#posts that are funnier when you're a system

[phantomrose96]

What the hell happens in the pikmin game?? Those little colourful bitches have been around for ages, but i never bothered looking them up, i just figured they were cute little mascots of some game. But your posts are making me question everything. Is it a horror game? (I know i could just google it, but asking you is funnier)

Yeah you're right asking me is much funnier :)

Pikmin is a fun and relaxing game! You play as a little astronaut man who gets to spend his days growing Pikmin, who are sweet and peaceful little plant creatures with leaves, buds, or flowers on their heads. You can corral them around with a little trumpet, like a bouquet of flowers following you through the pretty and whimsical landscapes of planet PNF-404 :)

Wait did I say fun and relaxing?

Sorry, typo.

It's a brutal skill-based survival game (❁´◡`❁)

So then maybe you're wondering, what's up with the Pikmin? What was that about growing a bunch of little flower guys? Well growing the Pikmin is super important!

It's super duper important mainly because you need to replace the Pikmin who die in the carnage of battle for you!

Battle against what?

Everything.

See on PNF-404, Pikmin are the bottom of the food chain. Just about every living breathing creature on this planet is orders of magnitude larger than the Pikmin and munch Pikmin by the hundreds for breakfast. Predators will do this instinctively. They will do this unprompted. They will do this while you're not looking. They will do this endlessly until every last Pikmin is dead.

So... what good are the Pikmin? What chance do they stand?

Really easy. Pikmin are the most violent creatures in the entire game 🥰🥰🥰.

How else do you survive when you're small and fragile other than incredible violence? Pikmin can exist out and about in swarms of up to 100. And the only way to survive predators as small little leaf creatures is to beat those predators to death with incredible mob violence before they can kill all of you.

Pikmin don't die like plants. They die like warriors.

And sometimes, this is the hardest mechanic to handle. Left to their own devices Pikmin will seek to shed blood. It's up to you to call them away from orchestrating their own demise, their own pursuit of the glory of Valhalla. It's in their nature. It's in their plant-blood.

And they go down hard. They shriek when snapped up in the jaws of predators. They glub and wail when drowning in water. They trill out screams when on fire. They choke and cough in poison. They die instantly to electricity. And you'll know a Pikmin is well and truly dead once it lets out a final whimper, and a ghost drifts away from where it once stood. This can happen by the dozens. This can happen to all 100 at once.

So wait, wait I've gotten far ahead of myself. Why the violence? Why the death? Why the fighting? What was that about a little astronaut man?

Well your astronaut man is Olimar, an honest and simple family man who's a freight ship captain from his home planet of Hocotate. He's a truck driver! He's just a guy taking his first vacation in years.

And a meteorite strikes his ship, tearing it to pieces as it crash-lands on a completely uncharted planet. Welcome to PNF-404...

And so you're Olimar. A truck driver. A nice dad. A victim of capitalism with the world's worst boss. Out on vacation.

Your ship is destroyed. No one is coming for you. No one will save you.

The oxygen on PNF-404 is poisonous.

You have 30 days before your life support system runs out.

You have 30 days until you die a brutal and lonely death.

Your only hope is to find every scattered missing piece of your ship--30 of them--strewn across the planet, return them to your ship, and repair it, before your 30 days are up.

But this is simply impossible. You're one tiny little man. You wouldn't be able to lift a single piece of your ship, let alone 30 of them, let alone doing so while fending off the wildlife hellbent on killing you.

But the Pikmin seem to like you...

So all that death? All the carnage and destruction? It's all in the effort to repair Olimar's ship before he suffocates. You pave a path of destruction decorated with the bodies of any creature that stands before you and your missing ship pieces.

The Pikmin do it. The Pikmin trust you. The Pikmin follow your command and die by your command. After all, you're growing their species. Oh did I forget to explain that part? The "how" of how growing Pikmin works?

Simple. Pikmin are grown from the corpses of the creatures they kill :).

If you kill something, the Pikmin take it back to their base and process it for pieces, and grow new Pikmin from it. That's how you get all the nice little flower creatures following you around. :)

Is it good enough? Can you sleep at night knowing that 50 creatures who trusted you implicitly were slaughtered under your misdirection? All to retrieve a hunk of metal which is 1/30 of the hope of getting you home alive? 100 slaughtered? 200? Day 30 is approaching. Things are looking bleak.

You're Olimar. Day 30 has arrived, and you haven't fully reconstructed your ship. You have no option to stay. Your life support has run out. You watch the Pikmin you've left behind, as you attempt to start up your ship which has not been safely repaired.

You try to take off, and try to make it home.

It does not go well.

But at least the Pikmin have another corpse to carry.

[levemetal]

I have a million and one svsss AU ideas that idk if I'll ever write cause I have 0 confidence in my untested writing skills. Any of these appeal to you?? Go ahead, use 'em. Know any fanfics like that? Please please PLEASE leave them in the comments. Ideas to add? Anything? Please go ahead I have no friends that are as deep in the svsss brainrot as me to subject this to ˚‧º·(˚ ˃̣̣̥᷄⌓˂̣̣̥᷅ )‧º·˚

Continued under the cut due to excessive rambling

These will be Ghost King/Calamity!SJ cause he has been living rentfree in my brain ever since one braincell at one AM shouted about it so you have been warned.

- Dual Ghost Kings YQY and SJ, Post canon of PIDW. That's it that's the idea. Their extras hurt my cold dead heart way too much and as much as bbygirl SJ is a piece of shit, Yue Qingyuan deserves happiness, and for that he needs his Xiao-Jiu. Basically YQY does not stay dead when Bingge turns him into a pincushion à la White No Face to Xie Lian except with arrows. What happens from here? Idk didn't get that far but I imagine he steals back his (probably dead) Xiao-Jiu, maybe does some other batshit insane shit like we all know that deep down he's capable of, and the duo fucking COMMUNICATES for once in their life and they live happily ever after. Bonus points for hilarious deaths for Bingge.

- If you're a filthy multishipper like me, want a BingJiu version of the above QiJiu? Easy, SJ decides to haunt Bingge's ass for eternity and vice versa when Bingge kicks the bucket and so they spent the rest of eternity trying to make each other miserable in increasingly ridiculous and creative ways. Maybe along the centuries they find a common enemy or sort their shit out and proceed to make their awful existence everyone else's problem. A match made in hell, truly <3

Are you seeing a theme yet. I like a general comedic air to svsss AUs, it just belongs to the svsss experience ya know? Anyway carrying on-

Shen twins, and SQH twins cause why not. If you want Binghe twins too, actually probably funnier with Binghe twins, where one is our beloved maiden Bingmei and the other OG!PIDW Bingge but forced back in time with memories of the PIDW timeline. Transmigrator SQH aka Airplane gets the peak lord + Mobei-Jun plotline while OG!SQH is just chilling as an An Ding Peak Hallmaster or something. Meanwhile, the Shen twins have a funny game of imposter going on. As far as everyone is concerned, there is only one Shen Qingqiu, Shen Yuan. Shen Yuan transmigrated in earlier into the novel, but ended up going to CQM with Yue Qi while SJ got stuck in the Qiu household as in canon. From here the details can change but the main idea is that

A) Shen Yuan knows how to do his peak lord job actually

B) SJ is a calamity ghost, having died either in his disciple years or alternatively never made it out of the Qiu household alive

C) Both SY and SJ have been playing switcheroo when SY needs to head out and do stuff or just wants SJ to do his paperwork for him.

I still need a good reason for the switching and duping, but wouldn't it be funny if the disciples just had to deal with their peak lord behaving WILDLY different at times. Most of the time it's good ol' Shen Yuan smiling at disciples, way too enthusiastic for monsters and plants and keeps forgetting his fans everywhere. Then one random week in the month after he has a resting bitch face, scowls, snarls and bitches at anyone and has 0 patience for teenage attempts at music.

Most shrug it off as just terrible migraine weeks, but some disciples are suspicious, most of all Bingge who is CONVINCED something is WrongTM. Like, he KNOWS SQQ and this SQQ is just so different, something must be different. He doesn't know how right he is yet everyone just thinks he's actually insane.

I know this is probably increasingly insane and dumb, but fast forward to the Abyss opening. SJ was probably there to keep an eye on his clumsy twin, but SY ends up asking the ghost to look over the Luos, as the system still demands that they go to the abyss. So SJ after much grumbling agrees (after all he probably just was unmasked as ghost calamity, and the twins as demons, with a huge amount of cultivators moving their way. It's really the smaller hassle to jump into the Abyss and deal with the horrors there. Besides, the scholar in SJ would be curious about the abyss (and SY too let's be honest) ), kicks both in and goes "Alright we're taking an impromptu field trip" and jumps in after leaving SY to deal with the political mess that comes after.

Anyway, the last AU can be changed in various ways, like make it a PIDW time travel fix it with only the OGs around, or just Shen twins, etc. Feel free to shout at me how dumb this all is.

[lennsart]

Hello all, remember that one time I lost my mind over a very badly translated french Zelda Encyclopedia ?

Remember how I said there'd be a part 2 ?

Did you think I had forgotten about it ?

Well you're right. I very much did.

But I remembered now, and I am not done screaming. This book personally insulted me, alright ? It pretended to be a useful tool to feed my obsession and was actually only pain.

And fun, I had to admit. Turns out that correcting it with my sister has been perfect enrichement for insane Zelda fans. We sighed a lot and shouted even more.

(But honestly, it's a bit sad how bad the book is. Like, were the translators so rushed that they made it with a bad internet translator and didn't double check ? Or did they just cared so little ?

Ok, my funnier theory is that they paired one guy who was lazy and knew fuck all about LoZ and one guy who was decent at their job... And only let the first guy do the final proofread.)

But anyways, case in point, here are my evidences !

And if you thought last post was long, wait 'til you see how I realized I don't have a 10 pictures limit on computer :]

Firstly, a thing that made me laugh as I saw the pictures I gathered for this very serious case is the clear gradual lack of respect me and my... Research Partner had for the book :

There's a "sticky notes" era, a "pencils 'cause we aren't gonna waste so many sticky notes at worst we'll erase" era, and a "we don't give a fuck anymore get the markers out" era.

