#staged finale critical

[hoarding-stories]

Y'know, after the hell that was the Otohan fight and now that we know about the higher-level exaltants' final stage,

I'm really glad Ludinus isn't one

[gabichanwrites]

Imagine you have a character, a broken, vicious man who bites and spits venom even at a person he loves the most, who pushes the buttons of his love just because this toxic familiarity is all he knows, just because it's all he feels safe doing. And then his love finds another person who brings out such a different part of them, a part this character never could or maybe just long forgot how to do. He drowns in jealousy, in his bitternes, he hurts his love, he hurts his love's beloved, their crew... And finally gets what he wanted. Finally has his Blackbeard back, finally can forget about the part of Ed he can no longer reach... But suddenly Blackbeard is unpredictable even to this character.

And suddenly everything changes as he slips and can no longer even enjoy the familiar toxicity because he saw something better and kinder and selfishly wishes for it too, despite it all. And suddenly he understands people around him, people who never saw the evil in Edward, and suddenly he realizes it's his fault. All of it, just a part of it - doesn't matter. He caused this and nobody is happy, not even him.

And then, despite everything, others start to care for him. They tell him "We think you're in a toxic relationship" as if they didn't know it was him who brought Blackbeard back and they hug him tight as if he wasn't the once to sentence them to this horror and they hold his hand when he panics. They experience kindness and hope in a miserable place, maybe a glimpse of what made Blackbeard so soft for a moment there. And when everything falls apart, when he takes the final tumble in this horrible dance he has with Blackbeard, somebody is there to hold him up. Somebody is there to criticize his drinking and make him a new leg and call him their unicorn. The character is "their bastard", he is part of them. He is part of something kind and accepting and he shyly embraces the new familarity-that-might-be, even when he still insults and retreats and bottles stuff up because maybe if he seems fine he can help others, maybe in the end he can be loved in a way as kind as theirs. Maybe he can have a family.

So once they are again in danger he takes the chance and speaks boldly and captures the ominous attention of the enemy. He takes a risk for them. He takes a bullet for it. He rests in the arms of his love and tells him he's sorry even when he could never accept the other's apology. He never gets the chance to try more and forgive more and try to be forgiven more. He can only ever serve as a tool for another character, can never evolve to existing on his own, to healing on his own.

You are Izzy Hands. You are drowning in your mistakes and the toxic familiarity you're too afraid to get out of. And once you dare to try...

The show would rather have you die than give you a chance at healing and happiness.

Your death doesn't prove a point and it doesn't mean anything. It's just cruel.

[fortunelowtier]

one of the only redeeming qualities of the character designs in Hazbin/Helluva is when someone looks at a canon design and goes "wow this shit is hot ass" and then makes a redesign and it's met with essentially universal appraise because i just know it makes Viv seethe

[squircatlies]

Actually, it's Calypso's birthday today and someone needs to sing la vie en rose, so dig that guy up right the fuck now or so help me.

[pondslime]

poacher’s dream

bo sinclair x afab!reader

word count: 2.5k

Everything is HAVE YOU SEEN ME? and yellow police tape and you are the girl on the milk carton and the face on the flier, and there’s nowhere to go unless you’d like to disappear into the fuzz of the television.

Bo’s just trying to watch a little TV and you keep distracting him.

cw’s: dubious consent, stockholm syndrome, explicit sexual content, rough oral sex, female reader, gendered anatomy, second person, alcohol, inanimate object porn, blowjobs, hair-pulling, dirty talk, degradation, slut shaming, pet names, bites and bruises, possessive behavior, obsessive behavior, little bit of a praise kink, canon-typical violence

read it here

[belindarimbi13]

they're finally reuniting 🫶🏻

these dialogues without context is so much funnier

[llondonfog]

🥲

[the-manderville-mambo]

