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alexissara · 8 months

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Probably The Top 10 Characters of 2023

It's time for the hardest top 10 list of the year, deciding who my top 10 characters of the year are. I am a very character focused writer and GM and that translates to my enjoyment of art too. I love characters and it's so hard to pick between the amazing swath of fantastic characters I read this year. Lowering the list down after eliminating stuff I had the list at like over 20 characters so getting this down to 10 was an exercise in self doubt. Of all of these lists this really is the list that I want to thin about next year and see what characters I am still thinking about in one years time. Unlike my other lists this is not even roughly in any order it simply is the 10 characters that at the moment I was writing this I managed to cut a list down to. My 45th character at this moment might be number 2 tomorrow and you can't see my 45th character, you can only see 10.

Mary Satome [Kaguri Twins]

I watched this early in the year but Mary stuck with me. She's funny, she's clever, she is messy, she's an asshole, she's sweet, she's passionate and determined and I just want the best for her and her girlfriends. It's rare to see a woman be as messy as her and remain the main character but she gets to both be kinda noble and heroic while also clearly being self motivated.

Prospera Mercury [gwitch]

Easily mother of the year, Prospera Mercury is a litness test for me on someone's taste and makes for an easy read on if someone will have utterly trash politics or not. If Prospera was a man she would probably be one of the most beloved characters in anime as a passionate loving mom who tries to teach her child hard lessons and is willing to do anything to give her child freedom and get her revenge. However, she is not a guy so from the start everyone suspected she was awful and abusive and terrible when the text never not even at the end supports it, she is mean to Sulleta exactly once and that is so she is not an accomplice to her crimes in case she ends up getting stopped.

Tilty Claret [MagiRevo]

My favorite "side" character of the year has to be Tilty, this little freak. Tilty is sweet, she's kind, she deserves a girlfriend, two girlfriends, she should be dating Anise and Euphy. She is funny, she's well used, she does great emotional support and understands Anise so well, I love her so much and I love how loyal and great she is to the people she loves. I love her sciencey freaky attitude too she's just great.

Honey Trap [Super Women In Love]

Villain to Hero Honey Trap is utterly endearing. She starts as simply simping for Rapid Rabbit but it's fun to watch her evolve as a character and as a person over the course of the manga. She's sweet, endearing and brutal at all the right times. She's so gay and really funny, and she is really a perfect protagonist for this romantic comedy action yuri series. She's such a perfectly crafted character who can really command a range from serious threat to tragic damsel to Hero to gay little goof ball all while feeling like the same consistent character.

Satya [Pink Sugar]

Satya comes in with an air of mystery but this trans lesbian swiftly shows how quickly someone can go from sexy mystery to beloved dork. Satya gets a lot of the most soft and sweet moments with her future girlfriends getting to be someone to listen to them, to ask questions as an outsider to the trio and to be the inciting incident to get them to go on their wild road trip to begin with. I am really curious where her story will go but it would be lying to say she hasn't already endeared herself to the top of my list despite being probably the least focused on girl of the quad so far.

Shadowheart [BG3]

BG3 has a lot of good characters, great characters even and that is in spite of it being attached to one of the worst IPs around D&D. Shadowheart stood out to me among the many characters of a character who had queerness as part of her character done well despite being a player sexual character and I think she has the most dramatic character arc of the batch on her good path. Shadowheart starts as a catty Mormon girl and evolves into this kind heroic adventurer who you could see saving the world many more times.

Adalia [En Garde!]

While En Garde! might be a short 3 hour romp all three hours with Adalia are perfectly used. She's funny, charming, cute, and heroic. She's fitting a very classic archtype but is a spin on it by having it both be a woman but also be queer. These two factors do add to Adalia's charm, the gay side lets us see her enter dork mode where she is very gay for a sexy pirate woman and her animations change and she makes worse decisions then snap out of it when it's what needs to happen to help people. She's utterly lovely and a true delight.

Nova [Spellastra]

While almost every character here has a bit of a silly side, I can appreciate a more dramatic character. Nova is a character covered in tragedies, of angst, of wanting to love but feeling unable, she's rough and prickly and messy and makes bad choices but they all make a lot of sense for where she is at in any given moment. Nova is at once the older mentor who knows what to do but also the love interest who's fucked up plenty of times and blames herself even more than she ever should. Nova's a testament to the depth and layers you can really give a character while having her be lovable and desirable and still fit in for more fun moments while having these hard edges.

Jala [Thirsty Suitors]

Speaking of messy queers we have the disaster bisexual herself Jala. She's a character I really wanna dive deeper into because I think there is so much to Jala and the game does a pretty good job at leaving a lot of space for my brain to get cooking about why Jala is like this while also explaining a lot of why Jala is like this. Jala has hurt a lot of people, like most of the people in her life and her path to make it right with everyone is great. We get to see where other people fucked up, what complicated situations, where she grows and where she stands firm. Jala is a really perfectly envisioned character with a cast weaved so perfectly around her that every interaction is splendor to behold.

Astra [Grand Slam Romance]

Astra's on a quest to fuck every woman on the planet and more power to her. Astra is kinda the villain of the first book but she's also the romantic lead which places her in an interesting position in the story where we see her at her worst, we get to understand how she got there and we are cheering for her to tone it down like 10%. I am fully biased in my love for her and I make no excuses for it. Astra is designed exactly like many of my OCs with a personality similar to a lot of my OCs, I love everything about her, I want her great success and I look forward to people telling me I ripped her off even if I made characters like her like 10 years ago and have a record of it. I love her and I just wanna see more of her.

If you want to help me enjoy more art then consider checking out my Patreon or Ko-fi .and giving me a little bit of cash so I can do more of this kind of writing but also like make lots of my own art, art is hard to make and costs money and like maintain my chronically ill and trans body also takes money so anything helps, thank you.

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psuthcapstone · 20 days

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Stuff I've been looking at as inspiration

youtube

I watched this video a while ago, and it's pretty youtube-pop-sciencey but I think it's come up again in my subconscious while I've been looking at the other stuff. Besides being decently entertaining, it gives some perspective to the ratios and dependencies we have as a planet that are hard to quantify due to the vastness of the world. It also leads into another more significant piece of media, which is...

Spaceship Earth, or more specifically the Arizona Biosphere 2 facility. Biosphere 2 was designed as a self-contained vivarium meant to simulate a closed system microcosm of Earth's ecosystem as an experiment in creating isolated self-sustaining systems for applications like surviving nuclear disasters and space colonization. The project came under scrutiny and eventually fell apart due to scientific community politics and mismanagement, but as far as I know it's the most spectacular example of this concept ever realized - a real case of reality being stranger than fiction, intertwined with the scientific ethos and discoveries underpinning the project.

I haven't watched this documentary yet but I plan on doing so as research for this project. The era and speculative fiction elements also coincide with another work I recently had the pleasure of reading...

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller. I highly recommend this novel as a peak example of Cold War speculative fiction mixing post-apocalyptic prophesy, cycles of human nature and the historical relationship between science and religion mirrored in a fresh light. I'll have to see where these ideas all lead, because it's very exciting so far. However, the jury is out on whether these influences will be direct or not on the finished product - there could be more of an allegory / speculation dimension than a direct adaptation of the concepts. Further brainstorming and perhaps a paper prototype are in order...

#Youtube

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olderthannetfic · 2 years

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Growing up in a socially progressive environment: How has this affected your feelings about success? Were you taught that forming a nuclear family played a role in that measurement? Or were you taught to value yourself strictly in terms of stuff like grades and academic achievements? Or maybe that whole talk was geared towards personal happiness, in whatever form it took for you?

Also, at school: did you have to do stuff like the pledge of allegiance? Was Columbus Day and history class transparent or did your teachers omit the fucked up parts?

The closest my mother ever came to advice about a nuclear family was: "Find a boyfriend after college. Roommates are awful."

(Though from what she said, this belief stemmed from being the one clueless white girl in an apartment with three black girls becoming politically conscious in 1970s Chicago. I'm pretty sure Mom was the annoying roommate in that scenario, so...)

She really didn't discuss success. I never asked, but I assume that this was a conscious choice the same as she never once mentioned my looks either positively or negatively. (I asked her about the latter, and she said it's something she'd decided on before having me.)

I've spent the last couple of years carting hundreds of pounds of books out of the house. Among them was a massive collection of child development books from the 70s through 90s. A lot of them were on topics like raising intellectuals rather than just kids who get good grades or fostering a sense of self worth and emotional self sufficiency.

