#they're at the battle of berlin

[atlas-atsus]

War is Over (not quite)

[ihatetaxes99]

I'll say it: I love the MLA, but they probably shouldn't have existed. Not in their canon state, at least.

Everything about their presence after their introductory arc only really serves to make everything to do with storytelling harder for Horikoshi. Let's remove the League from the equation for the moment. The MLA has Geten and Re-Destro, implied to be two of the more powerful characters in the series (and neither of whom were actually defeated during the MVA arc, with the latter only standing down due to losing his own faith in the battle), and that's without getting into the 100k+ foot soldiers they've got kicking around. Curious and Skeptic are fairly useless in regards to combat proficiency, but Hanabata provides another strong support pillar of the army. Even before you add in Shigaraki, Twice and Dabi, the MLA is overpowered.

And what did this lead to? A massively tangled operation where half of its members had to be unsatisfyingly knocked out off-screen because Horikoshi had accidentally made them too powerful to be conceivably beaten. And to be fair, it's a trap I fell into myself the last time I wrote them. The Liberation Army are very difficult to make threatening, because you have to gimp them in order for the heroes to not get immediately blown to pieces like a small child throwing a rock at the Berlin Wall. As it stands, they're too good.

So, in all this smug retrospect, what would I have done? Well, it's something I'm toying with for something I'm working on, but my main idea would be to cut the MLA down. Make them a real underground faction of extremists. They still have their primary figureheads, but that aside, give them a couple of hundred loyalists spread throughout the country, not a couple of hundred thousand. They're powerful, but they're low in number, with many of their forces consisting of people like Yotsubashi's private security team and Hanabata's party subordinates. Much like the IRB at the turn of the twentieth century prior to the Easter Rising, they're basically an old boys' club, sitting around and reminiscing on when the group had power. Their schemes have to be more subtle, more focused on the - ahem - hearts and minds of the public. Things like Detnerat's products and commercials, Curious' articles, Hanabata's proposed policies, they all subtly push a pro-Liberation message. They warm the general population up to the idea, they take advantage of the Commission's failures, they engineer public crises from behind the scenes to weaken people's belief in the current system. What if, for example, it had been the MLA who had secretly encouraged Overhaul's production of a Quirk-erasing drug, in the hopes that it would cause further unrest and fear that they could manipulate to turn public sentiment against the current government? What if they had provided funding to the League post-All for One's arrest in order to stir up more trouble, instead of getting in a big fight and losing half their men to Shigaraki? What if the UA traitor had been acting on orders from the MLA, who then relayed the information to the League for the purpose of essentially using them as their pawns to attack UA on their behalf? A secret society pulling the strings, and using the League as their unwitting patsies, behind the scenes to sow distrust in the Commission and set them up for their eventual failure. The final arc could have been less about whatever the hell it was about and more about the League finally realising what was going on and having a massive three-way battle between the heroes, the villains and the MLA who finally take to the streets after spending pretty much the whole story scheming and manipulating and building up their forces.

It's all fanfic stuff, and it's so easy to point and gape and go "I would do that so much better!" but I honestly think the secret society working to undermine the government angle would have been more interesting and made for a more threatening faction than a massive revolutionary army which gets immediately crumpled during their first major battle with the heroes.

[thedeviltohisangel]

I hope we get an interlude abut the boys “vacation” in Africa since it’s longest (?) Cass and John would be apart since meeting so you know he’s driving the boys crazy talking about her and he won’t shut up until he sees her and the only reason he shuts up then is because he’s too busy kissing her

Ok so a little interlude about what Cass gets up to during this mission, a little bit about what John gets up to and their reunion is here.

I think my favorite part of the Africa mission is going to be him meeting her brother, Bobby.

She gives John a present and some letters and an updated photo of herself to give her brother and he takes the task so seriously. And Gale is like then why are you meeting her brother while you're in a fez?

But that is exactly how John meets his future brother-in-law for the first time. And he tells all the guys it's no big deal and he's got it in the bag and they're like then why are you sweating?

And Bobby does his best to be intimidating. But the last time he saw his sister she was crying because he was getting to escape and do something bigger with his life and she was stuck getting shoved into dresses and dragged around like a lifeless doll by Sidney Landry.

And when John speaks about Cass he can tell he worships her. He is smiling and blushing and hands him the gift like he's just delivered the Ark of the Covenant. And he reads the letter Cass has included and she tells Bobby that she thinks, no she scratches it out and rewrites it then crosses it out again, KNOWS that she loves him. And she prays her brother will too because John Egan has brought the color back to her cheeks and makes her giggle and she has never felt safer than she does in his arms.

Bobby asks around about John Egan and his sister. And the men groan and complain that they are lovesick doves just could stare into each other's eyes and just drift around the world happily. They tell him about John punching the RAF Pilot for even daring to mention her. Tell him about the sleep mumbling of his love.

About the way he held her after Berlin and how he brings her flowers every day.

So the last night in Africa, John summons the courage to ask Bobby if they can talk away from the group.

"I love your sister, Lieutenant Colonel Cooper. I've told her I'm in love with her. Told her I will protect her and provide for her as long as this universe will allow me to. She gives me a reason to live. A reason to fight for tomorrow and every day after because I want all the time in the world to be with her. I can never promise her forever but I can promise her my forever and I...I want to marry Cassandra when the time is right, sir. If that happens before I can meet your father, I'd like to have your blessing."

"My father, John, has been praying for a long time that a man like you would ask for his blessing to marry my sister." Cass had always been a wild thing. Mr. Cooper had been delighted with the way she challenged her mother. But he had lost the battle of preserving her independence any further than the turn of her twenties had brought. "I don't want to take that honor from him but I also want my sister to be happy. She deserves it more than anyone."

"I'll marry her everyday, sir. Your father will get the chance to give me his blessing. I promise."

"You have my blessing, Major. Just promise me you'll never try to cage her." John smiles blissfully.

"There is nothing about her I'd ever want to change."

[shadowquill17]

I love the TBITB movie so much, but I can't help wishing we got more. More of the boys bonding, more of Joe's arc as he learns to trust people and to give his everything to the boat, more of the shenanigans they had. I mean, the whole point of the story is about the crew, about those nine guys bonding and reaching such a high level of trust and cooperation that it shows in their performance on the water. I want to see more of them, because in the end they're the heart of the story, and I think the movie focused on different parts, and in the end we didn't see the boys that much. I mean, some of them were barely in it. 🥲

And there's so much in the book, and so much that wasn't even in the book but could be added to make a longer adaptation, maybe a series? There would be more than enough material to fill up! There's so many ups and downs in the book it already feels like a sports anime, so we DEFINITELY could have a good show, maybe three 8-episode seasons, one season per college year? You'd start season 1 with Joe's childhood, and we'd get to see the actual love story with Joyce develop as we follow him all the way to his first year at Washington... maybe that'd take about two episodes before he gets to college, and then we'd get childhood flashbacks if necessary in the rest of the season.

