#retroactive posting

[sugar-goat]

Zee

[loveletterworm]

Ralsei has in his mind put himself as the least important out of his friends to the point of being kind of irrelevant (which chapter 2 sort of conditions one to accept with the running gag of him being ignored) but Tenna acknowledges him frequently as one of Kris's friends without any hesitation, however a not insignificant portion of this acknowledgement is in the form of recognizing Ralsei as some sort of marketable plushie creature worth $32.99 MSRP. And Ralsei genuinely does try to have a heart to heart with Tenna about his abandonment issues but due to his Ralsei nature he just ends up saying "It's okay you just have to accept that you're going to die one day so that you don't make anyone worried" which is really bad. I think they should be friends but have a mediating party present at all times to stop them from instilling brand new and much worse worldviews into each other

[stemmmm]

ok a third one. i've got a third one

context: 1 2 3

[cctinsleybaxter]

one thing i think people miss about lake mungo is a thing people also miss about twin peaks, which is that you limit your understanding by only seeing yourself as the dead girl; sometimes you're one of the people who knew her

[knifearo]

ultimately when it comes to shipping and fandom space treatment of aspec characters i just don't accept "aro/ace people can still date/have sex" as an answer from nonaspecs. like yeah. mhm. okay. now i think we both know that you're not saying that out of real interest in the diversity of aspec experiences. so you can turn in your seventeen-page essay on why and how you plan to examine this character's aspec identity within the context of a romantic or sexual relationship complete with evidence from canon and peer reviews from multiple aspec people within the next week or i'm putting you in the pit from the edgar allen poe story

[kardulis]

not liking the implications of "jesus was seen in ohio" "danisnotjesus" and "amazingohio"

[e-the-village-cryptid]

When all is said and done, I really don't know how it's possible to defend a woman saying to a man "I'm a distraction to you, I need to get out of your way so you can fulfill your great destiny" and then completely leaving the narrative as being anything but a misogynistic writing choice.

[gin-juice-tonic]

Well... vegetarians might find it a bit harder to stick to their diets, but it's a step up from feeling tempted to eat humans.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[beaft]

reading through my old work and realising that everything i have ever written is in some way about the unreliability of memory and the unconscious fictionalisation of your own history and the hallucinatory altered state of childhood and the impossibility of ever returning to a specific moment or place in time coupled with the knowledge that even if you could go back it wouldn't be the same because you are not the same. which could mean anything

[flortnite]

Hey question, what’s a sprout ? Miss Gemma (my Affini neighbour (she keeps asking me to call her Auntie Gemma lol (Affini are weird :3))) called me one, while I was just sitting on her lap and doing a colouring book. I’ve tried asking her but whenever I do, she giggles and ruffles my hair >w<

-Cheryl Du Mond

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[theheightofdishonor]

chapter 298: guide with that image of yamaguchi behind tsukki paired with "he's always been one step ahead of me after all" will always be famous/insane etc because of the way it retroactively reframes their entire relationship, especially in the context of "what more is there than pride?". Because that moment during the training arc is mostly from yamaguchi's pov and as far as yamaguchi's concerned (tbh, as far as the audience is concerned too) yamaguchi's always been following tsukki and his speaking out is like challenging the status quo. And here, for tsukki to be like, "no, wrong, he's always been in front, he's been the one leading me along" and honestly, the frankness in which he says it too ahhhhh i LOVE this chapter

[pinkd3mon]

Awkward family reunion

[annabelle--cane]

just realized a few of my parasocial fandom nemesis are all in a friend group. good for them that they've found each other, I hope they all deactivate as one and then blow up their computers.

[onesnoopyaday]

I AM AT MY LIMIT

Snoopy #90

30/12/2024

description under the cut

[description: a cartoon-style drawing of Snoopy's head. Snoopy is a white dog with black ears. His eyes are shut and his mouth is a horizontal line. There are two large blue teardrops, one under each eye. The text "I am at my limit" is handwritten across the top of the image.]