My mom was an educator, and she disliked a lot of the status-obsessed ways people deform their children's senses of self. Grades = worth is not a message she'd ever have espoused, though she did send me to hard schools and expect me to do my work. She could be a school snob as much as anyone, but she didn't explicitly talk about success in those terms. I think a big part of it is that all of her friends from when she was young were intellectuals who wanted to be professors, found there were no jobs, and ended up as carpenters or in the Peace Corps or all kinds of other random things. My mother herself started a PhD in... epidemiology...? (Something sciencey anyway.) She bombed out when her much older sister died unexpectedly and ran off to Kathmandu to hang out with an old high school friend who was studying Tibetan Buddhist religious logic.

She was certainly concerned with me finding meaningful work and being self sufficient, but she just didn't talk in terms of "success".

And more than that, worth as a human is inherent. It has nothing to do with success. If you want to raise a strong person, you give a kid unconditional love, clear boundaries, and a sense of stability. You teach them that all humans are valid and worthwhile just because. They don't have to do anything to gain that. It just is.

Perhaps that's not how you meant "success", but I've seen far too many otherwise intelligent parents mutilate their children's ability to learn by treating education and knowledge as the source of value in the world and not as something pleasurable in their own right.

Perhaps happiness = success is closest to what my mother would have espoused, but really, being a valid human being is a separate axis from being happy or successful or any other particular measure of a life well lived.

None of my schools would have been caught dead making us say the pledge of allegiance. They were all hippie private schools. We did shit like learn to sing This Land is Your Land.

We spent a lot of time on Indigenous history—though still in a "That was long ago" kind of way that made me assume everyone was dead and gone. Genocide was mentioned often. Columbus was mentioned rarely, and not in positive terms.

I still wouldn't say it was particularly well-rounded history. I'd rather have learned more about the Mexican-American war and less about the utterly irrelevant snoozeville that is the American Revolutionary War. Frankly, as a Californian, I would reduce the Revolutionary war to "It happened" and our equally boring Civil War to the politically important parts that it was indeed fought over slavery as Southerners themselves said at the time, that all that noble lost cause shit is just a retcon by white supremacists, and anybody who repeats it in the modern day can fuck themselves.

We did have pretty good stuff on Harriet Tubman in second grade and lots on Japanese internment later. Some of the schools I went to were better than others, usually because they were less beholden to stuffing our heads with irrelevant garbage that's on major history tests. I could have done with slightly fewer traumatizing documentaries on the Holocaust though.

As for my personal feelings about success, towards the end of my 30s, I was looking around for what should come next. I decided to finally write a novel, and I feel a lot better about my 40s having done so. I wasn't desperate or self hating like a lot of people I see around me fearing aging, but I did feel a lack of accomplishment in a sense.

My next goal... well, my immediate next goal is to finish book 2 of my series, but in the longer term, my goal is to not just finish writing things but to become financially successful as a writer.

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toonqueen · 3 years

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14. Learned Duck

I’m just gonna just list off canon characters and oc’s for Mighty Ducks what I have their learned skills be I guess? That makes sense??? Well it's gonna make sense.

Wildwing Flashblade- lolol he got hired on this team by his best friend cuz he was a good goalie and to be used as a distraction lolol. Luckily he turned out to be a good leader/tactician/have some common sense. So it worked out. Seems like the type that was in college didn’t know what exactly what he wanted to do and might have been doing a political science major or something who knows. Lulz.

Duke L’Orange- Well thievery stuff he knows. Maybe even picking locks all the time like that lock picking lawyer on youtube. Ha. Being a jewel thief maybe he could be good at- identifying jewels? This comes from me being very bias because I took some GIA diamond and gemstone courses online okay. BUT WOULDN’T it be cool. Just- talking about the clarity of a stone or a diamond just being si3. Ha. I headcanon him with some tech knowledge when it comes to security of course. When he was young before being in Brotherhood of the Blade I had him be part of a small thief group of teens with one smart guy leader (that was related to Tanya ha.) that showed the group the basics in security tech.

Tanya Vanderflock- I mean not only tech she also seems to know some medical stuff. Probably has like 7 degrees in tech related and also chemical and other sciencey things. We had it in our stories that she had been a child prodigy. As a kid she was in college level courses with @fluxchix OC Gallery. (Gallery was college age+ at the time.) Before Dragaunus attacked I see Tanya just starting out her own tech company after working some time in one that wasn’t really going anywhere. She probably would have been fully successful if, you know, SAURIANS DIDN’T ATTACK. As for her medical knowledge that may have come after the attack. Being very smart, and catching on quickly, she just learned out of necessity and learned under medics when she wasn’t using her tech skill for something else. Maybe even with resources being scarce they needed her to fix some medical related machines they could salvage, and she being thorough needed to know “Okay, what exactly in the body is this machine monitoring and how does that work,” kinda thing. She seems like the type.

Mallory McMallard- I remember in show it said she was a weapons expert. She just seems like she was from a military family and knowledgeable in all that stuff. Should also have some tactician knowledge as well. ‘We have to get the high ground” type stuff.

Grin - School of HARD KNOCKS ha. Well, maybe with all this meditating he also learned about different beliefs on Puckworld and have some curiosity to do the same on Earth.

Nosedive Flashblade - Did this brat just like, finish high school right before Dragaunus attacked? He probably hadn’t even decided what he wanted to major in. He seems to catch on to some things quickly though. (Wouldn’t it be funny if he was super smart like Tanya but just didn’t apply himself? Ha.)

-----

GALAXY TEAM

So, blaming @fluxchix yet again, this was the main OC team she made when we were writin’ dem duck stories in high school. So this is how I remember her things but we’ll see. LULZ.. She can correct me with whatever I’m wrong in. >_>;;;

So this team was sent out to find Canard’s team, cuz you know, they had that important MASK ARTIFACT. Even though Dragaunus is off Puckworld I’m sure there is a bunch of Saurian minions still lurking around Puckworld trying to hold power and prisoners still. THERE IS STILL SOME FREEDOM FIGHTING NEEDED THERE. Ahem.

Crono (I forgot his last name.) - Leader that does have a military background. Knowledgeable tactician and actually has some people skills, empathetic to people and what not. How and WOW.

Terry Pinion - Also military and their team’s weapons expect. Also can figure out how to drive/fly almost any vehicle. He’s not a smart tech like Tanya when it comes to fixing them. But if it has wheel and wings he can get it from place A to B pretty well. Jerk though and no people skills.

Gallery Knix - Their tech and doing an amazing job. Knows Tanya from college. Probably only has 3 degrees though.

Sasha - Is actually a well known Pop Star on Puckworld. But her acrobatics and hmm I guess espionage has been very helpful. Look they gave some dude’s kid brother a gun and made him the resistance Sasha has at least a little more skill than that guy.

Dan Tham- oh Dan. OH SWEET DAN. So he’s the medic but uh. He’s a lying little shit. He’s actually a nice sweet guy but when hearing there was a mission that would get a team off Puckworld he applied for the Medic position out of desperation. He wasn’t much of a fighter so having to deal with the leftover Saurians on Puckworld. But- which they find out a little bit later on Earth, he is actually a vet. OOPS. He did a REALLY good job that no one really knew that he was until a storyline where there was a virus that just affected the guys.. That's a whole other story. Then Gallery and Tanya quickly figured out Dan is a liarrrrrr!

-------------

Okay so then MY OC DULUNA L’ORANGE- (Duke’s little sister.) Man she was an art thief that was also a really good artist. As a little kid she was already in and out of school and mostly homeschool by the first thief group Duke was in. She has street smarts and common sense too. So- yeah. If she did any college would be art history to get better at forging art. Ha.

Oh lawd I wanted to do more OCs but you know what it's nap time. NIGHT.

#duckvember #duckvember 2021 #mighty ducks the animated series #mdtas #mighty ducks

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sixth-light · 4 years

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Three things - you live in the hills of Wellington, you support the Greens, and you did your PhD (or other study) in the US.

I have worked out your irl name - it was an article about halfway during lockdown, when it was getting hard, and a journalist said ‘Here’s some tips from my friend who spends months at sea on reseach vessels’ and my brain went ohhhh and clicked pieces of info together.

(I am a sciencey woman living in Wellington, with similar taste in books, so while staying aware of parasocial relationships, I relate to you a bit more than some other people I follow.)

yes, no, yes. I have great respect for the modern Greens but my political activism is directed elsewhere - some of their anti-science stuff when I was a teenager put me off. VERY well-spotted on that article. ;) (This is one of the reasons I don’t use my IRL name ~at all~ on this blog, sorry person who replied to this meme using my first name and will not be getting a response; NZ is not big, even my first name is pretty identifying contextually.)

