#that entire plot was not made up to nuke it to hell

[ssaalexblake]

weird take, but a a bunch of comments abt 13 make it clear that some people are confusing a consequence of the Point of the stories as the central focus of the plot, rather than recognising that that is not the point at all?

Like, the onus of the plot was Not reaching a goal where Gallifrey is nuked. Gallifrey being nuked was not the Aim of the plot or the sum goal of the writing, it was a consequence of it. The timeless child story did not exist as a justification to blow up the citadel when the master had too many feelings. The point isn't the nuking, it's the feelings that led to him doing it in the first place.

He is not the central point of that plot, 13 is, but if we're discussing Him then the point is his feelings and the ethics of the history of Gallifrey (and societies that we can draw parallels with from this story. So like. Our society), not the violence that stemmed from them, the violence is merely a consequence. The point is to examine the reaction in context, What about finding that out disturbed him so much that it drove him to do all those things? What was so terrible about it that drove him to genocide (... they're not the hardest person in the universe to drive to genocide, but it's still extreme as a reaction.)

It's like with Nine. Him nuking Gallifrey was a consequence of Other factors that are incredibly important in examining his motives and the plot. The destruction was a narrative coming to a horrible, terrible conclusion. But was gallifrey being wiped off the map the goal of the plot that was just made up as a reason to get rid of it, or was it an examination of trauma and ethics (or lack thereof) in a war of collateral damage? And many other things, as well.

I guess my point is. Gallifrey being blown to hell was not the sum of that plot and that's Not the important part, at all. In either example above, really.

[softgreengrass]

I’ll Survive

Natasha Romanoff x reader

Summary: happy then sad then happy, requested, supersoldier!r but it’s not relevant to plot

Word Count: 2.7K

Warnings: death, grief

A/N: thanks for the request!

You and Natasha are in the gym when FRIDAY calls a meeting.

“Come on, is that all you got?” she grins, leaning into the punching bag with all her weight.

You fire a few more jabs, and her feet slip back a little. Sweat rolls down your forehead.

“Attention, all,” FRIDAY’s voice rings out. “Mission briefing in the conference room. 10 minutes.”

You don’t stop your barrage of punches, your eyes locked onto the Avengers logo in the center of the bag.

“You sure you’re ready to get back into it?” Natasha asks.

You’ve been coming off of an injury for a few months now. Bad intel, a trap, a bullet straight through your femur — being on bedrest was your seventh circle of hell.

Instead of answering, you wind your fist back and hit the bag hard enough to send it flying across the room, taking Natasha with it. She slams against the wall and laughs.

You wipe your face with a towel before walking over and kicking the bag away from her. “Sorry.”

“Super soldiers,” she mutters, shaking her head.

You offer her a hand. She takes it, rising to her feet, and leans into your chest. Butterflies shoot through your stomach.

“You sure you’re ready?” she asks softly.

“Yeah.”

Her eyes flick down to your lips, and you pull her into a slow kiss. Her hands find the back of your neck, lace through your hair. It only lasts a few seconds before she swipes her foot behind your leg and shoves your shoulders hard.

You land flat on your back with a groan.

“10 minutes, killer,” she smirks. “And don’t ever do that again.”

You’re the last one in the conference room, and there are no seats left around the table. Cap shoots you a disapproving glance as you close the door behind you.

“Hope no one made any weekend plans,” Cap clears his throat. “Because we’re heading to Russia.”

Tony groans obnoxiously. “Come on, really?”

The holographic screen suspended above the table turns on, showing the floor plans of the Kremlin. Everyone falls silent.

“This isn’t a villain of the week, guys,” Steve sighs. “Hell, it’s not even HYDRA.”

You whistle, and Rhodey glares at you.

“As far as we can tell, the Russian government is doing this entirely of their own accord. The only one pulling the strings is Putin.”

“What are they doing?” Clint asks, leaning back in his chair.

“They want to put nukes in space.” Steve presses his clicker and the screen shows the earth and a dozen orbits around it. “That’s a one-way ticket to world war three.”

“And you want us to, what, eat the nukes?” Tony asks.

Cap clenches his jaw. “The Department of Defense wants us to make sure they don’t launch. My plan makes sure Putin won’t ever get the chance to.”

“You want to assassinate him?” Natasha asks quickly.

Steve faces her. “I want you to.”

Your eyes meet Natasha’s through the projection, and you swallow.

“He’s gotta be the most well-protected guy on the planet,” Bruce says.

“That’s a suicide mission!” Clint cries.

“Which is why we’re all going,” Steve says, in that authoritative old man tone that shuts everyone up. “Banner’s right. It’s going to take all of us just to get a chance.”

“Pretty sure assassinating the Russian president is an act of war,” you say. “Number two in command is just gonna send those nukes up and point them straight at the Pentagon.”

Everyone is quiet for a moment. Then they turn towards Steve.

“Which is why I have a plan,” he says firmly.

You don’t like it one bit. Not one bit. Natasha, undercover for two weeks without comms. Clint posing as a diplomat. The rest of you hunkered underground, waiting for the right moment to invade the Kremlin. It’s almost recklessly risky. And yet, Steve has his full faith in it, which means the rest of you do too.

That night, Natasha holds onto you tightly. She’s terrified to go back there, regardless of what she says. It’s worse than going after one cell, or even the Red Room itself. It’s the man behind the curtain who’s been controlling it all.

“It’s going to go fine,” she murmurs, wrapping her arms around your waist and pulling you further into her.

“It is,” you say. You take her hands and press them into your sternum. You’d only succeeded in being the big spoon a couple times — never when she was stressed. So you stare at the wall. “I mean it.”

“Me too,” her breath fans against the back of your neck. “We’ve done harder things before, haven’t we?”

“Oh, absolutely,” you exhale. “I mean, aliens? AI? Bruce when he’s hungry?”

She laughs, and that eases some of the pressure on your heart. “Worst case, I’ll survive.”

“You always do.”

“I always do,” she smiles. “And best case, I take care of him, you get rid of the cabinet, and Steve slides in his new leader. And we get out of there and go to… I don’t know. The Dominican Republic.”

“The Dominican Republic?”

“Why not?” she kisses your shoulder. “A vacation. Moscow’ll be a pretty intense way to get back into the action. You’ll deserve a break.”

“I’ve been on a break for three months,” you snort.

“Oh come on, you don’t want a piña colada? Palm trees? White sand beaches?”

“Well when you put it like that,” you say, turning around to face her. “I guess we could go to the Dominican Republic.”

She smiles, tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. “Promise?”

You could stare into the green of her eyes forever. “Promise.”

Not three weeks later, you sit staring at a computer screen in a bunker a hundred feet below Red Square. Tony sits to your left. There’s no point in watching the feed, since all of the cameras are outside of the Kremlin and Natasha walked in an hour ago, but you can’t help it. You feel powerless.

For ten days, Natasha has been Alina Konstantinovna Petrova, a middle-aged politician who just got back from a stint in Belarus. When she emerged wearing the nanotech mask for the first time, you genuinely didn’t recognize her. Her voice, her gait, her mannerisms — all changed. Sometimes you forget she’s the world’s greatest spy.

But with no comms and no tracker, all you have is your faith in that fact. Just your trust in her.

If she’s on schedule, she should be having tea with the Prime Minister, but really she could be anywhere, doing anything. There’s absolutely no way for you to know.

“You know,” Wanda sighs, tipping back in her office chair and tossing a tennis ball into the air. “I don’t think all of us had to be here.”

“Agreed,” Tony grumbles. “I was supposed to be at a gala right now.”

“Do you think-”

“Quiet!” Steve orders, narrowing his eyes at the screen. “Do you see that? Is that smoke?”

You lean closer. It is smoke, pouring out of a second-floor window, and it makes your stomach drop.

Steve taps into the emergency comms in Clint’s ear. “Is there a fire? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Clint’s voice replies, hushed. “I don’t know, they put us into a ballroom. I don’t know where she is.”

“Shit,” Steve mutters.

“What do we do?” you ask, rising to your feet.

Steve grimaces. “If… if we make contact now, she won’t have a shot. It’ll all be for nothing.”

“The Kremlin isn’t usually on fire,” you snap.

“I’m sure she can handle it,” he glares back. His voice is dangerously quiet when he speaks again. “She knows what’s on the line here.”

But five minutes later, the smoke hasn’t stopped. It’s spread. Clint and the other diplomats are being evacuated.

You keep your eyes glued to the feed, scanning for Alina Petrova’s face among the crowd. She never emerges, but neither do the Prime Minister or cabinet. Maybe there’s a hidden exit.

Just when it seems like the fire is coming under control and the chaos is cooling, the cameras cut out.

You rush for the exit immediately, Tony and Steve right on your heels. Your entire body goes numb as you climb the ladder.

It’s probably fine, you think, hands squeezing the rungs too tight. The fire burned a power line, or the government stopped the footage to protect their image. She’s fine. She’s fine.

You heave the manhole cover out of place with your shoulder, hoisting yourself onto the street and ignoring the pedestrians who stare at you.

It’s absolute pandemonium. There’s a crater where half of the Kremlin used to be, and the other half is engulfed in flames. You sprint towards it.

Steve immediately shouts after you, but all you can hear is the rush of blood in your ears.

Maybe there’s a hidden exit. She had to have noticed the fire, she would’ve escaped, she would’ve made it out. She would’ve.

The police that are always stationed around the Kremlin make a border around it, though no one except you is trying to go towards the burning building.

“Ostanavis’!” they yell, but you hurdle their makeshift barricade.

If she was on schedule, she would’ve been on the east side, top floor. The heat doesn’t even register in your mind.

