#tale of two heroes

[noellewrxtes]

bruises

pairing: spideyflash rating: t word count: 2,453 warnings: implied abuse, angst, trauma, mentions of alcoholism and substance abuse summary: “He’s your dad,” Peter insists, stretched out across the couch as he speaks through a mouthful of pizza. “I know you guys don’t, like, get along but of course he was going to text you on your birthday.” notes: this is not new. i posted this on tumblr a year ago and only now feel not weird enough about it to post it to ao3 as well. ao3: link

[jimmawww]

Fave Save Points

Resident Evil

Daymare: 1994 Sandcastle

Ico

Shadow of the Colossus

Silent Hill 3

Signalis

No More Heroes

Metroid Prime

Ape Escape

Nier: Automata

Dark Souls

Metal Gear Solid

Tunic

Kingdom Hearts 2

Cave Story

Tales of Symphonia

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Little Witch Nobeta

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

GTA: San Andreas

Undertale

OneShot

Hollow Knight

Need For Speed: Rivals

Onirism

F.I.S.T.

Dust

Earthbound (worst)

[annajustdraws]

Allies or Enemies?

[hulloitsdani]

What do u think Kiran is

How do u think the order sees kiran

*slowly sits up in my chair*

I think Kiran is a very normal person. This is someone you and I have met before. Be that from the other side of grocery store cashier, waiting in the same elevator, or walking by on a crosswalk. Kiran is a civilian from our world trying to roll with the punches of being warped somewhere completely alien. And you can see it in how they conduct themselves.

I always have a lot of fun writing Kiran’s dialogue because their casual modern speech almost feels like a dialect in comparison to the more formal fantasy tone everyone else speaks with. An “ain’t” will never exit Alfonse’s mouth, you know? And there’s a difference in “Do you have gold?” vs “You got gold?” To me, this gives Kiran an air of unfamiliarity to anyone they interact with. Let’s use Grima as an example, because it doesn’t sound like this grammatical change would make much of difference until Kiran has the audacity to hit Grima with a bro mid sentence. But that’s just how they talk. And as sweet and friendly as they are, there’s always moments like that to remind that no one has the cultural context to fully understand Kiran. Except for the audience, who can realize that Kiran let the customer service voice drop to talk to Grima like he’s an actual person.

And that’s just about how they talk! This view is only emphasized by every other thing about them! They’re a lovable goof, which is normal chill person behavior in the audience’s eyes but feels REALLY ODD to the characters of FE’s medieval fantasy war setting. There is this air of unknown about them that the more socially perceptive will pick up on and will try to come to a conclusion about. Example, I imagine Soren would interpret a lot of this as a dangerous and deeply annoying lack of intelligence from someone he has the displeasure of sharing a tactics table with. Or looping back to the Grima example, he would totally think Kiran has greedy ulterior motives behind that pleasant facade. It takes a lot of work for those types to realize that the discrepancy present isn’t really any of those things. But I also wouldn’t be too surprised if Kiran doesn’t try to directly prove any of those assumptions wrong unless they have to.

Why? Well now it’s time for the implications! Oh how we love the implications.

Because the Summoner is a different story. No one has any fucking clue what that is.

I can tell you what Kiran has pieced together so far. Summoning people from across time and space is apparently not easy. It’s not some school of magical study that some mage could pull off with enough time and research. Trust, Eitri tried. It’s a lot of complex moving parts. For example, the contracts. The contracts Kiran automatically binds their summoned to don’t even compare to the ones Veronica used in book 1. They are far more intense and infinitely harder to break. The only way out of them is if Kiran wills it so. Not even death is an option, because Kiran can come in for the revive. If they had to guess, it’s an older, more completed version of the art. Something lost to time. But no matter the case, Kiran has the ability to take full control of whoever they manage to summon. From a lowly farmer to the divine. And their power only grows.