Also, if you live in Wellington I’d say there’s at least a 50% chance we have mutual acquaintances; this is a small town in many ways. Feel free to say hi if we ever do run into each other!

#Anonymous

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birdsareblooming · 5 years

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My personal theory/headcanon is: Sans and Papyrus worked with Gaster studying timelines, until G accidently yeeted himself into the CORE, scattering himself through space and time. The brothers decided to work together to try and get him back, hence the machine in the basement (I highly doubt that Papyrus wouldn't know it's there, it's his house too after all). A long while later, Asgore hires a new royal scientist, Alphys, and she finds Gaster's blueprints and theories on determination. 1/?

(THis was about when i brought up the line of dialouge of sans going “we saw massive anomalies in time space shit”)

Yeah that’s fully possible! People leave Papyrus out of the gaster equation for some reason but he’s much more connected to him than people realise.

Alphys starts the determination experiments, while Sans and Papyrus work on the machine in secret. Sans occasionally goes to the lab to talk with Alphys about sciencey stuff, which is why they're friends by Undertale. Papyrus never goes to visit Alphys, but they do talk online (I think I remember this being canon through one of the phone calls?). When Flowey rolls around, the brothers' responses to continuously being sent back are very different. Sans remembers very small bits of the resets. 2/?

Yeah it was, Papyrus says he chats with Alphys online. Also I think both papyrus and sans have dejavu? But so does everyone. Undyne mentions dejavu and so does Toriel. However Papyrus mentions it more, and swears he’s done this shit before, sans doesnt mention it tho but like he’s sans.

Papyrus remembers more than Sans, enough to know that it's Flowey causing the resets, but not everything. After a few resets, Sans' depression and ADHD kick in harder than they were before. What's the point of trying if it's all gonna be reset anyway? Papyrus, on the other hand, think the best thing to do is to try and befriend Flowey, and convince him to stop resetting. Papyrus adopts a carefree and unknowing front to make Flowey think he doesn't remember resets at all, 3/?

Ye ye! I mean, after sans “couldn’t go back” i think is when the depression kicked in, and im p sure gaster was expirimenting with time travel/determination, so Sans might have figured there’s someone messing with timelines. I also really love the theory that Papyrus is pretty sure Flowey is resetting, but keeping things interesting so Flowey messing with him instead of other people.

Hence why Flowey is so surprised when Papyrus does something different even though Flowey did everything the same. Eventually when Flowey starts doing his murder runs, he makes the mistake of trying to fight the brothers. One on one with sans, he dies a lot, but eventually lands a hit. One on one with Papyrus, he dies even more, and gave up multiple times. He once managed to kill Papyrus, but it took a long time, and he doesn't want to do it again anytime soon. 4/?

Oh yeah Flowey is really awkward about talking about Papyrus, but outright says sans cost him quite a few resets.

He also made the mistake of trying to fight the brothers at the same time. He never got passed them. Ever. Sans and Papyrus are both equally hard to hit, but Papyrus has more HP. Imagine the genocide Sans fight, but you have to do it 20 times in order to deplete his HP. Sound like hell? It was. 5/5

Also like, neither of them fear death (probably bc they know about resets) So they’d be hard to even like, get past.

Papyrus takes the hits during battle becayse Papyrus plays fair. Papyrus plays by the rules not because he has too, but bc it’s polite. (another reason i put pap as a hufflepuff) He’s not gonna break the game any time soon.

Sans however we know don’t give a shit about the rules. He uses his strongest attack first. He has the first turn. He dodges.

With Papyrus taking hits but having a good Hp and strong attacks, and sans dodging and not following the rules, they’d be an unbeatable team together.

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tumblunni · 6 years

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okay to talk about EXACTLY HOW i would handle giving charon a big good boss fight and also sympathetic backstory and redemption and all that jazz

there are approximately ten million words beneath the cut, and also ten million raspberries in my shampoo, and these charon thoughts are just as sweet as that

alright so ALREADY i kinda did feel like he was sort of a friendly enemy when i first played the game?? like his Thing of being the constantly never fightable dude actually was kind of sympathetic in a way. it always just felt like he was Chilling Out and not giving much of a shit about being evil and also had nothing personal against you the player. he doesnt follow any of cyrus’s big philosophy and he’s clearly only here for the money and really phoning it in, and that kinda makes him not your enemy at all, even though he’s on the team youre fighting. Like I always found it a good establishing moment that in the Valley Windworks when they first introduce “hey this time there’s two galactic teammates here” and all, CHARON IS STANDING DIRECTLY IN EYELINE OF YOU RUINING EVERYONE’S PLANS. he’s just standing there! and of course he’ll never do anything to warn mars about you, the game just isnt programmed that way. but it fits really well with his character if you think of it as an intentional thing? just imagine this random gramps sitting there drinking tea while all his teammates actually Care About Things and Use Effort. He’s always criticizing team galactic’s plan too and like WHY IS HE DOING THAT TO YOU if not because Nintendo Wants Him To Be My Best Friend ok. Like he doesn’t fuckin trust anyone on his team so why would he spill the beans about his big secret plans he has to make money off of this villain plan and then bail before they actually do all the dumb shit with legendaries and such. Yes ok its PROBABLY just because its a videogame and they need to exposit stuff to the player that the character is probably just thinking and not saying out loud. But wouldnt it be so much better this way!!!! Also even when you finally face off against him personally in the postgame for his actual dumb money plan he’s still like ‘lol fourth wall breaking time im gonna not have a boss battle cos if you beat cyrus’s ass i aint got no chance’. Dammit nintend i still wanted to fight him but thats endearing so i cant stay mad at u! And he has several lines during it with stuff like “i like seeing children trying so hard BUT YOURE TOO LATE” and “youth like you can live in idealism but for me its all about the money”. Like man u remember that time i had a big angry rant about how his manga version was super OOC cos they didnt just choose to make him eviler but made him murder a child? like the only time anything involving children is mentioned in canon its him being mildly more polite to children!!! MILDLY FRIENDLY! LET ME HAVE THIS...

okay so YEAH the first big change would be just giving him more screentime and more fleshed out character in these early scenes. Make him a full on friendly character who is technically on the opposite side but has no beef with you and no loyalty to the greater plan of his team. So he’s just comically like “oh hi again! yeah lol today’s plan sucks huh?” and makes idle conversation while the main character villain admin of the day is actually doing important plot stuff. like have him along for everyone’s scenes not just mars at the start, dissappear for hours until the very end. And yes definately keep the thing of the game constantly lampshading that he’s a new character for the third version of the game, and everyone in the team thinks he’s useless and forgets he’s even there. it was annoying in the original game cos he actually didnt get any love from the writers themselves, but yknow you could give him an expanded role and rewrite that stuff to be more like “oh poor guy he’s the underdog”, yknow? am i the only one who felt inherantly sorry for him?? i mean he’s a tiny grandpa!!! and he looks so sad on his official art!! Oh oh and also add the additional running jokes and expanded characterization he had in his very brief anime appearance, which was honestly the only well written part of the entire team galactic arc. It fleshed out a bit of his relationship with jupiter who never really appeared alongside him in the game except to say “im not teaming up with you” at the end. Having the context that she finds him annoying cos she’s very serious and also very dedicated to cyrus so she hates this opportunistic bastard pretending to be dedicated when its an obvious lie. And also she thinks his laugh is obnoxious XD Oh also I liked how they expanded upon that one scene of Saturn being sarcastic at gramps and made it into an actual thing that him and charon most often work together and have a mutually sassy dynamic. I found it humanizing that anime saturn is very serious but can comically overreact to very minor teasing from this grandpa! I thought that was better than the games where he’s just serious or the manga where he was 100% changed to be 100% silly and kinda stole charon’s personality for reasons i will never understand.

