#sorry i just like bad people actually. it's a game about romancing demons. of COURSE i like characters who are Bad Sometimes | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

olivemeister · 3 years

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OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya’s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!

#neo twewy #neo twewy spoilers #this turned into a behemoth. im so sorry #I CHECKED AND IT'S OVER 11K WORDS #I'M SO FUCKING SORRY

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shijiujun · 4 years

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Hi! Is it okay to ask you for a small advice? I started reading Thousand Autumns recently (currently on chapters ~85-88) and I'm having a bit of a problem with Yan Wushi's character. I am so turned off by his behavior towards SQ for the whole novel up to this point and I just wonder - is it gonna get better...? I can't stand seeing him openly abusing SQ and treating him like shit, I'm sorry (1)

I know he's evil and it's expected of him to be bad but with future romance prospect I'm really struggling to like the relationship between him and SQ; and if in the first half of the novel I didn't expect big changes, now I keep hoping to see something different from him but I'm not seeing much. He keeps treating SQ horribly. I'm not sure if I can forgive him for what he's done and has no remorse whatsoever - (2)

- abusing SQ and manipulating him, using him as an experiment as if he's a toy to play with; selling him to a r*pist knowing he'll be tortured to death...! And after everything that happend I still barely see anything good in his attitude towards SQ. I can't help but think SQ deserves so much better. I suppose I should try to have some hope for the upcoming chapters to be better? Is it worth it to continue reading or nothing will change? Excuse me for writing so much, Thank you

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Heya! Oooof okay so you’re totally valid, Yan Wushi isn’t like a character for everyone - so let me break it down with the first part and then the second part where his attitude turns for the better XD

Spoilers under the cut

Before SQ goes to save him:

Yan Wushi does have a goal which is to play mind games with Shen Qiao and (1) throw him into despair (2) try to see if Shen Qiao is a worthy opponent - sure, he’s an asshole with an agenda of his own. YWS doesn’t believe that there is any good in anyone - he thinks Shen Qiao is a hypocrite and that everyone will turn evil given the right circumstances, and so YWS doesn’t trust anyone, or even considers anyone as an equal to him.

He wants to see Shen Qiao become evil basically and does everything he can to direct him towards that but I’d say his actions (with two exceptions) fit his character and the two motives above pretty well and I’m not sure I’d count it as abuse (based on my understanding of abuse, feel free to disagree). I think it’s easy to forget that Shen Qiao is not delusional or naive or ‘innocent’, and he does not paint YWS as some saviour or a friend (at least in the beginning) - he knows who YWS is, knows that he’s insane, not compassionate, totally evil etc. even from the start the moment he realizes that YWS and his disciple lied to him.

1. He lies to Shen Qiao that he’s his shizun, and then sends him to kill someone, but he’s not there to enforce it

2. Throws him out on the streets without his memories, but Shen Qiao is anything but a weak youngling, once again, YWS doesn’t do anything to him

3. YWS turns up at the temple and has Shen Qiao read the scripture - SQ’s not sure what’s going on at first but he more or less figures it out, but also the scripture reading inadvertently helps to heal him (and YWS knows this)

4. YWS flirts with Shen Qiao for a reaction for a while, he’s not genuine of course, but Shen Qiao knows he’s not genuine

5. YWS doesn’t help Shen Qiao out when he’s faced with an opponent while he’s still injured just to see how long Shen Qiao can hold out for - but firstly, Shen Qiao never really expected him to help in the first place, because he has no delusions about the man - and YWS ends up helping anyway, of course not out of the kindness of his heart, but I don’t see why I should hold that against him XD

6. Stands by and watches as Shen Qiao and his shidi Yu Ai have their confrontation - Sure, he’s there to watch the drama, but it’s Shen Qiao who makes the decision to go with him - the lesser of two evils

7. Forces Shen Qiao to fight him while he’s still injured because he wants to see if Shen Qiao’s recovery level has reached a certain point, enough to be an adversary worth dealing with - yes, he’s forcing Shen Qiao to fight when he’s still blind and weak, but throughout the fight you realize that YWS is right - it’s that very battle that basically lets SQ recover his previous abilities by a bit. He’s not hurting SQ for the fun of it (out of sadism or shit) - he purely (or evil-ly) wants to know if SQ is every bit of the skilled warrior he’s heard about

The exceptions are these: (1) When he plants the demonic seed thing in his heart (2) When he trades SQ to Sang Jing Xing for his sword, knowing full well that SJX has a habit of sexually torturing his prisoners - I feel like YWS was almost warming up to SQ when his habit of distrust and everything kicked in and he reverted back to his cynical self - Not an excuse for what he did though, because yes Shen Qiao especially didn’t want the demonic seed thing firstly (and YWS knows this), and then he despaired at being left to SJX. This is the incident that has SQ basically give up on YWS and allows him to erase any notion of him ever becoming friends with YWS. I’m also rather curious how exactly SQ kind of like got over this - but in the settings of the book, I guess it’s explained away with (1) SQ actually fully recovering as a result of this incident (2) SQ has a big heart, and forgives YWS after - but whether or not that’s convincing, that’s up to every reader.

After SQ goes to save him:

1. So after the SJX incident - where he chose to self-destruct and die, taking SJX along with him but ended up surviving and being able to cultivate properly again from the start (previously he couldn’t because he could only recover to a certain extent as there was some blockage etc., but the blast in this incident clears the blockage) - and after he’s sort of recovered like 50-75%, he hears of an ambush on YWS by the leaders of like 5 other sects, and decides to go forward to save him

2. Not because he harbours any like delusions on YWS, but to show him that despite all YWS has done to him (especially with SJX), SQ is still SQ, and he still adheres to his own principles, that YWS did not make him change his mind about being good basically

3. YWS’s views of him starts to change because of this - YWS has never found someone with this much grit to stick to his own principles etc., to still be kind and righteous basically despite being betrayed again and again. Of course this does not excuse the fact that YWS did indeed deliberately leave him to a potentially painful death with SJX - and SQ doesn’t forget either.

4. SQ saves YWS, and then his heart melts because while YWS is recovering from the ambush, he has two other personalities that show up - so YWS when he was much younger, then YWS when he was a teenager, and YWS now. So YWS as a kid and teen are more trusting and open, and SQ likes kid YWS a lot (like as kid brother), and now-YWS wakes up occasionally from the switch in personas, he realizes that SQ likes kid-YWS and starts thinking about why SQ hates him and likes his kid self.

5. Even then, YWS still does try to jump ship once and leave SQ and other evil people behind in a dangerous cave, but thankfully teen/kid-YWS personas fight to turn up in time, and then YWS goes back for SQ

6. SQ knows this - he doesn’t think YWS has had a sudden change of heart or shit, and knows full well that if it was now-YWS, if kid-YWS didn’t turn up, he would probably be left to think about how to leave the cave on his own

7. YWS’s behaviour towards SQ does a 180 - now that he knows he cannot sway SQ, he starts to listen to SQ, and despite all the barbs on the surface, even if he disagrees with SQ’s positive outlook, he makes an effort to contribute and consider SQ’s opinion even if he doesn’t, intrinsically, believe in it. Starts putting himself in front of SQ, and of course SQ doesn’t believe this all the way to the end, where he realizes that he actually, just that tiny little bit, has started liking YWS and doesn’t want him to die.

8. Then they confirm their relationship in the extras, and YWS does do that hot-and-cold thing once so SQ figures out his feelings for him properly - It’s SQ that initiates the confirmation at the end I think

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I think at some level, YWS cannot stand how naive Shen Qiao is, and some of the things that he’s leading Shen Qiao to think about/discover are valid - And throughout the book it’s proven true - SQ is kind to Chen Jing, but Chen Jing sells him out (not just once but thrice). He’s kind to and has always doted on Yu Ai, but Yu Ai sells him out too. The elders in his sect - some of them obviously turned to Yu Ai over him despite SQ never having given them reason to doubt him. I don’t think YWS is being deliberately cruel (or abusive) - he’s forcing SQ to look at reality, a reality that YWS sees and lives in.

He always asks Shen Qiao why he trusts others so easily, and afterwards, Shen Qiao does admit that YWS is right in this aspect - he won’t give up his ideals and how he gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, but through YWS, he realizes he needs to be able to think ahead to protect himself and the ppl around him.

Doesn’t excuse the SJX thing YWS did, and I’m sure SQ doesn’t conveniently forget about that either, but in terms of how/why they got together, I guess it’s because despite everything they do know each other best, and are soulmates (tho not only in the sugar-spice-and-everything-nice way i.e. SQ does think YWS is handsome and YWS thinks SQ is the cutest thing ever later). SQ has seen the worst of YWS, and YWS has seen the worst of him - and SQ is made to realize that what he was before was not the best path he could go on because of YWS, but he adjusts his attitude slightly and holds on to his ideals sufficiently.

On the other hand, YWS still does not believe everyone except his Ah Qiao can truly say they’re good and keep to it in every way, still thinks the worst of a lot of people if not all, but he stops to consider SQ’s POV and input now, whose opinions and every action now mean more to him than anything else ever will. Of course he has to prove himself and earn SQ’s trust back, but I guess he also doesn’t expect SQ to reciprocate, even after he developed feelings for SQ, knowing full well that he’s a mofo and SQ has every right to hate him after all he did.

They don’t fix each other, they’re not each other’s salvations, but they fit and come sort of to a truce, despite having differing views and principles.

Manipulation? Sure, but I think we forget that Shen Qiao is not a victim (except the part where he’s given to SJX) and his agency in every situation is apparent - He’s pretty clear-minded, he knows what Yan Wushi is doing, knows what his character is like, knows that he’s doing/saying things all to get a reaction out of him. He doesn’t expect YWS to help him either, because he knows YWS is here for fun and games. He doesn’t go along with YWS just because, either. He just made a wrong call by trusting that YWS reciprocated his feelings of friendship (not that it’s his fault at all), but that is certainly a moment of weakness he probably regrets.

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In summary, I personally wasn’t all that put off by YWS’s behaviour, altho I agree the SJX incident is pretty much unforgivable. For me I read this more from the SQ perspective, because his strength shines in every moment and interaction with YWS and overshadows YWS by a lot, which is why the end makes sense to me.

In response to your question - yes YWS does get better when he’s finally totally convinced that SQ is not a hypocrite (although yeah it takes him a while to get there). And for me it’s nice to see Shen Qiao figure out himself, and also his feelings for YWS after, but also never once compromising himself for YWS.

But YWS is definitely less palatable than most other characters in danmei, so it’s natural if you dislike him and remain unconvinced! It happens XD If you hate this, I suggest you try Wu Shuang! Set in the same universe and timeline, and actually doesn’t have much angst - full on bantering between the main CP, constant veiled insults etc.

#qian qiu #asks

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walkwithheroes84 · 4 years

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Lucifer: Season 5, Part 1 Thoughts

Part 1 of Season 5 of Lucifer came out on Netflix on August 21. And you bet your bottom dollar that I binged all 8 episodes. I stayed up until 2 am on August 22, but it was worth it. I’m not sure if the cast, crew, writers, and producers went into this season thinking it was their last (It’s not, Part 2 of Season 5 is rumored to be out in February of 2021, with the final season, Season 6, rumored to be released in early-mid 2022.) or what, but they really brought their A game for the first 8 episodes of the season.

What follows are some random thoughts I have on the season. Yes, there may be spoilers!

- I really like that the last couple of seasons have explored the supporting cast more. Maze, Ella, Linda, Dan - they are being fleshed out a lot and I am living for it.

- Seeing more of Linda’s backstory was great. And, I liked the way it tied into Maze’s own feelings regarding Lilith and abandonment. I am here for Linda x Maze, may that be a deep friendship or something more. I always love them together.

- Speaking of Maze - it is getting repetitive to see her be pissed at Lucifer (who really needs to step up and see that she is her own demon with thoughts and feelings.) or being down on herself for not being able to make solid connections. Maze, you have connections: You have a best friend in Linda, friends in Chloe, Ella, Amenadiel, Trixie, Charlie. These people are your found family! They love you, Maze. But, Maze has to learn to love herself. Stop betraying them because she’s upset. All that said, Lesley-Ann Brandt always brings her A-game.

- I didn’t care for Lilith. I get what she was trying to do and that, in the end, she wanted mortally and love, but even she couldn’t find it. But, she abandoned her children. :( I’m thinking her ring will play a key role down the road: either to give Maze mortally/a soul, give Eve immortally (so she and Maze can be together?), make Lucifer human, save Chloe, something! That ring is coming back into play.

-Amenadiel worrying about being a good father to baby Charlie. It was really cute, as is his friendship with Dan. The scenes with Dan, Amenadiel, Lucifer, and Jed trying to calm the baby were comedy gold. I also really loved seeing Amedadiel working a case with Chloe. He’s just grown so much as a character during the last five seasons and I’m here for it.

- Dan finding out about Lucifer was a bit of a surprise. Poor guy. He’s been lost since Charlotte’s death and all this new age stuff seems to be his way of trying to find meaning in his life. And, now he has to deal with the fact that EVERYTHING is real and his ex-wife/friend is in love with the actual Devil. And, he has this great fear that he’ll go to Hell, because of all he’s done - and knowing the Devil is real - of course that is going to mess with his mind! And, Michael - playing on fears - knew just want to do with that. I’m interested to see where Dan goes during Part 2 of the season.

-I felt so bad for Ella. She decided that she wasn’t going to go for the “bad boys” and that she was going to look for a nice, normal man for a normal romance and what does she find? A freaking serial killer! Who was using her and planning to kill her! Like, Ella, girl, take a break from dating for a while. She either dates men with no futures, serial killers, or Dan.

- I have to give it up to Tom Ellis in his portrayal of Micheal. So twisted and cowardly and yet weirdly I get it? From what the show has told us or implied - before his fall, Lucifer was one of their parents favorites, made Michael miserable, was a favorite of some of the other siblings. I can see a twin becoming jealous and causing issues. It’s interesting that Michael straight out stated he planted the idea of rebellion in Lucifer’s head. Michael planted the idea of causing Eve to sin. Of coming to Los Angeles. I’m wondering how much of it is true and how much was Michael just speaking nonsense. And, what else has Michael planted in Lucifer (or anyone else’s) head? Did he plant Chloe in God/Dad’s head? Did he pretend to be God/Dad and tell Amenadiel to bless the Decker’s with a baby? Oh, the possibilities.

