#with a few mainstream exception

[lyss-butterscotch]

Sig playing power wash simulator :D

What about Moon? Would they play stardew valley?

I imagine Pebbs playing some sort of shooter……. like ultraki-

Suns seems to be one to play games with a medieval or Japanese theme. Yknow, cause.. honor…

Core im like diving into my brain files and remembering what kind of personality i gave each of them to answer this jfnbdnnd

Moonie

Moon would love calm comfort games or games with great stories.

She defo would love stardew valley and is the kind of person to make pretty paths and dedicated patches for each crop even if they dont yield the most profit. Would also buy hats and ask someone else to go to the mines because shes out of stone to make paths :(

Other games i think Moon would vibe with is Sky Cotl, Minecraft, Gris, Spiritfarer, Slime Rancher, Animal Crossing, Stray, South Scrimshaw, etc.

Pebbsi

Pebbles i think enjoy strategy games, ones that can be optimized to oblivion or tryhard. But also has like a certain stardard for it, either it has great mechanics or unique artstyle that catches his attention.

Games he probably vibe with is Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Don't Starve, Ultrakill, Celeste, Elden Ring, etc.

Nishelin

Sig definitely loves games that can hold his attention for a long time (either gameplay or lore) or elicit strong emotions from him COUGHragegamesCOUGH. Doesn't really matter what genre.

I think Sig would vibe with Ultrakill, any rhythm games, FNAF, Minecraft, Roblox, I'm on Observation Duty, Cuphead, any of those games that gives you an empty drawing with numbers that tells you what colors go where, all those satisfying games, etc.

Sunnydew

Suns as the arts kid in the group would love games with unique artstyles and also genuine and deep lore or world building. They'd also love games with a lil bit of a challenge.

I think theyd vibe with Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Disco Elysium, Inscryption, Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring, Little Nightmares, etc.

[ventique18]

How it feels being a player of the niche game Twisted Wonderland, whose overall quality is stable, when you see players of mainstream games complaining about powercreep and shit storytelling and gooner fanservice

Because the gameplay and monetization practices are already dogshit from the beginning we don't really have expectations lmao. But the one thing we have against everyone is that the story actually has depth, has a message it wants to convey, and the cards are always beautiful except for a few odd ones. Every new release only fuels our love for the boys.

I'm the number one twst shill, but if you're even a bit critical of writing styles, you'd know it tops majority of the long-winded, pretentious storytelling word slop the other gacha games have lol.

Comparatively, twst is simple. Simple, but really gets its point across in the least amount of words possible while still keeping the execution engaging. Schools teach us KISS (keep it short and simple) for a reason lol.

[ellcrys]

wow slow season i guess literally the only thing that vaguely caught my eye was zom 100 lol

[lostwysteria]

Ya'll asked and ye shall receive!

Part 1 of Homemaker (Hero Lin Ling)

Masterlist

Lin Ling never expected to gain Trust as a child. He’d taken up babysitting as a way to help his parents. He’d noticed how tired some parents were after work and this started cleaning and cooking for them as well. He’d gained a reputation and soon he gained Trust.

Homemaker was what he was being called as his hero name. He was a local name even as an adult. His Trust Value would be that of the 500th rank, if he were mainstream.

He had a real job making advertisements for Treeman. After work he donned his white head hanky and his apron and took care of whatever children and homes he was called to that evening.

Well, he had a marketing job. His boss was an absolute asshole and had fired him for a very petty reason. Exhaustion dragged at his mind as the years of his double life caught up to him and he found himself on the roof of his former workplace. He was actually debating on whether to jump or not before he gaped as Nice floated down like something out of a manhua.

The next few minutes were a blur of Nice walking off the roof and Ling grabbing his cape, falling after him, and getting saved by the hero he was trying to save.

That somehow led to him getting a lapful of hero on a different roof blocks away. Said hero was crying about not wanting to be a hero anymore and about how Lin Ling saved him nearly at the cost of his own life. No one had ever cared so much! Except his boyfriend, but don't tell anyone. It's a secret.

A security guard that Ling knew was gaping at the two of them. Ling recognized him. He watched the man’s twins every once in a while. The security guard took a picture. “Don't worry. I’ll only post the bare minimum. I won't out him.” He waved jauntily before walking off. The man was a bit of a shit and Ling was the only one who could handle his spawn.

…

Local Hero Forum:

Kerex: At work today Nice landed on the roof with a small-time hero from my neighborhood, Homemaker. Homemaker saved his life, apparently.

*Attached to the post was a picture of a crying Nice in the lap of and clinging to a brown haired man. The man had Nice’s cap draped over his head due to a messy landing and scramble to get into said lap. It looked like he was wearing a headkerchief. The man was also clearly petting Nice’s hair in comfort, a tender, caring look on his face. In full Hero mode, apparently*

[ohnoitstbskyen]

What do you think of Fighting Game character designs, in how their appeal functions to people when selecting characters?

Very broad question - not sure there's a single answer, honestly. One thing I will say is that "appeal" seems to often still mean something much more interesting in fighting game design than it does in, just picking a random example out of a hat for no particular reason, gacha games.

In gacha (broadly speaking, of course there are exceptions) "appeal" in design is largely constructed along lines of beauty. So a very limited range of bodies, a very limited range of facial and physical features, and generally a high focus on elaborate costuming, flashiness, sleekness, "coolness," cuteness, etc. The commercial foundation of the genre, the need to induce the players to roll extensively for a new character, creates a design pressure to reach for lowest common denominators of appeal in order to produce "successful" designs within its metric of measurement.

In fighting games, more commonly, "appeal" is understood to take a much broader range of forms. There is the appeal of the beautiful and the sexy for sure, and in fact I think fighting games often do some of the best horny, sexy, thirsty, kinky character designs in gaming. But there is also the appeal of the monstrous, of the fucked-up and the weird. I think of Dr. Faust who is one of the few characters from Guilty Gear that I know, for example, or characters like Dhalsim and Blanka from Street Fighter, or Double and Painwheel from Skullgirls. Fighting games, generally, get more benefit from having a broad and varied roster with high diversity of character shapes and sizes, and can often dip into caricature and exaggeration in a way that things calculated for broader appeal just can't. They are more likely to let you play as a fucked up ugly weirdo, and also to revel in their fucked-up ugliness and weirdness, to enjoy it rather than play it for abjection and disgust.

Fighting games tend to go hard on strength and power fantasies, obviously (although not always - hello Dan from Street Fighter), which creates its own set of constraining genre limitations on its design space, but broadly speaking when I see character design from fighting games, I tend to see a much broader and more interesting range of ideas on display than I see in a lot of other mainstream and especially triple-A gaming.

That being said, with the major caveat that I am not a fighting game expert or deeply dialed in to the genre, I feel that fighting game rosters in more recent years have felt more and more like they, too, are bowing to the pressure of the gacha design wave, and more and more prioritize beautiful/cool characters wearing elaborate costumes over other, more interesting ideas, and fall more and more into the same narrow ideas of sex appeal.

That's just a vibe, though, not a serious criticism of the genre, I might be entirely off base with that.

[sassylittlecanary]

Happy Pride! Time to talk about how DC still hates Midnighter and Apollo despite occasionally holding them up as flashy tokens to say “Look, we do have queer superhero couples! We’re so progressive!”

Perhaps the most insulting thing about DC wanting credit for having such groundbreaking queer superheroes is that Midnighter and Apollo weren’t even DC characters during their most creative and successful years. They were created by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch in 1997 in Stormwatch, published by Wildstorm Comics, which was then an imprint of Image Comics before being purchased by DC a year later. DC didn’t create their success or foster their status as pioneering gay superheroes (that was all due to Wildstorm’s independent and edgy creative team)—if anything, DC fought against it. In 2000, DC vice-president Paul Levitz infamously censored a kiss between the couple because he felt they were “making fun of Superman and Batman.” (It was only a few years later, during Levitz’s presidency at DC, that he apparently didn’t have a problem with Brokeback Mountain jokes in Batman/Superman comics, but that’s another story). And that, really, is the crux of it. DC hates Midnighter and Apollo not because they’re gay, but because they’re gay pastiches of DC’s two most iconic heroes. Progressive as modern DC can be, it’s hard to believe they’ve truly gotten over their discomfort about Midnighter and Apollo’s unsubtle and satirical origins.

