#problem sleuth spoilers

[homestuckreplay]

oooo did rereading act 1/2 feel different now that you've read problem sleuth???

yes, definitely! I have stopped looking at Act 1 as a complete beginning, and started seeing it as a continuation of something that was already ongoing (MSPA as a whole). like, when Homestuck started, a young man standing in his bedroom wasn’t logged as Homestuck page 1, it was MSPA page 1901, and the people reading it back then were almost exclusively Problem Sleuth fans.

I saw a post a while back (which I sadly cannot find again) saying something like ‘people who didn’t spend a year waiting for Problem Sleuth to escape his office building will never understand what it felt like to see John easily leave his house 10 days into Homestuck’ and I think that post is correct – that must have been a very strange and surprising reveal. Problem Sleuth is so based on video game logic that it’s often very literal, and its puzzles only have one solution. PS, AD and PI are trapped in their building, and need the Megaton Key to escape. in real life, if you were trapped in an office building, you’d have options. calling some sort of building manager or locksmith, leaving via an emergency back exit, smashing a window, finding a YouTube tutorial on how to pick locks, etc. but a video game can bar all but the ‘correct’ solution (aside from cheats, mods, etc), as can an author. Homestuck sticks to this in some ways – the alchemy sequence in Sburb’s tutorial level, for example – but overall it feels much more grounded in reality than Problem Sleuth does, and much more metaphorical (its title, for example). those things only feel weird now that I have PS as a comparison!

in popular culture and especially in music, people talk a lot about ‘second album syndrome’, where an artist whose first album was a big success really struggles with their followup. sometimes that’s about the massively increased pressure on them, but often it’s that they put all their good ideas into their first album and haven’t had time to develop any new ones. in my opinion disappointing followups usually fall into one of two categories – either they try to do the exact same thing as the first album and feel like an uninspired retread, or they purposefully try to make something as different as possible, and end up experimenting without a solid artistic vision behind it. conversely, the second albums I love tend to take the ideas of the first album and build upon them. the artist is still working in the space that really interests them, but is actively trying to learn and advance their craft. a well known modern example of this is Olivia Rodrigo’s second album GUTS (2023), which is primarily about the same breakup as her debut SOUR (2021), but written with two years of perspective on those feelings, reflecting on her own actions and on other people’s responses to her original songs about them.

I think early Homestuck is basically doing the same thing, taking the core ideas of Problem Sleuth such as applying video game logic, inventories and battle systems to reality, characters interacting with their own medium, and telling a high concept story through small, reader-influenced actions, and exploring those through a different lens. PS, AD and PI could enter cheat codes for their own game and re-enter saved states, but due to their 1920s setting, none of them played video games outside of the one they were part of, so the mechanics that governed their lives had no context to them. John and his friends do play video games, program computers, etc, and so they’re able to more consciously game the mechanics of their own lives. Homestuck’s inventory systems are more complex and variable than PS’ equivalents, giving readers far more options (and opportunities for jokes) with their commands. the beta kids are far more similar to the average MSPA reader in their experiences, interests and senses of humor than Team Sleuth were, so might on some level be based on the types of people who were already reading the site. so PS and HS have similar ideas, very different execution

(for what it’s worth I think if Hussie had made a full Midnight Crew adventure instead of making Homestuck, it would have been far more of a retread of PS’ ideas instead of an advancement, and probably would not have recaptured the magic that PS accidentally stumbled on. but that’s guesswork)

anyway something else is that John, Rose and Dave are all Problem Sleuth fans!! and that meant something more to me on this reread than it ever has before. John, for example, has a poster of Problem Sleuth acting all hardboiled in his office with his gun and candy corn. John tends to identify with main characters over side characters, and he believes the front that people put up, even when it’s pretty obvious to other people that they’re faking. Rose has posters of Fluthlu and other strange beasts from PS’ imaginary realm, because she’s interested in occult and esoteric ideas over humor and puzzles. She probably read/played PS for its universe-destroying monsters more than any investment in whether Team Sleuth escape their building. Dave already has merch for Midnight Crew and the Felt despite not being super into the new adventure. He’s someone who doesn’t tend to stick with things for too long, and is always trying to keep up with what’s new so that he can have an opinion on it – PS is over, so he’s moved on. having your new main characters be a fan of your existing work feels pretty self indulgent, but the way they each interact with that work is VERY true to the rest of their characterization.

obviously there’s also a bunch of small references, like when Dave is described as ‘starting to flip the fuck out’ (p.465), or when John is commanded to ‘Fondly regard cremation’ (p.52), or my personal favorite, ‘CD: Punch clocks in faces to establish chronology’ (p.1180). Homestuck is always referencing itself too, with its many variations on doing an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle or stating immutable facts for the record or friendship being an emotion - specific turns of phrase that are used over and over to give the work its very strong voice and linguistic identity, keeping it cohesive even as it goes through wild shifts in tone, setting and art style, but without a greater ‘meaning’. the same way that a meme can circulate through different communities, platforms, even time periods, which makes it feel like there’s a singular ‘internet culture’ even though this is a huge and disparate place. so these references recurring from PS show that this concept I’d already noticed in Homestuck exists throughout MSPA and links these stories that seem like they’re taking place in very different worlds. I’m not someone who tries to pick out every tiny example of self-reference but the general idea does work for me.

anyway in conclusion: Problem Sleuth is very good and I don’t think it’s necessary to read it to understand Homestuck, but it has definitely changed my perspective on the early acts and given me some valuable context, which is very worthwhile!

[myckicade]

Here's what's rolling around in my skull. I'm probably just pissing in the wind here, but it's not like I'm not already drenched on this subject.

See, I trust Mr. Jenkins & Co. I trust them in the sense that I don't trust them at all.

(Please know that this doesn't involve pacing and such things, but just... It.)

There are too many kooky things for me to accept what we have seen as 'Door: Closed'. The thing that I keep coming back to, though... The fucking land burial. I've read more than one quote from Mr. Jenkins stating that Izzy is his favorite. Now, I've done my own characters dirty a time or two, but to take away the rite that they have earned? Nah. Unless Izzy had a wish that only Ed (or whoever) knew about, it's not adding up. And that grave marker... Something about the shape of it, the construction, it's tickling at my brain. Factor in Ed's passive reaction to the suggestion of revenge, the shot going in on the left side, and the fucking seagull, and I'd like to call bullshit on the whole thing.

And, if I want to get super daffy-doodles about it, did we see Izzy get put in that hole? Did we? Hm? (I know this is a long-shot, but it's fun for me to point out).

Again, I'm sure this won't amount to a hill of beans, but something about this just doesn't feel right. It could be the Denial Stage, buuut. These guys know how to play the con, so I'd be very interested in Finding Out.

[tiny-space-whale]

Loki will no longer respond to any user commands except "Loki: Fondly Regard Creation."