-While I didn’t love episode 4 (it felt a bit like filler) - it was so good to see Tricia Helfer, back on the show. I miss Mom and Charlotte.

-Chloe finding out she was a blessing/gift from God/Dad? I am so thrilled they didn’t get too angsty with it and played it perfectly. Yes, she had every right to be confused and upset. But, thank goodness they didn’t drag that out! The writers really hit a lot of great beats with Chloe this season.

- I have read that some viewers were annoyed that Chloe was/is worried that Lucifer doesn’t lover her back - when he has shown his love via actions - but, I get it. Lucifer is Lucifer. He self sabotages, he refuses to deal with issues, and he tends to pull away. He become invulnerable - right after it was more or less agreed by everyone that Lucifer chooses to be vulnerable around Chloe because of his love for her. She might be thinking: “Okay, will he get bored? Is this real? Will something else happen that makes him pull away?” Chloe needs to have a solid talk with Lucifer, and it’s a talk that he may not be ready to have. As a show-runner hinted: “You can’t fully be in love with someone until you fully love yourself.” And, we all know that Lucifer is still working on loving himself.

- I was really proud of Lucifer during the first half of the season. He stayed in Hell to protect Charlie, Chloe, and the world. He only left to deal with Michael and he was smart enough to leave Amendadiel in charge. He was honest with Chloe, he tried (in his own way and to the best of his abilities) to give her space, he bonded with Dan, he got jealous (that was hilarious), he moved forward with Chloe, he tried (again in his own way and to the best of his abilities) to not freak out over losing his “mojo”, he admitted (to others and himself) that he NEEDS Chloe, he found Chloe. He showed some nice growth. He’s by no means a mature and fully realized “person” yet, but it’s clear he is trying.

- When Dad/God showed up? I had no idea Dennis Haysbert had been cast in the role, so I was so excited. He’s a great choice. I love that he came down from the Silver City to break up a fight between some of his children. His ex walking around Earth? Demons coming to Earth? A half-angel being born? Eve coming down? Cain and Lucifer fighting? Dad/God’s not bothered by that. He’s not coming down for that. But, his children fighting? Yeah, he’s physically and completely coming down to break that stuff up. I’m excited.

- So, 5A mentioned the Silver City and some of the other angels often. We learned that many of Lucifer and Amenadadiel ‘s siblings are praising Lucifer for going back to Hell to protect Earth. Something which Michael can’t stand. We also learn that Dad/God has locked himself away and that Michael is the only one he speaks to. You guys - I NEED to see some of the other angels or at least hear about them. Maybe even hints of what the Silver City looks like? Uriel may be dead, but Azrael and Remiel are still in the Silver City. And, the show has mentioned a Castiel, who enjoys music. We’ve also heard about Gabriel and Raphael, who are apparently proud of Lucifer for being mature enough to return to Hell on his own. I’m actually wondering how many children Dad/God and Mom actually had together? So far we have nine angels/children. Did they have hundreds? Thousands? Just those nine?

- Let’s talk Deckerstar. If you are a fan of Deckerstar, as I am, then you were loving 5A. There was awkwardness, angst, cuteness, sweetness. They were flirty and playful. When they FINALLY had sex? Linda and Ella weren’t the only one celebrating. And, I loved that it really seemed that BOTH Chloe and Lucifer spent 5A trying to be honest and straight forward with one another. They seem to have realized that they’ve wasted too much time and they have to try and be honest with one another, even if it is very hard.

- Overall, I LOVED Part 1 of Season 5 and CANNOT wait for Part 2. 2021 cannot come soon enough!

-And, I’m sorry, but Lucifer gifs are lined up in my queue for days to come.

#Lucifer #lucifer on netflix #Lucifer Morningstar #Chloe Decker #dan espinoza #ella lopez #linda martin #amenadial #mazikeen smith #Deckstar #tom ellis #lauren german #kevin alejandro #d.b. woodside #lesley-ann brandt #rachel harris #aimee garcia #tricia helfer

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corlds-world · 4 years

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Top 10 Females from my Fandoms

This is all my opinion. It’s also from the fandoms I’m in (which are pretty popular). Your opinion of course will be different from mine. But I like sharing what I think and I like hearing your opinion, too. Also we’re doing ladies first because why not. Also I’m not good at explaining my opinion. So without further ado, here’s my top 10 females. Spoilers!

10. Meg (Supernatural) Meg is definitely my favorite female character from Supernatural. She’s a villain turned anti-hero. Also a demon. And being a recurring demon in Supernatural is a quick way to earn a spot in my favorite characters list. Apologies for Ruby for not making the cut though. Anyway, Meg is tough as hell (no pun intended). She starts by working for her dad, but that’s she’s not working for her dad because she’s a daddy’s girl. She works for her dad so she can get this apocalypse started. Her real loyalties lay with Lucifer. So when Lucifer was sent back to hell, she became a lone wolf. Season 6-8 Meg is my favorite, when she’s a lone wolf against Crowley. And I think the Winchesters have always been a little intimidated by Meg. Only 5′6″ to their 7′ but still has got fire.

9. Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel (MCU) I couldn’t just leave out the first woman to ever get a solo movie in the MCU. It was a long time waiting, but we still got it. I was pondering for a while between Natasha and Carol. I decided to go with Carol really just because I’m so excited for Phase 4 of the MCU. I’m the kind of girl that looks ahead. Captain Marvel is for sure one of my favorite solo movies in the MCU. Carol was a air force pilot from the 90′s who was told all her life that she couldn’t become a pilot. Like you see in the trailer, she picks herself back up time after time. And then she loses her memory, but she doesn’t lose that fighting spirit. She just has superpowers from the space stone. She knows her rights and her wrongs better than most people. It’s what makes her an amazing superhero. And she literally destroyed a huge spaceship in Endgame. I can’t wait to see what Brie Larson has in store for us because she is not done for sure.

8. Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter) I know there’s a lot of controversy with the Harry Potter fandom right now, but I just can’t help but place Luna on this list. She’s an amazing character. As a fellow Ravenclaw, she really showed us what Ravenclaw was all about: wisdom and having an open mind. She knows her spells, too, and does her homework (I think). I think more people would expect Hermione on the list, but she didn’t resonate with me the way Luna did. She’s bullied for thinking differently, which really resonated with me. But she’s got her close friends and that’s all that really matters to her. She was the first character I saw myself in, even if she’s just thinks differently than I do.

7. Eleven (Stranger Things) I really did not want to put Eleven this low. But I really just couldn’t put her higher because the girls above her are just better. However, Eleven is awesome. Truly awesome. We gotta respect the only character in Stranger Things that has superpowers. Nothing holds Eleven down. She escapes from a crazy laboratory and finds her new friends who she will literally do anything to protect. And she was messed up in that lab. But she still knows good from evil. She knew that her friends were not going to screw her over. And when she thought they were going to screw her, she kinda just said no. Like okay. She’s brave and kind and badass and everything I want in a superhero. I she’s a little intimidated by the world around her, but I would have run right back to what I knew if I were her. I think her bravery really shone in the third season. I’m sad about what’s happening to her powers, but I think they’ll find a way to get them back. Even if they don’t, I think Eleven will still prove to be everything she is without them. And just look at her. She’s just so cute.

6. Hazel Levesque (Riordanverse) I told you this was my list and I think Hazel deserves a spot. I mean, the youngest person on the Argo II, daughter of Pluto, can control the Mist and all the jewels in the earth, and tamed an untameable immortal horse. What more do you want? Yes, yes. I love Annabeth, but I really resonated with Hazel more, mostly because she just seems sweeter than Annabeth. I’m a sweet and shy person. And I love horses. And the 40′s. Speaking of which, a POC in the 40′s in Louisiana? If I ever make a top 10 POC characters, we’ll brush up on that. Anyway, let’s talk about when she died. Did I mention she died? She gave up an eternity of happiness so her mother (who was not good to Hazel) wouldn’t have an eternity of misery. Gotta thank Nico, though, for bringing one of my faves back to life. But when Nico was in trouble, there was nothing that Hazel wouldn’t do to help her brother. And when Hazel learned how to control the Mist in couple of weeks? What a display of power. She’s had a hard life, but she’s come out stronger because of it.

5. Katniss Everdeen (Hunger Games) What? Why is Katniss so low? Mostly because it’s been a while since I’ve read the Hunger Games. I never even finished it. I stopped halfway through Mockingjay. I really like Katniss, though. She’s never had a lot. Let’s just start with the obvious that she takes on the Capital. Like you’re taking on the government? Okay go off. Of course, it’s not for no reason. They’re slaughtering everyone. But let’s just talk about when she’s in the Hunger Games the first time. I don’t think I could start to go into detail about everything that Katniss has done. She’s a badass in summary. She took on people that train for the event. She dropped a... what are they called? *googles hunger games bees* Tracker jackers! She dropped a nest full of tracker jackers on to those stuck-up kids. And Rue. Rue helped. Rue’s the best. She’s not on the list, but still. I love Rue and Katniss’ friendship, even if didn’t last. I’m sorry Rue you had to die if Katniss was to win. Anyway, Peeta got her in sort of a weird romance, but I think Katniss saved Peeta more times than Peeta saved Katniss. I love gender role reversals. Also I’m such a sucker for girls who can shoot a bow. So, yeah, Katniss gets her spot which is very well earned.

4. Vanya Hargreeves (The Umbrella Academy) The second season recently came out so she’s fresh in my mind. The most powerful sibling in the Academy uses sound to harness energy. And does she do it in style. Yeah, she kind of causes the apocalypse, but that’s not her fault. It’s Luther’s. And Reginald's. Vanya had a rough childhood. She was told all her life that she was ordinary in a house where there where only the extraordinary. But she powered through it. And wrote a book as revenge. Like Five said, that took guts. She’s such a complicated character. She’s shy and kind. But don’t make her mad. She might stab you. I really couldn’t believe how hard I cheered when she killed Harold. Like it was bad. Also she blew up the moon. Do you want more? She’s dating a farm frau. If I ever make a top 10 canon couples, that’s going on the list. You know, if you can’t go straight, go gay. Also she’s a human bomb. I’m a sucker for human bombs. And memes.

3. Morgana Pendragon (Merlin) I really love good girls turned bad. I was a little worried that Morgana was just going to be Merlin’s love interest in season 1. But man was I wrong. Going from a ward with bad dreams to a witch determined to be queen. I was actually kind of rooting for her. But that just could be because Katie is a phenomenal actress. But anyway, Morgana really has issues, which is why she’s top 3. Also the fact that she didn’t have a girlfriend, so disappointing. But she’s a villain, and villains don’t have lovers. Or they’re not supposed to in my book. Also she can go toe to toe with Merlin, who is supposed to be one of the best sorcerers of all time. What a show of power.

2. Regina Mills (Once Upon a Time) My favorite redemption arc. From good to evil and back to good. Honestly one of my favorite characters to watch. And Lana just does such a good job with it. Do you see the trend that I have with my favorite characters? Tragic background is the base requirement. Magical badass gives you an improvement in the list. But Regina has had a horrible life. The fact that she is classified as a villain is heartbreaking sometimes. But she did kill a ton of people so she’s definitely a villain in the storybooks. And that sass. Only Regina could pull off that sass. But I think the fact that she tries to be good when it is not in her nature, I think that speaks volumes.

1. Kara Danvers / Supergirl (Supergirl) I feel like people just got thrown for a loop. It’s like wait a minute. Didn’t you just say that your favorite kind of character is a “magical badass with a tragic background?” Um maybe. But Kara has her own tragedies. She just doesn’t show it. She lost her parents when she was 12. Not just her parents, but almost her whole family and all of her home. But she learned to have a new home on Earth. But she manages to figure out how to save the world with all of these conflicts in her life. Shoutout to Alex for being an awesome sister. And she has a great social life, something I aspire to have. I’m so upset that the show is ending after season 6. I love Kara so much. Kara is the most amazing woman in the Arrowverse so I’m so sorry to see her go.

#supergirl #regina mills #vanya hargreeves #morgana #katniss #hunger games #Hazel Levesque #eleven #stranger things #luna lovegood #carol danvers #captain marvel #meg #supernatural #:)

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fenharel-babe · 4 years

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Extremely Detailed Inquisitor Questionnaire for Elle!

Elle’s turn :))). Love her the most lol. Her character background is kinda confusing so,,bare with me. Plus, every question is kinda too detailed and sometimes goes off track (but gets back on it) because I want to explain Elle a lot more. But this isn’t everything about her. There’s still a lot more >:)))).

Name: Elle

Age: 26

Race: Elf, but she uses her magic to put a glamour over her. She looks human to others.

Gender/preferred pronouns: Female. She/Her

Class (warrior/rogue/mage): Was a Mage but in DAI is a warrior.

Preferred weapon/spell type: She would usually use a staff when she loved her magic, but in DAI she likes to use a sword with both hands. Never was that great with a shield.

Specialization: Knight Warrior

Romance: Cullen (precious pup🥺).

Elle is a very loving woman. She’s a bit quiet, a little shy, but she always means well. The Templar’s weren’t that great to her when she was young (being a mage and an elf), but she refused to let that stop her from being herself. She showed kindness to everyone, sympathized with them, and did anything she could that would help them. However, her being so kind sometimes got her in trouble. Being used, manipulated, tricked, and other terrible things. Now, she plays as a human who has no magic whatsoever and fights for peace like she always will.

*Describe what your Inquisitor is like before the game’s events–preferably, choose three words that describe best. Then explain why those adjectives are appropriate descriptors.

She was a kind little girl. Her father was a Templar human and her mother was an elf mage. A little weird to everyone else, but her father truly loves her mother, and he loves his mage daughter like she was everything. And he loves his other daughter as well!! He loved both of his children so much (older sister is mentioned later). When she grew up, she would sing at the local tavern. It was shows they would put on every night and she loved it. She learned her glamour spell during this time. She didn’t want people to know who she was since she was a little embarrassed. She’d look like a human and her looks would change a little bit, but not much. She would be considered a bard, but not much. She was very observant. She watched everyone as she sang, listened to their conversations when she was by the bar, and acted playful to catch them slipping up. She didn’t really use the information for anything, but it was a little fun to her. Three words to describe her would be Kind, Playful, and Sneaky.

