#which is always the fun part

[unseemingowl]

Got tagged by lovely @robertpattinsonimdb and since I’m sitting on my way to a music festival, figured I might as well do a shuffle of the playlist I’ve put together of all the bands I hope to see (as usual I will of course not catch all of them)

Tagging @sweet-reverie @imaginejolls @bunivys @shotgunkitten @willowaus @deadgirlsupremacy and everyone else who’d like a go.

[egophiliac]

Have you heard of the "Crowley is Malleus' dad" theory going around? Where Prince Levan (or whatever his name is) didn't actually die and just went out to get some milk and is now known as Dire Crowley, the silly man? The implications of that theory is absolutely hilarious when you think about it

hold on, we can figure this out, we just need LISTS

PROS THAT CROWLEY IS SECRETLY REVAAN/LEVAN/LAVERNE/WHATEVER:

unspecified fae of some kind, with similar coloring to Mal

the animal masks are apparently a Briar Valley thing

has some kind of big blackmailable secret that was alluded to in episode 4, and then as far as I know never brought up again

(unless this was just Azul bullshitting, which is extremely possible)

based on Diablo, which...maybe means something?

has canonically worn Dad Shorts

CONS:

(gestures to Crowley's entire personality)

NO LISTEN Revaan was the guy they sent off on diplomatic missions and to take care of delicate political situations, and...look, I love this dweeb, but would you trust Crowley to be in charge of negotiating your war treaties

despite my brain insisting on reading his name as "Raven", Revaan's title does imply that he was also a dragon (or super into longan berries, I'm not ruling that out)

currently unclear why Lilia "my closest friend Revaan...he is no longer with us...I used to make fun of him for being kind of a priss about eating jerky..." Vanrouge has somehow not noticed or said anything

Malleus' Aloof Anime ~Aristocrat~ vibe had to come from somewhere, and by all accounts it was NOT his mom's side of the family

???:

turns into a bird in the opening, I don't know if that means anything but it's kinda cool, I guess

all that aside, if Malleus and Yuu are any indication, then the Draconias have...questionable taste in their social choices. so anything is possible!

[inkskinned]

so one time i got bit by a brown recluse which is one of the only types of spider in my area that's actually dangerous and at first i didn't know what had happened to me, only that it was nasty. the swelling wasn't going down and the wound started to get ugly. i don't want to like get into the details because that's gross but it got to the point 2 weeks later that i was worried enough to go to the doctor, which i hate doing.

i am not afraid of spiders but other people are so i'd been covering it with this big ole square bandage (i needed more landscape coverage than a simple bandaid) and sat in the university medical waiting room, kicking my heels and playing BOTW. the nurse who admitted me was like, oh, we have got to get Tom to cover this one. she wrote spider bite under my ticket.

i waited in the near-empty building for like an hour and then nurse tom shows up in spiderman scrubs, out of breath. "sorry," he says, "i saw - your slip - and I had," he heaves in a breath, "to run home and. get. these scrubs. i literally. ran. felt like a job. for. spiderman."

i laugh. he puts his hands on his knees, thumbs-ups at me. fishes a pamphlet out from under his clipboard that basically says spiders can be scary but you don't need to be scared, there's very few dangerous spiders in new england. "honestly," he wheezes, "we probably don't need to get you into an exam room. just..." he waves his hand at the pamphlet, "read that."

i look down at my arm. then back at him in his scrubs. and then down at my arm. i like that he made an effort to make a joke, but now it does not feel like a good joke, because they are mistaking my calm for a lack of injury. "can i. like. at least show you the bite?"

he gives me kind of a weird look, which is fair, but then says. "if. i mean, if you have to."

i peel the bandage off. his face goes green.

"oh," he says.

"yeah, man."

"a... spider bit you?" his voice is high and tight and trembling. he backs up a few steps.

"i think a brown recluse," i offer. "i know it's nasty, sorry."