[plaidos]

do you think the retcon in Homestuck was a good story decision?

yes, because Homestuck is fundamentally about breaking the narrative rules constraining you in a literal sense (it’s an obsession of Andrew’s — spoiler alert, but the ending to Problem Sleuth is that they escape into the real world).

a lot of people complain that the characters don’t really earn the ending, because a lot of their character development that led John to be able to go back and retcon things is, well, retconned. but that’s like… the point? it’s meant to be eerie and unearned. John is totally alien to the people he ends up with. that’s the whole point. it’s a narrative sacrifice so horrifying it can be felt by the characters. it’s repeatedly commented upon by John that it feels fucked up and wrong to be doing this, like “unearned” specifically. Homestuck is literally about the dissolution of narrative

[existentialterror]

ARG notes: ZampanioSim, part 2

Hey guys. catfishAnabasis (Light) here, continuing my… uh, ZampanioSim Let’s Play? That’s dumb. My investigation into the Homestuck/Magnus Archives/House of Leaves-inspired alternate reality game ZampanioSim. Read Part 1 first.

Now we have the bare minimum on Zampanio Sim’s format. Actually, we don’t know much and it’s constantly changing, but we at least have an idea of what we’re in for. Cool.

What is the story unfolding within Zampanio Sim?

So we know from the Classpect Menu game, the one that “is” ZampanioSim, that this was an effort to simulate a now-deleted game from the 1970s called Zampanio, based on a now-lost* FAQ on how to play it. At some point, possibly just search engines, I have learned that Eyedol Games is the company that makes Zampanio. Let’s take that going in.

*dubious

A lot of the “routes” off the house at the start of ZampanioSim – see the diagram – are procedurally generated places to explore or are otherwise collections of content. But other have a more directly obvious narrative to them. I have marked these places here.

Let’s go. We'll start... Uh...

…

(Okay, so there’s a recurring meme in ZampanioSim about whether personality-typing you based on whether you traverse labyrinths clockwise or counterclockwise.

But I’m confused about which one that means – like if I’m looking at a drawing of a labyrinth top-down, and I go from the entrance to the right passage, I guess I’m going counterclockwise. But if I were standing in a physical maze, the clockways framing wouldn’t occur to me – I mean, they’re both chiral processes, but like, the hand of a clock moves to the right, so which reference am I taking?

Maybe I’m not cut out for labyrinths. When I’m caving in minecraft I go to the right, so if I’m coming back into the house through the north door, then... I guess:)

We’ll start with the non-existent West Route (accessible by clicking on the west side of the house, where you’d expect a door to be.)

AdventureSimWest

AdventureSimWest is an audience-participation adventure game that, like Problem Sleuth or Early Homestuck, takes suggested commands from an audience that guide a character, and the author tells a story around it. This one has been running for quite some time, so there’s a lot of backlogged material!

AdventureSimWest gives us a lot of info right away. It’s about a character named Peewee, who is hired by Eyedol Games. Peewee and the staff of Eyedol Games are trapped inside a Space Loop. A Space Loop is like a Time Loop except that once you die, physical space (within the loop) and many of the circumstances reset, but its point in time is… not fixed. Peewee is a snakelike alien called a lamia. He first appeared in a different SBURBlike game on FarragoFiction.com called Farragnarok, which he remembers but which I don’t know anything about. He is a COOL GAMER who has lived various other lives including through the destruction of his home planet, Segundia. Keep in mind that he is from a SBURBlike.

Oh, hey, according to an offhand exchange in AdventureSimWest, solving mazes by following the righthand wall means you’re going counterclockwise. Everyone jot that down. We can bootstrap this. We can do this.

I read up through the “JR Rambles about Spoilers” interlude. And it was fun! It’s Peewee’s quirky, haphazard series of adventures in a quirky, sharp universe. The style is fun, self-aware and whimsical. I don’t know how much about the AdventureSimWest lore applies to mainstream Zampanio, especially given the multilayered narrative Zampanio serves up to us like a delicious but concerningly non-Euclidean cake, but some of the characters and concepts appear in other places, and so the worldbuilding might too. Here are some things we learn about the world of AdventureSimWest:

Peewee arrived here from his old universe by jumping into a giant, spiky, magical wall of flesh called an Echidna. He’s actually one of the set of gods who created this universe, but seems to be the only one left.

People central to the space loop remember the space loop exists.

Eyedol Games may have caused or be causing the space loop, but does not appear to be completely in control of it.

The space loop started in 1971 and is spiraling towards the end of the world in 2022.

Eyedol has other employees, including:

Wanda, the “CEBro” and “Lord of Space” (homestuck classpect). She’s tremendously rad and maybe a shapeshifter.

The Intern, a college-aged dude from Ohio, who Wanda is always trying to find and who seems unexpectedly critical to the existence of Eyedol Games. (I might apply a little homestuck logic and guess that he’s the “Muse of Time”, but this is my own speculation.)

The Closer, an aggressive businesslady in a suit and cape

Someone called the Eye Killer, who, like, lives in Eyedol’s basement and kills people.

Flower Chick, some kind of identity-stealing fae, who keeps a copy of Peewee’s skull on her desk.

Quotidians, which are another alien species – these ones are shapeshifting crows and are a hivemind. Many of them are named Tom.

Parker, a “waste”, who has made his business out of learning glitches, hacking, etc, in reality itself.

There are also just two other teams of people who don’t work at Eyedol Games, who both got ejected into some kind of infinite labyrinth around the same time. They have kind of SCP energy. I don’t know what their deal is. Yet.

What about that FAQ?

The mysterious lost ZampanioFAQ actually exists, more or less.

When I found it, it felt like natural game progression: I beat the Classpect Menu game, then there got a link to the official Discord. Then buried in one of the Discord channels, one of the pinned links goes to – yes – THE Zampanio FAQ.

But then it turned out the thing I’d found a link to was a fan-made transcript (by @verbosebabbler) of a different “official” ZampanioFAQ PDF. And through various link-hopping, most of which I now forget, I also found the original PDF on a different website by JR. So I don’t know if I got there the way I was “supposed to” or where else I might otherwise have found the FAQ. But we’re here now!

(The official discord, by the way, does not have talk permissions open in any channel. They are all frozen conversations from years ago, with only a spare few used threads acting as the actual usable channels. So the discord is its own labyrinth too. ITS A-MAZE-ING)

Okay. The ZampanioFAQ. In the frontnote to the FAQ, JR describes this finding a printout of fic they'd read long ago, and sharing it as evidence that they did not invent Zampanio – that this is a sburbsim/glitchFAQ (we’ll get to that, hang tight) crossover fanfic by someone else that they read once, lost, and recently re-found - and that it has a couple indications that it’s referencing Zampanio.

Mostly, contentwise, this FAQ is sort of a interuniversal document about how to play SBURB (the universe-creation game that the characters in Homestuck play), written by a group of players. The Zampanio FAQ has, unfortunately, been heavily redacted by interdimensional forces, perhaps SBURB itself.

It’s like it’s written by a new set of characters who are playing their own game of Sburb. They’re learning about it as they experience it! Haha, that’s a cute gimmick.

Oh, the skull? Yeah, don’t worry about that. Hah, no, I get how it looks. But it's actually totally fine.

The redacted words in the ZampanioFAQ seem mostly to do with certain details of SBURB itself, like SBURB is trying to keep its players from spoilers.

Drawing from VerboseBabbler’s transcript and partial de-redaction of the FAQ, I gave my hand at making what sense I could out of the original PDF.

