#windcarvedlyre

[vv-ispy]

places DR2 crew gently into @windcarvedlyre's hands

[pekoposting]

MERRY CRISIS

MEMRY CROS

[cry-stars]

Komaeda and Dementia: Part 1 of 5: Introduction and Overview of FTD

Hi everyone!

I’m an aspiring Komaedologist with an interest in dementia. I often see people doubting Komaeda’s stated diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia, since it presents differently in him than in the common portrayal of dementia in the media. While his portrayal may not be completely accurate, there is a lot of truth to it, and there are many symptoms visible in-game. I wanted to share a few posts about dementia symptoms that we do see canonically in Komaeda’s portrayals in SDR2 and DR:AE, and share some information regarding his specific diagnosis as opposed to Alzheimers, for example.

I work with people living with dementia as a recreation worker. This means that I see them living their daily lives, and know about difficulties they might have with recreational or day to day activities. There are a lot of observations that I might make that can’t be backed up scientifically yet, but do make sense in a practical way. Everyone with dementia is different, and since I work with seniors for the most part, some observations won’t transfer onto Komaeda. However, I’ll do my best to back up whatever I can with sources.

This post is just for fun and to give people ideas. It means a lot to me to see a fascinating and endearing character like Komaeda portrayed with dementia, since it is a sad and terminal disease, and I usually see it end badly in my job, so I hope to give people ideas on how to portray it, or just to notice things in a different way they might not have before!

My main sources for this post and the following ones include “Dementia Diaries,” which is a really cool project where people with dementia talk about their experiences, National Institute on Aging, Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s Society, and my own work experience. I plan on doing more posts about specific symptoms that we see in Komaeda later, but I would be happy to hear from other people who have dementia knowledge, or to answer any questions that I can.

For the most part, I'm only going to be talking about SDR2 and a little bit of DR:AE. I haven't finished watching the anime yet and have not read any of the manga. If anyone has ideas from any of those sources, I would love to hear about them!

Overview of FTD: Which Variant does Komaeda Have?

There are two major forms of frontotemporal dementia. The first, which Komaeda likely has, is the behavioural variant (BvFTD), which is also the most likely for young people to develop. This variant of FTD mainly affects behaviour, empathy, judgement, and planning.

Komaeda is less likely to have the other variant of FTD, primary progressive aphasia. This form of FTD mainly affects language skills, including speech and comprehension.

Komaeda doesn’t seem to have very much trouble with understanding the concrete content of what people say to him, but he does occasionally seem to have trouble fully comprehending hidden meanings behind statements (for example, taking statements literally rather than as sarcastic). To me though, this is less connected to him not being able to understand the words or content of statements, and more not picking up on the emotions hidden in the statements (which I’ll address more in the behavior post). He does seem to have some trouble with word-finding in the Japanese version of the game, but again, it doesn't inhibit his ability to express himself given enough time to speak.

Another thing to note about FTD is that, in its early stages, it mainly affects behaviour and language processing, as stated above, rather than memory. In later stages, memory does start to be affected as well, but it’s different from Alzheimers (probably the most well-known form of dementia) in that memory loss isn’t the main symptom.

FTD’s prognosis is about 6-8 years. Komaeda states in his fifth free time event that his life expectancy is between half a year and one year. However, he is also referring to his lymphoma diagnosis, meaning he expected to die from a combination of both illnesses within that time frame. In SDR2, Komaeda is probably in the early to middle stages of FTD, since he was diagnosed right before entering Hope’s Peak, and was a Remnant of Despair for some time without treatment, so while we can see evidence of memory issues (which I will address in another post), it’s something he’s able to cope with and isn’t a debilitating symptom yet.

One more observation: while dementia as a whole is usually seen in elderly people, Komaeda’s specific frontotemporal dementia diagnosis has an earlier age of onset, usually between ages 40-65, and is rarely seen in elderly people. Even though being diagnosed in high school seems unlikely, it is not impossible. According to Alzheimer Society Canada, early-onset or young-onset dementia (between ages 18 and 65) accounts for 2-8% of all dementia cases.

