#sure fuck it into the main tags you go!!

[monty-glasses-roxy]

Ya know, with the set ups I've been playing with, Roxy and Cassie are incredibly similar.

Both of them have been tasked with the impossible, both have had their loyalty pushed to the max, both of them have friends that betrayed them for one reason or another, both of them were left to die, and neither of them have many friends anymore...

Oh and both of them have a Helpi AI. Cassie's is just infected with Mimic/Glitchtrap/whatever. So there's that too!

[anakirui]

hot take ??

the only reason people say that "mafuyu and tsukasa have nothing in common" when presented with mafukasa parallels is because they equate mafuyu and tsukasa being similar to "tsukasa has depression" because the fandom equates mafuyu's personality to being depressed and nothing else.

it doesn't help that people (primarily younger people in the fandom) who DO believe in mafukasa parallels end up making the mistake of portraying tsukasa as depressed because as of right now he is not (although it's possible he was in past because of his Very Unclear Middle School Backstory but that's irrelevant)

anyways, mafuyu and tsukasa are narrative foils because their core personalities are built off of the concept of wanting to make the people around them— especially their families— happy.

they both developed personalities at a young age based on someone they looked up to. for tsukasa, it was seiichi amami's performance that inspired him to be a star— a hero that could cheer anyone up. for mafuyu, it was her mother taking care of her that inspired her to be a nurse— and you can see the similarities from there.

for mafuyu, her identity would first come into conflict when her mother expressed her want for mafuyu to be a doctor— suddenly, "everyone's" happiness didn't match what she wanted to do, leaving her in a state of disorder and eventual depression.

for tsukasa, his identity was something he nearly forgot in its entirety at the start of the main story— becoming arrogant and fully absorbed in a hero persona, forgetting the kind person he truly is. furthermore, his current character arc seems to be foreshadowing that what "being a star" to him is going to be called into question— maybe it is something more than just being the main character that saves everyone.

their insecurities are incredibly similar.

in mafuyu's first mixed, mafuyu feels insecure towards ichika because unlike ichika, she feels as if her lyrics have no genuine meaning to be expressed to other people— despite them being her very real feelings. this is brought up again in her second mixed as well.

in tsukasa's third focus event, something similar happens. when watching seiichi's performance, he thinks that his acting is "real" and feels inferior towards him, which is ironic because tsukasa has been method acting this whole time. when tsukasa is acting out rio or bartlett or really anyone at this point in the story, it's not just those characters— it's a reflection of his traumas.

just like mafuyu, tsukasa undermines his passions he's poured his feelings into because someone else's work is more genuine in his eyes.

now, then, foils have many similarities and parallels (and i could honestly list a lot more), but how i define them is that they usually have some kind of major branching difference that MAKES them foils.

for mafuyu and tsukasa it's pretty straightforward.

mafuyu's people pleasing behavior comes from external expectations and pressures— her mother's demands.

tsukasa's people pleasing behavior comes internally, from himself— if he can't meet his own standards, if he can't be the perfect big brother or the perfect star, then he is nothing.

and even then, there's some overlap.

tsukasa's behavior was indirectly encouraged by his mother praising him for being a "good big brother" over the phone instead of asking him if he was okay while home alone.

mafuyu's terrified to be herself around other people because she doesn't want to worry or bother them— she doesn't want to be a burden— and projects her mother's expectations onto them, not realizing that they would prefer the real mafuyu if they knew the truth.

and the concept of mafukasa being foils is most perfectly and blatantly portrayed in these two cards.

mafuyu, the marionette, sitting limp on the floor— puppeteered by her mother's demands and donning a mask to hide her true self.

tsukasa, the jester, standing above everything else— puppeteering silenced plushies— his feelings. he's not being completely honest with himself, and he doesn't even realize it.

mafuyu has cut her strings and ripped her mask in half. she has acknowledged her true feelings and expressed them to her mother, even if she had to run away in the end.

tsukasa has not yet cut his.