I mean imagine, you've got this triumphant season 1 on the freshman boat, and then in season 2 you move on to the all-sophomore boat, with Ulbrickson frustrated with their inconsistant performance, trying to take Joe out, putting him back in, all the turmoil Joe feels... and we start to see more of Bobby. He was mostly in the background in season 1, but in season 2 he starts feeding into the rivalry and being a little shit to the all-sophomore boat. And he's such a smartass about it that you can't help but like him, but he still feels like an antagonist, all the way to the end of the year where they battle it out for the varsity status... and you're like, how will we ever feel like Bobby can be on the same boat as Joe and the other guys?

BUT THEN you open season 3 with BOBBY's backstory, with his unrelenting drive and ambition, his cleverness and his expertise on a boat, you get to see how hard he worked to get along with his JV boat when they straight up wouldn't respect him, and then as the story progresses you get some pivotal scenes where he bonds with some of the boys, perhaps one where he and Joe come to understand each other a bit better, realizing that beneath their different personalities they've got the same iron-clad determination to get somewhere in life, to get what they want.

And so season 3 is all about the boys on the future Olympic boat coming together and bonding, their shenanigans in college and then in Berlin (I NEED to see that fight with the other teams, guys, I NEED IT, we were ROBBED). I just would love to see the whole story with all the little details and dynamics, all the changes and doubts, it would just be SO GOOD. 😭

[imagoddamnonionmason]

Hey pookie! Im sorry for flooding your inbox lol but I’ve got another question! How do you think Jodie and my Bell (Annika/Diana) interact with each other?

So, I love this question. I've been mulling over it for days, now, because I didn't want to rush in and give a non-answer, you know?

I'll mostly speak from Jodie's perspective and how she may feel/think/interact with Annika, as I don't want to put any assumptions on your oc, however, if you want I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this post! I think it would be nice to see if you agree with anything or don't agree!

Without further ado, though, here goes:

Within the CIA Safe House, East Berlin:

I don't know if they'd talk a lot, maybe hushed conversation here and there, when it's needed, but other than that I think their conversation would be limited. After all, Jodie feels like her every move is being scrutinised and would be unwilling to stand about chatting just because.

Adler is always watching.

Although, if Jodie became more comfortable around Annika, then their interaction in the safe house would probably be more chatty. It's all surface level, at the moment, because they're on a mission and there's work to be done.

That was an unintentional reference right there lmao

Within missions, stealth and fighting:

This is where I feel there would be some conflict - Jodie likes to be efficient, complete missions with the intention of leaving as little trace of herself as possible - in stealth she practically ceases to exist and will quietly dispatch anyone who could jeopardise her. In full blown fire fights, fist fights, you name it fights, whatever damage is made in the crossfire is not intentional. Any action she takes has to be calculated, it has to be necessary, even though in war that can't always be guaranteed. So, with Annika's carefree, I suppose, attitude toward damage, she'd probably regard the younger woman with some distaste - after missions, Jodie might voice her dislike of her way of doing things, but it would never be anything personal. Jodie would keep criticism strictly professional. For how Annika might react to that? I don't know, but Jodie wouldn't feel bad for voicing her opinion. Although, I reckon together they'd be good fighters - when Jodie gets over this difference, I feel that they share a similar ruthlessness when it comes to enemies. Now, I don't know Annika's motivations for being so ruthless with fighting is, but for Jodie it comes down to the very basic instinct of survival. It's me or them. Sometimes, in the heat of battle, you don't have time to think about the nuances of right or wrong, only whether you are going to be the one that's breathing by the end of the interaction. Together, I think they have that survival instinct that would bounce of each other.

Overall:

I feel like their interactions would be complicated, as they are very different people. I don't think they'd hate each other, but I don't think they would be the best of friends - in the nature of their job, can they afford to be 'best friends' anyway? I know that Jodie would respect Annika. After all, they are cut from the same cloth, and of their respective narratives they have both be fucked over by everyone around them. She'd respect Annika because she's survived and continues to survive, much like what Jodie has. It takes a strong type of person to persevere.

Hope this is alright @walder-138! <3

Like I say, feel free to add your thoughts - I'd love to know what you think!!

Goose out~

[thegreatyin]

&*$$$$$£HNf i meant it as like.. basically whichever oc you wanted to answer those for. like. receiver's choice kind of thing

BUT how about the scoundrel for those questions (2, 7, 23, 30)

ohhh. okay i overthought that. that's on me. lol.

2 - What sort of music would they like? Have you thought about what genres or bands do they lean towards? Do they have a favorite song?

The Scoundrel feels like they'd adore classical music more than anything else. Lots of violins, pianos, harps... the works. I've even assigned them Vs. Yinu as a boss battle theme, which feels like it sets the stage for their entire aesthetic lmao

As for favorite song.. I have absolutely no idea, since I know literally nothing about music and especially nothing about what kind of stuff was popular in the Victorian era.

That all being said, in a fallen berlin modern context, I could see them being a swiftie. I have absolutely no reasoning or explanation for this. I just feel it in my soul.

-

7 - Favorite animal? Why?

If you had to ask them, they'd say bats. For reasons that may potentially be obvious. If you had to ask me, however, I think they'd love a good moth or butterfly. Maybe the cinnabar moth?

-

23 - How would you describe their voice? Can they sing?

I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED BECAUSE I FIGURED THIS OUT A FEW DAYS AGO AND IVE BEEN LOSING MY MIND. Their voiceclaim is a weird mashup of Starscream TFP and Medic TF2 and this has haunted me.

Nasally little fucker. Horrid little weasel bastard. They have a very strong German accent and they sound like a scheming evil advisor absolutely chomping at the bit to throw their boss off a cliff. They tend to purr most of their words and devolve into high-pitched shrieking when they don't get their way. They sound absolutely goofy when they do this. Don't point this out or they'll throw you into the unterzee.

It can probably sing pretty well, in the same sort of way a disney villain can pull off its evil jazzy solo number. Which is to say good. They sing good. They're probably insufferable about singing good.

-

30 - Do they smell like anything notable?

Flowers! Specifically surface flowers. The exact scent varies wildly, but they always smell strongly of flowers and they make no secret of being proud or smug about it. They feel like the type to lather on perfume regardless of the occasion just so they always smell, at minimum, "vaguely pleasant". It probably earns them a lot of scandal.