Thank you for reading! I plan on making five posts total. The other post topics will be Outward Behaviour, Judgement/Thought Processes, Other Symptoms, and Writing Ideas.

[1loer]

that timeloop post talking about chiaki....

Chiaki getting so far into the time loop that she stops trying to fix it, and starts just trying to spend as much time with the others as possible. but its difficult because the killing game is still happening. and when she does manage it, she gets so far with them and starts making an actual connection to these people she's been programmed to love, and then it resets. and its back to square one and they dont know her again. But each time ehr love for them grows as she learns more and more about them, and she wonders if this is what the other chiaki had felt for them too.

[plum-pudding-everywhere]

@windcarvedlyre

[vv-ispy]

@noxiatoxia

My first and foremost opinion on genshin is if you're succeptable to gambling addictions/FOMO and don't have the money/time for it, don't get into the game. Though getting strong units isn't a requirement due to its single-player nature, at its core it is a gacha game that uses FOMO and withholding/rerunning of characters to incentivize spending money + contains general gacha game time sinks (daily login, limited time events, resource time gating, etc). If you're just interested in the story/character, you can find playthroughs online + character's 'About' lines in all four languages (EN, CN, JP, KR) on the wiki.

I think Lyre's covered most of the other general pros/cons of the game so I'll focus on using it for language learning and slide thoughts under the cut bc I ramble TL;DR: the game is made for a casual audience so set the game voiceover language to chinese, acknowledge any regular play as simultaneously being regular interaction with the language, and have fun with it — just building up a positive association with the language will be great for learning down the line

Genshin as a language learning program is actually exactly how/why I play(ed) the game! For background I started off going into the game with ~a third grader's level of chinese ie. enough to understand most of the spoken dialogue but unable to read most of the words. I had my game set to chinese audio + initially english interface but later ended up switching that to chinese too, and can definitely say after year of consistently playing the game I feel my chinese has gotten better, especially in terms of reading. But it did take so, so much searching up words (Pleco chinese-english dictionary app my beloved, highly recommend it with its handwriting recognizer/any handwriting recognizer (as opposed to pinyin typing))

For sure any regular exposure to chinese can't hurt. Chinese is a tonal language where there is a ton of homophones, differenciated only by the tone they're spoken in, and the tone is further modified by emotional expression and sentence structure (eg. questions are still rising at the end, anger/emphasis can be similar to fourth tone, even being in a phrase can modify the tone of a word, etc). Not to mention there's also many words with the exact same sound and tone and you're supposed to figure out which word it is from context. Familiarizing your brain to the sounds and tones, as well as learning to separate out when something like 'bei4' is used as a preposition (被, used in passive structure) vs verb (备, prepare) vs measure word (倍, two/three/etc-fold) vs part of a phrase (被子, 'bei4zi' blanket or 辈子 'bei4zi' lifetime, figure it out from context (note: this is also why most chinese media has subtitles)) vs idiom (狼狈不堪 'lang2bei4-bu4kan1', stuck in a dilemma) vs as its own word (背 'bei4', back as in the body part) is going to be so, so important going into the language.

(To be fair it's not all that different from any other language — nonnative english speakers are also out there going 'what do you mean 'car' and 'card' are two different words they sound the same — oh that 'd' is part of 'card' and that's the difference? But it's different from the '-ed' sound that indicates a verb happened? So confusing')

(also at least you don't have to worry about verb tenses and conjugation in chinese — they don't exist)

Aaaanyway back to genshin

Imo the great thing about using a game as a language learning program is there's no benchmark or standards, just have fun with it it's a game, build up a positive association with the language (personally I went into this game with Chinese Baggage and came out of it going 'maybe learning chinese isn't so bad after all, it's kinda fun even'). Funny enough this is a place I'd actually say genshin's daily incentives/FOMO can come in useful — it incentivizes regular interaction with the language. And as genshin has its combat/exploration/general gameplay loop separate from its story aspects, you can adjust your level of interaction based off your energy level for the day, ranging from 'chill out to combat and exploration' to 'do an unvoiced quest, searching up every other word in the dialogue'.