Last time I divided the mistakes in three categories, "Lore mistakes", "Translation mistakes" and the dreaded "What the fuck mistakes". They are... Inegal, to say the least, but let's keep this system !

Translation Mistakes

And I mean it in the sense that "the french translation have different names and stuff than the english one and this book ignores them", not in just general translation... Because if you go that way, this entire book is a translation mistake !

But here we go :

Little details, but they left "Koroks" written this way when the french version is "Korogus", they left "Impar" (the character from Twilight princess) when in french her name is, well, Impa, they left "Mia" for the name of the remlit when it's "Miou"...

As you'll see along the way, my research partner got very mad at the book and wrote a lot of funny comments. Here you can see that next to where the book says that the river zoras "become violent", she wrote "not all zora" in all caps, which I find hilarious.

And she's right ! Don't badmouth Echoes of Wisdom Dradd, he's a cool dude !

Here, the book pretends that the kikwis all have sort of teas as their name. English reader, I hear you get offended : "The book is right !"

NOT IN FRENCH IT'S NOT ! Here, kikwis have herbs inspired names, not tea.

Well, I was going to make a joke about "DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DRINK PARSLEY OR BASIL TEA ?" but apparently they exist, so. My bad. Can we still agree that these are not types of tea ? There's tea with parsley, but the parsley is not the tea, right ?

(Just for fun, our kikwis are named : Basil (for basil, shocker I know), Jasmi (for jasmine), Pirsel (for "persil", parsley), Romar (for "romarin", rosemary) and Lorion (probably for "laurier", bay leaf. This one is less obvious so I'm not sure)

So here it's a little worse than the other times because in the text, they used the literal translation of "The Imprisoned" from Skyward Sword, except in the title they used the correct french name, "the banished".

They really said : Here's a description of le Banni ! He's called le Prisonnier.

WHY

Ok so this one is a little funny to me, bear with me alright ?

In Phantom Hourglass, one type of enemies are the Phantoms in the Ocean King temple, right ? Well, Phantom in french (literally AND in Zelda, wonderful) is Spectre.

Alright ? So what do the book say about Phantoms ? That they are Fantômes. Fantôme is a word that is phonetically the exact same as Phantom, see ? But it means ghost. Not phantom.

(I mean, they're synonyms, you know ? So phantom kinda means ghost and fantôme kinda means spectre, but It Is Not The Translation in the game so it makes it worse)

Actually, it was funny, but as I explains it it makes me a little mad. It was one google search away...

URGH and it's just the same thing again, yes technically the literal translation for "Triforce of Power" would be "Triforce de la puissance", but is it what it is in french ? NO, IT'S TRIFORCE DE LA FORCE (strength). I was alright with random characters name getting mispelled, but FUCK THIS ENCYCLOPEDIA, THIS ONE IS LITERALLY IN MULTIPLE GAMES LIKE EVEN IF YOU DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT LOZ YOU KNOW THAT AT LEAST

All of these are details, but damn Zelda Encyclopedia, I know I'm insane about these games so maybe it's not that deep, but you're writing for the french fans, THE LEAST YOU COULD DO IS WRITE THE FRENCH VERSION OF THINGS

Whew, ok, this is starting to annoy me I feel, so let's change subject, why not ? Here are the :

Lore Mistakes

There are not a lot of them, but they made me gesture widely at the book trying to form a sentence that, if I had managed, would probably have been "Where the fuck did they get that from ?"

Which means that there's a possibility that it's right, but seeing this bitch's track record, I'm going to assume it's not.

Here are pictures of Kokiris, what is the description ?

"Since they're the Hylians' descendants, they look a lot like them."

Since

WHEN ?

Like, genuinely, help me there. Am I the problem ? Are the kokiris supposed to be descended from the Hylians ? And if they are, where is it cited ? I literally almost completed Ocarina of Time for the second time and cannot remember it being hinted at anywhere. Like yeah, they look alike, but aren't kokiris separate forest spirits ???

The tone of the book also annoy me, like "since they're hylians' descendants", as if it was common sense. SIR I PLAY THESE GAMES SINCE I'M OLD ENOUGH TO HOLD A CONTROLLER WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR INFO FROM

It's making me question whether I'm stupid or if it's just bullshitting me right now !

This one is a graph about the different worlds in LoZ. My problem here is that... Well, firstly, my problem is that there is the Sky and the Skies, but I guess that this is like... TP Sky and SS Sky, maybe ?

The real problem is that between these two categories they put "Minish World".

Minish World ? You mean, like, Hyrule ?

...Ok, I'm jesting, they probably mean Cloud Tops and the Wind Tribe. But in that case... Say that ? They make it sound like all the Minish live in the sky ! Precisely between two versions of the sky !

Are minish angels...? No, better question. ARE MINISH OOCCA ??

This one annoys me greatly for several reasons, but I'm going to be so so brave about it :

As you can see, it's a representation of the LoZ Timeline, with two games highlighted : Link's Awakening and Phantom Hourglass. It's because this is talking about when Link goes in adventures in parallel worlds.

So firstly, fuck Majora's Mask, right ?

And then, the thing I have underlined is saying that those events happened in "both case after Ganon was slayed".

See how they say Ganon and not Ganondorf. See it, 'cause I'm not going to make any comment about it because it's nOT THAT IMPORTANT

Quick reminder : Ganondorf got defeated but Hyrule was left destroyed in Wind Waker (third branch of the timeline). Ganondorf's plans were foiled before he had time to do anything in Majora's Mask (second branch of the timeline).

You know where Ganondorf didn't get defeated ?? IN THE FIRST BRANCH OF THE TIMELINE. THE ONE WHERE LINK'S AWAKENING IS.

Really, why go out of your way to say that if it's Not Fucking Correct ? This book wakes up some kind of ancient wrath in me that should only belong to children whose snack got confiscated in school !

Ok, as I said earlier, there aren't many lore mistakes, but that's good because they are the ones that makes me question my sanity the most. Let's go to the category you're probably waiting for :

What the fuck mistakes

Starting with a tame one, but :

This book is incapable of saying the word "regent". It is literally saying, for both Hilda and Midna, that these "princesses" are the "queens" of their kingdom.

No they're not, they're princesses, you just said so, IT'S NOT THE SAME GODDAMN TITLE !!

So this one almost made it to the translation mistakes, but it's in the 'what the fuck' ones simply because it's so poorly translated that I'm not even sure what they originally meant.

It's talking about Spirit Tracks' Tower of Spirit, and you can read "Sparkling trains are activated thanks to the gathered energy."

Excuse me,

Sparkling Trains ?

My guess is that they're talking about the tracks, but even then, they're not called "sparkling" ? And if they're really talking about the tracks, they're then talking about the Spirit Tracks. You know, the ones the game is named about ?

Then, a question : WHERE THE FUCK DID "SPARKLING" CAME FROM.

In the same style, but this time I simply hated it too much to put it in Translation Mistakes : Remember the Fused Shadows in Twilight Princess ? Well in french, they're called Shadow Shards.

What do they call it here ? "Melted Shadows". Not fused, not shards, I'm losing my fucking mind

As I have written on my sticky note, this one is a very disrespectful one. Ciela, the fairy from Phantom Hourglass, has the same name in french and in english, but somehow they still managed to write "Chiela".

Why is it so disrespectful ? BECAUSE IT SOUNDS LIKE "SHIT" IN FRENCH. SPECIFICALLY, IT SOUNDS LITERALLY LIKE THE SENTENCE "SHIT HERE". CIELA IS A PRETTY NAME, DAMNIT

Actually, it annoyed me so much that I went out of my way to show that thIS BOOK KNOWS HER NAME ! THEY DON'T HAVE ANY EXCUSES !!!

JUSTICE FOR CIELA !! FUCK YOU, FRENCH ZELDA ENCYCLOPEDIA !!!!

Honestly, it's funny to me now that these first pages had sticky notes. Ah, the good time from when I still had a slither of respect for this book...

Here, it just describes every Light Spirit from Twilight princess with animals : "goat, monkey, butterfly, snake". Firstly, they don't look exactly like animals, secondly...

Butterfly ?

I mean, Eldin has always looked like an owl to me ? Ok, the wings are vaguely butterfly-shaped, but it has a body and a face ?

Was Eldin a butterfly all along ? Am I going insane ? (ok yes I am, but reader, do you really see Eldin as a butterfly ???)

Oh ok, so now we just don't translate anything anymore. Remember how this isn't the first time this encyclopedia does that to me. You're right, why bother, I STILL HAVE TO FACT-CHECK THE BOOK ANYWAY, MIGHT AS WELL LEAVE IT AS IT WAS IN ENGLISH.

You know what else we could do ?

Leave actual mistakes in the book ! Let's forget a whole ass word in a sentence ! And why stop at random words ? Let's not proof read the title of the games ! Twillight Princess with two Ls ! What's next, MINISHIP CAP ??

(I said last time I'll never get over it, well, I didn't)

I think on my first post someone commented that the LoZ offical books weren't very accurate to begin with, and I hear that... But I still think there's a difference between accuracy and whatever the fuck this encyclopedia has going on

I spared you (and myself) some longer paragraphs that would have been harder to translate, but I swear to god it sounds like it hasn't been written by a human sometimes ! It's like they just put the whole book through a translator, and then went back to ADD some more mistakes ! I genuinely don't understand how an official product can be that bad !! It is hilarious, but also I want to bite through it sometimes.

I hope at least you enjoyed watching me lose my mind again ! It is fun to share how bad this book is, and I have to admit I had good laughs out of it. We haven't even attacked the items list yet... I'm scared ! But if I find atrocities, I'll report them here too.

(Maybe in like, 6 months, but I will !)

[the-aviary-system]

This is just what being in a system is like. If you don't take care of yourself, they will make you.

Our Sun doesn't annoy us into taking care of ourselves though.

He tends to do the mental equivalent of just picking someone up and going "We're going to get you some food now :)" and not taking no for an answer.