There’s also the fact that while the New 52 screwed over basically everybody, it began the DC tradition of absolutely destroying everything good and interesting about the former Wildstorm Universe. Yes, DC gave Midnighter a solo book and then a miniseries he shared with Apollo that centered their romantic relationship (one written by a gay man, no less) but those were still lackluster efforts when contextualized with the fact that the DC versions of these characters are heavily sanitized and depowered, barely a shadow of their former selves (especially Apollo). Wildstorm (in spite of DC rather than thanks to DC) made them the first gay couple to get married in comics and gave them an adopted daughter during an era when gay adoption rights were even more hotly debated than they are now. Post-Flashpoint, DC then broke them up, eventually let them get together again, and then basically stopped using them (and then when they did, like in Superman and the Authority, Apollo thinks Midnighter’s cheating and he’s doesn’t really deny it). A far cry from their glory days as devoted husbands and co-parents in the 2000s! Now they usually only appear in Pride specials, and even then it’s either “we’re using them for laughs and also Apollo’s the housewife teehee” (2025) or “Midnighter’s there but Apollo’s not despite them sharing a cover” (2021). They’re given no mainstream exposure, no meaningful character development, no creative endeavors.

Compare this to Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn being literally everywhere, Batwoman and John Constantine getting TV shows, and regular comic appearances (including solos) by characters like Alan Scott, Renee Montoya, Tim Drake, and Jon Kent. Many queer DC characters are both beloved and profitable. DC’s lack of real interest in Wildstorm’s legacy aside, their underutilization and sanitization of Midnighter and Apollo outside of using them as queer-friendly props when it’s convenient seems to indicate that the old resentment over “lol look we did Batman and Superman except they’re different and gay” really hasn’t died. Their legacy carries baggage that DC editorial isn’t willing to handle.

[mar64ds]

Canonically aroace character highlight: Thomas Saggs from Toontown Corporate Clash

When it’s time to name a list of aromantic characters, I feel like most people always mention the same ones and miss out on many aro characters that exist out there. Hell, I feel like most people ignore even some of the best ones, like Sakuko and Takahashi from Koisenu Futari or Tomoko from Konya Sukiyaki Dayo, in order to favor characters that are more “mainstream”.

There are plenty of aro characters that I’d like to discover as well. Today, I’d like to highlight a less known canonically aro character that is ACTUALLY written to be aro IN the story. They are aroace, but I will focus more on their aromanticism here:

Toontown is a MMORPG, I think it needs no introductions. I am a Corporate Clash player specifically, I was very interested by all the different characters this version of the game offered. But I’m not here to talk about the lore now, I’m just here to talk about one particular character: Thomas Saggs, the C.O.O.

All the lore context you need to know is that toons fight corporative machines called “cogs” or “suits”, and the boss of these cogs is called The Chairman, or Robert.

Thomas (he/they) is a quiet and introverted cog, the only cog that you do not fight in the game at all. When you are able to meet up with the character, all you do is stand there for 20 minutes while you listen to them talk about work, family or anecdotes about coworkers. Thomas doesn’t talk a lot in your first meetings, but opens up more each year (it’s an event that happens every April 1st, they’re a recurring character). Thomas is the C.O.O. of the company, due to the fact that he is The Chairman’s brother, they kind of started the company together. Thomas was originally going to inherit their parents’ company, but that was not the kind of life he wanted to live, so he decided to follow his brother instead (who cut off his parents due to mistreatment).

Thomas doesn’t like being the center of attention, they don’t really care much about businesses, Thomas just wants a calm life, with a nice calm job, next to his brother, who they really really care about. They also like taking care of their plants, he is very attached to them.

That's great but where is the aro part? Well, as Thomas starts opening up to the player, from time to time he says some interesting things...

Thomas states from time to time that they have never been in a romantic relationship, they do not wish to be in one and is really confused with how everyone acts when it comes to romance. For example, he doesn't get why people care about romance gossip, because he doesn't judge people on who they like. But again, he states that they don't really know much about romance anyway.

Thomas talks about this topic so many times that it was definitely not meant to be a one time comment. No, the great thing about Thomas is that their aromanticism is actually and genuinely a HUGE part of their character. Being aspec is not just a fun fact you can read about in the wiki or in a random tweet, Thomas IS intended to be written as aspec and their aroace identity impacts their WHOLE life. Even when they're not talking about being aroace, being aroace is STILL something that is a part of him.

Thomas was only truly confirmed to be aroace a few months ago, but the character has ALWAYS been aroace. You know what's more important than just saying a character is aspec? Actually WRITE them as aspec! Even before being 100% confirmed, Thomas was already a way better aroace character than many others who were just 'confirmed' outside of the story

Going back to the game, a big conflict in Thomas's life is his sister in law, Crystaline. Thomas is very kind and finds the positive side in everyone... except Crystaline. And it's not because he hates her for no reason, she's stated again and again to be a pretty selfish terrible person that will probably become a villain later on in the game. But she is married to his brother, and ever since they have been married, his brother spends way less time with them, he talks to them less, etc and this is VERY difficult for Thomas

The topic of being alone vs being isolated is explored so wonderfully with this character. Thomas really DOES like being alone, they find it peaceful and nice. Thomas usually spends their days alone with their plants. They adore talking to his plants and taking care of them, that's honestly all he really needs in his life. It's so awesome to see a non-partering aro character that is genuinely happy being alone, and I even headcanon them as aplatonic too, given the fact that even if he spends time with other cogs from time to time, they dont really have any deep bonds with anyone aside from his family

Which, speaking of, the topic of being isolated BECAUSE of amatonormativity is also so well written. Yes, Thomas likes being alone, but they do NOT like being abandoned by the world, ESPECIALLY by his brother and it's BECAUSE they are aromantic and everyone is 'supposed' to value their romantic relationships more. This really hurts them!

Thomas is all around a very endearing character, even if he works for the bad guys they are constantly portrayed as kind and nice, again literally the only cog that NEVER fights you. Thomas is beloved by the players and constantly portrayed as sympathetic in the story. Their aromanticism and asexuality is never demonized, and if you're worrying about 'ok but they are a robot', ALL the other robots in this game ARE allo (well hopefully not all of them) and they live in an amatonormative society. They are NOT aspec because they are a robot, this trope does NOT apply in this world. PLUS, the game let's you, the player, wear aro and ace outfits, like bows and capes with the aro or ace flags. The game CLEARLY cares about portraying a good aspec character and story cause it CARES about aspec people

Thomas is a character that is VERY very important to me and I am really attached to them. The day he was confirmed to be 100% canonically aroace was the best day of 2024 for me, not even kidding. I even made an unscripted video about this just cause of how happy I was

And I was really hoping that after these news more people would find out about the character! You don't need to care about toontown or play 1000 hours of the game to simply know and appreciate this character, I just wanted people to know and talk about them! But aside from toontown fans I have seen NO ONE care about this. It has been SILENT everywhere else.

The more mainstream characters get celebrated all the time, we need to also celebrate the less mainstream ones, that's what I wanted to do today!

Anyway, if you have read all of this, thanks! And I'm sorry, I'm just normal about this character

[paarksunghoon]

sometimes i think about street racer jake… reader is the race starter girl in the new city jake just moved to.. y/n used to be a nerd in high school, but jake always remembers faces, which is why he makes sure to win every race that night going forward until he ends up fucking reader in his car…

lol meant to make this maybe 2-3 paragraphs buuuut I struggle to keep things short. for u, anon <3

***

okay but can you imagine that maybe you two went to the same high school in a small town and graduated the same year, which means the two of you spent 4 years in close proximity.

perhaps you were a nerd in the sense that it’s the category people would put you in because you tended to like non mainstream things and enjoyed spending time by yourself instead of partaking in school activities. most of the time people would see you hanging out by yourself or with the same few friends.

it’s not that people really confronted you about it. rather, you stayed underneath the radar and chose to focus on your life instead of boasting about high school superlatives.

thing is, jake always had a thing for you. he’d probably be someone who was kind of popular because he was pretty, even at the age of 16, but his confidence fell short when it came to girls. eventually, the two of you graduated and separated ways until you meet him years later at a street race.

he’s always loved the thrill of racing and this excitement only accelerated when he saw you waving the checkered flag before it was time for him to drive. he won that race and ended up seeing you at another.

jake learns that you’re a friend of a friend and you’ve grown out of your timid shell. you’re still quiet but only because you choose to be. he’d be lying if he said his crush on you went away and somehow he finds himself talking to you to catch up since most of his wins involve his friends taking him to a bar to celebrate.

except this night, jake foregoes the bar and listens when you tell him about everything you’ve been up to since he last saw you. somehow this ends up with him confession and you kissing him like you’ve wanted to since you were 16.

the sex is hot, both literally and figuratively. his windows are steamed up and the coolness of the glass only heightens both of your pleasure. his car shakes with every thrust and jolt, and he’s sure to make this a memorable night for you if it’s the last thing he does.