[e1dritchqueer]

All the silly mech media I've consumed so far to prepare for my beam saber game

(Ya'll I have gotten so autistic about mecha it's wild)

Okay for context I'm gonna join a Beam Saber (Narrative based mech ttrpg, it's really fucking cool) game soon and I realized that I don't know anything about mecha stuff so I decided to develop a hyperfixation (and I did!!! Luv me some gundam!!!) Anyways here's all the silly media I've gone through for both fun and research as to what "makes" the mecha genre/what the fantasy of mecha is

Underlined ones (EDIT underlines apparently don't work so I'll be putting italics and !!! next to each one I really really like) are ones I really really like and like if you're gonna play/watch anything I recommend those ones

Mobile Suit Gundam I The original Gundam series!!! Both this and the other ones are compilation films, so like yeah, some pacing stuff feels off.

Mobile Suit Gundam II

!!! Mobile Suit Gundam III !!! This one is real well done, worth going through the other two movies I think. The pacing is real tight, focuses on some fascinating ideas and themes, and yeah, I like this alot. Char and Amuro should kiss (also gahhhh frothing at the mouth at the ideas of mech rivals (and mech rivals kissing))

Titanfall 2 Is Titanfall campaign, is good

!!! War in the Pocket !!! The story about a young boy once fascinated by war and mechs until the terrifying reality of war arrives to his home. Love this one, it's real good and also a real good emotional gutpunch. Like.... yeah, I'm fond of this one

Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt: December Sky This is the only one I've seen so far that I DO NOT like. Yeah the animation is good and all but it felt too voyeuristic about war in a way that did not sit well with me.

!!! 08th MS Team !!! Gundam but with Vietnam war aesthetics? Love this one love it alot, the story is real good and the backgrounds are GORGEOUS. Out of all the ones I watched this one hit the nail on the head for thematically what I was looking for. Like, it's about a pilot becoming more and more disillusion by the fact they're a soldier and seeks to escape the war, I really really like it!!!

08th MS Team: Miller's Report This is a compilation film, but a weird one, taking place between episodes six and seven, personally I think you might get some enjoyment from watching it instead of those two episodes (at least episode 8, but I'm not sure, there are some moments that I really liked from the show that were cut) but idk.

08th MS Team: Battle In Three Dimensions Short little animation, lovely :), having watched it I think Michel and Sanders should kiss???

!!! The Witch from Mercury (Watching) !!! GAY ASS MECH MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Love me some mech lesbians. But like seriously this one is real good!!! It starts off in its own universe so really good for newcomers (just need to know that there is a difference between a Gundam and a mech within the fiction of the show) I like it alot, it's high school drama with the backdrop of corporate war and space capitalism and like... it's really well done!!!

Friends at the Table: Counter/Weight (Listening) What if an actual play podcast sat down and discussed critical worldbuilding and themes, that's Friends at the Table and it rules!! This one is a more noir focused game with mechs (the system they use is literally called MechNoir) and it's essentially a group of detectives in space Berlin! Real fond of Austin Walker's stuff and Friends at the Table rule, has really inspired me as to how I can run games and what I can do as a player.

Project Nimbus (Playing) Fast mech game, fun.

!!! Heaven Will be Mine (Playing) !!! This game raises the question of what if mech rivals kissed to 11, they are also lesbians, in space, with heavy themes and symbolism, and beautiful art. I really really like this game, finished it twice, trying to 100% it but it's real good, big big big mega fave

Zeta Gundam (Watching) Sequel series to MSG, not sure how I feel about it yet but tbh I'm enjoying it, genuinely love Kamille and I love how Char is in this

!!! Umurangi Generation (Playing) !!! What if you were a photographer at the end of the world and the way the world ended specifically was Evangellion? That's essentially Umurangi Generation and it's REAL good at that, I am extremely fond of this game

Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner (Playing) Like Project Nimbus but with a better feel and also made by the some of the same people who made Metal Gear Solid and Tokimeki Memorial, fun game also all the mechs are sexy????

Phew anyways thats the stuff and my thoughts on it, mech stuff real fucking cool!!! I'm quite fond of it!!! I have so many blorbos now

[youngbugandtonystank]

ok small rant I know it's been months but I just have to say this to someone. It's funny that people hated on the irondad fandom for "forgetting about may" (even though many of us didn't) and now may is dead but all those same blogs don't even mention it they just post about andrew's spidey and forget about may.

It was never about Aunt May, anon. They actually never cared about her at all, they only cared because that'd give them an excuse to hate on Tony and his relationship with Peter. They didn't have a problem with superfamily before (Tony+Steve+Peter), sciencefam (Tony+Bruce+Peter), or shipping Peter in a platonic way (father figures-mother figures) with many different characters like the F4, Bucky, Steve, Natasha, Norman, Hope, etc. They didn't rant about erasing Ben or May in fanfics, they didn't care about it at all because they understood that fanfics were only that, FANFICS. Or they understood what headcanons were, what alternate universes were, what different adaptions were. They used to make or reblog thousands of superfam edits/gifs, and let me remind you, they'd use Andrew's Peter for that. But, after Civil War, the hate for Tony intensified because of what happened with Bucky and because for some, he was interfering in stucky's relationship. Before that, they didn't care that he was a billionaire or that he was (years agooooo) a weapon's dealer (and they understood Tony's story). Now, they're suddenly blind or they don't remember. Or some of them only follow the crowd and can't form opinions on their own.

They never cared about May. They only cared about Tony looking bad compared to her but funny thing is, everything they said Tony did wrong with Peter, May did it as well:

Tony;

let a kid fight in a fight that wasn't for kids (airport battle).

gave Peter suits for protection.

encouraged Peter to keep doing his spiderman activities.

lied to May about Peter's activities (taking him to Berlin).

asked Peter for help using SM (to detain his friends).

joked about Peter's abilities.

May;

let a kid fight in a fight that wasn't for kids (elementals battle).

packed Peter's suit for protection.

encouraged Peter to keep doing his spiderman activities.

lied to the authorities about Peter's identity (as a legal guardian she let Peter keep doing his activities and told no one about it even if the Accords were placed to regulate individuals like him and she was worried precisely about this in CW, she trusted Tony would keep him safe and he did).

asked Peter for help using SM (spiderman's popularity helped with her charity event) ''And thank you, Spider-Man. And he'll be right back out to take photos and videos!''

joked about Peter's abilities. ('What's up? You can dodge bullets but not bananas?')

Both did the same regarding Peter. They can shut the fuck up about Tony and kiss ass.

[pixelgrotto]

Cool Cold War Ninja

Capcom's Strider series holds the distinction of starring one of the coolest ninjas in video games. Hiryu feels like he was designed to look as rad as possible, from the blue suit to the red scarf to the tonfa-esque cypher blade, and his appearance was partially influenced by Spawn (another hero engineered to radiate style) because Capcom character designer Harumaru saw some Todd McFarlane books one day. Even Hiryu's name (飛竜, "flying dragon") is cool, mostly because it taught me that 竜 is the Japanese simplified form of the Chinese 龍, a character in my own name.