[angrycloudcrown]

whenever i block horny tumblr users it feels like im hitting them with the roblox ban hammer

horny on main? not on my non-fucking watch

[moeblob]

Look, I just think it's VERY funny and on brand that I thought of an entire premise of colorful characters for half the cast and immediately drew the only one void of color.

[yujeong]

Okk. I don't want to compare or anything but I don't get the people who's getting mad on Korn Tonkla scenes saying they had more screen time? Or shit. I mean tbh, I am understanding the plot of the series better because of the two of them because they are somehow related to all of the events. And Tonkla's situation is...... he somehow senses the other timeline which I think is an important role. And also, Korn! Like what you've said he knows Dome is dead, and at the same time he's with his brother who ’saved’ Dome. Both of the characters are pivotal in the series.

Also, I think that they are more talked about because a Bas and Fuaiz couple was not expected in the series, and at the same time their plot line is really good as well as the build up of their characters. And I've seen more & more people are falling in love with Fuaiz & Bas (as an actor) in this series.

But somehow, I get them because the main couple is GreatTyme but why does it feel like they are becoming more of a side couple. Also saw people saying that their ’plot line’ or how they were introduced to eo /wasn't it./

Thank you for giving me the incentive to speak about this issue, anon. I'm going to do it now because the new episode will come out in a few hours and hopefully I won't have to do this ever again - which I honestly doubt but anyway. Since I haven't seen this type of discourse pop up on Tumblr (thank GOD), I'd like to inform everyone that over on Twitter, there have been massive complaints about Tonkla, aka Fuaiz, getting more screentime than the main characters, aka JesBible, to the point of people tagging BOC in posts and demanding they give them more scenes with TymeGreat - as if BOC can just pull footage they haven't filmed out of their ass or something. It got so bad that Sammon herself saw them and AGREED with these people, further explaining how it was important for some plot elements to be explored now, in order for the rest of the series to make sense. Now, with all due respect to her position as a screenwriter: she's factually wrong here. Someone on Twitter actually sat down and counted the minutes each character is on screen and came out with these results:

It's not in English, but I believe the results are clear: Tonkla doesn't even come close to Great's screentime. He's a little closer to Tyme's, but the main character is Great, so he's the one we should be looking at. Also, in case it hasn't been fucking obvious, Tonkla is an essential character in 4 Minutes, which is why we're getting many scenes with him. The reason I mentioned the actors is pretty self-explanatory - people are mad their favourite actors are shown a specific amount of time, giving space to other plot lines and characters, instead of being there for the whole episode, as if the point of 4 Minutes is the romance between Tyme and Great and nothing else. Meanwhile, Bible himself was laughing and clapping and enjoying the flashback scene between Korn and Tonkla when they had their first time, because Bible wanted to be part of a good production, which he is and he recognizes it. But no, God forbid we get more context over KornTonkla, which is one of the most important relationships in the show, which guides Tonkla's actions, which moves the fucking PLOT of the SHOW. I could give the benefit of the doubt to people being upset Tonkla was shown for not even half of episode 4, but I won't, and the reason for that is because I'm sick and fucking tired of people getting their panties in a twist because a character who loves getting fucked is actually getting fucked in almost every episode. Good for him honestly, even if it's making him worse. (I've already ranted about this whole thing here, I'm not going to repeat myself) I don't know how your social media feeds are like anon, but mine are flooded with BibleJes + GreatTyme content and I rarely see anything about KornTonkla or Bas and Fuaiz or anything of the sort, so I can't agree with you that they're more talked about than the main actors/characters. (That's not the case on Tumblr though: I have a very varied feed + my lovely anon asks which give me the chance to talk about my boys and I'm thankful for that.) And I'm sorry, anon, but I'm going to have to disagree with you in the end: Great and Tyme do NOT feel like the side couple at all. They are and they feel very much like the main couple and they've had multiple scenes together in every single episode so far (at the hospital, in Great's garage, at the park, at the university, at the arcade, inside Great's car, at the rooftop of the hospital, at the warehouse, inside the tent etc). We've gotten plenty of fucking content for them AND also BOC has made sure to give Bible and Jes the chance to do a million interviews together + magazine photoshoots, with only half of the show being done, so fans have zero fucking reason to complain about anything. That's all. Rant over.