[weaselandfriends]

The Making Of: Fargo

Today, May 4 2025, is the tenth anniversary of when I started Fargo! To celebrate, here is a behind-the-scenes/retrospective on the work. Enjoy!

I. This Is Your Brain On Anime

I started writing Fargo at the lowest point in my life. I'd been watching anime.

For years, I'd managed to not watch anime. Sure, there was Pokémon as a kid, and to a lesser extent Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh. And as a preteen cinephile who followed the Oscars, Spirited Away's Best Animated win got me to pick it up on DVD. I'd later seen a handful of anime films that similarly carried cinephile credibility: other Miyazakis (Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke), Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Paprika. But I had always refused to watch anime anime. You know what I mean. The seasonal stuff.

In 2007, the final fringe of Wild West internet before Facebook changed everything, seasonal anime was exploding in popularity. A lot of this was due to sheer accessibility. No longer did you need to find a VHS release of some OVA or hope for a play on Adult Swim. Fan subbing and dubbing communities rendered more-or-less anything showing up in Japan available to worldwide audiences via a nifty new site called YouTube. This level of immediacy, combined with the niche tight-knit communities that governed the internet prior to social media, made following seasonal anime a social event. Week by week people posted reactions, reviews, theories, and memes, driving up engagement and rapidly expanding anime's reach as an entertainment medium.

The big breakthrough title in this regard is 2006's The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a massively influential show that changed the look and feel of mainstream anime for years. But my first brush with the anime community came via the following year's Lucky Star, by the same studio and with the same moe stylings. As I prowled the boards of Nintendo's official forum, Nsider, and its successor Nsider 2 (after Nintendo, in characteristically Nintendo fashion, annihilated the site from existence without warning), I found myself constantly bumping into people posting pictures of these four hyper-cutesy anime girls with candy-colored hair. They were everywhere. Teenage me took one look and came to an unshakeable and incontrovertible conclusion:

Only girls would watch this!

Saccharine aesthetic? Lack of plot? And, god, all of the characters are girls? Girl show. No doubt in my mind. Nah, none of this "anime" crap for me. I'll stick with real media, like Leprechaun 4: In Space (which I eagerly stayed up until midnight to watch on the SciFi Channel) and Eli Roth's splatterhouse classic Cabin Fever.

Then some devious motherfucker, I don't even remember who they were, told me something truly insidious, something that would haunt me for years to come. "Hey," they said, "what if there was a show like Lucky Star except they all killed each other with knives? Wouldn't that be awesome?"

And they recommended me Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.

(They showed me an AMV with a similar feel to this one to entice me. Unfortunately that original AMV is lost to history.)

I wound up bingeing the entire 50-episode show, in 10-minute chunks on YouTube, across a single 24-hour period. I couldn't stop myself. It was the same obsessive consumption that would infest me when I discovered Homestuck five years later. Obsession so intense that after I finished it, I immediately went crawling in search of more anime and devoured Death Note in another 24-hour span.

Emerging, blinking, back into the sun, I looked around and realized I couldn't go on like this. I couldn't plunge headlong, headless, into anime. I could not become the dreaded "weeb."

So I cut off anime. No more. As quickly as my drop into the abyss began, I ended it. And a few years later, when I went to college, I cut off the internet as a social experience altogether. No more forums, no more chatrooms. I was an adult. Time to do adult stuff, like read classic literature, write novels, and play League of Legends for 10 hours every day.

Despite how it sounds, college was a great time in my life. I enjoyed learning, enjoyed going to classes, enjoyed reading textbooks, enjoyed writing essays. And I was good at it, very very good—even with the 10-hour League sessions. I felt no need to reconsider anime.

Then I graduated.

Graduating college was like slamming face-first into a brick wall. My entire life until then had seemed to be building toward something. Academia is a series of stepping stones to more prestigious levels of academia (middle school! high school! college!) with a golden gleaming Adulthood at the end of the line, omnipresent. And I did it! My success in college got me a job, eight hours in an office five days a week, much better than anyone else in my post-recession cohort. Adulthood accomplished.

It was miserable. That gleaming paradise Adulthood was a sham. I was doing less work and less difficult work than at college but they were demanding I spend way more time doing it. All sense of fulfilment vanished. There was no longer progress, no bigger and better things on the horizon. I had nothing to hope for. I'd achieved the thing people tend to hope for, and THIS WAS IT. The notion that consumed me was that my life had slipped into overtime, a dead zone past its expiration date, treading water in misery. I also had a 90-minute daily commute in SoCal traffic.

My free time was cut down to a fraction of what it was in college, so no more 10-hour League sessions. I tried to maintain my schedule of reading 50 pages and writing 2,000 words a day, but I no longer had the time or energy, and it didn't make sense why I didn't have the time or energy, because I was doing things that were so trivial and easy compared to my college courseload. Work was an arbitrary time-wasting machine with nothing ahead except 40 more years of work. I wanted to die.

Despairing, seeking nothing save relief, I turned back to anime.

In a Skype groupchat I wound up in, there were two teenagers with their fingers on the pulse of the latest anime buzz. They were my guides back into this wretched world. First, I was served up Fate/Zero, which I consumed quickly (though not with the same leisure time to afford a 24-hour binge) before asking for seconds. I was then recommended Angel Beats. Okay, I said, typing Angel Beats into YouTube, which seven years after Higurashi I still assumed was the main way to watch anime. The first result I got was called Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan. Aha, I said. Angel Beats, Bludgeoning Angel, I know what this is. It's an alternate translation of the title.

It's the kind of comedy of errors that could only happen to someone who timewarped directly from 2007 to 2014 with complete ignorance of the intervening years. Angel Beats, of course, is a tearjerking Key show about students in the afterlife coming to grips with their tragic deaths. Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan is about an angel repeatedly bludgeoning a boy because otherwise he will grow up and create a world where every woman stops aging at 10 years old—a so-called "Lolicon Paradise." (As someone who reads classic lit, seeing the bizarre cross-cultural route Nabokov's novel has taken always amuses me.)

When I started Bludgeoning Angel, I was a little uncertain whether I had the right show. Its tone didn't quite jive with Bingus and Bungus in the Skype chat. Hesitantly, I decided to react in chat to the first thing that happens in the show. "Haha," I said. "The angel really just killed that guy."

In a sadistic twist of fate, this is somehow exactly how Angel Beats begins, too. My friends responded as though everything was total normal, and I figured I must have the right show after all. Thus, I wound up watching the entirety of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, which becomes increasingly surreal, violent, and depraved as it goes on, and only learned my mistake after the final episode. That show probably tainted me forever.

Afterward, I watched the real Angel Beats (in my depressive stupor, it made me cry), Mirai Nikki, and the "only for girls" Lucky Star (it also made me cry). I was getting hooked. It was only a matter of time before Bingus and Bungus recommended me a true landmine. They did. "I think you might like this," Bungus said, tepidly, not exactly sure.

"Hit me," I said.

II. Puella Magi Madoka Magica

The League of Legends-induced timewarp that imprisoned me in college had the side effect of allowing me, in early 2015, to watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica completely blind. I hadn't the faintest idea what it was about, or even a hint of its reputation. Bungus said, "Watch it," and I watched it.

Believe it or not, this blindness backfired. Despite the sanctity people place on spoilers, expectations are a crucial component of the narrative experience. Unaware of what I was watching, I was not nearly as impacted by what I saw. The much-famed Episode 3 twist was nothing to me. Why? I was certain, absolutely certain, the death wouldn't stick. I felt extremely confident either Madoka or Sayaka would make a wish to bring Mami back to life.

Nonetheless, the show grew on me. The cute exterior steadily transforming grimmer was a Ratatouille flashback to Higurashi; there's something so delicious about how jaggedly the hyper-poppy upbeat OP jumpscares in the middle of increasingly hopeless situations during the show's back half. After 12 episodes and a movie I needed more. Not more anime. More Madoka Magica.

I didn't get it from the spinoffs, of which there were several even then, most of which I knew nothing about. Instead I went looking for it on more familiar terrain, another relic of my 2007 timewarp: fanfiction-dot-net. This is where people go to engage with media fandom, right? I hit up the Madoka page, sorted content by number of reviews, and got this:

Well, sort of. Fargo wasn't there yet, obviously. The other five were, in this same order. I opened To the Stars, read a chapter or two, found it impossibly boring and nothing at all like the show, and discarded it. Resonance Days, A Happy Dream, and cat's cradle [sic] all looked like shipfics, which was not my speed. That left one fic, which I would read in one day home sick (legitimately) from work, one fic that would prove massively influential on the idea for Fargo I didn't yet have.