Kind because she is kind. She listens to people, does her best to help them, and tries to not be judgemental. She’s playful because of how she acts. Whenever a Templar would say “oh it’s a mage,” she’d be like “Oh, thank you for noticing me. I do like the attention,” and she’d laugh at how the Templar’s looked a little uncomfortable. She’d make jokes and almost never seem to take anything seriously. Always having a comeback to the Templar’s (or sometimes mages) that made fun of her or tried to bring her down. And when Cullen says “no one made quite the entrance you did.” She’d smile and pull out the playful side of her and reply “Well, I do like having everyone’s attention,” or something a little more playful. And she’s sneaky because she was a kinda spy. She would listen to people when they thought no one could hear them, she’d sneak through the halls of her home late at night to go see her friends, and because of what she’s doing now. Hiding what she really is out of fear and anger of her past.

Does your Inquisitor change over the course of the game’s events? If so, how? What events affected their character arc the most?

Yes. She learns to not be afraid of her past and shows her real self to the main people in her life (the party members and main people in the inquisition). She learns to not hide herself and accepts her magic as a part of her. The one event that affected her most was when she was thrown into the Fade. When the fear demon was speaking to her, it shook her to her core. Her past flashing in front of her when she closed her eyes, and she was afraid everyone would see her entire past. It made her panic the whole time there, but leave it to Elle to hide behind a well built mask. She was a performer after all and meant to never show her true emotions when the attention is all on her. And when she saw how panicky she was and how afraid she was for them to find out, she decided to talk to Cullen and everyone else.

What is their combat skill level before the events of the game? Are they already skilled fighters, or can they barely hold their weapon of choice properly?

She was a very well trained Mage. She loved magic and was always wanting to learn more, and her father, siste rand mother also wanted to learn more. With her family encouraging her and wanting to learn beside her, it made her learn more and more about magic. How she could protect herself and others, but also the bad side of Magic... However, she didn’t just know how to fight with her staff. She was curious about fighting with swords, daggers, and bow and arrow. Always wanting to know more. Her favorite way of fighting (without her staff) was either with bow and arrow or a sword. As she grew up, she learned how to fight with a sword by her father, but it never was intense training. She even tried to fight the Templar’s for training and beat most of them. Why is that good? Because she didn’t get the amount of training they did. She was observant, noticed their patterns (almost every fighter has a pattern in how they fight), how strong they really are, and looked for weak spots. This is why she would’ve been good as a full time bard, but nah. She would study that and win almost every time. Made her dad very proud. But he was always proud of her no matter what,,,

How well do they improve after becoming the Herald/Inquisitor?

She learns how to truly fight. As a kid (and a grown up before the main events of DAI), she never tried to fight hard, never wanting to actually hurt someone (even if it happened anyway...), so she didn’t train too much. Just wanted the basics with the sword. She grew stronger (TUFF baby), learned how to not hide her emotions, and learned how to love fully. She never truly knew how to love another person (romantically I mean) until she met Cullen. She’s happy about that and so is everyone else around her :). And she learns how to not let herself lead mainly with her emotions. She was a little naive and lead with her emotions most of the time, but she learned that that’s not always the best thing to do, even if it hurts her heart.

Does the Inquisitor have family they left behind? Friends?

This part is rlly long sorry lol.

She has her mother and sister left behind. Yeah, she has a big sister. They are very close. Her sister is an actual human and is a warrior and is a Templar. She became a Templar because she wanted to be like her father and actually protect people. If someone ever insulted the mages, she’d literally be like “wanna square up?? Wanna take this outside???” She imagines that mage as her sister and can’t stand it when people try to hurt the mages or treat them unfairly when most of them did nothing wrong! She believes Templar’s were not made to be like that, so she tries to help people see that. Elle left because of her past. It wasn’t on her own accord, she left out of fear and shame. She hurt people on accident, so she couldn’t show her face.

What made it worse, her dad died when she was 10 and her sister was 11. He was a Templar so he used Lyrium. When he and their mother had Lela (the older sister), he wanted to stop taking it, prove that he was more than just a Templar taking lyrium. That he could be a good father. However, irs like Cullen said, if a Templar stops taking it then they could go mad. And mad he did. He never abused anyone, he rarely showed the symptoms of an abuser of the lyrium, but his wife knew and she always tried to help him stop taking it, but after so many years of not taking it, he would go back to it. But he overdosed (I’m assuming that’s possible right?) and died. It haunts her everyday because she has a ring of his. It was a Templar ring. She wears it everywhere she goes, refusing to take it off. And she also Has a best friend who is a Templar! I’m kinda assuming Templar and Mage relationships aren’t really ‘allowed’. They’re not banned but frowned upon. However, they met in secret when they were kids, and they’ve stayed friends every since. His name is Caleb and he loves seeing Elle mess with her magic when she had it :))).

How does the Inquisitor react to the Anchor and the idea of closing the Breach–do they want to do the right thing, are they only along because they are a prisoner, or something else?

Oh boy,,she’s terrified. Having technically magic on her hand gives her anxiety. She doesn’t know if she’ll hurt people, doesn’t know how to use it, doesn’t know what will happen, and it gives her a lot of anxiety. She’s scared, but hides it once again. She gets anxiety bc the last time she used magic she hurt people on accident (I’ll explain it if someone asks or maybe later idk) and everytime she looks at her hand she feels the magic that’s still in her flow throughout her. It scares her, but she eventually learns to deal with it. She learns how it works, and what she can use it for. Plus, she does want to do the right thing. Always has and always will. She’s happy after she knows she can help people, but that past always comes back to haunt her.

Do they take the mountain pass with the scouts to the Temple or do they charge with the soldiers?

She takes the mountain path. She knows it’s dangerous, but believes in herself and her companions to make it through. Plus, she didn’t want to risk more lives, and she wanted to save the scouts if she could. Once again, letting her emotions lead her in the beginning, but she believes they’re alive and won’t take any other path. If her comrades didn’t go with her, then she would’ve went by herself. Stubborn girl😤.

How does the Inquisitor react to being called the Herald of Andraste?

She’s a little worried. She doesn’t like people fearing her. She does claim to like the worship, to like the way people bow to her, and its not 100% false. Everyone likes attention sometimes, and she does like it. But it causes guilt to rise in her mind. Would they bow to her if they knew what she did? How she hurt people? She just accepts it and smiles to everyone who gives her praise. But after awhile, she accepted the title and knew that meant she was someone important.

Do they believe it themselves?

She does a little bit. Not fully believing it, but not thinking of it as impossible. She’s just wishy-washy about her opinion.

How do they react to being thrown a year into the future? Do they believe they can get back? Are they focused on their goal, gathering information? Or are they just freaking out?

Hmm...she isn’t panic panicking, but she is still worried. She’s afraid of what happened to her family in this future (her mom, sister, and everyone in the inquisition) and she feels like they can’t get back. The walls feel like they’re closing in around her, and when she sees everyone with the red lyrium growing inside of them, it causes her heart to ache. However, she pulls herself together and will fight her hardest to save everyone. She would not let this come to happen. No matter what she had to do.

Does the Inquisitor help Harrit and save all possible citizens of Haven? Why?

YES!! She’s rushing around everywhere, checking every building that she can, and trying her best to hear for anyone calling out for help. She helps everyone the best she can and still feels regret for how many they lost that day. She does it because she cares. She cares so much for everyone and wants to save everyone if she can. She couldn’t live with herself if she let someone die because she was too lazy to search.

How does the Inquisitor feel about being a distraction for Corypheus while Haven flees? Are they resigned to their fate? Resentful? Determined to defeat the enemy/survive?

She feels sad. She knows this is needed, she has to do this. When she decided to help the inquisition, she signed herself up for this mess, and she WILL see it through. Even if it costed her her life. However, her sadness does effect her when she’s talking. Her voice cracking and tears almost falling, but she holds it together and does her best to distract Corypheus.

Does the encounter with Corypheus change their opinion of being Herald? Does it make them believe they are the Herald, lose faith, or affirm to their previous belief?

She’ll stare at the mark on her hand for awhile after everything, wondering if it is a blessing or a curse. She feels it flowing through her. Not pain, but just...there. And now seeing that Corypheus wants it and how he will come for her life, it only makes her more determined. Elle is not a woman known for giving up. Her faith doesn’t dim. Heck, the fire inside of her gets brighter and stronger after this. She believes she was meant for this. To see a creature that powerful and to LIVE after it? She believes she’s truly blessed, and she will use that blessing to her advantage.

How do they feel about being chosen for Inquisitor?

Guilt. Overwhelming guilt. They don’t know her past. None of them do. They don’t know how she is truly a mage, how she lost control of her magic once and hurt people. They don’t know, and yet she watches as they bow to her. Swear their loyalty to her. An elf playing human and champion, when she feels like she doesn’t deserve it. And as she looks at them, sees their bravery, their loyalty, their faith, and the way they want to see this through, she smiles and pushes her guilt back and raises her sword high. She will save this world and maybe, just maybe...they’ll still love her if she reveals herself.

How does the Inquisitor react to being in the Fade?

She feels like it’s a playground. Well, not an actual playground, but she’s excited to see all of it. Is it terrifying? YES. But does she also find it...kinda beautiful? Yeah. She feels how Solas feels. She was always interested in her magic, and that interest hasnt dimmed at all, and she looks so in awe of everything. She couldn’t hold back her curious eyes looking everywhere. The only part she truly hated was seeing the graveyard of fears. She saw hers and it said, “Herself.” She saw her past flash before her eyes and she felt like it was hard to breathe. Her curiosity now replaced with fear and anger. However, when one of the companions called her name, she was pulled out of whatever trance she was in, and laughed at their concern.

“I’m fine. I’m always fine. I’m the inquisitor. Let’s just get out of here.” And when the demon spoke to her, it’s cold, cruel voice called out, “Would they still love you if they knew?” She would yell a curse at it in Elven, and keep walking through the fade, desperate to get back to the world to save everyone and avoid her past.

Do they ever believe the spirit is actually of Divine Justinia?

She does. She likes to believe that Divine Justinia would look out for them, would want them to get out of here, and somehow stay behind. Is it a stretch? Yes. But she believes it was Divine Justinia. Let her have hope for once...

How do they react to learning it was the Divine behind them in the Fade, not Andraste?

She didn’t know the Divine, but she felt sad at how she sacrificed herself to save Elle. She feels at fault, but knows she isn’t. Divine made that choice. She feels sad at how she isn’t what people believe she is, but she still feels like it’s the Makers will. Or whatever is watching over them, she believes it is their will, and knows she is still destined to be here.

What is their opinion on attending the ball in the first place? Do they think it’s a waste of time, a necessary duty, or something exciting?

She feels nervous, but not too nervous. She was like a bard and was used to being someone else. Being careful, putting on a mask. It was a talent of hers. So, she is a little excited to be who she was when she was a bit younger, even if her decisions will affect everyone, she keeps a confident look on her face, gives playful responses, listens to everyone when they think she isn’t, goes with their opinions for their support, and knows how to persuade people. It’s something that was taught to her and she guesses becoming like a bard was a very important step in her life. However, she does see this as serious and treats it like that. When she’s searching, she’s moving as fast as her feet can take her, using her strength to maybe or maybe not break a door, keeping her mask on when she shows up, and knows how to play nice and when to play vicious.

Does the Inquisitor fight Grand Duchess Florianne, or expose her?

SHE DRAGS HER SWEETIE!! Even Cullen was holding back a laugh at how Elle was circling her like a shark, the way she had a smile on her face, the way she was confident, and noticing how she was very good at this. She said some...colorful words, and she dragged her, exposed her, humiliated her, whatever word you wanna use! She usually would feel bad, but this woman was going to get people killed without hesitation, so Elle held nothing back. And she loves exposing terrible people >:).

How does the Inquisitor get along with Morrigan?

She treats her with the same kindness and respect she treats everyone else with! She doesn’t trust her completely when they first met, her naive ways and too kind heart was now protected and wary. But overtime they grew a bit closer and became friend and when Morrigan acts coy and secretive, Elle would play along as well. As if it was a game between the two. They enjoyed it sometimes, but when it came to serious matters, they would drop everything and try to understand each other, no secrets or coyness involved.

How does the Inquisitor feel about facing Corypheus for the last time? Do they feel confident? Do they believe they will survive the encounter? How do they cope with the possibility of failure?

Her heart hurts. She panics. She believes she can do this, she knows she can’t use her magic, she can’t show it, but her magic is flowing through her stronger than ever before. Her magic seemed alive and desperate to be revealed and unleashed again. She was tempted to unleash it and beat Corypheus, but she knew she could do this on her own strength. She feels a bit confident, but she is shaking when she goes to spend time with Cullen the night before facing Corypheus for the last time. It ends with private time alone (hehe know what I mean ;)), and she does everything to show how much she loves him. She holds onto him as tight as she can, as if he’ll disappear if she doesn’t hold on tight. She makes him feel as much pleasure as she can make him feel, whispers her love confessions to him, and gives everything she can to him. She loves him. She loves him. And she feels so happy when he does the same. He loves her. He loves her. And that night is the night she reveals herself to him, knowing she needs to let him know just in case she doesn’t make it...

How do they react to Solas’ disappearance?

Worried. She’s always worried for her friends and family. She was interested in Solas and everythint he taught her, so she considered him her friend. She liked his company and the way he sorta comforted her sometimes, so she was definitely worried. She sent out many orders to search for Solas, refusing to give up on him. Needing to find out what happen.

Now onto the people >:))).

Who does the Inquisitor prefer to have in their party? Why?

She likes Cassandra the most. She likes Cassandras voice a lot. She doesn’t know why but it just sounds beautiful to her, even if she mainly hears it with curse words or shouting, but it’s beautiful to her😌. Plus, she likes seeing Cassandra be kind to people who need it. She believes going with her is sort of teaching Cassandra to breach out and to show how people are suffering on every side. And she likes making Cassandra smile whenever she can, since Cassandra wasn’t one to smile or laugh.