But despite his coolness, Hiryu is better recognized for cameos in the Marvel vs. Capcom series instead of his own franchise. This is most unfortunate, especially considering that Strider's one of the earliest video game examples of a cross-media property. Way back in 1988, Capcom greenlit a Strider comic with the help of the Moto Kikaku mangaka group while also assigning two internal divisions to helm an arcade game and an NES title. The intent was to make Hiryu into a hero who would span multiple mediums and be recognized everywhere, from the printed page to the pixelated screen. And that sorta worked, but not as well as Capcom hoped.

The first and most famous Strider - the 1989 arcade release - begins with Hiryu gliding onto the towers of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in a truly iconic bit of spritework. Within three seconds, you're hit with an array of action as Hiryu strides forward, explodes enemies in half with his cypher, and does a signature flip where all of his limbs flail outwards in a mid-air cartwheel. The action and setpieces never let up, and over the span of the game's five levels, Hiryu fights a council of politicians who morph into a multi-limbed robotic centipede, runs from mountain avalanches, explores dinosaur-filled Amazon jungles, hitchhikes a ride on an airship, and battles robotic anti-gravity cores in the fringes of outer space.

Strider is a blend of a hundred different things that the developers considered cool. But beyond all of the set pieces, the factor that sticks out to me the most is the Cold War futurism that drips from every level, feeling original but somehow dated at the same time. What other games start with your character infiltrating the "Kazakh Federation" and end with them fighting the sorcerous Grand Master Meio, a dude who seems like a thinly-veiled stereotype of a communist dictator gone wild? What other games commit to their "born in a geopolitical era of tension" vibe by featuring speech samples in multiple languages, including Russian, Japanese and Mandarin? Strider came out right before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and you can feel it. On that note, I don't think Kazakhstan has appeared in any other franchise as much as Strider. Honestly, the world would probably be a better place if more people associated Kazakhstan with Hiryu's adventures instead of Borat.

Strider didn't receive a decent conversion for home consoles until the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in 1990, and the NES "port" that came out around the same time wasn't a port at all. Instead, NES Strider is an early Metroidvania, and one that I actually enjoy a fair bit. This opinion goes against the norm, since while I can recall NES Strider getting lots of promo in Nintendo Power when I was growing up, popular internet consensus these days tells you that it's a broken game with controls that feel like they're stuck in a beta phase.

I can't refute that - NES Strider's controls stink, especially when you're forced to pull off a wall jump that's impossible to do unless you have perfect timing. (Thankfully it's only a mandatory move at two points.) The game's also got a weird glitchiness about it, with enemies respawning at an utterly aggressive pace and the edges of the screen flickering way too much every time Strider moves an inch. The bugginess of NES Strider supposedly kept its impending Famicom port from ever being released, making it a rare example of a Japanese game that sold in North America but not in its native country.

And yet, the ambition to NES Strider is admirable. The trend of backtracking through levels and using items to unlock previously inaccessible areas might be commonplace now, but it wasn't in 1989. The plot, while burdened by a messy English translation, also features far more of a story than any other game in this franchise thanks to its heavy basis in the Strider manga. (Which is pretty cool, by the way, and partially readable in English thanks to a fan scanlation of its first three chapters.) Instead of simply facing Grand Master Meio, Hiryu's got to dig out corruption from the ranks of his organization, and it's nice to actually get some insight into his companions, from a fellow Strider named Kain to a guy named Ryuzaki who left his Attack-Boots in China.

Strider never blossomed into one of Capcom's sequel-studded franchises of the '90s. The NES game was a bold but flawed experiment that didn't get much traction, and while the arcade game performed okay, many of its key developers left the company soon after its release. In the European market, though, arcade Strider received dozens of ports for home computer systems that really couldn't handle it, like the ZX Spectrum. Tiertex, a local developer behind a handful of these ports, got the rights from Capcom and made Strider II, a sequel with shockingly bad level design which also goes under the name Journey from Darkness: Strider Returns. Capcom effectively retconned Tiertex's work with an in-house Strider 2 in 1999, riding off of the wave that Hiryu received from his inclusion in Marvel vs. Capcom.

Released for the arcade and Playstation, Strider 2 seems to take place two thousand years after its predecessor, with the Hiryu the player controls a clone of the original. It's never entirely clear, as the plot was clearly just an excuse to have Hiryu fight a reincarnated Meio. Forgettable story aside, the game spans as many environments as the first Strider, and the opening level sees Hiryu fighting terrorists in Neo Hong Kong to the beat of some darn good music which sounds suspiciously like the Ozzy Osbourne song Shot in the Dark. There's also a rival Strider named Hein who wears an all-white uniform in a nod to Hinjo, the main character from Tiertex's Strider II, which is a polite ode to a game that Capcom has all but disowned nowadays.

My biggest issue with Strider 2 is that each level is divided into small chunks, with the player forced to sit through loading screens while the next segment loads. Most PS1 games released during this era suffered from long loadtimes, but it's annoying to deal with the same thing in an arcade game. Maybe the load screens are meant to give players a breather before the next spree of button mashing, but I feel like the game's pace suffers tremendously. It's hard to fall into the same "blaze through, slice 'em with the cypher, do a billion flips along the way" rhythm that the first Strider inculcated when you've got to wait five seconds after every major encounter.

Strider 2 released during a period when action platformers were nearly nonexistent in the arcades, and a 30-minute experience - which is about how long it takes to beat the game once you know what you're doing - wasn't going to really cut it on the PS1. And so the series went back into dormancy until 2014, when Capcom once again enlisted the services of a third party. Double Helix Games' Strider is yet another retread of Hiryu versus Meio, but there's a surprising ton of DNA from NES Strider present. These go from the music, which features an awesome remix of the NES game's level 1 Kazakh theme, to the decision to make Hiryu's journey into a full-fledged Metroidvania.

Double Helix clearly poured a lot of love into their work, and I give 'em props for that NES inspiration. But there's something missing from the experience, which is probably why you don't often see 2014 Strider on lists of the best recent Metroidvanias. Unlike the world-spanning levels of the other Striders, this one takes place solely in Kazakh, which is large but very samey. As a result, the game feels padded despite not being terribly long, and the in-game map is far too confusing due to different planes that Hiryu can jump across. While Metroidvanias are one of the few genres that tend to activate my completionist tendencies, I never felt the need to explore every nook and cranny or snag every ability. It's a shame, because Double Helix was almost there in melding Strider's disparate gameplay styles and finally bringing Hiryu back to mainstream stardom. But they didn't stick the landing, and Amazon Game Studios bought Double Helix right after Strider released, ensuring that the devs probably won't ever get the chance to improve on their formula.