Excerpt. You may not like it, but this is peak ARG performance: multiple collaborative layers of nested PDF annotation.

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

Trying to fill in these blanks made me appreciate the potential of the fan-ARG.

Homestuck is a story that both rewards a lot of knowledge about its worldbuilding and also often doesn't explain itself – I think that’s why it has such intense fanwork, because it implies so much but leaves you to fill in the gaps.

Like, okay, classpects, alright? Fans make a big deal about classpecting and it’s cool but it’s also kind of nothing, like, we get some gestures about what it means but not much. (Quick, what does a mage do?) There’s so much fanon trying to make sense of it that even the wiki explanation is based on fanon. But fanon can be dope and people have done some really, really neat stuff bouncing off of the gaps in canon.

ZampanioSim is about nested realities and missing information, and it's heavily based on specific fanworks of homestuck. And filling in missing information on this document, I could use my knowledge of Homestuck to make inferences about this related-but-separate storyline and worldbuilding. That’s so cool!

In the same way that the best fanfiction draws from and interacts repeatedly with canon, the fan-ARG can act as a commentary on or a dialogue with its sources - a story made stronger by connection to another.

There have been other fan ARGs and this is really my first experience with the genre (well - does EverymanHYBRID count as a fanwork? discuss), but like, holy shit, I get it now.

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

Okay, let’s regroup. So the FAQ is a bunch of advice written collaboratively by a group of people playing SBURB. The FAQ is about a kind of SBURB that is very similar to the one in Homestuck – but it’s even more similar to another game on the FarragoFiction website, SBURBsim, which is “is a fanmade browser simulation” of SBURB.

In SBURBsim, you can throw in a randomly-generated or customized set of characters into their own session, and SBURBsim will invent plotlines, fights, character progression, romance, alchemy, time travel shenanigans, and more, eventually telling you a story about how that session might go. It is mind-bogglingly ornate and cool, check it out.

Okay, anyway, so the game described in the FAQ is mostly Sburb-y but has some clear Farrago/SburbSIM elements in the form of the fan-classes – wastes, graces, smiths, and more. But it has some stuff that feels more Homestuck-classic-SBURB, like in the FAQ [EDIT: SBURBsim] there’s a convention where all the randomly generated player-usernames have the same initials as their classpects, so like the session’s Bard of Time might have the username belugaTrainer or belligerentTriangle or whatever, which isn’t a thing in Homestuck nor in the FAQ. It also adds a few elements all its own, like that there’s a recognized pantheon of gods who have sway over the rules of the universe, with their own usernames and classpects.

(Hey, synthesizing that with some background Homestuck knowledge + what we’ve learned from AdventureSimWest, I think the ‘gods’ are the players whose Sburb session created the ones that the FAQ authors were born into. Elegant!)

Oh yeah, as JR mentions, the Zampanio FAQ also takes heavy and pseudo-explicit inspiration from a fanfiction called the Sburb Glitch FAQ, a sprawling fanwork I haven’t read that’s sort of a game guide and technical manual to SBURB. Maybe more of this is references to that, I don’t know.

(Sidenote, Rose’s GameFAQ was one of my favorite plot points in Homestuck. I’m only sorry it wasn’t used more. So I’m delighted to see all these fanworks that took inspiration from it.)

So okay whether the FAQ players are more playing OG-SBURB, or SBURBsim, or a game that has aspects of both – well, they’re all pretty similar, I don’t’ think we need to split hairs. This document is an in-universe survival guide for a SBURBlike.

You know what it’s not particularly like? ZampanioSim, the game it supposedly inspired!

This is so fun to me. SBURBsim existed long before ZampanioSim. If you were going to make a simulator game based on the Zampanio FAQ, that game would be SBURBsim. But SBURBsim was already a thing! JR knows this – they worked on SBURBsim! Their sburbsona is on the about page!

They mention this in the introduction to the “found scanned printout” of the FAQ - they initially read it deeply to figure out, through the redaction, if it was a fanwork for their own project (SBURBsim). They write:

this is obvs JUST the faq, not any of the like, description or author name or all that shit that eventually lead me down the rabbit hole. like, you could find the missing sections in this weird ...not arg? I don't THINK? and they started talking about things like the achievement system and shit, stuff that stuck with me a lot more if what i chose to focus on in zampaniosim is any indication. still. having a record of the START of this branch is better than nothing

So, okay, the FAQ itself is not explicitly Zampanio. We’re missing the description and whatever else that’s supposedly out there somewhere, as lost media. I tried to find some reason to think the fic was supposedly out of time, like that it would have been from before SBURBsim was made, but there isn't any - everything lines up with what JR said in the forward.

So I think maybe reading so far into the FAQ without that other supposed metadata was a great time and, yes, sold me on a new art form, but it wasn’t that productive in terms of the broader Zampanio story.

... Or was it?

I've connected the dots

There was a reference somewhere – I think in the South route, though I can’t swear to it – that was pretty outright something like “JR added Magnus Archives elements to Zampanio because of an at-the-time obsession with the Spiral from TMA.” Now, some stuff like the south route is less in-character than in other places, so I don’t want to necessarily say that everything like that will “carry through” to the rest of canon, if that makes sense. But it helps put those pieces together, so here’s my running theory:

In the story, Zampanio is a memeplex that moves and spreads between dimensions - very diverse multiple dimensions, including different fictional worlds. (Think the Big Bad in There Is No Antimemetics Division - effecting "universes which embed ours as fiction".) Sort of a psychic prion that goes around twisting orderly systems and punching its way between meta-layers. The core of it stays similar between - it has a predilection for spirals, mazes, meta bullshit, and games - but some of the specifics change from instance to instance.

Zampanio probably spread rampant among this constellation of Sburb universes, perhaps because Zampanio is affiliated with games and Sburb universe is a game. (Or at least uses a game to reproduce.) It’s a great carrier. From there, Zampanio rode into our universe on the back of the FAQ. (Game FAQs being a known way to throw information between Sburb dimensions, in Homestuck.)

JR took the seed that came with the FAQ and instantiated Zampanio in this universe, and added their own compatible TMA-spiral flavoring to it.

(This also lines up with another cool aspect of Zampanio, which is that if you make your own fan-work or fan-story about Zampanio, that’s canon too. It is impossible to gamejack this. Thus far I’m focusing on JR’s ZampanioSim canon, but there are other people out there putting their own spins on it, which are also canon.)

Questions I have now, if that theory is true:

What other aspects of ZampanioSim carry on between versions?

Is Eyedol necessarily associated with the Zampanio memeplex? Does or did it actually create ZampanioSim in some causal way?

Does the Space Loop that occurs in AdventureSimWest have ramifications or equivalents in other instances of Zampanio?

Why does Zampanio like games so much? (Is it because interactive games are a convenient way to punch through from one dimension to the fictional dimension within it?)

There are comments about someone, maybe Eyedol, trying to scrub the ZampanioFAQ from the internet (in our dimension). Why would they want that?

What’s the other missing metadata that would have associated the ZampanioFAQ with Zampanio?

Who wrote the ZampanioFAQ? Was it written (...IC) as a fanwork of SBURBsim or did it “come from a SBURB universe”? Who censored it?