"excuse me for a moment." he looks over to the administering nurse on the other side of the small room. "i need to find someone else to take care of you."

the administering nurse smiles over to us with a degree of pleasure that is almost salivating. for a moment, like a window opening, i am briefly aware of what must be a psychic message floating amongst the in-between. her jaguar teeth all say this is like a party for me and i know exactly what i'm doing.

"oh no, tom," she says, grinning. "i gave her to you specifically."

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Thing about just clicking with someone and not having to put in the work is finding not making and those relationships - whatever form they take rarely last or manage to develop past a surface level.

Buck is such an all in or nothing kind of person that has had to fight for pretty much everything (when it comes to relationships of any form) he just cant comprehend that other people experience various levels of friendships or relationships more widely.

We see it in his training of Ravi, it comes out in his father son reltionship with Bobby, it’s part of the underlying reason the lawsuit happened and stems from his childhood abandonment issues. We even saw it in the other sneak peek where he’s with Tommy - he’s trying so so hard to make a friend that he comes across as slightly intense and focused. And while the worthwhile people will stay (the fire fam, his sister, Eddie) those who can’t take that level of focus will pretty quickly drop away, Abby and Ali are prime examples of this and even Taylor to a certain extent - she just didn’t care enough to be bothered by it.

It’s one of the reasons he’s oblivious to the fact his relationship with Eddie is different on multiple levels and it’s part of what makes Buck so interesting and why so many of us think he’s neurodivergent.

[futuristichedge]

Surprise! This cat is transgender

[whaliiwatching]

a taste of hannibal, a touch of megamind, a shot of venom (pours the whole damn bottle)

i love venom (2018) a lot, it’s my go-to movie when i’m bored or sad, i have seen it many many times. i saw it again a week or so ago with a bud and finally had the opportunity to pen down this lovely au i’ve been thinkin bout

i’ve got a much more fleshed out sketch of how this au plays out. not sure if i’ll write it yet

anyway some bullet points

noir (called, ofc, noir) arrives on earth-138 in the 1920s. his first host is robbie and they basically go through the venom movie, where noir slowly learns to love earth and humanity and all that jazz. up until the 50s or so they’re an investigative reporter and occasionally a scary vigilante superhero!

when robbie is killed (not ewaf style. i forbid it), it fucking devastates noir and he host-hops for a bit, doing fun anarchy things to keep up robbie’s legacy but also losing a few morals here and there. he can do a little murder and eat nazis as a treat

the symbiotes arrive en masse and osborn infects humans with them to turn into his fascist riot police army

through vampire-hunting-esque shenanigans, hobie and noir meet, and strike up a tenuous truce to fight the government. hobie does not like him at first, but noir very much does ;)

cue a slow burn gothic romance between a freedom fighter and a devoted monster <3

[front-facing-pokemon]

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Hello!! I'm back for: more whining about TotK Quest Design Philosophy

I can't reblog a really great post I just saw for some reason (tumblrrrr *shakes my fist*), but hmmmm yeah not only do I completely agree, but I think I might expand on why I feel so much annoyance towards TotK's quest design philosophy at some point, because it does extend past the fundamentally broken setup of trying to punch a pseudo-mystery game on top of BotW's bones, where the core objective was always explicit and centered and stapled the entire world together; or the convoluted and inefficient way it tells its story through the Tears, the somehow single linear exploration-driven quest in the entire game.

Basically: I'm talking about the pointless back-and-forths. There were a lot of them, a lot that acted against the open world philosophy, and almost none of them ever recontextualized the environment through neither gameplay abilities nor worldbuilding nor character work.

I'll take two examples: the initial run to Hyrule Castle (before you get your paraglider), and then the billion back-and-forths in the Zora questline.