ANYWAY! IN SUMMARY! show scenes of charon being endearing by being not really interested in the big evilness, being underdog-y by always failing at his smaller evilnesses and getting disrespected, and also maybe drop in some more interpersonal relationships between the admins to hint that charon does indeed have some friendship going on even if he’s a tsundere bitch who’d never admit it. Also maybe the other thing from the anime where they made him a cool computer guy? cos srsly it was lazy that the games just said “he’s the science” and never clarified wtf he actually does at his job. cos cyrus is already a science boss??? he kinda already did most of the big sciencey plans?? why does he need this man if its not for mechanical or legendary pokemon stuff OK HEY MAYBE COMPUTERS! also its funny to imagine him being a memey blogger but sun and moon actually made faba canonically that so i dont think you could improve on him. TAKE NOTES FROM BEAN MAN, NINTENDO

Also maybe you could hint at the rotom backstory before it actually happens? like could just show some mild implications that he is sad, cos the ‘friendly enemy’ thing would already be decent foreshadowing for him potentially having a soft spot. “Wah i am an emotionless evil money man” says local villain, while gossipping with Dawn about his coworkers and sharing lemon squares. But like I mean i don’t really want him to be LITERALLY that, i still like him being grumpy and guarded about his secret good heart. I’m just saying “friendly” as in.. sort of a disconnect between what he says his personality is and how he actually acts. The stuff he actually says is very grumpy but like.. hey he’s saying stuff to you when he doesnt need to, and nobody else on this team is casually talking to you as if youre not an enemy. Like he’s SUBCONCIOUSLY friendly and doesnt realise it? He’d never SAY “i am lonely hello please talk to me” but he’d sure as hell walk over to you and talk to you anyway. About grumpy things! Grumpily! And maybe express occasional compliments in a sort of “haha im surrounded by idiots you’re way more down to earth than all these adults who act more like children”. Cos in that fourth wall breaking moment he has, he respects that you’re a badass and decides thats why he’s not gonna have a boss fight. “You’d just kick my ass, so lol fight these grunts instead while i run away and do my evil plan” That is the kind of sympathetic charon i want!! He’s doing a douchey thing by breaking the script of how boss battles work and making everyone else fight you instead even though he knows that they’ll lose. But he’s also likeable because breaking the script of boss battles is unexpected and comedic! And he’s also accidentally being complimentary to you so its like SIMULTANEOUS JERK AND NICE AT THE SAME TIME. Thats the good stuff!! That quality grumplegramp content!!! if he got redeemed and just 100% changed his personality to lose all the sass and sneakyness then that’d be boring yo...

OKAY WHERE WAS I? Okay hey once you’ve established that, maybe now you have a basis for the sad foreshadowing!! Like you could have one scene where he’s suddenly NOT friendly, he’s not just grumpy in the funny sort of way but actually seems cold and stoic and actually does something useful to the team’s mission or whatever. Sort of a ‘whoa what’s wrong with him today’ thing and it could be subtle cos on the first playthrough you’d just think he was being a jerk cos he’s a jerk and all. but maybe it happens on a scene of team galactic doing some evil plan in eterna forest/other place that’d potentially relate to the rotom sidequest. like he’s just really fuckin depressed to be reminded of his one big failure in life. OH maybe it could actually be at the unnamed junkyard thats mentioned in his backstory but doesnt actually feature as an area in the original game? It could make sense that it’d be part of their plan cos team galactic attacks various energy sources and other technology related places to find the stuff they need to make the big world erasure machine. could just be simply them robbing some old generator parts after their attempt to take the whole power plant failed.

Oh and also maybe add a lil something to his last scene at the galactic lab? Cos like.. what we already have in the game has potential to be a moment where he did a good thing but no its not. Like when you look at it, hey he kinda helped you out here by being all “hey lol saturn the kid is here, bye im not stopping u, feel free to take the lake trio”. Even if saturn is the one who actually SAID feel free to take the lake trio and actually had a good hint at redemptiveness moment and all. Please never take that away, that was good, you just coulda had both of them do it, yknow? And we dont wanna make charon go full good guy all of a sudden when he hasnt even finished his characetr arc, so instead make it more of a moment where its like “im a bad guy but this is going too far”. Like maybe ACTUALLY HAVE A PAYOFF for the foreshadowing that he has no loyalty to cyrus and is blatantly plotting to betray him at some point. He never actually did!! He only tries to capitalize on cyrus already being defeated in an entirely optional sidequest that fails at delivering a proper payoff.

So hey! My idea! Add some complexity here by making it clear that charon is evil in a more petty and mundane way and not in a.. like.. actually dangerous way. Once things start getting actually dangerous he starts chickening out! Like he’s a jerk who does mean things to get money but he’s just MEAN and not friggin murderous or worldending. Give him a moment of “oh shit cyrus was actually serious oh god how do i get off of this train”. Like it seemed that he never really believed that team galactic would ever truly create a new world, and he certainly didnt give a shit about it, he just thought he found an easy opportunity for a paycheck in some dumbass’s deluded plan that’d never really work. But OOPS i guess it actually is happening, oh fuck! Give him a bit of a crisis where he realizes what he actually helped this man do, but not like a full on “everything ive ever done is bad and i dont wanna be evil anymore”. Not YET! Just friggin.. “oh fuck i cant spend money if the universe doesnt exist and also i am dead”. “PLEASE HELP ME CHILD, CYRUS IS GONNA TAKE AWAY THE MONEY!!” xD It’d be fitting for his character and a good light moment of comic relief after the emotional and dark stuff happening around this section of the game. Like he already kinda does that by having that scene of saturn snarking at him, but it could be even more funny! Move the first him and saturn bickering scene to earlier on and have this be like a satisfying scene of saturn actually winning? cos in the anime it was always charon being smug and making fun of him while saturn gets all grumpy about it, now it could be the reverse with smug charon having a breakdown and realising his whole money plan is in shambles and its his own fault.

Also maybe it could have additional payoff with Charon actually helping you take down cyrus? Again, not actually because he’s switched sides but because he's still evil but evil for different reasons than cyrus. That good ‘reluctant teamup with minor goofy villain to take down big actually scary villain’ thing. With the added bonus that the minor goofy villain is objectively a worse person than the scary villain and the scary villain is still redeemable, as opposed to in the manga where they used this same trope in the form of “cyrus is good now and we’re making charon the big scary villain to prove how good cyrus is cos charon is worse”. That was dumb. It was especially dumb cos WHY ON EARTH would you pick charon for this??? like they still had moments of him being comedic and wimpy yet at the same time wanted us to believe he was legitimately threatening? ANYWAY my idea for this is that charon’s computer skills could pay off and it could be something like “oh i always put a failsafe kill switch in my computer just in case i need to grab the money and run”. Like him being a paranoid untrusting selfish asshole was actually the reason he was able to save the day! Also it would explain why cyrus’s machine only fails and summons giratina in platinum version. the manga actually did say that charon sabotaged the machine so thats one actually good thing that came from it! Congrats u filled one plothole while making twenty more XD

OH and perhaps this same section could also foreshadow the rotom thing? like I was thinking about how he could actually choose to give up and let you take the lake trio and have it still be 100% in character. It could be an extension of his “shit, i didnt think things would get this serious, please save me from the consequences of my own actions!” moment. Cos I think that any normal dumb greedy money man would still be horrified at the idea of mutilating a thousand year old majestic unicorn of mythology and then flushing it down the toilet when it outlives its uselessness. Like he doesnt do it because he wants to help you save the day or anything, just cos the idea of killing the lake trio is just too evil for even him. It could be kind of a meaningful moment about how cyrus is doing all this for good reasons yet they caused him to do these actions that are even more evil than the actual dude with evil motives. And maybe you could establish this through a scene of him and cyrus inetracting, which could also help amp up how intimidating cyrus is, in preparation for the big climax? Have charon trying to wimp out of “disposing of the useless specimens”, but cyrus is having none of it. Like it could start off funny with him making up loads of other excuses cos there’s no way he’d admit he’s having Feelings and all. “Wait but let me have them! if theyre useless to you then i can just sell them right?? ha ha thats the only reason im saying this, lol you know me i’d never be swayed by any sentiment” But cyrus sees through it instantly and gets right up in his face like fuckin Raw Cold Fury, no you are NOT going to disobey me. He is PISSED OFF because the only reason he kept this useless senile old bat around is because he’s the only one in this group who isn’t a simpering moron at the mercy of their pitiful heart. If you can’t even do that, then what’s the use of you? So everything charon tries fails and all he accomplishes is getting fired on the spot for even TALKING ABOUT defying his boss. And cyrus just orders saturn to dispose of the lake trio instead. Saturn of course is smarter and says nothing in defiance, but then the both of them work together to let you take the pokemon and just act like they failed to stop you rather than doing it on purpose. And its kind of an uncharacteristically quiet and intense moment between these dudes that are usually at each other’s throats with funny banter. They’re united for a moment but for very different reasons. Charon knew that cyrus wasnt a good guy from the very beginning and he just underestimated him, and is now feeling in over his head and worried this could be the end. And saturn always thought cyrus was good but is starting to struggle with doubts. And maybe charon actually tries to warn saturn about it? Like “hey i knew this all along but i never told you but HEY CYRUS MIGHT ACTUALLY KILL US ALL” and saturn starts on his usual speech about cyrus being the greatest but he starts to question it and AAAAA! but ultimately this moment isnt the moment where he makes the right choice, and he does end up going back to cyrus and continuing the plan. and also charon is on the edge of actually doing something good and trying to stop cyrus’s big ol doom time (albiet for selfish reasons of No Money In The New World) but he also wimps out from this chance and instead decides to grab as much cash as he can and run the fuck away, as if its even possible to outrun the destruction of a whole dimension. but at least him and saturn agreed on the lake trio rescue operation, thus their moment of almost-redemption helped the player even if they didnt actually turn good. AND then you’d have the surprise moment of charon actually stepping up at the last minute and doing his thing to sabotage the machine and all. which again doesnt really solve the whole thing and doesnt really make him turn good but at least it downgrades the threat from ‘cyrus actually succeeds in destroying the world’ to ‘okay we just need to deal with a slight case of poke-hell and one collossal centipede’. Srsly man sinnoh’s plot has the highest stakes cos in platinum you straight up actually fail and cyrus actually would have destroyed the world if not for giratina! Oh and also a random note is that i think it’d be funny if charon helped you out while still running away? like you just learn about the machine sabotage being his responsibility cos it flashes his goofy hacker logo from the anime or something. Maybe instead he hacks your Poketch and is like HEY HELLO IM GONNA SPLODE THE THING BUT NOT COS IM A GOOD GUY, BTW I AM A SAFE DISTANCE AWAY PLEASE DONT LET CYRUS KNOW I DID THIS