Aw man. And there's still so much I haven't even gotten into.

Like, okay, do you guys know gopher? It’s an early alternative to HTTP as a way of organizing the internet that was mostly sidelined, but a few servers are still around.

Apparently there’s a bunch more Zampanio stuff only accessible via Gopher and I’m going to have to figure out how to use it.

Thanks, JR, YOU MAD SORCERER.

So, that's where I'm at vis a vis ZampanioSim. I gotta get back to my own stuff for right now, but thank you ZampanioSim discord for helping blaze trails and mostly to JR for weaving such a wonderful weird mystery.

If you have questions or comments you want me to talk about in a future one of these, my ask box is open.* Also, if you get into ZampanioSim yourself, feel free to say hi on the discord.**

*(okay I know people have been involved in this for years and I’m still mostly trying to formulate my own opinions about what’s going on, so if you know something that’s like “an actual answer” and want to share, then consider phrasing it as an ominous clue instead of telling me outright – but I’m under the strong impression that this is an ARG where there’s not gonna be like a canonical underlying “answer” to a lot of things so, you know, do what brings you joy.)

**Your first challenge is to find the discord. I wanna be cryptic too!

[heylavellan]

Hello and happy Friday! ^^ How about ""I don't want explanations. I want…" 💋" for Neve and Bellara?

did i get carried away? yes! i had so much fun writing from bellara's pov. veilguard spoilers, read at your own discretion! @dadrunkwriting

no takesies-backsies

rating: t

words: 1282

notes: bellara follows in varric's friend fiction footsteps and writes her self insert falling in love with neve's character. wingman lucanis

Maybe Bellara went just a bit toooo far. Sometimes that happened. More than sometimes. This whole writing thing had been Neve's suggestion. Well, Neve and Rook's. It was a nice break from interrogating the Nadas Dirthalen made by Anaris the Forgotten One and trying not to think about the fact her brother was serving said Forgotten One. Also that her gods thought it would be fun to try and Blight the world.

There was a lot going on, and sometimes Bellara would rather distract herself. The serials Neve brought her were great, but she always finished them before the next chapter was ready. Then she'd read the week's assigned reading for the book club and get bored, so she'd try one of those large academic tomes Emmrich brought. Which inevitably brought her back to the Nadas Dirthalen and all those thoughts she was trying to avoid.

So she started writing about the Veilguard! It was really fun at first, but she quickly ran into a problem. She caught up to the present day. Which was good, because it meant that she could write about things as they happened. But bad. Really bad, since it meant she was stuck with the original problem. Nothing to do.

One day when Bellara was complaining to Lace, the dwarf shared what she knew about Varric's books. About how Hard in Hightown was based on some of his friends in Kirkwall. Donnen was Donnic, Belladona was Isabela, and Maysie was Merrill. Friend fiction, he'd called it.

It was then that Bellara had the perfect idea. Neve was always saying that the press was giving her a bad rep in Minrathous. So why not write a story about how awesome she was? The Neve Gallus!

Well, clearly the main character couldn't be Neve Gallus exactly. Varric didn't drop his friends straight into the works. No, he gave them new names. So how about Guinevere? It had "neve" in the name, but it wasn't immediately obvious. She could be called 'Gee' for short! Agent Gee? No, that wasn't right.

Neve was a suave detective, so Gee needed to be too. But what was she sleuthing? Maybe... for stolen elven artifacts? No, that wouldn't sell in Tevinter. Which was where Neve needed to fix her image. No, she could be the Bloodhound of Minrathous, stopping blood rituals just in time and tracking down anything lost.

And every hero needed a sidekick. Lucanis seemed like a good option, but he didn't live in Minrathous. He was the Demon of Vyrantium. But maybe she could work with that. Maybe they were instead rival detectives, who shared a sidekick unknowingly. The Shadow of Vyrantium competing with the Bloodhound of Minrathous. Yes!

But who was the sidekick. Maybe they were telling the story. Maybe it was... her? Hmmm, that could work. Lucine, the elven sidekick who could sneak across the city unnoticed. She ran a repair shop in Dock Town and sold second hand and vintage wares.

As Bellara continued to shape the story and write the first chapters, it became quite clear that Lucine was in love with Guinevere. Which was strange. Because Bellara wasn't in love with Neve, right? She knew she liked women, after all she dated Irelin for a while. But Neve?

She continued to write. Gee was developing a crush on the Shadow, who she would later reveal to be Lucine's younger sibling Dellen. They both continued to solve crime in Minrathous and Vyrantium until Lucine got targeted by a scheme. The Shadow and the Bloodhound work together to retrieve Lucine, where they admit begrudging respect for each other. And Lucine confessed her love for Guinevere. And they lived happily ever after.

That felt like a good place to end the book. Rook helped her find a publisher, and it was out in Minrathous. She thought that was the end of that. She'd put her first book out in the world!

But with Neve Gallus, things weren't so. Publishing might have been the step too far. After an excursion to Arlathan with Rook and Lucanis (who politely informed Bellara that her book was very popular among the residents of Treviso), Neve was waiting in Bellara's room, reading through a copy of her book.

To be honest, she'd been shoving down her feelings for Neve in case they weren't returned. Until the crush went away, the book was a good enough outlet. "Guinevere took Lucine's hand and kissed her knuckles, looking reverently at her sidekick," quoted Neve, placing a ribbon in the passage she was on. "I was wondering why so many people were asking me if my full name was Guinevere recently."

Bellara blushed and stammered, "I'm sorry if I put your real name out there, but I wanted the character to be like you but also not you?"

Neve smiled -- a real smile, not the ones she wore when she was patiently putting up with Bellara's rambles. "No. I just think it's sweet what you think of me," she replied, setting the book down on the table. "I hope I have enough stories to fuel your next book."

If it was possible, she flushed an even brighter red. Neve drew closer, and Bellara became immediately aware of the curve of her body, the click of her shoes. The deep cut of her shirt. She gulped. "I think so? I don't know if I'll write another. I mean, you're awesome and deserve to have another written about you, but um. Only if you want me to. I really should have asked," she said, letting her mouth speak whatever words crossed her mind. Mythal'enaste, she hadn't been this flustered since she first met Irelin!

"I'm honoured that you want to write about me. But I think the one thing that's stumped me is who Lucine is. The Shadow, Dellen. That's like Lucanis. There's Guinevere, me. You even had Inge, that was a slick way to get Ingellvar in there. But Lucine?" Neve dissected the book and placed a hand on Bellara's shoulder.

She knew? She had to know, right? There was no way she didn't. She was a detective and had clearly picked up that she'd used last names to inspire first names. Guinevere - Gallus, Dellamorte - Dellen, Inge - Ingellvar. Leaving Lucine - Lutare. Neve had to know. And if she didn't she'd certainly have it confirmed by her facial expressions.

Before she could stammer out an apology or explain it away as just part of the book, Neve started, "Look, I don't need explanations. I need…"

Well, if the nug was out of the bag... Bellara cut her off by standing on her tiptoes to kiss Neve. It wasn't intense really, just a quick peck. Before she embarrassed herself. She already felt like she did, but... Whatever. Also, if she kissed Neve longer she'd want more. And Neve might not want that. "I'm sorry!" Bellara squeaked.