It's been almost a decade since Hiryu got his own game. He most recently showed up in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, and Capcom threw Strider fans a bone with the character Zeku in Street Fighter V, who has a Hiryu-style skin and is said to be the dude who founded the entire Strider order. All of this is neat, but it's baffling that Hiryu - despite being one of the coolest ninjas in gaming - has never had a solo title truly take off since his debut. Some of this might be due to the fact that Capcom has to credit (and presumably pay) Moto Kikaku whenever Hiryu appears, and one could argue that the original arcade game's balls-to-the-wall action and high difficulty don't have a place in Capcom's catalog any longer, or at least aren't as money-printing as new Monster Hunters and Resident Evils. But I think you could easily make something like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice starring Strider Hiryu, and I wish someone would. After all, we're talking about one cool ass Cold War ninja here, and he deserves to shine once more.

[practically-an-x-man]

how do your OCs sleep? do they cuddle with their partners? do they sleep hot or cold? how many pillows?

Ooooh good question! Thank you so much!

Rae: Sleeps cuddled up with Warren - she's a back sleeper, he's a stomach sleeper because of his wings. They're used to sharing a smaller bed from when they were in Berlin, so he tends to sleep half on top of her with one of his wings draped over her (it makes him feel safer). They don't usually need a lot of blankets, just one or two.

Robin: Usually starts the night cuddling, but since Peter's got such a warm ambient body temperature from being a speedster, they tend to drift apart in the night, especially when it's summer. Usually Yoda likes to curl up next to Robin, or even plop himself down on her chest if he's particularly being a nuisance.

Madison: Is perpetually cold, so she's usually got a lot of blankets and is rooted to Alex's side when she sleeps. Bravo seems to take up half the bed, but Madison doesn't particularly mind. The only time she's not curled up with him is when it's summer, since it's just too hot and sticky to stay close.

Ophelia: Half the time, she doesn't even make it to her bed. She'll get caught up in her work and crash on the couch in her lab. Even when she does go to bed on time, she's not much of a cuddler - and usually she and Peter are both bruised up from hero work, so cuddling just puts pressure on the wounds.

Jasper: Usually sleeps curled up close, with their head on Kyle's chest so they can listen to his heartbeat. It's calming to them. The only time this changes is when they get a new tattoo and have to sleep differently while it heals.

Katherine: Is a bit more of a nocturnal type since she spends so much time at the museum, but she sleeps alone for obvious reasons. She's usually got a lot of pillows and stuffed animals, basically making a nest for herself.

Kestrel: Can sleep just about anywhere, isn't very picky - they've spent a lot of time in hotels and other temporary housing while on missions for the Knights, not to mention overnight flights and things like that. Usually sleeps human, and braids their hair to keep it from getting tangled, but sometimes prefers to sleep as some kind of animal (cats are one of their favorites). Always tends to sleep a little better when Warren is with them <3

Quinn: Tends to sleep on her back, and very still. She used to toss and turn a lot, but since she became disabled that gives her a lot of pain. She also can sleep just about anywhere, since she's used to being packed into a dingy apartment or hotel room with the rest of her crew. Billy's a tactile guy and tends to be a cuddler when he sleeps - Quinn doesn't mind this at all, but also doesn't usually engage it themself because they're not used to it

Eris: Prior to meeting Rick, they would rarely sleep at all - only when they were heavily injured in battle and their healing tired them, or when they use their shape-changing and that drains their energy. Once they live with Rick, they continue to insist that they don't need sleep... but they're secretly the most cuddly person alive and could spent years just curled up with him if they had the chance. They would not admit this under torture.

Nikoletta: Is also perpetually cold, but is too traumatized from having her shadow-touch push her away from people to do anything about it. Most of the time, she'll just deal with being cold even if she knows cuddling up with Abner would fix it, since she's still bad about initiating physical touch - especially when she's asleep, and wouldn't know if her shadow-touch returned, or if she got a nightmare and it flared up, or anything else. Having the cats helps, though: they'll curl up with her and that helps her keep warm, and it's a lot harder to shoo away their sweet little sleepy faces.

[daughterofhecata]

20 Questions For Fic Writers

I was tagged by @a-different-equation, thank you for that!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

...520, as of right now.

2. What’s your total A03 word count?

Right now it's 916,952 words. If I can get somewhat out of this writing slump, I should be able to crack the 1mil next year.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Drei Fragezeichen/Three Investigators pretty much exclusively (506/520) with the occasional Tatort (Berlin) fic thrown in.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

Don't tell him! (DDF, Peter/Bob)

Eine Studie in Flurfunk (Tatort Saarbrücken, Leo/Adam)

comfort (Kingsman, Eggsy/Merlin)

Truth or Dare (Criminal Minds, Derek/Spencer) (don't look at this one. it's bad.)

the answering to every prayer i prayed (DDF, PB&J)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yep! Love it! Because fic writing is also about community and i love talking to people about fic!

6. What’s the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

...probably 9mm, although some of the oneshots in the sometimes suffering is just suffering collection probably aren't much better (special mention for Kammerspiel, I guess.). If you go look at these, please mind the tags.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

I write a lot of fluffy shit and I do love my happy endings, two fics that specifically come to mind are Vegas Wedding (Peter/Skinny wedding) and weil dieses timing immer irgendwas gegen uns hat (Cotta/Victor, who meet five times over the years but the timing is only right the sixth time and they're so so relieved they finally get to be together).

8. Do you get hate on your fic?

I got one weird comment a long time ago that boiled down to "trans!Cotta is unrealistic and not canon" (okay, chill?) and more recently (i think earlier this year or late last year) someone going "please block me so I don't have to see your fics anymore" (dude, just exclude me from the search???) but apart from that it's been quiet, although there do seem to be some people in the broader fandom that absolutely loathe me (or so I've been told xD).

9. Do you write smut?

*looks at the past two years' Kink January fills* *looks at the current Kink January fills I should be writing* ...sometimes? xD

10. Do you write crossovers?

Don't think I have yet. Although there is a poem in my drafts that I wrote for a Creative Writing seminar that parallels Lolita and Persephone, I guess that counts as a crossover in ao3 terms?

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I'm aware of.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Someone asked me a long time ago on ff.net if they could translate one of my johnlock fics but idk if they ever posted it. Also my little brother used to translate my johnlock fic into german for english practice xD

13. Have you ever co-written a fic?

Well, we started something last year, but I've never finished/published a co-written fic.

14. What‘s your all-time favourite ship?

...you can't ask me that. I can't possibly answer that.

