2hoothoots

[2hoothoots]

Love this fandom to death but sometimes the haterisms are a bit much. Tell me what you LIKE about psychonauts, what makes you enjoy it? This is not rhetorical I’m asking you to tell me I need some positive opinions

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it's her favourite game

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years of intense training in a secure government facility have finally proven it's possible to create a person who can only rep his max while listening to the Spice Girls

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so i get being disappointed that we didn't see more of Milla, Sasha and Oleander in PN2. they're fun characters, it would have been nice if they'd had more screentime! but i think it's kind of odd to say it was a "missed opportunity" or "wasted potential", when... i feel like the camp counsellors being sidelined in PN2 was unambiguously a good thing for the game, in ways that (to me) feel so self-evident I'm surprised it's apparently a controversial opinion! like:

not everyone who plays PN2 will have played the first game! it was a financially unsuccessful niche platformer from 16 years earlier with a cult following. PN2 is deliberately structured to be approachable to new players who won't know who these characters are. taking time to re-establish them will eat up screentime, and feel redundant to people who are familiar with the first game. it's more effective and self-contained to focus PN2's story on the new characters. having Milla, Sasha and Oleander pop up in the intro and then take a back seat to the new additions is objectively a smart writing choice from that perspective.

relatedly, PN2 is already groaning under the weight of having too many characters fighting for airtime. it's the game's biggest pain point, I'm far from the first person to point it out, and it's compounded by the fact that we know dev time was limited and so a lot of interactions and dialogue had to be left on the cutting room floor. if anyone deserves more dialogue and more interaction, it's not the established returning characters from the first game, that's for sure!

like i say, it's obviously fine to think it's a shame that your faves from the first game didn't get to appear more in the sequel. but sometimes i see takes along the lines of "why didn't the developers simply ignore all their ideas for new characters to focus on Sasha and Milla instead? are they stupid?" – and i think that's just, like, fundamentally misunderstanding what PN2 is doing. Tim and co have talked about how excited they were to introduce all these new characters, and to make the world of the games so much bigger. i think that's great – and given that that was the story they wanted to tell, it is imho pretty inarguably a good thing that PN2 decided to let the new kids have a turn in the spotlight.

[2hoothoots]

re reading the paris affair for the 20th time

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there's no tragic reason for it! he just doesn't have as much time to train as he used to, with his full-time job as a Psychonaut and all. he still works out most days a week, but he doesn't have the time to set an hour aside every day for stretching and contortionism any more.

(every so often, when the family circus is back in his neck of the woods, he'll join them for a few performances for old time's sake. the training regime they put him through to get him back up to speed is brutal)

injury also plays a part in it – not that he's had any serious injuries to his spine or back, but because when he gets hurt he has to take a break from training. and it's hard to get back up to your peak after that! really hard. missing just a few weeks of training out can set you back six months when you're at or near the peak of what your body can physically do. so even if he's not getting hurt that often in his line of work, it compounds with having less time he can dedicate to working out to make it that much harder to keep his form.

he's still in very good shape by all means, and it's something he prides himself on! but he'll probably never get back the flexibility he had when he was 17 and still living and training with his family most of the time. it's something he's come to terms with, even if he gets ribbed for it constantly by his siblings, hahaha.

stretches

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stretches

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Chapters: 5/5 Fandom: Psychonauts (Video Games) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Razputin “Raz” Aquato/Dogen Boole/Lili Zanotto Characters: Razputin “Raz” Aquato, Lili Zanotto, Bobby Zilch, Benny Fideleo, Frazie Aquato, Phoebe Love, Dogen Boole Additional Tags: Slice of Life, Future Fic, One Shot Collection, and that’s all i’ll tag! Summary:

In the life of a prestigious Psychonaut, the quieter moments are, sometimes, lost in the haze of operations. For Raz, however, there are treasured times when that simply isn’t the case.

happy (belated) birthday @2hoothoots!!

[2hoothoots]

alright, here's my hot take on the Sasha-Raz dynamic: i think Raz represents a wish fulfilment self-insert figure for Sasha just as much as Sasha does for Raz.