Genshin's story is separated into archon quests, character quests/hangout, and world quests, where the archon and character quests are voiced and everything else is not (kinda a pity, there's some really good — and really long — world quests out there). All quests have an autoplay vs click to proceed option. If you're using the game for language learning, I'd suggest focusing on the voiced quests of which there's a lot. There's also a transcript button now if you miss any text/audio, pretty great for language learning! Ah also the archive section has the transcript/audio of all completed archon/character quests, also great for revisiting sentences. Though unfortunately when playing a quest, once you start a dialogue sequence, you can't exit out/use the menu until you're done, which isn't great for when you lose interest in the language halfway (<- I think aside from the fact genshin is not a language learning program, this is my main issue when it comes to using genshin as a language learning program).

In terms of other voiced content, characters also have voiceovers you can access from their information after pulling them. Those are also on the wiki. Events are sometimes voiced, sometimes not, depending on how important they are. Those aren't archived, you only get to experience them once.

Since the game's target audience is as broad as possible, you don't have to worry about coming out of the game talking in a way no one speaks in the real world. And it also does model a bit how different age groups talk/interact, like the adult's gentler/simpler way of speaking to the child characters, or the respect characters will show to elders. (As a note, more literary/archaic characters will also speak more poetically/archaically in a way people don't in modern times, but most characters speak casually). The Lanturn Rite (lunar new year) event also keeps in mind showing off chinese culture to a global audience if you're interested in chinese culture and perspectives towards topics.

If you want to try setting your interface to chinese I'd actually recommend starting with familiarizing yourself with more game mechanic words — things like the seven elements, weapon types, stats/substats of an artifact. These words are disconnected from any sentence structure so you don't have to worry about what they mean in context, show up often bc they're part of the main gameplay loop, and yet bc of chinese's.....efficency....in reusing words, the characters have other casual uses and that's words you later don't have to pause mid-sentence to search up. Otherwise, I found the fact that genshin has text scattered everwhere (item descriptions, weapon/artifact/material lore, quest descriptions, overworld stuff sometimes, etc) was another level of 'I can choose to engage with the language when I want to, and just ignore it but still be surrounded by it when I don't'

Unrelated to genshin, two of my favourite chinese supplementary apps - Pleco (as mentioned before) as a chinese english dictionary. For free on mobile devices, has paid add-ons I don't need myself - Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary, free browser addon for chrome/firefox. Will show a character + its pinyin + its translate on hover

Uhhh if you read all the way to the end here, then I hope some of that was helpful! Personally genshin was probably the best thing to happen to my own chinese language learning (I guess aside from growing up speaking chinese) so if you decide to try it out I hope you enjoy it and find it beneficial too :D

never played genshin but i like a lot of the designs. you mentioned learning mandarin once I think, is genshin a good game to play for those learning the language? As I plan to learn mandarin some day :>

Summoning @vv-ispy because he could answer better than me! My mandarin's still really basic because I haven't worked on it in ages... so I use the mandarin audio but the most I can do rn is recognise a bunch of individual words and simple phrases. I'm guessing it's still helping but y'know. There's also a japanese dub btw!

While I'm talking about it, broader opinion on whether genshin's worth getting into: if you like theorising and/or engaging with fanworks you'll have a lot of fun with it. The actual writing isn't a masterpiece- I feel like it shows that it's a gacha, even if it's really good for one- but there is so much foreshadowing and worldbuilding you can pick apart from both quest dialogue and a huge amount of text scattered around the game. And the writing gets better with each region outside of the third one sucking imo. I find the open world exploration mechanics really satisfying as well, especially if you can pull some characters that enhance it. The OST is incredible too. The gameplay after you've finished the story content is just grinding for stats and the premium currency but there are regular events with minor plots or more casual interactions with characters.

On the other hand it's faced a lot of criticism for colourism in its character designs and mashing cultures from 3 separate continents together in the latest region- even whitewashing a character based off a Yoruba deity who's black in all other depictions lmfao- while giving both europe and east asia 2 separate regions (edit: 3 for europe when the Russia region releases). Fortunately you really don't need to spend any money on this game.