What is the Inquisitor’s first impression of Leliana?

She finds her very interesting. She was used to being like a spy, but she saw how serious Leliana was and was in awe of her talent. She was still a little naive at the time and trusted Leliana with everything in her since Cassandra trusted her and how Leliana did stop Cassandra from basically attacking Elle in the dungeon👀. And eventually when she manages to soften Leliana, she loves how Leliana is hopeful and she agrees with her hopes and dreams. She’s happy she knows Leliana :))).

What is the Inquisitor’s first impression of Cullen?

First impression AND their development sorta is included.

She felt safe and was interested in him as well. In a different way from Leliana though... And as she fell for him, she felt love for the first time since she ran from home, and when she learned about how he quit Lyrium she felt a lot pride in her. Like, she was proud of him and supported him with all of her heart. And when she learned how he was suffering, her heart dropped so hard. She had seen this before. Her father was suffering like he was, dreams being terrible, and knowing that want to go back on it. She didn’t get it as a kid, but as she grew up she understood how dangerous quitting Lyrium was and she couldn’t let someone else she loves dearly die. She would NOT let it happen. Not again. She’s older. She can do this. She tells him not to take it and she watches him like Cassandra does. Checking in on him everyday and always making sure he’s telling her the truth. And sometimes she just flirts with him to take his mind off of it :))). It works and he feels so happy when she’s around him. Even if it’s in the war room...he just loves seeing her.

The same goes for everyone else. She treats them with kindness, loves their specific traits (Serahs prank, Cassandras true kindness, Morrigan interest in Elven lore, Solas’s knowledge, and everyone’s desire to save the world). This is it for Elle but this only scratches the surface of everything I’ve thought about her >:))). I love the idea of someone having a terrible past, misunderstood, and being afraid to show themself, but still also showing their true intentions and emotions. I love this baby and want to talk about her more but not sure how?? I guess I’ll figure it out. Anyways yeah, Julien is next >:))).

#long post #da #da:i #dai #dragon age #dragon age inquisition #dragon age: inquisition #my writing #I love Elle so much. Idk why shes so thought out. I chose human and champion ONCE GUYS!! ONCE!! Always usually an elf and a mage and #I was like ‘Hmmm—I got a sad sad Idea’#and thus Elle having a tragic background (theres still a lot in her background) and hiding her true self out of fear and self-hatred.#I love her and she deserves happiness and loves Cullen with her whole heart and loved when he hugged her when she got back from defeating #Corypheus. I just—I LOVE HER ALRIGHT!! Hope y’all love her too and will ask me more things about her. Honestly anything because I love her #and wanna explain her background. Whether from asks or my own posts. Guess we’ll find out when I finish these questionnaires-

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johannesviii · 5 years

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Top 12 Personal Favorite Hit Songs from 2012

We’ve now entered the first year in a trio of fantastic years for hit songs, so yeah, it’s a top 12.

You won’t like some entries on this particular list.

Disclaimers:

Keep in mind I’m using both the year-end top 100 lists from the US and from France while making these top 10 things. There’s songs in English that charted in my country way higher than they did in their home countries, or even earlier or later, so that might get surprising at times.

Of course there will be stuff in French. We suck. I know. It’s my list. Deal with it.

My musical tastes have always been terrible and I’m not a critic, just a listener and an idiot.

I have sound to color synesthesia which justifies nothing but might explain why I have trouble describing some songs in other terms than visual ones.

Still working in Paris in 2012. Getting rapidly fed up with that. In constant stress to pay the rent because the landlord is bad and refuses to pay for stuff he should actually be responsible for in the flat. Other than that? Life was pretty good. “Having Money(tm)” meant being able to actually eat decent food and my health started to improve. Also I adopted a cat. That’s also the year I discovered the French branch of the SCP Foundation and started to contribute a lot to it. I also made this Tumblr blog!

I subscribed to a magazine called Elegy which always came with a music sample, which was great to discover new and vaguely obscure stuff.

Quite a lot of notable albums that year: Some Nights by fun., Night Visions by Imagine Dragons, Monkey Me by Mylène Farmer, Living Things by Linkin Park (with poorly chosen singles unfortunately imho), Revelations by mind.in.a.box., Babel by Mumford & Sons, Neverworld’s End by Xandria, and most importantly, the dreamy and emotional Valtari by Sigur Ros and the dark and excellent Hide & Seek by The Birthday Massacre (even though my year was mostly ruled by Automatic (VNV Nation) that came out the previous year in 2011). Actually having money meant I could finally own the albums I had wanted for years, and you can bet the fact that I owned zero The Birthday Massacre albums even though I had loved their stuff since 2008 was quickly rectified.

Nothing too annoying as far as non-elligible songs go this time, apart from the fact that more stuff from Mylo Xyloto (Coldplay) should have charted higher, and that I kinda regret the absence of La Vie Est Belle by MC Solaar. Not even sure I would have put it on the list, but still, great song.

Honorable mentions first!

Dusty Men (Saule) - Nothing to say about this. Pretty cool.

Young And Wild And Free (Snoop Dog) - That is a super chill and nice song.

Happy (C2C) - At the time, my brother was part-time DJ and opened a gig for these guys, and I was so proud of him! And I was also really glad to see some of their songs become hits. Very good stuff.

Midnight City (M82) - Borderline annoying or very good, depending on my mood.

Burn It Down (Linkin Park) - As I said, my opinion is that the singles from that album were poorly chosen, and Castle of Glass should have been the first one because let’s face it, that song is fantastic. Burn it Down isn’t bad at all, though.

Glad You Came (The Wanted) - I love how this song is written and it’s a lot of fun to hear every sentence starting with the end of the previous one.

I Cry (Flo Rida) - A ton of energy, very propulsive song.

Domino (Jessie J) - There’s a shit ton of weird metaphors in there but it’s still a very solid song.

Princess of China (Coldplay ft Rihanna) - I know I keep going on and on about Mylo Xyloto and how weird it was that the biggest hits from the album weren’t at all its best songs, but still, that’s really good stuff.

Ho Hey (The Lumineers) - The last cut from the list. This song is adorable and always puts me in a good mood. It’s so cute it almost feels mean to leave it out of this top. It’s also elligible for 2013 but I had even less room on that list, so...

And now, a top 12.

12 - Diamonds (Rihanna)

US: #94 / FR: #5

Was considering leaving it out of the list, decided there was no way I could leave it out, realised there was no room left, and added a slot. Welcome to a top 12 instead of 10. But yeah, love that song even if it’s no longer on my playlist nowadays.

11 - Bangarang (Skrillex)

US: Not on the list / FR: #92

Yes.

The other reason this list was turned into a top 12 was to put Skrillex on it.

I’m not even remotely sorry.

Make fun of dubstep all you like, that track is an explosion of sharp colors and edges, like an audio version of edgy street art. It’s almost impossible for me to listen to it without miming the shapes of the sound with energetic gestures and some hand-flapping. Perfect stim music.

10 - Die Young (Kesha)

US: #85 / FR: #78

This is no Take It Off but it’s the next best thing available, and it’s catchy and has a lot of fun little details (like the dirty socks line), and also, unlike the previous two, it’s still on my mp3 player, so yeah, 10th spot is fair. I love a party song with some sort of apocalyptic mindset.

9 - Skyfall (Adele)

US: Not on the list / FR: #2

I usually don’t give a damn about James Bond movies but I sincerely loved that one, with its stakes becoming smaller and smaller and more personal as the story progressed, and most importantly, it had some visually striking colors near the end, and this wonderful, wonderful song. As I already said about the previous Adele song, I only like slow, emotional songs when there’s some energy behind them or at least some sort of dramatic atmosphere, and boy that’s some quality Drama(tm) right there.

8 - A l’Ombre (Mylène Farmer)

US: Not on the list / FR: #86

If C’est Une Belle Journée was the “last great Mylène Farmer song”, A l’Ombre might just be her best single released post 2003, at least imho. It’s only #8 because the general quality of hit songs in 2012 was insanely high, otherwise it would be way higher.

It’s about losing your identity and as you might already know I’m a sucker for that theme ; also the music video features Olivier de Sagazan, an artist who puts layers of clay, paint and mud on his own head and body to sculpt new faces, and it’s disturbing in all the best ways (obvious body horror tw for the link even if it’s clay and very abstract. Also there’s wolves. I’m just saying because I have one friend who’s scared of them).

7 - Thrift Shop (Macklemore)

US: Not on the list (#1 the very next year obviously) / FR: #7

Finally, a song about my favorite type of clothes: the cheap, comfy, unfashionable ones. With a great beat! And really fun lyrics! And a great music video! And a couple of actually insightful lines! Can’t even imagine how happy I would have been if this had dropped 3 years earlier back in university when I was still called “the hobo”.

I was still wearing that same old black coat from 2006 in 2012, mind you.

6 - Lights (Ellie Goulding)

US: #5 / FR: Not on the list

This song looks fantastic and, just like Fireflies by Owl City which to me looks exactly like fireflies flying in the night, it’s incredibly satisfying to hear a song titled “Lights” which looks like a series of pulsing semi-distant lights in the dark.

5 - We Are Young (fun.)

US: #3 / FR: #21

As far as favorite bands go, the 2000s charts gave me Linkin Park, Placebo, The Killers and My Chemical Romance. The 2010s charts were a bit less generous and only gave me fun., who’s own arrogance killed them right when they were at the top of their game and that’s nothing short of a tragedy considering how f█cking good their few hit songs were.

I guess your band either dies a hero, or it lives long enough to see itself become Imagine Dragons.

Oh well. At least we had some of the best songs (if not the best) of the 2010s while they were there.

4 - Turn Me On (David Guetta ft Nicki Minaj)

US: #35 / FR: #57

Ooooooh I bet some of you are furious this is placed 5 slots above Adele.

Listen. You know I love dance music, especially when it’s aggressive or with a darker edge. And yeah, that sounded like a lost Benassi Bros track, and it had a great (but way too short) rap bridge. You also know how literal-minded I am. So when I first heard Nicki Minaj’s voice with a ton of electronic distorsion saying “Make me come alive, come on and turn me on”, I didn’t picture anything sexy, but a robot. I’d rather pretend songs are about interesting things instead of generic supposedly sexy club anthems.

PLOT TWIST! As it turns out, the music video, instead of featuring some generic club stuff, featured everything I wanted and more: a weird, steampunk world of robots in which an inventor just created an android that looks way more alive than all the previous ones, and they all become jealous, and break his door down. With an axe.

Framing is everything. I absolutely love it. What a gift.

3 - It’s Time (Imagine Dragons)

US: #91 / FR: Not on the list

Believe it or not, I used to love Imagine Dragons. I still love the album Night Visions, which, apart from a couple of duds (like Demons, which is dreadful), is damn good. I don’t know what happened after that. I really don’t. Everything became slow, and heavy, and kind of boring. It worked fine for Radioactive, because that was a post-apocalyptic song, but when you try to apply the same formula to motivational songs, it simply doesn’t work.

Oh well. At least, for now, there was It’s Time. The music video, with people walking through a wasteland, is the perfect imagery for that song. Rebuild something new, but don’t change who you are. Things might get broken, but we’ll make art with them. We’ll plant trees over the graves of people who burnt them. Positive pessimism only, lads.

2 - Good Time (Owl City & Carly Rae Jepsen)

US: #38 / FR: #40

The most innocent song about parties ever written. It IS always a good time when you listen to it. It reminded me of the parties at the campus at my job training the previous year, where we’d make dumb contests like “best disguise but if you buy anything you’re disqualified” and I made Freddy Krueger claws in papercraft and a friend won with his “emperor Nero” disguise which was basically a toga made with his bed sheets, a crown made with ivy he found outside, and him looking incredibly punchable on purpose.

It’s an incredibly cute song, it never outstays its welcome, always puts me in a good mood AND gives me some much needed energy. You already know I loved Owl City to begin with, even if I wanted him to have way more hit songs, and Carly Rae Jepsen was going to end on my playlist eventually, with several fantastic future songs. I’m glad this was a hit. They both deserved it.

1 - Some Nights (fun.)

US: #14 / FR: Not on the list (why. how. f█ck off)

There’s drums! There’s ‘woho-woho’s! There’s guitars! It’s a perfect pop-rock earworm that never ever gets annoying! There’s a goddamn solo made with an autotuned version of the singer yelling “aaaaaaa”!! What more can you possibly want from a hit song?

I’m saying this right now: this is my favorite elligible hit song of the entire decade. Spoilers, I know. The #1s for 2013 and 2014 both come really close, but they aren’t as anthemic as this one. What did we do to deserve something this f█cking good in that day and age? I have no clue, but clearly, we didn’t deserve more of that, because these guys split up very quickly.

Anyone know some kind of magic spell to bring them back for an encore?

Next up: The Year When Just About Everyone Dropped An Excellent Album

#Johannes’ bad not good pretty terrible music lists #music #long post

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msawesomegeek · 5 years

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9 good movies with terrible endings

A/N: So I felt like writing some lists and this has been a long way coming. This is of course on endings, so spoiler alert!

9. Remember Me.

Okay this movies is not particularly spectacular to begin with. But it did have decent enough acting and a fairly simple plot. Seemingly a good old fashioned notebook rip-off. And then it all goes to god damn shit!

It turns out he works in the twin towers on 9/11, which would have made a great twist. In literally any other movie. It makes this entire thing so god damn pointless!

8. Lucy

From a romantic drama to sci-fi the only thing Lucy has in common with Remember Me is that they both decide to fuck their audience just before ending. Right so Scarlett Johanson who plays Lucy, gains access to all of her brain capacity (Limitless style, but without the drugs). And then in the end, she just turns into a fucking USB drive! What the hell?????