The second part of her apology was cut off by two warm hands grabbing her cheeks and a long kiss on her lips. It began to heat up, as Neve licked and nipped Bellara's lips. A small gasp left her mouth, allowing Neve to slip her tongue into Bellara's mouth.

Someone coughed at the doorway. "I'll just bring your tea later?" Lucanis asked, slowly backing out of Bellara's room. Bellara darted over, grabbing her tea from Lucanis with a smile. She missed the pointed look Lucanis shot Neve over Bellara's thank you hug.

Neve mouthed a thank you to Lucanis, and picked up the book. "I'll be back later, Bell. I'm certain we can come up with more ideas for the next book," she teased.

Elgar'nan, Neve was going to be the death of her.

[katzell]

Daredevil Born Again Spoilers

First, I will be watching it to the end. And there were things I liked.

I liked Heather Glenn and Kirsten Mcduffie.

I like little BB Ulrich and Daniel Blake.

Almost everything about the Fisk storyline is working for me. Although I am sad Wilson and Vanessa are having marital problems. I love Vanessa and want to see more of her.

Fisk as mayor and his crusade against vigilantes works. I don’t think his crusade against the police works. I’d prefer to see him moving his corrupt cops up the ladder and sort of piece by piece undermining the government. You know, the real evil stuff like shutting down anti-corruption task forces and firing people in the DAs office.

But….

I just do not understand why they felt the need to kill Foggy and send Karen away for this storyline.

I get that Daredevil is a comic where the worst things happen to Matt. Killing Foggy is literally the most devastating thing you can do to Matt Murdock. There is nothing worse. But in the Netflix series if you inflicted pain on that scale you better believe we would see Matt embody the suffering. No one year jump. No suppressed ticking-time-bomb Matt. We would be with him minute by minute as he rampages through the city. It should be excruciating.

If the show wanted to do repressed ticking-time-bomb Matt*, there are other ways to get there. Any one of his cases/Daredevil investigations could have made him try to be different if he was emotionally invested. A horrific case gone wrong could put him over the edge.

Then, if you wanted to explore a new set up with Kirsten, have Foggy react to the same incident by joining the DAs office or being elected into office.

Put Foggy in danger inside the machine Fisk is trying to dismantle.

Have Karen react badly to Matt giving up Daredevil and run some tension through their relationship. Keep Karen as his firm’s investigator. Or, have her quit and open her own firm. Heck, make my dreams come true and have her work at Alias investigations. Either way, she’s sleuthing around the city and committed to doing something about Fisk from the start. Or give her the “random” case that will ultimately connect Fisk back to his crime empire.

Nothing else has to change.** Only now we have two more characters to put in peril and to provide insight into what happens to a city that allows a Kingpin into office.

Sacrificing a fan favorite character should galvanize action not reset the table. I am angry because I loved Foggy but I am more angry because I ultimately found killing him boring.

*I love Matt suppressing his emotions. I am here for it! But this is not the way.

**Okay one more thing has to change. Justice for Marci!

[affluent-havoc]

Even though Kyoko and Byakuya are quite introverted people who aren't the best with others, I like to believe that, when their in the swing of things with their talents, they can really excel in that, in their own ways of course. For Kyoko, say she's interrogating a suspect for a case. So, in order to get entail, she'd adjust her mannerisms accordingly. By doing this, it's a lot easier to have the suspects be more comfortable and potentially spill important details. Though she could probably figure it out with her more distant personality, it's not ideal. Not to say she acts completely different during interrogations. This is still Kyoko after all. However, she's also a skilled detective. Nevertheless, when it comes to simply sleuthing out stuff, she's more reserved like she usually is. It's just around people when she's more of a chameleon. After all, in order for there to be crimes, people have to be involved to some capacity. Byakuya, meanwhile, is a business man. Thus, he has to communicated with people for many reasons such as expanding the conglomerate or having communications with any competitors. Stuff like that. I feel that, when speaking to those high up, 1-percenters, he's a lot less snooty and arrogant. After all, these are important people to the Togami business, even if he may not like speaking with them. Byakuya, at the end of the day, is a guy who had to be in a large competition with his 14 other half siblings to gain his position while also being the underdog as the youngest. So, if he were speaking with any wealthy folk who didn't earn their money, he'd refrain from expressing his distain and be cordial despite it. This is not to say that they're not flawed in their ways. Even though they are Ultimate's, they can still have room to improve! Kyoko and Byakuya both have immense trust issues and are still seen as cold to others around them. They may both be very smart but they're also still young, being late teens at the beginning to early 20s adults at the end of the series. Spoiler-y part down below:

The tragedy and it's aftermath applies to both shining their faults and how they have improved. For instance, I feel the memory wipe affected their ability to preform their talent. With Kyoko, due to her being hit the hardest with the memory wipe, she might be a bit lacking at some aspects she was once very good at such as the people skills and being able to be a chameleon of some sorts. I see her improving a lot after though. Makoto's hope opened her eyes and made her learn that she didn't have to close herself off, that she could trust again. Also, I like to believe that, as she gets older and better at her craft, she's develops that Agent 47 in her, being able to assimilate herself in crowds if needed be and use disguises to her advantage. Not that she'd knock out any civilians to get that achieved (or would she hehe). Perhaps her bettering trust with the other survivors enhances this skill of hers too. For the heir, due to the tragedy and his change as a person, it takes him a bit as well to get back to where he was before. I like to think Byakuya eventually reflects upon his life, his decisions while working to rebuild his empire and help the world in it's disrepair. He's still a bit arrogant and cocky at times but it's less malicious. After all, he "unfortunately" cares about the other survivors. In regards to his business mask more, I feel it develops and becomes less of a mask at all. He's still professional but is also a bit more genuine when it's appropriate of course! He'd also have better trust with the people around him like Kyoko too. I can also see him being a lot more empathetic to his staff as well. Not that he was abusive prior. It's more of the fact that Byakuya wasn't as empathetic back then than he is in the future. So, he'd really become a better business man after becoming a better person, learning what problems were there from before and improving them! Maybe he also thinks about his butler Aloysius Pennyworth, appreciating how much the man helped him in his life and wanting to ensure that all the other butlers, maids, and other workers get treated with respect, not just to improve productivity but because he really does care, even if he still isn't the best at showing it. He IS still a tsundere after all!

[homestuck-fanauthor-coalition]

Pesterquest Rewritten [Fan Game]

by @classpectpokerap and with contributions from several of our coalition members (including Luke aka terminalLoquacity and @horsesbones ], this visual novel explores a unique journey for the MSPA Reader. M^3 has only played the first few chapters, but is absolutely entranced by this story. If you can't play it yourself, Tetra also provides a walkthrough without commentary. we really encourage you to check this out!!!

also, it's on AO3!