The "annoying until you go take care of yourself" is more like what Michael does to me if I won't get out of bed. He once literally shoved me off of our innerworld couch to get me to move. Bastard /aff

hes annoying and he knows it

ignore the jump in quality I took a break between the two

[breezytealy]

Summoning Goten and Trunks fans

HI RIGHT so I'm trying to get ages and school years for Goten and Trunks and it's driving me bonkers (working out Blue Hal but birthdays will do), feel free to chip in and correct, I'll update the original post with strikethrough corrections if needs be.

ETA: would be too much to correct but @secretsofdbz has a really good breakdown of why we can consider Daizenshuu (and therefore most online timelines) as out in the reblogs. The post below attempts to square Daizenshuu by squinting but sounds like it's neater to just ignore it. It's too late for my fics I'm stuck with parkour, but maybe not for yours if you're particular!)

At the end of the day it doesn't matter but I like everything to line up as best as possible and headcanon what I can't.

They're born 767 and 766 respectively, Future Trunks is postulated as Nov 766 as he's stated he was born about six months before the androids arrive. We know Goten is born after late May 767's Cell games.

In the early May 774 tournament before Buu we know they give their ages as 7 and 8, but since that's impossible for Goten I like to think he rounded up and Trunks was born earlier than Future Trunks. Trunks could have also lied but we know the timestream changes and it's just funnier to me that a 6 year old would lie to be a cooler age, especially if his friend is 8.

Running with those constraints we're at:

Goten: May 767 - Dec 767

Trunks: Jan 766 - early May 766

I thinkkk Blue Hal takes place 3 months before Super Hero, which is when Pan is 3. She's born 779 (seeing references to May?) so Blue Hal at the latest is early 783 could be late 782? She's also supposed to have just started kindergarten in Blue Hal, but I don't have the Japanese scan to see if it's Japanese or American naming, and kids join nursery all the time so idk if there's strict timing help there. We also know Goten and Trunks are one school year apart.

So! Taking late 782 for arguments sake:

Trunks is 16 turning 17 sooner rather than later

Goten is 15, turning 16 later rather than sooner

In the Japanese system which runs April to April and three year high school, to keep them only a year apart Trunks needs to be born after April (so basically born in April 766), making him a first year high schooler (already turned 16), so Goten is a final year middle schooler (May 767 - Dec 767, has or will turn 15 in that apr 782-mar 783 school year).

BUT we know they go to the same school, and it's literally written as "high school" in the Japanese, and it's in West City, so they could be a freshman and sophomore.

Going further, if it's a Western High School the American system runs September to September, that means Trunks can be born Jan-early May 766 and Goten May 776-Aug 767 for the year gap, and in that case Goten is a sophomore and Trunks is a Junior, as they'll be turning 16 and 17 in their respective school year.

So I can get all my ducks in a neat little row with a very constrained pick of April 766 and July 767 for birthdays. I think?

WHEEZE

[nijicx]

I remember in one of your post on how you made quirks, to never disregard an idea for someone ability, but with how unique the abilities are. Instead of simply making manipulation or project of elements powers. Is there any other tips or ways that help you make your character powers? Love your work and powers!

First of all thank-you so much ;__; I'm glad you get a kick out of my unhinged ramblings! Hmmm I guess my only tip besides what I outlined is just be curious about things even if you think they wont serve you now. I have an unfathomably short attention span so perhaps this is easier said than done for some folk, but I think an example I'll run with is very silly way I came up with a character last night~ I had a part in my story that I needed some sort of underground doctor for, Garrote nearly dies in a fight against Ren and gets a big ol hole in his chest, and its pretty hard to fix a giant hole in the chest, especially for such a big patchwork guy. Every time I have sat down to formally try and figure out what kind of character should be there I have failed. But last night I was running the scene through my head since I thought about making a few panel comic about it and I just saw a girl character eating a burger sitting at the edge of the tub while healing Garrote, and I was like "Well that's weird, but kinda funny, I like that, how can I make that work?"

and so then I was like "well it'd be great if she could create flesh...so her power should be some sort of regeneration power, but how can she just MAKE flesh and vasculature systems? and then my brain went back to the burger and was like "well...burger is technically flesh...wait" and then googled up how the body goes about filling holes when it's healing, i.e reconnecting its vasculature system and creating a matrix of cells for the flesh to basically seal back together, and so I decided that her power would be that when she eats flesh, she's able to create extracellular matrix in others and heal/regenerate their wounds.

I ended up thinking it was really funny and weird, and so then was like "well how do I nerf the fact that she could just buy like 12 McDondalds dollar menu hamburgers and heal a small army, which is when I thought "well, burgers are beef/pork/chicken, that kind of flesh while similar, is probably not good for intensely life threatening injuries like Ivan has, and it feels like it would more or less just be a patch job for things like stabs/bullet wounds. So then I had the horrible idea that she'd have to take in human flesh to resuscitate someone who was that far gone already, to be able to reform all of the complex structure of the actual human body, kind of like how some people can get flesh/organ transplants from animals, but they aren't quite a one-to-one match and can cause issues. (pretty sure I learned that fact from some weird facebook post and googled it after to see if that actually happened)

So I ended up making her villain name Cannibal Matrix (Or Hanibelle Matrix, haven't decided which yet, second one is funnier but time will tell) All of this process happened within about 15 minutes or so I guess the TLDR is, everyone's brains work in a specific way, if I fight the way my brain enjoys expressing itself, it usually just leads to me coming up with nothing and to myself getting frustrated. I think there is merit to sitting down formally and telling yourself that you're gunna come up with something in one sitting, but I think 90% of my ideas come when I am doing other things and my brain is just wandering around thinking about whatever.

I think though if I think about it further, imagining the scene itself helped form the character that needed to be there for me, the rest I sort of just happened to fall into place, so spend some time actually imagining interactions between your characters, your brain might fill in the spaces all on its own~ Expose yourself to lots of art and music, and weird facts about the world, fill the well your brain has to pull from when it comes to drawing inspiration to make something new~

[aethercurrent]

If you've been around, I just finished Time Travel AU. If you're from AO3, you know what this post is and you can skip further down to read more. If you don't know what Time Travel AU is, it's a long FFXIV fanfic I've been working on for the better part of six years. Five and a half of which it's been online to read.

This post is to document some of the early plotting that I never talked about written down into a coherent-ish(?) post. Mostly to get it out of my system and to hopefully stave off the absolute breakdown I'll have once that "it's finished after six years" thing settles in.

Let's start this off with something funnier, because this a looooooooong post: the name.

(That isn't a word, for the record. I just mashed two nouns together to be funny.)

And then, finally, being a class clown at heart, I follow that up with:

It wasn't too long, and that joke that took me half a minute to come up with stuck around. It still makes me chuckle.

But, I suppose now we go back to a couple months before that conversation took place.

~

The first idea for the AU started rotating in my head a few days after finishing Shadowbringers. I’m kind of a sucker for time travel of any sort (a good chunk of my favourite media of all time includes it somehow!), and another thing I enjoy is enemies to “unfortunately, we’re on the same side for a while”.

So, as one does after a game thoroughly rearranges their brain, I started throwing darts at random points and saw what started sticking.

The first major things decided for the fic at that early conception stage were the following points:

the time travellers are WOL, Exarch, Ryne, Elidibus

the Final Days were caused by the star itself

Hythlodaeus (shade or real deal) is involved (maybe as 14th?)

Hydaelyn and Zodiark are non-violently undone by the end

it ends with a city by the Crystal Tower on the Source

I started drafting a few ideas for it over a couple weeks while waiting for 5.1.

Initially I genuinely wasn’t sure if the WOL in the story was going to be Meteor or my own WOL (every iteration of her has been in this fic, but when it started she was actually still a male Seeker… he’s the jumpy conjurer tagging along in the Praetorium; and the Dunesfolk, Highlander, and the Hrothgar are all obvious or hidden in the background, too). It took me a while before I settled on Meteor, mostly because I don’t want to ship her with NPCs, really. Also, Catboy Lahen was extremely jumpy and wouldn’t have been able to keep him being a time traveller and an Ascian secret for long. I needed someone made of sterner stuff, sorry Catboy Lahen.

The party was a proper light party at that stage, too, even before I settled on Meteor (Meteor / Ryne as tank, Exarch as healer, Ryne / Lahen and Elidibus as DPS)… and then dropped that once I started getting into the more detailed part of plotting.

By the time 5.1 rolled around I begrudgingly accepted that the WOL was going to be the 14th member of the Convocation, but I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t like that. I still don’t like it, actually. I would’ve liked the WOL being a genuine random soul choosing the road and becoming modern day Azem just as Venat and her successor were before them, instead of having it just be Venat’s successor 2 electric boogaloo.

I also finally accepted the clown’s nose and admitted that my favourite Ascian was Lahabrea because he was a good villain back when I started in the last couple days of 2014. I was disappointed that after how much Emet-Selch and Elidibus got and were getting throughout the end of Stormblood and Shadowbringers, Lahabrea still hadn’t gotten much of anything else. Yes. The first time I met one of my now better friends, she joined call for Endwalker fanfest and the first thing she ever heard from me was me straight up bursting into tears over FFIV references and Pandaemonium.

A few more plot points were also starting to come together:

I wanted Emet-Selch and Lahabrea as POV characters

Hythlodaeus definitely was going to be one as well

he was going to have sat by and watched all of history

he was going to be tempered by Hydaelyn and Zodiark

Unukalhai, if not a POV character, was going to be somewhat important

the party was going to try saving some NPCs who died (success rate varying)

Meteor’s characterisation started to crystallise a bit more

because of that, they were going to try and substantially alter the Steppe section

Lahabrea would be explosive early on, leading to him being taken out of 2.55

Minfilia vanished before she could catch on to Ascian shenanigans

Ysayle would catch on to that, though

It’s glossed over in the finished fic because it’s mostly irrelevant, but as I worked on on the plot draft more and more, I noticed that the party accidentally fit into the elemental chart rather neatly:

Lahabrea as lightning; most volatile and destructive party member

Emet-Selch as fire; also fairly temperamental and not easy to work with

Elidibus as wind; easier to handle but still fairly dangerous

Meteor as earth; unmoving object that can bury a lot of things if they want to

Exarch as water; that one was mostly a “river of time” joke, I won’t lie

Ryne as ice; it’s the closest to light and once she’s determined she’s unyielding

Hythlodaeus as light; absolute stasis due to his circumstances

Unukalhai as darkness; always on the move and always thinking

A lot of the character dynamic comes from that! Emet-Selch and Lahabrea don’t get along, Elidibus manages to get along with both of them. Ryne as the most interesting mortal out of the bunch as far as Emet-Selch is concerned stems from a fire and ice joke that ran away with me; him and the Exarch butting heads is a water and fire joke. The reason why Ryne was the one to surprise Elidibus comes from the fact that she’s a solid ice wall to his wind, and so on and so forth.