Puella Magi Homura Magica by Lestaki, despite its second-place position on this prestigious list (behind only a work once described by acclaimed guy-with-a-blog Eliezer Yudkowsky as the most prescient depiction of future warfare ever written), is a fanfic I have never heard anyone mention once in my now 10-year stint in the Madoka Magica trenches. Even in the subculture it is a blank of memory, which makes sense if you look at its publication and last updated dates. It came out May 24, 2011—barely a month after the show finished airing—and was unceremoniously abandoned, incomplete, little over a year later. It's easy to see the fic emerging in the frenzy of activity prompted by the show's immediate popularity, rising on the tide, and vanishing under the waves of works with more temporally dogged creators.

So what is it?

PMHM is a three-arc story set after the show (and ignoring, of course, Rebellion, which it predates). Its first arc focuses on the three-man band of Homura, Kyoko, and Mami as they prepare to fight against a "demon prince"—an exceptionally powerful, city-destroying wraith—that Kyubey predicts will be born in Mitakihara soon. The demon prince is so powerful that the trio cannot possibly defeat it on their own, causing them to soon be joined by a ragtag team of original characters, spinoff characters, and a contracting Hitomi. The squad butts heads, but ultimately manages to come together to destroy the demon prince when it appears.

The second arc revolves around an inter-city magical girl war. The Mitakihara girls, for reasons I don't fully remember, have to invade and defeat an OC magical girl warlord in charge of another city. Both sides amass allies until the final confrontation involves at least a hundred magical girls. At the end of the arc, the OC villain reveals she manufactured the war to put Homura in a situation where she would be forced to continually use her time-rewinding powers to save Kyoko and Mami (whom she has come to care for over the course of the story), which is part of the villain's plot to generate enough karmic potential that she can create a new Madoka-esque god. Homura is aware that every time she rewinds time, she is helping the villain usurp Madoka, so she's torn between saving her living friends and saving her conceptual girlfriend.

That's where the story abruptly ends, mired in a series of repetitive chapters where the villain keeps finding ways to kill Kyoko and/or Mami and forcing Homura to turn back time. (It seems the author trapped themselves in the concept of showing each timeline in detail and lost momentum fast.)

And that's where Fargo begins.

III. Williston

Fargo was not a conscious work. Unlike most of my fiction, it was not assiduously planned. It was not kicked around in my head for years before I started writing it. It was not drafted and redrafted. Fargo was a creature of instinct, and because of that even now I look at it with a certain sense of wonder. Both Chicago and Cleveland Quixotic originated with me examining Fargo, trying to see what made it so popular, and laboriously reengineering whatever I concluded was the cause (I was wrong both times).

It emerged in my head not as an idea, but a vibe. Frigid, frostbitten wasteland. A tough, take-no-bullshit magical girl, dead inside. She'd use a Gatling gun. Long brown coat.

I was 60,000 words into a draft of a story I'd been planning since I first read Homestuck in 2012, a story I was tentatively calling Soulstealer but would eventually call Modern Cannibals. But I didn't want to write it anymore. At work, I was still miserable. I wanted to write a work of misery. I wanted to write a miserable human being. I abandoned the Modern Cannibals draft despite how far along it was (I was at the scene where Z. rescues Kiki from Mitchum's party). I began, as if automatically, writing something else. It was the same surrender that had led me to anime in the first place. The path of emotional, intellectual least resistance.

It's probably because I was on this path that I wound up unconsciously borrowing so many structural and worldbuilding cues from Puella Magi Homura Magica, especially in the first arc, with the Williston archon substituted for the Mitakihara demon prince. It wasn't even a conscious decision to do what I had seen in PMHM; I didn't realize the overlap until later. I was putting onto page the last thing lodged in my brain, and that was it. At work, I'd recently learned about the homeless crisis in Williston due to the shale oil boom, and that wound up in the story too.

Basically every part of the first few chapters of Fargo manifested on the page without me having any idea what it would build to. When Kyubey told Sloan to go to Williston, I knew he was being deceptive, but I didn't know how, and certainly had not figured out his elaborate plot to defeat Homura yet. Ditto Omaha. Clair Ibsen as Sloan's detested rival was a name I flicked onto the page at random (combining Clair, the gym leader from Pokémon, with Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian playwright, because I figured a character from Minnesota should have a Scandinavian surname). The girl, unnamed, who scuffles with Sloan in Chapter 1 was not yet Anoka; I had no plans for her to reappear, nor plans to make her relevant to how the Williston archon was born. When writing Chapter 2, I had no conception of Delaney or Erika (another Pokémon gym leader) as characters until I started writing them, at which point their personalities emerged, fully-formed, all at once. I didn't know Delaney's backstory, only that she was suspicious.

What made Fargo work is that I very quickly figured this stuff out.

Throwing these ideas and characters onto the board was like putting myself in an escape room, and the challenge then became to figure out how everything slotted together. It was around Chapter 4—which I had written fully before I started posting the story, and which was about the time I realized I actually wanted to go through with what was starting to shape up as a long and ambitious work—that I started seeing the connective tissue. Kyubey's plot came into view, as well as Omaha's role in it. (Hence why Chapter 5 begins with a scene involving Homura.) I figured out Delaney's backstory, though I hadn't yet figured out how she was part of Kyubey's plot yet. The end of the first arc formed in my mind: Erika dead, Delaney alive, she and Sloan en route to Minneapolis to fight Clair. I had the beginnings of an idea how the second arc would go; there was the ghost of an idea for a third arc, but that made the story seem impossibly long, so I wrote with the belief everything would end with Clair. By the end of the arc, when I had started thinking about Clair's goons, I had the idea for Anoka, and incorporated her into the Williston archon's origin story.

I think there are still signs of lack of foresight. The actual plot of Fargo's first arc is like the plot of a Legend of Zelda game. Go to three different places, fight three bosses, then go to the final dungeon where the final boss awaits. What the characters actually do, narratively, is spin their wheels in endless action sequences; all sense of progression is driven by the slow unveiling of Delaney and Erika's backstories, which recontextualizes them as characters, as well as broadening hints toward Kyubey's plot. And Sloan's gradual recovery from the precipice of despair, of course.

That last one was a mirror of the author. Fargo was an immediate smash hit of the kind I had never seen before; I was getting two to three comments per chapter, and they were good comments, too. Before, I hadn't even been able to beg friends and family to read my novels. (I once described the plot of a pre-Bavitz novel to my grandmother; she said, "That doesn't sound any good at all.") I expected obscurity, an obscurity reflected by the aggressively anti-SEO title I decided on as a joke (Fargo being a movie I don't particularly like, and the only real overlap between that one and mine being neither is actually set in Fargo). Receiving any reception at all was a miracle.

At the same time, I moved closer to where I worked, killing my daily commute once and for all. Time, energy, and hope were surging back into me. The dream I had always harbored of being an internationally-renowned author seemed to be finally coming true. Everything was looking up. Riding this momentum, I no longer worried about the ambitious length of my story. It was worth it. I was in for the long haul.

IV. Minneapolis

Clair's personality emerged as the natural foil to Sloan, the brutish, instinct-driven meathead: elegant, careful, intelligent, poised. It was my get-out-of-the-escape-room problem solving that led me to realize this made her similar to Kyubey himself; that connection inspired the plot twist that she was, in fact, a homunculus created by him, which turned into Delaney being a homunculus too. (In early Williston chapters, I repeatedly focused on Delaney's dead eyes to foreshadow her sociopathic turn; this pedestrian bit of description became eerily serendipitous for explaining how she changed her eye color with magic to hide its natural red.)

As an author, I myself was transitioning from Sloan-esque instinct to more careful and intelligent planning. I'd already come up with Anoka, but the other Minneapolis girls emerged in ways I thought would play well off of Clair, emphasizing her uncanny and aristocratic coldness. I entered the second arc with more elaborate plotting, where I would set up characters like chess pieces and knock them over in spectacular and fulfilling ways. It all centered around the Yaldabaoth fight, which was the first part of the second arc I came up with, in a first arc sense of unconsciousness: A massive monster of light, crawling across a city, chasing magical girls as they sped around in a car.

There were some speed bumps. This arc featured the only time while writing Fargo that I scrapped a scene and rewrote it; this being the Terminatrix's introduction, which originally showed her receiving her commission from Kyubey. I felt it was plodding and tedious compared to her current introduction, which remains highly popular. (As a side note, Puella Magi Homura Magica also includes a character whom Kyubey pays to kill magical girls he doesn't like.)