Pesterquest Rewritten (92051 words) by EtchJetty, terminalLoquacity Chapters: 12/? Fandom: Homestuck, Hiveswap, Problem Sleuth (Webcomic) Rating: Mature Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: The Handmaid & MS Paint Adventures Reader, Doc Scratch & MS Paint Adventures Reader, John Egbert & Rose Lalonde, Rose Lalonde & Rose's Mom | Beta Roxy Lalonde, Rose Lalonde & Vodka Mutini, Mallek Adalov & MS Paint Adventures Reader, Damara Megido & MS Paint Adventures Reader, Polypa Goezee/MS Paint Adventures Reader, John Egbert & Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider, John Egbert & Jade Harley & Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider, Jade Harley & Peregrine Mendicant, Jake English & Jade Harley, Becquerel & Jade Harley, John Egbert & Jade Harley, Aradia Megido & MS Paint Adventures Reader, Mallek Adalov/MS Paint Adventures Reader, MS Paint Adventures Reader & MS Paint Adventures Reader, Sollux Captor & Kanaya Maryam, Sollux Captor & Karkat Vantas Characters: MS Paint Adventures Reader, Spades Slick, The Handmaid (Homestuck), Damara Megido, Polypa Goezee, Mallek Adalov, John Egbert, Aradia Megido, Rose Lalonde, Rose's Mom | Beta Roxy Lalonde, Vodka Mutini, Dave Strider, Doomed Timeline Dave Strider(s), Doc Scratch (Homestuck), Jade Harley, Becquerel (Homestuck), Peregrine Mendicant, Jake English, Chixie Roixmr, Stelsa Sezyat, Tyzias Entykk, Marvus Xoloto, Galekh Xigisi, Chahut Maenad, Joey Claire, Xefros Tritoh, Dammek (Hiveswap), Karkat Vantas, The Trolls (Homestuck), Beta Trolls (Homestuck), Beta Kids (Homestuck), Homestuck Ensemble, Problem Sleuth, Sollux Captor, Kanaya Maryam, Aradiabot (Homestuck) Additional Tags: Transcribed, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Pesterquest (Homestuck), Hiveswap: Friendsim, Hiveswap: Act 2 Spoilers, Multiplicity/Plurality, Minor Character Death, Temporary Character Death Series: Part 1 of Pesterquest Rewritten Summary: Transcripts of the fangame Pesterquest Rewritten. What if MSPAR remembered themself at the beginning of Pesterquest's prologue? If they didn't immediately leave Doc Scratch's mansion, but instead kept their character arc from Friendsim, and used their new knowledge of Homestuck to try and save someone? Contains full spoilers for the fangame Pesterquest Rewritten, and is best enjoyed with at least some knowledge of Friendsim and Pesterquest.

[bladekindspecibus]

INTERMISSION LOL

the one and only

Problem Sleuth

i have to agree he really is a "good-looking gentleman"

second outfit's from fan-adventure Homeslice

i guess i can recommend for reading it's interesting thing and animation is so smooth

at least for seeing Jade in wolf costume for Halloween(and Karkat in granny costume alongside with Dave being little red riding hood)

oops spoilers

[thelazyhermits]

I gotta say, the more the Playful Land event progresses in the ENG server, the more difficult a time I have in deciding how the hell I would cover that event. I swear, no event has ever been this difficult for me to make decisions about lol

Honestly, I've been puzzling over this event since it came out last year since, even though I never got around to seeing all the translations cause I just decided to wait until it reached the ENG server, I saw enough spoilers to know what all happens.

At first, what had me at a loss was the event's ending since I didn't particularly like it, but now, all I can think about is how I could possibly make this event work when Yuu wouldn't trust Fellow for a single second cause she distrusts adults, especially ones as shady as him lol 😂

Like obviously the only way she'd willingly go to Playful Land is to go after her sons, and I can make that work despite Yuu's best attempts to stop them since Grim/Ace have their ways lol

The real problem lies in what Yuu does whilst inside the theme park cause she wouldn't be able to just go on rides since she knows the story with Pinocchio and she has absolutely no intention to let her guard down and follow in his footsteps 😂

At this point, it's looking like my version of Playful Land will be a lot like my version of Endless Halloween/Spectral Soiree. By that, I mean, I think I'll have the majority of the event happen off screen cause Yuu will not be present since she's gonna being busy with handling the Playful Land situation secret agent-style, leaving her upperclassmen in charge of taking care of Kalim and her sons.

So people looking forward to this fic might end up getting disappointed since it'll likely not be super long, and I probably won't end up covering all the fun scenes that happen while everyone is having a good time.

Instead, a lot of the fic will likely follow secret agent/super sleuth Yuu as she tries to figure out what Fellow is up to while he's distracted with watching over her friends so she can put an end to his shady schemes before everything goes to hell.

Of course, in the end, everything still goes to hell anyway cause that's just the kinda luck Yuu has 😂

[aerithium]

The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve Review!

*Spoilers ahead*

★ Score: 8.5/10 ★ Date Finished: May 13th, 2024 ★ Final Thoughts: What a phenomenal sequel to the original game in this duology. I'd argue to say this one blows the first one out of the water (despite the game taking a length time for me to get through). The first case is outstanding for a tutorial case and unique to the Ace Attorney franchise so far as we see Susato briefly act as a defense lawyer in Japan. The case is nice because its familiar, serves as a good refresher for mechanics, and is still relevant to the later plot of the game. The second case is to some degree your typical filler case at this point in the game but still has a nice twist in the fact that it takes place during the first game and is a case we didn't know about originally. The characters are fun and it has its good moments as well as propelling the overarching story with a pretty major plot point after the court hearing resolves. The discovery of the Baskerville collar deepened my intrigue but also left a long list to be wondered about what awaited me further in the game, I think its discovery in chapter 2 serves well for the whole game. The third case was slightly underwhelming at first but does begin to save itself as it slowly intertwines with the mysterious Professor cases the player is slowly starting to learn more about, regardless I can't say I found the case that memorable but it serves its point in the overall game. The final two cases for this game are one in the same so I want to give my opinions on them together, much like the rest of the franchise, the finales are always outstanding and this game does not change that. The fourth chapter is a nice set up for whats to come and still remains interesting as Ryunosuke chips his way ever closer to the heart of this game's story. But it all truly comes out in the official final chapter, which was full of endless twists and astonishing moments. I found what I liked most is that each of these twists and revelations were inherently predictable thanks to the aggressive foreshadowing in this game and the installment before that. I say this as a positive thing about the game, I did not have the entire ending predicted but I enjoyed that I was able to sleuth out some of it before it was revealed to the characters while still being shocked by certain things being revealed. If you've paid attention to the game you should have no problem predicting the overarching end of the plot, but still able to enjoy the ride you take to get there. To me that means the devs created/wrote a great game! The music is just as great in this game as well, if not better than the first. For the mechanics, they remain the same from the first so nothing to say there. I greatly enjoyed the characters in this game, both new and old, especially seeing their development over time between both bad and good.

[a-sea-with-no-shores]

The Sleuth of Ming Dynasty notes for any other latecomers like me:

I liked the parts of it that I liked very much, including the main relationship. There are a handful of good female characters that rotate in and out. The fight scenes are mostly short and semi-realistic, light on the lightness skills (pun intended) and lacking anything more fanciful than that.

Women in armor, even if it's only a small amount of the time: A+++ (this is in the opening animation; that's not a spoiler).

You should have some tasty food on hand over the course of the series, including at least one bowl of noodles, or you will be Very Sad.

