#sometimes i feel . . . i dunno

[zuzu-draws]

King of Pouts and Grumps, Ladies and Gentlemen! /(.^.)\ ~ <3

[devilart2199-aibi]

Hello :3 I'd love to see a Hermit do G10. Maybe Falsie or Gem?

She's gonna obliterate someone!! ⚔️

[uncanny-tranny]

"The only person who can save you is yourself, don't rely on anybody else!"

Actually, what has saved me is books and my favourite video game and my cats and my friends who I've shared late nights and too-early mornings with and the dew-covered grass I walked on on the way to a competition bus in ninth grade band and the sunburn that kept me out of school for days the month prior.

I understand the viewpoint of how you are ultimately the person who can save you, but don't discount that you aren't an island. You aren't meant to be your sole savior. Let others save you, too. You are worth the care and love the universe has for you.

[miqo-tia]

I like Alisaie's continuous distaste for self sacrifice. In a genre where self sacrifice is usually something noble and necessary, it's refreshing to see a character say "No. There is another way. You are not losing it all for this cause. You will live to see your efforts bear fruit."

[bixels]

I'm not getting into The Giving Tree discourse...

[shopcat]

i think in the hamster wheel of my mind a big part of where people go wrong with eddie and his shitty garage band as an extension is that they for some bizarre reason think he's gene simmons metal when he's jack black metal. heavy metal. he's tenacious d metal. he's school of rock. he's stoner lord of the rings metal he nearly wore blue jeans and plaid. jack black literally in real life once said eddie was the best character bc he's heavy metal like him. LOOK AT THIS

[moongothic]

Madoka is the promise you won't turn from a child, full of hopes and dreams and the wish to save the world, into a bitter adult who just wants to hurt others and ruin people's lives

Madoka promised to be there for you to remind you of the person you wanted to be and to stop you from becoming what you sought to destroy

Madoka made that promise and became the very embodiment of it

[unknownarmageddon]

but im singin like a bird bout it now

killer belongs to rahafwabas cross belongs to jael peñaloza

[exilepurify]

it’s been four months since December 2022 and I’m still not over the fact that Reigen was apparently so haunted by guilt from that one time in S2E2 where he scolded Mob for eating too many french fries that it showed up in the super emotionally charged eyecatcher montage during the series finale.

I wonder if reigen will ever find the closure he needs to free himself from the poltergeist of regret that obviously follows him around as a result of this incident. the confession incident really had reigen re-evaluating everything from the past three years.

[puppypawprintce]

anyone else out there think severus is just a chronic pain haver. i know the dark mark pain is real, but i feel like he might be miserable in more ways than just mentally in other ways

[deadtiredghost]

my 07 series as abstract memes:

[a-star-that-burns-brightly]

I feel like my main sticking point with a lot of Post-CH2-12 Hu!Culprit theories / Hu lied about her alibi theories is that in all honesty, I simply cannot imagine Nico just... letting that slide. Especially if everyone's lives were on the line. If any Hu!Culprit people can sorta explain that thought process to me I'd appreciate it a lot

[uncanny-tranny]

I'm aware many people (including myself) are uncomfortable with this framing, but I can't help but love the "sometimes, a little girl grows up to be a man, and sometimes, a little boy grows up to be a woman"

How eloquent, how beautiful is it to describe the growing-up of a trans youth? Something about it feels soft and so unabashedly human.

[phantomrose96]

Controversial opinion time, I don’t hate the idea of Tumblr Live. Like “hey I’m gonna go for a walk who wants to see the new flower buds”/“I’m gonna cook dinner and tell a story so I don’t feel like I’m cooking alone” seem fine to me, even appealing. But the Tiktok-ification and Instagram-ification of everything don’t sit right. And given how typically anonymous and faceless Tumblr is, a jump to “Live” feels pretty unnatural.

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[dumb-doll-lips]

So been like low key horny a bunch of the day. And I like when I have fun little games w it to involve tumblr some, that has been lots of fun. Been unsure of like what I wanna do since I think last time I got too overwhelmed. Gets a little annoying sometimes how little it can take to make me feel very overwhelmed, like my brain can’t keep up w too much going on. Idk how to figure out what would be easier.