Otherwise, though, I was locked in. Everything just worked. I came up with an idea for a character or a plot twist and it made perfect sense with what I had already established. It was like magic. It was effortless. I was reading literature again, too, after a year away from it; my prose improved as a result. There is unparalleled exhilaration in growth. It was like academia all over again, where I learned new things day after day and always seemed to be ascending to some better place. I started imagining future greatness. It wouldn't stop here. Fargo was just the start. My next work would be even better, would be read by more people. (Modern Cannibals remained bouncing in the back of my mind.) It wouldn't be long before I was breaking out of the internet and into the real world. They'd be talking about me...

V. Mitakihara

Why did Puella Magi Madoka Magica mean so much to me?

Because, as I mentioned, it didn't leave an immediate impact. A lot of what I look at now as masterstroke storytelling—Mami's death, or Rebellion in general—I first watched insensible, uncomprehending, somewhat blandly being washed over. Only a few months prior I had watched Lucky Star, a work that would heavily inspire one of my future stories (Cockatiel x Chameleon), and was profoundly and immediately emotionally affected by it in a way I almost never am. I cried at its conclusion. There was something unbearable and tragic in the ending of such a nice world, no matter how inoffensive that ending was; in the banal high school life it depicted, I saw reflected what I had lost forever, been sealed away from on this side of Adulthood.

(Which explains why my mindset on it changed so radically from when I was an actual high schooler, its ostensible target demographic.)

I didn't have a similar reaction to Madoka Magica. I liked it, for sure, but it was not an emotionally harrowing experience for me. Yet it grew in my mind, in ways I didn't consciously understand. It kept crawling, kept forcing me to think about it, until there was no option but for me to drop what I was doing and write over 300,000 words of fan fiction for it.

I never figured out the answer until a few years later, when I chanced upon a post someone made on Tumblr. "Okay," it said, in typical I-know-everything tone, "but can any of you tell me a single THEME in Madoka Magica?"

It made me think. What IS Madoka Magica about, beyond a plot-and-character level? The story, at least in the show, is so lean and tight that it lacks a lot of obvious signposting in this regard. It's easy to look at Madoka Magica and see a sharp story founded on a series of slick twists, with a banal hope versus despair angle for a bit of emotional punchiness. Regardless of whether you agree with that assessment or not, it certainly couldn't have been what I saw in it to make me so obsessed, right?

It's not even like Madoka Magica is a story that lends itself to fanfic, past the level of shipfic or slice of life AU. Its extreme economy of characters renders it vitriolic to expansion. Everything that matters in the world of Madoka Magica is happening in Mitakihara to five specific people. The system extends beyond them but in a useless way; magical girls in Osaka or Russia or Fargo exist, but they are doomed to irrelevance, doomed to die pointlessly. Every canonical Madoka spinoff falls into this same pratfall; the best involve the backstories of the main cast or past Homura timeloops, the rest fail to rise above sideshow.

I think what gnawed at me, what made me brute force a new narrative into this story that doesn't need one, was the reflection I saw in it. The Lucky Star kids with all their hopes and dreams and pleasant optimism tossed into the clanking reality of Adulthood, forced to work jobs with no point and no hope until they finally just died. The more I rewatch the show, the more I become consumed by a socioeconomic reading of it, the financial disparities between the characters (Hitomi, free from all of this, is rich; Madoka, the redemptive savior, is too—while Mami is faking it and Sayaka is shabbily middle class in a foreboding and monotone apartment complex, consumed by dreams of an upper-class recital she once saw), the conversations Madoka has with her parents (who tell her again and again what "being an adult is like," only to then give advice that is utterly unhelpful), the emotionless and mercenary way Kyubey dissolves all meaning in the universe to a system of pluses and minuses.

Unconsciously, the socioeconomic aspects of the original story emerged in Fargo with even more exaggeration: Sloan is introduced in terms of her outrageous poverty, everyone else is on the economic fringes (prostitutes, drug dealers), and only Clair lives in a state of financial stability. (There's a sideplot in the Minneapolis arc where she plans to gentrify the city by rooting out its Ramseys, all in service of creating a model community to show off online.) Sloan pursues monomaniacal revenge for a betrayal she suffered at Clair's hands, but the crux of the reader's disdain for Clair lies in the unctuousness of her wealth and the disposable way she treats her employees. Plus, there's the plaid-shirted workers who osmose around Williston, silent as they fall into pits and keel over dead on the streets, parts of an economy founded on resource extraction not all too dissimilar from Kyubey's own system (though he, ironically, wonders at one point why humans would get so up in arms over such a "primitive energy source").

Sloan is a have-not and Clair is a have, so there's an innate sympathy for her in favor of her archnemesis, on top of the innate sympathy readers have for protagonists over antagonists. This all sets the stage for what is in my opinion the best part of Fargo, its third arc, where the story's thematic elements come together in more interesting and subversive ways. It's all predicated on Sloan's quest for revenge having been faulty from the start, her motives much less ironclad than they first appear and her bullheadedness making her the perfect pawn in Kyubey's schemes.

The best aspect of the third arc is how Sloan is irrelevant. Seeing the outcome of her self-absorption cuts her off at the knees, and she has to grapple with the fact that the world is a lot bigger than her immediate purview. Ultimately, her role in the climax is tangential, a singular meaningful wrench tossed into a much larger machine that manages to prompt an unexpected positive outcome. She barely even factors into the penultimate chapter. (Fun fact: Chapter 41, Love, with its 10+ character POVs, was both directly inspired by Ulysses but also by a comment I got during the first arc hoping for more POVs with drastically different writing styles.) The emotional power of Sloan's arc stems from her coming to peace with her own inadequacies, both morally and in terms of greatness, and in that way she wound up being a mirror for me to the end, didn't she? In academia, I believed I was going to be someone important, and much of the existential dread of my workplace came from its boundless mediocrity. Fargo allowed me to come to terms with that mediocrity, both in the story and without; though much of that "coming to terms" was based on the new delusion that my popular fanfic would spur me on to mainstream literary success, a delusion I would not need to reckon with until after the minimal readership for my next work, Modern Cannibals.

This also explains my decision to frame Madoka's magical girl heaven as a giant office job. Though I would also defend that decision from a textual standpoint, given the esteem Madoka has for her company suit mother, and how she visualizes her mother as an example of "successful" adulthood in contrast to the cruel failure of the magical girl system.

Lastly, there's the instinctual level of things. All this socioeconomic stuff was not explicitly clear to me even as I was writing it; I didn't consciously think "Oh gotta make this about having a job." It just came out that way, an expelling of the self, the same way I unconsciously modeled some of Fargo's structure and worldbuilding on Homura Magica. The same way, I suppose, I modeled the emotional thrust of the story on Madoka Magica. A bleak downward spiral of misery and death culminating in a sudden and unexpected redemption. When, as a teen, I watched Higurashi, I remember being bowled over by its unexpectedly happy ending. I'd never seen anything like it, not in something otherwise so macabre and pessimistic. As a teen, I enjoyed that ending as a subversion of expectations, an original and novel idea. As an adult, watching Madoka Magica, it held a lot more emotional potency, and that potency was, like everything else, unconsciously replicated in Fargo.

When I wrote that final chapter, I remember being utterly drained. The finish line was in sight and I had been doing this for a year, for 300,000 words, far longer than any other story I'd ever written until then. I remember feeling like my prose was sloppy, like I was stumbling right at the end, like the chapter was no good. But the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and now when I reread that chapter I see nothing wrong with its prose or technique. Even stripped bare, exhausted, that unconscious emotional core remained, and maybe that sense of being stripped down, so that nothing else is there but it, is what gives it so much power.

VI. Retrospective

There are flaws in Fargo. The prose is not always my best, and there are stretches that are clunky. In Chapter 3 I wrote a 5,000-word fight scene, and became possessed by the notion that all subsequent fights must be even longer, which led to some truly overlong combat sequences. There are a lot of continuity errors and mistakes, some small, some embarrassing (there's a scene where Clair tortures Delaney with boiling water and it's clear I had never boiled water before). And, significant to me, there is a lack of thematic complexity compared to my other works, with long parts of the story that aren't interested in meaning anything at all, at least overtly.

That last part might not really be a flaw, though. There is a singleminded focus on plot and character in Fargo, prompted perhaps by the unconscious way I wrote it, that was a major driver of its success. Nobody has ever complained about the continuity errors, either. At the end of the day, people might care a lot more about what comes from the heart, rather than what comes from the mind.