In a similar vein, if there was any character to canonically see the hud, I think it would be Kiran. It’s genuinely part of their power set. I have previously described Kiran as the party mage until Veronica shows up to be the actual mage, but it would be way more accurate to call them a mystic/seer. They see the map, everyone’s stats, and is doing a fast amount of math to give the combat forecast. Then, upon processing all this information their enemies couldn’t dream of having at their disposal, Kiran can telepathically communicate any change in plans to anyone under contract. Kiran is not inherently some great tactician the moment they touch ground in Askr; they simply can do things no one else can. They’re learning the actual tactics part on the fly. This makes them simultaneously the largest ace up the Order’s sleeve and potentially its biggest liability. If they fall, it could cause a whole system cascade. By that same token, some of the biggest threats the Order has faced are the ones who do their research and rightfully target Kiran.

Now. Thinking critically about all that. That’s downright terrifying. A ridiculous amount of power has been dropped callously into Kiran’s lap and they have to work extremely hard to be moral with it. It’s terrifyingly easy not to be. It would actively take less effort to ‘take the reins’ as it were. But in order to be able to sleep at night ever again, they go the extra mile to not invalidate the will of their summoned. To take over like that. To make a colony of worker bees out of people. Because oh dear god they just summoned a child and the fact that they could easily force them to fight and die for them, only to be revived and do it all over again, is HAUNTING. No. No the Order has an in house orphanage now. This kid is getting adopted and cared for god damnit or Kiran might just pop a blood vessel. And sure that child is going to be a child and there will never be a world where they get along with everyone else, but that’s just going to need be a problem they address when they get there and not an excuse to use Hubris; the power set. Now replace the word child with everyone they ever summoned and you have the wider philosophy they apply to the entire Order.

They’re hyper aware of the power imbalance. They hate it with every bone in their body. They work really hard to correct it in whatever way they can.

So Kiran might not jump on the opportunity to correct those who think lesser of them. It’s… oddly comforting to know someone is keeping a critical eye on them. Holding them accountable. Especially since so much of the order just thinks of them as this quirky yet well meaning host. And, really, what can they even do about that? They have gone over the contract with every hero they summon and despite that they still choose to stay. So, what, do they try to inspire more mistrust? The problem with that they would have to actually do acts that intentionally inspire mistrust. And even if that was successful they can’t just waste the extra man power because every other month there’s some new divine asshole who wants them all dead. And if they fail that means they have to start their life from square one and god they can’t do that again so—

Just breathe Kiran.

It’s fine. You’re fine. Just breathe.

You have work to do.

[prehistorichyes]

so like do any of you guys play Guardian Tales

[acediathemelancholy]

Love it when the protagonist/antagonist intentionally chooses to vent to their opposing counterpart. It’s even more interesting and unusual that a protagonist would seek advice from an antagonist when she knows he’s completely unrepentant. (Cartaphilus really is only chipper when talking about murder huh)

And Chise’s corruption arc just keeps chugging along...she’s already got multiple curses, a body count, and an evil mentor at this point

[princessranboo]

she says you have ten seconds to get this thing the fuck off her before she rips you apart like a wild animal

[frayed-symphony]

Oh sweet I got that new Colloyd unit in FEH

[christopherleefan]

Christopher Lee as Marquis St. Evremonde in A Tale of Two Cities (1958)

[payasita]

I just want to say you were my first introduction to slay the princess so I partially blame you for my current hyperfixation/j thank you I am deranged over eldritch horror princess and Just Some Guy eldritch horror bird (they are everything to me)

OH I will ask: who is your favourite princess/voice and why? Mine is voice of the contrarian bc he just like me fr, and thorn bc 🫶🫶

WOO glad you're into it! Definitely up there with my favorite games of all time

god I'm gonna have to give you a list. this was a much much longer answer because I have several paragraphs to say for Many Of My Favorites but I'll spare this blog the vomit for now until I can structure parts of it better

fave princesses: Witch and all its routes, Specter and all its routes, Nightmare and all its routes

Fave voices: Stubborn, Skeptic, Smitten. special shout-out to Opportunist for consistently having the best dialogue in the game tho, he sucks and I love him so much

Favorite routes: Razor, Thorn, Damsel

LEGITIMATELY it's so hard to pick but for the sake of giving Some explanation, the razor has to be my favorite for how it exists as the purest subversion of both the story the game is telling (which is itself a subversion of classic monsterslaying fairy tales) and it sort of has to get kind of meta, but it leans into it SO joyously. you as the protagonist being constantly split because the story plot twisted itself so fucking hard that it just. Broke Everything

and the result is absurd and horrifying and slips away from any kind of growth or cogency until both protagonists are stripped completely bare, and it's weird and it's hilarious and no one is having a good time except for the very AGENT of shifting perspectives, no longer constrained by any world or singular force that matters!

and also. How could I not pick the route that gave us The Look™.