15. What’s the WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

...there are a lot of those. Let's all keep our fingers crossed I'll eventually finish the perfect part about it is: it's all that i've got because I'm actually still mad passionate about it.

16. What’s your writing strengths?

Dialogue, I like to think.

17. What’s your writing weaknesses?

Long fic, no discussion. I'm decent at oneshots and short-ish multi-chaps, but real actual long fic is a battle.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Sure! Love it! Currently it's mostly the occasional french phrase for Victor, but there is abandoned Inglourious Basterds fic on my hard drive where the dialogue switched between English, German, and French.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Harry Potter.

20. Favourite fic you’ve ever written?

It's still out of hell, I'm pretty sure. Necessary Tragedies is also up there tho.

Tagging (no pressure tho): @crazy-walls, @peppsta, @alintheshitposter, @manahiel, @lalalenii & @pointwhitmark.

[ulfhrafnx]

𝙷𝙰𝚃𝙸 & 𝚂𝙺𝙾𝙻𝙻: 𝙸𝙼𝙰𝙶𝙴 𝚁𝙴𝙵𝙴𝚁𝙴𝙽𝙲𝙴

i’ll be using this god of war : ragnarok artwork as a visual guide because the design aligns perfectly with the mental image i already had but i claim no ownership of any of this art. the photos by azillot are fan art concepts , the last two photos in the series are from the games official art book , that i own , and the artist's are mark castanon and luke berliner.

although they're the same size and equally matched in strength , their tactics in battle differ greatly , as to be expected. hati is the more calculated of the two , a trait that lira also shares , because of sköll's damaged vision --- a direct result of existing so close to the sun so consistently --- he's much quicker to lash out than his brother , so as not to ever appear weak.

to give a better idea of scale ( and this applies to lira as well ) , the first image in the top row is a common wolf , who although much larger than many people realize ( 6 feet in length, including tail , and about 30 inches in height at the shoulder ) barely reaches either of their knee. kratos , the man standing underneath their chin, second image , top row below , is canonically 6’4.

the photos on the top row are how they appear by default , the bottom row where they appear more cosmic is what they become after they've devoured the sun and the moon , kicking off the events of ragnarok.

the choice to give hati's fur hints of purple and blue makes me ecstatic because lira's hair / fur has always been described as resembling the wings of a raven in the sunlight , now we know who she gets that from.

[newjerseydumpster]

Bundesaetos, Lord of Ulmich

A funky skrunkly little guy

Please excuse my art, I attempted to emulate the Pokemon shading style and it had interesting results 😞

BUNDESAETOS! He's the Legendary Pokemon of the Ulmich Region (I'll elaborate soon dw dw), a silly little fellow if there ever was one.

GENERAL INFORMATION

Species Name: Bundesaetos

"The Governance Pokemon"

Type: Fighting/Flying. (He looks like a Dark/Flying type to be fair, but there are quite a few of those, and Yveltal's taken).

Gender: Bundesaetos is Genderless, but often referred to with he/him and it/its pronouns.

Ability: Morior Invictus - Sp. Atk stat is boosted at the start of a battle.

Base Stats: HP - 120 Atk - 100 Def - 80 Sp. Atk - 160 Sp. Def - 120 Speed - 100 TOTAL: 680

Its signature move is called Chancellor's Decree, a Fighting-type special attack with a base damage of 120 and a PP of 5. Bundesaetos will open its twin-toothed beaks, stretching its wings to their full mast before unleashing a deadly array of blinding beams toward the target. This move has no aftereffects, but definitely ask Arceus if he needs a bandaid.

Bundesaetos' name is derived from the German word Bundesrepublik (federal republic), and Chrysaetos (the latter half of the golden eagle's scientific name).

Bundesaetos itself is drawn from the Bundesadler, or "Federal Eagle," a black eagle that is both Germany's coat of arms and its national animal.

Bundesaetos is known best for being the founder of Ulmich, a Pokemon eager to break away from a controlling and highly religious empire in order to create a new region in its more idealistic image. Because of its roots in what would be a sort of alternate Pokemon version of the Holy Roman Empire, it's very regal looking and quite befitting of a king. Don't get Bundesaetos wrong, though - he's probably an anarchist.

As for his two heads? They represent East and West Germany. The black split in the middle of Bundesaetos is representative of its time in separation. A physical representation of the Berlin Wall, if you will.

There are no analogs for either of the World Wars in Ulmich or Expat's Folly, and subsequently, Kalos and Galar never had any horrendous beef with Ulmich during that whole debacle. Ulmich's history has always been very internal, a governing eagle tore in two by tyrannical politicians against the rest of Ulmich. In its place, two Pokemon would come - the eagles of the East and the West, trying desperately to find each other and unify as Bundesaetos once more.

Think of Ulmich's "evil team" as a more people-centric rendition of Team Plasma, with Ghetsis vying for control over Unova by any means necessary. Ulmich's version of Team Plasma is the Ivory Batallion. The IB is, in essence, a bunch of shitty right-wingers who would commit horrific acts of arson and then say they're the ones being victimized by the "liberal agenda" or something. Bundesaetos does not like them and I don't either.

The Ulmich Region itself is coming soon! Very epic of you to listen to me dump about yassified PokeGermany and its bird president guy

[linuxgamenews]

Experience the Intense Action of Tackle for Loss

Tackle for Loss football-infused top-down action game beta is heading to Linux with Windows PC. Thanks to the talented team at Indifferent Penguin. Due to make its way onto Steam. If you’re a fan of intense action and dark, gritty vibes, get ready to jump into the open beta for Tackle for Loss. A new football-infused top-down action game from Indifferent Penguin, a solo developer based in Berlin. This title is all about diving headfirst into the rough and tumble world of 1980's American Football, but with a twist. Think Hotline Miami meets the hard-hitting world of football.

...there is no Linux version yet. But with the next build I will give it a try and get back to you.

Here’s the update from Indifferent Penguin: they're working on a Linux port for this Unity title, aiming to have it ready for the open beta. Keep an eye out for a post in the Linux_game subreddit soon — they'll be looking for testers as well. In Tackle for Loss, you play as a former American football pro who’s seen better days. The title throws you into violent, fast-paced combat, all while unraveling a story that's as gripping as it is dark. Picture this: You’re navigating a gritty underworld, battling enemies, and uncovering a conspiracy. All while dealing with the lingering effects of concussions. It’s brutal, it’s intense, and it’s full of pixel art that pulls you into its shadowy world.