It's set in 1478 CE (the Chinese name is literally 成化十四年, 14th year of Chenghua*). Thus you get what you'd get in a show set in another region in a similar era: nasty attitudes about nations adjoining distant borders, deals made in fancy brothels, etc. etc., and I'm not going to write up all that because I expected it going in. Are there current political aspects involved? Yup. (Like, was that bit about exiling someone to Xinjiang historically accurate? I don't think the Ming actually had control of it well enough for that during this period!) But that all goes over there in the box marked General Historical and Modern Social/Political Problems With Everyone's (Quasi-) Historical Shows Everywhere.

(if you don't want to know ANYTHING more about the show before watching it, don't continue, although I've tried to avoid real spoilers.) *not everything in that article that's stated as fact is accepted as fact, though that should be a given with brief histories of any era whether on Wikipedia or anywhere.

Some things I was NOT expecting:

I was not expecting for Tang Fan to be such a cringey brat. I honestly wasn't sure I could deal with him at first. But underneath the (gestures) everything, as it turns out, he's remarkably strong even in a show full of steel-willed characters. I don't know exactly what caused all the (gestures) everything, but I have some guesses.

Holy shit, so many instances of people ending their own lives! I literally lost count. Generally for "I got caught and there's no way out" reasons but whew. Genre-appropriate but like. A lot. It wasn't triggery to me in the least but if you're bingeing it becomes a little ridiculous. (And there were two instances in which I was mad about it.) ETA in April 2025: I've now seen a lot more cdramas and in fact the number of suicides in Sleuth is unusually high.

ACAB: One main character is a judge/clerk/DA/public defender, kind of. One is an army veteran/cop/enforcer/investigator, kind of. One is a secret agent/spymaster, kind of. They are all deeply enmeshed in the machinery of power and have different relationships with it, which change over the course of the show. (Though they are all never more than one breath away from being crushed by it.) For the most part the overly idealistic/rigid pair change for the better, though there's a moment of what felt to me like real abuse of power over marginalized people that I think is mostly excused by the narrative as being done in the grip of panic (and love). But it also felt like it was written in a way that indicated there would probably be consequences? If so, they didn't come up. (I'd have to rewatch to really analyze it.)

I meant it about the food.

There are clearly good/evil characters, complex/morally grey/ambiguous characters, and then there's the third main character in this show, who's like ... a third, secret thing. Like, utterly amoral in pursuit of his own ethic? I would not want to live in the same time zone or decade as him.

Unexpectedly, there's a case that involves (sigh) an Autistic EngineerTM. I can't comment on this character or storyline in depth but over several episodes they managed to make the handling of the whole thing both better and worse multiple times. The ending made me mad but I don't know enough about the depiction of autism in Chinese media to say if even this kind of storyline was a positive or negative in that sense.

Actually, for both the above and the handling of Sui Zhou's PTSD, I can't say if the translation made things better or worse. That kind of vocabulary is pretty well beyond me. That said, I don't think "mental illness" is necessarily the best translation every time it showed up in the English subtitles.

Character ages make no goddamn sense. When I try to imagine that Wang Zhi is the age they claim he is, my brain just breaks. (I think it's roughly accurate for historical Wang Zhi,though since the other two MCs are fictional it doesn't really matter.) I suppose it's a miracle that they let Consort Wan be played by someone who's 3 years older than the actor who played the emperor, even though in real life she was more like 15 years older (I forget exactly).

Gender/crossdressing: One male character wears a woman's clothes/makeup/etc. as a disguise and gets thoroughly laughed at by one other male character (others are surprised or matter-of-fact about it) but it's unclear whether the laughter is deliberate manipulation, mockery, delight, or a more complicated gender thing given who's doing the laughing. There are a couple instances of female or AFAB characters presenting as men as a disguise and/or as their daily life. I think in all of the cases these characters have some degree of agency when there's the inevitable (because it's a drama) revelation. Honestly in one case I was pleasantly surprised because the character continues to present as male. I honestly have no idea what the character's gender turns out to be, which is fine! The subtitles do change their pronouns to feminine but I can't remember from the spoken dialogue if there's any actual change in address.

I've only watched the show once and my memory is not that good so forgive me if I got anything wrong here. None of this is really criticism, just personal observations! I'd like to read the book eventually. (I've already begun to investigate the fanfic. I see that while the show forgot about Tang Fan's side hustle pretty quickly, fic writers certainly didn't lmao)

[priohuq]

Okay, this is gonna be the kinda post that probably none of you follow me for, but you do follow me and now you must reap the consequences of that decision.

I've been watching Blood+ recently. It's an anime from 2005 vaguely based on Blood: The Last Vampire.

That's all the background context I care to give here, you have access to the same wikipedia I do.

Minor spoilers and major rambling follow. So if you like anime about girls killing monsters with a katana, maybe go watch it first. I'll wait.

Recent episodes (Here meaning, episodes I saw recently, regardless of actual release date) haven taken place in London/The UK. And, I was quite surprised at how accurately it seems to portray the UK?

Burger King, beer and soccer all exist internationally, but who the hell knows about Boots outside the UK? (If it's actually very well known then I'm about to find out just how sheltered from humanity I am and cry a bit.)

I also noticed some of the background noise on the streets of London seemed to actually have English voices in it?? Could have just been a stock sound effect, or maybe one of the creators went so far as to actually go to the UK and recorded some audio while there. Either way, it's a level of detail I really didn't expect to hear. I also have no idea how to look into what actually happened behind the scenes, if such things are on record.

Anyway, I get to episode 35 and I see this building.

The sign is way too blurred for me to read, but something about this building makes a spark in my brain. The scene that follows this shot, taking place inside the building, suggests that it's some kind of taxidermy museum. I'd recently had a conversation with a friend, about a museum I'd get taken to as a kid, which also had a lot of taxidermy in it. So I guess it was on my mind. (If you're curious, it was the Horniman museum. The walrus there taught me how to fear.)

My autism fully engaging, I take to google maps to see if this is even a real place. I went through EVERY MUSEUM IN THE UK with taxidermy in it. There were actually only like five, it really didn't take long.

It exists. Sadly lacking the sign with a zebra on it. It's the Natural History Museum at Tring and it contains dead things.

While looking into this place on wikipedia to write this up, I found that until 2007, it was called the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, which seems to match what the unreadable blurry screenshot above might say. The museum was initially the private collection of a Lionel Walter, 2nd Baron Rothschild, who happened to also be a big fan of zebras it seems.

My guess is that at least one person involved in the production of Blood+ had been to the UK, maybe even this museum in particular, and it ended up in the show. Again, I haven't looked up behind-the-scenes info, and don't even know if it's on record.

Something I do find interesting, is that in my admittedly very brief google searches, I couldn't find any references to this. Part of the problem is that "Blood" is also a word, so my searches were pulling in some medical related results. But even the Fandom (ick) wiki for Blood+, in the synopsis for the episode, just calls it a museum. That same wiki has pages for the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, and the Vietnam History Museum in Hanoi, as they appear in other episodes.

I doubt I'm the first person to find this information, but I guess the cross section of people who saw Blood+, people who recognise or hunt for British museums they see in anime, and people who talk about these things on the internet is very small.