[decarabiandivorce]

being nb is suffering

(special thanks to @windcarvedlyre for the joke / rough draft)

[dearvesper]

Hey, don’t you think it’s a coincidence that this year’s Father’s Day is in correlation with Venti’s birthday? Look.

Let me rant.

The fact that it’s also Venti’s birthday is no coincidence to me, because Venti is technically a “father” in a sense.

I would like to add more photos where Venti was actively playing his role as an archon but the sources are a little difficult to find again because they’re mostly statements and quotes from the game.

Although not a “father” in a literal sense, we can safely say that he is a dedicated god to Mondstadt, and looks after them in a way a father would. He dotes on them regularly, as seen many times in various events and quests such as with the case of Klee or Sister Grace in Kaeya’s hangout event. He thinks of Mondstadt as his children and actively does what he can to help from the sidelines, and bring about little changes of hope.

He also values his children’s wishes and never tries to dilute or shame them for it, regardless of how “childish” it might look as seen in Klee’s case, showing that he viewed them as growing individuals, not people deserving to be punished. Speaking of such things, Venti was also betrayed several times by his children like the Lawrence clan straying from their oath to freedom and rise to tyranny, and from Signora despising him and outright disrespecting him while stealing his Gnosis. Yet, he had so much graciousness to still consider them children of Mondstadt, and that takes a lot of strength than people might think. His love is unconditional and flows in everything he does for his people.

There were so many times when Venti had treated Mondstadt and the Traveler with nothing but kindness, but gets repayed and portrayed by the fandom as nothing more than a lazy drunkard or a “useless” archon. Venti is such an underrated character but gets awfully mischaracterized by the fandom and his character is understood as nothing outside of his alcoholism.

People can come at me for this but I partially blame Paimon for misleading people with the drunken bard jokes, and for the rest of the fandom for having NO media literacy to even scour for the actual lore of his character. I swear some people can be so dense-minded when it comes to characterization.

Going back to my point, I’m saying that if we just remove the close-mindedness to his character and look deep enough, we’ll see that Venti truly is a wonderfully written character on the inside and deserves much more than the treatment he’s getting.

Venti’s done so much for his people, and for that he truly deserves to be recognized as a father in this special day. I’m waiting for people to recognize this and maybe write or draw more content of him being a father figure to his children in Mondstadt.

Venti deserves the title of a father because he loves his children like one.

People I wanna tag just because: @ventisslut @carmendeiact2whenplz @windcarvedlyre @lanternlightss (feel free to share your thoughts in the tags!)

[vv-ispy]

Friend head pats too comfy, best cat-behaviour he can do right now is send a gentle breeze around his friend's braids and enjoy the way they dangle @windcarvedlyre

[mars-ipan]

Your character tags are amazing. I've seen 'ultimate bore', 'ultimate whore' and 'ultimate snore'; do you have any more rhyming with them?

Now I'm wondering who could get 'ultimate chore'. Probably Komaeda again.

i only have 4 rn. first was komaeda with “ultimate whore” bc i thought it was Funny Haha. following him was hajime with “ultimate bore”- a mutual provided me with “ultimate snore” which i immediately gave to chiaki. in an act of what i believe to be incredible cleverness i gave izuru the tag “ultimate bored”- like hajime’s tag but with just a bit more :)

[pekoposting]

The tag break really makes it because it creates the impression that she does hesitate but decides to fully commit. Fuck yeah take me to The Dawn Breaker

LMAOO tag character limit is good for something for once

[vv-ispy]

Gives my own Trying dnd knowledge a shot

100% on human bard Venti + 'yes and'-ing a super in depth and surprisingly cohesive backstory. Chaotic neutral. His spellcasting focus is his lyre (of course). Charisma is his highest stat (bc spellcasting) but he's also got proficiency in performance + persuasion. Also proficency in insight + perception. Also got high wisdom, good dexterity, average intelligence, constitution + strength dump stats. I imagine he has a pretty good split of utility + offensive spells, but less defensive/healing spells.