That’s also why Unukalhai remains closer to the Ascians to some degree, while Hythlodaeus has absolutely no qualms whatsoever interacting with mortals as long as his restrictions are adhered to even if he doesn’t like them in the end.

It became extremely less relevant as time went on, but a lot of the early fic can be traced to that elemental balance.

Along with the elemental balance of the team, I started working on the magic system for the Ancients. I was extremely stuck on the sidequests in Amaurot and how two of them dealt with the WOL not being able to use creation magicks. I thought it was interesting that it seemed as if the one making clothes didn’t use a concept crystal, while in one you were handed one to summon those funny slimes.

The final point was that you had to catch a cubus for one while you didn’t for the other.

So, eventually I came to the magic system in the fic. Three classes of magicks (body, soul, environment), and differing levels of innate ability and trained skill. Ironically, the three antagonist Unsundered all fit into three out of four extremes of that latter scale…

Then there was the question of what was considered “dark arts” before the Sundering. It wasn’t necessary, none of the main characters would be students of the dark arts, but it was a fun thought experiment. Eventually I came up with the idea to animate something inanimate with malicious intent. Living weapons, defensive automatons, sentient traps, and so on and so forth.

I started applying that to all of the relevant Ancients, and it was a lot more fun than I want to admit here.

Essentially what the concept crystals thing came down to in the end was a certain level of intricate casting and preservation. Lahabrea can create a flock of his birds effortlessly because he knows the concept inside out with all its details and intricacies, while someone trying to summon it themselves would have to use a crystal to get the details right. That’s also why most of the time the Ascians don’t seem to be using concept crystals—they aren’t creating much, and when they are it’s things they already know how to make.

Actually, I dug out the notes on the innate/trained scale. There’s a lot of things that are irrelevant for the fic on that, but let me write down the most relevant ones:

Emet-Selch: soul; high innate/low trained

Lahabrea: body; high innate/high trained

Elidibus: environment; low innate/high trained

Hythlodaeus: soul; high innate/not trained

Alexis (Meteor’s ancient): environment/dark arts; low innate/medium trained

Igeyorhm: body; medium innate/high trained

Minfilia: body; low innate/low trained

Venat: environment; medium innate/high trained

Rafael (previous Elidibus): soul; low innate/high trained

There was also the question of what to do with Ancients in general. True, we had the shades in Amaurot as a general idea, but just like with Azem above, I wasn’t a fan of the featureless or just “human” thing. I still am not, for the record. I think it’s goofy to have everyone be proto-Hyurs and then post-Sundering we suddenly have Hydaelyn give some people a goddess-assigned fursona. And that’s coming from someone who previously played a Hyur, for the record!

But just like how magic focused on the elements specifically instead of the broader strokes, I decided that in ancient times there would be one term for the different tribes. I tried to handwave the shades away with making the region around Amaurot the ancestral home of proto-Hyurs… and then only had one of them in the party. Oops!

Overall, my thought process was to address the weird lore bit that apparently interracial relationships are frowned upon in Eorzea. I mostly wanted to… not… have that apply for ancient times because it’s fucking weird. Not gonna call it anything other than that.

From there, it was as simple as… naming everything and everyone, giving them a place they come from, and… oh god I wrote so much stuff that never came up just so it stayed internally consistent y’all, I almost don’t want to talk about it.

The main notes on that are in Astral Scions, Umbral Sinners I, but to recap:

Hyurs were Amaurotines

Elezen were Atlanteans

Miqo’te were Children of Sirius

Lalafell were Saronian Marchers (Saro)

Roegadyn were the Galg

Viera were Lunarians

Hrothgar were the Watchers

Au Ra were white-scaled Steelhearts and black-scaled Flareseekers; formerly the Volcana

Specifically the Au Ra have a lot of background history that gets mentioned due to Lahabrea being a Flareseeker. Long story. Too long for this already long post.

Speaking of Lahabrea, though; there was rhyme and reason behind why the Ascians were what they were.

Lahabrea (Flareseeker+Amaurotine) is a renowned scholar who also is something of a social outcast both in Amaurot due to his Flareseeker heritage and in Bodhum due to his Amaurotine heritage, which leads to him being quite hard to deal with thanks to bad experiences way in the past

Elidibus (Child of Sirius+Saronian Marcher) is both very quiet and observant and still relies on company if not community and is rather lost without the support of those he deems his family

Emet-Selch (Amaurotine) is the one who misses home the fiercest out of all of them because that’s where his family and he always belonged, that’s where everyone he ever loved was

Hythlodaeus (Atlantean+Amaurotine-Lunarian) feels all over the place and cuts out his paternal home under the waves and his maternal home high above ground to find his own home

Venat (Amaurotine+Lunarian) grew up on her father’s stories about how the star looks from the Floating City of Babil and wanted the more grounded people of her home to see that as well

Another fun thing about ancient times was the fact that I could do whatever I want. It’s not that glaringly obvious with their names, but when it comes to their cities and settlements in general, I got to go a bit wild with it.

And with “wild” I mean I had some fun picking settlement names across the Final Fantasy series. I hope people who know the series a bit outside of XIV itself had some fun with the interludes; I know I had a lot of fun with it. I think if I had to pick a favourite it’d be the Floating City of Babil, the underground city Insomnia, and Archades on the mountains by the sea.

Again, I think having everything, apparently, be Ancient Greek Mythology is… stifling. I admit that even in my more canon-compliant other works I struggle with it. There’s a lot of myths to draw inspiration from; I for one would’ve loved Hermes to deal with a mfing Wolpertinger. Creature of all time.

But… at that point I was writing two different drafts. One where Unukalhai joined shortly before Hythlodaeus as POV character (which also was a joke about the darkness-aligned character joining before the light-aligned one because darkness is active), and one where he remained a non-POV but important character. Kind of similar to what Minfilia became after she was saved! It was the same for both of them up until he joined the party for good.

If I had gone with 7 POV characters instead of my full party set-up, there was a bit of an act dedicated to unravelling his feelings on this nonsense. Specifically a non-POV Unukalhai wouldn’t have spent as much time with everyone else and would have gone down a different mental rabbit hole of eventually struggling with not being able to get his revenge on Igeyorhm while also starting to feel like a replacement heist from an alternate timeline self is extremely creepy considering how the “heroes” of the Void all changed until they were effectively replaced by alternate versions of themselves. He’d have tagged along for Meteor’s Regula mission and would have gotten to hear their version of the replacement heist after they escape from Garlemald together. (Meteor taking over this timeline’s version of themself grew much less important overall as the drafting continued, so it never really came up again beyond Titan where the alternate self died during Living Dead).

After that Unukalhai would have mellowed out a bit until he would join the Ascians and Cylva on the First to deal with the Flood of Light. That would’ve been the last of him until the part where Meteor and G’raha come to the Empty.

Overall, a non-POV Unukalhai would have been less gloomy but also would have been a completely different beast. He remains fairly introspective and reclusive across both drafts, but the reclusion gets the better of him as non-POV character.

The setting itself was also becoming rather rigid—part of having so many things set in stone while adding more and more. It would be extraordinarily hard to integrate whatever canon proceeded with. I couldn’t add or remove characters because that led to a ripple effect throughout the whole plot, and the ending was admittedly the first thing I decided on after I got the idea for the premise. It was the only thing I couldn’t negotiate myself out of.

I can work with that! I’ve worked with that before!

But unlike previous longfics, something about TTAU felt daunting in ways I couldn’t articulate at any point. Still can’t. I guess I just really wanted it to be everything I’d want to read at any given time, and I really am my own harshest critic. Great going, Ms aethercurrent née vanitaslaughing, now you’ve made yourself anxious about disappointing the target audience (yourself).

I also struggled with not only making it fun for me but also for readers; I wouldn’t have posted it if I didn’t want to share it with people. I hope I did a good job in the end, but really I can only speak for myself here. If you read it, even partially, I hope you at least had some measure of fun before you dropped that absolute behemoth of a fic, and if you finished it entirely there are no words in either language I speak to convey how happy I am that my silly big baby entertained you to stick through with it until the end.

I eventually reached a point where more and more details were starting to form that were needed to keep things straight while probably never coming up.

Every member of the Convocation before the Sundering has a name and was assigned a race. Most of them are mentioned in an Interlude, but in most cases there’s some sort of underlying joke to them. Similarly all of them received titles similar to Speaker, Emissary, Architect, Seer; I attempted to keep it somewhat balanced and/or in line with a fantasy government. Messenger Mitron and Listener Loghrif sound a bit redundant with the Emissary Elidibus around, but those two specifically mostly stick to Amaurot and the more immediate surrounding settlements—specifically calling back to that one city mentioned in the sidequests in Amaurot where you deal with the debating shades. Something akin to a national relations minister, an international relations minister, and one specifically for the neighbouring countries.

At around that time the Twelve were also decided to be actual genuine deities of the star. A bit of inspiration comes from Sailor Moon (nothing concretely 100% similar, but the Twelve are effectively the star’s Sailor Scouts who also have the ability to become a new small system if they decide to leave), but I mostly just wanted them to be, y’know. Gods. Coming back to the issue I have with canon going “everything’s Amaurot”, I can’t say I love how the Twelve are in canon but I do adore them as characters. It made me choosing Menphina as the one to speak with the group all the more sweeter since I think out of all of them she’s my favourite design-wise.