I think?? the goal of that initial quest to Hyrule Castle is to familiarize you with the landmark, introduce the notion that weapons rot, tell you about the gloom pits, and also tell you that Zelda sightings are a thing? But to force any of these ideas on you before giving you a paraglider is, in my opinion, pretty unnecessary. I think the reason it happens in that order is to prevent Link from simply pummeling down to the gloom pit under Hyrule Castle and fight Ganondorf immediately while still introducing ideas surrounding the location; but genuinely, the Zelda sighting makes the next events even more confusing? Why wouldn't you focus all your priorities in reaching the castle if you just saw her there? Why lose time investigating anything else? Genuinely: what is stopping you from getting your paraglider and immediately getting yourself back there, plunging into the depths to try and get to the literal bottom of this? (beyond player literacy assuming this is where the final boss would be, and so not to immediately spoil yourself --which, in an open world game, you should never be able to spoil yourself by engaging with the mechanics normally, and if you can that's a genuine failure of design)

I think, personally, that you should not have been pointed to go there at all. That anything it brings to the table, you could have learned more organically by investigating yourself, or by exploring in that direction on your own accord --or, maybe you think Zelda is up there in the castle, and then the region objectives become explicitely about helping you reaching that castle (maybe by building up troops to help you in a big assault, or through the Sages granting you abilities to move past level-design oriented hurdles in your way, etc). Either way: no need to actually make you walk the distance and back, because the tediousness doesn't teach you anything you haven't already learned about traversal in the (extremely long, btw, needlessly so I would say) tutorial area.

But to take another example, I'll nitpick at a very specific moment in the Zora Questline, that is honestly full of these back-and-forth paddings that recontextualize absolutely nothing and teach you nothing you didn't already know. The most egregious example, in my opinion, is the moment where you are trying to find the king, and you have to learn by listening in to the zora children who do not let you listening in.

So okay. I think Zelda is great when it does whimsy, and children doing children things guiding you is a staple of the series, and a great one at that. But here? It does not work for me on any level. Any tension that could arise from the situation flattens because nobody seems to care enough about their king disappearing in the middle of a major ecological crisis, except for children who are conveniently dumb enough not to graps the severity of the situation, but not stressed out enough that it could be construed as a way for them to cope about it and make anything feel more serious or pressing. It feels like a completely arbitrary blocker that isn't informed by the state of the world, doesn't do anything interesting gameplay-wise with this idea, doesn't build up the mood, and genuinely feels like busywork for its own sake.

This is especially tragic when the inherent concept of "the zora king has been wounded by what most zoras would believe to be Zelda and is hiding from his own people so the two factions do not go to war over it" has such tension and interest and spark that the game absolutely refuse to explore --instead having you collect carved stones who do not tell you anything new, splatter water in a floating island, thrud through mud who feel more like an inconvenience than a threat or, hey, listen to children playing about their missing king less than a couple of years after being freed from Calamity Ganon's menace. It feels like level designers/system designers having vague technical systems that are hard-coded in the game now, and we need to put them to use even if it's not that interesting, not that fun or not that compelling. It's the sort of attitude that a lot of western RPGs get eviscerated for; but here, for some reason, it's just a case of "gameplay before story", instead of, quite simply, a case of poorly thought-out gameplay.

Not every quest in the game is like this! I think the tone worked much better in the sidequests overall, that are self-contained and disconnected from the extremely messy main storyline, and so can tell a compelling little tale from start to finish without the budget to make you waddle in a puddle of nothing for hours at a time. It's the only place where you actually get character arcs that are allowed to feel anything that isn't a variation on "very determined" or "curious about the zonai/ruins", and where you get to feel life as it tries to blossom back into a new tomorrow for Hyrule.

But if I'm this harsh about the main storyline, it really is because I find it hard to accept that we do not criticize a structure that is at times so half-assed that you can almost taste employees' burnout seeping through the cracks --the lack of thematic ambition and self-reflection and ingeniosity outside of system design and, arguably at times, level design-- simply because it's Hyrule and we're happy to be there.