I'm glad, though, to be writing this retrospective on the heels of When I Win, an assiduously structured work with a lot of deliberate thematic potency that managed to achieve similar levels of success as Fargo. For a long time Fargo was a millstone around my neck. What I once looked at as the start of my literary rise started to seem like its peak. This work that I, its author, so poorly understood, could not replicate even when I tried, and yet was by far my most popular story... It was a terrifying prospect for a long time. Though a lot of detail in this regard should probably be saved for if I write a Making Of post for Chicago in the future. (Side note: Despite the prominent role Cicero and the Chicagoans play in the final arc of Fargo, with their own unresolved theater of worldbuilding, I had no intention of writing a Fargo sequel until after the "commercial failure" of Modern Cannibals.)

Even at the depths of my self-esteem, though, I never resented Fargo or its success. It's a story I like. It's a story with a lot to like about it. And, even if I don't fully understand it, it's a story that has a lot of myself in it.

Thank you, everyone, for reading.

The concept art throughout this post was created by Phetaritette, from whom a fan once commissioned art of the main characters. At the end of the Making Of posts for Cleveland Quixotic and When I Win, I talked about where I got the names of the characters from, but other than the two Pokémon gym leader names and Henrik Ibsen reference I mentioned before, most of the names in this story were dredged from people I once knew. The only other exceptions are Erika's surname, which comes from Frank "Doc" DuFresne from Red vs. Blue; Bloomington's surname, which comes from rapper Dennis "Ghostface Killah" Coles (who would be the primary template for the rapper Malkwon in Modern Cannibals); and Hennepin's surname, which comes from League of Legends pro player Johnny "Altec" Ru.

[radarsteddybear]

Ariadne "introduces" this fantasy author to her editor like "this is a very dear friend of mine. She's extremely reclusive; her book is very good, and I think you should publish it."

And her editor reads it because he does trust Ariadne's judgement enough to realize that there might be something there (though he is surprised about the genre) and he's like "you know what? I think we would like to publish this. When can we meet with this friend of yours?"

And Ariadne's like "You can't! Didn't you read my letter? She's a recluse! Sees nobody!"

And her editor is like "...ok...well, tell your friend that we're publishing her book. Have her sign these papers and here's the money for it."

And Ariadne signs the papers with her pen name and collects the money and hides her grin whenever she sees the book in stores and in people's hands.

The world doesn't figure it out until the turn of the next century when someone runs the works of Ariadne Oliver and [pen name] through a computer program that finds that they were likely written by the same person. The literary world is turned on its head.

I. LOVE. Ariadne Oliver.

[intimidaid]

hi for anyone that likes certain isekai and is also a shifter, i've been thinking about this concept for a long time now but i'm not patient enough to be some kind of immortal being to see it all 😭 so i'm sharing

mha, jjk, and maybe even demon slayer and chainsaw man could all be one world, just different times, with minor modifications

jjk: cursed energy is the start of Quirks as we know them, the majority of society just hasn't realised it actually exists yet. it's the start of the Quirk mutation, before it really gets any form. mha left the origin of Quirks really vague ("a baby made out of light suddenly appeared and then like three generations later the majority of people had Quirks!!!") so obviously even in 21xx we don't understand what Quirks really are. and people have always had a tendency to explain away scientific things they didn't understand/couldn't explain as "magic!! witchcraft!! energy!!" so it makes sense that they'd think it's "cursed energy" and not "human evolution leading to powers".

demon slayer (potentially): demon slayer (and you're gonna have to take this with several grains of salt because i know a lot less about demon slayer than the others) COULD just be a slightly later version of jjk. a lot of people are catching onto the existence of "demons" (spirits) and "demon slayers" (jujutsu sorcerers) but still not really understanding it all. same things, different names (possibly because of regional differences/slang), slightly different times.

chainsaw man (potentially): the very start of Quirks as we know them, a midpoint between cursed energy and the full mha system. the "devils" are just a mixed demographic of the few humans with the more advanced (mutant) Quirk mutation and the spirits/demons, or how Quirks became a thing (Pochita becoming Denji's heart would be his Quirk/him getting his Quirk).

mha: modern Quirks!! modern HPSC (a fully developed, mainstream version of demon slayers/jujutsu sorcerers)!! where did the spirits and demons go? i don't know, don't ask me.

i can 100% imagine this as the evolution of Quirks if you wanted to, for whatever reason, experience all of these animes in ONE reality as some kind of immortal being. i might actually script this for myself one day (since i don't have much interest in any isekai except mha), but for now, it's on the back burner.

[gingerteafairy]

𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧'𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 + 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬 masterlist

𝐣𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐞: 𝐜𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭

Your story with Jonathan began with the classic forbidden cliché: a psychiatrist falling for his patient. You didn't know you were being analyzed since you met him in the lab, but as he took notes on your characteristics, he began to fall for your complexity, your twisted way of being. He constantly showered you with gifts and specific compliments that he knew would get to you, keeping you attached to him. Despite being manipulative, Jonathan is unstable and needy, relying on you far more than you rely on him. He’s clingy, possessive, and jealous, often interrupting your routine just to pull you into a room and inhale your scent, soon convincing you to move into his apartment so he could continue his addiction.

𝐧𝐞𝐢𝐥 𝐥𝐞𝐰𝐢𝐬: 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚���𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩

Neil is definitely unconventional. You would have a deep and consistent relationship with him for a while, where you were Neil’s first choice to show a new film. Though he was a devoted cinephile, he would never belittle you for your movie choices, even submitting to watching silly mainstream films like Camp Rock, which he affectionately dubbed a "C-rank movie," a typical pun. Though he never formally asked you to be his girlfriend, he would cry in the middle of the night at the thought that one day you might leave him for some hot brainless gym blonde.

𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐲 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐫: 𝐡𝐮𝐬𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐝

Miller is quiet, to the point of being terrifying in how mysterious he is, but he notices every tiny detail about you. At some point, you stopped asking him about what he did, and he was grateful for that, comforting you with a “don’t worry, leave the problems to me.” Despite all the pampering and affection, Lenny saw you as a strong woman, someone who couldn't be broken by any jewel, and that was incredibly important to him in order for you to be his. His bodyguards would watch you 24/7, with the exception of the bathroom and dressing up time, which was strictly off-limits.

𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐟𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐫: 𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐝

Vulnerable, almost pathetic in some ways, forced to marry you by his father, the condition to inherit the company being that he would start a family. Being an emotional person, Robert would soon fall in love with you through your time together, learning that not everything could be solved with money. Still, he’d irritate you to no end, giving you $1,000 “to clear your head somewhere.” He would regret it later and buy you something to try to make up for it. Small steps.

𝐣𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐧𝐞𝐫: 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝

Jackson Rippner is dominant to the core, naturally drawn to a submissive girl, whether innocent or entirely attracted to that kind of thing. Being with him felt like walking a tightrope, a thrill for someone addicted to adrenaline. Public displays of affection and embarrassing situations in public places were common, as he used his charm to escape countless situations. Yet, inside his sick mind, he felt something human for you, attaching it to some cannibal analogy to not relate to simply love. It was too committed for him.

𝐫𝐚𝐲𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐞𝐨: 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥

Raymond keeps track of everything, including friendships, where he keeps track even more due to their frivolous nature. Every encounter is calculated. With you, however, it seemed different—rare moments, of course—and he would dare to spend a few more hours in your company, talking about stress and sharing some human warmth in this messed-up, superficial world.

𝐣𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐡: 𝐛𝐨𝐲𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝

Jonathan Breech is a case apart. He would treat you as the reason for his life, as you gave him a reason to live after his father’s death. At times, he would catch himself saying self-deprecating things in front of you, but you would quickly reprimand him. He would be upset if you said anything bad about yourself since he saw you as perfect in every way. After the near-death experience, he would want to live life on the edge with you, getting into situations that were sometimes dangerous. That was the most fun part.

[fairestbeard]

Why Fakrichie makes sense

I know when a lot of people in the bear fandom think about Neil Fak and Richie, they think comedically sexually charged banter but not actual flirting or possible romance.

One of the reasons is probably because Neil is accidentally a little bit annoying even though he is written to be a kind of comic relief character - a little bit cute, a little bit (or a lot) stupid and a little bit useful. Some people find his stereotypical-ness a little bit much and it doesn't help that he goes around complicating a certain matter.

The other reason, and I know a lot of people will hate to admit it, is the aesthetics of it. What it looks like. It's an unusual sight for a guy like Richie to be smitten with a guy like Neil Fak even in the queer world and especially in media and this is exactly why I eat it up.