7. Vampire Academy

Okay, I will admit these first few films are by no means cinematic masterpieces. But up until the end of this film, it actually had a lot going for it. It was everything that Twilight was not. Gory, funny, had some compelling characters (and some that were as dead pan as Kristen Stewart (look at you dude who plays the stalest love interest in recent memory)). But it was a good movie, it does have some problems with its premise, but it would have made an amazing b-teen-vampire-comedy if it wanted to. But at las. The twist does kind of work it is not that bad. It is the same problem that DCEU has. It spends the entire last few minutes of the movie, setting up a sequel that was never to be. Never even explaining any thing about what it means and why it is there? At least they could have saved it till an end credit scene like Marvel does. But they did not, and in stead of leaving this movie feeling entertained and content I was left with more questions than answers.

6. SpiderMan 3

Now, before you all collectively loose your shit. Yes, I am calling SpiderMan 3 a good movie. Because right up until the end it kind of is. Yes it has a major villain problem, and sandman being uncle Ben’s killer doesn't really make sense. But until then it is objectively a good movie. AND before you say anything, yes I know the dreadful emo sequence. But if you think about it, it is totally in line with Peter Parker’s character. Peter Parker is not cool or an edgy killer guy like Tom Hardy. Finger guns, a dumb haircut and silly singing and dancing is what he would think is cool. And I am willing to fight you on that.

But then there is the villain team up that sort of works and is kind of odd. And hell even Topher Grace agrees that he was a bad Venom so... But go re-watch it, and I guarantee that you will have a good time, until the ending.

5. Now You See Me

Now, I do actually really like this movie. I am a Harry Potter nerd, so even if there is a trick to it, I do still love the wonders of magic. I loved the actors, I mean I am a sucker for Jesse Eissenberg and Dave Franco on their own, and having those two balanced out by Woody Harrelsson and Isla Fisher, sign me the fuck up.

But even I, a fan of the film, is willing to admit, that the twist ending does not work. I mean I do kind of get it, but then all of it just seems to undermine everything. And were they really getting away with everything or was he just letting them? And why be so cryptic about it and not just contact them instead to tell them? Like I get that he is a secret organisation of magicians that have an image to uphold, but like??? Come on, there is just too much lapse in logic for this to work...

4. 2001 a Space Odessy

Again, a movie I do objectively love. I have no idea how it should have ended, but that weird ass acid trip in the end, was not really what I was hoping.

Honestly it would have been great and terrifying to end it with: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can't do that”. And just having him choke to death, hell I would even take the acid as a kind of death sequence. But seriously, while it is set to epic music and I have watched that movie a few times now, I still have no fucking clue what that ending means.

I know it is what Kubrick wanted, but I would just have cut it...

3. Hereditary

Marked as one of the scariest movies of 2018, and I get it. I was objectively scared in sequences of this movie. But the twist in the end, it just seems so forced.

It seems like a weird way to explain everything that happened without explaining anything. I feel like there is a huge chuck of this movie that I either missed or was cut from the version I saw, because by the end of this movie. I was more confused than I was going in. Like why was the mother seemingly the main character when she just gets offed like its nothing in the end? Is she just crazy? Are the supernatural events we saw real or just fabricated by this cult? Who is the demon king? And why did it first possess Charlie, why couldn't it go directly into the boy. Why do the weird haunting thing? Why the naked people?

I just have so many questions! I get that there is something scary about the unknown, but I felt like this movie took that feat a little too far.

2. Black Panther

I know everyone is gonna hate me for this. But Black Panther is a Meh movie at best. Like Shuri is fantastic, the villain is one of Marvels better ones. T’challa is a pretty cool protagonist. But I don’t think that it deserved all of the praise and the oscar nod it got. Why? The ending is just plain shitty.

The end fight is just plain stupid and Illogical! Right before Killmonger and T’Challa go to fight, one of the warriors literally says: The dual is not over.

So since T’Challa is not dead, he and Killmonger need to continue fighting till one of them surrenders. Meaning, there is no logical reason the rest of them should be fighting! It is just plain stupid. That and I am sorry, but the CGI for the last fight scene looks like something from a play-station 2 game. If they had just changed a few things about this movie, maybe it could have been great enough to deserve all it got. But I am sorry, but the end fight is just so dumb and badly animated that I can’t call it a perfect film.

1. Kingsman 2 The Golden Circle

Now this movie still infuriates me. On one hand I love it, and it is seemingly another very great movie, almost as good as the first one. And then, the last 5 minutes of the movie happens. I even remember leaving the theatre infuriated with this movie. Obviously they had a bit of a bigger budget and expectations for this movie compared to the first one, because the first one was so good. But it was like as soon as the americans got involved they took everything that was great about the first one and just pissed up and down it. The reason I liked the first one, is that it was cheeky.

Taron Egerton, is cheeky too arrogant for his own good and compelling through and through. I liked it for having great character dynamics and for not cheapening it by putting in some unnecessary romance plot. It was, in other words everything the second movie wasn't. I loved every bit of it. Up until the marriage and the speech Harry gives about how having relationships are as important as BEING AN INTERNATIONAL SPY! And then he just marries the girl, without thinking about how public a royal wedding is, and how many enemies and henchmen know his face and he will be putting himself Thilde and everyone else in fucking danger! So not only is it a stupid decision, but is also just soooo Hollywood. Having to get married and have that perfect happy ending. It was so sugar sweet that I feel like throwing up just thinking about it.

Now I could bitch forever about how much I hate that movie ending, but I am stopping myself. If you agree or disagree with what I said I am always willing to discuss or go into depth, or just talk about movies really.

If not, tell me what list or movie I should review next.

Until next time.

- Geek out.

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missjackil · 5 years

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My 15x06 Opinion

Golden Time

This was a really good episode despite my disapproval of the end. I can be objective :)

We have a very fun start with Dean moping adorably around in his hotdog PJs binging on cereal and Scooby-doo. And be still my beating heart, Sam going for a run! There’s nothing unsexy about sweaty, messy-haired, athletic Sam in sweats!! But oh wait... ghost Eileen appears. She’s stuck as a ghost, having escaped Hell when the gates opened. Strangely enough, the Winchesters are stuck on the word of a demon that people cant enter Heaven if they have ever been to Hell. I gotta say, I'm kinda disappointed that the boys just take his word for it, is that just me?

Meanwhile, we have Cass on his own. On a mission to find a missing kid. I have to give it to Cass, he was pretty interesting this week, and I loved his look of complete done-ness when Dean was barking at him on the phone. I also gotta love Dean for his “Don’t you dare ignore my brother” attitude!

In other news, another local witch tried to get into Rowena’s stash and got dead in the process. Sam is going to Rowena’s apartment to find a spell and a crystal to put Eileen in to keep her fro going back to Hell or going insane as a ghost. When he gets there, he finds the body, the apt in disarray and nothing of good witchy value in the immediate area. Eileen finds a secret room where all Rowena’s goodies are and Sam goes in. This was a nice moment Sam had of remembering her. Might I say, he took her death much harder than he’s taken others deaths aside from Dad’s and Dean’s many. I dont even think he looked this shaken by his Mom’s death, but much has to do with him killing her Im sure.

Upon leaving, Sa buckles in pain, spitting blood, of course he has been hexed. Now I think it’s so cute that even though he knows very little sign language, he knows how to sign “My brother” to tell Eileen to go get him. Sam, of course, is thusly abducted.

After Sam’s obligatory “tied up and mildly tortured” scene, he takes a young witch with him to get a resurrection spell from Row’s apt. The witch states her now-dead sister made her life hell. Sam trie to relate by saying Dean put Super Glue in his toothpaste when he was 10, which was instantly trumped by real horrors the young witch endured. Thats right Sam, Dean isnt such a bad brother...but you know that ;)

Sam tries to convince the girl to run start a new life, be happy, and she accuses him of lying and a big fight scene starts. Dean arrives in time to save Sam, Eileen saves Dean, then Sam saves Eileen. TADAAAH!!

Now we have the scene that screams “Sam and Eileen are gonna bang!” to me. They couldnt leave Eileen as their host friend that is the inspiration they need to try to fix Heaven or make a new one or whatever, no, lets bring her back to life because I guess we need to get Sam laid before whatever fate befalls him at the end of the series, go out with a BANG as they say 😣

We have a spell to bring Eileen back, because obviously, bringing people back to life has always worked out so well for the Winchesters, they should definitely do it again!!! And this spell requires Sam to draw a nice deep soaking bath, in a modern tub that the boys must have installed themselves because it doesnt fit the MOL time period motif they've always had, sprinkle in some herbs (probably rose petals too why tf not) speak some extra sexy Latin, and have Sam modestly turn around because he’s a gentleman, and found the only resurrection spell to date that brings ‘em back naked. Candlelight, soft music, Sam’s ample bosom heaving breathlessly in anticipation for the spell to work. Of course it does, theres a twinkle in Sam’s eyes as he hears the water splash... “Sam?” He hears and takes as the OK to turn around. It worked!! His 4 yr crush-when-convenient is back to life because again, this has always worked out so good.

She holds out her hand for Sam to take it... this is so y’all know she initiated the sex they have/had later that we’ll either get to see the cuddle in bed, or get a verbal acknowledgment of. I may literally puke if we actually get a sex scene. Sorry, it was fine back when the bros barely liked each other, but theyve been more or less married for years now and it just seems wrong. Oh dont worry, if Sam gets laid, Dean will too. Though Sam did put Eileen to bed without sex because she needs sleep, we need to know this because it wont seem as creepy if we know he at least let some time pass and didnt take advantage of possible vulnerability.

I hope I can come back next episode or so and be very glad I was wrong, because I know a lot of you dont think they’ll bang, but I say theres no reason whatsoever for a scene like that other than to prep us for romance and not leave any of you saying “Wait! Where did that come from?? They only think of each other as friends!”

I hope its short lived, not that I want Eileen to die... again... but lets just have her go off hunting on her own because if she is Sam’s end game (which I dont think she is) I will unwatch the entire series and never let it on my screen again 😑

Honorable mention to Cass, congrats on solving your first case by yourself and I actually really dug you losing your shit on the Djinn!!

So aside from my personal disapproval, on a scale of Bloodlines to Lebanon Ill say this was another very good one. Ill give it a 7, deducting a full point for giving me agita.

#15x06 spoilers #golden time spoilers #my opinion #anti saleen

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imsuchotometrash · 5 years

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Obey Me! Incomplete Walkthrough - Lesson 1

So I noticed that there isn’t exactly a walkthrough for the game out yet, and I figured it couldn’t be a bad thing if I posted my findings.

I do have to preface that this is incomplete, and that is because I found out that when replaying the game, there is no indication if your answers from previous playthroughs prodive intimacy increases. So all of my original answers from my first playthrough will be marked, so as when you are reading this you are aware that THEY SAY “NO INTIMACY”, BUT IN FACT COULD BE INTIMACY INCREASE ANSWERS. I did not take note during my first playthrough.

On to the walkthrough!

Lesson 1-1: No opportunities for intimacy increases that I could find.

As a human, it will probably take a little while for you to adjust to things here in the Devildom.

Is this a dream...?

*The Devildom...?*

...

I’m the president of said council.

*Why am I here?*

When can I go home?

… I offer you a most heartfelt welcome, Y/N.

*Answer the question.*

On behalf of the students?

After one year, you will write a paper about your exchange here in the Devildom.

*Tasks?!*

Write a paper?!

You demon!

Lesson 1-2: No opportunities for intimacy increases that I could find. BUT, a second choice becomes available is you choose the Avatar of Lust when presented with the two demons. No chances of increasing intimacy with this second choice, but it is a cool attempt at explaining Asmodeus’ powers.

Sounds like you had a nice chat.

*He seems reliable.*

I would’ve preferred you, Lucifer.

I am Satan, the Avatar of Wrath.

*The Avatar of Lust?*

It’s okay, I won’t hurt you. Come on, don’t be shy…

Look into his eyes.

*I’ll pass, thanks.*

...

The Avatar of Wrath?

To keep you safe, you are to stay with them at the House of Lamentation.

To keep me safe?

*The House of Lamentation?*

Lesson 1-3: Personally, this is the lesson where I think you should be able to start gaining intimacy, although I found no opportunites to increase.

But in return, you better make sure you don’t cause me any trouble, got it?!

*All right, deal*

Uh-uh, I won’t go along with this!

...

We have decided who will take care of you, so on to the next subject: your tasks.

Tasks?

*Will I get tests?*

Your task is to polish up your soul nicely and to acquire the power to resist demons.

My soul?

*It’s okay to resist?*

You could say it is an experiment to find out who will win.

*What happens if I win?*

What happens if I lose?

Lesson 1-5: There is only one choice option in this chapter, and it does not provide intimacy options.

...

Let me go home!

This must be a dream... Pinch me!

*Let’s make it a year to remeber!

Lesson 1-7: No opportunites to increase intimacy that I found. Disappointly enough.

Anyway it doesn’t matter! Just don’t go thinking that I’m scared of Lucifer or anything! Because I’m not!

I know that.

*Honestly, I really don’t care.*

Sorry, wasn’t listening.

If there’s something you wanna ask me, you’d best do it now.

Nope. Nothing in particular.

What are your hobbies?

*I want to know about that job listing.*

Lesson 1-10: First opportunity I found to increase a character’s intimacy. Also another chapter that has a hidden second choice option.

...What? You looking for a fight, is that it?

Defend Mammon. (Mammon Intimacy Increase)

Which ones? Ooh, do you have any of the main characters from Battle Princess Brigade? Or Girls Only, or Diamond Dust?

Yep, I do, actually.

Nope.

Sorry, I don’t follow you.

So then, you actually are a lowlife, Mammon?

*Don’t say anything. Just watch and wait.*

(Text Exchange in Chapter) Angry bird sticker

*Ok bird sticker*

No bird sticker.

Angry bird sticker.

Lesson 1-13: More intimacy increase opportunities and hidden options.

But a normie! You know what people would say, right?!

*Are you worried that people might gossip?

Are you an otaku, Leviathan?

Actually, I’m an otaku, too.

Wait, that looks like… The Tale of the Seven Lords. Are you a fan of that, too?

Yep, I love it.

Hmph, is that so… Okay then, can you tell me what the first lord is known as in the story? *It should be noted that all answers are incorrect and this is a trick question*

The Lord of Shadow.

The Lord of Emptiness.

... Sorry. The truth is I don’t know.

Huh? Never heard of it.

Actually, you know what? I want to BE Henry!