There's something in the industry that is called the "wow effect", which is their way to say "cool" without saying "cool". It's basically the money shots, but for games: it's what makes you go "ohhhh" when you play. And it's great! The ascension to the top of the Ark was one of them --breathtaking, just an absolute high point of systems working together to weave an epic tale. You plummeting from the skies to the absolute depths of hell is another one; most of the dungeons rely on that factor to keep your attention; the entire Zelda is a dragon storyline is nothing but "wow effect" (and yeah, the moment where you do remove the Master Sword did give me shivers, I'll admit to this willingly) and so is Ganondorf's presence and presentation in the game --he's here to be cool, non-specifically mean, hateable in a non-threatening way and to give us a good sexy time, do not think about it too hard. What bothers me is that TotK's world has basically nothing to offer but "wow effect"; that if you bother to dig at anything it presents you for more than a second, everything crumbles into incoherence --not only in story, but in mood, in themes, in identity. This is a wonderfully fun game with absolutely nothing to say, relying on the cultural osmosis and aura of excellency surrounding Zelda to pass itself off as meatier than it really is. This is what I say when I criticize it as self-referential to a fault; half of the story makes no sense if this is your first Zelda game, and what little of that world there is tends to be deeply unconcerned and uncurious about itself.

And no, Breath of the Wild wasn't like this. Breath of the Wild was deeply curious about itself; the entire game was built off curiosity and discovery, experimentation and challenge (and I say this while fully admitting I had more fun with the loop of TotK, which I found more forgiving overall). The traversal in Tears of the Kingdom is centered around: how do I skip those large expanses of land in the most efficient and fun way possible. How do I automate these fights. How do I find resources to automate both traversal and fights better. It's a game that asks questions (who are the zonais, who is Rauru and what is his deal, what is the Imprisoning War about, where is Zelda), and then kind of doesn't really care about the answers (yeah the zonais are like... guys, they did a cool kingdom, Rauru used to run it, the Imprisoning War is literally whatever all you have to care about is who to feel sad for and who to kill about it and you don't get a choice and certainly cannot feel any ambiguous feelings about any of that, and Zelda is a dragon but we will never expand on how it felt for her to make such a drastic and violent choice and also nobody cares that's a plot point you could *remove* from the game without changing the golden path at all).

I'm so aggravated by the argument "in Zelda, it's gameplay before story" because gameplay is story. That's the literal point of my work as a narrative designer: trying to breach the impossibly large gap between what the game designers want to do, and what the writers are thinking the game will be about (it's never the same game). And in TotK, the game systems are all about automation and fusion. It's about practicality and efficiency. It's also about disconnecting stuff from their original purpose as you optimize yourself out of danger, fear, or curiosity --except for the way you can become even more efficient. And sure, BotW was about this too; but you were rewarded because you had explored the world in the first place, experimented enough, put yourself in danger, went to find out the story of who you used to be and why you should care about Hyrule. I'm not here to argue BotW was a well-written game; I think it was pretty tropey at large to be honest, safe for a couple of moments of brilliance, but it had a coherent design vision that rewarded your curiosity while never getting in the way of the clarity of your objective. There is a convolutedness to TotK that, to me, reveals some extremely deep-seated issues with the direction the series is heading towards; one that, at its core, cares more about looking the part of a Zelda game than having any deeper conversation about what a Zelda game should be.

[thebirdandhersong]

breaking the tumblr fast to ask for prayer :') it is currently the WORST of times (though, in intense joyous flashes, occasionally also the best of times). I am bulldozing my way through the dregs of midterms, final exam prep, graduation plans, job applications, dorm volunteer stuff, all while trying to deal with/reckon with/endure/come to terms with/persevere through literally the deepest emotional pain I've ever been in lol

[oceanwithouthermoon]

ive never liked powerless saiki aus because the entire conclusion of the series is him accepting his powers as being a part of him that he cant change so like.. in aus where the power remover works, half of his development is erased..

if he had been "powerless" for longer, we wouldve gotten to see him realize this himself and im genuinely sad that we didnt.. we got to see him realize that being powerless wasnt the change he wished it would be and that its something he cant change, but its literally over a two day long period and we miss out on sooo much potential development..

