are able to pump out multiple fics for a single prompt! If you would like them to be considered seperately for voting, please be sure they are standalone fics! If you end up writing multiple chapters or parts of one fic, let us know! We will only include one for voting but we will be sure to share all the parts!

Collaborations! We've had some people ask about collaborations, and we're all for it! If you and a friend would like to write a fic together, go for it! Just let us know who to credit when we share the fics on our masterlists and we will be sure to tag anyone involved!

You will be disqualified if you include:

Smut! Due to the chance that some fandoms might include a cast of all underage characters, we have decided to exclude smut. All ratings G-M are allowed!

Rape!

Underage! This means no High School AU with sex, no teacher/student if the student is underage, zero adult/under 18 romantic relationships!

Incest! Incest includes adopted siblings, foster siblings, parent/child, step siblings, biological siblings, or any familial relationship, blood related or not!

Negativity towards any character or ship! This includes any sort of abuse perpetrated by a character intending to paint them in a negative light, negative statements about a character intended purely to express your dislike of a character, or things of that nature. You MAY write characters as villains! Writing a character as a villain asks the audience to disagree with the characters motivations and choices, not to dislike the character on principle. The basis of this rule is that your fic should not be written as a way to simply express your dislike of a character.

Plagiarism! While the tropes we use in our challenges are common and communal, the stories and words you create must be your own! Fanfiction is about transformative work, and taking concepts from other writers is natural! Inspiration can come from lots of places, but rewriting someone else’s fic is unacceptable. *Following our own rules, we want to let you know that all photos used in the TROPED: VISUAL Moodboards are from Unsplash.com —a source for freely-usable images.*

This is meant to be a fun and positive experience for everyone. We reserve the right to disqualify anyone if we are reading their fic and we think it violates any of our rules!

Because this challenge is NOT completely anonymous, feel free to share your fics and post about them to your hearts content! If you wish to remain anonymous until after voting, you can, of course, wait and post about your fics then! The non-anon only applies to this event, though, so if you come back to write for us in the future be sure to keep those lips zipped!

Follow along here on Tumblr, the TROPED Twitter, the TROPED Instagram, or our Discord Server for more information on the event! We will release our prompts in these places and then everyone is free to start writing!!! We are super excited to see what you guys create!!

If you have any questions about this event, fandoms or pairings, or any other concerns please send them to our Ask Box or DM a Mod (@dylanobrienisbatman or @thelittlefanpire)!

#TROPED: VISUAL #troped visual #Multi Fandom Event #multi fandom fanfiction #troped: multifandom #multifandom #long post

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cannot-decide-on-a-fandom · 5 years

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Because I can't keep only making Haikyuu videos, I'll just do this here

(Part 1) I'm gonna go ahead and rate every match in the series

Rules:

1) We need to see a significant portion of the game, so simply glimpses of practice or official matches or just really short games don't count (so let's say more than 2 chapters long in the manga (with one exception as it's kind of a crucial one), I know this will miss out a few great moments, and basically the entirety of the training camp, but this list would be like 1000 pages long otherwise)

2) I'll go in chronological order as opposed to preference order because I'm too lazy for that

3) This first post is gonna be all the matches already in the anime, and I'll make a second about the manga (I'll post a link to each other on both) so this is spoiler free. Here's part 2 with the manga matches-

Alright

Yukigaoka Junior High Vs Kitagawa Daiichi

Okay, obviously this was more like a prologue than anything else. It holds a place in my heart for introducing us to these characters, and later on for not dropping Kouji and Izumi, and I liked the little details like how being in the football club meant he was able to make a good save or 2 with his foot. But of course this was hardly a match necessarily. Still fun and I enjoyed a lot of it, though.

6/10

Karasuno 3 Vs 3

Oh, Tsukki, to think you aren't as big of a douchebag as you seemed here.

I really do appreciate the entire situation, though. Tsukishima never disliked volleyball, it wasn't like he suddenly started getting serious after never doing so before when the Shiratorizawa match came, he was always one who could be riled up but he just didn't want to show it because it was irritating to him that people were so intense.

The match itself was really nice for what it was. The early matches really contained a lot of foreshadowing, like Yamaguchi messing up the serve we saw him do. And of course this was the start of the partnership between Kageyama and Hinata. Still warming up to proper matches, of course.

6/10

Karasuno Vs Aoba Johsai practice match

Okay, this is undoubtedly the funniest match of the show. Not necessarily the funnest (I won't forget Jozenji) but it was kind of hilarious. Poor Hinata freaking out, I love him, but it was so endearing. And of course there's the serve mistake he made. Baby crow grew up afterwards.