*And someday you WILL be Henry.

I’m afraid that’s not really possible...

Right! Screw all the normies! Who needs ‘em? (Leviathan Intimacy Increase)

Lesson 1-15: No intimacy increase oppurtunites that I found.Also has the first “choice” with only one option available, so I will not be noting those options here.

The demon lends his strength to a human to make their wish come true in exchange for their souls.

*I don’t want to give up my soul!*

That’s so cool!

Don’t you agree?

Yeah! All right, I’ll go give it a shot!

I’m not sure I could manage to do that.

*How would I go about doing that?*

Mammon Phone Call after Lesson 1-1: No opportunites to increse intimacy

Yoooo.

*Yoooo*

So what business does a human got with THE Mammon?

*You will be in charge of me from now on.*

Let’s be friends.

Diavolo “Hello” Text Chat: Diavolo is not a romancable character, but I went through the trouble of documenting his options anyway. If his answers raise other boys’ intimacy levels, I will of course include those choices in the walkthrough. Otherwise, I will not include him. Feel free to message me if you really do want to know though.

Lucifer “Hello Text Chat: No intimacy increases I could find.

You had better not do anything that would cause Diavolo to lose face.

*Of course!*

I’ll do my best.

Leave it up to me!

Satan “Hello” Text Chat: Literally no choices given. It’s just one sticker.

Asmodeus “Hello” Text Chat: No intimacy increase I could find.

Kissy purple devil sticker

*Excited heart bird sticker*

Kissy purple devil sticker

Smiling red demon sticker

Beelzebub “Hello” Text Chat: No intimacy increases I could find.

Pouting Purple devil sticker

Did you not eat today?

*I have a lollipop*

And that is literally everything I could possibly think of to include in a walkthrough of Lesson 1! Let me know if there’s anything I missed, and I will hopefully have Lesson 2 posted in the next day or so!

#shall we date obey me #obey me walkthrough #obey me spoilers #obviously it's a walkthrough #this took so long #and it's my first post #go big or go home #I'm cannonballing into this fandom

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courage-a-word-of-justice · 5 years

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Fruits Basket 10

*sees Kagura* - Kyo! RUN! (Also, I had to google this…but “Je t’aime” means “I love you” in French.)

(TW: suicide discussion) Ohh…this is Mitchan…I didn’t recognise her, now that she’s coloured in. (I forgot that she had suicidal tendencies for the funnies…the 90s have some really nasty things in them when it comes to sensitive topics, like playing “being gay” as a joke and playing off suicide as a joke is one of the worst, I think.) Update: Accidentally mistook Mitchan for Mine, Ayame’s assistant.

Sarazanmai 10

So close to the end…I read a bunch of spoilers on what’s coming up though, so not much will be a surprise anymore…

Why do otters have hands…? (Or at least, this one does.)

Kanten…apparently it’s basically agar but with a different type of seaweed.

The chyron actually says Enta no Seishin Sekai, which translates to something like Enta’s Spiritual World. Y’know, like the world of the soul inside you or something like that.

I sort of assumed either Enta or Mabu would become a monster, based on people’s speculation, but the spoilers I read never stated anything about who became the monster/s in episode 10 (and/or 11). So this’ll be interesting.

I never thought Mabu would be going solo, although my sources did spoil me on the fact Reo would become a kappa.

Hey, I said to Irina earlier today that I knew there was tragic yaoi/shonen ai. Welp, there it is. Tragic shonen ai.

Oh…there’s a single shadow. It’s just Kazuki.

I was pleading for Enta to be saved by the dishes…and turns out I was right.

Update: Come to think of it, Reo and Mabu greatly resemble the Kunzite/Zoicite romance from Sailor Moon…right down to the “servants of the prince” thing.

BSD 35

Flashback Kyouka reminds me of Rachel Gardener (Angels of Death).

Pay attention to Mii-chan.

Fruits Basket 11

Ritsu!!!...Er, Ritsu’s mum first.

“I wonder if she knows about the zodiac…”

Gakuen Babysitters OVA

Oh…this is 27 minutes. That’s unusual.

I feel sorry for Saikawa already…

How the heck did Saikawa switch clothes so fast?!

Eh…? I didn’t expect Ryuichi to get the top grade…

Come to think of it, Saikawa is an enigma wrapped in a…blanket. Nah, I’m kidding, he’s an enigma wrapped in a mystery. (That’s how that saying goes, anyway.)

LOL, I think he sad the complex dish names just to confuse the kids…and maybe scare off Ryuichi.

Oh no, what is it now? What horrors shall we bear witness to? (sarcastic, but laughing a bit too)

Inomata…makes a really good Snow White.

Ya-who…? Who in heck is Yayoi???

Oh…if you watch to the very end, you’ll see a shot of the chairwoman as a kid! I didn’t think we’d ever get to see that.

Kimetsu no Yaiba 11

A tsuzumi seems to be a type of drum, if the kanji is anything to go by…at least, from my recognition of the kanji for “Tsuzumi”, I seem to recall that first kanji has something to do with drums. Update: Yes, it means “drum”. I recognised it because it’s the Chinese way to write “drum” – I don’t think I’ve seen it in 10 years or so, so...I’m glad I still remember it…(?)

As much as I don’t like seeing slapping a creep as humour…I feel sorry for Zenitsu…

It turns out…this show’s deliberate humour…sucks…

Hey! No suicide jokes, Zenitsu!

The sparrow talking with the crow is far too cute for me. Please protect these precious avian buddies…they warm my heart too much.

“Would you like to eat it?” So onigiri exist in this era?

Since I’m not listening to the sound (I’m in a position where I can’t listen to it, because others are in the vicinity), I don’t quite get what Zenitsu’s on about…but it makes me wonder if Zenitsu has good hearing much like Tanjiro has a good sense of smell. It makes sense since there were 5 of the Final Selection guys…although we don’t know who the 5th is.

*sees eyecatch* - Yeah, as much as Zenitsu complains…I feel sorry for him.

How did Zenitsu survive Final Selection??? The more he panics, the more I wonder that.

There’s a 3D model for Zenitsu too…I should’ve known…

Ooh, pep talk from a kid younger than him (Zenitsu)! Burn!

Okay, Zenitsu, yell it with me – BOARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! (aka Inosuke)

Hey! Don’t just go announcing your name and rank, plus the fact you’re a demon slayer!...By the way, how do you know your rank…?

Aw, just seeing the sparrow in the bottom right corner warms my heart.

“…in front of girls…”

Shield Hero 23

“I forgot that my shield translates for me.” – Only now do I realise how dumb that sounds…

“…small islands bunched together.” – Uh, that’s what archipelago means…?

Where are L’Arc and Therese, anyway…?

The quality of CR videos has been bad lately due to the weather I’ve been getting, so…I was waiting for the video to buffer and I guessed Raphtalia was going to get drunk. She did…*sigh*

Since when does eating wine berries count as “drinking”…?

LOL, those weird birds are called “Karma Penguins”.

I thought Filo’s clothes would tear when she transformed, so making clothes was futile…? Maybe she has more control over her transformation now, so it’s less futile?

Wuh? Gahaha! A penguin suit, with a Santa hat too!

OPM 23 (S2 Ep 10)

King’s shirt says “I <3 Otaku” and I like how Saitama chose a bald character, while King chose a character that looks nicer than Saitama’s but packs a punch. It’s translating the real world into the game world for them.

By the way, Saitama’s shirt is for the Tokimeki Sisters series from earlier in the season.

It seems Metal Bat‘s real name seems to be just that.

Did Tareo keep the Almanac…in his pants???

Sarazanmai 11 (FINAL)

When Keppi says “s***”, I guess he kind of…means it. (small LOL)

Gotta love Keppi’s “dadadadadadaaaaaaaaaaarkness…”. It must’ve been fun for whoever typed it into their program to do so.

When watching in slow-mo, you can see Kazuki’s kappa dish jump off his head for a second.

Wait, so…the episode titles are all taken from their shared future…?! Oh my glob!!!

Kazuki, Enta and Toi’s pro game – brought to you by Asakusa Film, Sozoyu and KAPPA…LOL.

I never knew Sara’s princess outfit could be so…lewd.

Kapamilk, LOL.

Why is this ending only Toi…?

Hmm…is Toi 18 in this end scene???

“Quecrotte” doesn’t seem to mean anything…

How did Enta’s glasses not come off his face???

Aww…please protect this old Toi. He kind of looks like Chikai, but he also doesn’t.

There seems to be a Nakata Building in Asakusa.

I think that’s all folks. See you next time!

Shield Hero 24

Instead of romantic penguin suits, couldn’t someone have invented deep-sea magic for swimming in bikinis or trunks with…?

“Of course, even the ships were arranged for by the queen.” – Now that’s ballin’ on a budget in another world!

Oh, so cohol fruits are the names of the wine berries…

This is just a scene where the camera shakes…it looks nice, but it has a terrible sense of “action”…

Not this Skybound move again…

Not dis “they’re not the real Cardinal Heroes” shitto agen…

I already knew from CR advertising L’Arc and Therese would become Naofumi’s enemies, I just didn’t know when.

Uh, L’Arc? She’s a raccoon girl. A tanuki??? She should be good with illusions…according to stereotype, anyway.

AOE seems to mean “area of effect”.

Is Glass a hero from another world as well, maybe???

#simulcast commentary #the rising of the shield hero #tate no yuusha no nariagari #Sarazanmai #Demon Slayer #Kimetsu no Yaiba #Fruits Basket #gakuen babysitters #Bungou Stray Dogs #Chesarka watches Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari #Chesarka watches BSD #Chesarka watches Gakuen Babysitters #Chesarka watches KnY #Chesarka watches Furuba #Chesarka watches OPM #one punch man #Chesarka watches Sarazanmai

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diabolikotaku · 6 years

Text

Vampire! Yui Komori Headcannons

Sorry it took me like three million years to answer you!

Vampire Age: 17

Human Age: 117

Her father is Seiji Komori, the Vampire King

Goes by Christian name in demon realm: Solomon

The youngest of four

Her eldest brother Yusuke, her older sister Yuna, her twin brother (who was born 2 hours earlier) Yuito, then Yui.

Yusuke and Yuna are fully Japanese while Yuito and Yui are half East-European

Yusuke and Yuna had a different mother than Yuito and Yui.

Yui has an orthodox name: Anastasia (Anya) Vasiliev

Yuito is Aleksandr (Alex) Vasiliev

Yusuke and Yuna go by catholic names: Jeremias and Juliette Lazarus

Her mother is Natsia Vasiliev

She was a low-class vampire who was filled with greed, so she decided to become a handmaiden at Seiji’s manor in order to seduce him, have his children, and demand money.

After all of her plans failed, she drugged Seiji and raped him

Once she was pregnant, she threaten Seiji to spread all over the demon realm that he committed adultery with a low class demon, unlike his current wife Hanako (Helena Lazarus) if he didn’t give her enough money so she could be comfortable

She didn’t even want to keep her children once she got the money, so she ditched them with Seiji.

Alas, Seiji still loved Yui and Yuito. So he and Hanako kept them nd treated them like family.

She was born with Yuito on June 21, 1901

The reason why she was made the ‘heiress to the Komori throne’ was because Yusuke fell in love with a werewolf (violation of vampire law) and was banished to the Miasma islands in the demon world (it’s just really hot and everything at some weird black miasma around it he’s immune to, he and his wife Yuri are living happily together), Yuna loathed absolutely everything about Seiji and swore to never associate with him or anything involving the vampire throne, and Yuito just calmly passed the responsibility down to Yui.

She couldn’t say no at that point

She has many nicknames in the demon realm, such as: Anya the Blood Heiress, the Trinity Cross, the Rose, etc.

Yui lives by herself in the Komori Manor, with the exception of a few servants.

For someone who’s loaded, you’d think she wouldn’t have to lift a finger.

Nope, she does all of the cooking, gardening, and sometimes cleaning herself

She needs something to do to pass the night time

That’s why she was so happy when Seiji told her that she was having guest staying with her from now on...Until he explained her situation.

Basically, six people with pure blood are sent to the Komori manor as ‘food banks’, one of them is the true blood Adam and will help make her the Eve of the demon realm

She had to pick wisely on who her Adam would be

Nevertheless, she was still happy about not being alone.

Yui has the complete opposite demeanor of what a vampire should act like/are perceived to act like.

Most vampires are sadistic, cruel, unforgiving, wouldn’t look twice at a human, usually arrogant, thinks everyone around them are weak, etc.

Nah, Yui’s all like: smiling, giving kindness to others, being helpful, friendly, caring, motherly, nurturing, equal to everyone, understanding, etc

So that’s why the Sakamaki brothers brushed her off when they first met her.

But now we get into her Sadistic side.

Yui has a completely different personality in her that sleeps, only wakes up to feed or pretty much take control when she feels like it. Sadistic is very much like the typical aristocrat vampire.

Normal Yui hates talking about or when Sadistic wakes up because it means she’ll lose control and Sadistic will destroy the trust she built with her humans.

When Sadistic wakes up, Yui’s eyes turn blood red.

Yui has to watch everything Sadistic does and she can’t take it.

That’s why she tries so hard to get along, have people’s trust, and make up for Sadistic’s words

Yui has some control over Sadistic, that’s why the boys don’t die after Sadistic feeds on them.

she tries to drain them like a juice box!

Yui is very innocent while Sadistic is very nasty and so not innocent if you catch my drift.

Sadistic is fond of punishments

Yui cries as she watches in horror what Sadistic does to the boys.

Has a fox and an owl familiar

The fox is named Xian and the owl is named Fester

Yui’s favorite colors are dusty rose, lilac velvet, pink ruby, and cream.

She’s quite up to date with what’s happening in the modern world.

switches between old-time clothes and modern clothes if not at school.

will sometime say old-time things by accident

still doesn’t own a phone (and Seiji didn’t put a land line in.)

When the Sakamaki brothers first discovered she was a vampire, Subaru was the one to pull out a trinity cross (gift from mother)

She dead ass pulled her rosary from under clothes and smiled, “You have one too? I figured you weren’t too deeply involve with religion by how you act!”