SO YEAH! whatever! whether or not we get that added bit of teamup with charon in the climax, we’ve still given him a bit more screentime so the player actually remembers him and actually cares about doing his optional sidequest in the postgame. so him not having a boss fight would be less of a letdown and all. But having the teamup plot would be a good opportunity to turn the wifi event into not a wifi event! maybe during his panic charon drops the key to his secret lab and thats how you get it? cos really it makes no sense at all that the magic wifi gods can just hand you something you’d have no idea existed and never have an opportunity to get. none of the other wifi items are literally a thing owned by a significant character that needs to be teleported out of his pocket by plot magic! Also it sucks that a chunk of important backstory would be hidden in a wifi event so if they still wanted rotom’s alt forms to be a wifi event then JUST make it the ability to get the forms and not the charony diary bit. Cos it makes no sense that the ENTIRE REASON CHARON EXISTS is to introduce the rotom form event yet you’d have no clue he was connected to rotom until after youve already finished the event. It gave no damn indication you had to take the key to this particular dude’s lab in team galactic!! ANd click on an otherwise unmarked wall!! Put the diary somewhere else and hey there’s a Charon Clue(tm) and now you can actually find the damn event, there you go, fixed. Also annoying cos nothing in the event tells you you have to go somewhere entirely different to catch the one rotom in the game, and click another unmarked piece of scenery that only has a staticky screen to indicate rotom if you happen to be playing at night. Seriously this is why serebii.net was such a lifesaver!!

Okay so WOOP there we go, here we are at a point where the player has seen more of charon and had oppotunities to grow to like him as a character and be suspicious that maybe he could have some sympatheticness. And if he drops an Importante Key Itemme right before the end of the game then thats a hint that postgame stuff exists involving him, and at least one clue where to find it! All the rotom diary stuff would play out exactly the same except that its less of a hell to find, lol.

BUT THEN the big difference in Stark Mountain is that now you have the full context of charon’s backstory and the game actually reacts to you having that knowledge. Like maybe if you dont do that step first then either charon never appears at stark mountain until you do, or you get an abbrieviated version of the quest without the redemption plot? I was thinking actually maybe make it one of those daily repeatable quests, to avoid the player doing the quests out of order and permenantly losing the chance to redeem gramps. Like if you dont see the rotom diary then instead of a big actual quest you just get some five minute “oh we’ve seen team galactic sneaking around stark mountain, defeat them for Some Money Or Something hey thats weird that they were only stealing money hey yknow who’s all about the money? charon! maybe go follow up on his Importante Key Itemme to continue the plot.”

SO THEN once you return Emboldened By The Knowledge Of Good Gramps, you get the proper thing. And... it would actually play out totally the same as in vanilla platinum. Charon doesn’t have a boss fight, all his minions leave him and say he sucks, he gets anticlimactically taken out by someone else in a cutscene, and his last moment is someone making a crack about him being so frail and useless that the hot volcano breeze could knock him over.

BUT THAT ISNT THE END

Its just a fake out that its gonna have the same funny ending as every other charon appearance, and the same lack of him being remotely threatening.

cos NOW WE FINALLY GIVE THE MAN A GODDAMN BOSS FIGHT

and yknow how i said i hate the manga where he’s all super evil and owns three legendaries and kills a guy? okay take away all that stuff but KEEP THE MOMENT OF GRANDPA GETTING TO DO SOMETHING BADASS FOR THE ONLY TIME EVER

Maybe he surprises everybody by actually not being down for the count! And by now he’s just SO pissed off from a whole game’s worth of failing and being disrespected that he does something desperate and stupid at the last minute. If he was meant to be the dude who invented the red chain, maybe he could use it to control heatran even if looker took away the magma stone? like i feel it’d be in character for charon to secretly steal a prototype red chain for himself during the whole “oh fuck my boss is legit destroying the world i need to get out of here” thing. Grab some stuff to sell now your last paycheck is dissappearing into an ominous void, lol. He didnt expect to actually be using it, and if the actually completed red chain puts enough stress on its weilder to make them cry blood then this thing must be even more risky to use! so its a really huge holy shit moment of tiny gramps actually doing something intimidating! and his boss fight could actually be using heatran and actually having heatran get to goddamn appear in this sidequest. it was soooo underwhelming to have to return thru the dungeon a second time to actually see heatran, this time without any story stuff to break up the long walk...

also this entire thing could be a great climax to his character arc and sort of a moment of “okay THIS was actually his motivation all along!” Cos I always felt like Charon’s real motive was low self confidence? Like he’s always on about money but he seems to focus more on SUCCESS instead. Fame and success. “Ha ha i am the greatest scientist and i want people actually aknowledge me” is a thing he repeatedly brings up and also that other characters directly demonstrate in how they act towards him. It just feels like he thinks he can buy that with money if he’s failed his whole life in earning it. And the old “acts egotistical because he actually hates himself” character archetype would work really well as a sympathetic interpretation of his character. It would be like how he’s ‘subconciously friendly’. The thing he actually does (being boastful) is because of a different reason (not believing his own lies and being super insecure about his self worth), but he keeps it so well hidden that not even he realises that its really what he feels. Similar to how he acts grumpy because of a different reason, because he actually DOES want friends and he’s just guarding his emotions under a million walls cos he’s scared of being hurt again. And scared of how he knows he’s a weak willed person who might betray his friends again for his desperation for money. Which is really a desperation to feel valid as a human being, which is really just ‘i want friends’ again under another coat of paint. So depressingly he caused his own problems because of the same character trait that was once a positive in his life! I think he works well when interpreted from that angle, he’s like a dark subversion of a pokemon professor or of your classic ash ketchum figure. Like “the power of friendship” is what turned him evil, and also turned him into a guy who acted awful to his friends. And it could add to this thematic thing if “loving pokemon” was also referenced throughout his plot in a negative sense?