There was also the thing with the Seer position that needed to be tackled at this point. I’m morbidly fascinated by characters who know the story they’re in but can’t do much to influence it because they can only tell what path they’re on depending on the ending.

I think the biggest struggle especially towards the end was the fact that I often drafted at least two possible POVs for a chapter. I often went in expecting to write one POV, got stuck irreversibly on it somehow, steamrolled the whole thing, and wrote out the other draft. I’ve cannibalised previous drafts into complete rewrites of the same POV a lot more than you’d think I have. And I only save a copy of a chapter that reached a certain word threshold or if there’s something integral written to a degree I like.

One of the worst offenders of the bunch was Chapter 78… which became Chapter 79 when I posted it. Yeah. It got so bad and frustrating that I had to make dealing with Hythlodaeus future me’s problem. Thankfully it didn’t cut too much into the pacing thanks to Act XI being extremely slow due to how introspective it was.

In the earlier days one of the other struggles was formatting. Something about my documents went haywire when pasted, leading to endless strings of completely superfluous <spans> that added strange spacing issues between all that mess. It was something that my older works struggled with too, which became a non-issue over the years (thankfully. I shudder thinking about possibly having to deal with that issue while already spending 48 hours formatting Eden Rewrite correctly).

The documents just eventually started to bug out because they were so damned long. I never expected them to be in one, but I have five documents holding all of this fic. It’s rather funny to see four chilling and the fifth on top with a 00 as its first characters in the document title so I see it first.

It's... really bittersweet to remove that 00 and seeing them all together now.

That's... about it for the fic as it was posted there. Whether you read the fic or just read this post, once again: thank you.

Thank you for sticking with me for six years, or for reading about the earliest of these six years!

~

For those who remember at a certain point I was considering overhauling the fic and implementing canon from Endwalker at that time, there's a bit more post to go specifically relating to that idea!

You’d think I’d struggle with keeping the canon characters and the fanfiction versions apart as someone who prefers staying canon compliant, but over the years those guys became their own beasts. Ophion could never have been Themis, but why would I want them to be the same? I needed Ophion for this fic to work, after all.

A lot, and I mean a metric shitton of stuff, breaks and changes there. It’s been a fun thought experiment at the very least. I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t like the Warrior of Light being a reincarnation of Azem’s sundered soul; I just like them being a nobody with no preconceived notion that they’re bound to adventure no matter what because that’s what their soul always did… but Hythlodaeus likewise can’t replace them in that case.

The solution to that first massive hurdle? I suck up the Azem thing, and instead of an Unsundered Hythlodaeus, the one that joins the party is the Shade. His plot stays surprisingly intact through all of that, but instead of dealing with forced indecisiveness it becomes more of a plot about identity and what to do when you’re a creation on the path to freeing the real deal you were based on.

Out of all of them, Lahabrea changes surprisingly little—I wrote him like a stern father to Igeyorhm in this, and you can mostly mix and match a lot of that onto Erichthonios. Instead of dealing with her ascensions and the fact that she needed to be taken out, Lahabrea gets to see his son reincarnate and die over and over again.

Honestly? I could even keep the dual Elidibus approach. Instead of Ophion (the previous one’s student) and Rafael (the Zodiark sacrifice), it would be Elidibus (the Heart of Zodiark) and Themis (the rest of the Heart still remaining with Zodiark). There would be a lot of overlap with the Shade here but in the end the Shade and Hythlodaeus would exist independently from one another while the Heart of Zodiark reunites and becomes Themis again.

I think the parts where I would have to genuinely start rewriting it entirely is where to integrate canon Venat over TTAU Venat and the Endsinger. TTAU Venat is a lot more mellow than canon Venat—a shitty mother but an excellent politician versus canon’s all-loving hero with an understanding of but no love lost for politics. The Meteia as a villain are a lot less vague and distant than the Star Itself. Instead of a journey to the innermost reaches it’s to the edge of the universe. Doable, yes, but marginally harder to do. Honestly, thinking about it as I’m writing this, I think I would have to do an arc where at least Meteor if not all Sundered go to Elpis in the past to learn something while the Unsundered+Shade remain in the present to deal with the Final Days…?

Actually, let’s tackle the characters one by one in a canon-adjusted remake.

This would be assuming that there is inter-shard travel so the starting group would still be Meteor, Ryne, and G’raha. The one major major change would be that instead of Elidibus the “Ancient” to go with them would be the Shade.

Meteor would change the least. They don’t care about being Alexis, they don’t care about being Azem either. They’re one of a handful children of a farmer family in La Noscea, not some sort of government freak from ancient times long before they were ever born. They didn’t start travelling because their soul told them to after they got the Echo, they started travelling because they damn well wanted to after seeing the Calamity, get outta here with that “Azem” nonsense.

In an Elpis episode they would do the opening section for the most part. Not much else to say here.

G’raha would be a lot more cheerful once the initial horror stage of travelling through time to prevent the end of the world again faded. He’d still have his struggles with the idea of possibly letting down the future Ironworks and being arguably the least experienced in the adventuring department.

In an Elpis episode, G’raha would likely be the one to deal with Venat overall. She’d be the perfect foil to him; an experienced traveller to his inexperienced adventurer. They’re both old but he’s barely a blip on her lifespan. They’re both incredibly determined to find the reason for why this is happening.

Ryne would feel a bit more resentment towards Ascians in general at that point. Other than that, her struggle was always being the odd one out amongst the Sundered, about being face to face with the woman she was named after and seeing why that woman was so beloved. About finding her own niche and staying there, no matter the people she loses.

I think out of all of the Sundered in a possible back-in-time-again Elpis episode, she would be the one to sympathise the most with Hermes despite also possibly interacting with him the least; she would likely lead the charge right before Ktisis Hyperboreia and her plot in Elpis would mostly be about travelling treacherous foreign terrain just the way Thancred taught her.

Unukalhai’s a bit of an odd case. After all there’s still two drafts, one where he joins the party as main POV character, and one where he becomes something along the lines of TTAU Minfilia. In a rework of that, I’d have to apply a lot of the Void lore since revealed to him, which makes him go from an odd case to an even odder case. He’d… either possibly involuntarily make Azdaja’s predicament worse, or free her before Endwalker happens but she loses her memories and becomes his cool new partner in crime until a completely flabbergasted Vrtra has to drop the facade immediately because no one told him a thrice-damned Warrior of Light had his sister tagging along what the fuck.

The hypothetical Elpis Episode would have a POV Unukalhai likely be the one to help Meteion get a gift for Hermes. His already intense internal hatred coming to the surface to turn a flower from bright white to darkest shadow, mirroring what happened with Hermes and the flowers in the past? Yeah. That’s the good shit.

In a non-POV case he’d stick with the Scions to help deal with the Final Days and his section of the story most likely would have gone to Ryne.

Ophion would likely still be a soul in Zodiark. Other than that, he’s not relevant.

Themis or the Heart of Zodiark… wouldn’t necessarily be the first one to join them. Actually, I think he’d be the last one. Immovable object without memories meets unstoppable force that draws in his allies. Overall he would be a lot colder on account of having no memories, and be rather fiercely protective of the other Unsundered for reasons he cannot recall. He’d make for an excellent diplomat, but it would likewise lead straight into his greatest vice: vague, foggy memories of something other other that might float up to the surface on occasion. Claudien would be an extremely weak spot for him, except unlike Lahabrea in the same position, Themis cannot tell how or why he’s reacting like that.

While the Sundered are off for their Episode Elpis, Themis would likely scour through the Crystal Tower to find a way to interact with the him from the timeline the others came from.

Emet-Selch would be the first legitimate Ascian to “join” their cause.

Mostly out of morbid curiosity, partially because he wants to figure out how in the name of all good graces a recreation of Hythlodaeus with sentience so advanced it can be deadpan sarcastic and have an identity crisis is with there, and it’s driving him just a bit insane. He’d actually be a lot more antagonistic as a result, and he’d be the one mostly bemoaning the Sundered and how Meteor is a disgrace to Azem early on until they have enough of his nonsense and beat him up. That would serve the purpose of actually confirming that they have the strength to kill an alternate timeline version of Emet-Selch and he mellows out a bit. Not much. Just a bit.

Overall he’d be a lot more prickly—which makes for an interesting switch when during the Final Days on the Source he very swiftly drops the antagonism. It’s a bit of a “been there, done that” attitude but since the star itself is in danger he has surprisingly few qualms about saving a few Sundered while he’s at it.

Lahabrea wouldn’t change much like I said, though there would be a lot more ruthlessness behind anything and everything he does. He’s willing to walk over corpses no matter what instead of calming down a little on that once he’s been thoroughly humbled (and untempered).

He’d also be a bit more strangely sentimental internally around Minfilia specifically; he already compares her to Igeyorhm a few times in TTAU proper but in a canon-compliant rewrite the comparison point would be Erichthonios. No matter how ruthless he is, at the end of Pandæmonium he and Erichthonios started the long journey of making up, and Minfilia reminds him of Erichthonios’s best qualities in a quite haunting way. They’re both tenacious and care about everything and everyone from the bystander to the one causing the mess… except Minfilia is a bit more spicy and willing to speak her mind. He wouldn’t be as fond of her by the end, but he’d still accept her terms and teach her.

Lahabrea during the Final Days would likely be recruited by Urianger and the Loporrits as additional quality control.

I’ve gone over the Hyth Shade, but the endgame there would be essentially affirming that he is as much a person as the Sundered are. Sure, he may have been someone else’s creation but that doesn’t make him any less a person on this star, not to mention he was one of the time travellers.

The real Hythlodaeus also would’ve been rather delighted to have an identical twin, and one who’s fighting against the Final Days no less.

Can’t go into too much detail otherwise, since this canon compliant version never quite left the drafting phases for obvious reasons. He’s the one character who more reacted to the plot than being the one to move it along, and without the plot there isn’t much to say.

He’d have stayed behind to deal with the Final Days, and he’d likely have been one of the first to go to Garlemald when news of the skies changing there broke.