Tackle for Loss - Teaser

The combat in Tackle for Loss is all about keeping things fast and fierce. The more enemies you take down in quick succession, the higher your score multiplier climbs. And with every new level, you’ll unlock unique moves and attacks. Due to let you refine your combat style and keep things fresh. Whether you’re stringing together combo chains or experimenting with different skills and perks, the game rewards you for being aggressive and strategic. But Tackle for Loss isn’t just about the adrenaline rush. It also gives a hard look at the darker side of football. This title doesn’t shy away from showing the long-term effects of the sport, like Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Which your character struggles with throughout the story. It’s a raw and real take on what happens when the glory days fade. Now, about that open beta—if you’ve got a PC and a gamepad, you’re in! Participants will snag a free Steam key, and you’re free to stream your gameplay or upload it to YouTube. But heads up—slots are limited, so you’ll want to jump on this quick. The deadline is August 31st. Tackle for Loss football-infused top-down action is aiming for a late 2025 release on Linux with Windows PC. But you can wishlist it on Steam right now. The title has already scored some funding from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, so you know it’s got some solid backing. Ready to tackle the underworld? Get in on the action and see if you’ve got what it takes to survive the brutal beauty of Tackle for Loss.

[golemsmuse]

Myth in the Machine

Dr. Evelyn Voss wasn't the type to indulge in guilty pleasures. A professor of comparative literature and mythology at Berlin's prestigious Freie Universität, her life revolved around dusty tomes and the echoing labyrinth of the university library. Yet, nestled discreetly within her laptop, was a digital folder simply titled 'Diversions'.

Inside lay a motley collection of texts—absurd snippets of dialogue, stilted descriptions, and plots as intricate and ephemeral as soap bubbles. All of them bore the same watermark: 'Generated by OpenAI GPT-3'. For Evelyn, these weren't mere amusements; they were a clandestine research project. A scholar in the realm of myths and epics, she saw something startlingly familiar in the machine's output.

"It's all archetypes, isn't it?" She mused aloud to the indifferent silence of her office. "Like a Jungian fever dream churned out line by line... fascinating."

Her fascination was a dangerous, double-edged sword. The same colleagues who lapped up her lectures on Homer and the Vedas would likely cast a jaundiced eye on her current dalliance. The world of academia was notoriously wary of the nebulous, the experimental, especially when it involved a machine seemingly capable of encroaching on the hallowed domain of human creativity.

It was Marcus, her most promising doctoral student and teaching assistant, who smoked her out. A keen-eyed young man with an unruly mop of dark hair and a tendency to wax philosophical, he was also the only one granted access to the labyrinthine sprawl of her office. It was bound to happen sooner or later.

"Dr. Voss..." Marcus began, his normally eloquent voice hesitant. He hovered by her desk, his gaze flickering between the laptop screen and a printout he clutched in his hand.

Evelyn felt a familiar pang, the mix of irritation and resigned amusement reserved for when her students inevitably discovered one of her more eccentric interests.

"Yes, Marcus, it's precisely what it looks like," she answered, her tone deliberately dry. "AI-generated fiction. Intriguing, isn't it?"

Marcus blinked, the hesitation fading into genuine curiosity. "But, um..." He gestured helplessly at the printout in his hand, a mirror image of the digital document on her screen. "Isn't it wrong, somehow? To read, well... this?"

Evelyn arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. "Wrong, Marcus? Tell me, is it wrong to study the anatomy of a frog even if it's never penned a sonnet?"

"But, but these stories..." He gestured helplessly at the printout. "They're soulless. They lack that spark, don't you think?"

Evelyn smiled, a genuine one this time. "Ah, but the spark—the soul as you call it—isn't that precisely what we've sought to define, dissect, and replicate via literature for millennia? And don't forget the myths, Marcus. Weren't they born from mankind's attempt to narrativize the natural world, to tame the chaos of existence?"

She leaned forward, elbows planted on the antique desk. "Tell me, do you find anything in this... " She snatched the printout from Marcus, thumbing through the printed pages, " ...this machine-crafted tapestry that doesn't have a precedent in the oldest of epics, the folktales whispered around Neolithic campfires?"

Marcus shifted, caught off guard. "I suppose there are recurring motifs. The quest, the battle between good and evil..."

"And the flawed hero, and the wise crone, and the trickster shape-shifter," Evelyn continued, her voice taking on a strange, almost incantatory rhythm. "Tell me, Marcus, in this so-called 'soulless' algorithm, do I not see the bones of our most enduring stories? Do I not see humanity itself—its fears, dreams, glories, and follies—reflected back?"

That evening, hunched over a steaming mug of green tea in her apartment, Evelyn found herself scrolling through the digital folder with an unnerving sense of anticipation. AI fiction night. There was undeniable irony in it, she mused. Here she was, a scholar steeped in the classics, willfully seeking out tales conjured by a machine. It felt like an admission of defeat, and yet, fueled by her unexpected encounter with Marcus, she was strangely compelled to continue.

What unfolded was a familiar yet disconcertingly alien landscape. A knight errant, his armor dented like tin foil, quested for an artifact named 'The Crystalline Singularity'. He sought to save a kingdom whose name was a garbled string of consonants and vowels. There was a talking fox, a princess afflicted with a curse that seemed to involve both logarithms and the haunting refrain of an old pop song. Evelyn couldn't stifle a laugh.

It was preposterous, and yet... there was an echo of Gilgamesh in the knight's melancholic determination, a shade of Scheherazade's wit in the fox, and a sense of the inexorable, the tragic, in the cursed princess.

Scrolling down, she encountered a passage that made her sit up straight:

And the knight, for the first time, felt not fear, but the yawning abyss of something much older. Was it pity? Was it the echo of his own long-suppressed despair? Or was it simply a strange kind of kinship with the vast, unknowable algorithms that shaped the world around them?

Evelyn stared at the screen. There was an unnerving poignancy there, a raw vulnerability that felt disarmingly human. In that moment, the AI, with its mishmash of references, its broken syntax, became something else entirely—a mirror turned unexpectedly onto the reader.

Suddenly, an idea seized her. It was audacious, perhaps even absurd, but like the best of myths, the more she contemplated it, the stronger its irresistible pull became.

When Dr. Voss submitted a proposal for a new seminar titled 'From Algorithm to Epic: Mythmaking in the Digital Age', she knew she was courting professional controversy. The whispers began even before the approval arrived—a mix of titillation, skepticism, and the occasional outright scoff from the old guard of the faculty. Evelyn ignored it all. She was used to pushing boundaries.

The day her seminar debuted, the room was filled to overflowing. There was her usual flock of wide-eyed students, and something else: professors from the computer sciences, curious philosophers with unruly beards, even an avant-garde visual artist who was rumored to be integrating AI into her installations.

Instead of launching into the usual analysis of epics and folktales, Evelyn opened by asking her students to write a single sentence. It could be anything, she assured them: a memory, an observation, a snippet of overheard dialogue. The sentences were fed into an AI, and the machine, its digital mind armed with a wealth of literature and data, generated a story.