Zhongli..........dragonborn, I can see him being a paladin. Lawful good. An expert in the game lore but his own character's backstory could use some work. His character fights "for the good of the people" but that's never expanded on. Highest score constitution, then wisdom, intelligence, strength, then dexterity and charisma. All his ability scores are pretty good though he rolled really well on his initial scores. Defensive spells mostly + some offensive + one healing. Definitely proficency in history, but also....hm, investigation? Survival? idk. Traveler dm's nightmare bc he got all those good ability scores aND he rule lawyers technicalities. He knows the rulebook better than the traveller.

Ei just. no spieces. Lawful neutral. Actually she's probably some homebrew robot that the traveller eventually accepted. Fighter for sure, with dueling fighting style + champion archetype. Highest score dexterity + strength, then constitution, intelligence(built very human robots herself even if she had blueprints), charisma, then wisdom(sorry ei but the lockdown was Not a wise choice). Also very little backstory from her other than she's seeking to perfect her martial abilities. Proficient in athletics + acrobatics + intimidation + religion (bc of 'eternalty closest to heavily principles')

Nahida I can see as a halfling wizard! Lucky creatures + smol. Neutral good. Her backstory....I'm imagining it like Elizabeth Comstock from Bioshock, trapped in a tower but with all the books she could read, and the party released her! So now she's a skilled wizard who wants to learn everything she can about the world! Highest score wisdom + intelligence, but none of her other scores are particularly high. Decent charisma + consitution, not doing too well on dexterity (her character is endearingly clumsy) or strength. Surprising amount of offensive spells, but also utility spells like 'identify' or 'fly'. Proficency in history + nature + arcana + perception. Her character is a bit overspecialized in the intelligence/wisdom areas but boy is she effective there

Furina theater kid.......I can see her having fun with it and being any spieces really. Or any class. She's in the game for the fun and the roleplay. Maybe druid for 'ability of water is to take any shape' and shapeshifting animals lol??? Otherwise I can also see her being a bard. Or warlock for 'mirror self Focalors is her patron'. High constitution + charisma, intelligence, dexterity, wisdom, strength. Proficency in performance....and investigation + acrobatics + religion(killed a god)? I really don't know with her. I think she'd play chaotic evil for fun. Her character probably acts true neutral though. She's also got a very in depth backstory, and the best actor + voice actor in the group. Puts SO much effort into acting as her character, she shifts into a whole other disposition during the game. Can write a twenty page analysis behind each decision her character makes from roleplay to the actions she takes in battle.

Alright now I gotta ask....................what class and spieces do each of the archons play for dnd and how much of a headache are they for DM traveller

My dnd knowledge is not good enough for this haha.

Venti's always a human bard. He just gives each character an increasingly wild rollercoaster of a backstory that gets updated on the spot to 'yes, and' people multiple times over the campaign. A lot of them feature tragedy and/or a fall from power for some reason.

Zhongli would be totally unpredictable, choosing whatever has useful stats for whatever ridiculous way he wants to exploit the rules this time.

I'm not sure what this would mean in terms of dnd races but Ei's character is always pretty much her. This roleplaying thing confuses her. Wasn't this about navigating a fictional adventure? Why are there so many steps before one even begins?

[noxiatoxia]

Hi! Are there any translation quirks regarding Nagito’s illnesses in his final FTE? Are there any references to it outside of his FTE?

Hi! Thank you for the ask! And sorry about the wait.

I assume by quirk you mean that if there's any extra info, or if something was translated differently/weirdly.

Regarding his illness in the final FTE, it is the same. Malignant lymphoma stage 3 with concurrent frontotemporal dementia. 6 months to 1 year life expectancy.

As for direct mentions of the illness outside of the FTE, I don't think so. The closest we get, I think, is this official (but non canon) story between him and Nidai during island mode.

I sadly don't have the Japanese version of the book on hand, and it's far more difficult to find manga online in the original language, so we'll have to settle for this and hope the translation is accurate.