The one major departure from canon would be that Zodiark and Hydaelyn aren’t fully slain—Zodiark specifically it put under a complete stasis spell in the middle of unravelling, but that breaks the protective shroud He has over Etheirys and the Final Days start happening again. Hydaelyn created meticulous seals and mechanisms to ensure that despite being bound the protective shroud remains, but under full stasis and while the whole thing is falling apart…

(Hyth Shade was the one to suggest it to the Watcher, Elidibus, and Emet-Selch as an absolute last resort. None of them really wanted Zodiark to suffer; the main goal still remains to bring back those Ancients should it prove possible).

All issues with how wonky and not finished that is aside, I’d also get a lot of extremely fun things to explore. Jullus already is one of my favourite characters introduced in Endwalker, but having him tell his story to Emet-Selch would be super interesting. There’s knowing what you’re doing, and there’s coming face to face with it, and that would genuinely be super cool to do.

Then there’d be the whole Heart of Sabik business—I’d unironically love for that whole mess to unfold with the real Lahabrea and Elidibus there while there’s memory-creations Erichthonios and Themis there as well. That would be absolutely chaotic on top of Athena also being there. Atrocious vibes, ten out of ten.

Likewise, Ryne and Vrtra would also be an interesting pair of characters to interact; they’re both the youngest siblings (of a sort in Ryne’s case), they’re both intensely protective of the people they care about, and they couldn’t bring themselves to hurt those they love even if it were absolutely necessary until someone else confirmed that this was the only way. There’s also that loss of family (Azdaja missing, Ratatoskr/Bahamut/Nidhogg dead; the whole abandoned timeline) that would have them interact in a neat way too, they’re quite similar to each other.

Unukalhai and Zero. She’s effectively everything he was said to be and they both failed. There’d be an interesting dynamic between them because of that—even if getting Zero in on the plot would be rather hard. Unukalhai would definitely try and sympathise with Zenos’s voidsent and maybe try to get them to abandon their master, and through that realise that she might not be there entirely willingly.

But overall, the hardest character to implement would be the Meteia. There’s eight main characters and there’s eight different opinions on this mess, ranging from intensely sympathetic and willing to rebuild burnt bridges (Ryne, Meteor, Hyth Shade, Elidibus if he regains his memories before Ultima Thule), apathetic despite how high the stakes are (Unukalhai, Elidibus if he doesn’t regain his memories), different levels of less sympathetic (Lahabrea, Emet-Selch), and the option where G’raha has such intense issues with being not overly sympathetic and having no sympathy at all that his understanding of the situation is wildly out of control until the very end.

Having worked with them as both individuals and as a hivemind in a couple writing exercises, I honestly would have had a Meteion for every main character, and give all eight of them a proper story on top of what’s already going on there. Narrative foils that lead both parties to Ultima Thule.

Putting that one lightly: that would’ve been a goddamn motherfucking nightmare to write. Fun, but a nightmare.

And that's a lot coming out of Ms Almost Half a Million Words Across Six Years.

[olderthannetfic]

Man, the Americans enraged because a couple of Greeks dared tell them they don't know Greek culture firsthand and therefore should shut the fuck up sometimes.

There's nothing I find funnier than seeing them just be outraged because someone they perceive as inferior told them they're wrong. It's like watching kids in fifth grade yell insults at the teacher while implementing the big kid words they learned during the week because they think it's gonna make for a more compelling argument.

People were really saying "No, we don't count you as one of us if you weren't raised within our country and culture, and therefore should sometimes shut up when it comes to discussing culture that isn't yours," and the Americans very rational response was "YOU'RE ACTUALLY ANTI IMMIGRATION AND A FASCIST AND PART OF GOLDEN DAWN AND I AM VERY INTELLIGENT AND YOU'RE NOT!!!"

I don't know how to tell you, but people who live in the old countries don't think of you as immigrants. When we talk about the issue of immigration (which is mostly: people in need of asylum are moving here and we don't have the resources to help them out and the EU isn't helping us either, so... not whatever you think), we aren't talking about cousin Vinnie who is four generations removed from us because great-great-grandpa moved there. You're not the main character here. Get a grip.

And yes, X-American culture is not part of our culture. It's a watered down version of (maybe) our culture that spent the past centuries being watered down and got progressively more and more fucked up and offensive for us. Culture comes from the place you live in. Americans are literally the only ones who bitch about not being immediately accepted by the populations of places they've never seen in first person (or hold any respect for.)

PS: I always read the Americans on this site cry that the school system is fucked up and didn't teach them anything, that it's unfair they didn't receive the education they should've received, etc etc, but somehow, when one of us evil weasels dares sneak out of its hole in the ground and correct you on something you're absolutely wrong about, we just get told to get back into our hole because... stereotyped notion you also saw written on Tumblr by other Americans who also routinely write posts about how they didn't receive the education they should've. I am not the only one who sees the problem with this, right? The mental disconnect between word and action?

--

[august-anon]

Hello, Mario Kart anon here! I’ve recently been inspired by all the tickle headcanons and mini-fics and some of your fics to write my own small story. I’m thinking about writing one based around Bruce turning training into a game of hide and seek or tag. They both have so much potential and I can decide which one would be funnier. I was hoping I could get some input from Chef August on which plot to choose and who shall be the final victim of Bruce “tickle monster”  Wayne.

(Also, instead of posting the fic through submissions, would it be alright if I sent it through asks and you just post it as a fic with credits?)

hello again mario kart anon!! omg, it is SO exciting that you are thinking about writing a fic based on your training games headcanon, i am SO excited to see it!! genuinely i love both ideas of hide and seek and tag so much its so hard to decide skjdfsfh just gotta write two fics i guess (/j to be clear, no pressure to write two fics at all, no pressure to write even one fic if you find its not working out for you for any reason!)

it is SUCH a tough decision for which game to go with..... the anticipation play of both of them is so strong..... hide and seek, you slowly hear your siblings get found and laugh themselves to tears at your father's hands........ tag it's everyone-for-themselves as you try to not end the game as "It" so that youre not the tickle victim of the day.........

i think, since it sounds like you might just be starting to dip your toe into fic writing (though i could be wrong, maybe its just your first foray into tickle fic writing but you have other writing experience) and you sound like you're looking to write something on the shorter side, the tag route may be the way to go! that way it seems like there's focus on one singular ticklee at the end rather than a trail of giggling children left in Bruce's wake lol

as for the victim of this fiendish tickle monster........ look besties, i am such a Dick Grayson girlie KJDHFJKDH i love all the batfamily like so, so dearly (even the ones im not confident enough to write myself yet like Babs, Steph, Duke, Cass, etc.), but in the end i am SUCH a Dick Grayson girlie........ so my heart of hearts says Dick (maybe he's been on a tickle monster rampage himself, maybe he just needs to be taken down a peg, maybe he's been too busy in Bludhaven and hasnt been down to Gotham to see the family much recently, maybe Bruce just wants to mess with his eldest baby, idk!!) lol. Unless you're feeling it more for someone else!! I know I would be more than happy to see any of the batkids that you choose for the situation

as for the asks vs submissions.... we can try it, maybe? do you mean for me to just post the ask directly, or copy the ask into a more formatted post and just make it obvious that it's a fic from "mario kart anon" (which -- let me know if you wanna stick with that anon name or if you wanna change it, totally up to you!!) I have like, 2 concerns on this, which are: I know they changed the wordcount limits on asks -- did they remove it completely, or is there still a longer wordcount limit that risks cutting your fic off depending on the length? and second concern, there's no formatting options in asks, so things like italics and such would be completely unavailable to you.

I answered an ask before on how we can work to keep anons anonymous via the submission system if yall want, since they revoked anonymous submissions (which SUCKS), but i also totally get if you dont even want solely me possibly seeing your URL, even if i'll probably forget it. back when i was a little lurking anon myself, not doing much more than shooting asks to wordstrings, i also never wouldve wanted my normie blog's name seen by anyone, even if they would probably forget it

[wumblr]

tag game tagged by @rih-easy

last song: um i was listening to midlife chorus and doechii alligator bites in the car yesterday. midlife was on end of year lists and it was pretty good (doechii made my top ten, a couple posts back). today i've been sitting here in silence staring at the wall eating a pink orange i'm groggy i haven't made coffee yet

favorite color: i think my wardrobe is majority gray and black at this point but when i was a kid i used to say green

currently watching: did you guys know there was a meme movie called the chronicles of rick roll. well there wasn't. but i just watched a video essay about it by sarah z's script writer lady emily

currently reading: i have a little shelf of unfinished books and jodorowsky psychomagic is probably the most recently opened one. and that was like at the beginning of the year i do NOT read a lot of books unfortunately. i think most recently finished was l'engle short stories and that was also when i was doing a lot of air travel at the beginning of the year when my mom was in end of life care

last movie: hundreds of beaverrrrs. i thought my man would love it and while he was surprisingly attracted to the guy he progressively lost interest as more beavers died. we both agree it would have been funnier if the beavers were just attacking him apropos of nothing. not a movie where i wanted to watch the protagonist succeed. and yes, he's been begging me to grow my beard out ever since

sweet/savory/spicy: spicyyyy they don't make hot sauce hot enough for me and yes i mean at the hot sauce store. i would pull a lorde on hot ones. can somebody email me when they start running out of celebrity guests because i am available for booking

relationship status: well you see i'm dating this guy who's dating a guy...

current obsessions: umm. nuclear policy. sorry i never change. there's a new karen silkwood docuseries. i did not know she died in a car crash i thought she ate a polonium sandwich. every time i try to look her up it immediately devolves into chaos and i've apparently never retained any of the information. but did you know she's namedropped in the classic 1996 tori amos track, "horses"

last thing i googled: i do not have search history enabled but i'm pretty sure it was "rambutan" because they had an exotic fruit display at the grocery store and the word snuck into my brain. i did not buy any exotic fruits. you are what you eat and i'm chicken

this is bad form because it kills the tag game but usually what i do is say if you want to do this you can say i tagged you and i won't tell anyone. i don't like tagging people it's like paging them on the PA system at kmart like did you really need to do all that. like i don't mind being tagged but if you're getting tagged on my blog it's like a whole thing and you're about to get brigaded probably. @pizza