[mabaris]

no youre completely right - im a gay (trans)man and i legit wanna see so much more about the women bc There Is So Little. I wanna make a lesbian oc who gets bent in half by taash. im very normal.

i’m just tired man!!!! it feels so obvious how disproportionate it is when you’ve got. a cast of characters that we know almost equally little about. and a few of them explode in popularity and it’s like spongebob sticking his hand out the curtain. literally all a character needs to do numbers is to be a light-skinned man

[thresholdbb]

Do we think Seven can feel all of her face and body?

The Borg know when things happen in the collective and can arguably feel them, but when an individual is severed from the Borg, that expansive collective consciousness is violently narrowed down to a pinpoint. We know Seven has pretty good proprioception because she agrees that her shoulder hurts when the EMH finds that her biradial clamp is off by 0.3 microns. Because of this, she arguably has a very good understanding of how things in her body feel. That said, she doesn't really complain about physical pains, and we really only see her struggle when things are emotionally difficult.

Since she had been in the collective since she was 6, she wouldn't necessarily know that certain sensations are not normal. If there were any issues that happened as a result of her assimilation, she wouldn't necessarily know they are unusual after she was severed because that's what she has always known.

So back to my original question: can she feel all of her face? Looking at the placement of her facial implants, they are both on the trigeminal nerve. The cheekbone implant is right around the root of the nerve, and the eyebrow piece sits right over another branch. Trigeminal neuralgia is crazy painful, but she could have trigeminal neuropathy and think it's completely normal because she doesn't have a typical baseline to compare it to. I imagine the Borg implants must interrupt some nerve functioning to ensure that the drones move as they are supposed to, and the nano probes would repair any damage that would affect their functioning. But the Borg would consider physical discomfort irrelevant, so relatively minor issues like neuralgia, pins and needles, or any other unusual sensations would not be considered an issue.

[agirlinthegalaxy]

It's been rolling around in my brain the last few days for some reason, but I still hate the family backstory reveals for Sophie and Eliot. I've seen some of the meta for it, but quite frankly, it still makes no sense. If it had been something actually thought of and intentional in the original, I think it could have been so fascinating. I mean, Sophie's willing abandonment of Astrid to contrast with Nate's loss of Sam or Eliot's adoption in contrast with Hardison's and Parker's? Could have been excellent! But they came out of nowhere in Redemption and don't work with these characters.

Sophie was still actively using the fucking alias that she met Astrid under! She met with someone from her past on the show! Like. Quite frankly, that one is unequivocally bullshit that they made up and threw in and pretended could fit with the established canon. (And I'm sorry, but the idea of Sophie abandoning Astrid and never telling Nate about her just... So much of Nate's trauma was rooted in the loss of Sam, and I think that introducing this element after he's gone and unable to respond to it taints Sophie and Nate's relationship in a way bc I'm not exactly sure how Nate would've responded to learning about this but I think that it's something he'd have needed to know. I don't know how to fully express my thoughts on that but yeah.)

As for Eliot, I don't like the adoption aspect literally at all. The way that he would interact with his family and the memory of his family would be different, and I think that it's flat out ridiculous to think that he'd have never mentioned it to the team in the original show, especially when dealing with the kid cases. (I also dislike the biracial adoption as its own element because if Eliot was actually raised by Black parents in the... idk what 80s/90s? That just. doesn't feel congruent with how they write Eliot interacting with PoC, not necessarily in a bad way, but babe, he's written like a white southern man raised in a specific kind of culture that does not jell with that. It also makes Eliot look... really bad that he was apparently raised with the knowledge of how fucked up the military was and his parents' history and made the choices that he did.) Like the show may not have explicitly stated it but the implication of that relationship was vastly fucking different throughout the original show.