But then Oikawa's introduction was badass as hell. I love the entire Seijoh team, they're great, and I love every opposing team, but Oikawa is still the best rival in the series in my opinion. And people like Tanaka got some spotlight too which was nice.

7/10

Karasuno High Vs Neighborhood Association

Listen. I may be biased because I love the Neighborhood Association, but I absolutely loved this match. It was hype even though it was low stakes. We got Noya and Asahi playing for the first time, and Suga as well in fact. The introduction of the jump float serve. Some fantastic saves and spikes. I love it. And it was emotionally fulfilling.

7/10

Karasuno Vs Nekoma practice match

NEKOMA! Sorry, sorry. Just love them.

Anyway, I'm only talking about the match so I can't count how much I adored Kenma's introduction and the two of them meeting (Hinata, you're my cinnamon roll), nor can I count the ridiculous interactions before and after (Yamamoto and Tanaka, Kuroo and Daichi, and Yaku and Suga, are just too perfect) but other than that, I REALLY liked how Nekoma was the first team to show us how any spike can be countered. I loved Hinata and Inuoka's rivalry, and I so appreciated how they showed Kenma being a strategist. Also, in the manga, there's like 20 panels of him like this

Which is a) a freaking mood, and b) one stupidly endearing quality about him.

Maybe this match is just about how much I love every character?

But it was so fun. Oikawa is the best individual rival, but Nekoma is their best rival as a whole. It's just so great.

7.5/10

Karasuno Vs Tokonami

I loved how we got backstory for Daichi. I don't know why, but I didn't exactly expect it? Like I expected development, but I guess I'm used to the focus being purely the main characters in terms of backstory, at least this early on, in most series. But I really like Ikejiri and I find his dynamic with Daichi endearing.

Not the best "match" but I appreciated the sentiment

6/10

Karasuno Vs Dateko

Oh, now we're talking. Gonna be honest, Dateko is one of my least favourite teams (I still love them! I love every single team. They're just on the lower end of a really highly appreciative scale) but this match was fantastic.

Again, I may be judging this based on one aspect, but I mean to this day Noya's save is one of my favourite scenes in anything. It was so well done, both anime and manga, and I just fell even more in love with Noya. And the symbolism of smashing through the iron wall was so great.

8/10

Karasuno Vs Aoba Johsai (1st official match)

And we come to the only team which Karasuno faced more than once in an official game (that we see) and that means I can't help but judge it harsher because their second game was awesome

HOWEVER! I still 100% love this game. It's such an important game to everyone and though I won't count the after effect, in the restaurant and all, I will count the immediate aftermath. It was so sad but also understandable and the entire match itself was intense. I could go into it, but it just paid off. The build up and the animosity between some of the players, the background we got for the characters during this game, the freaking soundtrack which is incredible in any of the matches.

Fantastic.

8.5/10

Karasuno Vs Oghiminami

...Meh

4/10

Karasuno Vs Kakugawa

...Meh again

With a side of interest in the idea of facing a 2m tall player, but...yeah, meh (neither game was bad, I just hardly cared about the actual matches. I enjoyed the surrounding discussions and all way more)

5/10

Karasuno Vs Jozenji

Most certainly NOT meh!

I love Jozenji so much. I want to see them more! They're so, so fun, and this shows you don't have to stick within a specific type of play. Be able to have fun while also being serious, it's important!

And, like, they're good! They're not bad or anything, even though they're messing around. They're entertaining as hell but also try hard.

I love them

And we got to see Suga playing too. I love him so I need to point this out.

8/10

Karasuno Vs Wakutani

Firstly, rip Daichi.

Alright, but seriously, I'm so glad we got to see someone like Takeru. His playing style is completely different to Hinata's at this point, yet they admire the same player, but neither of them are actually cruel or rude to the other team. This was such a respectful match while also being intense.

And we got to see an injury of a key player who couldn't go back on the court unlike Kags in the previous game, which, while unfortunate, is actually really, really good to see. It happens and can throw a spanner in the works, but it allowed us to also see 1) Ennoshita stepping up, 2) Tanaka's reaction to accidentally injuring Daichi (though it wasn't really his fault), and 3) an entirely different type of dynamic on the court.

Also, Yamaguchi! My baby! I felt like crying for the poor thing, but this was the start of his confidence and I love him so much.

I really, really, really liked this match.