[disabled-stuck]

HI ITS ME CHRONIC PAIN ANON BACK AGAIN... here's my thoughts on who of the human cast is Aware That They Have Chronic Pain Issues. srry ppl were discussing and im like, Wow, Time For Me In Hc Central

june's issues start to really develop and get bad post-game (in my headcanons), so for a long period of time she literally has no one to talk to about it bc she's self-isolating. she eventually tells nannasprite about it when nanna is guilt-tripping her into getting up (nanna voice: Whatever works, hoohoo!), and nanna is like. this is my only granddaughter. i will do whatever i can for her. (i love june & nanna's dynamic. could u tell.) jasprose also is like GIRL!!! You Are In Pain!!! nanna & jasprose team up of the century to get june egbert to Acknowledge Her Problems

dave NO clue NO idea WILL not talk about it. maybe EVENTUALLY tells karkat about it but i don't think she ever seeks out a diagnosis or tries to get one. hes got old ingrained trauma about seeing doctors, which is something he's trying to get over, but like, he already has 4 bajillion other things to unpack about his childhood and healthcare systems are not historically good about chronic pain, a dismissal of their symptoms might set them back in that regard. they're just homebrewing this shit for now.

rose: yeah, she knows. she doesn't talk about it in those terms, though. instead of saying "i have a horrible migraine and cannot get out of bed" she tells kanaya to text the gc that she's afflicted by the Broodfester Woes and cannot join them this evening. theyve sort of picked up by now what that means but she thinks it's funnier this way.

jade: HMMM. i think she put herself through her denial paces but actually i think going grimbark essentially caused her to not feel her chronic pain (a side effect of condy's semi-control over her body), and when she got shunted back into her body she had to face the reality where she DIDNT hurt all the time like wow thats how ppl normally feel? what the fuck????

jane: oh absolutely fucking not does not know. unlike jade, his pain got WORSE during crockertier. yet it still takes literally two decades for him to finally acknowledge that his stuff is NOT normal and the fact that her whole friend group has chronic pain doesn't help, which kind of sucks. jane voice: well sometimes i can get out of bed when i have a headache and rose can't, so clearly its not the same (as if jane doesn't force himself out of bed even when he really shouldnt!!!). roxy has to be the one to tell him.

roxy: yeah she knows it's chronic pain. she's been worried about getting cirrhosis for years, and so has been keeping up to date on her physical health as a result. she figured it out pretty quickly after a couple flareups. trickster mode made it worse for her.

dirk: hal has been telling him for YEARRRRRRRRS that his carpal tunnel is just that, carpal tunnel. and yet. AR: Dirk, if you do not take better care of yourself, you are never going to be capable of building me a body of my own. TT: 1. I'm fine. 2. I'm not building you a body anyways, so the point is moot. anyways he accepts it during the game bc he's like you know what. might as well admit it to myself. good thing, too, because it only gets worse after a couple decapitations.

jake: has pretty much always known, deep down, but like. she lives on an ISLAND. the hell is he going to do about it? no, better not to think about it. someday they'll be able to deal with it, but that day isn't today, and theres so much to do. so he represses it DEEPLY. normal action hero jake english doesn't have chronic pain, of course. she's a heroic manly lead, after all... (the deconstruction of that mindset sort of makes them acknowledge it, though.)

ANYWAYS I JUST RAMBLED AT YOU FOR A COUPLE HUNDRED WORDS HOPE U HAVE, A GOOD DAY/NIGHT/WHAT EVER

YYAYYY no you're so good nonnie thank u forever and ever

[funnierwhenavoidant]

this is funnier with AvPD, a typical "funnier as/with-" blog, but for AvPD. :

it's simple! i reblog posts i think are funnier when you have AvPD, and you can tag me in posts you think are funnier when you have AvPD. you can also send me post links in anonymous asks if you're too nervous to tag me. the only thing i ask is that you yourself have AvPD or avoidant traits when tagging/submitting anything for me to reblog. this account is run by ramlethal (@lesbi-am) in the group call system (@group-call).

profile picture is an edit of the AvPD flag (by @avpdvoidspace) but with the allied mastercomputer logo instead of the galaxy triangle, banner is a graphic i made myself also using the avpdvoidspace AvPD flag. this specific blog doesn't have a dni, don't interact if you're uncomfortable with us.

[pedulum-chronometry]

First, I need you to understand this post has permanently rewired by brain.

Second, this makes the scene where God gives Job a lecture for asking questions is like 120% funnier now. Like She had a plan. The original one was good, so good, but then well angels pushed back and She had to invent Hell on the fly to deal with things.

So now She moved on to The Plan 2.0 - special brimstone and fire edition and is trying to get on with it - with a diminished workforce no less. But here come Mr. Guilty-by-association, who for the record She really didn’t want to throw out but She draw a line and now has to stick to it, and this brand new demon just gives humanity knowledge as his opening gambit from the other side, like a fucked up wish you were here from a former friend. And God now has to do another Plan revision.

So She throws humans out of Eden and sends the flaming sword to keep it that way. Except, this angel sees the possible harm that could come to the newly pregnant Eve and in a completely loving and caring way just gives the flaming sword away to humanity. Like She didn't have reasons for keeping angel weapons away from humans in the first place. So the principality helped invent war instead of just standing there and looking menacing like he was supposed to!! Plan revision.

Now we move on to 'biblical times', the actual meat of the original plan only for the snake and the sword-giver to just keep showing up and messing with things. Noah's ark? was supposed to be a hard system reset to deal with the rampant war and strife introduced by history's worst guard and Her now favorite demon who She'll admit to Herself ONLY, has some good points, occasionally. Only it doesn't work. Plan revision.

So in comes Job. And he has questions. And really isn't that just the way things have been going from day one of this. And She lets him have it. The stress of having to account for constant changes to what was supposed to be a very straightforward Plan. Like how hard was this guys? I gave you instructions and all you had to do was follow them. Do you know how hard it is to rebalance the laws of the universe every time one of you just decides that it should work different? I made a fiery bush where the fire did not consume bush, I can do extraordinary and exceptional why do you keep drawing me back to the mundane and problematic? I'm trying to craft narrative and meaning here guys please stop messing with the constituent materials.

So people have knowledge and war and free will and God's just like "oh my me Jesus will you please come help me clean up this mess?". And he's just like "yeah mom whatever you need. What's this new draft you're working on? Apocalypse, fun name"

Like God is a frustrated writer who is BEGGING her characters to make different choices and just sitting there dumbfounded when they don’t. By the time we reach The Apocalypse (version 847626848.136-c final-final this time I really mean it!), She has given up on the direct approach. It clearly does not work for beings with free will. So She goes about with a much more light tough. Little bit of misinformation here and a dash of misunderstanding there and suddenly FINALLY She's got the plan going in the right direction.

Oh and those two trouble makers, her favorite snake and that angel he loves, those two deserve some payback. They like the world they way it is, don't want the end of the world? Go forth my children, expend effort only for your wheels to spin fruitlessly as you are thwarted from your plan's inception by other people and their godawful choices. You get to keep the planet but not before I mess with you two the way you messed with me. How do you like them apples? God out!

Awhile ago @ouidamforeman made this post:

This shot through my brain like a chain of firecrackers, so, without derailing the original post, I have some THOUGHTS to add about why this concept is not only hilarious (because it is), but also...

It. It kind of fucks. Severely.

And in a delightfully Pratchett-y way, I'd dare to suggest.

I'll explain:

As inferred above, both Crowley AND Aziraphale have canonical Biblical counterparts. Not by name, no, but by function.

Crowley, of course, is the serpent of Eden.

(note on the serpent of Eden: In Genesis 3:1-15, at least, the serpent is not identified as anything other than a serpent, albeit one that can talk. Later, it will be variously interpreted as a traitorous agent of Hell, as a demon, as a guise of Satan himself, etc. In Good Omens --as a slinky ginger who walks funny)

Lesser known, at least so far as I can tell, is the flaming sword. It, too, appears in Genesis 3, in the very last line:

"So he drove out the man; and placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." --Genesis 3:24, KJV

Thanks to translation ambiguity, there is some debate concerning the nature of the flaming sword --is it a divine weapon given unto one of the Cherubim (if so, why only one)? Or is it an independent entity, which takes the form of a sword (as other angelic beings take the form of wheels and such)? For our purposes, I don't think the distinction matters. The guard at the gate of Eden, whether an angel wielding the sword or an angel who IS the sword, is Aziraphale.

(note on the flaming sword: in some traditions --Eastern Orthodox, for example-- it is held that upon Christ's death and resurrection, the flaming sword gave up it's post and vanished from Eden for good. By these sensibilities, the removal of the sword signifies the redemption and salvation of man.

...Put a pin in that. We're coming back to it.)

So, we have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword, introduced at the beginning and the end (ha) of the very same chapter of Genesis.

But here's the important bit, the bit that's not immediately obvious, the bit that nonetheless encapsulates one of the central themes, if not THE central theme, of Good Omens:

The Sword was never intended to guard Eden while Adam and Eve were still in it.

Do you understand?

The Sword's function was never to protect them. It doesn't even appear until after they've already fallen. No... it was to usher Adam and Eve from the garden, and then keep them out. It was a threat. It was a punishment.

The flaming sword was given to be used against them.

So. Again. We have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword: the inception and the consequence of original sin, personified. They are the one-two punch that launches mankind from paradise, after Hell lures it to destruction and Heaven condemns it for being destroyed. Which is to say that despite being, supposedly, hereditary enemies on two different sides of a celestial cold war, they are actually unified by one purpose, one pivotal role to play in the Divine Plan: completely fucking humanity over.

That's how it's supposed to go. It is written.

...But, in Good Omens, they're not just the Serpent and the Sword.

They're Crowley and Aziraphale.

(author begins to go insane from emotion under the cut)

In Good Omens, humanity is handed it's salvation (pin!) scarcely half an hour after losing it. Instead of looming over God's empty garden, the sword protects a very sad, very scared and very pregnant girl. And no, not because a blameless martyr suffered and died for the privilege, either.