Anyways, he outright says it was more from luck than illness, but I don't think that factors out illness. Especially if he was in the hospital almost daily.

If you just mean stuff regarding evidence for his illness, there's a few. Sorta. It's less outright and more like...it can be related, maybe.

Here's an entry from the SDR2 artbook:

Fair-skin. His skin is so pale that it's probably abnormal*. Don't say stuff like "Toast is a good choice for breakfast", he really should eat some white rice too.

*The word "abnormal" here is 病的, which means "sick of body and/or mind". Can be used to describe somebody who has a quality that is ill/abnormal/strange. Such as having an illness, or acting in a way that is excessive to a degree of abnormality. Obviously here it's being used to say he's so pale, he looks ill.

(By the way, if you can speak Japanese, the SDR2 artbook is a lot of fun. We get many great details such as: Komaeda's favorite food is bread/toast, his fashion sense is "edgy" and "avant-garde", his hood is likely custom-made to be a hardhat (this would explain why it doesn't lay flat in his sprites) and he obsessively cleans his bathroom after using it each time.)

Otherwise, on the topic of his FTD, I had a chat with @windcarvedlyre about some interesting tics in Komaeda's speech. I'll reiterate them here in hopefully a more concise manner.

Specifically, one could perhaps argue these to maybe be because of his FTD. For one, he is breathier and generally talks slower than Naegi. I bring this up as they both have the same voice actress, so it's definitely a deliberate choice Ogata made.

He also trails off a lot in speech. However, I have a hard time quantifying this because many characters not just in Danganronpa but Japanese media in general trail off constantly. I can say I think Komaeda is up there as one of the people who does it more often in SDR2, though.

And I think I've talked about this before but he uses a lot of filler words. I actually want to go into detail about this more. I don't know if I have before.

So, in Japanese...a lot of English learners are taught "uh" and "um" words are えーと etto, あの ano, その sono, ええ eeh, and so forth. This is true, for sure. But they aren't the only filler words. I think they're the most well known because JP to ENG dictionaries will readily tell you they mean "um" "err" etc. But others aren't really touched on in ENG dictionaries.

Specifically in Komaeda's case, he has a tendency to use "excessive" ね and さ particles. These particles are normal in Japanese speech, and reflect specific feelings and emphasis. But like any word, you can use them in a manner that functions more like a filler word.

However, context is important, as always.

I kind of see it like this: the way Komaeda uses ね and さ specifically reminds me of both Saionji and Koizumi's speech patterns combined.

Saionji uses ね a lot, probably as much as or more than Komaeda. In her case though, I wouldn't attribute it as a "filler word". To me, it reads more as a deliberate act to be cutesy/playful/youthful, and makes sense with her character.

Koizumi uses さ a lot very similarly like Komaeda. Strangely enough, the official English translation actually does go out of its way to occasionally translate this particle usage as "like" by her (e.g the line "this is like, really important!"), but not when Komaeda uses it.

Anyways, since these are merely being used as filler words, any sort of filler word fits. "Like" "um" "anyways" "so", etc.

You can make of these as you wish.

[organic-danganronpa-shitposts]

IMPORTANT!!!

hello everyone, i’m here to apologize about yesterday’s post.

i didn’t realize that there was real gore in the image, and i’m extremely sorry for that.

i was half asleep and panicking about missing my upload time again so i didn’t look that closely at the image, but that’s no excuse for what happened.

in the future i’ll make sure to always look closely at submissions to make sure there is nothing inappropriate or triggering in them.

once again, i apologize to anyone who may have been triggered or upset by the post.

thank you so much to @windcarvedlyre for bringing this to my attention, i greatly appreciate it.

and finally to the anon i’m very sorry for misunderstanding your ask and dragging you for how you spell yeah

hugs and kisses - jello

[plum-pudding-everywhere]

@popatochsp @mars-ipan @windcarvedlyre

[askjabberwock]

What’s Hajime looking for at Rocket Punch market?

(THANK YOU BOTH FOR THE ASK!!! tagging @windcarvedlyre for asking the same question!! <3)