8.5/10

Karasuno Vs Aoba Johsai (2nd official match)

YES!

Okay, firstly, the strategies in this game. Using a double edged sword like Mad Dog from Aoba Johsai, and Karasuno going with a more tactic savvy thinker when in a bind, like Suga, even though Kageyama is over all a better player, it was SO great to see. Suga may not be a genius or a prodigy, but his intelligence doesn't just lie in volleyball, so he can use general knowledge to his advantage so well, and teach Kageyama something too.

Kyoutani is such an interesting character and forms a brilliant dynamic for the team to play with, it's great.

Oikawa being shown to make genuine errors is such a fantastic thing. No matter how good you are, Oikawa, Kageyama, Ushijima, whoever, you will never be 100% perfect, and you will always have moments where you make mistakes. I really enjoyed seeing that. Especially his serves, which we were introduced to before his setting.

And, of course, the Hero of the match...

I WILL PROTECT YOU! BUT RIGHT NOW YOU DON'T NEED PROTECTING, YOU ARE SMASHING IT, YES BABY!

Sorry. Got over whelmed. But real talk, I also liked that they did eventually lose that set. Miraculous plays don't automatically win the game, but it also doesn't diminish their importance.

9/10

And finally for this list

Karasuno Vs Shiratorizawa

Well, do I really need to say it?

Yes, Tsukishima owned this match, this season of the show, but he wasn't the only great player

Nishinoya had some amazing moments, Hinata is such an idiot but he utilised that to his advantage by...not thinking. Like, he deliberately received the ball with his face. I mean, come on.

Yamaguchi played great too, Suga was such a key part even when on the bench (yelling at them from the side lines is absolutely brilliant), pretty much everyone was amazing here.

But while it was longer, I still preferred the Aoba Johsai game. Only slightly. Still-

9/10

Okay! So that was the anime, now...

I committed to do the manga too, didn't I?

Alright, it does contain my 2 favourite matches, so you know what? Yeah, let's go

#haikyuu

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punkscowardschampions · 6 years