It was just that she'd had such a bad day. And there were vicious animals out there. And Aziraphale worried she would be cold.

...I need to impress upon you how much this is NOT just a matter of being careless with company property. With this one act of kindness, Aziraphale is undermining the whole entire POINT of the expulsion from Eden. God Herself confronts him about it, and he lies. To God.

And the Serpent--

(Crowley, that is, who wonders what's so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil anyway; who thinks that maybe he did a GOOD thing when he tempted Eve with the apple; who objects that God is over-reacting to a first offense; who knows what it is to fall but not what it is to be comforted after the fact...)

--just goes ahead and falls in love with him about it.

As for Crowley --I barely need to explain him, right? People have been making the 'didn't the serpent actually do us a solid?' argument for centuries. But if I'm going to quote one of them, it may as well be the one Neil Gaiman wrote ficlet about:

"If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization." --Robert G. Ingersoll

The first to ask questions.

Even beyond flattering literary interpretation, we know that Crowley is, so often, discreetly running damage control on the machinations of Heaven and Hell. When he can get away with it. Occasionally, when he can't (1827).

And Aziraphale loves him for it, too. Loves him back.

And so this romance plays out over millennia, where they fall in love with each other but also the world, because of each other and because of the world. But it begins in Eden. Where, instead of acting as the first Earthly example of Divine/Diabolical collusion and callousness--

(other examples --the flood; the bet with Satan; the back channels; the exchange of Holy Water and Hellfire; and on and on...)

--they refuse. Without even necessarily knowing they're doing it, they just refuse. Refuse to trivialize human life, and refuse to hate each other.

To write a story about the Serpent and the Sword falling in love is to write a story about transgression.

Not just in the sense that they are a demon and an angel, and it's ~forbidden. That's part of it, yeah, but the greater part of it is that they are THIS demon and angel, in particular. From The Real Bible's Book of Genesis, in the chapter where man falls.

It's the sort of thing you write and laugh. And then you look at it. And you think. And then you frown, and you sit up a little straighter. And you think.

And then you keep writing.

And what emerges hits you like a goddamn truck.

(...A lot of Pratchett reads that way. I believe Gaiman when he says Pratchett would have been happy with the romance, by the way. I really really do).

It's a story about transgression, about love as transgression. They break the rules by loving each other, by loving creation, and by rejecting the hatred and hypocrisy that would have triangulated them as a unified blow against humanity, before humanity had even really got started. And yeah, hell, it's a queer romance too, just to really drive the point home (oh, that!!! THAT!!!)

...I could spend a long time wildly gesturing at this and never be satisfied. Instead of watching me do that (I'll spare you), please look at this gif:

I love this shot so much.

Look at Eve and Crowley moving, at the same time in the same direction, towards their respective wielders of the flaming sword. Adam reaches out and takes her hand; Aziraphale reaches out and covers him with a wing.

You know what a shot like that establishes? Likeness. Commonality. Kinship.

"Our side" was never just Crowley and Aziraphale. Crowley says as much at the end of season 1 ("--all of us against all of them."). From the beginning, "our side" was Crowley, Aziraphale, and every single human being. Lately that's around 8 billion, but once upon a time it was just two other people. Another couple. The primeval mother and father.

But Adam and Eve die, eventually. Humanity grows without them. It's Crowley and Aziraphale who remain, and who protect it. Who...oversee it's upbringing.

Godfathers. Sort of.

[anendoandfriendo]

CN: bitching about Asshole again, general assholery about individual identity/identites

------

Fuckinf CRYING right now that Asshole knows us well enough that when we chanted "Curse cube! Curse cube! Curse cube!" at the best buy in response to some of her bullshit, because, you know, Teh 'Tism* and [redacted] was literally just vibing and

She (Asshole) was like "yeah yeah we all know about the Curse Cube" and now we can't say that anymore because she is Onto Us and she'd call bullshit if we tried to say it was a Rimworld reference.

Like okay yes they DO have a curse cube and that was the plan but it's a entirely different ballpark when she's figured out that's not what this is about anyways.

Also she literally fucking laughed about the guy who knows [other redacted who CAUSED this psychological mess] when we mentioned him casually, ft. Muichiro witnessing this and bitching about it to someone else and also even more obfuscation:

We mean, with respect to "obfuscation" here, the guy WAS a villain but not the "antagonist" (and man, do we despise using those words in particular) but we highly doubt our fictive/soulbond/whatever-you-call-him helping up look up what ingredients in our deodorant are causing skin irritation is like, a reason to bust up laughing. Actually, that kind of makes sense because he — you know what, that's not even relevant right now. Fuck canon, canon is dead when you're a system. What is relevant is that don't care it was unintentional or that she apologized, we're still fucking pissed about it, you know, when we actually have the capacity for emotions.

Why the hell in our right mind would we be comfortable telling her we have the other guy in the pair to match??? Why in the hell would we ever feel safe around Asshole after something like this?

Why in the hell would we ever feel safe around Asshole after something like this, when [redacted] is actually going off of a completely different framework than being a fictive here to boot?

Plus: how the fuck and when the fuck did she start suspecting, we guess? Those jokes were months between each other.

Heh. Fuckin' typical of her; we guess we wouldn't have been friends, and then not-friends, with her for this long if she didn't have some similarities to the actual insanity that is both the framework and speed/pace of our thinking patterns.

Godfuckongdamnitwhatthefuck.

And we know we usually only post about this noticeably when we Feel Bad but in truth, 99% of the time we're just kind of vibing and that includes [redacted] when they're having their weird "I don't think I'm from here, guys" feelings. Like, this is the same vibes as "Silver from HGSS ate a piece of cheese today" we don't need to blog about that skskslksks.

All of this because...[redacted] got some of the most intense dysphoria we have seen in the past month and a half, couldn't look in the mirror, and then said "aren't we [over 25 but less than 35-ish], shouldn't we be doing something else? Maybe something a little more professional, and [extremely specific dead giveaway we do not want to name here] when it comes to our job?**"

*yes we see the typo. We have left it in there because it is much funnier if we do. XD

**Not that applying to the kinds of jobs we have been is bad, and it's a step up, but it's still extremely far away from what we ""should"" be doing according to him. Our response was, again, canon can go fuck itself and we would literally have to NOT be in this universe for that to work with how exacting and hard on himself he is being. Most of us have the feeling this is typical? -_-

[unearthlytwilight]

so... 20E complete!

spoilers: he was hit and also did not crit. this run is surprising and not always in a good way

Liveblogged thoughts (long, lots of swears and images, one video) below:

Huh. I guess Nils just gave Ninian a power-up. Sure, that can happen.

cute that she has Ninis' Grace equipped. I remember getting that back aaaaall the way back in 7x.

also, remember that that chapter boss was so scared of failing those assassins that he took poison after he died? feel like that might be relevant soon

Eliwood really letting her help because he wants her to feel better. what a guy

hot damn, a Restore staff! also the lady getting mad that it's the middle of the night is funny

I forgot there were wyvern riders this map. the poison was annoying

the enemy monks suck. not sure if that's just light magic being bad or enemy quality but :/. also I forgot this game had enemy monks. Black Fang enemy monks at that! that's relevant to a magic system lore tidbit

Ninian got a level! didn't catch a screengrab but it was all the stats she can get I think so. yay

Fiora also got a level! at least she's getting strength (Florina callout post)

FUCK Oleg moves. he missed though so it's fine

stole his Hero Crest. maybe take some dodging lessons here, Eliwood, I have it on good authority Canas loves teaching

I know it's just because of the blinking but. the smug in this image. Eliwood clowning on Hector will never not be funny. friendship goals

oh look it's Eliwood acting out of noblesse oblige rather than simple niceness again. it's almost like it's an integral part of his character

*item get sound* Isadora get! because the game apparently thinks I need 5 cavaliers. I do not

not gonna use you, Isadora, but you make some good points. also you're pretty

still really like [Mark]'s integration into the story. they're a presence and acknowledged but they're not the focus. unlike some more recent games *cough Fates and Engage cough*

not a lot to say here. just good power of friendship stuff

man, I understand that you're trying to to be nice but... your father literally died in your arms very recently. please stop apologizing it's uncomfortable

yeah! power of friendship. it's executed pretty well here.

this plot decision is... confusing. the main villain sits around twiddling his thumbs while the Black Fang plotline happens. we already know his motives, but he doesn't get to act on them for quite some time because reasons. on the other hand, it's nice to see an FE dad actually accomplish something with his death

...I'll go into how this is handled later. suffice to say I have issues with it but not the usual ones.

a miniboss squad, you say? fun times! anyway, off she goes to do crimes

this becomes 20 times funnier when you consider later revelations about Sonia. that's all I'll say for now.

and so Limstella valiantly journeys offscreen to murder important people. iirc they aren't relevant for a while so. that's happening

next time: stat snapshots! 21E has lots of plot, so while that's happening you all can look at what horrors level-up RNG has wrought on the blorbos

[flagellant]

A list of basic Tumblr etiquette quirks that might not be obvious for newer Twitter refugees:

If you have a funny addition to a post but aren't sure if it's REALLY funny, a safe bet is to drop it in the tags. If it was good enough, your followers will screenshot or copypaste the tags into the reblog in a form of peer-review.

It is common courtesy to make sure you cite the tag maker when you do this.

Right now there's an average of 2 likes to 1 reblog for any given post. You don't gotta reblog everything you like/LikeTM, just make sure you're reblogging things, especially art by OP.

If you get Anon hate just block them unless it's funnier.

Get the extension Shinigami Eyes, which is a community-run way of marking out TERFs. That said, the system isn't foolproof and so you should still learn transmisogynist dogwhistles like you were gonna anyway.

You can press B to suck her dick on Sunday.

Call-out posts and call-out blogs will always be made with the motive to try and make you believe that the person being called out has done something heinous. Don't just blindly assume this, people lie on the internet and so do your due diligence.

For the love of fuck, please don't say shit like unalive if it isn't being ironic.

Just get weird with it. Cringe is dead and you have a Tumblr account. We are all just gay little tube worms clustered around deep sea sulfuric vents soaking up the content and looking sort of phallic while we're at it.