and then in aus where hes born powerless, people think he would have the exact personality and development that he THOUGHT he would if he got rid of/didnt have his powers, like NO ? "without powers he would be another satou-" NO he would be a shy, borderline flamboyant, weird, awkward, genius LOSER.

he would have a more normal relationship with his brother (still probably competitive but in a way more average sibling way and kusuke wouldnt have had the motivation to become so murderous) and he would probably be even more friendless but with less trauma.. he may or may not have ever befriended akechi at all, and the classroom incident wouldnt have happened.. even some of his current friends might not be around if not for coincidences due to his powers or direct involvement from his powers.. (nendo and kaido would for sure still be there though, but this only ensures the idea that he would be the biggest fcking loser ever)

he would still be saiki, but. his powers are a key part of him. he would be totally different without them, but NOT in the way he thinks he would..

[metanarrates]

its interesting to me that the common sentiment appears to be that han sooyoung intended for jang hayoung to be trans. I think there's room for multiple interpretations, but I view being trans in orv as being inherently tied to the themes of self-actualization, as well as the idea that a narrative is unable to be fully defined by either author or reader. put more simply, jang hayoung is trans regardless of either kim dokja OR han sooyoung's intentions in creating her, or in how they each interpreted her. maybe the version of her in the novel was meant to be something else, but in the reality of this world, she is a trans girl. han sooyoung's intentions kind of don't matter there because the text has moved beyond its author

[atomicengineerdetective]

I've been watching Hazbin Hotel in prime. Just watched episode 5 and I gotta ask

Why, oh, WHY DON'T I SEE MORE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT "MORE THAN ANYTHING" WHEN TALKING ABOUT THE HAZBIN HOTEL MUSIC???

Like I get it, the song before it "Hell's Greatest Dad" Is a bop reminiscent of other music from the era its parodying. I loved it.

BUT why are you only putting clips of that song when this MASTERPIECE comes a few minutes after

I honestly don't even know where to begin with this song. The visuals are beautiful, especially when we get moments like this where you can just see the absolute LOVE this man has for her daughter is so sweet and Heartwarming I just-

The voices are fenomenal but what else can you expect from the broadway talents of Erika Henningsen and Jeremy Jordan.

There is also the whole Symbolism with passing the baton to the next generation and stuff. I- I can't even get into the specifics right now Im too emotional.

But above all else THE LYRICS

ESPECIALLY THAT LAST ONE

"I'M GRATEFUL YOU ARE MY DAUGHTER/FATHER MORE THAN ANYTHING"

DO YOU WANT ME TO CRY?? CAUSE I AM. I AM BAWLING MY EYES OUT RIGHT NOW.

It's just so fucking beautiful man. Probably the best song I will hear all year. Obviously my favorite from Hazbin.

[jesterwhoreknee]

Not me wanting to do a Chalastor/Radiobelle roleplay but being scared to death of being attacked or mocked in the roleplay community for it 💀

Don't get me wrong I love Vaggie and Charlie together and loved Vaggie's angel look alongside the backstory and how they met, but Vivzie isn't good at writting women and they don't have chemistry at all. Meanwhile I have always had a soft spot for Charastor and the dynamic/potential they had since the pilot came out. I know it will never be canon and don't intend in wanting it to be because I respect the characters sexualities/official pairings. BUT LEMME ENJOY MY FANON SHIP IN PEACEEEEE 😤😤😤

[mobius-m-mobius]

There’s this idea that people are meaner than they used to be. Because of the internet, you know, people are meaner. They’re not meaner. People are not meaner than they used to be. People have always been assholes, except you guys. But they… But they are, and people are not meaner. What happens is the technology is just faster. It’s just faster. What happens is, you have this crazy idea, and there’s a crazy, angry thought, and you’re like, “I’ve got a crazy, angry thought.” Tickety-Tick, tick, tick, boom! And it’s out.

Craig Ferguson: Does This Need To Be Said? (2011)

[theswedishpajas]

The man truly can’t take a genuine compliment 🙄

[megumi-fm]

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