Just. These were not backstories that were congruent with their depiction and characters in the original show, and they're also just moves that I don't particularly like or find interesting directions for those characters. There's also something to be said about how it was apparently unacceptable for a woman to not have kids or someone not reconciling with their biological family when that was something that the original show handled a lot better. Out of all the directions to take Sophie and Eliot's stories, that's just not really one that I think was a good idea.

[crazymecjc]

manga redraw bc I’m in a silly goofy mood

panel and version without text below the cut!

[chibishortdeath]

Great googley moogley it’s all going to shit! Every day becomes exponentially more terrifying!

And all perfectly timed to just right at the start of what’s supposed to be my adult life where I get my shit together and be useful and productive!

[queenlua]

What began as a friendship between Ann and Abraham [Lincoln] turned at some point into romance. They shared an understanding, according to friends, that they would marry after Ann completed her studies at the Female Academy in Jacksonville. Ann was only twenty-two in the summer of 1835. While New Salem sweltered through one of the hottest summers in the history of the state, a deadly fever, possibly typhoid, spread through the town. Ann, as well as several of Lincoln's friends, perished in the epidemic. After Ann's death, Abraham seemed "indifferent, to transpiring events," one neighbor recalled, "had but Little to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by him self." Elizabeth Abell, a New Salem neighbor who had become a surrogate mother to Lincoln, claimed she had "never seen a man mourn for a companion than he did." His melancholy deepened on dark and gloomy days, for he could never "be reconcile[d]," he said, "to have the snow—rains and storms to beat on her grave." Acquaintances feared that he had become "temporarily deranged," and that unless he pulled himself together, "reason would desert her throne."

goddamn. fuckin bleak period in mr sixteenth president's life

[utilitycaster]

The thing about the "official" CR Reddit is that it was founded by the same person who founded the Fandom Critical Role wiki. At the time of founding in late 2015 he was 18, and in my experiences with him through the Fandom wiki I found his management and personnel skills to be...shall we say, understandably lacking, given that he's a programmer in his early 20s. He also stopped keeping up with the show with the end of the Vox Machina campaign if not before; and I think was just generally entirely unprepared for Critical Role becoming more than what it was in late 2015 in terms of actually having large fandoms in need of serious moderation in spaces like Reddit. He also equated being a frequent contributor to the Fandom wiki (cannot personally speak to the Reddit) as being a worthy moderator to the point of asking someone whom a more competent admin had once admonished for outright plagiarism if they were interested in being an admin. This persisted, despite, at the time of his leaving, him and one of the other moderators of the Fandom wiki having held those positions while being almost entirely absent from editing for years.

So anyway I say all this because as result of those communities being created by someone young, inexperienced, and lacking in the awareness to realize these limitations, these issues have propagated. Moderators in a lot of fan-run Critical Role spaces have been selected not on the basis of any merit or community consensus but rather by sheer volume or by ingratiating themselves to the previous mods. From personal experience on the Fandom wiki and from reliable hearsay about the Reddit it seems that they tend to embrace their privileges as mods while eschewing their responsibilities. I also find that there's an ongoing hangover in both these spaces of not really knowing how to deal with the fact that Critical Role is still rolling nearly six years after the end of the Vox Machina campaign, because a lot of these people were ultimately fans only of Vox Machina and more generally Critical Role as it was during that era. They're still acting as though the cast is very directly involved with the fandom and are the final word on various decisions, as they were in the very early days, even though that's long since ended. This in turn is I think behind the knee-jerk resistance to change - moving away from the old chapter system on the Fandom wiki and even implementing basic infrastructural changes to accomodate the fact that there are now multiple campaigns, for example, was met with pretty significant pushback. They still really struggle to cover anything that's not Exandria canon because, well, in late 2015 no one could have predicted Candela Obscura. And on the Reddit side, I think that's why changes that are purely production-related and should not affect your enjoyment of the show as a work of fiction (pre-taping, merch, having other people GM one-shots sometimes, taking longer breaks) are similarly treated as harbingers of doom.