This confused the brothers and resulted in Ayato smacking Subaru up the head.

When she was little, she couldn’t bare to hurt a creature for blood, so she starved herself until her father make her drink blood via transfusions/cups of blood so she wouldn’t die on him.

She stopped doing that when she was around 13 in vampire years, but it always hurt her on the inside to hurt someone for blood.

She really does care for all of the Sakamaki boys, even if they brush her off because she seemed weak or she terrified them.

She helped Ayato find something around to Manor to do as a past time because there was no internet here...Or a phone line.

Gave Reiji the room with the largest study and always

Showed Subaru where her personal little chapel was so he could pray.

(Even though he would always criticize her about not being right) She would bake sweets when she can for Kanato.

Introduced crossword puzzeles to Laito

Showed Shuu the music room

Yui actually used to play the piano when she was younger, but became rusty

Yuito and Yuna never learned how to play one

Yusuke was an excellent violinist and she always loved to listen to him play

That’s why Yui was happy to hear Shuu knew how to play the violin.

Yui is a hopeless romantic, when she just hit ‘puberty’, she spent all day in the library reading romance novels and dreaming of her ‘one true love’. When she gets the chance to, Yui buys romance novels in town and indulges in them.

Well, she sure gets a selection...

and they’re certainly no prince charming.

For being this old, she’s bound to have at least one lover in the past, right? You’re correct! She used to spend her time with a human artist back in 1981.

His name was Takizawa Hayato

He taught her how to draw, or at least he tried too.

Yui’s still pretty bad at drawing people, but she can draw landscapes pretty well.

It only lasted for a little bit when he found out she was a vampire (and he questioned why she stayed the same age as when she met him while he aged).

Yusuke had to kill him.

Over the years, she learned how to crochet doilies out of pure boredom

And also learned how to sew a bit, you really have nothing to do after years of no internet.

Knows some Russian along with Yuito

Yusuke and Yuna know Italian.

Met Cordelia once

Yui didn’t really like her

Also that one time was when Seiji killed her because of some unknown reason.

If this were formatted like the actual games, then there would be a part in one of the boys’ route where she would lose a lot of her own blood and Seiji would give her a transfusion of Cordelia’s blood. Thus Cordelia becoming one with Yui.

Let’s get into some Otome Game shit :

(We’re going by Haunted Dark Bridal btw)

The best endings:

All: Marriage

maybe kids?

Becoming ‘Adam’

overcoming the shitty parts

Bad endings:

Ayato: Yui gets amnesia and doesn’t remember Ayato, making him crazy.

Kanato: Yui kills Kanato but keeps his corpse as a doll.

Laito: Sadistic becomes the controller of Yui’s body and abuses him for the rest of his days.

Shuu: Yui dies in a fire

Reiji: Yui is killed by Karlheinz

Subaru: Yui locks up Subaru and he is forced to become crazy like his mother.

Routes:

Ayato: Since he is main bae in the original series, there’s gonna be lots of cute things,

Kanato: i feel like there might be a lot of bonding in this route, of course it’s eventual, but when the time comes Kanato just clings onto Yui. This can help out a little bit with his complex about being the ignored child and help him move on. Possibly help him grow up a little? But then again, we love our man-child.

Laito: ear porn This route could go either ways, it either helps Laito rip away the playboy act and get over his problems about his mother (and him being sexually abused) or it helps him become more...Child-like again? Like before Cordelia fucked him over.

For the triplets, there might be a discovery arc about why their mother was involved with a family of vampires for some reason.

Shuu: I feel like Shuu’s route would probably be a healing route for him, from being cold, emotionless, tired, and shut-in, to someone who can get over his past. Even though it still lingers, I think Yui helps him out with his ptsd and depression and he gets better throughout the playthrough.

Reiji: The route that holds most of the actual plot. But there is still memorable moments between Reiji and Yui that satisfy the soul and goes over some of Reiji’s issues.

Subaru: Maybe a mix between a healing and a discovery route. Like Subaru finds out his mother was involved with the Komoris somehow and he’s trying to get the answer some how from Yui, the more time they spend together they fall in love and they have to come over some epic plot I can’t think of while he tries to heal after the ptsd of watching his mother suffer her days in that locked cage his father called her room.

All of them will have the main plot of the story, though.

In each route, Yui’s struggles will be revealed.

Ayato: Her mother, definitely

Kanato: Sadistic’s origins

Laito: Her mother / Struggling with controlling Sadistic

Shuu: Hayato / the depression of being practically immortal.

Watching all of her friends grow old and die while she doesn’t change

being unable to friend humans because of this

generally has been alone her whole childhood besides her family.

etc.

Reiji: being maltreated because of her mother’s intentions

the other servants knew about this and some of them maltreated Yui harshly.

Subaru: Her self-worth / the fear of hurting those weaker than her

Maybe some other alternative bad endings would be either Yui or one of the boys becoming Yandere over the other person???

There has to be saucy stills because is diabolik lovers, you cannot expect less.

Maybe add a rival to the boys were he’s trying to obtain Yui in order for her to love him or just kill her, idk.

The Komori family is filled with pure-blooded vampires that go back for several generations (well, except Yui and Yuito)

Has a summer home and a winter home. The summer home when the bounty hunters get into town and the winter home for when the war was happening in the city the summer home was located at.

Sadistic formed in her when the servants were abusing her, when Yui had enough Sadistic came over and killed the servants and hid them before Yui ‘woke up’.

The only kind of makeup Yui knows how to do is Victorian-styled.

Makes her own perfumes and makeup from flowers and such

Before this whole ‘Adam and Eve’ stuff, Yui was supposed to get married to a high-class vampire family’s eldest son, but he was killed by Yuito

The son wanted to kill Yui and sell her organs and blood to the lower-class vampires and demons for a price.

sleeps in a regular bed

Locks herself in her room when blood moon arrives because she doesn’t want to hurt anyone during that period of time.

Sadistic doesn’t come out, this is a whole new monster Yui doesn’t understand.

2nd year

Considered popular by the students, but not ridiculously popular.

Has her fair share of fans

when some girls were trying to intimidate Yui about staying away from the Sakamaki brothers, she just scoffed and told them she can’t avoid them since they live with her.

And she also told them that they wouldn’t be into girls like them, it shut them up real fast.

Helps Subaru and Ayato study (even though it’s a difficult process)

Favorite foods are: fruit tarts, parfaits, and pancakes

wants to have three children

She’s afraid of turning someone into a vampire after the incident with Yuna and a past lover.

Still can’t swim

Follows her father’s orders without a fail.

Including keeping in 6 human boys for food.

Will occasionally take the boys out to the town next to the school.

Feels bad for the boys since they can’t go out often, so she places in vases of flowers to liven up the dark manor.

Somehow, she has met all of the sakamaki mothers one what or another.

Karlheinz actually tried to kill her once, however he was mistaken by Yuito and got badly injured.

That’s all I got for now~

#anon #request #diabolik lovers #reversed!diaboliklovers #au #headcannons #vampire! yui #dialove #diahell #sakamaki shuu #sakamaki subaru #sakamaki reiji #sakamaki kanato #sakamaki ayato #sakamaki laito #otome

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sand-rose · 6 years

Note

Right back at you for all the ocs! I especially love the name apocothea (I think I spelled it right?) Its super cool!!

Thank you so much!! :) Sorry this took awhile to answer, I’ve been busy with work and other stuff. But here they are! I was actually in the process of redesigning my OCs when I saw the post (thanks to Sims inspiration and wanting to update how I draw them), so it was perfect timing! I don’t have the drawings done yet but maybe soon…

Full Name: Pandora

Gender & Sexuality: Female, Pansexual (yes, punny, but also serious)

Pronouns: She/Her

Ethnicity/Species: my Balanced Ego

Birthplace & Birthdate: my mind, August 10

Guilty Pleasures: She loves taking bubble baths. Bring on the bath bombs and fragrant soaps, and the (pink) rubber ducky is a must! She also loves stuffed animals (especially pandas). And it surprises a lot of people, but she’s also an avid fan of anime/manga and video games.

Phobias: Accidentally losing one of her earrings, which keep her balanced. She’s particularly afraid of what she might do if this happens, because she loses control of herself and becomes truly evil. A past experience in regards to this also makes her uncomfortable around sheep. (Even toys or drawings of sheep. She will get a flashback and start sobbing, apologizing to the ‘poor sheepies’ until they’re out of sight.)

What They Would Be Famous For: Probably owning the only fashion-themed amusement park in the Ego World, or her fashion designs.

What They Would Get Arrested For: Being a public nuisance, like getting too hyper and making too much noise. Because honestly, if someone told her to shut up she would only get louder to spite them. She’s not afraid to get in a fight though, so maybe that too… Maybe for throwing a heel at someone. lol

OC You Ship Them With: Reim. He’s much calmer than her, but loves her crazy antics.

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: It. He gets along with Pan better than Aurora, but he can only take so much of her 'hyper hyper happy happy joy joy’ personality.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: romance and rom-coms. The blossoming love between two people! The heartbreaking 'is this it?’ fights! The oblivious misunderstandings! Burnt dinners! The hand holding, the hugs, the kisses…! (You get it.)

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: When everything turns out to be a dream. Her Host loves this cliche. She hates it because 'what was the point of it all if it never really happened?!’

Talents and/or Powers: She’s a talented fashion designer. She likes to draw, like her Host, but when she became interested in clothes when she was younger she was frustrated that she couldn’t wear the clothes she drew. So she learned how to sew and began making her own clothes. She’s also very imaginative and ambitious.

Why Someone Might Love Them: She’s fun to be around, always a bouncing ball of energy! She likes pretty things, and considers everyone around her to be pretty in their own way. She’s the person who will convince you to try that new thing, or who will say 'Let’s go somewhere, my treat!’ when she sees you need cheering up. She’s also ready to kick ass if anyone dares hurt her friends or loved ones.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: She’s so hyper… Some people might find her hyperness endearing, but some people find it exhausting. She’s also had people judge her before based on her girly-ness, interest in fashion, and how she looks like a typical anime girl, but she doesn’t let it bother her.

How They Change: She hasn’t changed all that much since I first created her back in middle school. She’s grown a lot more mature emotionally, I think, and she’s more careful about other people’s feelings.

Why You Love Them: She was the last of my Egos to be created, and she’s probably the best representation of who I wish I was. She’s daring, outspoken, bubbly, made a career for herself doing something she loves… I love her because even though that’s not me and probably never will be me, I still like to think that she’s cheering me on. “Don’t be afraid! You can do it!” lol

Full Name: It

Gender & Sexuality: Male, not sure (he’s never given it much thought)

Pronouns: He/Him

Ethnicity/Species: my Alter Ego

Birthplace & Birthdate: my mind, October 31

Guilty Pleasures: He has a collection of weird t-shirts that he’s both bought and designed himself. He also has a collection of light sabers that he may or may not have bought off the Ego World’s black market that trades in Other World (Worlds of Licensed Series) objects…

Phobias: Becoming a soft goody two-shoes like Aurora… Gag.

What They Would Be Famous For: Nothing. He’s too lazy to really stand out much. And he’s fine with that.

What They Would Get Arrested For: Disrupting the peace. He’s got a temper, and when it flares he’s liable to kick/hit any object unlucky enough to be in his way. Be it a trash can, car, mailbox… He’s broken his toes for kicking a brick wall before. He’s also got problems with authority figures since he doesn’t like being told what to do, so if the police show up it would just escalate the situation. There was also the time he bombed Aurora’s house, but that was years ago, when he was jealous he wasn’t my only Ego anymore. He was a lot more evil back then, and Aurora (being the kind soul she is and understanding how he felt) didn’t press charges.

OC You Ship Them With: Apocothea. She keeps him in check and doesn’t put up with his crap, yet somehow sees the… best… in him…?

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Pandora. She gets fed up with his gloomy outlook on life and gets cranky when he gives her attitude. They get into lots of arguments over nothing, especially with their quick tempers.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Horror/Suspense. He likes movies with lots of jumpscares, gore, and freaky nightmarish scenarios. They get his blood pumping and while he’s not that evil enough to enjoy people getting hurt, he likes to think about what he would do if he was trapped in that house trying to escape the serial killer. And of course, though he’s not a clown or even named after said clown, he likes Stephen King novels.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: It was love at first sight. He doesn’t believe in it, and if he sees that cliche he skips a few minutes past it or turns a few pages ahead, hopefully to a less mushy scene.

Talents and/or Powers: He’s great at video games. He actually earns money by playing video games for people who get stuck on them. They send him the game, he plays past the part they got stuck on to the next save, he sends it back. He’s been debating lately if he should start livestreaming, but his laziness in acquiring the equipment and setting up a room for it is currently holding him back.

Why Someone Might Love Them: He’s… It. lol He’s an Alter Ego who by all means should be trying to take over the world and plotting evil deeds, but either due to his laziness or from the influence of those closest to him, he just isn’t that into it. He’s just a cranky man that loves to kick over trash cans in my Sims game. lol

Why Someone Might Hate Them: He rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and with good reason. He’s not very social not because he’s shy but because he hates people in general. He comes off as rude when you first meet him, and he likes to glare for no reason. (He probably thinks it makes him look tough.) Honestly it’s a wonder people like him.

How They Change: He’s changed quite a bit since I first created him in middle school! He’s probably the most changed of all my OCs. At first he started out as a wolf demon, but after a few weeks he became my Alter Ego in a human form and stayed that way. He still has fangs, they’re just smaller. They serve no purpose, he just looks good with them! He’s also not as evil as he used to be, but like I said, I like to think that Pan and Aurora are a good influence on him.

Why You Love Them: He was my very first Ego! Way back in 6th grade I used to write and draw my own stories and share them with friends, and he got a pretty good response from them and they wanted to hear more about him. I wrote conversations between me (the Host) and him during free time in class and my friends loved reading them, and it kind of took off from there. Aurora was created next, then Pandora, and even though they were fictional characters I’d made up they started to feel like a second family to me. And they still do! lol

Full Name: Aurora

Gender & Sexuality: Female, Straight

Pronouns: She/Her

Ethnicity/Species: my Good Ego

Birthplace & Birthdate: my mind, February 23

Guilty Pleasures: She likes knitting and has so much yarn she doesn’t know what to do with it. She spoils her cat Cupcake with so many toys she doesn’t know what to do with them all. She has so many recipe books she doesn’t know what to do with them all. She’s actually a very neat person though, so another guilty pleasure would probably be cleaning. lol

Phobias: Heights, needles, and spiders (like her Host). I feel bad she shares my phobias. (Sorry, Aurora!) She’s also afraid of sharks, ever since she watched Jaws years ago and had nightmares for a week about them. She knows it's not good to be afraid of sharks and they get a bad rep, so she's trying to overcome that fear.