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Bea & Bronson

Bea: Hey Bronson: You don't have to Bea: I do, though Bea: it's important, your feelings are important, I acted otherwise, so you have to know that's not how it is, how I see things Bronson: Yours are too Bronson: I know you weren't seeing things clear last night Bronson: Call it forgotten Bea: Fuck that Bea: I know there's no forgetting Bea: and I know I've broken your trust and there's no getting it back Bea: but please, let me rebuild something Bea: I only did it because you're important to me Bronson: important in what way though Bronson: we aren't gonna be that Bea: No Bea: not like that, I don't want that Bea: I don't even want what I did, not really, I know that's just words when I did it but I swear to fucking God Bea: you're my best friend, my only friend, frankly Bea: it's a distancing thing...you know Bea: make you like him, put you in that box, that way I can see it as a good thing when I lose you Bea: but you don't deserve to be tarred with that brush, so I am, I'm really sorry Bronson: I've been around C & R long enough to see some fucked up boxes Bronson: and not walk off Bronson: I'm not doing that to you Bea: It probably won't be you Bea: that'd be me too Bea: I can't sustain shit Bea: I did the same to them, you know Bea: but they don't care so I didn't have to feel bad about it, got to be selfish Bronson: and they never bragged about it in my earshot...whoa Bronson: blessing or curse Bronson: I mean, if I was gonna, you'd get first dibs, but let's not make it weirder like Bea: Guess they give enough of a shit about you to not put that weird on you Bea: little did they know...ha Bronson: I mean they have made some offers over the years Bronson: But we were a lot younger Bronson: And the flashbacks only occur sometimes lol Bea: Didn't mean to add to the PTSD Bronson: You're off the christmas card list but you can still come for drinks Bronson: Nobody needs the newsletter and cringey family photo really Bea: Bron Bea: stop making it a joke if it ain't Bronson: I don't know how else to deal Bronson: You're not a club random Bea: You could tell me what you wanna tell them Bea: might help Bronson: I don't see it, you didn't have those motives Bea: Wanna violate my trust somehow Bea: hack me Bronson: Sure Bronson: Scope out that inbox Bea: go for it, serious Bea: #exposed Bronson: Am I gonna go further down the PTSD rabbit hole by catching sight of your nudes? Bronson: You can delete but they won't go Bea: I mean Bea: perhaps best to swerve my texts then Bea: uni emails Bea: ooh the scandal Bronson: Fix your grades while I'm there Bronson: 100 or nothing Bea: 🎯 Bea: Too good, you Bronson: Then, you'll owe me solidly, there's my angle Bronson: 👀 Bronson: Express your gratitude in a manner we won't have to run from and everything's normal again Bea: Anything you want Bea: WANT being the keyword there Bea: no funny business ever again Bronson: Swear on what you hold dearest Bronson: I can make those grades go down easy peasy Bea: Hmm, myself? Bronson: Those are my terms Bronson: 'Cause I can't stutter a no out don't mean a yes 😂 remember that going forward Bea: DON'T Bronson: too soon Bea: always too soon to be assaulting people Bronson: I'll stop smacking you with these punchlines in a minute like Bronson: Living with those two scallys too long Bronson: Not too soon to think about moving out Bea: You'd miss the mess you bless Bea: having your stuff knicked, constant undesirable and unknown visitors, all the noise and drama Bronson: I'll miss you if you do one after this botched reconciliation Bronson: You're my fave hot mess they ever brought back, Judes Bea: Don't make me cry Bea: this mascara is 22quid a pop Bronson: We'd be close to even Bronson: I'm worth at least that Bea: How rude of me to suggest otherwise Bea: but the foundation, the blush Bea: adding up Bronson: 💸 Bronson: Gotta get Ronaldo to teach you everything she knows about 🖐 discounts Bea: I think John Lewis would see her coming from a mile off, babe Bronson: There's a reason I have no fucking idea what one looks like inside Bea: like you're inside a upper middle class home but the bitch is also selling avon Bronson: 😂 Bronson: Take me there girl Bronson: I wanna see this Bea: Get you a pot of tea and a slice of something nice if you behave Bronson: I can be bought Bea: No judgment Bea: can't we all Bronson: Bring me coffee and all will be forgiven like Bronson: I've got the headache to end all 'em Bea: 😱 you? never! Bea: surprised you're not caning the red bulls already you animal Bronson: I would be if there was any left Bronson: hot commodity in this household Bea: 🤢 you are garbage people Bronson: You missed a trick not calling us monsters 😂 Bronson: It's early but you're a 🤓 Bea: I'm not gonna stoop to such levels Bea: any time of the day Bronson: Not gonna say your forgiveness depends on it Bea: Good Bea: not gonna change who I am, babe Bronson: Can't either Bea: Noted Bronson: But I'm not trying to change you, note that Bea: I know Bronson: Your man might Bronson: But I'm not going that deep into your inbox Bea: At least I don't have to tell him Bea: unless I drunkenly did Bea: bitch you better not have Bronson: I remember taking your phone at some point Bronson: If you're drunk enough to let me that's trouble Bea: 😬 Bea: Oh great Bronson: Get me his phone and it'll be like nothing ever happened Bea: idk if my skills of persuasion are gonna match his rage rn Bea: or pay for the first class postage Bronson: Quick trip to Ireland to buy my forgiveness and do some petty thievery could be a plan Bea: how is this for your forgiveness Bea: its entirely for me Bea: too pure Bronson: I need a- uh- Bronson: Guinness and Lucky Charms Bea: 😏 as cultured as I expected Bronson: Whoa there, I've