Raz wanting to be like Sasha and seeing him as an aspirational future self is self-explanatory, right. Sasha is his hero from his favourite comic books, he even dresses up like the guy – it’s cute! there’s a fun hero worship angle there. but i think there’s also an aspect of it going the other way: Sasha sees Raz as an idealised past self. he's an excuse for Sasha to recast his own troubled childhood in a more flattering light, to imagine a version of himself who was more confident, more capable, more driven; and to explore the fantasy of that version of himself getting support and training and recognition, instead of the way things really played out.

here's something. when you use clairvoyance on Sasha, he sees Raz as a younger version of himself:

not as his younger self – specifically, a miniature version of his current self. there's a difference.

here's something else: from what we see in the memory vaults, I don't think younger Sasha was actually like Raz at all.

this part is heavier on extrapolation, because all we see of younger Sasha is a single memory vault; but i think the expressions and the body language tell a clear story here. the boy we see in these vaults is shy, uncertain, estranged, lonely. the distance between him and his father is palpable, physical and emotional. 

think about the things that Sasha says to Raz: your talents will always set you apart. sometimes, isolation is a good thing. those are very weird things to say to a kid as “advice”, and they’re very revealing about Sasha’s own mindset! i think it’s very easy to read Sasha as someone who had a very troubled, lonely childhood, and then sought to retroactively redefine and romanticise it. it wasn’t grief that stopped him and his father from ever forming a meaningful bond; it was just his talents, his father didn’t understand. if he was lonely and isolated growing up, well, maybe that was a good thing. just look at where he is now!

and i think Raz serves as a vessel for Sasha to project all of that onto. because their experiences aren’t that similar, not really. Sasha left home because he was unable to connect with his father; Raz ran away because his family didn’t understand or support his gifts. Sasha pushed things too far with his powers, and was shocked and unsettled by what he saw; Raz pushed things too far with his powers, and was rewarded for it. Sasha left home uncertain and afraid; Raz left home on a mission. the two stories aren’t the same, but they rhyme – you can draw parallels, if you squint, if you’re willing to change a few details here and there. and one of these stories is much more alluring, more satisfying, more compelling than the other. 

when Sasha says to Raz in the shooting gallery, “I would have done the exact same thing at your age” – sorry, but i absolutely do not buy it. younger Sasha was meek and conflict-averse, he faced one single unexpected consequence and immediately noped out. i think he absolutely would not have done the same thing. but i bet Sasha wants to think that he would have, y’know? i bet he wants to see himself in this boy, who’s driven and confident and focused and such an eager student – who has so much promise, and is in an environment where that can be recognised and rewarded and nurtured. Raz isn’t just a promising student, to Sasha – he’s also an opportunity to live out that what if, to explore the wish fulfilment of his own younger self getting that kind of recognition and support, instead of being left, lonely and alone, to fend for himself. 

one final thing: one of the big reasons i really like this reading is that i feel like it makes the scene where Sasha scolds Raz for messing with Hollis’ mind way more interesting: [screenshots from this upload of the game's cutscenes]

"You thought you could manipulate another person's mind, to bend their will to your own! There are few things worse, Razputin."

i’m not the first to point out that this feels a little hypocritical coming from Sasha, especially when you consider that this is basically the exact same thing he encouraged Raz to do in his own mind! and besides that, you could argue that it isn’t even Sasha’s place to hand out this lecture – Hollis was the one whose mind was actually messed with, and her and Raz have already hashed things out.  but if you think about Sasha as projecting himself onto Raz, then i think there’s more depth here. this isn’t just Sasha being upset because his protégé did something bad – he’s shaken because Raz did something unexpected. suddenly, Raz has broken away from the model that Sasha had built up in his mind, of the perfect, confident young agent that Sasha could easily see himself in. now he’s having to realise that Raz isn’t perfect – and maybe he isn’t just like Sasha, either.

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future AUs are so much fun, whenever i get bored i can pluck out another one of scott c's lovable little freaks to sculpt like clay

here's Benny! a wannabe theater director, his dreams of making it big have so far failed to materialise due to a lack of talent, charisma, or a likeable personality. he's working in the underfunded media department at the Motherlobe (but only until he finishes his next script - trust him, this one's gonna be his big break for sure...)

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it's my birthday which means i get to make everybody look at my plant

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it's my birthday which means i get to make everybody look at my plant

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i'm almost a month late but happy birthday rose! @kibasniper

B-Movie continues to be such a riot with some really cool visuals, so i wanted to homage some of my favourite scenes! pulled a lot from 80's horror movies for these, especially in the colour palettes. it was so much fun pulling everything together! (and i'm gonna plug the fic again while i'm here! go read it!! it's got Scenes)

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Hey! Psychonauts is 91% off on steam today!!! And:

Theyll be showing some new goodies next week starting Monday! No game news or anything, just art and maybe some giveaways for the occasion!

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happy Psychonauts to all who celebrate

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Hey Raz, Who is your spotter for weight lifting? With the ridiculous amounts you lift, i wonder who you have that could help out if something went wrong with a lift.

it helps when your spotter is telekinetic

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silly guy supreme