You root through rubble as fast as you can, barely noticing when Wanda and Steve join you in your search. Smoke stings your eyes and fills your lungs until you can barely choke out a breath.

There are heaps of ash that might’ve once been people, might’ve once been Natasha.

You climb trembling supports to get to the second floor: there are bones there, even fragments of medals and jewelry. The farther you get from the crater the less charred the bodies become. But you can only get so close to the live blaze, and none of the bodies are hers. The skin on your hands begins to blister from red-hot ash and metal.

At some point Steve pulls you away, ignores the way you claw at him and scream that you won’t leave her. The three of you (Tony, Bruce, and Rhodey had been wise enough to run away from flaming wreckage) end up in a Russian prison, charged as enemies of the state responsible for the fire and ensuing blast.

By the time the Department of Defense negotiates you out, you’ve convinced yourself that Natasha must’ve escaped. There’s no other option. She couldn’t die. If you didn’t find her, she couldn’t have been there. She must’ve gotten out.

But when you walk into SHIELD’s Moscow base, she isn’t there. It’s only Fury and Clint.

“Where is she?” you ask, rushing towards them. Everyone else seems to slip out of the room.

Fury’s eyes stay trained on you, swimming with something you don’t want to decipher. Your heart pounds against your chest

“Where is she?”

“She’s dead,” Clint says, his voice raw.

“No,” you respond immediately. “No, she isn’t.”

He closes his eyes.

No. You see a flash of her smile, of the jacket she loved. You feel the ghost of her touch on your face.

“I thought she faked it,” Fury says after a moment. “But… we made a deal a few years ago. If one of us faked it again we’d leave something behind so the other would know. A ring.”

You’ve never heard his voice so weak before. Somehow it’s scarier than anything else.

“But there was no ring,” he clears his throat. “Just this.”

He holds out his hand, opens it. The necklace you gave Natasha last year is bunched up on his palm, dark with soot. Your knees almost give out. She never takes it off, not to sleep or train or go undercover. She would never leave it behind.

Reality dawns on you like an awful black wave. Natasha is dead.

“I’m sorry,” Fury says, resting a hand on your shoulder. You can’t feel it. Every breath, every blink is manual now, every movement an act of will.

Worst case, I’ll survive.

You just want to hug her again. Just see her face one more time, knowing it’ll be the last. Suddenly a deep red rage fills your vision, and your muscles twitch to strangle whoever set the fire, whoever planted the bomb.

“There was no body?” you ask hoarsely. You can’t tear your eyes from the necklace.

Fury shakes his head. “Ash.”

A lump forms in your throat that won’t leave for weeks. You feel like you’re looking at everything through frosted glass, frozen in the moments that you just held. It’s like you’ve been caught in a spiderweb.

You don’t cry until you set foot inside her room at the compound. Everything is just how she left it, like she just stepped out. Like she’ll come back any second now.

The covers on her bed are rumpled.

You can’t wrap your kind around the fact that she could be gone, vanished into thin air, reduced to dust. That she’ll never touch anything again. You sit down on the floor and hug your knees.

For a few days you don’t eat; you don’t speak for longer. The gaping hole in your chest churns and twists in an agonizing way. Every night you dream of refusing Steve’s plan, or going up as soon as you saw the smoke, or doing anything except sitting idly while she burned alive.

You’re at Steve’s throat often enough that Tony kicks you both out of the compound. It’s not like either of you are of use, anyways. The others manage to channel their sorrow into work. You don’t.

Clint takes time off, too. Laura manages to convince you it’ll be good.

But with nothing to distract you, you feel the pain of every passing moment. Every minute that you get older and she doesn’t. You don’t want to have to think of a life without her in it.

Weeks or months into your dull gray blur of a life, someone knocks on your door. You hope it’s not Steve. You don’t know if it’s the season, but you could spring for a box of Thin Mints.

It’s not a girl scout. It’s Natasha.

Your eyes go wide; your face pales. Nanotech mask? Clone? “A-Are you real?”

She wheezes out your name, keeps her hands clutched to her side.

“Is it really you?” you ask, your eyes welling with tears and your hands trembling as you reach out to touch her.

“I missed you,” she breathes, her eyes roaming your face.

She has a black eye and a split lip. It’s her. You drink in the green of her eyes and the red of her hair and the softness of her face and you can’t keep the sobs from escaping. She crashes into your arms, ignoring the throbbing pain in her ribs. She smells like sweat and home.

Natasha is crying too, shaking, her face hidden in your chest. You close your eyes and tilt your head down to rest your lips on her head.

“You’re hurt,” you say when you remember how to speak.

She pulls away and kisses you deeply. It feels like God blessing you, even if it tastes like blood. She’s real. You don’t let go of her until she gently pushes you away.

“We should go inside,” she whispers.

You’re in a daze for half an hour, while you wrap her ribs and bandage the gash on her arm. She doesn’t leave your gaze for one second. When you’re finally satisfied that she won’t drop dead, you collapse onto the couch next to her.

She climbs on top of you, pulls you close.

“They were onto me,” she murmurs into your hair. “I had to escape, I couldn’t let them think I was alive.”

Anger roars in your chest. “I’m not losing you again.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’m going to kill them,” you growl, wrapping your arms around her securely.

“I’ll help,” she says, and you can hear the smile in her voice. “They’re probably coming here.”

“You were followed?”

“I wanted to see you,” she sighs. “I didn’t take all the precautions.”

You laugh and bury your face into the crook of her neck. “You think we can go to the Dominican Republic after?”

“I’ll break up with you if we don’t.”

[swaps55]

Hi! Sorry if you have already answered this somewhere, I love reading about your writing process for Opus and was wondering if you would talk about how you pick and choose which missions to assign Sam and Kaidan, like Kaidan taking on the Project Overlord mission? Also, lol, will Sam ever have the misfortune of driving a Hammerhead and how much would he hate it?

Hahahahaha, Sam would hate the Hammerhead so much. I will probably spare him that displeasure, given how much else he has to deal with.

This is such an awesome question; thank you so much for asking it, and I am so sorry this answer is probably far more involved than you were looking for.

Stories like Cantata, Fugue, and Kaidan's portion of Mezzo necessitated missions that weren't main plot for the trilogy. But since the codex is so rich and there are so many side missions across the three games, I made it an unwritten rule that I wouldn't make up a mission from thin air if I could help it. Instead I'd pull something from canon and twist it into a new shape. That put less pressure on me to invent something from scratch, and it meant fun Easter eggs for the reader.

This has taken different shapes. In Cantata, the mission where Sam experiences a blood sugar crash in mid-combat was going to be heavy on action, which meant a fairly elaborate "combat chess board." Designing a visual setting is one of my big weaknesses as a writer, so I set it on Benning because I could then use the ME3MP map as a template to craft the rest of the mission around.

The underwater mission Sam does on Proteus is what it is because the codex states that combat diving is part of the N program. I thought that was cool, and while perusing planets in the codex, the description for Proteus included an underwater colony. "Great!" I said to myself. "What if I broke it?"

Virtually every place the Yang Gang visits in Cantata is pulled straight from canon, as well as what they find there. It's something I'm pretty proud of.

(The big exception is the thresher maw on Sharjilla, which is pure artistic liberty, but I am beyond delighted that people have played that mission expecting to find one because of Cantata. At one point I had planned a really great joke where Sam nukes the thresher maw from orbit out of pure spite, so when they come back to Sharjila in ME1 and Kaidan mentions threshers, someone could go, "wait, there's thresher maws down there?!" and Sam would growl under his breath, "not anymore." But I couldn't fit it into Cantata, lol.)

As for all the side missions I've woven in, they provide a neat opportunity to spread the love. They are Shepard's responsibility in the games because Shepard is the player character, so the entire world revolves around them. In fic, I don't have that constraint, so I am free to take missions that have some good narrative potential and give them to other characters.

Side quests like Bring Down the Sky don't offer much to the canon plot, but for Opus it provided an opportunity for some pretty sharp character development while also advancing my reimagined plans for ME3.

In the case of Overlord, I loved the complexity it would add to something like Horizon: if Kaidan got a first hand glimpse at the terrible things Cerberus does right before discovering Shepard on Horizon, suddenly his distrust and anger take on new meaning.

Kasumi became Kaidan's partner in crime because the cast of ME2 is so dense that I went looking for ways to weed down the cast without having to just leave people out or inflict mass casualties. Kasumi's skillset as a thief never made sense to me for something like the suicide mission, but Kasumi herself is a delight. And like Kaidan, she has experienced the death of a partner. They seemed like such a natural fit for each other, and Keiji's role as a double agent with the Alliance also worked narratively in my favor: I got to use him to answer questions like, "how the hell does Cerberus get their hands on the Normandy design docs?"

Fugue also incorporates a few ME2 side missions that, again, just dovetailed nicely into what I was trying to do. Superimposing Keiji over the Cerberus agent in N7: Lost Operative just worked well for what I wanted to do, and N7: Imminent Ship Crash gave me a good segue into it, while also giving me the chance to explore how Kara and Aslany dealt with the loss of the 'Yang.

So how I choose what missions I use comes down to what I need for the story. I have a vague idea of what I need to accomplish, then look for a side mission or DLC that can help me get there. The Hammerhead DLC missions are utterly terrible to play, but there is just enough of an interesting story to them that I was able to weave something useful to future Opus plans while also letting Kaidan grow into his role as a leader.

The DLC and side missions are really fun to work with, and one of my favorite parts of Opus, even if I almost went bald tearing my hear out over N7: Imminent Ship Crash. XD

[pknn18]

A blog post about South Park, Chef, Issac Hayes, and Scientology

I'm already kind of preemptively looking for things to focus on for my next video while I'm still working on another script. And so I think "Oh yeah, Exploding Rabbit, what the hell happened to that guy?" It could be explained just by looking at his small Wikitubia page and his YouTube. And while there's obviously.a way to turn it into a short video, it honestly was just kind of lame and even deflating seeing what happened explained so plainly.

Now, I have a better idea for a essay and an excuse to be a dork about something other than video games. Issac Hayes, South Park, and his exit from South Park along with his character's exit. Because upon kind of reluctantly revisiting the episode where Chef is killed off, "The Return of Chef"

Holy shit, this is one spitefully made episode, like Matt and Trey don't just assassinates Chef's character for the plot and thinly veiled Scientology reference, they fucking nuke it until it's turned into ash and soot. Like, this is probably more of their more vitriolic driven episodes besides "Mecha-Streisand" and "The Biggest Douche in The Universe". They're very clearly mad at Hayes' departure from Scientology, perhaps they found it insulting considering the show Hayes was signed up for. 

In the episode, Chef had left South Park, depicted in a "Previously on.." sequence that doesn't actually continue off of anything, very funny. Some time later, he returns to the town, but something's off about him. For starters, they didn't get Hayes to record new audio for Chef, for obvious reasons. Instead, they make him speak with comically spliced archive audio from over the years. Oh yeah, also he's a pedophile now. He joined a club named the Super Adventure Club, which is a club for: pedophiles. And also a less than thinly veiled stand-in for Scientology, with Hayes being Chef.

 Later in the episode, Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny manage to undo Chef's brainwashing from the Super Adventure Club, but SAC - I'm calling them that now - manages to re-brainwash him. This pisses off God, aka Matt and Trey, and as Chef crosses the bridge back to SAC, a lightning bolt hits the bridge, causing it to break and for Chef to fall to his death. 

This death is probably one of the most brutal and vicious in the entire series and is pretty much the peak of this episode’s treatment of the Chef character. However, It is followed up by a rather touching eulogy from Kyle at Chef's funeral that serves as a message that although Chef, or rather, Hayes, is no longer on the show, his character will still be remembered by the townspeople and by extension, the audience. Then they cut to a Star Wars prequel parody and SAC turns Chef into Darth Chef so he can diddle more kids.

This is a really harsh way for them to depart with the character and Hayes and I have the suspicion they didn't immediately know the truth behind his departure at the time.

He suffered a stroke in 2006 which left him very shaken mentally to say the least. Scientology, the absolute fucking scumbags they are, took advantage of them and basically told him to quit, which he did while not in sound mind at the time. This all comes from his son, Issac Hayes III, who revealed all of this information ten years after The Return of Chef aired in 2016. This information would also reveal that Matt and Trey were aware of some funny business, though whether they knew as they were writing the script for The Return of Chef, I couldn't tell you. Tragically, Issac Hayes passed away in 2008. And just as bad, it's unfortunately, it's quite likely Scientology had something to do with Hayes' death. 

When his body was found, it was next to a treadmill that was still running. A victim of a stroke running a treadmill raises some questions. Ordinarily, one would see a neurologist and a psychiatrist for a thing like a fucking STROKE. But one of the things that we know about Scientology that we probably weren't supposed to know initially is that they make you sign a form prohibiting "psychiatric or mental assistance". This specific quote is from Roger Friedman's article where he explains Issac Hayes' history with Scientology, but this was also common knowledge by the time that article was written and published. Not only that, but Scientology even has a page discussing why they're against psychiatry, but I'm not giving them traffic. Anyway, most likely Scientology placed Issac under some strange kind of workout routine just so he wouldn't run to a neurologist or psychiatrist.

It is absolutely depressing what cults can do individuals as it did in this instance. They try to chip away at that individual's personality so that they act in only the cult's best interest. This can affect relationships, personal or business, which of course ruins the individual's life. But that won't matter because if all goes well, their life belongs to the cult. Yeah, this is a "no shit" string of texts but I just wanted to reiterate: Scientology' fucking suckssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

I do apologize if this blog post isn't perfect - this swelled from what happened in the beginning and I just kinda kept going. This was done in a day, and not in a very long period of time. This is essentially just a organized infodump. If you actually fucking read this however, thank you.

Also yeah I watched the hbomberguyvideo I might've absorbed some of his style in the process OOPS-

[astrxlfinale]

Knowing a partner well can potentially make writing together a lot easier.

Repost it up. No reblogging.

--------

NAME: Jace

PRONOUNS : He/Him

PREFERENCE OF COMMUNICATION : Tbh DMs and Discord are the best way to go. If I'm ever calling you up in 4k, we've probably know each other for a hella long while at this point in this hobby. lol

NAME OF MUSE(s) : Caelus (Honkai Star Rail)

BEST EXPERIENCE : In particular it was a RP in my manga days of RP with my Oga Tatsumi muse. Me and a bunch of Nintendo related muses (After playing the hilarious spectacle of Shut up and Jam Gaiden, proceeded to do a shounen-esque RP of basketball that went into comical perfection. Rosalina Nintendo did indeed nuke everyone at the end with her Cosmic, universal shattering dunk.

It was GLORIOUS.

RP PET PEEVES / DEALBREAKERS :

:| So uh, there may be a bit to this.

Trauma/Stress Dumping: The #1 that will have me done at the drop of a hat. Since I even began rp'ing it's always been this thing, people seeking other folks/people who offer up solid chill times to just go and vent the entire world and then some onto them. Mind you a lot of these interactions being with strangers likely known for a week at most.

This literally has no changed a lick since middle school. Unless I've known you for a considerable amount of time, this is the easiest way to proceed breaking all contact with me.

Not to have this confused with venting on your own blog/space. I accept and always respect that boundary. Just do not use talking as an opportunity to lean into such subject matter. It's one of the central reasons I'm really careful in joining group chats to begin with. There is a difference in telling me that a day was rough/bullshit, AND letting me know of particular territory to be watchful for in discussion, then just using me as an outlet. Especially in what I take for a hobby.

Socializing =/= Writing time: While I enjoy the social aspect of RP in it's nature. I never want to be in a position where the hangout time I spend with you creates the curve of interaction. That easily exhausts me and takes the fun from things once I'm clued in. Honestly speaking, someone could never talk to me outside sparse words, and we just run around with our muses writing up all sorts of scenarios and it'd work perfectly. This is what I use the website for!

Plotting does not fall under this umbrella. If people need an angle to make their magic work, I'm all for cooperating with you, this again just leans into xyz activities outside the hobby. Stretching yourself too thin in this regard can genuinely screw people over in other long time hang outs too, I've learned that the hard way.

Reference of Son/Daughter talk in mention to the muse in question: While I've first seen it on this website, in the same vein it's made me incredibly goddamn tired as it reels directly into the conversation involving the infantalization of muses. This likely strikes the highs for me into terms of 'Fandom Curses' alongside 'One character quality defines the whole character in question.'. Let's not even get started into fandom habits shaping the perception of a character OUTSIDE of canon content. Having muses that had to deal with the primary talk point here, I've just said to hell with giving many things or people a chance.

It just comes off as a really weird practice to me. It leans off heavily into the realm of character disrespect on top of that, as these idealized fandom notions. (For Example: Kingdom Heart's Aqua being relegated to 'Momqua'.) It gets too 'family' oriented in a sense where these accomplished characters can't really explore the depth of both their struggles, triumphs and lows. So if you seen me avoid that like the plague, that's exactly why.

'Comfort Character' Projection: It aligns a smidgen with the above. But no, have no expectation that I'll ever be a source to live out these particulars with you if I happen to play that very muse. I've again not hesitated to cut off connections at all when people attempt to wire these expectations onto me. My iteration of the muse is exactly what you signed up for by following me, respect that, just as I respect your boundaries.

MUSE PREFERENCES: If we're talking about the TYPE of muse I enjoy? Delinquent muses take the penultimate crown. I love those rowdy but firm hearted types.

PLOTS OR MEMES : Throw both at me. Now days I've gotten particularly more experienced into the plotting department. In the same vein I can't have it entirely streamlined either. I gotta let the muses breathe their breaths and exercise their own voice and actions.

That said? Memes are eternal, just throw those in anyday of the week, even if they're in the old logs of my blog. I never mind that. Just the prompts and scenarios alone can spark forth some vivid ideas/adventures that do lead into plotting. So hell, both sides win.

LONG OR SHORT REPLIES : Either is good. Though, a forewarning that I CAN wind up getting wordy. This never has to be matched as I'm just a sucker for details.

BEST TIME TO WRITE : For me, it's normally times outside the midday. It's usually when I'm available, as you'd come to see me around mornings or nights. (Also it's the best focus time.)

I say normally however, there's also plenty of times I'd just be hanging around on/off periodically.

ARE YOU LIKE YOUR MUSE(S) : Outside of some brazen qualities. Not really no!

Tagged by: Not a soul! Yoinked it up myself.

Tagging: If you feel like lettin' the world know, then by all means!

[foxgirlpirate]

But… that’s not in character??? Why the hell would Vi EVER give up on her sister if she knew she could be saved? The reason why she gave up on Jinx at the start it pretty cut and dry and reasonable. After cementing herself as Jinx, threatening to kill Caitlyn, and making the choice to nuke the council, I get Vi giving up on Jinx and even making the decision to kill her, with the asterisk of her being the one to do it. Which yeah, is in character and going good for the first three episodes. I won’t comment on the several out of character choices because that would detract from this discussion. But anyways, flash forward to episode 6, Vi and Jinx had made up, bonded over the fact that Vander is alive (if you want to call what Warwick is alive), and everything is going well. When she learns that Jinx was thrown in a cell, she’s furious, angry, and breaks her out, seeing how mentally devastated and broken Jinx is. She was self harming, refusing to eat, had entirely mentally given up due to the death of Isha being the catalyst.

Once Jinx leaves, and mentions how she’s going to break the cycle, and HEAVILY IMPLYING to Vi that she’s going to kill herself, which lo and behold she was, of fucking course Vi is going to break and want to try saving her sister again. Old habits die hard with her. What WOULD HAVE been in character, is have Vi still have the breakdown to Caitlyn, but have Caitlyn encourage Vi to get her sister back, to be there for her considering Caitlyn seems to have had a change of heart about Jinx. The sex scene was too soon, and should have happened later. These characters still had so much emotional baggage to work through, both with each other and themselves over what happened in the past 6 episodes that there is no way what she did being a “selfish decision” was at all an in character decision. Once again, this was the result of bad pacing, an overstuffed plot, and expediting character arcs for the sake of having a rushed finale, because we needed Caitlyn and Vi together so we could do our epic finale battle.

Would I believe that Vi would give up on Jinx EVENTUALLY? Maybe, but literally 5 seconds after Jinx leaves, she accepts the fact that she doesn’t want to bother saving her sister and fucks Caitlyn, which by the way, there still feels like we need a larger conversation between those two over everything that happened between episodes 3-6. We just… didn’t get that. Just like how they cut out any conversation between Ekko and Jinx, and instead do a surprise reveal of the two at the final battle for the “omg wow” shock factor, when we SHOULD HAVE had that conversation. They could have made all of this work, but they NEEDED to pace it well, which they absolutely did not.

good for them but lmfao ???

[mysticaltora8276]

Also in the new comic, let me just say this as obsessive we study a lot of Japanese history and culture which the fire nation is based off a let me just say this the entire thing where they keep protesting “tradition“ feels just so awkwardly placed. I don’t know if they were trying to make a commentary on so-called traditions that are put in place by colonizing power that have long since degenerated people Was the commentary, but it just felt very awkwardly placed. Also, there was the fact that Mai is incredibly vocal. And I can kinda understand that but at the same time I feel like that she after having watched her father be a politician would’ve found more diplomatic solutions that would’ve assured their feelings, but still ultimately getting what she wanted to done done. That actually would’ve been a hell of a lot more interesting than her just kind of brashly yelling and screaming. The fact why the hell did we get that kind of commentary? Seriously. I just thought of a better idea and then the comic. Showing me working from behind the scenes to subtly influence the school, and bring new change in order of meanwhile plotting against the other people that are trying to undermine her. Why the hell aren’t we given that? And no this isn’t because “it’s a kids” we’ve seen in the show proper how they’ve aimed things and kids, but still showed a lot of complexity. Ba Sing Se for example? That’s an example of a very complex theme told in a kid show. So no the idea of “it’s for kids“ doesn’t attract from the fact that we could’ve gotten a much more interesting story than what we got. And now that makes me massively disappointed and just so happy that I’m sticking with Azula and the spirit temple. We’re it actually you know Dell’s into complicated themes and tries to humanize a character that is constantly demonized by incompetent writers, including the show creators who have clearly forgotten their own character, nation of that said character.

We’re getting back to the fire nation. I think would’ve would’ve been better is if they aside from what I’ve mentioned up in the previous paragraph is if they had taken cubes with how Japan deal dealt with with its post war trauma seriously they could’ve really benefited from that and talked about how they had to rebuild their culture and how they are having to you know reassess everything. Granted they didn’t get nuked unlike Japan, but they could still have that kind of weighing you know defeat on them that they were beaten by the avatar, and now they are having to pay reparations. What’s that? They aren’t paying reparations? All right the promise exists. Dammit, why the hell couldn’t they’ve gone into reparations? They had an interesting premise in the promise about you know colonists who are colonizing earth kingdom lands, but then they try the whole crap about “oh we’re just gonna leave the colonist right here.“ Honestly, I say that they should’ve just you know made them earth kingdom, citizens, and that’s it. They either stay in the earth kingdom and become earth kingdom citizens or they go back to the fire nation and become fire nation citizens. Other than this halfway BS. It’s only been 100 years. Yeah there’s a long time but this hasn’t been generation after generation of living on stolen lands. This is only like a few generations. Yeah I know and it sucks but hey, the war wasn’t fair either.

[lastoneout]

okay I said I was done but I'm not I just gotta vent but pls if you liked it you're wonderful and this is not directed at you at all, I'm just processing my thoughts, feel free to ignore me and this <3

I also just like....is that what Wolfwood is like in the manga? Bcs in the '98 anime he was way nicer?? I liked his dynamic with Vash bcs on the surface they seemed like VERY similar people but when push came to shove they had fundamental ideological differences that brought them to conflict. They would both decide to help people because they believed in helping people, they just disagreed about how sometimes. It was interesting! You don't usually see conflicts like that!!

And every time Wolfwood was an outright asshole to Vash, insulting him and being genuinely mean, or just being an open, unrepentant ass to every other person around him I was just like "He would not say that!!" bcs Anime Wolfwood was yeah, a bit of a jerk, but he was NICE!! He helped people with a smile on his face out of the goodness of his heart!! He liked hanging out with Milly and Meryl!! He was goofy like Vash!!

In Stampede he just feels like every single bitchy anime boy whos the protag's foil he's like Keith and Bakugo and Sasuke all wrapped into one boring as hell burrito I just don't get it!! He was interesting!! Unique!! Now he's bland!! What the fuck!!

I def saw the appeal in and shipped Vash//Wood after the original anime, but Tri//Stamp Vash//Wood? I can't even believe they're friends. (And trust me, that's not bcs I like Vash//Meryl more or anything bcs this version of Meryl is just as bland as ever I much prefer their dynamic in the '98 anime over this. In fact, I much prefer the four of them in an ot4 bcs the original anime really sells ya on it.)

But yeah idk if I even want to read the manga bcs the Tri//Stamp versions of these characters kinda fucking suck??? Meryl literally just exists to be confused and say what's happening, she never is given any real agency or a chance to shine, her "defining" moment was pointless and was barely given any time to breathe or have weight, she's a sexy lamp with a voice box that goes "huh, what?" every five seconds I s2g, and instead of a partner who played off of her and made sense she's saddled with Generic Drunk Anime Detective/Reporter 11 who treats her like complete shit constantly right up until he dies!!

I don't understand how this is a better version of the story. I don't understand how waiting to introduce Milly does ANYTHING for Meryl's character. She had an arc in the '98 anime that didn't start with her being a baffled plot tourist, you can have her be competent yet out of her depth AND STILL GROW FROM THERE. And maybe I'm just reaching but I cannot get over the fact that it feels misogynistic as fuck to get rid of your well-written GNC female character in favor of an asshole guy and to take your other well-written female character, who was basically the POV character and nuke everything interesting about her until she can't do anything but go "huh what?", stand up for herself exactly once by deciding to do what some other guy tells her to do, and shout Vash's name.

It's bad fucking writing.

Like Trigun '98 was such a breath of fresh air in terms of shonen character writing. Two male protags who are upbeat and goofy and earnest and sweet and want to do the right thing but struggle? Two well-written, NOT SEXUALIZED, MAIN female characters who are confident and strong and have arcs and personalities and DO IMPORTANT THINGS ON THEIR OWN WITHOUT HELP? YOU NEVER GET THAT. I think my queer ass REALLY resonated with it, these characters felt so wonderfully queer because of how much they subverted traditional gender roles, bcs of how they were more than the tropes they came from, but Tri//Stamp just shoved them back in their boxes and it honestly sucks to see.

And as a woman(more or less) I have spent my entire life acutely aware that shonen anime and manga Does Not and Will Not make space for people like me, and so seeing the ONE THAT DID get NUKED in favor of again, a new asshole and an old character who's had all of his caring, soft, "female" traits dragged out back and shot so he can be EXTRA rude and dickish is so fucking upsetting.

We don't get characters like the Milly and Meryl and Wolfwood we got in the '98 anime. We don't see subversions of gender roles and archetypes like we did in that anime. But we should. And frankly, if this is all that Tri//Stamp can bring to the table, then I am not impressed.

[youlackconviction]

*exaggerated sigh* here’s a link to the rest of the post, do what you want with it (they weren’t kidding when they warned it was LONG, and no i didn’t read it all)

the only reason i’m posting about this is because of one remark they made:

and honestly?

i’m just so... absolutely sick to death and beyond of people who DON’T share my views on something, telling me WHY I DO.

i don’t try to tell these people why they LIKE the series, or LIKE sylvie, or LIKE her with LOKI. so why the hell do they insist on trying to lay my thoughts out for me - when so many of the ones who think like i do about it have gone to such exhaustive lengths to explain it, very carefully.

1) NO, i don’t give a fuck about fictional “self”cest. that’s literally a fantasy concept that cannot exist in our universe. so why would it concern me in the slightest if someone wrote a made up story where that impossible event takes place? i literally don’t give a shit about that fandom trope as a storyline -

EXCEPT where it is used to criticise gender diverse people with the bizarre and harmful claim that "fucking themselves” is the reason a person wishes to depart from their assigned birth gender. that dehumanises and fetishises trans and fluid people.

the show drifted a little close to that accusation with mobius screaming at LOKI that he was an “incredible seismic narcissist” for “falling for himself”. even though the show was also super clear that she wasn’t LOKI, she was nothing like him, she was amazing and he was shit actually so how could it be self-love? except somehow it teaches him to love himself? um... kissing yourself is not what self-love means, showrunners. fucking hell.

2) NO, i also don’t give a fuck about lokius. can these people even imagine confronting an IRL person who admits to disliking a specific woman, and presenting this argument to them? “you only hate her because you wish her boyfriend was fucking a man instead of her!” and actually, i ALSO can’t stand mobius, because of the abusive way he treated LOKI. mobius is nowhere near good enough for him, and i absolutely don’t ship them either.

what’s fascinating to me is that they never quote our actual most common arguments against the sylki ship and then attempt to dismantle them or show them to be on false ground. is it because they simply can’t? that the arguments are so reasonable and watertight, that to argue against them would make them look unbalanced, misinformed, and creepy? i don’t know, but until i see it happen, i might as well assume that.

in bullet point form, my own reasons for disliking sylvie:

she’s rude, obnoxious, and aggressive, all the time

she has no personality, just a set of bullying tropes

she never misses an opportunity to belittle or mock LOKI

she doesn’t support him, build him up

she isn’t kind to him, shows no empathy

she’s verbally abusive and physically abusive

she thinks that trauma is an olympic event that she won

she’s emotionally manipulative

she’s ungrateful and selfish

she doesn’t listen, just insists she knows best

she’s one-dimensional and poorly written

the weak plot framing sets her up to be admired but it just backfires

the writers nuked LOKI to make her look better

her actor comes across as too arrogant and dismissive of tom

her acting itself is incredibly average and inconsistent

there are more... *gestures at my entire blog* in there somewhere lol. anyhow... yeh. that. and i’m not even gonna insist that series fans DNI cos guess what, i don’t care if you reblog this and try to argue with it. be my guest, just don’t get mad if i reply to your arguments with my own.

[findingjoynweirdstuff]

Tubbo’s S2 VODs

Alright. Time for an update.

I’ve filled in a bunch more information on the VOD link spreadsheet I’m working on, going through all the uploads on Archive, and by now I have pretty much finished documenting all of Tubbo’s Season Two VODs on there. I still need to write in synopses for some, but I will get to that. The Archive links are all there, the stream titles are all there, the dates are noted.

And here’s some good news: 

It’s all there.

Pretty much every Tubbo VOD from November 17 to January 20 is completely available.

It’s a miracle! I don’t think I’ve found any noticeable gaps! Which is something that can be said for neither Season One nor Season Three.

Every little thing -- Tubbo giving Ranboo his first-day tour, Ghostbur giving Tubbo the compass, Tubbo getting Squeeks, the Bee Dome VOD, Doomsday, Tubbo creating Snowchester, the nuke streams -- it’s saved and preserved.

Now, here’s the thing though, and where it gets a little worrisome.

Every single one of these VODs was uploaded by the same person.

ONE person.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. “But Joy, what’s so bad about that?”

Well. Yes, this individual is incredibly admirable for doing this, and it’s a wonder they did. However...

NOWHERE else have I been able to locate these videos now that the Dream Team SMP channels got taken down. All of the comprehensive playlists on YouTube have blank spaces where these VODs used to be there. 

They aren’t on YouTube anymore, only on Archive.

This single person’s effort was the ONLY thing standing in the way of all that footage getting lost.

And that’s really fucking concerning! That half the plot could have just been wiped like that! Made completely inaccessible! 

Tubbo’s entire POV from exile? Gone! The beginning of Snowchester? Gone! Dream suggesting the Festival? An incredibly important plot point, just GONE!

It’s really concerning that in a fandom made up of millions, literal MILLIONS of people, it was only ONE person who’s the reason these VODs can still currently be found publicly online.

One in a million.

But, I suppose, to be a bit cheesy about it, this also goes to show that one person can also make a hell of a difference. 

You, downloading your favorite comfort VOD, even just for yourself? You could be the difference between that footage getting preserved or getting lost forever.

A big issue here is the bystander effect. People assuming that, well, other people must be doing this! Other people must be saving everything! There’s no way it could all just be lost like that! 

The thing is, you just never know. 

So please, do not undervalue the impact you as an individual, even just one person, can have when it comes to preserving this piece of media. Every little bit can help. I know I sound like a stereotypical PSA person right now, but seriously. 

Do not underestimate the impact you can have, even in a fanbase as big as this one. Everyone counts.

[evangelifloss]

one piece

(Send me an anime and I'll tell you why it sucks)

You really went there huh, asking me about One Piece when the fans are completely fuckin rabid... thank you for the opportunity.

Ironically, I am a HUGE fan of media pirates. I LOVE pirate centred franchises/shows/movies, and you can bet that I have huge brainrot over the first 3 pirates of the carribean movies (anything after that is terrible and I don't consider canon). I even have a period accurate, hand made pirate get up I use to go to festivals... so why don't I like One Piece? By all accounts it should be my no.1 anime but well, let's get into it.

One Piece sucks for a multitude of reasons and while yes, the main known problem is the art regarding the women characters and I am on this team, I also have other opinions on why I won't ever continue the anime. To sum this first gripe up: WHY THE FUCK DO MALE CHARACTERS GET KICKASS CRAZY DESIGNS OF ALL SHAPES WHEN EVERY WOMAN CONSISTS OF : Pretty face, massive honkers, zero stomach, big hips, and long legs.

THERE NEEDS TO BE MORE BIG MAMA'S FOR FUCKS SAKE. Also why did the only uniquely designed female villain involve her making babies... like c'mon. Do we always have to add reproducing as a major plot/character defining trait for a woman?

With that said, onto the other issues.

For starters, it's completely inaccessible for the new fan. Unless you started watching when it was only 200 episodes long, which generally speaking, is already a commitment to some, as of right now you cannot expect someone to want to watch a series that has over 900 episodes that is still ONGOING. For a newbie, this is not only daunting, but it isolates them from engagement with the community. EVERYTHING is spoiler-town, and blacklisting one piece spoiler tags won't work because what is a spoiler for the newcomer, is old news to the fans. It is incredibly lonely to be unable to engage with the community because of how far behind one is. A huge character death related to Luffy regarding someone whose name starts with A is so well known now that I found a t-shirt with the panels of said death smack bang on display. For me, that was a MASSIVE spoiler... and i couldnt be angry because it happened a long time ago.

Now, I don't mind long animes, and a pirate anime with an obscene amount of eps should be a dream come true, but with the age of the series and length, ive been indirectly spoiled so much that i pretty much know all the important bits anyway, and with that onto my next gripe.

Anime isn't accessible any more because streaming has become incredibly regulated. I live in Australia, so my choices are already limited and I can't pirate the old animes due to every site being nuked. Do I support pirating anime? Not really, it's not my go-to but I don't have access to even trying out a "classic" any more. Luckily with one-piece, it's popular so it is available on a legal, paid subscription service. With that said, I'm not the wealthiest so for me, I can't afford to have a subscription. Ergo, I can't even watch one piece if I wanted to.

Which leads to the alternative: read the manga. Now this is possible, I can in fact do this and I have! I read pretty far and enjoyed myself but... I got bored. Nami's fish people story, Sky arc, alabasta, now those were bangers. Everything else was meh enough where I legitimately don't remember anything other than those three arcs. I don't expect every manga to have phenomenal arcs the entire time, but since one piece drags the hell on (anime more guilty of this) none of the other story arcs spoke to me. There was a formula to the story and it got repetitive. Frankly, I quit because I was bored.

With a 900+ ep anime following an even longer manga, whose entire narrative is based on finding the One Piece, no matter what the One Piece is, it will be massively disappointing. All this build up, mystery and hype regarding on what the treasure actually is cannot be resolved in a manner that fans will find satisfying. I can guarantee you that if the One Piece is the "friendship we made along the way" type deal, the fans will probably lynch Oda. If the One Piece is an actual treasure, which, compared to the intensity of the series as a whole, the fans will also probably riot. Basically since the whole story is so long and the mystery of the One Piece is over 20 years old, no matter what the treasure actually is, it cannot live up to the expectations anymore.

Also as far as I'm aware, there's no queer rep. I can forgive alot of it due to the fact One Piece started in 1997, but it's 2023 now and with the sheer volume of characters, world, countries, lore, I find it strange that everyone featured is GENERALLY ambiguous with an obvious leaning towards hetero. Do I want zoro and luffy to become gay? No! That's not what I'm saying. Do I want romance to be in this series? No. Not as a focal point. Do I think that there should be some diversity in the world the straw hats explore? Yes, absolutely. It's incredibly weird to me that with the massive universe of one piece, there isn't a single canon presence of queerness.

And don't get me started on early one piece racist caricatures. Again, started in 1997, not exactly a progressive time especially not in Japan. It is however, still a problem to me.

Also I miss Nami and Zoro's melanin.

[saltwukong]

The entire plot point surrounding Ironwood becoming a bigger threat to the mains then Salem herself.

Send me a plot point in Volume 8 + your opinion on it so I can radically alter your already-bad perception of a terrible season of RWBY.

Here's the thing about that plot: it's a torpedo.

People have the wrong idea when they, in the depths of their rwde thoughts, say that Volume 8 was the plan trailing from Volume 7, and it was just poorly-executed. Poor execution was not the problem. Miles and Kerry said multiple times throughout the Volume 8 commentary that Volume 8 was what they had originally planned for Volume 7, and motherfucker, do I believe it. There is no real attempt to lead James Ironwood into Jack Tincan, antagonist of V8. Ironwood's heroic journey in Volume 7 starts on Chapter 2, and ends on Episode 11--9 and a half episodes, versus half of one--seven-ish minutes, maybe ten total--meant to basically try and throw a sheet over all of it and make way for incoming nonsense.

Volume 8 was made with no fucking regard whatsoever for Volume 7, in a manner that makes it clear that Miles and Kerry felt no need nor any obligation to account for new material inbetween what they'd already written and what was incoming. The 'poor execution' isn't just all there is: it's a bunch of writing habits and patterns that were absent throughout V7 returning with a vengeance 11 episodes in and littered throughout V8. They almost certainly took the reigns back after letting Burkhart and friends pen one and only one season of the show.

That's a thing that unfortunately happens even with authors writing the whole work solo: they have an ending in mind and already written, and they just refuse to change it despite interim material dictating that yeah, sometimes you have to change it.

Ironwood and Salem are the biggest proofs of this. Salem has a hilariously small part in a volume that was allegedly built up to be her entrance to the war she was fighting with the heroes, yet she literally never leaves her ship and Ironwood never meets her in person. They never even think of one another at all. Miles and Kerry never intended them to. Salem herself was a bit player--they wanted a villainous Ironwood, and damn it, they were going to have one, and to hell with anything that got in the way--including Volume 7 and including the big bad of the whole fucking story. The nuke that eventually menaces Mantle starts off intended to blow up Salem--and was probably going to do exactly that in someone's drafts, hence MK's scribbling over that with highlighter and inserting the Ozpin Cane Nuke From Nowhere to get that job done so that Ironwood could try to blow up Mantle for...no reason whatsoever since the fight was already won.

The pettiness is astounding.

[impossiblepackage]

Adding this in at the end because I started this post in one place and came to some new conclusions by the time I got to the end, but I think that the entire Locked Tomb series is about love and all the different ways that love can manifest, up to and including evil shit.

99.99% sure that John's imperialist efforts for the last ten thousand years are only possible, only happen the way they do, because one of the ships got away. They killed the planet and left everyone to die so he really killed it and the rest of the solar system to make sure they didn't get to just go on, but he failed, and they got away. Think about that for a minute.

Imagine what it must have been like to finally find where those trillionaire assholes went. Suddenly discovering a group of people living somewhere you and the people you killed and resurrected have never been. Going somewhere entirely new, and finding humans where you expected to find nothing. I imagine he first thought "what the fuck, how did they get here?" At least until he realized how they got there. They lived like gods back on earth, and fucked over everyone along the way right up until the end when they hijacked the "save humanity" project to save themselves and only themselves. They lived like gods back on earth, but now he is a god. A vengeful one, at that.

I dunno. Obviously John is an evil, selfish, hateful man, but this all started with trying to save the world and watching a bunch of powerful people decide that they didnt want to save the world. In a lot of ways, the Locked Tomb series is about love. It's about a bunch of other things, too, but I think it's mostly love. Every character, every story beat is in some way about love. Love haunts these books. It looms.

Harrow is made because her parents love their House, and they love her in their own weird kinda fucked up way. They wanted the absolute best they could give her and it turns out that evil space wizards cand give a lot. Gideon isn't loved by anyone her whole life, and craves it so so so much. The necro-cav pairs of the 4th and 5th love each other and others so much that they're willing to die twice. Ianthe loves her sister and her self and most of her choices are fueled by that. Camilla and Palamedes love each other, and the Lyctors all love their cavaliers. I could go on, but honestly I can't think of any plot points that aren't driving by at least one person's love for something or someone. Which leaves John, Emperor Undying, Necrolord Prime, TurboHitler, Complete Bastard, and....scientist? The story of his rise to power is the story of a scientist his compatriots trying desperately to save as much of humanity as possible. A single ship is about to escape, chock full of the rich and powerful, their loved ones, and their servants employees? Not if my suitcase nuke has anything to say about it. He tells the world "if these fuckers try to leave us here, I'm gonna blow them to hell" and they said "lol. Lmao, even. We out." and next thing you know, he killed the entire solar system and some of them still got away.

I dunno man, I feel like if John didn't love the world, he wouldnt have been trying to stop the ship. He would have been trying to get on that ship.

[e-mangos]

The Flash Fix-It: Season 9

In light of all the major changes happening to the Flash and the CW, here’s my suggestion box wishlist fix-it for the upcoming final season.

A shorter season -- no more than 10 episodes. Give Barry moral dilemmas to solve. We get it. He’s “leveled up” (It’s a travesty how Ciara didn’t make a dime off of the number of times they said this horrible phrase) so give him less physical challenges and more emotional/mental challenges. Gustin is a brilliant actor and drama is where he truly shines; in those moments when he’s getting ping-ponged between his head and his heart. Give him a villain that breaks his spirit. Give him a villain that challenges his values. Zoom, Season 1 Reverse Flash and Bloodwork were great villains because they tried (and nearly succeeded) at breaking Barry’s heart. Hell, Zoom literally broke his back. Bloodwork threw Nora/fatherhood in his face. Reverse Flash killed killed his mom, turned him into the Flash, trained him and then betrayed him. The Flash works best when the villains’ motivations are rooted in values that challenge/undermine Barry’s.

Gut the team. When it was just Barry, Cisco, Caitlin and Wells that made sense. Every other combination since them has been trash (Chester and Sue are awesome though). No more Allegra. No more Cecile. No more scout meetings in the cortex; no more hallway talks after the scout meetings in the cortex. No more randoms going “into the field” with Barry. He’s the Flash. He’s “leveled up”. He got this yo. At this point in Barry’s development, the “team” really should just be Barry, Chester on comms and a medic. Hell, at this point, I’d love to watch an entire season of Barry lone wolfing it. No Star Labs. No equipment. Just the suit and a need for speed.

About that medic...it shouldn’t be Caitlin. I said what I said. Frost was a more interesting character than Caitlin ever was. Honestly, I’d be willing to bet money that Panabaker probably enjoyed playing Frost more. I wish Frost was the one with the medical background so we could ditch Caitlin and keep Frost as the medic. Now that Frost is gone, it’s time for Caitlin to go too. The few times that Barry needs a medic, I’m sure Argus can spare one.

Cecile has got to go. Her and her “oh, my god I’m sensing that you feel embarrassed at the fact that I keep invading your privacy with my powers. Tell me (and everyone in this room) more”. Doesn’t she have a child to rear? A career to foster? Please, go do that especially since it doesn’t seem likely Joe will put a ring on it. Now that Jesse L. Martin’s role has been reduced to recurring, write Cecile off. Please.

I hope the Iris time sickness foolish resolves with Iris getting stuck in a future century permanently. WestAllen fans hear me out. I too love WestAllen. I think Gustin and Patton had amazing chemistry. Read: had. (The way this man used to kiss her I swear --!) Any who, whatever chemistry they had is gone. The show has gone out of its way to deliberately nuke it by constantly separating them for reasons I will not even begin to speculate on. They really turned them from “touch is our love language” to “roommates who occasionally see each other when schedules line up”. The spark they had in earlier seasons is gone. It’s a damn shame too because they’ve utterly wasted Patton. She’s a good actress and she was given nothing to work with for years. In the pilot, she mentions working on a dissertation. Where did it go??? Where? Then they absolutely bungled her C3 plot by shoehorning Allegra and her cub reporter side plots. It’s infuriating. At this point, just make it that Iris is stuck in a future century and Barry has to use the speedforce to visit her. This way, she’s not dead, but she’s not present, which if we’re being honest isn’t all that different to what they’ve been doing with her for the past 8 seasons. And they can still have their future kids, etc. (Be free Candice Patton, be free and prosper!)

[pyreo]

Loreposting about Abaddon

Abaddon doesn’t get a lot of attention. As a deposed god he doesn’t seem relevant to the Guild Wars timeline after Nightfall. But I keep thinking about him because Abaddon is probably the most influential character Tyria ever had.

Let’s just go over where he appears in-game if you start off in GW2. Everyone knows the six human gods. They’re in statues, temples, personal shrines everywhere. The base game story makes you detour through a sunken temple dedicated to Abaddon, while the Orrian temples to the other five gods are still intact on the surface. This is not by chance. It’s also nudging you to notice that there are no Orrian temples to Kormir, because she replaced Abaddon only two centuries ago. This is reflected again later on in Siren’s Landing on the other side of Orr, where the Five, and Abaddon, each have a personal reliquary, and Abaddon’s is central, connected to all the others, and still intact.

Building on that refresher on human divinity, in Path of Fire you visit the actual place Abaddon was defeated by the other Five gods and pushed into a side dimension to keep him out of the world.

And when you visit the archives of the Durmand Priory, they have an imposing Abaddon statue towering over the stairs. Other than being reflected in three major environments, he doesn’t have a role in the plot. BUT.

As Kormir explains to you, the weakness of the human gods is that their excess of power keeps fucking up the world. The Desolation, a map that covers only a part of the sulfur desert, is completely uninhabitable because Abaddon was destroyed there. This happened because Abaddon, who was actually the most powerful of the Six and the leader of the group, wanted humans to share in the gift of magic. He was the god of knowledge, after all. This proved disastrous and the other gods reduced and compartmentalised the magic, and Abaddon went on a whole attempt to overthrow them and become one, single god of all.

The destruction of Abaddon’s temples and relics was intentional. He was wiped from memory. The pantheon was called The Five until Nightfall, wherein the existence of Abaddon was revealed as he tried to drag himself back into the mortal plane. As a god his spheres of power were water and knowledge. Erasing knowledge of him was what made him powerless. (Interestingly, the Priory’s special collections contains the Scroll of the Five True Gods, an ancient record of what the human gods knew about the Elder Dragons, but one dragon is missing - the water dragon, who like Abaddon, has a damaged and erased history. The six Elder Dragons and six human gods have many respective connections.)

When he lived, Abaddon’s followers were the Margonites, who believed him the only real god and worshipped him exclusively, unlike other humans who revere all the Six together. They were rewarded with transformation into etheral beings with an extremely long lifespan, and were imprisoned in Abaddon’s Realm, the Realm of Torment, when he was forced out of Tyria. As the god of knowledge he had a realm to himself, and when fallen, his sphere inversed. Knowledge became madness, the theme his realm embodies. Temples were sunk, records destroyed, because to remove all knowledge of the god of knowledge made him powerless.

I can’t remember where, but it’s implied that by Nightfall comes around a thousand years after his banishment, Abaddon is finally able to claw his way back into Tyria because people are starting to remember him. There’s one side quest that sticks out in my memory called The Search for Enlightenment about a scholar stealing scriptures from an Elonian library which leads to a massive raid by Margonites. The scholar was ‘babbling’ about a forgotten god. Proximity to knowledge about Abaddon seems to bestow insanity, the connection between Abaddon in his inverted realm and his hold over anyone who knows he exists. Though the Five Gods tried, they didn’t erase everything (hell, Trahearne and Sayeh al' Rajihd give you a guided tour of an Abaddon temple). Over a thousand years, relics popped up and people began to remember The Five was once The Six. As they did his influence returned until he was able to attempt to merge the Realm of Torment with Tyria and become a single, all powerful god in the absence of the others.

But wait how does that make a forgotten god the most influential character in both games?

Well.

Guild Wars lore is nothing if not completely linked together. Every single thing has cause and effect, every event is a domino. The story is consistent from Prophecies to this day. So let’s start with the first GW1 chapter, Prophecies.

It all starts at the Citadel of Flame.

It was built into the volcano Hrangmer. The charr had been displaced, pushed out of Ascalon by the successful expansion of humankind. 450 years before GW2 the Flame Legion found this volcano and, inside, Titans. You know how Mordremoth’s minions are Mordrem, Zhaitan’s minions are Risen, etc? Titans are Abaddon minions, left behind and hidden after his defeat. They change their appearance to suit their environment. In a jungle they’re vegetative, in mountains they’re made of ice, in the Realm of Torment they’re twisted constructs of flesh, in a volcano, they’re fire. The Flame Legion brings the Titans back to the charr, charr worship them, and in exchange, get immense fire powers. Flame Legion completely takes over charr society and makes it a theistic, misogynist nightmare with the Shamans at the top.

Abaddon has just restructured charr society.

Using their overpowered fire magic indirectly from a human god, charr, ironically, rally against the humans and nuke Ascalon to pieces. The few survivors escape to Kryta. Charr are now pretty much unstoppable and invade all the way to Orr. Vizier Khilbron used a powerful stolen scroll to repel the charr with magic, and it completely destroys Orr, collapsing the island into the ocean.

Abaddon has just wiped out two nations of the humans who used to worship him, with Orr as the final goal - to tear down the resplendent city of the Gods who betrayed him. This is referenced, if you know what you’re looking for, in GW2. You can scale the Vizier’s Tower, where he read the scroll that sank all of Orr, and on the wall...

A mural to the lost god, a testament to power that, a thousand years later, one who was expunged from history had a faithful likeness depicted.

Ascalon’s a burning hole and Orr is underwater. Now what? Those Ascalonian survivors in Kryta find the place is controlled by White Mantle. The White Mantle are committing mass murder via bloodstone sacrifice (bloodstones being the power curb the gods introduced after imbuing humans with magic) in order to halt the prophecy of a Chosen One opening the Door of Komalie. Vizier Khilbron turns up, shaking out some mysteriously wet boots don’t worry about that, and leads you against these genocidal cultists. Which, whoops, does lead to the Door of Komalie being opened - and it’s a doorway into Abbadon’s Realm of Torment, out of which Titans power through. This was the apocalypse planned for Kryta. Unlike the first two, this one is thwarted by the player. Kryta lives on. Vizier Khilbron is the final boss and turns out to have been a lich.

That’s 3 of the 5 human nations. What about Cantha and Elona?

GW: Factions is the Canthan chapter in which Shiro Tagachi, the emperor’s bodyguard, continually visits a fortune teller until she inflicts such paranoia on his mindset that he believes he needs to kill the emperor in self-defense. His defeat causes the Jade Wind that creates the Jade Sea. As a spirit, Shiro then engulfs Cantha in a plague that warps people into tumorous mutants. The fortune teller turns out to be an Abaddon minion whose task was the eventual destruction of Cantha. This one also is foiled by the player.

GW: Nightfall is the culmination chapter. Abaddon is now powerful enough, well known enough, to breach Tyria and try to come back. His agent is Varesh Ossa, who slowly transforms into a Margonite over the course of the game. The player confronts the breach between planes and finally enters the Realm of Torment, meeting the shades of Abaddon’s servants that came before, the lich form of Vizier Khilbron, and the spirit of Shiro Tagachi, before facing Abaddon himself.

And that’s the end of it. In Guild Wars magic cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred, so another god ascends in Abaddon’s place. They are once again The Six.

It’s Abaddon that ruined half the Elonian desert, Abaddon whose sinking of Orr gave Zhaitan the perfect mass grave to necromance, Abaddon who froze the Cantha sea into solid jade, and Abaddon whose final death and eruption of magic started waking Primordus, leading to the norn, dwarf and asuran alliance to stop it in 1078 AE-- introducing the norn and asura to the rest of Tyria, and making the dwarves extinct, cutting their entire race’s existence short. If it wasn’t for Abaddon, the charr wouldn’t have been taken over by their magic-toting shaman caste, only to come to their senses and rebel and ostracize the Flame Legion afterward. Hell, the current Flame Legion Imperators STILL style their horns in an homage to Abaddon, and probably don’t even remember why! To a human god, gone for over a thousand years, who used their race as pawns in a revenge attempt at wiping out every nation the humans had built!

And even after being thoroughly and completely destroyed, his magic STILL haunts Tyria enough for his statues to punish you for not showing the proper respect.

[hamphobicbasil]

Could u elaborate about the dsmp story being bad? Not a rabid/brain dead fan, just genuinely curious and I enjoy reading people's rants lolol

oh you dont know the floodgates you just opened

a few things:

1. despite not liking the creators of the dsmp anymore, I don't actually hate most of them. [the ones that are particularly unsavory fall outside of this of course] so all that I'm saying i truly mean in a critical sense towards the story, its also just all purely my opinion as someone who enjoys fictional and fantasy stories and who like criticizing works to see what it does well and what it doesn't do well

2. for clarification I'm going to use the c![name] to indicate when I'm talking about the characters. Don't get me wrong, I think its annoying too but its the only way I'm gonna be able to write this thing without getting something across the wrong way yknow?

3. I stopped watching the streams after November 16th, [save for one Techno one but I closed out after a particularly bad story beat lol] and so all information coming afterward is all second hand from either me seeing people on twt talk abt it or people dming me. All i really know is up to dream's imprisonment and some stuff past that.

4. This is mostly aimed towards the "main" story, so stuff abt the badlands, eggpire, and whatnot are briefly mentioned.

anyways uh, i'll try to be brief but also include enough information to get why i feel the way i do on some stuff across

A. Performances Alright obviously these people are all streamers, so obviously they might not be the best actors, and hell no one is even asking that of them. However, when you're telling a story that's based on the audio with the visuals kinda coming to a second, it's gotta be pretty strong. I will say, some of the best actors in my opinion are Wilbur, Tommy, and Tubbo. I would include Ranboo but I never watched any of his story bits or story streams so I can't say much. Wilbur and Tommy are excellent in selling their character's emotions and feelings, when I watch the stream I don't feel like I'm watching an rp but an actual thought-out story yknow? And one of my favorite Tubbo examples was in the Hog Hunt video whenever Techno attacked him, he sounded genuinely afraid and I believed everything his character was feeling.

However, unfortunately, not everyone is gonna be that good. And I'm gonna say it; Dream and Techno have to be the worst out of the entire cast. I understand Techno's whole character is this monotoned badass, however, when really emotional moments hit I feel like he never lets that fall, and a lot of intense moments just ring hollow. And I'm sorry but Dream's attempts at being intimidating leave me laughing whenever I watch them. It feels like he watched that one scene from The Marriage with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson and said "Oh this is what good acting looks like! Just yelling." His whole "I don't give a FUCK about Spirit!" speech isn't as great as people keep making it out to be. And whenever he tries to act coy when being a villain it feels like a guy reading the script for the first time, a bit like he's trying too hard. I have more problems with his character but his portrayal certainly doesn't help.

Everyone else is fine, and I don't feel strongly either way about a lot of them.

B. The "Lore" Okay first off, I can't be the only one who thinks it's silly that people are calling the dsmp's story "lore" when it's not, it's the fucking story. Lore indicates backstory to either the world or the characters, which a lot of the streams don't really pertain to. This is a really petty section but god it's a weird pet peeve of mine.

Other than the misusage of "lore" vs "story", the actual lore and world-building of the world are so lackluster that new elements can be introduced whenever and it often feels cluttered or not well thought out at all. And here's the thing, I feel like if the writers sat down just for a few minutes to establish world rules and general history, a lot of this could be solved! but so much is made up on the spot that it starts to feel like they're grabbing at straws to keep people invested, trying to reach that next high and intense story beat without actually earning it.

C. The Egg / Eggpire This is a pretty minor note since I was only invested in the Egg storyline for a little bit, but god it's so underused that it's almost embarrassing. Bad has provided this super interesting antagonistic force that's infecting the SMP, can control people, and who one of our main character is immune to, and it's just never used or even talked about again? Now I understand if he wanted to keep it to a side storyline only, however, to introduce this borderline eldritch creature and force within the world and then never have it dealt with is so weird.

D. The Writing Oh boy this is. kinda a big one. Now I'm not gonna lie, it's pretty obvious I have a bias for the Wilbur writing over the current team [that consisting of Dream, Quackity, and Tommy mostly]. I don't this his writing is perfect by any means, the characters constantly bringing up traitors got obnoxious after a while, and writing Hamilton but in Minecraft really isn't the modern Shakespeare or anything. However, I think his exploration of characters and plot progression was a lot more thought out and well planned, like he actually had two brain cells behind the story yknow? The current team I think fails to be as emotional or even impactful, things happened too fast and my god was everything drowned in angst for so long.

Don't get me wrong, you gotta have your characters face hardships to make them reach their goal believable, but some of the shit they put the characters through just felt like too much. From c!Tubbo's constant comparison to c!Schlatt [who btw, fucking ordered his death and kept him from his friends in a nation he felt trapped in] and on a side note, i kinda really fucking dislike the "c!Schlatt dad!!" au's or the au's where c!Tubbo inherits some of Schlatt's features, it would be like c!Tommy getting a c!Dream mask after his exile, it's feels so weird yet people eat that shit up for some reason.

But god, did c!Tommy get the brunt of it all and in retrospect after his final death, it kinda feels really fucking gross. Now obviously, I'm not trusting any of these people to write decent mental health representation, but c!Tommy's PTSD and how it was explored was just degrading. [Specifically the scene in that one Techno stream where he saw the final control room from the first war, and had a flashback / panic attack where he started calling out for c!Dream. I understand this is an actual thing people with PTSD will experience, but it felt so fucking stereotypical it got on my nerves. I actually had to close out of the stream because it made me feel sick, fiction shouldn't leave you feeling that way.] And don't get me started on how they basically reused the formula from the previous arc. [Problem introduced -> Tensions rise as things start to fall apart -> Big confrontation -> Exile -> Return from Exile -> Blowing up L'Manberg, again.]

And speaking of characters-

E. Character Arcs, or the lack of them In my genuine opinion, some of these characters' arcs are so disappointing. Especially c!Tommy's. I'm not one to believe that he was a "selfish" character or anything, however, his goals were simply set on his discs and maybe c!Tubbo, he didn't have much outside that. However, L'Manberg gave him something to care about, he gave up his discs for it and he fought for it tooth and nail, I think it taught him to open up to others and trust more. It was a great character arc for him to have, seeing him still fight even after his first exile alongside c!Wilbur, to return safely to the nation that he and his found family had built.

But then his second exile happened, and I feel like all of that was undone.

c!Tommy's exile genuinely pisses me off for so many reasons. It's not that characters can't have their low points after reaching a major change or feeling like they've "completed" their arcs or anything, but it's more of the fact that it seems like he's never going to heal that feels like a spit in the face, especially to people who might have had setbacks like that before. Progress isn't linear, sometimes things happen and you get knocked back down, it can take a while to get back up, but I don't think c!Tommy's character is ever going to be allowed to get back up. From c!Dream, who pretty much was a constant abuser in his life, killing him then reviving him, and his still fractured relationship with c!Tubbo, which by the way I have a had time believing they would still be friends after all that happened, it feels like he can never get a win and it's generally kinda a shit way to treat your characters who have been abused. Of course, not all abused characters are going to get happy endings, I'm not trying to dictate that they all should, but c!Tommy deserves one and the fact that it's so obscure feels shitty.

Side note: we still don't have a canon reason to give a shit abt the discs. Like I'm sorry but without some sorta connection to the MacGuffin why should we give a shit about him getting them other than "he wants them lol". Like hell, I would even accept the classic "they were the last gifts from his parents" or something, but we still don't have a reason.

c!Tubbo also lacks a fulfilling arc as well, from someone who started out as a yes man, he has progressed a bit into having his own interests first, but besides that sometimes his character makes me so. depressed. He's easily one of the most pushed around and hated characters within the story, all for being a kid who didn't know what to do and he's in the same vein as c!Tommy; these kids can't get a break. Also, his anti-violence beliefs morphing into the "lets kill c!Techno lol!" bit was so out of place and without proper build-up it was like. what. And now he's building nukes?? god c!Tubbo makes me so sad because he's kicked around constantly and never given a chance to grow.

Another small note, I also don't really enjoy c!Techno at all. Besides the previously stated reasons of lack of emotions when they're really needed, I find his character to be weirdly pretentious. He talks as if he's constantly been betrayed and hurt but I personally, don't see it? Like, I think one of the main examples was the Pogtopia vs. Manberg war, yknow he wanted to end the government but they just reinstated it after they won = c!Techno upset. But this doesn't make sense to me because why did he think otherwise? The entire time c!Tommy had talked about taking back their nation and starting again, so the fact that c!Techno suddenly thought there would be a sudden change is, to put it bluntly, kinda fucking stupid. I don't want to say that he "plays the victim" or anything because that feels a bit harsh, but his character feels so far up his own ass that I can't enjoy him.

I have a major grip with c!Dream as well, but that's getting it's own fucking section.

F. L'Manberg This is a quick note before we get into the, forgive me for this, endgame, of this entire rant, since the next two sections are tied together. But god, L'Manberg makes me upset because it feels like they gave up on it.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that it is supposed to be c!Wilbur's "unfinished symphony", the thing that destroyed a once charismatic and widely loved man, his attempt at power that utterly ruined him. But the fact that it just got blown up in the end after everything and left to rot felt like such a waste of time. From the first war, to Pogtopia, to even c!Tommy's exile, it all felt fucking worthless in the end, and the story is actively closer to how it was when it started now more than ever. I wished it was actually allowed to exist and continue to be a peaceful place in what is a chaotic world, but no it was just snuffed out because why dedicate to this concept of finding others you can band together with and feel safe. fuck that noise apparently?

G. The Villains Now villain-wise, I'm only talking about c!Dream [during the first war], c!Schlatt, and c!Wilbur. And believe it or not, this is actually mostly positive.

Now I'm not gonna lie, c!Dream as a staring antagonist wasn't bad actually, he posed a genuine and threatening opposition to L'Manberg, even if we didn't know his real intentions or motivations as to why he was against it. He's lucky in this sense because he didn't have to be good, he had to be passable. If anything, he felt more like an anti-hero than a tyrant or traditional villain, and my god do I wish he kept this theme going forward.

Now quick disclaimer, I don't like JSchlatt as much as the next guy, he's an adult man who should know better than to joke about some sensitive topics and act the way that he does. But the one thing I'll ever give him is that damn, was he a good actor for his character.

Now here's the thing, c!Schlatt wasn't particularly deep at all. He had no real motivations behind his exile of c!Wilbur and c!Tommy other than getting competition out of the way, had no reason to act the way that he did and yknow? that's fine. The reason why he worked was from his performance alone, he was actually intimidating. When he came onto the stream and was doing his typical bad guy stuff, it was actually intense to see what he would do. Whenever he would almost catch c!Tommy back in Manberg, whenever he would begin to pressure c!Tubbo, it put you on the edge of your seat and it felt like everything would change at the drop of a pen. He's a villain to be a villain, and this works out because he's just charismatic and well put together enough to make it interesting, even without the backstory or motives.

c!Wilbur however, is much more tragic, and the best villain of the story. He essentially was the "mentor turned evil" trope and it felt terrible watching him descend into madness, unable to trust barely anyone except for c!Techno and c!Tommy. Hell, in the end I think he still cared about them both, despite losing everything. Sure, he blew up L'Manberg, but there was still a smidge of the old c!Wilbur in there made everything he did feel melancholic. His death at the hands of his father after achieving his final wish was chilling, and something I still think about.

Until yknow, Ghostbur came back way too soon to let people feel his loss as a character within that world. And then he got revived, pretty much-undoing everything that moment meant for his character lol.

And then there's the worst one:

H. Dream. I'm going to be completely honest, c!Dream is one of the main reasons why I dislike the current dsmp stuff so much. Outside of his actions as a person, the way Dream decided to write his character as this overpowered madman of the dsmp really just. destroyed any intrigue that he could've had. Perhaps this is from my growing dislike towards him, manifesting into a bias towards his character, but god I cannot fathom why people try to insist he's interesting when he has as much depth as a fucking puddle.

And here's the thing, I'm not even entirely against c!Dream being a villain, hell I think he would've been great as an anti-hero if anything. Make him sympathetic but not through c!George to get your precious "DNF" points or anything, but show him actually caring about the people within the dsmp, including c!Tommy and c!Tubbo. This would make his rival status with them just a bit more complicated, sure they're enemies, however, he doesn't want to hurt or kill them, and there's still a level of friendship there that keeps them bonded when things get super bad. This could've been super interesting to see, the first villain of the story receiving a sorta redemption arc then descending into madness as he started to fixate on being a god. This is all how I feel personally, but god do I feel like it would've been better than his current character, and hell would've worked with how he was during the Pogtopia arc, before the war that is. I'm not trying to tell Dream how to write his own character, but there are so many other ways he could've done the madman seeking to become god rather then. whatever the hell we got.

Because instead, we got this power-mad asshole who does things... because he can? And that's one of my major issues: he tries to surround his character in mystery to make him "intriguing" but it's kinda like c!Techno, it comes off as pretentious. Not only that, but you cannot keep waving around this mystery of a backstory without ever actually revealing it. I know the story isn't over, but c!Dream is effectively at his lowest point, now would be the time to reveal his backstory. But no just keep it in the dark and keep everyone guessing, that's totally fun and not at all tiring and annoying. (sarcasm, if anyone needs it)

And back to his performance, he doesn't sell this aloof, cynical and strategic warrior that has perfected the blade or some shit, he comes off as some angry guy yelling on reddit. which i don't need to tell you, isn't intimidating. It feels like he's trying to have c!Schlatt's intimidation combined with c!Wilbur's depth, but instead he's like a little brother who's trying to hard to mimic his older brother and is kinda embarrassing himself.

but other then that i dont feel too strongly abt the dsmp lol

but seriously, these are the main complaints I have abt the story tbh, I could probably talk about more but I wont because man. this is probably gonna get me in trouble if any of the hyper-dsmp fans actually read it.