seen that Leprechaun film with Rachel from Friends in it Bronson: Putting the cult in culture lol Bronson: 😂 Bea: Oh God Bea: 🤓 for all things trash Bronson: Blame the trash queen herself Bronson: A slut for shite horror Bea: I'll take great delight in telling her her Mum is just the same Bronson: Start saving for a headstone now I will Bea: she's gotta face facts some day Bronson: She'd sooner spite her face violently Bronson: We all know it Bea: 🤞 Bea: whaddya think I'm aiming for Bronson: Not to get Charlie about it but peas in a pod you two Bea: how dare you Bronson: face them faces, Judy baby Bea: Dick Bea: Now either way, I prove your point Bea: 😒 Bronson: You might be a smarty pants but I'm a smart arse like Bea: think of some witty retorts for Fraze then and go at it Bea: 'cos I can't face that yet Bronson: Time to build another fort and hide you in it Bea: gonna have to take up permanent residence at this fucking rate Bea: kick Tommy out of my old box room, that's not my graduate plan Bronson: Shack up with you like you're my actual missus Bronson: bedsits are very affordable Bronson: leave Fraze in the dust and forget the awkward convo looming Bea: Ha Bea: not exactly the plan either Bea: as much as I LOVE what you lads have done with the place 😽 Bronson: I'm not as house trained as poshos need theirs to be but not the pup they treat me like Bronson: We'd manage on our own, hun Bronson: love conquers all Bea: 💘 Bea: You're ridiculous Bronson: You need me Bronson: Too sensible by half Bea: 😏 Not gonna deny or accuse you of mixed messages BUT Bronson: Victim blaming isn't the way back into anyone's good books, love 😂 Bea: 🤷 Bea: don't want you to get the wrong idea Bronson: My ideas are fixed Bronson: No changing this mind Bea: that impenetrable firewall, I get it Bronson: Yeah Bea: Don't even be impressed by my nerd talk then, bitch Bronson: You can better Bronson: And we're trying to swerve pillow talk Bea: Look, I can't help being the best k Bronson: Back at you Bronson: Hard life being irresistible and unattainable like but I'm styling it out as effortless Bea: Ahh Bea: the one goal I can never reach Bronson: You're up there for me Bronson: If we stick together you've done it Bea: Safe to say I proved that I can't Bea: whore that I am Bronson: You're my whore Bronson: Stick around Bea: Who could say no? Bea: Such a charmer Bea: can't go in my inbox nevermind home anyway Bronson: Say the word and I'll clear it or pack a bag Bronson: Whichever Bea: Cheers, Bron Bea: what's the morning after without some drama to sort Bea: be at a loose end without it Bronson: Rather wipe your texts than clear up after the motley two Bronson: Disgusting Bea: Eurgh Bea: Don't even wanna think about them Bronson: How strong are the flashbacks? Bronson: I don't wanna think about that Bea: Why did you ask then 😂 Bronson: I'm a caring son of a bitch Bronson: And nosy Bea: Fair and fair Bea: wasn't that bad but not needing to repeat, is the answer Bea: but keep that on the DL Bea: not having them think I'M more repulsive than they are Bronson: I would but I feel like R's got that tattooed on her cause its such a legit review Bronson: Revolving door for her lack of repeat custom Bea: Well Bea: 'cept one Bronson: Let's not start Bronson: Enough of a headache without going there Bea: 2nd that Bronson: Onward to John Lewis Bronson: How much scandal can follow us around there realistically Bronson: We're well safe Bea: unlikely they're gonna want us to stock 'em up on overpriced knitwear Bronson: Trying to sell that on for anything but a loss would be an even worse headache Bronson: It's a no from me Bea: aw but you'd look adorable Bea: and sexless, more importantly Bronson: Would I though? Bronson: Or would I look quality in a bit of salmon pink Bronson: Trying to make me a target for the older crowd so I wouldn't turn you down next time, is it? Bea: 🤢🖕 Bea: nice bit of argyle Bea: golf chinos Bronson: 🏌 Bronson: a look Bea: if you wanna be some daddy's caddy Bronson: And risk taking Charlie's gig Bea: you know i know he knows he's past his prime Bronson: Yeah but I'm not trying to take his place in my mine Bea: Your loss booboo Bronson: Theirs Bronson: My daddy issues don't go that hard Bea: Worst luck Bronson: Like in the rankings I'm the worst horse to bet on if you want that action, dads Bronson: Pay my bills and get nothing back if that's your deal otherwise its a strike out Bea: save all this time I'm wasting on uni, eh Bronson: I haven't got a leg to stand on agreeing cause I'm still showing up myself Bronson: Half the time Bea: 👏 Bea: get you Bronson: someone's gotta show up to tell the rest to turn the computers off and on again Bronson: be a hero Bea: ⭐ for you Bronson: High five Bronson: We're killing it Bea: gotta slay in at least one area Bea: even if the rest is going to shit Bronson: I can't tell you not to feel bad about last night but I am Bea: I'm glad we're alright Bronson: You gotta get right by talking to freckles though Bronson: Rip off the plaster Bea: Yeah Bea: John Lewis first though, eh Bea: cheer myself with expensive crap when it all goes tits Bronson: Return it when the guilt kicks in Bronson: Easy fix for that fuck up Bea: If only everything had that 30-day return policy Bronson: We have to try on the most ridiculous shit they have Bronson: Guaranteed cheer up Bronson: Nothing's better than taking the piss outta me so I'm told Bea: 😂 sounds good Bea: though i can turn a look with anything Bronson: There she is Bronson: I'll meet you there but you have to walk in with me so I don't get trailed round the shop like the scum I come from Bea: wear your nicest hoodie please Bronson: Never dressing like a dosser when I'm meeting my lady Bea: so 😍 babe Bronson: Deffo

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