1. Because woke

(Richie breaking the 4th wall for the first time while making his infamous announcement to the Ball Breaker nerds)

I love wokeness. I love woke shit. I love inclusion. I want to see all types of people and all forms of (adult and consenting) relationships on my screen. With Fakrichie, as with Sydcarmy, I know that the unspoken sentiments and unacknowledged theatrics of desirability politics is always obviously in play in different forms. And just so you know, everything is political. Everything you see in media plays a political role and there's no such thing as leave politics out of it (for those getting ready to yell at me lol).

I've always read Richie's announcement to the nerds as a way to subliminally convey to the public that some wokeness is going to go down on the show (which I'm still waiting for). Calling out the incel, 4chan, Snydercut crowd who expectedly would naturally be a part of the audience in that manner couldn't have been for nothing on a show where every interaction has several layers of meaning under the surface. It is also very interesting to me that this announcement was made by the most reddit bro-y character on the show as at the time (and still current messiah of the reddit bros). Talk about a perfect messenger.

The general assumption is that Jess is the one and obvious choice for Richie. This is because people tend to naturally favour more heteronormative relationships and Jess is the only woman Richie has really had a close friendly interaction with apart from ladies of the bear family. Also he's been known to be in and pursue relationships with women.

And Jess is fine. She's beautiful, intelligent, ambitious, driven, kind and all the good stuff. If it is the story they want to tell, it makes sense. It is perfectly normal and interesting. They fit aesthetically in the desirability hierarchy of things which makes them acceptable to the wider audience and there's nothing wrong with being acceptable.

However, personally, I don't think that is Richie's story. It's a good story but I don't buy it. Interestingly, the possibility of Richie and Fak being genuinely into each other is never brought up in mainstream discussions and even any suggestion is dismissed even though these two have had very sexually charged interactions throughout the seasons. Everyone just assumes they can't be doing anything else but trying to be funny. Because Fak is the exact stereotype of the fat, gluttonous, idiot comic relief character.

But what if they're not?

2. Richie is written as a queer character

You can't pay attention to Richie, in my opinion, and not see that this guy has a little sugar in his tank. I wouldn't imagine there's a lot of people who see Richie as a straight guy (except his subjects on reddit). I know I've seen a few posts and comments on other platforms pegging him as bisexual at least.

Richie is written as a common trope in my opinion. He is the queer guy whose struggle and character arc is based on his identity. He has built his entire identity around things that can be taken away from him but who is he, really? When you take away his being Mickey's best friend and Tiff's (ex) husband and Eva's dad, who is he? He keeps trying to hold onto being a fringe Berzatto and the ex who wouldn't let go or the dad who wonders if he is enough of a dad because deep down he has a hard time accepting himself for him. He is all of those things but his struggle to define himself based on these things points to a struggle to accept himself as something else that is a crisis for him.

He is portrayed initially as a homophobic and sexist character all the while displaying very homoerotic behavior. He seems very strangely fixated on Fak, showing very aggressive homophobic and simultaneously homoerotic displays to him. He's is a very old and unpopular queer trope; the guy who struggles with his sexual identity and manifests it as a violent aggression towards the person he's most attracted to. Even his baseline bodily mannerisms and the way he carries himself subtly hint that he's a little sweet on the inside even as he tries his hardest to display classic toxic masculinity on the outside.

3. The material is there

Even as we sydcarmys scream that the crumbs for that romance has been strewn around since S1, this has also been happening for Fakrichie. The same way a lot of people never see Fak as a viable love interest is the same way a lot of people deny seeing it with Syd. It's a classic desexualization of certain characters on TV as a way to diminish their personhood. Even us sydcarmys are guilty of this as well and vice versa, because there are layers and filters to desirability politics and what is being perceived and allowed in media.

Richie is strangely obsessed with Neil Fak in my opinion. He zeros in on him once he's mentioned in the episode, eavesdrops on his conversation with Marcus, sexually harasses and bullies him (think Adam and Eric in Sex Education), singles him out unprovoked when Carmy is telling the story about the scar he got on Mickey's 15th birthday, works with him on fixing the machine in the S1 finale with all that flirty compliment Fak was giving him about getting stabbed.

We see him carry Neil along as he improves on his own lifestyle, getting him to not say the banned words, making him wear suits like him and being sweeter and more encouraging to him as he learns to be a better person himself. He defends Neil when he makes the hilarious mirepoix mistake during service. All in all, this could be explained as him having a soft spot for Fak.

The curious case of Phil

This is the scene where I firmly clocked Richie as queer. There is a scene that is never explained further in Dogs (an episode which I find very exposing for both Carmy and Richie).

Remember this guy?

Phil.

There was never a real explanation for why this very short but insanely odd and charged interaction took place. The way this guy came by and made Richie clearly uncomfortable- calling him by his full name "Richard", the only time anyone ever called him that on the show with Richie mumbling a response not wanting to engage with him.

He looks clearly hurt by Richie's lack of acknowledgement and very abruptly walks away

Cicero of course notices the strangeness of the interaction and comments as much wondering whether Richie had ruined any of his property with his neglectfulness which Richie jumps on and explains in terms of what was happening between him and Cicero at that moment. What Richie never actually does is answer honestly what the real deal actually was between him and that guy. He just deflects.

Richie is been known to love to squabble. He's not afraid to get in a fight with anyone especially guys like him. But this guy? Crickets. He couldn't wait for him to get out of there. Why was that?

For me I read it as him encountering someone he had a secret with. He wouldn't acknowledge him because he wasn't ready to deal with that side of his identity. The DL queer man. If he had tried to have a conversation with him it probably would have been too obvious so he avoids it and so does the show.

Another thing I noticed was how the guy looked. Does he bear a resemblance to anyone else on the show? The chubby guy with a mustache? To me he looks like Fak in another font. Just a cleaner, more put together and a thinner version of Neil Fak. So not only that Richie might like men, he might actually have a type LOL.

I'm even suspicious of this interaction

I feel like it was awkward and charged for no reason. The way this guy kept beating around the bush with the subject as if he was going to say something more serious, only ending up just saying that he should have given Richie a heads up? The conversation felt like a waste of time to me (the only interaction I hated more than Claire's) which is why I started overthinking it. I feel like more was being said than what was said. I feel like they know each other way more than what is being shown here.

There may have been a hint that the Berzattos know him a little more than just the guy Tiff got with after Richie. Their relationship with Frank seems to go way beyond that based on this little sneak (now, of course, it could be a different person but what are the odds?)

However, whatever extent to this relationship is not known. In fact, the history of Richie and Tiff's relationship has been neglected through the storyline and that might throw some light on this. But the conversation feels weird to me. The way it seemed like Frank had more to say and Richie had his guard fully up. Frank commenting about his looks in the middle of this "important" conversation. He was talking to Richie like he knew him differently to what was assumed all along. Cornplating? Maybe. But it still seemed very strange and left a lot to be seen.

All of this is to say that there's enough material to explore Richie's arc as a queer man coming into himself and finding love in a relationship that has been there and has been fleshing out under the surface. Classic slow burn style.

4. Subverting tropes and stereotypes

A trope is a plot structure, theme, storyline, character trait, motif, or plot device that is commonly used in storytelling.

There are a million tropes you can find in the storytelling of The Bear. They deliberately lean in ever so slightly into those tropes with the aim of subverting, upholding, subverting the subversions and so on and so forth. There's so much going on in there.

The characters are also very archetypal, as expected, with some leaning ever so slightly into the stereotypical. Now the problem with stereotypes is not the image in itself, because characters like these actually exist, but in the perception and subsequent flattening of whole groups to that image, making the stereotype.

Not to wax too academical about it, I'm trying to say, for example, fat, gluttonous, goofy people do exist but fat people do not exist solely to be gluttonous and goofy. And there are many iterations of this but I want to focus on the fatphobia of it all and Fak for now.

Society and media has made fat people a subject of derision and the butt of jokes. It's like they exist in media only to make people laugh and to be laughed at, so much so that they almost seem to have no value as anything else. You see a fat person on your screen, you instinctively expect them to be comic relief. Then especially when they fit that bill, it is almost an absolute impossibility to also see them as people who could be an object of desire or adoration.

Sydcarmy has received pushback from the media simply because, in as much as they deny it, they can see the potential of them breaking out of a particular trope they love to see with a black female lead. They write unnecessary think pieces waxing lyrical about the beauty of complex platonic relationships because they do not want to see Syd as an object of Carmy's desire. They have to do this because one thing they can't deny is that Syd is objectively beautiful and believable as desirable.