That’s actually one other good thing about the manga, they removed his greedy grumpyness (bad) but replaced it with the same motive as the villain of the 2nd movie (weird flex but okay). Aka “a guy who collects legendary pokemon just as trophies and has forgotten how to treat them like genuine friends”. Even if that wouldnt be his main character concept in this hypothetical rewritten game, it could still be a secondary trait that’s used to suppliment the main emotional arc. Like instead of just saying “money money money” you could flesh out more scenes of him actually talking about HOW he’s gonna get the money and what he’s gonna use it for. Via collecting all the rare pokemon, and to collect more rare pokemon. Which will somehow (in his twisted cynical perception of how the world works) make him a person of value and get people to respect him. It could also tie together pretty much every scene he already has! Cos his backstory is finding this pokemon friend... who was a rare unknown species. And maybe as a kid he decided to become a scientist initially just out of excitement to learn more about his new friend and show them to the world! But then the realities of the difficulties in being respected as a scientist gradually wore him down and he became more cynical, more obsessed with recognition, more believing that the only way to get it was by being an asshole and he’d just get taken advantage of if he kept being soft. And he started to forget why he really wanted that fame in the first place, and instead it just became an obsession, a vain hope that he’d hate himself less if he accomplished his life’s dream. When really from the player’s perspective its obvious that even if he succeeded he’d still be depressed when he realized how he’d lost everything in the process. And it’d be a more realistic sort of way he could have turned from a good kid to an asshole gramps. There wasnt any single day he suddenly made the decision to change, it was just a gradual wearing down of his morals over the years. he became more obsessed and more cynical that normal moral ways of doing things would never get him what he wanted. he started making small sacrifices to his personal sense of morality, and eventually reached the point where he’d completely abandoned it all without even noticing the gradual change. And somewhere along the way he forgot that he started this because of his pokemon friend, and discarded it as “not good enough” in favor of this vain quest to acquire a million other rarer pokemon and just friggin put them on a shelf to boast about them and feel less empty inside. And then also his redemption was a gradual change too? After he reached that point of completely betraying his own sense of goodness, he gradually got sadder and more tired with living this way. By the time you see him ingame he’s not remotely happy with being evil and he’s just a poor dude who’s deluded that being evil is the only way to escape the sadness rather than the cause of it. And thats why his whole ‘oops im accidentally subconciously befriending my coworkers and also the enemy’ thing kinda set him on the road to eventual redemption, cos its the first bit of small upliftingness he’s had in ages. sorta recharges his Ability To Care and he starts realizing what he’s doing and feeling regret. But yeah throughout the main game he never actually acts on his doubts and just repeatedly misses the chance to get redeemed and makes you Kinda Frustrated, similar to zuko or peridot’s redemptive arc? And ultimately reuniting him with his old best friend and showing him that its not too late to fix what he broke = the actual catalyst for his changes to fully stick and he completely switches to the good side.

BUT ANYWAY thats why he needs a boss fight first!

Something like 50-70 years worth of self hate and frustration from devoting himself to a super incorrect way of defeating that self hate, and sacrificing EVERYTHING for the sake of it, and being disrespected the entire time, and being terrified that you’re getting old and running out of time, and almost dying to some guy’s weird void plan, and losing the only thing you had left aka the team galactic job and a few maybe sorta kinda friends you had, and now being disrespected AGAIN by those same people you thought were friends (but never actually admitted it to them) and then also bitchslapped by a frog?? Also this place is real fuckin sweaty?? Yeah stark mountain is a great climactic point for his entire frustrations to boil over and be a bigger eruption than the actual volcano!

Thus we have Grand Dad Gets Serious And Has An Actually Interesting Boss Fight!

but also grand dad is being emotionally open and whoops accidentally might be tearing down those walls he built up around his big ol soft as fuck heart

like the battle would possibly be more ‘you talk him down into giving up, realizing he was wrong, quitting being evil, and going home to his friend that he misses so much. and finally realizing that thats actually the only way he could ever really defeat the self hate that drove him this far in the first place. also he’s not worthless and his friends always believed he was the awesome dude he always wanted to be’. Yknow, rather than actually defeating him and all. I mean you still do that but i think it’d be a case like with the giratina fight where even if you lose or run away you get the same result, just slightly altered text? Just as long as you come here with rotom in your party your victory was already a foregone conclusion. you just get a really cool boss fight as your reward, yknow? cos seriously I WAS WAITING THE WHOLE GAME FOR THAT DAMN BOSS FIGHT!!!

obligatory link again to the cool song i think is a great summary of all of my headcanons for this man’s character arc and would also be badass backing music for a hypothetical boss fight:

youtube

context: it makes more sense if you imagine it as his own internal thoughts of all the stuff he’s been running away from accepting in his own feelings. and/or what he THINKS that the player and rotom would be saying to him, so he’s shocked into speechlessness by the fact that they actually do think he deserves a second chance and has the potential to be good.

actually that could be a really good ending to the fight!!!

like when you get through to him and convince him to stand down, he cowers in fear thinking he’s gonna get the karmic payback for everything he’s ever done. and he tries to run away from reuniting with rotom. half of him is scared that his friend hates him and the other half is.. well..

i think it would be thematically appropriate to end it with a hug

just an image of this lil toy robot pokemon hugging this scared old man, and he’s just so empty and doesnt know what to say. its the last thing he ever expected. and then his shock turns into pain and sadness, as he was really the most scared that his friend actually would forgive him. that everything he ever did really was all for nothing, and he should have done this years ago and saved all that lost time. he’s so scared because he thinks he doesnt deserve forgiveness and he doesnt know what to do now its happening. so he just lets out all those tears he’s never cried over all these years, and the scene ends with him desperately hugging his best friend and never wanting to let go ever again

And then that’d be the big moment that was really the turning point for him, though of course that wouldnt be the end of his redemption and if there was any further postgame content you could show various scenes of him atoning throughout that. or just some images in the second credits scene after you beat the postgame stuff. i’d kinda like if there was some moment of him apologising to the rest of team galactic and joining them in their attempts to rebuild the team into something good. and maybe an extra postgame segment where this redeemified team goes on some bigger quest to try and rescue cyrus from the distortion world and heal his pain too. i think you could get a lot of good scenes out of a redeemed charon being along for the ride! like you’d obviously have cyrus being skeptical that this dude really has changed so much, and probably an extension of that earlier scene where he’s pissed off that the one guy he thought agreed with him about emotions being foolish is actually being the most emotional of everyone. but i think because of that they could also have scenes of relating together and actually starting to form a friendship in the end? like i can see charon feeling guilty for never trying to reach out to cyrus before, and also believing really strongly that cyrus can be redeemed cos like ‘yo i’m way worse than you and i was able to change, please believe that its a possibility for you too!’ Also cyrus likes machines so i think he’d be happy to meet rotom and become friends. And he has that whole grandpa related backstory so it might help a lot towards healing those scars and reuniting the two of them if he starts forming a friendship with a different gramps? THERES A LOT OF GOOD THEMATIC LINKS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT TEAM GALACTIC MEMBERS THAT ARE NEVER EXPLORED IN THE ORIGINAL GAME

also in the original version of this plotline it was a fanfic/fangame idea of an alternate universe swap where dawn/lucas/other customizeable protagonist is a galactic grunt instead of the hero. so a lot of the details were different but in that version the protag was literally adopted by whichever galactic admin they picked as their main friendship route. entirely because of self indulgent ‘i wish these guys were my dad/sister/grandpa/whatever’ feels cos sinnoh helped me thru a tough time as a kid. soooo i cant really do that charon grandpa idea where he also renovates the Old Chateau into a ghost pokemon sanctuary and becomes like an actual good pokemon professor. (also rekindles his friendship with prof rowan and agatha from the kanto elite four cos thats just a random headcanon i have) BUT i could still do all that except the part where he adopts u cos canon dawn/lucas already has a mom lol. And i think it’d be more fitting of canonverse protag to adopt Cyrus? Like obv in the canonverse itd probably be the main boss of the team who gets the bigger redemption plot and is canonically the best friend EVEN THO for tumblr user tumblunni in particular it is All Grandpas All The Time. And i like the idea of Cyboy being a survivor of child abuse who tries to become a good dad just like his parents werent. But i also like the idea of dawn’s mom adopting him as her new big brother and him getting to experience a genuine loving family for the first time! I think itd work that way cos cyrus is meant to be 27 even tho he looks older, and i dont think dawn’s mom is that young and also i just see no chemistry between them as any sort of ship. (and headcanon cyrus as asexual anyway) But also the family does still keep in touch with all the other galactic friends!!!

hhhh i wrote So Many Word just about grandpa redemption holy shit i’ll probably die if i try and cover all the other teammates now

ok i will leave it here but just know i also have Deep Headcanons about all of them, even if charon gets the most. somedaayayyyay i will share with you more!!

#commander charon #why. why am i like this #okay apparantly i have used that exact tag like 15 times already on this blog and im betting most of them were also about charon #please love charon

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primalspice · 3 years

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2, 4, 6, 15, 17

yas

What is the usual climate like? What precipitation, temperature, and humidity is common?

its michigan so i mean they have Seasons but. winters and summers are p long and rough, they got somethin fucked up goin on here.