Seeing real places in media can be fun. I once spent a few hours looking up locations shown in Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth on google street view. On a different occasion I came across a collection of google map pins for the different locations in Steins;Gate.

I don't know how popular Blood+ was, or how good this museum is. I just find it weird that I couldn't find any record of this connection at all. But it's also more than possible that people did notice it, and I just couldn't find it. It feels like it should at least be a poorly worded item on an IMDB trivia page.

[mirageofadesert]

Rating cdramas I watched as a newbie pt.1

!!Spoiler Warning!!

The Untamed 9+1/10 

Acting: 10/10 World-building: 9/10 Production: 7/10 Storytelling: 9/10 Re-watch Value: 10/10  Pacing: 7/10 Bonus: +1 for Chemistry & Fight Scenes 

The Untamed was the first C-Drama I watched. At the time, my BTS focused Twitter TL started to watch the drama during BTS 2019 break and I joined them out of curiosity. The first few episodes left me very confused, while the beginning of the flashback in episode 3 failed to grab my attention initially. It wasn't until episode 10, that I was completely sold. Later on, the show made me cry so much. In retrospect I think, that this drama doesn't just have a high re-watch value, it actually gets better watching it a second time.

When I watch the initially confusing beginning now, it makes me tear up. While I didn't care about all the side characters at first, the second time around I was full of emotion and sadness seeing their story play out. However, the initial pacing was a bit too slow and I almost stopped watching the show. The overall world-building is interesting, but it left me with a lot of question regarding the sect system and the Wen sect felt especially flat. The highlights are definitely the acting by the main characters and the supporting cast, as well as Yibos fighting scenes. One of the biggest problem of the show is the production: From low budget CGI to cheap looking props, to strange camera angles and lighting issues.

I would always recommend this to someone who hasn't watch cdramas yet. It's easy to get into and the story and characters are equally well done!

---

Word of Honor 8/10 

Acting: 8/10 World-building: 8/10 Production: 5/10 Storytelling: 8/10 Re-watch Value: 8.5/10  Pacing: 9/10 Bonus: A psycho with red eye makeup and a fan.

Neflix was really adamant that I would like this show and after a while I (fourtunally) gave in. As much as I love it now, initially, it took me a while to get into the characters and world. I was often confused about the story, which actually added tension. I cried so much during that wedding. Some of the acting of the side characters was rough, so was the production at times. The romantic slowed down fight scenes really made me cringe so hard I had to pause the video multiple times. One of my favorite things is the world-building, especially the social constructed ghosts, even through it took me a while to fully understand them. The story arc between the Scorpion King and his adoptive father messed me up a bit, but it gave the show even more nuances. I love this show so much now, Wen Kexing has my whole heart.

---

Back from the Brink 6-1/10

Acting: 6/10 World-building: 7/10 Production: 8/10 Storytelling: 4/10 Re-watch Value: 4/10  Pacing: 4/10 Bonus: -1 for making me hate Liu Yao Yuan's character and acting

YouTube started to recommend the show to me and I started out really liking it. Especially the familiar arc was fun and when Tian Yao took the heart scale from Yan Hui I was ready to cry. However, at some point the show turned into a mess. The characters become more and more flat and the emotional impact of the events were non existing. The acting was another weak point of the show - and I do think it's the fault of the bad script. Neo Hou is doing a good job as Tian Yao, while Zhou Ye as Yan Hui is carrying the show. Riley Wang lacks as Bai Xiao Sheng and I think he doesn't suit this genre. All the villains are flat and boring. But Liu Yao Yuan as the dumb prince Zhu Li is a crime. I hated this character every time he appeared on screen for being annoying and unnecessary. But what really made me lose it, is when I recognized the actor as having played Wang Zhi in The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty. He did such a great job there and was one of my favorite character. It takes a especially bad script, superficial directing and one-dimensional character to make a talented actor to give such a horrible performance. 

--

Till the end of the Moon 10/10 

Acting: 10/10 World-building: 9/10 Production: 9/10 Storytelling: 10/10 Re-watch Value: 10/10  Pacing: 10/10 Bonus: In my Tantai Jin obsession era

Who needs sleep and sun light, when you got Luo Yunxi as Tantai Jin suffering so prettily? Not me apparently, since I binged the show in one weekend, skipping sleep, only to re-watch the show the second I was done with the last episode. Is there room for improvement? Of course. The editing messed up the pacing, but I still loved it the way it was. My main grievance is that they had to cut so many episodes and side stories. I see a lot of people complain about the complex story-line and plot holes, but I actually think that if you pay close attention its all explained quite well. Only the re-birth connection took me a bit to fully understand. That's why I also like the pacing - it's faster than normal, but that led me to be obsessed with the show by episode 2 (usually it takes me at least 6-10 episodes). I cried, I laughed, I squeaked and vibrated in excitement. The acting is great through out the show, even the supporting cast is pulling their weight next to two strong leads. The chemistry between Luo Yunxi and Bai Lu is really something. I loved watching the bts moment, when they were overacting their parts only to fall into character so well, once the camera was on.

The show - and Luo Yunxi - pulled my out of a hyper-fixation, that was turning draining and effecting my mental health negatively. I will forever be thankful for this, but also stay cautions not to be dragged into fandom toxicity again.

Part 2 coming soon... (including Love is Sweet, Love Between a Fairy and a Devil, And the winner is love and more)

[pochapal]

I may of asked this already but a blog search was unhelpful so whatever:

What do you know about the rest of the When They Cry series? Like Higurashi & Ciconia, and any Umineko spoilers I suppose.

On a note, you reblogged smth mentioning Higurashi in 2014 apparently. It doesn’t spoil it at all, besides maybe some vibes with the other shows listed.

i've mentioned this once or twice but not in the main liveblog tag so i can see how it fell through the cracks, but my advance when they cry knowledge is as follows:

i know higurashi exists. until i started umineko i got i confused in my mind with we know the devil/heaven will be mine. i have learnt over the course of this liveblog that higurashi is a horror story and shares a lot of dna with umineko. kind of like a problem sleuth/homestuck relationship. i couldn't tell you a thing that happens in higurashi and i couldn't identify a higurashi character if you put them right in front of me.

i am hearing about ciconia for the first time live right here right now. someone might have brought up the word to me like once before but if they did i don't remember it. my knowledge about ciconia extends to the word "ciconia" and literally nothing else.

as for umineko spoilers, the only real big thing i have is that i know that it's kind of like the homestuck epilogues in. some way. this is why i am approaching the story with the specific analytical framework that i am. i get the sense that knowing umineko has something metafictional going on might constitute as a spoiler but i don't have any kind of framework or context to understand why that might be the case. i guess the only thing it's done is make me closeread from minute one and not buy into the idea that this is a straightforward mystery, so i guess there might be an eventual rugpull that won't hit as hard as a result. only other thing i've been quote unquote "spoiled" on are the like three no context beatrice sprite images i've been exposed to.

i just blog search higurashi to find the post you're on about and i'm gonna be honest i completely do not remember this post at all on account of it being almost a decade ago. also it seems to be in the context of a "here's a bunch of anime that Will Fuck You Up" post that doesn't really tell me anything i don't already know lol.