Personally I think that, out of all the relic weapon questlines so far, the one that has the best ratio of effort to reward is the HW relics. There's some grinding, yes, but it's far easier to bear than having to do the same exact thing 9 or 12 times (Zodiac weapons), or having to level up an entire separate thing just to progress a story in an entire separate area in order to unlock more weapon stages (Eureka and Resistance weapons), or just doing a bunch of roulettes to buy some rocks (Manderville weapons). And it has far more reward for that level of effort than any ARR, StB, or ShB relic while not being as ridiculously easy as the EW ones

[eurekq]

I feel like people are reading a lot into that baudelaire welch message that really isn't present? It sounds to me like they were assigned to finish up astarions writing during crunch (still bad) rather than making the decision to do that voluntarily. That + the fact that most of his extra scenes were already present in early access (he's very front loaded in terms of content) and iirc the extra durge content for astarion is like... from what I remember basically just the breakup conversation, some mid-conversation lines (ie. "but you're MY leaking blood bag"), and the first night durge scene which is again, like, three lines of dialogue tacked onto a scene that would occur with or without him. While astarion IS clearly larians darling and that's not good (if I had to guess I think it's because the devs really like neil newbon's performance, as he's not actually the most popular among fans) I think baudelaire welch is getting a lot of undeserved vitriol over what amounts to probably like 20 lines of dialogue max. Something also to note is that companions amount of content is distributed differently; wyll has far more actual dialogue trees to go through in my experience, and karlach and shadowheart have a lot of environmental interaction in act 3 and act 2 respectively. Also worth noting that my game was incredibly glitched in act 3 though, so I may have missed a lot. All this to say that larian definitely had a favouritism problem but, especially given that they only joined on in 2022, which is after a lot of astarions scenes were already written, I don't think baudelaire welch is the boogeyman people are acting like they are. I'd need a full interview from them to really know what was going on leading up to release rather than. One discord message. Actually why are they even in a discord with fans that's such a bad idea

[takumis86]

i need to read the manga and then watch the battle stages and then iniD legends

[obitoslay]

going through the worst year of my life depressed broke lonely slowly rotting away etc etc

[mechawolfie]

i’m a few saturdays late but i’ve finally caught up w tristamp

[unproduciblesmackdown]

the most recognized as comedic song being the best part of the movie musical because the conventions that serve as a mode of communicating ideas, for example "people just bursting into song" or "choreography" or "'noticeably stylized' cinematography" that accentuates nonliteral nonrealism-invoking choices, are regarded as Silly or Frivolous. and the effort to shove everything else that's more "serious" into what is expected to be read as dramatic cinema that's not stylized in any ways that seem too "Genre" which only makes [but someone's singing?] underwhelming and out of place because no other elements are supporting it

[therevengeoffrankenstein]

i liked rebels, but the way almost (excluding maul) every villain (yes, including kallus) gets sidelined and minimized as threats bothers me a lot. it's not even that the show is sidelining them in favor of more emotionally based conflict, because rebels stays pretty lighthearted and action-based for most of its length. it just doesn't care about showing off and utilizing its frankly impressive and large roster of villains at all because of how afraid it is of having stakes.

as much as i love thrawn and enjoy many of his main moments and episodes in the series, i don't like how he became the main villain instead of the inquisitors, who were all killed off as soon as possible. rukh being a worse inquisitor-fill-in (in the sense that he is there to be a serious threat and hunter of the main characters) also felt so. forced. even though they had hinted about him appearing since pretty early on in thrawn's run as the main villain. and the pellaeon name-drop was pander-y and i'm mad about it.

[blueish-bird]

Logic’s album College Park why are there skits built in to the last half of the majority of these songs? why are they not separate tracks? im enjoying the saxophone on Clone Wars III only to be forced to listen to a drawn-out staged Carl’s Jr. drive thru order. in what context is this relistenable?

[orcelito]

Oh the difficulty of writing Meryl pre-character development. Me being like "is this how she would actually act?" & thinking it through

I think the geo-plant stuff was a big moment for her, development-wise. I think this makes sense actually