How do people normally spend their free time? What sorts of common activities and entertainment is available?

not much LMAO it's pretty industrial generally everywhere so there's not a ton of fun places to go. there's plenty of bars and a decent amount of Contaminated Nature if u enjoy drinking or like. wandering around LOL. many ppl are v work oriented so theres not a ton of community fun stuff goin on. the act of Making and Fixing Things in whatever sense is p common....art, clothes, machines, items, etc... oh and u can watch game shows on TV. yea ppl love tv in this one too whats new.

What religions and beliefs are common? Are there physical structures or locations for these? What are the typical practices of these beliefs like?

not super religious since a lot of the original ppl were also stem-y sciencey too-good-for-all-that ppl LMAO but the religions that do exist are p much the same as what exists outside. religion from outsiders and religion thats just been passed down from a few generations is about equal in amount, n ppl who practice a religion are usually p independent or small groups, there's not much in terms of physical Facilities.

What is the social structure like? Are their classes or castes? Does treatment depend on class or is everyone treated equally?

in terms of financial i think it generally depends a good amount on what jobs ur able to work considering there’s not a ton of options. any military and higher government positions are prioritized n secure financially and socially. anything trades/factory related it also pretty well respected and livable. other jobs can Vary but a majority of the lower class are not military/gov/trades bcz they dont have much of any protections or priority so :| also if u arent able to work for whatever reason Fuck You figure it out.

socially there’s kinda a rift between military and nonmilitary folks. military do gain a lot of protections bcz theyre kinda doing whatever Big Gov determines the current purpose of the region is to be while everyone else just kinda Exists Here. A lot of ppl join the military just for those protections bcz everyone else is kinda treated shitty LOL. also for pretty much every military non-combat-or-politics job (doctors and tradesppl mostly) there’s a nonmilitary equivalent but ofc they’re not typically very well-off financially or socially since they’re unprotected and kinda demoted to the Second Choice.

What is medicine typically like? Advanced or primitive? Traditionally based or more modern-like? Who are the medical practitioners, and how are they treated by society?

uuuhhhh like. ive not fully developed this yet but theyre trying rlly hard to be advanced, at least within the military. plenty of Questionable Experimence but this whole place is a questionable experiment so anything goes rlly. that was kinda a big thing before everyones focus switched to nuclear production. in terms of Normal Medicine ofc there is the division between military and nonmilitary practitioners and both kinda have their own issues LOL relatively well-respected on both ends but both have beef with each other.

military folks are Official, easy to access, usually cheaper, but they kinda hire just anyone LMAO much to question in terms of ethics. they typically also have more access to spaced and supplies....by whatever means....

nonmilitary folks are usually more specialized and ig ethical LOL they tend to cost a bit more Usually since theyre responsible for covering a lot of their own costs of existing as a freestanding thing, less accessible since there aren't very many of them, but they do a good job. A lot of the current doctors are not originally from within the region so a lot of ppl approach that with skepticism.

#ask game #ocs

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myassbrokethefall · 7 years

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As a fan of The X Files, what did you first think of Fringe? I remember Fringe being compared to TXF before the show even premiered and the creators stated that it was influenced by it. Having seen TFX after seeing Fringe, I definitely understand the comparisons and I was wondering what did you think about that. One thing I think Fringe did really well (especially in later seasons) that I wish TXF S10 had done was having the mythology sprinkled in even in the case of the week episodes

When I first watched Fringe, it did feel to me like something of an XF ripoff. Basically that they added more people to make it different but then copied XF as much as they could. I thought it was OK, and I didn’t mind it being “inspired” by XF per se -- after XF’s peak popularity there were a ton of shows that tried to cash in on the vibe (anyone remember Dark Skies?), so there was actually a little novelty factor in one of them coming out years later, and I like XF and I like the XF vibe so I was fine with it being basically redone.

But it was a little boring to me, and it didn’t really have anything on the order of the Mulder and Scully stuff that chained me to XF. I found myself not really looking forward to watching it, and after a few episodes in I basically had decided to stop watching it, but I had a series record set on my DVR and it kept giving me episodes so I kept being like “fine I guess I’ll watch this.”

And then it changed in literally one episode for me, which was the first episode with the Observers. That kicked it from “people investigate paranormal cases and fight vague opposition from Authority and crack jokes and Pacey is in it” to "...What is up with this creepy dude??? I MUST FIND OUT”

Then it had its hooks in me, and it got better as so many shows do as they find their footing and their rhythm and what they do best, and it actually grew to be quite different from XF. I never really cared about Peter and Olivia as, like, a ship, but I enjoyed the interactions of all the characters in their various configurations. And what I really loved about Fringe the most was that ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN. They weren’t afraid of gamechanger stuff, and after Season 8-9 of XF, that was a breath of fresh air for me. DD left the show and after five minutes of Scully crying and sad music playing, the show settled into the exact same format, except with Scully doing the “believer” lines and Doggett doing the “skeptic” ones. Hell, they even amped up the drama of Mulder leaving as much as possible by having Scully be pregnant to maximize her sadness and that in-the-moment emotion, just so they could then drop it all after the two-part season premiere and go back to doing the exact same shit. Fringe did an entire season (half season? I don’t really remember) set in an alternate universe. They just kept COMMITTING to stuff and it gave me a TV boner.

I enjoyed a lot of the characters -- and I really am very fond of Astrid -- but the focus for me in that show was the plots and the twists and the sciencey excitement. For XF, I’m in it for Mulder and Scully, and I occasionally have glimmers of “you know, this IS sort of a cool mytharc thing,” but mostly the plot stuff is background noise (or atmosphere/aesthetic) for me, and has been since about Season 4. Which is fine; I love XF for what it is. But it does mean that I get impatient when we have to listen to people from the show talk about how a great twist is coming up or how it explores modern society’s blah blah blah Tad. I’ve never felt XF does any of that particularly well, even if it thinks it does. I just want to see Mulder and Scully doing things together. Also, after S10 and the breakup I’ve kind of transitioned from “I’ll politely tolerate all CC’s plot brainstorms and just enjoy all the Mulder and Scully I can” to “please don’t let CC’s plot brainstorms hurt Mulder and Scully, I just want Mulder and Scully to be OK, I wish CC would leave Mulder and Scully alone.” Hence, it’s hard to get excited about any spoilers anymore, because after he broke M&S up, seemingly in service of returning everything to status quo even harder, I feel like he might do anything, and our priorities as regards the show have, plainly, diverged.

Well, that was a digression. I totally agree with you that Fringe integrated the “mythology,” aka, the big important stuff that was happening in the show’s universe(s), much more seamlessly into the show. And without that need to reset everything every week, no matter how high the stakes seemed in the moment, so the characters could get back to doing cases in the exact same way they had done since S01E03, Fringe was free to have foundation-shaking stuff happen and then actually build on it and progress and evolve. Separating it worked semi-OK for XF at the beginning, as the outlines of the conspiracy/alien stuff were still very faint and mysterious, but it worked less and less as the series went on and Mulder and Scully’s world darkened and changed around them, and at this point it’s pretty self-conscious, artificial-feeling, and silly. “We’ve always done it that way” is not a good reason to keep doing something, especially if you only did it that way because that was the only way you knew how to do it. But that is a fundamental difference of opinion between 1013 and me.

#fringe #xf negativity #a bit #Anonymous

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kimbisaurus · 6 years

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My first almost D&D but Not DND session!