[noellewrxtes]

For the WIP ask game, I'm asking 9, 15, and 17!!! <3

hello, thank you for asking!! <3

9. What’s the biggest reason this project is still a WIP?

no time and adhd is the answer for most of my wips, but some of them i've hit pretty major writer's block on. aftermath in particular i was stuck on forever because i couldn't write a final scene that felt satisfying to me and i finally realized that the beginning was throwing off everything after. i've also been stuck on a james bond au i thought would be hilarious to write but i can't think of a good plot for it so it just sits in my docs.

15. What has been the easiest thing about working on this WIP so far?

oh, gosh, i don't think there's ever one single aspect of writing a wip that is consistently easy for me, so it changes depending on the project. i won't go down the list of all of my wips because it's way too long but for the wheel of fortune (my superhero au) the entire plot came to me very quickly, which is extremely rare. i just sat down to write a handful of scenes that were stuck in my head and after a few days of that i realized i basically had the entire story. usually i have to work to make everything make sense and flow from point a to point b in logical ways, but that one just came together on its own.

i have another wip i call heliocentric that's set in an original au that i've slowly just built up over time and creating that world has been surprisingly fun for me because big original worlds are not something i typically enjoy creating, but everything has just come to me very easily with that one. of course the downside is now i have so much content i want to include that doesn't really have a place in the storyn itself.

17. What POV is your WIP written from?

okay, this is actually always a struggle for me because i go into most of my new wips blind. i just have a cool idea and a handful of scenes and interactions that won't leave my brain, and so i write those and a lot of times they're not in the same pov as the others. like, i'm not against changing povs throughout a narrative (clearly) but i want to do it in ways and places that make sense and not, like, 500 words of one pov then 200 of someone else's then 450 of another because i feel like that's distracting. so i struggle with this. i'm actually having a really hard time with this exact problem in both new york is faster than yesterday and as time goes by because i want to change povs every three paragraphs and i just can't do that. bruises was written as a side piece to another wip i'm working on specifically so i could have an excuse to write flash's pov because the whole story is otherwise peter's pov.

anyway, if one character is hiding something significant it's easy for me to stick to one pov so that character can keep their secrets, but otherwise this is very very difficult for me.

[martianbugsbunny]

Love the way Rosco and Despereaux are narrative foils. Their love for the light led them into the darkness. One of them wore what he wanted on his sleeve so that he was exiled for it and the other locked what he wanted away where only he was ever allowed to see it. They both lost their tails for different facets of the same quest. They both had their hearts broken, but one managed to put it back together right with forgiveness and the other didn't know how to mend his properly. One is a deceiver. The other is pure earnestness. One of them belongs not where he was born, but where he loves. The other doesn't belong anywhere, neither where he was born nor where he loves.

[sandy-grains]

Estelle meets Estelle and while they don’t have a lot in common, someone else she knows does!

[britneyshakespeare]

not until i started reading restoration and post-restoration plays written by women like aphra behn and susanna centlivre did i fully understand romantic comedy on another level. the male love interests are just built better. like as much as i love a midsummer night's dream, if i were hermia i would never risk death or a forced life in a nunnery for lysander. no. hell no. he's just ken. but if i were miranda would i risk my thirty-thousand-pound inheritance to elope with sir george airy? if i were leticia would i contemplate leaving behind my country and my hated old husband i was tricked into marrying the second i learn that belmour is still alive, to live with his banished ass in exile? hm. let me thin—yes.

[ladye-zelda]

Man, I miss the way I drew stuff earlier this year

Like LOOK

[bokumono-bachelorette-bracket]

Round 2: REINA/LICORICE (TToTT, SoS) vs GINA (HoLV, MM)