What They Would Be Famous For: Her cookies! She owns a bakery and while her cakes, brownies, and cupcakes are delicious, it’s her cookies that rake in the most dough. (Ha.) Every customer has their favorite, but hers is her creamy peanut butter cookies. They’re so soft and chewy, and she sprinkles peanut bits in so there’s a little crunch too!

What They Would Get Arrested For: The day Aurora gets arrested for anything is the day the world ends. She’s too pure, too innocent, to do anything resulting in arrest. She apologizes to insects when she has to capture them before setting them free! She gives away too many free samples at her bakery! She cries when she accidentally forgets to water a plant and it dies! If she ever gets arrested for anything, Pan and It may legit seek revenge to restore her honor…

OC You Ship Them With: Marcus. He’s sweet, she’s sweet! Their relationship might be normal and therefore a little boring to some people, but they love each other and are happy just to be together. They’re like an old married couple. lol

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Not a single soul. Not even It. (Anymore.) She’s too kind for this world. An angel!

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Generally anything except horror and war movies. She gets too nervous and scared watching horror, and gets too emotional watching battles with people fighting and dying. She tends to like comedies the most though, since they’re usually upbeat and make her laugh. She’s also a sucker for heartwarming stories. Those Chicken Soup for the Soul books? She’s probably got the whole collection, regardless of the intended audience.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: 'I had to do it. I had to kill them.’ She refuses to believe that killing is the only option no matter how dire a situation might be and will visibly get upset when she comes across this cliche. When she gets upset her face reddens and her lip wobbles, and if Marcus or Pan is with her she might rant to them about all the other options the protagonist had.

Talents and/or Powers: She is excellent at cooking, but baking is her specialty! If she’s mastered a recipe, she’ll master it again until it’s even better. And if she finds a new recipe, she will pull an all-nighter until she’s perfected it.

Why Someone Might Love Them: She’s such a sweetheart, bless her. She’s what the world needs more of: just honestly pure, good people. She’s the person who if she came across someone in need, she would give them everything she had. If you’re feeling down, she’ll do all she can to make you happy again. She’s definitely the mom friend.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: Some might consider her too good. Like It. He gets annoyed when she does things out of the kindness of her heart for no reason. He just doesn’t understand how someone can be that selfless. He thinks of her as a crybaby and she worries a lot, so that irritates him too. And others might be suspicious of her at first, wondering what she’s hiding or what she wants. But once people get to know her, they adore her and look to her for advice if they need help. Or just want free food. lol

How They Change: She’s probably the one who has changed the least. She’s always been the angel on my shoulder, the do-gooder. Someone has to keep the peace with the other two Egos around, after all.

Why You Love Them: Aurora is the one who resembles me the most, both in terms of looks and personality. There are some differences, though. She’s not shy, just quiet and reserved. She’s more comfortable with confrontations than I am, especially if it’s a matter of right vs wrong. I don’t have a problem with horror and war stuff. I wish I knew how to cook/bake. And I don’t think I could ever be as selfless as her. Basically, she’s a goody goody two-shoes, like It says. But it’s not a bad thing!

Full Name: Reim

Gender & Sexuality: Male, Bisexual

Pronouns: He/Him

Ethnicity/Species: Ego Entity

Birthplace & Birthdate: Ego World (specifically the city Venia), April 14

Guilty Pleasures: talking to his plants, liking movies that everyone else hates, singing in the shower, and he also enjoys the occasional bubble bath (thanks to Pan convincing him he was missing out on life if he didn’t take one now and then) (she was right)

Phobias: Moths. When he was little a big one got caught in his hair and he accidentally smashed it trying to get it out. It was messy and gross.

What They Would Be Famous For: Hopefully for his paintings! He does all kinds of paintings, and has even had a few displayed in art shows. He likes doing landscape art the best, because he loves plants and nature.

What They Would Get Arrested For: Not that he’s looking to get arrested, but he’s secretly always wanted to experiment with graffiti…

OC You Ship Them With: Pandora. Just when he thinks he knows her, she surprises him and he loves it! She makes him see how exciting and fun life is, and she’s always encouraging him with his latest art project and boasting about his paintings to her friends.

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Probably It. It and Reim don’t see eye to eye a lot… Reim’s pretty optimistic, and that clashes with It’s pessimism. They don’t exactly hate each other, but they get on each other’s nerves. “You threw off my groove!” “Fuck your groove!” Yatta yatta…

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: He loves animated movies. As an artist, he really appreciates them and considers them art, so he’s constantly rewinding scenes because he was focusing on the style or shading instead of what was going on. As for books, he likes fantasy. He likes escaping to another world, and fantasy can be anything and everything, just like a painting.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: Not really a typical cliche but… He really hates noir style stuff. Noir movies annoy him to no end because there’s no color and he wishes he could restore the color so bad. He needs color! And when people talk noir style, with the witty and flirtatious old-fashioned banter. It’s just so cheesy to him… This extends to books as well. He prefers deep conversations between characters rather than quick one-liners.

Talents and/or Powers: He’s an artist, so he’s well-rounded in a variety of mediums. Painting, drawing, sculptures, photography… He enjoys painting the most though!

Why Someone Might Love Them: He’s a down-to-earth guy that has his goals set and has a plan to achieve them. He knows what he wants in life and he also knows not to get his hopes up. He does hope his dreams come true, but if not he’s got plenty of back up plans. He’s just a nice guy in general, always ready to lift the mood with a joke or a grin.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: For people like It, optimistic people can be annoying. No matter the situation, Reim looks on the bright side of things and his pleasant attitude and charming smile can make It angry. Because life sucks, and It knows it, but apparently Reim doesn’t. Reim’s not optimistic all the time, however, and he does have days where he’s a little moody or depressed, but he tends to keep to himself those days (so of course It doesn’t know that).

How They Change: Reim started out as a painting I did my senior year, so I thought it fitting to give him the painter career in my Sims game. Until that point I didn’t know much about him but watching him interact with my other characters has helped me flesh out what kind of person he is. He looked more emo and brooding in the painting, but in Sims he’s a cheerful guy who enjoys life, so I like that change in him.

Why You Love Them: He’s the character I didn’t know was going to be created. But I’m glad I did that painting of him years ago! Before I made him in Sims, I wanted to do more with his character and knew I wanted him with Pandora, but that was about it. Originally Pan was with someone else from an Other World, and for reasons it didn’t work out, but I think she and Reim are a perfect match. They balance each other out.

Full Name: Apocothea

Gender & Sexuality: Female, Demisexual

Pronouns: She/Her

Ethnicity/Species: Ego Entity

Birthplace & Birthdate: Ego World (specifically outside the town Abraxxus), November 2

Guilty Pleasures: Obsessed with Itachi from Naruto, so she has a collection of Itachi merchandise that shouldn’t even exist (her father knows people). She loves anime/manga and video games, and rock/heavy metal music. She also enjoys fan fiction (smut included, but she is picky about it).

Phobias: This woman has no fear. You should be the one afraid.

What They Would Be Famous For: Not exactly famous, but her old classmates still remember the day the teacher was late and Apocothea calmly walked up to the front of the class and announced the teacher had been in a horrible accident and she was in charge now. She spoke with such authority that no one questioned her, and she proceeded to pass out copies of the 'worst fan fiction she had ever read’ for them to read and critique. It turned out that the teacher had been in a car accident (from speeding), and when the principal delivered the news everyone turned to her in fear. Of course she hadn’t really known… She just saw an opportunity and took it. She needed beta readers for her first fic, after all.

What They Would Get Arrested For: She’s too clever to get herself arrested. Anyone who leaves fingerprints and DNA samples is a Class-A moron. But if she did get arrested, somehow, it would probably be for making the police officer feel like an idiot. Or she would just ignore them and do the opposite of what they ordered her to do out of pure spite. Challenging authority and whatnot.

OC You Ship Them With: It. She wins all the arguments, basically, but they’re stupid arguments to begin with. They bicker back and forth, but it’s from love(?). I don’t know… Their relationship is kind of hard to explain. lol There’s not a lot of typical romance between them, but they do have their moments that say 'Yeah, they’re a couple alright!’

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Nobody’s brave enough to even try murdering her. She’d murder them first.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Like It, she enjoys horror. Except where he’s the guy to think 'what would I do if I was trapped in a house with a serial killer?’, she’s the girl who thinks, 'If I was the serial killer, I’d go after them this way… That guy’s an asshole, anyway.’ She also likes murder mystery novels, but she’s always disappointed when she figures out who the killer is halfway through the book.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: 'The chosen one will save us!’ She doesn’t buy into the whole 'only this person can do it’ trope. Really? Only that person? But he’s an idiot. What if he dies? Then what? Guess the world ends.

Talents and/or Powers: I guess you could say her skill at Guitar Hero is a talent. She’s undefeated with all the Guitar Hero games (every mode, even expert). Other than that, she’s very talented at pretty much anything and everything, but especially at making people feel uncomfortable and fragile in her presence.

Why Someone Might Love Them: If you can get past her intimidating exterior, she’s a pretty cool gal. She’s kind of like Hana-chan from Fruits Basket… The things she says can come off as strange and threatening, but if you become her friend she would quite literally kill for you. She also has a younger sister named Analyse, and you can definitely tell they’re sisters from the way they look and talk.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: She’s very blunt, and if she doesn’t like you she won’t hold back on insults. Lots of people get offended when she does this, but that’s kind of the point. She can also be crafty in the way she talks to people, so sometimes they’re really not sure if she’s insulting them or complimenting them.

How They Change: She’s changed just a little since I created her. Her relationship with It before was very one-sided, and she liked toying with him. She still likes to, actually, but it’s more affectionate now. She’s always been confident and in charge, but I think being with It has taught her that a relationship requires more teamwork and less blackmail.

Why You Love Them: Again, she’s one of those characters that displays traits I wish I had. She’s not afraid to be assertive, she loves herself for who she is, and doesn’t give a damn what other people think of her. And she gives off this vibe, like you really don’t want to trust that smile she’s wearing. Her calm but menacing demeanor really compliments It’s personality too, I think. He’s fire, she’s ice!

Full Name: Marcus

Gender & Sexuality: Male, Straight

Pronouns: He/Him

Ethnicity/Species: Ego Entity

Birthplace & Birthdate: Ego World (specifically a suburban area named Hannen), March 27

Guilty Pleasures: watching YouTube/EgoTube videos, memes, taking internet quizzes… And surprising Aurora on a regular basis with flowers and chocolate like the romantic sap he is!

Phobias: Puking and cuts on the skin. When he’s sick he gets very agitated and nervous and will refuse to eat solid food in case he can’t keep it down. (Soup and water only, basically.) With cuts, it’s not the blood he fears but the sensation of skin splitting. It stems from when he was a teenager and got a deep cut on his knee. Little nicks while shaving are no biggie, but papercuts make him lightheaded and make his skin crawl.

What They Would Be Famous For: He’s a very relaxed guy who honestly doesn’t stand out much, but his friends know him as the tech guy. Computer or game console acting up? Marcus knows how to fix it. TV or phone bugging out? Call Marcus, he’s your guy.

What They Would Get Arrested For: Like Aurora, he would never get arrested for anything. He’s too nice to do anything like property damage or fighting, and he’s never gotten a ticket for anything in his life.

OC You Ship Them With: Aurora. They’re so precious together, too good, too sweet! They dote on each other and probably unintentionally make other couples jealous. lol

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: It. Another goody goody two-shoes frustrates him even more than one. The only thing It appreciates about Marcus is that he’s not above using swear words (unlike Aurora). And maybe the fact that he’s willing to fix It’s laptop and game systems for free.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: He really likes documentaries and informational books. He’s always interested in learning something new, and he’d much rather watch an hour-long documentary on EBS than watch the newest hit movie. He was the kid in school who always read the assigned Literature, Real World History & Ego World History, and Science books for fun.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: He doesn’t like when a side character you grew attached to suddenly dies. They make you care about them, only to kill them off! What the hell?

Talents and/or Powers: Talented with fixing all things tech. He does claim it’s his superpower! lol

Why Someone Might Love Them: When you find a genuinely nice guy who cares a lot about you, you struck gold! Aurora loves his soft, sensitive side when he’s alone with her and also loves his corny jokes. People in general like how laid back he is, as he’s very patient and knows everybody makes mistakes. He’s the guy who will walk an old lady across the street if she needs help, the guy who literally climbed a tree to get a cat out of it (sneaky little Cupcake!). Nice guys do exist, and he’s one of the best!

Why Someone Might Hate Them: Again… There’s people like It. They get annoyed with the whole 'nice guy act’, especially once they learn it’s not an act at all but just how he is. They might get jealous when they see how much other people like him, but more often than not they come around, especially after he helps them with something and expects nothing in return.

How They Change: His character hasn’t changed much, either. He’s thoughtful, kind, cheerful… He’s popular with everyone he hangs out with, because he gets along with pretty much everyone. He’s polite, open to new things and opinions, and though he admits he might be a little boring to be around he also doesn’t mind. Such a great guy!

Why You Love Them: He and Aurora are a pair of cinnamon rolls, too sweet, too pure for this world! Even though I created him long before I met Alex, he reminds me of him. lol Marcus is the perfect example for how you should treat your loved ones, and anyone you meet, really. He’s like the Mr. Rogers of the gang, I guess you could say. He just wants everybody to respect each other and be kind to themselves and others.

Sorry if this got super long, I just really love these characters. lol Also! When I was reading your OC post I found it really cool that some of our characters have birthdays either on the same day or really close, that made me smile! :D

Thanks so much for the ask again!!

#egos #my ocs

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