Soo way back when, my dad gave me a book - a AD&D DMG from a market stall. And it was soo intriguing - but completely almost incomprehensible. A DMG made some sense - but all the numbers & mechanics were weird alien concepts that followed no simple path (some went up, others went down - and there was all these weird changes to add or subtract everywhere! AD&D was a chaotic book to say the least). Later, I’d discover my school had an original D&D players guide (ok, it was actually just the D&D book. There was only meant to be one. It was the very first book every made & meant to be a all in one concept). Suddenly things made sense - and we even had 2 modules. D&D could be had! Sooo I went to a friends house & he loved the concept. He also loved elves - no really, you have to understand he worshipped elves soooo much his ears gear almost 2 inches longer & pointy when he was leaving highschool. it was OMG scary. No surgery, no fakes - just straight up brain power misspent to reshape his body after his favorite image. He was already kinda tall & thin. And a pale skinned gaming geek naturally... So all he needed was to grow out his hair & grow pointy ears. Sooo he did... Kinda freaky... Kinda explains a lot about being human - and yeah, ‘Worshipped tolkieen type elves’ is the best description I have. But otherwise a nerdy nice guy. Annyyywayyy, I went over (pre-elf state) & asked about D&D. And he produced a rulebook - for Lord of the Rings. I didn’t care, we’re doing this. So we rolled up some characters. He had a Warrior or a Paladin I think. And I had a rogue - were-tiger. The LOTR RPG was a point buy system similar to white wolf games. You buy advantages and flaws to gain talents/powers/magic/skills & flaws. I found some for balance, jumping & damage resistance. And something like claws/teeth. Add in some rogue skills & movement skills & I was set! Now my friend was the by the book type - which I thankfully cured immediately by suggesting we do a ‘By the seat of our story pants’ session - we just started. Soon we were running atop rooves of the city doing a chase scene - totally awesome for a thief. And the paladin was running below trying hard to keep up. Rogues are totally awesome! Ooohhh yes! Anyway - we dived into this brave new RPG world. We had lots of fun. At some point we decided our setting was Faerun’s Waterdeep - we’d read a D&D novel about it & that was all the inspiration we needed. We also grew our party to like 3-4 people, maybe 5? And we were working for the political movers & shakers of Waterdeep. But we started with 2 characters chasing a thief across rooftops... Using a completely alien system that had almost no magic what so ever - improvising everything from rules to dice. We knew D&D needed d20s, so we rolled d20s plus our skills. That worked well. Damage was a d6 or 2d6 for something big. Life was soo simple - then we got loot! And we had a DMG for that! OMG, but my mate surpassed me here. Suddenly we had a gnomish inventor with a self moving carriage. It was steam powered.. ish... Magic steam I think... And we ended up with a self shooting crossbow on top at somepoint. That was actually scary - it shoot anyone & everyone, sometimes even us! I remember leaping from the rooftop of our carriage as it steamed it’s way over snowtopped fields, leaping for our opponent’s horses & chariots. I had to make so many agility checks (or was it balance?) - and aced them all. I was a were-cat & I knew where to specialise. Movement skills! Later our paladin died - and we wanted him back. So we planehopped over to the elvish heavens to steal his soul back (we’re adventurers after all! We know we’re here to loot the place!) So the GM distracted us with various scenes of heaven. I was really tempted to try and open this ornate obsidian door that seemed to glow with red runes everywhere. It was chained up with heavy mithril chains & magic locks - and omg it was so tempting... But the party managed to guess it might actually be a portal to the Nine Hells & dragged their curious kitty away... Then the GM tried to distract another player with a beautiful glade. However it was the Kitty who ended up wandering inside & being all curious. There was an elf there & we talked a lot. We kinda got into a debate about religion - and realized we had the same goals, but completely opposite perspectives on how to achieve it. We laughed a lot as everyone else realized the GM & I we’re arguing the same points from the opposite side of the lens. After that, I decided I liked this god - and well our campaign was slowly getting a VS Evil Hell Demons vibe. So believing in a particular god was appropriate. We did a lot of the ‘I pay homage to each different deity when I do something related to their portfolio’ type of prayers - partly as jokes & partly just to be characterful. So having one God was kinda cool. Anyway this elf asked if I wanted to start on the path as a cleric. Sure I said - now the other players had noticed when the GM said this god was forgotten on our world (it was a grey hawk god I think? Some other setting besides Faerun either way). And we’re pretty powerful folk now. We dance with the city’s politicians, royalty & gentry. We go to fancy parties & hang out with the royal poisoner, do work for the head Assassin sometimes & we even helped out the temple of helm so much we have a writ from the High Priest of Helm - allowing us shelter, food, aid & even a few coins from any temple of Helm. Amazing right? Well imagine my surprise when someone introduced me as a cleric of ‘Long Forgotten God’ when we finally retrieved our Paladin’s soul, avoided accidentally opening the door to hell a second time (It glowed and everything! I mean spoilt sports!) and we went to a royal ball to our success & our Paladin’s resurrection! Cleric’s were kinda a rare thing - we had lots of priests. But they could do no more than light healing (cure wounds & disease, produce food & water kinda magic. Very limited- because the system was also kinda limited in regards to magic) but clerics could open portals, summon angels & do real magics. Of course, I had 1 spell (*cough I had just enough exp to buy 1 ability cough*) - and slightly elfin features. There was the promise of an elven lifespan if I was a dutiful cleric though. So almost immortality was a pretty cool boon for a were-kitty... Now you’re wondering what the catch was - because there was one. I was just a cleric of this god. The only cleric actually. I’d been charged with spreading the word & given a cool title. Cleric! And then someone finally completed the sentence - we walked into the Royal Ball - and I was announced as the High Priest of ‘Long forgotten Elven God’... High priest... Yeah... The GM saddled me with ‘promote my faith’ & ‘High Priest’ in a political campaign... Now the GM was cool - the royal folk gave me a plot of land to cultivate into a druid glave with an underground cave/temple space. Which was cool. I even got a gold grant to help transplant soil & plants to the space. And it was near the Temple of Helm. The High Grand Temple of Helm... Where we have that lovely writ of aid... Soooo I maybe started preaching on the steps to the Temple of Helm... About my new god. And that made the High Priest of Helm just a little mad... Then we summoned a angel. The GM read about this spell where you could trade goods & gold to gain the service of angels. And they were anime angels that could build cities in days instead of months. Or nuke cities filled with undead and such... Sooo we traded some stuff from our stash & roll a d100 like all good gamers asking for a miracle. Got a 99 or was it a 100? That called forth some angels, saved our city in a big climatic battle & then sponsored a massive party - and our Angels turned DJs & Dancers and we jammed all night long! I mean we literally had them in our service for 2 days, so we just jammed & partied, then cleaned up the city some the next morning. Amazingly, given how rare Clerics with real magic were, this had an impact on the populace... Preventing the Devil Apocalypse, Summoning Angels & Jamming with the rarest of planar beings after kicking all the BBEG’s collective butts! Yes we made an impression... Now prior to this I had established a kitty theme for loving high places. I always liked to sleep atop these massive columns that adorned the Temple of Helm. 20 to 30m tall columns that were under an even taller roof - so I could nap up there or watch the city flow below me like ants... it was awesome! Which meant I was now awoken by crowds of faithful, flocking to the temple of helm, to wake my charrie up with shouts for wisdom & sermons. I’d tell stories on the front steps (just so I was taller than the crowds. They had a bunch of statues to climb over and leap atop too!) & it was sooo fun! Anddd the GM was secretly making rolls to see if the High Priest would finally snap & do something evil against me... Even turn to the devils just to ‘silence’ this menace to their god... I totally stole so many of their followers... I mean the GM saddled me with being a High Priest... So I lied, tricked & teased my way into becoming the most popular cleric in the city. You let the rogue make a faith after all. This is totally before we ever read Terry Pratchett btw - So you can’t think I’d ever read Going Postal or Making Money. All original madness I’m afraid :) - And yeah... I nearly broke apart the campaign world in my childish teasing of Helm’s chosen... Heeh... Still almost no remorse there :P Sooo that was my role in our first campaign. I mean, we fought wars, assassinated assassins trying to kill us in our supposed sleep, raced steam chariots & besieged armies! We stole artifacts, invented flawed intelligent items like repeating crossbows (we had a sciencey type player who got on well with the mad gnomish inventors guild) and ended up nearly killing the party 3 times with our own repeating crossbow (twice we luckily ran out of arrows, the third time we had to throw a boulder onto our carriage - and boy was that expensive to fix...) And don’t get me started on the politics... It literally flew over my teenage head... I was so clueless then. I even was tricked into being a high priest... Seriously, our party laughed me out of the room when I realized my easy-street lazy rogue was now saddled with actually working & promoting something, raising funds & even having to preach to get followers... And then people worked out I was actually a really good talker & on state debate teams... I just really enjoyed being lazy, stealing & leaping my way through problems... Anyway... long rambling stories... Probably not that interesting - but OMG my fondest memory is just that beginning - we rolled up characters & started playing before we read the mechanics. We invented everything we needed in 5 minutes & learnt some real rules later - which we half ignored as we tried to recreate the spirit of DND with d20s & Lord of the Rings Character Sheets. Still have that sheet too! If you ever want to start a game - just take whatever books you have and go for it. Don’t stress about the rules, make stuff up. Borrow the Advantage/Disadvantage system from fifth Ed - and just go with the flow. If it feels like success, tell the player. If it doesn’t, describe the player's misfortune...

#RPGs #RPG Storytime #First Session #OMG I am such Cheese!#No Regrets!#D&D #DND #Not actually D&D #Fake Rules #Just go for it #No rule

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