But with Fakrichie, it's absolute crickets. I haven't even seen a just for fun article about the chemistry between them and if it means something, haha. And this is even after Ebon has kissed Matty on live television!! It's like Fak doesn't even exist. I saw a random post talking about the brotherly love between Richie and Fak and they didn't mean the Philadelphia kind. Sure, they've joked about "calling mom" and all that but I doubt (normal) brothers want to dry hump each other in the bathroom.

Now I'm not saying Fakrichie is absolutely a thing or have to be. Maybe all he's meant to be is a fat gluttonous goofy character. Maybe Storer meant for him solely to be a joke as per usual. Maybe all that flirting and tenderness is meant to be for the laughs after all, because fat people amarite?

But imagine if it wasn't a joke. Imagine if Storer set this up to shake things up by making them real lovers. Imagine if a character can be fat and even goofy and still be an object of desire and adoration to another objectively beautiful main character. Imagine if this wasn't some fucked up queer bait (maybe alongside an equally fucked up straight bait) but a real slow burn love story simultaneously happening.

Goofy? Nah, I think, iconic!

[imahgined]

the rosy blog project - episode 1:

꒰ঌ intro + pt. 1 on how we made 2024 actually feel like 2014 ໒꒱

hiiii sweethearts! ໒꒰ྀིᵔ ᵕ ᵔ ꒱ྀི১

welcome to the first episode of the rosy blog project! i’m andrea, but you can call me roseate. i'll be your host to this dreamy corner of the internet, where we celebrate all things feminine and inspiring.

this project is my way of reviving the iconic rosy blog era here on tumblr. in the 2010s, life felt slower, filled with hobbies, fashion, beauty tips, boybands, fandoms, iconic tv shows, and bubbly playlists. here, we'll savor the little things that made us feel connected, feminine and creative!

༊࿐ ⊹ ˚. part 1: what was the rosy blog era?

just in case you weren't around on tumblr in the early 2010s, rosy blog content focused on the years we spent hours reading glossy magazines like teen vogue, watching our fave youtubers, and scrolling through dreamy blogs. the rosy blog style was unapologetically girly. it embraced soft pinks, cream tones, and everything feminine. it was all about finding joy in the little things, like curating playlists, buying self-care products, and creating a space that felt uniquely yours.

༊࿐ ⊹ ˚. part 2: my take on how we made 2024 really feel like 2014

from the beggining of the year, i saw so much content on ig and tiktok from people begging to bring back 2014 vibes in 2024. i definitely believe that, collectively, we made it happen. this will be a series of a few blog posts breaking down this year's best moments and how everything felt like the rosy blog era.

section 1: music and pop culture

ariana grande in her wicked & eternal sunshine era: she literally embraced everything we loved from her yours truly era and reinvented it to fit her glinda role. the looks we got from her were super feminine, elegant and classy. seeing her like this reminded me so much of her gorgeous 2010s aesthetic. also, her eternal sunshine album was insanely good. the dreamy vocals felt like a new era that revisited her feminine side from her first album. last year, we even had her yours truly live sessions. inmaculate vibes!

madison beer slowly becoming viral again: i've been a fan of madison ever since i discovered her. this year, i got so excited when her song make you mine went viral. the techno style and her beautiful voice reminded me of some of her earlier songs, even a bit of i won't let you walk away. she’s so talented, and back in 2014, she was all over tumblr. i hope she finally gets the recognition she deserves!

fangirl nostalgia: during the 2010s, you were either a 1d, 5sos, jb or btr fangirl (or all of them at once!). so much has happened this year with our faves—jb having his first child, btr touring again—it’s been a beautiful revisit of the memories we made in those fandoms. and the best part? we continue to create new ones by supporting them into their adulthood. (except for the tragic passing of liam—may he rest in peace).

lana in coachella: nothing felt more 2014 than our beautiful lana headlining coachella this year. her ethereal voice revided her most iconic songs, and the vibes were simply the dreamiest. i completely adored the setlist, and her styling was too cute! classic lana, yet timelessly fresh.

girly pop revival: from sabrina carpenter's short n' sweet tour to taylor swift's eras tour, 2024 absolutely brought girly pop back to the mainstream. we had amazing albums from artists like charli xcx (the most 2014 revival ever) and rising stars like tate mcrae, addison rae and many more. my personal favorite? FLO's debut album, access all areas. their vocals and y2k style are a must hear i'm sure you'll adore.

.mp3 by emilia: if you haven’t heard of emilia i'll be GLAD to introduce you. she's an insanely talented argentinian singer, composer, actress and model (also, the most stunning girl ever). last year, she released her second studio album, .mp3, with a 2000s-inspired sound and vibe. it's the girliest, most empowering, and fun album from a latin artist. this album served girly vibes with genres like pop, urban, dance pop, and contemporary r&b. even though this project and tour leaned into a y2k aesthetic, it also gave me major 2010 vibes with its sounds, looks and visuals. i'll dedicate a whole post to her and the album soon because, genuinely, the art direction is INSANE, and it's my favorite thing ever

for now, that’s it for this first section. i have so much to share with you—from lifestyle to fashion and so much more! i hope you enjoyed reading this 2024 recap, pt. 2 will be up soon.

i'd love to hear your thoughts on this post! let me know what you’d add or want to chat about, my dms are always open lovelies! have a magical and dreamy day ೀ ׅ ۫ . ㅇ

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

I have been wondering do you think we would ever get a playable female character in the next Halloween events?

I don't know why but I want to see a twisted character from Captain Hook in the next events but I want the character to be female and I don't even know why I just think it would be cool to have playable female character for the first time lol.

Love your work!!

Thank you for enjoying my work ^^

I mean 💦 Listen, I won’t say the chances are zero (because there are a few exceptions in this genre), but given the nature of joseimuke games (which Twst is), the chances of having a playable female character are very slim. I’ve heard people say this is “sexist” and demand for more female representation, but it’s really not intended to be that. It’s simply the nature of joseimuke, which are typically idol raising games featuring a female or gender neutral protagonist training a bunch of guys. All the playable characters tend to be guys because that’s what sells to the target demographic, which is women (most of whom are straight). I think part of it is to sell the fantasy of being surrounded by and friends with pretty boys that differ a lot in their looks and personalities.

This is the same reason why the vast majority of otome games have all male love interests. You’re just risking appealing to a smaller demographic if you pivot to something the genre doesn’t normally do. But again, there are some exceptions, though very limited. I’ve seen at most one female love interest being introduced, and typically in indie projects, not mainstream ones. Other times, female routes are provided but they’re kept strictly platonic and you can’t actually date them.

[suratan-zir]

Don’t you think that the public has forgotten about Ukraine and the genocide that is happening there?

Hi. That's a tricky question. If I answer yes, then people who do still care will be upset. When in frustration I write that no one cares, there are always people in the notes telling me that they do care very much. These people exist, of course. But most of them have either friends or family from Ukraine, or have Ukrainian roots themselves. There are always exceptions, but they are few and far between. It also depends on the country. I have the impression that people from the Baltic states and some neighboring countries still do care about Ukraine. It's a war close to their home, they risk becoming russia's next victim, and most of them have suffered from russia before.

The fact that fewer and fewer people care with each passing year is not surprising. The shock factor from seeing bombed apartments and flattened cities wears off quickly, it gets old, becomes a new normal. As we always knew it would. Since it's not news anymore, most of it doesn't make it to the mainstream media, you have to actively search for the war updates rather than seeing them everywhere.

Popular posts from the far-left where they compare Russia to Israel illustrate really well just how little people know about this genocide, about the russian invasion. How little they want to know. They write something like "imagine if russia did THIS in Ukraine, there would be immediate international outrage and brutal repercussions!!!", while in reality russia has been doing THIS and worse the whole time, not just since 2022, but much earlier, and not only in Ukraine. Some people close their eyes and cover their ears to live in this fantasy where russia can do no wrong, and if it did, it would have been punished for it. As a Ukrainian suffering from russian unprovoked aggression, this notion is really hurtful to see.

I'd say that being a Ukrainian on tumblr is even worse than being a Ukrainian on twitter. The genocide of your nation is mostly ignored here and if not, then often denied. (again, not by everyone, please don't take this the wrong way!)

While I was typing all this, I thought - why bother? You can simply look at my (or blogs similar to mine) recent posts about this genocide, look at the number of notes, but most importantly, see how many of those who reblogged are my fellow Ukrainians. The majority. It wasn't like that in the first six or so months of the invasion. So yes, people care very little, but I can't blame the whole world for that or else I'll go insane.

I have currently only a few hours of electricity a day and I waste the time answering depressing questions or thinking how to answer them. *sigh*