And, that in turn is why I suspect the other CR-related subreddits that have since sprung up have such a reputation for being all negativity - it's people who got understandably fed up with the ridiculous rules and culture of the first Reddit, so their roots are in venting, which is valid. But it can be very difficult for a community built on venting to stop being only that, especially under Reddit's structure, and they're also still largely influenced by that Reddit and share and propagate those biases towards what the show was in 2015-2017.

[eyndr-stories]

Everyone needs to see him. I’ve sent him to all my friends. I sent him to my brother. I sent him to my aunt. I’ll show him to my therapist. Now he is here,

catboy mobster

[fullscoreshenanigans]

Do you know of any fics about Ray looking like Isabella or having her her eyes?

The one that most readily comes to mind with Isabella and Ray's relationship as the main focus is They Don't Know You're Hers (2019) by NigiyakanaAki (there's also a sequel one-shot fic from Emma's perspective on Ray's looks, although she's not directly making the connection between them so much as noting they have a similar aura about them and how Ray's pretty like she was).

Although I'd also recommend always a riddle inside my head (aesop's kin) (2019) by evanescent.

It doesn't place as much focus on the physical similarities between them, but rather on their personalities and choices.

With this passage directly confronting what underlies any potential angst he might have associated with his features.

“It could, but you’re scared,” Isabella says then. “Of how my mind worked. Of how your own brain is wired. Is being similar to me really that terrible?” - “You made your choices…are you happy with them?”

To plagiarize myself from this post:

I don’t know if I would phrase it as him hating himself more because of [their physical similarities]? Because no one can control their genetics, and he never delves into angst over his black hair and other physical traits he inherited from her. He instead focuses on the actions of himself and others:

His phrasing of the “true nature” of demons in chapter 123 makes me think back to how he justified his self-immolation in chapter 32:

He fully convinced himself that the only way he could atone for what he did was by committing suicide as the linchpin of his plan. He views what he and Isabella did—using the children of plant no.3 for their respective machinations—as reprehensible. So I feel he would still beat himself up over this inherited nature/loathsome predisposition and how their brains must be wired similarly more than actually hating any physical traits he might have gotten from her, but they would be triggering for him any time he’s having a negative thought spiral (you could easily write all of this off as pedantic semantics though lol).

While I'm 100% on board for Ray having purple eyes, I'm not keen on them being the focus of his inner turmoil and him repeatedly drawing attention to them (or worse, other people doing this with how awkward it feels on multiple fronts) as I am for them acting as bonus visuals and triggers to kick off a deeply embedded fear of an inescapable, inherit nature that dooms him. He made the choice to use people, proved the lengths he was willing to go to, just like she did (not getting into the circumstances behind it because for all the nuance he'll afford other things, when pushed this is something he's very stark about and won't budge on.) It's not all-consuming because that places him at odds with his vow to live and take care of his family, but something he falls into now and again, believing he'll never be able to truly atone for what he did and for that he doesn't deserve happiness.

Facsimile (2020) by banana_slug_army is another fic that follows this line of thought.

Enjoyed all four of these, but it's far from an exhaustive list, so opening it up to followers and others if they have any other recs on the subject.

[sirompp]

the autism urge to create a blog archiving and sorting the entirety of something nobody wants not even me

[aro-arttorneys]

Swan Princess AU? Why not. Edgeworth has enough mean swan energy and Phoenix has enough himbo energy to make this work.

And of course the famous "What Else" scene: