#they have a very different backstory from the player character & a very different way of ending up in hope county

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Hey um, what if the Overblot boys told each other their backstories?

Mmm… Well firstly, I think it would take a lot of effort to arrive at a point where all of the OB boys would even feel comfortable being that emotionally intimate with the others. Many of the OB boys are highly guarded and resistant to putting themselves in compromising positions. For example, I can easily see Azul being paranoid that the others would use his background as blackmail; he would not risk having his own vulnerabilities becoming public knowledge. Would Leona really be okay with being sentimental in front of various people he dislikes, especially Malleus and Vil? Would Idia feel safe unpacking his trauma and grief in front of his peers? Etc, etc, etc.

Secondly, I think that even if the OB boys were hypothetically at the point where they were okay sharing their backstories with the others, it wouldn’t change much about their immediate circumstances?? The OB boys generally don’t strike me as particularly… empathetic? At least not automatically empathetic. It’s something they would need to put effort into and actively work on. I imagine that they’d otherwise just pull a Zuko-style “That’s rough, buddy” or potentially even say something tactless that rubs their peers the wrong way (for example, not fully understanding the situation or even downplaying one another’s trauma). Riddle (someone with very little to no experience with social media and entertainment mediums) might not get how being a celebrity influences Vil’s life, Leona might insult Malleus (someone whom he has a bone to pick with), everyone might still be upset with Malleus for what he did to them in book 7. etc. Each OB boy only has their own experiences as the lens through which they see and interact with the world, and it’s not that easy for just anyone to put themselves in the shoes of another person.

Hearing a (for lack of a better term) traumadump doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll connect with it or understand just how grueling it was for the person who experienced said trauma. It would usually take a significant amount of time and reflection (ideally facilitated by a licensed mediator or professional) to digest those stories in group therapy and to make sure that everyone actually understands one another. A surface-level story retelling alone in most cases isn’t (again, for lack of a better term) “enough”, especially with how self-centered, emotionally immature, and different many of the OB boys are.

Think of empathy like a skill or a muscle. It isn’t innate. You need to develop it and train it, and not putting it to use can lead to atrophy. And given how arrogant and independent your usual NRC student is… yeah, it’s definitely going to be something for them all to work on.

If you want to think of it another way, it’s like how different players will react differently to reading the OB boys’s backstories. Someone who experienced bullying similar to Azul could more easily empathize with him while also not fully “getting” the full scope of other stories they hear. Maybe they can’t understand why Riddle still cares about the mother who mistreated him. Maybe they don’t see why Jamil sacrifices so much for his family. It doesn’t make the player a bad person for not understanding all the stories, it simply means they have a limited perspective. The same is true of the TWST characters; they, too, have incomplete points of views.

Maybe knowing their backstories in advance would change some scenes in small ways (such as book 6, when they split up and then butt heads with each other). They’d know where the other boys were coming from, and how that informs how they act in present day. However, I maintain that I think not much would change from the original. In a stressful situation like book 6, they could easily slip up and say something insensitive/make assumptions about their behavior based on their background/overlook or not even consider their background in the first place since they’re so focused on the current task. For example, Azul, feeling insulted that Riddle is underestimating him, could make a snide remark that just because his mother was a control freak doesn’t mean Riddle also has to be. Jamil could still see Leona as a spoiled prince because, despite being treated like an outcast, he still grew up in immense privilege as royalty. They can so easily fixate on their own interpretations of events that it colors how they perceive others, rather than how they can relate to others no matter how similar or dissimilar their experiences were.

In other ways, I think the OB boys sharing their backstories with one another stifles potentially meaningful development. Character growth in TWST isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and we’re here for the long haul. What does depositing all the backstories in their laps achieve for the OB boys? It artificially puts them in a situation to “better know” their peers rather than let it happen organically or allowing them to grow closer through their own efforts. Let’s look at the Deuce-Epel beach scene from book 5. Do you think it would have been as impactful of a scene if Epel explained his life in the countryside and how he got his traditional views on gender norms to Deuce? Personally, I don’t think so. The scene we currently have has them bonding and connecting through a shared activity (shouting at the sea), then having a heart-to-heart without a heavy backstory exposition. It’s through that, not explicit backstory sharing, that the two form an attachment and become genuine friends.

Those are all my thoughts!! ^^

[xejune]

fc5 OC headshot

bonus drawings under the cut

fc5 look vs.

far cry new dawn look, still need to finish rendering this one someday lol

[felassan]

All companions are pansexual!!!

Game is rated M, will contain nudity. [source]

Full article:

"In a new interview with The Veilguard game director Corinne Busche, we've confirmed that yes, you will be able to romance any companion you want, regardless of your character's gender or race. It's a bit of a surprise for fans, considering that in previous Dragon Age games, the romanceable characters had different sexual orientations. Some were pansexual, sure, but others were heterosexual, others were only attracted to the same sex, and some could only be romanced if you were a certain race (Dragon Age: Inquisition's Solas, for example, could only be romanced by female elves). But Busche pushes back on the idea that The Veilguard's companions are "playersexual," a term used to describe games where NPCs are specifically only attracted to the player character. She says she's seen playersexual "done in a number of games," and "it can be really off-putting where these characters are adapting to who you, the player, are." Rather, Busche insists that they're all specifically pansexual, and that might come through in what you learn about their backstories. "Their past experiences or partners, they'll reference them and indeed who they'll become romantic with," Busche tells IGN. "For instance, we saw Harding. I might be playing a straight male character flirting with her, but I choose not to pursue a romance. She might get together with Taash. So my perception, my identity has no bearing on their identities and that comes through really strongly." When asked if that means it won't take long for romance to become an option in The Veilguard, Busche confirms that you'll be able to start flirting with everyone pretty early, as you recruit all seven companions throughout the first act. But, she clarifies, "it's not until the later parts of the game where you really commit to romance and it gets pretty spicy.""

---

"Speaking of spicy... Of course, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a BioWare game, and games from the studio — specifically those in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series — are known to have some fairly explicit sex scenes. Busche confirms that The Veilguard will be no different, particularly towards the end of the game: "Of course, we are an M-rated game," she says. "We do have nudity." There's also some obvious parallels to be made between The Veilguard and last year's critical darling Baldur's Gate 3. The latter became known not only for its deep romances (like The Veilguard, Baldur's Gate 3 player characters can romance any companion regardless of gender or race), but also for its sex scenes, including one involving a Wild-Shaping Druid that went pretty viral. Busche isn't afraid to admit that she has played Baldur's Gate 3, and loved it, as she's an "an RPG fan through and through": "The more character-driven party-based RPGs with deep emotional connection, the better." "What I love about the two games is I think they live side by side in a really interesting way," she continues. "They're very different games, but those emotional connections and how the narratives hook you, I think there's space for both." Specifically in regards to the sex scenes and how The Veilguard will handle theirs differently, Busche says some of Baldur's Gate 3's scenes were "shocking and comical in some ways, and I would say I loved that." "Our companions, we want them to be relatable and fully realized. So they can get spicy, but in a way that I think people will actually relate to," she says. Basically: no bear sex. Busche goes on to say that how sexually explicit the scenes are, too, will vary between characters. "Some of them are more spicy than others," she reveals. "Just like real life, our companions have such diverse personalities. Some of them are more physical, more aggressive, and some of them are more... we have a gentleman necromancer, for instance, that is more intimate and sensual." Our interview with Busche comes as BioWare continues to roll out information about the highly anticipated Dragon Age sequel, with a cinematic trailer having dropped at the Xbox Showcase over the weekend. Dragon Age: The Veilguard will debut sometime this fall."

[source]

[indierpgnewsletter]

There's Other Kinds Of GM Advice: Theatricality versus Transparency

(This first appeared on the Indie RPG Newsletter)

I find that broadly there are at least two kinds of GM advice – and they have a very different philosophy underpinning them.

The first kind of advice aims at all costs to maintain verisimilitude. It’s a solution that you can implement without breaking the players’ immersion in their characters. This can just be stuff like Matt Colville explaining that if your players are taking too long discussing plans, guess what, orcs attack! We’ve all probably played a game where people were going in circles and not able to decide what to do. If it looks like we’re not able to decide, we’re probably going to be relieved if the GM makes something happen to break the deadlock and prompt us back into the action.

(Historically, this kind of thing was taken to egregious lengths like Gary Gygax saying if players start acting uppity, have a rock fall on their head. It’s mostly gone now but reddit tells me that Cyberpunk Red which came out relatively recently still says something similar.)

The second flavor of advice involves breaking character and talking to your players directly. I know “talk to your players” is a mantra repeated so often that autocorrect suggests it as soon as you type the letter t. At its worst, this advice is vague and unhelpful. We’ve all considered talking frankly to people in our lives, we just find it awkward and hard and annoying. But, but, but – at its best, just describing the problem as you see it and escalating it from a character discussion to a player discussion will make it go away instantly. Like magic. (If you’re not sure what that means: In a previous issue, I discussed Jason Tocci’s excellent advice on escalating conversation in this way.)

And since the theatrical flavour of advice has the weight of history on its side and transparent advice keeps getting boiled down to mantra form, I thought I’d write down some examples of situations and some alternative ways to handle them:

Situation 1: The players are marines discussing whether to dive into the alien lair and recover their stolen engine (their main goal) or go and see if another missing team of marines is okay. There is only 45 minutes left and this is a one shot.

Theatrical: The other marines suddenly come on the radio and say, “hey we’re okay, please complete the mission.”

Transparent: “Hey, folks. There’s 45 minutes left. If we don’t do the alien lair now, we won’t be able to do it at all. Is that fine?”

Situation 2: The players are low-level fantasy nobodies who have a famous wizard friend. They’re about to tangle with some medium-level bad guy and decide to call in their wizard friend.

Theatrical: When the players try to contact her via a telepathic phone call / spell, she sounds breathless and says she’s busy doing something way more important like fighting a dragon.

Transparent: “Hey, folks. If we get the wizard in, she’ll absolutely make this fight a cakewalk. We won’t even need to roll initiative really. Is that what you want? Or would we rather have a fun fight?”

Situation 3: The players were having fun exploring when they meet a cool NPC (an android! an elf! an android elf!) who has this interesting backstory with an urgent, earth-shattering hook. They go along with the android elf because it seems more important but immediately look like they’re having less fun.

Theatrical: Narrate how the android elf meets a group of other android elves and have the elf say, “Hey, now that I have these folks helping me, you can leave it you want!”

Transparent: “Hey, folks. Talking to you as players here, do we want to stick with this whole android elf plot here? It does mean that we won’t do any open-ended exploration. Which would you prefer?” If they want to ditch the elf plot, you could just retcon it entirely or do the theatrical solution.

All of these situations have happened at my table. They’re all relatively low stakes and I think whichever way you handle it, it’ll probably be fine. But that said, some situations absolutely work better when done transparently so if you’ve never tried the transparent way, give it a shot. If immersion matters a lot to you, try it at the end of the session.

/End

PS. The theatrical options often still require the players to willingly suspend their disbelief and go with it. If a player didn’t play along, they might just say “I thought their radios weren’t working, otherwise we could’ve just contacted them before. Why can they suddenly contact us now?” or “Oh, the wizard is fighting a dragon right now. We can totally wait. There’s no reason we need to fight the bad guy right now.” And sometimes I can’t shut off that part of my brain either so I won’t judge. But if there’s a way to sidestep that situation even coming up, I’m going to take it every time.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA if I tried to get my friend's character killed?

🎾🐕 for recognition.

I (19M) and my friends (all 18-early 20s, 5 players incl. me but not the DM) play Dungeons and Dragons from time to time, usually once a month.

We just introduced a new player to the campaign, who we'll call Evan (21M). Evan's character seemed a little Mary Sue-y to me when she was displayed to the rest of us, but I don't usually have beef with characters based off of that and just chalked it up to having different tastes which isn't bad at all.

My character has been working very closely with the BBEG and has basically joined their side in their conquest to y'know. Do the thing that makes them the Big Bad Evil Guy. I was super excited to see what the BBEG was up to.

Well, this was our 8th session, and we were about to wrap up Arc 1. My character had finally reunited with the rest of the party at the BBEG's lair, and Evan's character was introduced as being a traveling assassin/Sorcerer that happened to recieve a tip that the rest of the normal party was here.

By the end of the session, Evan's character had spent a third of the game time monologing at the BBEG before slicing his head off. My character is currently half blind and mute thanks to Evan's character [she tried to kill my character and I didn't roll the best on my roll to move out of the way of her blade so now she's missing an eye, and Sara's character cut out her tongue as punishment for working for the BBEG while my character was knocked out], and was kidnapped by Evan's character.

I was and still am PISSED. I'm trying not to be, but it's been driving me insane. Evan keeps on bragging about how he killed the BBEG and keeps on revelling in the scene, and I'm the only one upset by it. He was the BBEG, and you KILLED HIM YOUR FIRST SESSION?! It just seems like a silly thing to be upset about, but it's been really upsetting me and me alone (everyone else saw the BBEG just as that, a maniacal mustache twirler). Everyone is making jokes and laughing, but it was really upsetting me.

My character is very fond of revenge. Anything she has to deal with, she tries to get even with anyone no matter the cost. One of our characters died back in Session 4, and my character ended up being the only one that learnt about his character's backstory: he's a prince, and his family would do anything to give proper punishment to his killer, and his character told mine what to do to make this happen before he died. I am the only one in-game with this information.

We're now on Session 16, almost done with Arc 2, and the current plan is [the DM mentioned we'd have to wait until Arc 3 to act on the prince's last words] to rat out Evan's character as being the killer [she isn't the killer, my character would be framing her, but the BBEG was the true killer and my character is loyal to him] and hope that she's persecuted. Most likely, this would end up with Evan's character dead, but I'm not sure due to how much he's been Mary Sue-ing all over the place [not a bad thing, but his character does virtually have no flaws that have presented themselves opposed to the rest of our party each with a glaring flaw that the DM made us all add in when we first started playing, and her stats are leagues beyond the rest of ours due to what her Sorcerer powers granted her].

I haven't told this to anyone, but I have asked the DM questions about how to execute this plan. I feel like it's going to be a real dick thing, but I think it's well within the realms of what my character would do and I honestly want to knock her down a peg. I don't know if the DM will let me do this anyways, and as I said I don't think Evan's character will even die because she's just got too good of stats so unless Evan rolls Nat 1s she's probably fine.

WIBTA for acting on this?

What are these acronyms?

[thekingofwinterblog]

You know what the most annoying thing about the Twists regarding the Elves in Inquisition was?

That all the twists, if taken on their own, would make for a really good story.

The reveals about Solas backstory and how him and his fellow God Kings rose, became decadent, warred with each other and fell, setting the stage for their transformation into the Old Gods is frankly speaking, some of the best lore that Dragon Age ever had, and lines up really well with how the world is structured while explaining how the Old Gods came to be, how the elves fell, and so on.

That the tevinter imperium when it conquered the nation of Arlathan was not the great imperial state lead by mighty mages their descendants liked to think they were, but instead a bunch of weaklings that needed years and years to take on one, measly city-state that had utterly obliterated itself in civil war.

There is so much great stuff here.

So where did it all go wrong?

The answer, is of course execution.

Inquisition overall is a great game... But man did it drop the ball so hard with the Elves that it's pretty much hard to believe that they will be able to tell a nuanced story about them in Dread Wolf.

Everything from the companions, to the world itself as the game presents , to retcons regarding mages that's there, not to tell a story about the elves, but to try and make the Templar vs mage conflict grey.

Starting with the companions, we have a great example of coming so, so close to greatness... and then falling right on it's face.

The game has two Elf companions, solas and Sera... and the contrast between them really illustrates the big picture with how incapable Inquisition is with trying to tell a nuanced picture with the elves.

Solas as a character is perfect. Love him or hate him, he is a fully fleshed out character with very clear, defined, understandable motives that makes sense to him.

And most importantly of all, his way of viewing the world is WRONG. The game acknowledges that he is wrong.

The entire story of where dragon age 4 is heading, is all about how the Dread wolf, for all his knowledge and intelligence and genuine virtues, is at the end of the day, a monster, who is willing to see the world burn to restore the Elves magic and immortality.

He is a racist, he is bigoted, and ultimately misguided. Despite all his development with the inquisitor, he does not manage to grow enough as a person that he manages to abandon his genocidal goals. And the game does not pretend othervise.

That is what makes the story of Solas rise to become the big villain of the sequel great.

There is no disconnect between the story, the characters, or the way the game wants us to view solas.

Solas is far, far more bigoted and close-minded than any of the dalish he so despises, and the game ultimately does not pretend othervise.

Which brings us to the opposite end of the elf spectrum with Sera.

Sera is a very disliked character by a lot of people, but by dalish and elf players/fans more than most.

Just like Solas, she is bigoted, racist, and ultimately misguided in her hatred of her fellow elves, whether they be city elves, or Dalish, or ancient elves.

And that frankly, would not be a problem if the game acknowledged that fact. If her character arc was about it, and either how she could not overcome her own issues, or actually managed to grow beyond them, she could have been a great character.

The problem is the fact that the game is not willing to handle this fact head on. Its not willing to come out and portray Sera as just as bigoted against her own kind as Solas is, and to treat this as a flaw.

Instead the game treats her as if her biggest flaw is that she's annoying, and not the fact that in a game that is in many ways about setting up the rise of the dread wolf, she is just as bad as Solas, just from a different origin point.

Sera should have been a mirror to Solas, both from a story point, as well as a thematic one, but unfortunately she is not.

Hell, she doesn't really overcome her racism either. The closest she comes to doing so, is basically burning out on hating the dalish and other elves in trespasser, not admitting she was actually wrong to hate them so much in the first place.

The game does not treat Sera's disdain for other elves and their culture as a problem, and it does not give a dalish inquisitor the option to tell her to go fuck herself on the topic that you are given with Solas if you really desire to do so.

You are given the option of kicking her out of the inquisition, but not actually stand up for the dalish or even city elves the way the player could against Morrigan's flemeth raised cruelty in origins, anders and Fenris obsessions with, and hatred for templars/mages in da2, or solas ideals in inquisition.

And thats a problem that really illustrates the bigger issue with the way Inquisition took what could have been a great story about the Elves and the reveals about their anceators, and frankly ruined it.

The dalish and city elvea were very thouroughly fleshed in both Origins, Awakening and DA2.

However, city elves largely managed to avoid being utterly destroyed by the narrative the way the Dalish were, for the simple reason that outside briala, we don't get much if any interaction with them at all, making them essentially a non show foe the game for the most part. They don't get a city elf inquisitor, and so we have no point of view to look at them from a pc perspective.

They got off much better than the dalish though.

Starting off with the arguably single worst thing in all of DAI is the retcon that Dalish clans, if there is more than two mages in a clan, sends off the third one alone in the wilderness to fend for themselves. This goes against absolutely everything that has ever been established about the Dalish, and worst of all, wasn't even an addition meant to demonize the dalish, instead being an addition to handwave away the obvious fact that the Dalish had a much better system than the human circles when it came to magic... Which in turn was made irrelevant by the fact the Avvar was later shown to have a much better and more effective solution to the possession question anyway.

It was, in essence, a pointless retcon, that overall only made the dalish look bad, and has now opened the door for the idea that most dalish clans acts like this, and will be portrayed so in future games.

Its bad, but unfortunately it was only the start.

The game goes out of its way to portray absolutely every single person who critices the dalish as having a point, that they brought on their own downfalls, even as they are being the most imperialistic, racist assholes imaginable, while the dalish inquisitor can only offer a token of defence for his people, a far cry from way origins allowed you to handle the same situation wheter your main ethnicity was ferelden, mage, city elf, dalish, casteless or dwarven noble.

But nowhere is it worse than the way the game handles the fall of the dales.

Now the actual lore you learn about it, is not bad. At all. I know some complain that the reveals that ameridan(and presumably other elves) worshipped both the creators and the maker, as well as the fact that the dalish unfortunately did have a bad relationahip with the rest of the world, in particular orlais, is bad storytelling, but i firmly disagree.

No the problem is the execution.

Ameridan is not wrong when he says that The Dales should not have distanced itself from the rest of the world, especially not in the face of a blight... But the Dales of his era were in turn not wrong when they argued that the Orlesians were little better than the imperium, and they would be completely right.

This is not a grey issue, its a grey and black issue.

Orlais was, and still is an evil, expansionist empire with 99% of its population living as serfs, that can be raped and beaten at will, little better than slaves.

The dales were the morally right side of the exalted march on the dales. No amount of new lore we learned in inquisition has changed that fact. We simply get the details fleshed out a bit more to add context.

Orlais was going to invade and enslave the elves anyway, as they proved through their actions against all their other, very much fellow Adrastian neighbors.

The problem is that you are not allowed to express this kind of point of view and stick to it like steel.

The characters you meet having the bigoted opinion that the dales ultimately brought on their own fate is NOT a bad thing in and out of itself... the problem is that you are not allowed to challenge that opinion the way you could challenge Lelliana's view of the dalish in origins, or the way you could tell both Anders and fenris to go fuck themselves on their extremist opinions all through da2, and ending that fuck you by killing them in the endgame.

And thats a real shame, because just looking at characters like cassandra's character development through Inquisition, you could easily have made a really compelling narrative put of a dalish inquisitor who stuck by his or her principles, and actually challenged the people they met's racist views on the dalish the way you could in origins, just with a more fleshed out and(unfortunately something way too many people just cannot emote to a character withouth) an actual voice to raise those arguments with.

I do genuinely like Inquisition, and i think it's overall a much better game than DA2... but man did they drop the ball with the elves so hard.

I feel so sorry for anyone who really got invested in the elves as their favorites factions, and i honestly don't think the elves will be handled particularly well in Dread wolf, especially as the only Dalish we are likely to see fleshed out will be the villains fighting for Solas.

[burr-ell]

Putting Terms on the High Shelf: Main Character Syndrome

As I'm watching C2, one thing I've noticed about Caleb's various sidebars to talk to different people is that he's still very much involving them—the conversations reveal various different priorities not just for Caleb, but for the people he's talking with. Liam's RP is often geared toward encouraging character work out of the other players at the table; it's something you see with Vax early on, and it's very present with Caleb.

So I find the accusations and warnings of Liam having Main Character Syndrome, which started during C1 but really ramped up in C2, to be rather shallow. Look at the contrast between the tables during this:

and this:

In C1x27, Orion adds pressure to the cast's already-frayed nerves with him, compounded from previous incidents of bad behavior, by taking up several minutes of time purely to himself—his only interaction with anyone else at the table is to ask Keyleth for help with alchemy mechanics (fun fact, early Keyleth was into alchemy!). This included:

An attempt to buy 1500 mirrors to build a light array;

A request to his father to send in his home country's army to Whitestone; and

An attempt to combine a fog spell and a sleep spell after being told point blank that it was mechanically impossible

This was all very obviously an attempt to make himself the hero in what is clearly set up to be a Percy-centric arc. (Worth noting, for the record, is that up to this point Percy had actually had very little focus and largely kept himself in the background, while Tiberius had been in focus for most of the show's run up to that point.) Laura snarks that he's like the giant eagles in Lord of the Rings and can just do everything, and if you actually watch the clip that I've giffed above, Travis's tone is genuinely aggravated. This, by the way, is all after Tiberius was notably not present for Percy revealing his backstory to the rest of the party in episode 24; while everyone else voiced concerns for him and went down to his workshop to check on him, Tiberius largely ignored this and went off to do his own business.

That is a selfish player. That is selfish behavior and a clear example of someone who thinks the story should revolve around them. There are several reasons Orion was asked to leave, not just because he fudged his dice rolls.

C2x62 is a completely different story. None of the conversations Caleb has within that episode are just a way for Caleb to gain information; he's engaging with what the other people are doing. When he asks Nott and Jester about the letter they wrote to Astrid, he reveals a little about himself—something he is particularly reluctant to do with Jester—and they are given an opportunity to respond. His conversation with Beau gives time for both of them to check in on each other and where they're at and lets Beau give her own perspective on the politics of the Empire, the Cobalt Soul, and Xhorhas. The discussion with Fjord lets them both level with each other a little and does more work for Fjord's character, letting him open up about his insecurities and issues, than it does for Caleb's. Caleb is still initiating these conversations and he still gets something out of them, but both the players and the audience still get the benefit of the other characters pushing and pulling against that in response.

Like many terms that get thrown around in this circle ("player agency", "manipulating", "metagaming", "going dark", to name a few), Main Character Syndrome has been so misconstrued and warped to fit a heavily biased perspective as to be almost meaningless. Main Character Syndrome is not when a character initiates a lot of conversations, even if you personally don't like the conversations for whatever reason. Main Character Syndrome is not when a character chooses to take a risk or push a big red button, even if you personally don't like the choice for whatever reason. Main Character Syndrome is not when a character has an arc or aspect of lore heavily focused on them, even if you personally don't like the character for whatever reason. (Particularly considering that arc focus is entirely out of the player's control; Taliesin, Liam, and Laura did not in fact force Matt to focus a significant portion of each campaign's lore on Percy, Caleb, or Imogen's backstories respectively.)

Main Character Syndrome is specifically about player selfishness—it's a player inserting their character into scenes or roles where they do not logically belong in order to make them the center of the story, as we see with the example of Tiberius. The camaraderie at the current table versus what was going on back in 2015 does not suggest that anyone currently sees anyone else like that; everyone is laughing at the jokes made at someone's expense, and everyone is getting something to do. Your favorite character may not always be flashy or in focus all the time, but then again, you wouldn't want them to have Main Character Syndrome, would you?

[metalandmagi]

Underrated Sports Anime Recommendations!

In honor of the summer Olympics, I wanted to make a rec list for some underappreciated sports anime. Obviously we all know the popular stuff: Blue Lock, Kuroko, Hajime no Ippo, Ace of Diamond, Slam Dunk, Haikyuu, Free, Yuri On Ice, Yowamushi Pedal, Skate the Infinity etc. But there are lots of great sports anime out there that go completely unnoticed. And who knows, you might find a new sport to get into. Just FYI, these are all on the newer side, since most of the older sports anime I’ve seen are the popular ones.

I think a big reason that a lot of these have largely gone ignored is because they focus more on interpersonal drama between characters and what is going on in their home lives, as opposed to a bigger focus on the technicalities of the sport itself. Food for thought. Anyway, let's get started:

Stars Align (Hoshiai no Sora): Stars Align is about a boys high school soft tennis team (not to be confused with regular tennis) who are constantly getting out performed by their girls team. Desperate to get people to take the boys team seriously and get results, team captain Touma tries to get a new transfer student Maki Katsuragi to join. Maki eventually agrees ... .on the condition that Touma pays him and covers any club expenses. From there we discover the messy family drama going on in each boy’s life, and I just love all of them okay? They’re my precious angel babies, and sure I had some problems with the show’s pacing at the end, but I still love them and I want another season!!!! 😭

Oblivion Battery (Boukyaku Battery): There are a myriad of baseball animes out there, but this one made an impression on me. Catcher Kaname Kei and pitcher Kiyomine Haruka are a badass, ace duo who dominated the field and made a fearsome reputation for themselves all throughout middle school. They seemed to be completely unstoppable…until Kaname (the brains behind the operation) lost his memory, became a total goofball, and the two ended up going to a no name high school with no real baseball team. So of course, we end up getting a rag-tag team together full of ex-baseball players with dramatic backstories who all help train Kaname up again. I love Kaname and Haru’s friendship, and the cast was very well rounded, each with their own interesting attributes to add to the team.

Re: Main: If I had a nickel for every sports anime where the main character used to be an unstoppable badass until he lost his memory, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice. Yeah, it’s exactly the same as Oblivion Battery, but with water polo and the main character isn’t as much of a goofball. I liked the characters, but I wished we focused a little more on the water polo side of things, since it’s not exactly a dime a dozen sport for an anime.

Mou Ippon: A girls high school judo anime from 2023 that nobody fucking watched! When former judo enthusiast Michi Sonoda enters high school, she wants to put judo behind her so she can focus on finding a boyfriend and enjoying her school life. However, after Michi suffers a particularly humiliating defeat in a match against her the prodigy Towa Hiura, the two end up going to the same high school together. Naturally, Michi can’t just quit now that her rival is going to the same school! Cue the judo team shenanigans. This show is so down to earth and realistic. It’s 100% not a “cute girls doing cute things” anime where the girls are all blobs of moe that talk in annoying voices. They have different body types, different motivations, and different styles of combat. It didn’t blow me out of the water, but I liked it way more than I thought I would.

And speaking of different body types…

Hinomaru Sumo: That’s right, it’s a high school sumo wrestling anime. AND IT’S HYPE AS FUCK! You know how in Haikyuu, Hinata is short, and it’s a big deal because middle blockers are always tall? Well this is that multiplied by a thousand, because there’s a minimum weight to sumo wrestling, and our main character Hinomaru Ushio is definitely below it. But he’s not going to let that stop him from spreading his passion for sumo and becoming the High School Yokozuna, the strongest wrestler in high school tournaments…because becoming the Yokozuna is his only chance at going pro with his small stature. It’s impossible to watch this anime without feeling fired up!

Run With The Wind (Kaze ga Tsuyoku Fuiteiru): Kakeru Kurahara, a former track star, is looking for a place to live after losing his apartment deposit at a mahjong parlor. Luckily, he runs into Haiji Kiyose, a boy who goes to his university, who offers him a spot at his apartment. Little does Kakeru know, Haiji’s apartment is full of other university students who are all members of the Kansei University track team! The story follows the quietly devious Haiji as he tries to get the boys to become a nationally recognized team by running the Hakone Ekiden, an extremely long and grueling relay that none of the boys have ever trained for. This is one of my favorite sports anime ever. Don’t get it twisted, I hate running. I don’t like doing it, and I don’t like watching it in real life, but this anime had me in a chokehold. Animation? Amazing. Characters? A+. Music? Perfect. It’s hilarious. It’s relatable. It’s heartwarming. One of the absolute best sports anime out there.

Welcome To The Ballroom: It’s a motherfucking ballroom dancing anime, and if you didn’t think ballroom dancing could be hype as shit, THINK AGAIN! The animation is great, and I never realized how much actually goes into the world of ballroom dancing. There’s not really much more I can say. High school boy discovers the cutthroat world of competitive ballroom dance. Drama ensues. Just ignore everyone’s oddly long necks.

And speaking of dancing…

Dance Dance Danseur: Okay, this one isn’t quite in a sports competition setting, but I still consider it a sports anime. All his life, Junpei Murao has suppressed his interest in ballet, choosing to follow his father’s path for him in the more “manly” martial art of Jeet Kune Do instead. But when he realizes the girl he likes is a highly skilled ballerina, he hardly says no when she recruits him to train at her mom’s ballet studio. The show follows Junpei as he must balance these two worlds and become a ballet master while dealing with the divisive image of “masculinity.” My only real critique is that Junpei is kind of annoying, and I was actually much more invested in the other characters. There is a big message about the horrors of the competitive ballet world that I didn't think it would dive into.

Overtake: Another show from 2023 that was terribly overlooked. In this anime, we follow disgraced photographer Kouya Madoka, who falls in love with the fast paced world of Formula 4 racing after watching high schooler Asahina Haruka. However, Madoka failed to realize that Haruka’s racing crew, Komaki Motors, is drowning in bills and underfunded as hell. So of course when he finds out, Madoka takes it upon himself to support Komaki Motors himself and get Haruka a place on the podium. This was such a great drama! Each character is so fleshed out and completely relatable. Even the antagonists! Hell, especially the antagonists. There is a great balance of drama and humor that make this feel like it could easily be a Hollywood movie. The longer you watch, the more you root for Komaki Motors and want to see everyone succeed. Madoka is best boy!

And last but certainly not least…

Tsurune: In this anime, we follow Minato Narumiya, a former kyudo (Japanese martial art that involves archery) prodigy who wanted to quit the sport after an incident in a middle school tournament. However, after encountering a mysterious archer one day, Minato ends up joining his high school Kyudo team, despite his fear of failing at the sport again. It’s Free with archery, except there are also girls on the team! It has so many good themes about perseverance and found family and getting in your own head. And there is a massive amount of homosexual undertones. Not to mention it’s made by Kyoto Animation, so you know it’s one of the most beautifully animated shows I’ve ever seen.

I just wanted to add a few honorable mentions too…

Cheer Danshi: A university boys cheerleading anime. I had problems with the pacing, but I still had fun with it.

Ryman’s Club: An odd blend of office anime with a badminton anime. I really liked this, but it’s sort of half sports anime, half The Office. But it’s the only thing on this list that features actual working adults and not students.

Megalo Box: I don’t know if it counts as “underappreciated” but this was a fantastic show all around. It’s a gritty, down to earth, sort of sci-fi take on the fictional sport of Megalo Boxing (boxing with enhanced mechanical arms). 

Ping Pong the Animation: Look, I’m going to be honest. I didn’t really like this show very much, but apparently I’m the odd one out because this is an underground favorite of the sports anime community, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t include it. It’s one part ping pong, two parts character drama.

Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story: I couldn’t leave this out of the list. It’s the wildest golf anime you could ever imagine. There are lesbians. There are snake ladies. There are underground golfing yakuza. No amount of explanation can do it justice. Grab an age appropriate beverage and watch it.

[faeiri-tft]

PLEASE do the toontown online rant i want it so badly

this post kinda got away from me, and by "got away from me" i mean this 3000 word toontown rant is Part One. there will be a Part Two to this later in which i actually talk about the fanservers i wanted to talk about. anyway let's go

toontown online (tto) was a children's mostly-turn-based subscription MMO released in 2003. after a few years of obviously being on life support, disney gave a one-month notice that tto (and several other games) would be closing on september 19th, 2013. on the same day the game closed, the fan-run server toontown rewritten (ttr) was announced (with multiple other fanservers/fangames/reimaginings being established since), and is a few months away from outliving the original game

see, one thing about tto that allowed fanservers to crop up so quickly and easily was that it had, um, interesting choices. very interesting choices. like, "kids could use a code injector to turn their backyards into giant mashed-together nightmarescapes"-level choices

(loose video description: a rabbit toon running around a chaotic mismash of rooms, obstacles, and npcs that Should Not Be There. audio caption: Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life".)

but ok let's talk about the actual game first.

toontown online (tto)

the game starts with you creating your player character - you can pick from eventually-9 species, a couple body types, and 2 dozen preset colors. the gender code is a spaghetti nightmare but you won't learn this until the fanservers come about so don't worry about it. you're then taken to the Toontorial, which explains maybe 20% of the game's mechanics before setting you loose into the main game

the toontorial also gives you the basic "plot", such as it is: Toontown is suddenly* under attack by a bunch of boring businessrobots called the Cogs. their goal is to turn toontown into a dreary gray featureless corporate hell; their business activities are so boring that they're physically painful to be around. luckily, they can't take a joke, so the toons have figured out how to defeat them: by playing pranks on them until they laugh so hard they Explode

*originally, the game installer had a little animation giving a backstory for the Cogs' creation. this was never referenced in game, removed pretty quickly, and i think even the devs kinda forgot it existed

that's...pretty much the whole story! in that context, your toon progresses through all of toontown, helping some mostly-pretty-interchangeable shopkeepers, reclaiming buildings from the cogs, eating ice cream, etc. occasionally, the cogs would Come Up With New Tricks (read: major content update) and the toons would Find A Way To Fight Back (read: same major content update). that was the closest thing to Plot, unless you count "the devs scheduled a bunch of invasions of high-tier cogs right before the game's closure". but...i doubt most the kids really expected a Plot. mickey mouse was there

the gameplay:

the Free Account

there were two...pretty different approaches to playing toontown online. when the game launched, there was a 3-day free trial to the entire game, after which you got kicked entirely until you subscribed. at some point, this was changed so that the first area, Toontown Central (TTC), was Always Free - you could do all of that area's quests/"taskline" and limited activities, indefinitely, and in theory this would make you beg your parents for the rest of the game

i have no idea if this actually got more subscriptions or not. from what i can tell it just spawned more warrior cats

(source)

there were. a Lot of warrior cats. there were some other social activities, too, such as Fashion Shows (with your limited range of clothes) and Begging Subscribed Players To Summon Cog Buildings To TTC and Getting Chat Banned. ...however, as one of the subscription kids i didn't really interact with this side of the game, so i'm not the best person to talk about it

2. the Paid Account

mmm look at those crisp clear graphics. hell yes

a subscription account gave you access to this whole map, along with all these areas' tasklines. to progress through the game, you must complete a variety of "ToonTasks" for the Toon Resistance (it's called that. their catchphrase is "Toons of the World, Unite!". you were giving disney money for this). these reward you by increasing your max health (your "Laff Points"), slowly unlocking more combat options, and sending you to different, higher-difficulty areas of toontown

some of these tasks were...longer than others. generally, though, they all boiled down to: "just go fight some cogs"

combat:

(source)

toontown battles are turn-based: the players use their attacks ("gags") first, and then any surviving cogs attack you with, usually, office equipment and puns thereof (unless the cog is e.g. a Loan Shark, in which case they can just fucking bite you). if you defeat a cog, it explodes; if the cog defeats you, you "go sad" and are sent back to the safety of the playground, lose your gag inventory, and can't leave until you heal.

early on, most your battles are 1v1, but later on almost everything is a multiplayer 4-ish-v-4.

an...interesting feature here in the game's early days was that you could only Type Your Own Words to someone who shared their "friend code" with you IRL. otherwise, you had to use this thing:

(source)

you had a set list of phrases you could string together, which generally covered most the things you wanted to say. but it could get frustrating when you wanted to have a real conversation with your toontown friends! so...as the source above mentions, people obviously found ways around the system. turns out that if you let players move objects around their houses, they will use that to Draw Letters and pass their friend code along regardless

eventually - before the warrior cats, of course - disney presumably realized this system was pretty goofy (🥁) , so the game got a real chat, albeit one that functioned on a very strict whitelist. my favorite is that it didn't let you type numbers, however you could just say won too tree for hive etc. like. disney i really don't know what to tell you. anyway

(isn't he charming)

cogs come in levels 1-12, with levels displayed above their heads, and as you'd expect their damage output and HP increase with their level. however, the game doesn't...actually show you cog HP? instead they have a little colored light on their chest that fades from green to red until they explode. you see numbers on all the damage you do, and you see your own HP/laff, but never the cogs'. also lategame cogs are Too Tall For You To See Their Level once they line up for battle (which isn't actually that bad but it's funny). there's a formula for HP per level, but it's never mentioned in-game. i guess someone can teach it to you but then you have to watch them type "a level tin cog has won tree too health" and is that really worth it

(as you can tell i just…don't get this. "my kid is practicing arithmetic with toontown!" - marketing angle expressly denied by god. the stealth edutainment was right there)

anyway! in theory, you have seven base combat options ("gag tracks"), which combine in a variety of ways:

toon-up, which restores your teammates' health;

trap, which does guaranteed high damage but only if someone uses lure;

lure, which stuns the cogs for a few turns and is the only way to make trap work

sound, which does low damage to every cog;

throw, which does medium-high-ish damage to one cog; multiple throws combined give percentage combo damage, and hitting a lured cog will also add percentage "knockback damage";

squirt, which is exactly like throw but less damage;

and drop, which does high damage but cannot hit lured cogs, and has low accuracy unless you hit the cog with something else first

each gag track has 6 levels, which you unlock by using that gag track a bunch. you can't carry as many of the high levels with you - i mean, putting one piano in your backpack makes perfect sense, but two is just silly, right

a few years into the game's lifespan, level 7s were added - these were huge AOE that you could regain with every 500 track EXP. there was also something called "organic gags" to promote the please-log-in-every-day gardening system

every player starts with throw and squirt, and throughout the game you slowly unlock four more gag tracks. your choices are permanent: once you have your six tracks, you're locked out of the seventh forever.

in theory, all of this opens up a huge variety of combat options!

in practice, the battle strategy looks something like this:

use sound

as mentioned, almost all of lategame will be 4v4 battles, which means sound will almost always outdamage everything on earth. you don't even need four foghorns (the highest normal sound gag) to break 200 AOE damage, and the highest health a cog EVER has is 200*. and two of the boss battles can reward you with gag restocks and heals that you can use mid-battle with no consequences (other than having to grind for those rewards a bunch). and failing THAT, you can just...ration your foghorns and take 2 turns to clear a set of cogs, interspersed with healing.

(*okay there was something called "v2.0 cogs" but they were...strange, and we just used sound anyway)

sure, once level 7s were added you could use those occasionally. and you could fall back on lure+throw if you didn't want to use your sound restocks. but even then, for most of tto's existence there was something called the "knockback bug" which. well. just look at it

(link for transcript. it's tvtropes sorry)

if you are a target-audience eight-year-old this translates to "lure + throw will only do enough damage if the cogs Feel like it." like it's really just insult to injury at this point. this was the result of One misplaced variable and was not fixed until the game closed

in the tto era, if you didn't have sound, you were kinda doomed to be kicked out of every fight forever

(bonus fun fact: there were Four entire battle themes and they were 40-second midi loops. let me out)

the bosses:

each of the four cog departments has a Boss Cog. to face off against them, you have to assemble a cog disguise and collect enough merits/stock options/whatever to be allowed into the boss's office.

(pictured: your convincing disguise)

when you enter, your disguise pops off due to Reasons, and you have to fight through...a bunch of waves of normal cogs. it's basically a really long normal battle. once the minions are dealt with, you have to, inexplicably, do a live-action battle against the boss themself:

(loose video description: four toons defeating the CFO by using magnet cranes to hit him in the face with safes for 32 seconds.)

the live-action rounds aren't supposed to go this quickly, but it's still...kinda strange? certain reoccurring game areas require Parkour, but there are no battles like this outside of the Four bosses. the CFO's room is the only place you see these cranes and they have A Lot Going On. the other 3 bosses have their own unique weird mechanics. before the first boss was added we neither had nor needed the ability to Jump. it's just weird

once you've defeated the boss, you're given a reward of varying usefulness (the best/most unbalanced reward type is Unites, which are a free heal or gag restock you can do inside or outside of battle. essentially lategame toons can simply choose not to die. riv2u etc.)

and, um. then you get some more merits/stock options/whatever and do it again. and again. and again. and again. and agai

the grind:

so the thing is that tto was a subscription mmo. every addition to the game had to be measured, above all, in terms of "how can we best get kids to beg their parents to give us money." this especially shows in the suit grind:

(source/source)

you have to defeat each boss 78 times in order to get all their laff points - and as you proceed, you have to defeat an increasing amount of cogs to even be allowed into the boss (although once you max you get in for free).

by far the easiest way is to run through the designated HQ facilities - basically, cog fights interspersed with some platforming or minigames. you only collect your merits/whatever at the Very End of the facility. the only way to increase what a facility gives you is if your last battle ends during an "invasion" - a timed period where One Specific Cog replaces all street cogs, usually summoned with boss rewards.

the sellbot HQ grind isn't so bad. bossbot HQ - the endest-game HQ - frequently requires you to do an hour-long facility and on six separate occasions you have to do seven of them. if the invasion ends before your final battle, you have to sit around until someone summons another. if you lose your internet connection because it's 2008, or if your parents make you come to dinner, or if hacking or the game's general bugginess cause a server reset because you're probably in the busiest district for the invasion bonus, you have spent that Entire Hour On Nothing. the CEO (bossbot cog boss) probably also takes an hour because you and your fellow players are 10

this shit, combined with laff points locked behind gardening (time-gated), racing and golfing (multiplayer minigames with absurd requirements), and fishing (RNG-based with some fish being absurdly rare. i watched my mom fish for one every day for a month), meant that maxing a toon took Years, if you managed it ever.

it wasn't, um. it wasn't good

ok so what else is wrong with this game:

i had "aged out of the game" (lol) by the early '10s, so i'm not the best person to do a writeup of the hacking/scripting situation of those days. that said, what i'm going to do is give you a few examples, and i want you to just...look at them

(source)

(source). early '10s youtube was funny i'm trying to decide if i miss it

(source). fun thing to note here is that other players had collision, so a swarm of t-posing toons could just barricade the gag shop if they wanted to

(video description: toon who has Replaced His Head Model With An Anime Logo throwing thousands of jellybeans at everyone) (cw mild flashing just in case? and also the feather headband accessory)

i should note that the Bring Me To Life vid i started with was client-side, meaning only the player could see their technicolor hellscape. this guy's face was server-side. i do Not Think you should be able to do that

(video description: a player demonstrating use of a bot to get into the nutty river district, followed by other players using it to go to different game areas)

the above video was posted on august 17th, 2013. if you don't want to watch an Unregistered Hypercam 3 recording at about 5 frames per second, what's going on here is:

the player goes to a specific location and says a specific speedchat phrase.

a bot toon teleports to their location and provides some prompts on how to use it

the player tells the bot, via speedchat, to teleport to the (currently closed from the outside) busiest district so the player can follow

these "taxi toons" were server-sided, persisted across server resets, were made by a future fanserver dev, had younger kids referring to them as a "glitch" as if this were something that could Accidentally Happen, and stayed functional until the game closed

like...a lot of the "hacking" was just baby's first script download. this one - afaict also created by the laughing man head guy - is like...the fact that after years of no substantial game updates, someone effectively programmed their own "QOL feature" (note: not actually good for the poor mid-00s server being turned into a clown car) into a silly disney MMO and it just fucking sat there for a year is just. it's just.

i don't know what this is. this is not Playing The Game Toontown Online. this is nothing. this is everything. there are comments from 2013 on some of these videos saying stuff like "hackers killed toontown", but your game cannot have this happen if it is not already dying

and, like...it was. i'm not sure how many moderators there were by this point, but at the very end of tto, the number of active devs was One. the original devteam recently brought this up at the 20th anniversary celebration: devs just...slowly started getting pulled from the game, one at a time. there were a few updates after bossbot HQ - Field Offices, which i've basically never heard anything good about in their tto form ever; the Silly Meter, a yearly event...thing whose main function was to add unskippable dancing-inanimate-object cutscenes to your street battles; Parties, which...yknow parties were okay actually. i accept parties. but they weren't exactly a Major Game Update like the ones that had come before. in 2011 we gained the ability to Wear Hats. in 2012 the test server got some actual QOL updates that never made it to the main game; the final test server update was some maintenance in february, and then nothing for 18 months. disney was not providing enough resources to address the scripting because disney was not providing enough resources to address toontown. imagine being the last dev standing on an MMO that was older than some of its players, was losing its business model to mobile gaming, and spent most of its life falling apart at the seams. just imagine it, for a second

it couldn't have kept going, not like this.

on august 20, 2013, the closing announcement came: we had a month left of toontown online. the test server shut immediately; subscription refunds went out, and the game became actually F2P for the month; the part of the announcement that went like "we're shifting our focus to other games!" made a bunch of twelve-year-olds hate club penguin as if club penguin wouldn't also close in a few years; all the holiday events went off at once; and...

there wasn't a "thanks for playing!" popup. everyone online just got kicked, all at once. it was finally over

hey wait.

[centaurianthropology]

My thoughts on C3E77

So apparently this one was controversial?

I'm going to say right now, I really loved everyone's decisions. They all fit the characters, but more they fit the players. I know that there are claims that Tal ignored all the warnings, but I actually think Matt may have misjudged the situation going in.

Ashley made it clear on 4SD that she did not want the shard. I think she's not really feeling the Dark Fearne storyline (and that's fair), and Matt seems to have missed that she genuinely didn't want to go down that route. Maybe he thought she was playing coy? Maybe they've been playing together so long he thought he knew a story she'd enjoy and missed her signals that she wasn't into it. I've done that before with some of my long-term players.

However that went down, Tal and she had a conversation after 4SD about what they wanted to do, and it was clear going into the episode that they at least had it planned out who was taking that shard, and it was going to be Ashton from the off. The fact that Matt was not expecting that somewhat surprises me. As Taliesin said: he put a big red backstory-shaped button in front of Ashton, and Ashton is terrified of losing people. If Fearne didn't want the shard, Ashton was going to dive on that grenade head-first. And part of Ashton wanted it. They are told they can't do something, and they will go about proving that old tree and everyone else wrong in the most self-destructive way possible. They are intensely punk in that way.

Matt may have designed the shard for Fearne, but this is not the first time that an item meant for one player ends up with another. Deathwalker's Ward was made for Percy, but through the events in the Sunken Tomb, it ended up with Vax and led to a hell of a story. And now something meant for Fearne goes to Ashton, and I have a feeling we're now in for another hell of a story. Because Ashton is now, essentially, a lava genasi, with three impossible things crammed into their broken body. Will they survive the campaign? I have no idea, but it has become clear that they don't expect to.

And honestly? This may well be what the Hells need, not in terms of power, but in terms of really realizing how self-destructive they all are. Marisha may say that no one loves a martyr, but Laudna was very much ready to play that role earlier this episode. Imogen is very self-destructive. So is Orym. So is FCG. The only two who have shown any degree of self-preservation are Fearne and Chet. The rest are bombs waiting for the most poetic moment to go off.

And today one of them did for a moment. They finally saw the end result that their self-destructive tendencies get them: Ashton blown into a thousand pieces, scattered across the top of the ziggurat. Deanna's ring saved him. Fearne's Aura of Life and FCG's Aura of Vitality saved him. Ashton could only roll and take damage.

Matt may have not designed it this way, but this was absolutely Ashton's 'where do you get your strength from' moment of the campaign, but in a very different way than Grog or Yasha experienced them. Because Ashton might just need this realization slapped into them by all their friends: this was dumb and they would have died because they didn't trust their friends. Because their strength and their salvation truly came from the people that love them.

Ashton has been, up until this point, a bit gung-ho to die for his friends. Honestly, they all are, and it's about time he and all the others learned how to live for their friends.

Anyway, hell of an episode, and a brutal but thrilling last hour. I was grinning right along with Sam. The mad fucker pulled it off by the skin of his teeth and by the grace of two friends dumping every bit of healing they had into him.

[saeyoungchoismaid]

Okay so I just finished my first round of Andromeda Six and here are some thoughts I have (both good and bad!). Pls feel free to comment with your thoughts or send asks or message me or whatever!! I'll update this anytime I get more info or think of smth new to add lol. Warning: obvi will contain spoilers.

The amnesia thing - I think the biggest thing for me that I wanna talk about rn is the whole royalty thing. While in general the whole thing is a really cool idea and either way I still love the plot, I think the whole 'I'm royalty' thing was WAY too obvious. Like the SECOND the a6 crew revealed where they found me, I was like "okay cool so I'm the princess got it." and then everything after that only fueled that theory (which obvi turned out to be right). Idk I just think if you're gonna have a game that's based around your main protagonist having amnesia, you need to make the player just confused as the char yk what I'm sayin? Like I shouldn't be able to know stuff that the char I'm playing as doesn't know yk? 😂

Nerissa - I think one of the biggest things for the fandom (that I've seen really only on Tumblr by the way lol) is the whole Nerissa thing so here's my two cents lol. I actually really like the plot twist of Nerissa being alive. My only thing is that it doesn't really make sense and bc she's alive, the whole thing with Vexx at the prison where he breaks down kinda gets (almost?) vetoed in response. To explain, I think it doesn't really add up that, at first, Oppo and others were like 'yeah, only the youngest princess' body wasn't found' (which in general was already weird cause ??? how do they know that her body wasn't found but then people also apparently quote unquote "didn't know she existed" like huh????). They mentioned NOTHING about the literal heir's body being missing??? Like idk if Zovack did that on purpose (and if so ???? homie wyd lmao) but if not, it's a big plot hole in my opinion lmao. Also just the fact that she was literally shot by Vexx (who held her bleeding out and dying body in his arms) and then shows up later like 'yeah no I'm completely fine actually' is CRAZY. Like what kinda medicine do these folks got that makes that so easy?? Like she's not on crutches, has a cast, a limp, like ANYTHING. It's absolutely bonkers to me. It's just very OP like okay so she can literally be shot in the future now and I literally won't react cause she's apparently immortal 💀 N e ways I think it's cool that the MC can choose to basically defy Nerissa and be like miss girl you're so wrong and I don't wanna do that is SO SLAY. Cause yeah no she was not it at first (and I lowkey didn't like her for a phat min). Also, kinda off topic, but I was surprised they actually showed what she looked like. Like, I guess her skin tone is ambiguous enough to work, but I think it would make more sense if they just said somewhere that the king had more than one wife, had a side hoe he got pregnant, yk smth like that lmao

Different species/race - As someone who has only played the game once, I'm not completely sure about what I'm about to say next, so pls correct me if I'm wrong! I think it's really cool that you get to choose from 3 different species in the beginning of the game. I was hoping that this meant that this would change your backstory, but from seeing some posts about this on Tumblr, I'm assuming this means that certain things will change but overall your backstory is the same and you're still royalty. Which is fine as long as the different species thing actually makes a difference. I just thought it'd be cool for one if it's like oh you're a human? Yeah, you're Peg'asi. Oh, you wanna be Tilaari? That's cool, but this character doesn't like you bc of it. Like that kind of thing would be super cool! Anyway, either way it's fine lol it's just a thought I had

Vexx - I haven't seen anyone say otherwise, but I personally really love Vexx and his arc/development. I never really blamed him for what he did since it was literally done against his will (and turns out Nerissa is alive anyway so it's like okay I can't even be upset that you killed her when she's literally alive). Something I will say though (which is kinda similar to my stance on the amnesia thing) is that I think it'd be nice to have a little more doubt on whether or not Vexx is on our side or not. Like, when you first find him and regain your memories, he's pretty cutthroat after the shock he initially feels. After that though, anytime you see him, it'd be described as 'an emotion I can't decipher crosses his face' or 'a piece of the old him flashes in his eyes' kind of thing and I was just like "yeah okay so he's good but is just being brainwashed or being blackmailed or smth." Like, there was no danger in it. Not once was I ever like "omg no he's gonna kill me/my friends/my boyfriend/etc!!!!!" Like no dude he's just a lil guy that needs help lmao. So yeah, a lil more uncertainty about him would've been super cool (or even an alt route where he really is bad and they didn't make him do anything. like there could be choices in the memory section of the game of your time in the palace where like if you were rude to him, he actually betrayed y'all kind of thing)

Kitalpha - I might just be dumb, but when Aya was explaining her backstory about her home planet, I was a little lost. Like, I understand the basics ig, but I overall am still confused on how it actually got destroyed lol. I read the Wiki and it still kinda doesn't make sense to me. Also, the info dump they give on this (and a lot of stuff in general) is CRAZY. Like I need so much time to process what you just said and you're already laying another bomb on me lmoa. That aside, I think it's really weird that such a (apparently) major planet that (apparently) hosted a major species went supernova 10 years ago and you just never hear anyone talk about it??? Even Aya says that people kinda just forgot about it and moved on. Like girl HOW?? (Like okay yeah with the whole Zovack thing I can understand cause they got more important matters ig but he only overthrew the throne a MONTH ago like what were people doing before then lmao). It also didn't make sense to me as to why no one wanted to help them??? Like Aya explains that they were just met with closed doors from EVERYONE. Like why??? What about a dying planet/species is so bad that people are like 'yeah, that sucks and all, but we aren't gonna help. Good luck w that tho! 🥰' Also, I saw someone on here say that they wish there was more definitive features for the Kitalphan than just having gills and I agree! I didn't even notice that Vexx had them for the longest time. Also the fact that we never get a scene where Aya/you/Vexx get to actually use them (to my knowledge anyway) is insane. Like, what's even the point of giving them the gills then??? lmao

Update: I found this post that explains more in detail about the races. "It was, despite that, their own choice as to whether to live above or under water, and those who chose to do so submerged, had their bodies altered to further adapt to their environment; webbed fingers and toes, bright colored skins to allow for better camouflage among sea life, nictitating membrane over their eyes. Those who chose to live inland, on the other hand, kept to the more human appearance, with only the gills telling the difference." So, from my understanding, those who choose/chose to live underwater are the ones that are more fish like whereas the ones who choose/chose to live on ground are the ones who look like Vexx and Aya (more humanoid looking but still fish-like qualities like gills). Still think it would be cool if we could then meet a Kitalphan that chooses to live underwater!!

Time - speaking of it only being a month, it's only been a MONTH bro???? Like, Zovack overthrew the throne, had the entire Peg'asi family killed, you've been with the A6 crew trying to regain your memories, visit like 4 planets, find love, discover your sister is alive, and start planning out your plans for a war all in ONE MONTH. Like, ig it's not super inaccurate, it's just kinda crazy yk? 😂 I saw someone say that they wished we could've spent more time on all the planets and I completely agree. For some like Orion, it makes sense that we couldn't really stick around lmao. For others though, I didn't understand why there couldn't be more downtime ig? Idk maybe it's as simple as there's nothing interesting enough to write about that will keep the player's attention that's not just boring filler? But eh idk how much I believe that. Instead of info dumping a lot of stuff, they could've spread it out for moments like these where like yeah we aren't exploring this planet or whatever necessarily, but we are learning more lore while we are here getting gas lol. Also the fact that other planets get mentioned but we don't actually get to see or learn anything about them. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head (but if anyone really wants I can go through the logs to find them), but like planets or stations they'd stop to refuel or whatever just never really get talked about. I think there was a place that was similar to Teranium or Cersa that everyone was like 'omg be careful here like don't wander off alone' and then like nothing happens (or am I crazy and mixing my stuff up and I'm just yappin??? lmao. I'll probs come back and edit this once I play the game again). (I actually think it might've been the pitstop they mentioned that was ruled by mercs so they probs wouldn't have any problems with the K'Merii. Maybe it's the place they're supposed to go to on their way to Goldis?? Cause isn't it that the place that Khandar (help is that their name??? Google isn't telling me his name help pls 😭) said he has contacts??)

Damon - I'm so down bad for this man it's not even funny. His route is the first and only route I've done so far and I really just have one thing to critique I suppose. I fell in love w his char bc he's this super tough, mysterious, elusive guy that teases the shit outta you and just in general dgaf lmao. When you choose his route, pretty much all of that goes out the window. Now, don't get me wrong here. I still love Damon and I love that we get to see his sweeter/softer side, but I don't like how his bad boy side kinda just disappears. Like, maybe in chap 9/10 it'll show up more, but since choosing his route, he's kinda just become a big ol softy (which again I love that about him but I just kinda miss mean Damon lmao). Like, when the whole Wren thing happened, I feel like as soon as Wren points the gun in our face, OG Damon would've gone FERAL. Like, even if knows he can't actually like stop them or whatever by fighting, like just starting to mouth off to get attention off of us would've been so UGH. Idk maybe this is just a me thing bc I like crazy men but yeah would've liked more consistency ig in that aspect?? lmao. Like, there was one point in the game where I lowkey almost didn't choose Damon cause he was such an asshole (and almost went w the other loml Bash). Like THATS THE ENERGY IM HERE FOR. Make him a morally grey char and stick w it yk what I mean? Yes, he has walls up and he's actually very sweet and care about his found family and has a soft spot for cats and blah blah blah, but you also need to remember his upbringing and why he is the way he is ykkkkk

June - Maybe this gets explained later or more in his route, but when he's explaining his backstory and who he is, I was a little stumped. I mean, he wonders the exact same thing, but why is it that he can withstand the testing that was done to him and is now a super human, but his own twin brother and soldiers and whoever can't. What makes him so special? I figured he was able to become this super human and the K'Merii and whoever couldn't bc he was being tested on when he was still in the womb. Again though, if this is the case, why did his brother not make it? Would love to know more about that whole thing

Okay I'll stfu for now...but I'm sure I'll be back LMAO

[having-a-hyperfixate]

Don’t mind me sprinting to try and get this thought in order before the Anime Expo panel. I need it to be out in the wild Just In Case.

So, a few of the Gung Ho Guns have gotten reworked for Stampede, yes? To varying degrees.

Ninelives is apparently not a horrific flesh mech, Dark Souls boss thing, according to the end credits of episode 3.

E.G. the Mine just got a HUGE upgrade and didn’t get owned 3 seconds after he showed up.

Monev was an actual character with a fubar backstory and emotional impact instead of just Some Guy who trained in a basement for years specifically to kill Vash. (and Orange is SO EVIL for this)

Elendira is. *gestures futilely* There is so much going on there but yeah. She’s going to be terrifying once she achieves adult body and loses (drops?) the childish attitude. Also because of the whole Plant hybrid thing her nails truly are literally infinite sooooo.

So I have some thoughts about Hoppered the Gauntlet.

In Trimax, Gauntlet’s narrative weight comes from the fact that he makes Vash remember, which by extension makes US, the reader, understand what July really meant. Before that we had heard mention of it a few times as ‘a city destroyed in a single night’ and talk of there being ‘no survivors’ but we had no actual connection to it, and also no real idea if that was even true. But in Stampede, we saw July happen. We were there. So even if Vash’s memory is still shot afterwards, and he doesn’t remember Lost July, we the audience DO. So having the Dragon’s nest play out exactly the same isn’t going to have the same narrative punch in the gut that it did in Trimax. It can’t.

There’s also the fact that, given how we’ve met most of the major players in the story, or had them mentioned at least (hi Milly), it feels kind of Odd™ that we haven’t seen someone has emotionally impactful as Gauntlet yet.

Unless we have.

We saw with Rollo/Monev that Orange is willing to have the person’s regular name be one thing and then have a second Eye of Michael code name. I suspect that is going to happen with Gauntlet; either because EoM or because he has decided on his own to lie about who he was.

And yes, I do in fact have someone in mind.

I checked myself the translation there is accurate; the only change I would make is calling the gun ‘gaudy’ instead of ‘shiny’ but that’s not a huge deal. Also for the record, the original tweet is from Jan. 11, well before he makes his reappearance for the season finale. So when it talks about a ‘reappearance’, it is talking about seeing him again in July. Original tweet here, tweet containing the translation here.

I think Chuck Lee is going to be our Gauntlet. That he made it just far enough out of the city to survive, but that he was badly maimed in the process, and that his family didn’t make it. He’s the ONLY member of the military police with a unique design. He has an actual name, and the director himself tweeted about his backstory. His gun is so unusual that we would recognize it anywhere. Hell, I referred to him as ‘the gold gun guy from episode one’ when one of my friends didn’t recognize him immediately. His gun is so incredibly recognizable. Almost like we need to be able to recognize him by that alone, when everything else about him has changed.

THIS could be how narrative weight for Gauntlet is established in the Stampede universe when it can’t be done the same way as in Trimax. Taking a character who has, in a way, also been with the audience ALL ALONG, who was there with us for two pivitol moments, the beginning and the awakening, but who comes at it from such a horrifically different angle and bringing him back in such an agonizing way. Because he was very much in the wrong with his stunt at Jeneora Rock, but his rage over the loss of his family in July would be justified, even if we know it wasn’t Vash’s fault.

(Also, the IRONY of him ending up as one of Knives’s lackeys when Knives is the one that caused all of this? Damn.)

Footnote: I have Thoughts on why they can get away with adding Milly to The Squad late. That is a whole other Thought but tldr; (and also I haven’t actually written it out) Milly is the most perceptive of all of them she doesn’t NEED an extended intro to Vash to Know.

[friendlybowlofsoup]

Another Update

Hello Friends,

I have a rather long (but optimistic!) update to share with you all today. As many of you are probably tired of reading these kind of posts, I have a TL;DR here, but I did want to share what has been on my mind in that past half-year that I haven't been here.

It has been rough, and busy as always, but I think I'm finally facing myself and my project for the first time in a very long time.

TL;DR (it's actually long, I have a lot to say (*_ _)人)

I soul-searched and decided to stop compromising on my own feelings with regards to this project. I gave in to everything I wanted to do.

Plot changes, which means some character changes, which means some of the demo is outdated.

GotRM will be switching over to Twine.

----

OH MAN DID I SUFFER THE LAST FEW MONTHS

After my previous update, I hunkered down and really analyzed how I wanted to proceed with GotRM as a project. Because even prior to that post, I had already been going through long periods of hiatuses (which you are all aware of), and while I didn't lie about school taking up my time, I was also harboring a growing dissatisfaction with my own writing that really killed my progress for a long time.

So after everything had settled, I sat down and forced myself to peel apart my work. I know I said I would answer asks, but I uninstalled all of my social media and put aside this blog to focus. I made a note of all the things I liked and didn't like, and I made a list of things I wanted to change or improve on. The biggest point was that I also looked at my efficiency during actual writing sessions: how much of my time was spent writing vs. fighting with code? How could I change that?

And after a lot of deliberation, I figured there were a few things I had to change from the ground up, summed up in four points:

My working style was super incompatible with grad school. I can't spend 20-30 minutes scrolling up and down CSIDE checking code or looking for narratives while also jumping between chapters to make sure events line up. As this story grows, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the branches, so I needed an alternative working method, which I am adhering to now, and it prioritizes efficiency.

I hated the way I was tracking and coding stats in-game. I have griped so much about coding stats, and I have adhered to such a rigid style that I really felt trapped whenever I was confronted with balancing them out. So I'm throwing that to the wind and redoing how I utilize and convey them. Player-side, this decision doesn't change much since I never fully utilized stats in the demo anyway, and the stats page with indicators will still exist, but I'm getting rid of stat bars and how I treat stat checks.

The story I want to write now is different from the one I started out with. I've known for a while that GotRM was becoming far more than the tiny, wishful novella that I wrote as a teenager. I held onto that old story for a long time, but there's just so much I want to change that I realized I'd been clinging to a story I no longer enjoyed writing. So I spent the majority of the last few months rewriting GotRM from scratch. I redid some worldbuilding, I changed a lot of plot points, and I fixed a lot of characters' backstories accordingly. This meant scrapping stuff from even the demo, but that turned out to not be the biggest issue because:

I wanted to branch away from ChoiceScript. Honestly, I never really cared about getting officially published, but the camaraderie in the forums and on Tumblr were why I committed to CS and CoG. However, ultimately, I really want the functionality that other tools can offer GotRM, and so after a long internal debate, I will be switching over to Twine. Fortunately, since I was rewriting everything anyways, this has been relatively painless, and passage mapping has made everything so much neater. I am trying my best to make it up to chapter 2 before I release the new demo, so please look forwards to that!

And so yes, I am still here, chugging along.

I love this game and this story: it's been my creative escape for as long as I could remember, and you can imagine how frustrated I was when I realized I was starting to dread working on it.

I am forever learning more about myself and my writing style, and this is simply more of that journey. Thank you everyone for sticking around, for joining the discord, and for checking up on me--that I have all of you has truly been a dream.

Hopefully more updates to come soon! I understand that there may be questions about these new changes, so please ask away! I will (try) to release some asks that I've been working on in the drafts too, but I will wait until at least tomorrow to release them so that this post doesn't get drowned out immediately.

And as always, with a lot of love,

FriendlyBowlofSoup (Mei)

[wanderingswampbeast]

Long Post: Why I Don’t Like The Drow

I’ve been ranting about this to a friend on discord (a lot of points I make will come from him) but I’ve finally figured out what my issue with the drow is outside of inherently evil groups being dumb.

The drow are boring. Drow lore is less of a dive into a unique culture and more of a list of fucked up things they do. Like, I cannot name a single interesting aspect of typical drow society that does not directly involve murder, sexism, or slavery, or Lolth. And even then, most of those things are written about in an incredibly bland fashion with them.

The Drow don’t really have much depth to them, and are just kind of evil for evil’s sake (or “because Lolth said so”). They do slavery, but the only real purpose of doing slavery for them is “because Lolth said so”. It isn’t for cheap labor, it’s to be more evil. They betray each other purely because that’s what evil people do. They’re misandrist, not for any real societal reason, but because Lolth hates men. There’s none of what would make slavery an interesting topic or story element, no justification for why they should be allowed to commit one of the worst injustices possible, no real economic reason for it. They just do it because Lolth says they should, and from a writing perspective it hammers home the fact that they’re evil. They aren’t evil because they enslave and murder, they enslave and murder because they’re evil, if that makes any sense.

Them being written as comically evil as they are also hurts them from a worldbuilding perspective. They’re so reliant on slaves for menial labor that the lower class of their society struggle to get jobs. Drow culture so obsessed with betrayal and dumbass house wars that even when actively under attack from the outside they sabotage each other. They’re so decadent that their buildings are held up with magic and semi regularly collapse when a spell fails. To put it bluntly, drow society feels like one that should have collapsed in a few centuries, which, funnily enough, is way longer than D&D elves live.

Their culture being so monolithic also makes writing anything about them difficult. Every drow antagonist is going to have near identical motivations, methods, and ideologies as every other drow antagonist. Every drow protagonist is going to ultimately feel very similar to Drizzt, because leaving their fucked up society to become a do-gooder is such a common backstory element that they added a whole extra god just for doing that. In fact, you can divide 90% of drow characters from any official materials into these categories:

Manservant

Ambitious male, usually a wizard (5 bucks says he has long hair and a widow’s peak)

Dommy Mommy Warcrime Woman

Drizzt Do’Urden or one of his many duplicates

Self-loathing and/or resentful Drider

And finally, their existence almost purely to be humanoid enemies you can fight at nearly any levels is just kind of lazy. This is a problem that I have with the “evil races” of a lot of fantasy but having a group that’s evil by birth just feels like an excuse to not have to write actual motivations for your antagonists. It’s the difference between “go attack this camp of soldiers because they’re part of the SkullMurder army and their general wants to use our land to build a dread fortress” vs “go attack this camp of soldiers specifically because they’re drow/goblins/orcs/the dreaded peepee-poopoo folk”. Using stuff like this just feels like an excuse to not have to write an actual antagonist since it comes pre-written in the group’s lore. This has the side effect of whenever such a group is the antagonist of the plot, the players or audience know near exactly what to expect. The orc is here to conquer, the goblin is here to steal, and the drow is here to enslave or do some dark ritual.

I’ve legitimately heard people say “well if XYZ can’t be inherently evil anymore, who will we use as bad guys?” It’s very simple: whoever the fuck we want. Write an evil queen, or a scheming wizard, or an underground slave trade network. For God’s sake, anyone can be evil, you don’t need to tie that to a specific ethnic group and write it as “they’re just like that”. Write an actual character for your antagonist.

[aydafigs]

ooh I have so many thoughts on The Rat Grinders discourse okay

on the one hand, I think it's completely reasonable to be disappointed that there was no attempt from The Bad Kids to engage with TRG beyond just killing them as quickly and bloodily as possible, or no effort from Brennan to present that as an option. I agree that it sucks that these teenagers, who have been corrupted by rage crystals and are presumably being manipulated by authority figures, are being treated as irredeemably evil and therefore condemned to hell forever for their crimes - and I agree that it feels incongruent narratively, when a big arc this season involved 'redeeming' a corrupted goddess, and a key theme has been the power of utilising doubt to overcome rage. I also think it's a shame that Fig's past attempts to engage with Reuben were ultimately forgotten about and rendered useless (and I definitely got the impression that Emily herself was also frustrated about this).

however! I do also completely understand it from a gameplay, genre, and storytelling perspective.

firstly, mostly just as a sidenote, I think it's worth acknowledging that a lot of 'real-world' thinking and logic surrounding death and ‘redemption’ and the moral complexities of 'good vs evil' don't always work within Fantasy High or d&d. death is treated much more flippantly in a world where characters can and do regularly plane-shift to the very real and tangeable afterlives. it's harder to think of death as truly an end to someone's life when it is known for certain that those who die are actually continuing to live alternate lives on different planes of existence - and I think from a meta perspective this inevitably affects the way players think about killing NPCs within a story. no one is ever truly gone; they're just living somewhere else now.

additionally, in-universe, the prospect of dying or being killed is an accepted risk for those attending Aguefort. they're training to be adventurers, and as fucked up as it is, a key element of the universe and genre that this story takes place in is that people - including teenagers - die on adventures, and this risk is entirely normalised and considered unfortunate but necessary. it's one of those genre-specific tropes that you have to accept for the world to function. this is d&d, this is fantasy adventuring high school, teenagers have to save the world from other, villainous teenagers. it's every teen supernatural/fantasy drama. it's Teen Wolf. it's fucking Riverdale. as Brennan has put it before, "it's adventuring school. people die."

The Rat Grinders are not the heroes of this story - and what is so interesting about them, at least to me, is that they know that. there's a lot of excellent analysis of TRG as existing on a meta level even within the story; they're power gamers, they're XP farmers, they know they're NPCs; and this is the source of Kipperlilly's anger. Kipperlilly's rage stems from knowing that she is ordinary; that she doesn't have a tragic backstory, that she will never save the world, that she and her friends aren't a notorious adventuring party or 'found family' or anything other than regular. so she set out to become Not Ordinary by any means necessary - and if she and The Rat Grinders couldn't be the heroes, they had to become the villains. whether or not TRG 'deserved' to die or not is a moot point, I think. it's not about what they deserve. their story, and especially Kipperlilly's story, is a tragedy in this way; she was doomed by the narrative from the moment she started to write herself as the villain.

The Rat Grinders are, narratively, the Big Bads of the season; the Final Bosses of this game of d&d. this final battle is necessary to conclude the story in an exciting and climactic and satisfying way. it would simply not be as exciting, either for the players or the audience, if this season ended with The Bad Kids talking it out with The Rat Grinders and convincing them to switch sides. at the end of the day, this isn't a movie or a TV show. this is a game, being played in real time by real people who are improvising and having fun while collaboratively telling a story together. of course, the storytelling on this show is phenomenal - but it's never going to be able to do everything. they don't have a room of writers pitching ideas to write perfectly timed and paced scripts for character arcs and resolutions. they're a group of improv comedians playing a roleplay and combat-centric game together. they're playing d&d. they’re playing heroes fighting bad guys.

I do think there's a lot of valid criticism around rage and manipulation and who is considered worthy of 'redemption'. I just also think there's a middle ground somewhere between "The Bad Kids killing The Rat Grinders is awful and evil and bad storytelling and everyone involved should feel bad" and "haha suck it Rat Grinders fans, told you they were always evil". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ idk. it's all love now. [smooch]

[l0vergirlatheart]

Hello! I have this idea/request for sagau loosely based off of me and my friend’s dynamic where there are two separate creators. Like, not two reader clones or smth just two separate people, either of them can be reader, or both??? Idk, just do whatever you want with this idea :)

They both play genshin, and both of their accs r self aware. One of them is a whale who has all the characters and plays everyday. However, they dont know much about building characters because their fav part of the game is the lore and knows a lot abt it and always talks while playing. The other is a f2p that plays for several weeks straight before taking along break, and only has their fav characters (COUGH wanderer COUGH) and they are the type to never speak AT ALL while gaming. They also have more of a meta player mindset while building their fav characters and doesnt care for much for the lore.

I just like to imagine how the genshin cast would react to them in coop, especially for the first time. Just seeing one of them rant to the other about the lore or seeing one of them one shot all the enemies. And imagine two if the same characters from the different accs meeting each other.

absolutely love the idea of two wanderers as that silly little fucking spiderman meme

also there's scaramouche instead of wanderer for now for the plot

DOUBLES! ft. scaramouche and albedo

c.w // spoilers for sumeru quest and scara's backstory, heavy(?) angst in scara's part, pet names BECAUSE I CAN!!1!11!! GRAHH

start under cut

ALBEDO

"What are these talent levels?? Why'd you crown Albedo's normal attack? It's the most useless in his kit- you know you should've leveled his Skill, right?" You said, while you looked at your friends Albedo- it honestly hurt to look at.

"Uh.. Yeah, I totally knew that.. I just was.. testing it.. out..?" Your friend mumbled into their mic, obviously lying.

Meanwhile, in one of your worlds, two Albedos were silently watching the other.

'Why is there another me? I could've swore I killed Dorian.. but he also has a star mark. It looks exactly like mine.' They both thought to themselves.

Eventually, one of them spoke out.

"Who are you?" Albedo said, staring at the other blankly, the smallest bit of confusion and fascination only seen if you truly tried to look for it hard within his eyes.

"I am Albedo."

"I am also Albedo. Are you sure you're really 'Albedo'?"

"Are you sure you're Albedo?"

This went on for a while.. neither of them were like this usually, but the other just wouldn't give up. Both were persistent when curiosity had peaked, and this just got very interesting.

end : 1/2

SCARAMOUCHE

"...well, that was one hell of a boss fight.." You mumbled under your breath.. you had barely managed to make it out of Scaramouche's boss fight alive-- half of your characters were dead, and the others were barely hanging on by a thread-- you truly need to thank the ancient Genshin cooks for Sweet Madames and Chicken Mushroom Skewers..

"It sucks that Scara really thinks that about himself. I mean, sure, he was abandoned by Raiden, but not because he was weak or anything. It's really because she just didn't want to control every aspect of his life, but there are of course, better ways she could've done that. You do have to understand that both made mistakes that lead them to where they are now, and..." You went off on a ramble, and unbeknownst to you, a certain purple-haired boy was listening to everything that spilled from your lips.

Everything he's ever known and believed in-- it was all just.. just a misunderstanding? He felt hopeless all of a sudden, he felt like falling.. and he did.

That's when you looked back at the screen, suddenly knocked out of your rambling state and (semi)yelled out, "Oh shit, ain't nobody gonna catch him?!" ...and nobody did. You silently flinched at the sound of the impact-- even through a screen, you could tell that hurt horribly.

"Oh no, poor darling.." You mumbled sympathetically as you read each and every word stated and said during the 'quest,' just like you did with each and every other one. You knew all of this yet you still felt so sad for the poor puppet Scaramouche. He really didn't deserve any of that, you thought to yourself as you wished you could've done something, or that you could do something.. if only it weren't through a screen.

Scaramouche hated being pitied, but maybe.. maybe if it was you, he didn't mind, and maybe he felt a small sense of pride because it meant in some way, and at some point, you cared for him.. and that filled him with more joy than either of you realized, and much more joy than you ever will even think.

end : 2/2