What materialized was bizarre, moving, and strangely insightful by turns. Evelyn's gamble, it seemed, had paid off. The room was abuzz. Amidst the cacophony of reactions, Marcus's voice cut through the din.

"But what does it all mean, Professor?" he asked, his usual diffidence gone. "These stories we created... are they art? Are they... alive?"

Evelyn smiled. "They are potential, Marcus," she said. "They are the echoes of ourselves, refracted and distorted. And when you spend enough time gazing into the abyss, sometimes it begins to gaze back. What we do with that reflection…well, that's where the true story begins, don't you think?"

(This story was written by AI.)

[xtruss]

The Codebreaker | Article

How Codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman Fought Nazi Spies! For 50 years, Her Contributions To WWII Intelligence Were A Secret. No Longer.

— December 29, 2020 | Kirstin Butler | From The Collection: Women in American History

Art by Carla Scemama. Source photo: The George C. Marshall Foundation

She tracked her targets’ coded messages for more than two years, painstakingly translating gibberish into actionable intelligence. Then, without warning, the messages ceased.

When covert transmissions go dark, it means the worst thing possible for a codebreaker. Her targets have discovered they're under surveillance. They've stopped transmitting and have gone underground, and from there they can regroup and resume sending signals with stronger and more impenetrable codes.

This dreaded turn of events came in March 1942. Master cryptanalyst Elizebeth Friedman had been intercepting and deciphering codes of Nazi spies in South America since early 1940. Friedman listened in as the spies told their masters in Berlin about the movement of Allied ships carrying troops and supplies to the front. She transformed strings of garbled letters from Nazi transmissions into plain text:

Queen Mary departed on March 8 1800 local time.

The Queen Mary on the 12th at 1500 MEZ was reported near the coast at Ceara in the direction of Belem through Piratiny.

The entire arsenal of democracy was at stake, with millions of tons of Allied supplies already sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic by German U-boat interceptions. By knowing what Allied ships the Nazis were tracking, however, Friedman could alert American and British military leaders to alter their course and get out of harm’s way. More than once, as in the case of the route of the troopship RMS Queen Mary and its 8,398 American servicemen, her work saved thousands of lives.

Now the only sound on the radio line was silence.

The person Friedman had to thank for that foreboding calm was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Hungry for acclaim, Hoover used the information gathered by Elizebeth’s team of Coast Guard codebreakers to send his G-Men to South America to arrest the Nazi information sources. Failing to understand that the raids would tip the hand of American intelligence, Hoover left the cryptanalysts to deal with the aftermath. Now all of their previous progress was undone. The Nazi communications were secret again with new and more convoluted strings of ciphers and potentially fatal consequences.

Elizebeth Friedman was 49 years old. It had been 25 years since she first taught herself, with no formal training and an academic background in poetry, how to break codes. She was one of the best in the world. Friedman stopped rum running gangsters and foiled international drug trafficking operations.

The Coast Guard first approached her in 1925 for help battling the rum runners violating Prohibition laws. She created the branch’s codebreaking unit, trained all of her colleagues and over the next decade built up a top-notch cryptanalytic team. After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, however, her unit was taken over by the Navy and she was essentially demoted, replaced as the unit’s leader by a younger and less-skilled male lieutenant. (The U.S. military didn’t allow civilians to head up intelligence operations, and, in any case, women would only be allowed to serve fully in the military after 1948.)

Now she faced the greatest challenge of her career. Even after Hoover’s gambit set her efforts back by months, Friedman’s response was what it had always been: She simply redoubled her efforts and got back to work.

Elizebeth Friedman, 1940. Credit: The George C. Marshall Foundation

As she had feared, following the FBI roundup, the sizeable Nazi contingent still at large in South America resurfaced with far more complicated ciphers. Already by April 1942, new clandestine radio stations were cropping up all over the continent and broadcasting messages using a devilishly complex encryption device called the Enigma machine. Across the Atlantic, British computer scientist Alan Turing was breaking the most elaborate Enigma codes with room-sized electromechanical machines that were some of the earliest forerunners to computers. Elizebeth was trying to decipher almost equally complex Enigma messages, but using only pen and paper.

Once she was decoding the secret spy communications again, she discovered that nothing less than the balance of power in the western hemisphere was at stake. The Reich’s most successful South American agent, a high-ranking member of Hitler’s elite SS forces, named Johannes Sigfried Becker, was working behind the scenes to drum up fascist sympathy across the region. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay—all had vulnerable governments that could potentially be turned fascist.

Friedman helped ensure that such a sinister future never came to pass. She had become, through her work, a one-woman pattern recognition engine. And now, over several months, she led a critical effort to suss signal from noise once again.

Elizebeth S. Friedman (left) and staffers at the International Telegraph Conference in Brussels. Credit: The George C. Marshall Foundation

By December 1942, Friedman’s Coast Guard team cracked every single one of the Nazi’s new codes. They were back to eavesdropping on German spies who were none the wiser they were being listened to. By the end of the war, her team broke three separate Enigma machines and contributed 4,000 decoded messages to the fight against Nazi domination, but it would be more than half a century before the larger public knew what she had accomplished.

Years later, Friedman wrote about her last day as a government cryptanalyst in her unpublished memoir, Footnote to History, titled with an eye to how the official record often treats female protagonists. “I signed the pledge that was exacted of all departing from the sacred precincts of secrecy,” she said, “the pledge never to reveal at least without authority from on high, or even to refer to, any of the projects with which I had dealt during WWII.”

In the meantime, J. Edgar Hoover again had his own designs on those projects.

As 1944 came to a close, the FBI began a publicity campaign to cast itself as the main actor in routing out Nazi influence in the western hemisphere. With Hollywood director Frank Capra, Hoover produced The Battle of the United States, a propaganda film that depicted the FBI as the sole player in the fight against the Nazi threat in South America. Neither the film nor any of the articles which Hoover commissioned at the time mentioned Friedman’s cryptanalysis unit.

The FBI also re-catalogued the Coast Guard reports from Friedman’s unit under the bureau’s filing system. Only when all of the original intelligence reports were declassified after the turn of the twenty-first century were the authors' identities and Friedman's true role in the war effort revealed.

By her account, she left behind the life of a secret agent with as little fanfare as she had entered it. “I was…back in the world-at-large once more,” she wrote. “It was the end of a Period, an Era. I knew that, as surely as I stood on two feet, I should never…return to that particular form of endeavor again.”

She was right; the dawn of the Information Age made analog solvers obsolete. But the proof was in the trove of papers furnishing evidence of her work decades after her 1980 death. With their release, Friedman was fully brought into light: visible warrior, footnote to history no longer.