#+ with most of the story dialogues its MULTIPLE TIMES in the same one. like theres a grand total of FOUR (4) TIMES in their intro cutscene

[rbtlvr]

anyway i went through all of loops dialogue to see how many times they let something slip that hints at their identity and. holy shit theyre so bad at it yall

not counting the 'what should i do next' section because theres a million different little ones for every single point in the game, and not counting the tutorials because thats usually just really generic text. also not counting twohats because thats just straight up revealing it theres no hints there lmao

but. outside of those there is a grand total of 32 out of 65 dialogues that have some kind of hint or clue to loops identity

breaking it down more:

11/23 'lets talk about something'

7/14 'i had a question about...'

6/16 predialogues

3/7 item interactions (counted the silver coin pre and post incident as two separate interactions, otherwise its 2/6 if you count them both as the same)

and a whopping 5/5 story dialogues. good lird

in conclusion: theyre so fucking bad at this and i am fully convinced there was some part of them, whether conscious or subconscious, that wanted siffrin to figure them out

[adriberry]

The Meta of Magic in Twst

I apologize dearly for the more concentrated amount of Twisted Wonderland posts today, but I just have a lot of thoughts and feelings after my sister recently got back into the game and we've talked a bit about the story.

It's been hard to organize my thoughts on what I believe is the true origin of magic in Twisted Wonderland. I've wrote a lot of notes about it myself, mostly to use in fanfiction. I'm especially concerned with just how the characters we know as villains in our world are regarded as savors in Twisted Wonderland and why characters like Silver, Rook, and Kalim have golden, glittery cosmic magic while all other characters at NRC have purple, inky cosmic magic. The recent canon origins of magic as told by Lilia to Silver in Book 7 have confirmed some of my theories, so I want to structure my thoughts around that and will probably do so in multiple parts.

I'm sorry if you want to keep spoiler free, but this theory hinges on a few lines of dialogue in a portion of Book 7 which was recently released on JP server.

The Wish

Silver said Lilia once told him that the origin of magic came from a wish- a deep desire to change the world.

Yes, it's cheesy the way Disney things usually are. No, I don't think this is a direct reference to Disney's recent movie Wish (which really is a bunch of Disney animation references, concepts, and themes in a trench coat trying to convince the public it's its own solid Disney Movie, but that's it's own post).

Since the very first Disney animated movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, characters have been singing about wishes and dreams and their deepest desires. Throughout the 100 years of the company's lifespan, it's been touting that dreams are possible if you believe. Disney characters wish on stars and in wells and while belting to no one in particular but the horizon. Disney characters wistfully describe great loves and adventures that they have in their dreams that they chase to make reality. Dreams and wishes are the main theme of every Disney story, so it only makes sense for those to be the strongest themes of Twisted Wonderland.

I've already had a theory that Twisted Wonderland would follow a similar storyline to Fantasmic, so if you'd like to see my take on why the dream hopping in Book 7 is so appropriate now, you can go read the other post. But wishes are a different thing entirely.

There are 3 NRC students whose cosmic magic always got me thinking: Silver, Kalim, and Rook. Most characters' cosmic magic is purple with black specks in it. For these three, their magic is glittering gold. At first my reaction was, "Oh, cute. It's because they're not based on villains!" but this is Yana Toboso we're talking about. She does most things (save for too similar designs for faces) with a reason behind it. And fans have already picked up on a different pattern where Silver, Kalim, and Rook match the knight, pawn, and rook pieces on the chessboard in Leona's room respectively. Why are these characters singled out? Why are there visual differences between their mechanics and the other characters?

On Magic...

Well, I do think it has to do with the fact that they aren't based on villains but it's less of an aesthetic choice than I first thought. These twst characters are based on Disney characters who put faith in others, trust their hearts, and do what's right for no other reason than it's what should be done. And Silver, Kalim, and Rook all do the same. Rook lives authentically even though he spent so much time hiding his true self. Kalim loves Jamil despite the fact Jamil tried to kill him. Silver wants to end the generations long tensions between humans and fairies. They aren't exactly self serving and, though I love all the NRC boys very much, the rest kind of are. Crowley says as much in the Prologue when he praises MC for being able to get Night Raven students to work together for once.

So I think there are two kinds of magic which stem from the idea of "the wish." There is light magic which depends on what's essentially faith, trust, and pixie dust, and there is blot.

We're introduced to magic for the first time via Crowley. Crowley is revealed to be unreliable very quickly as he obviously is taking his sweet time trying to figure out how to get MC home if he really is at all. Based on fan theories and evidence in the text, he might actually be hiding his true identity from us. But in we don't have any of that information in Book 2 when Crowley talks about overblot, so we trust him when he shows us how blot works.

Crowley claims blot generates when using magic. The magestones Ace, Deuce, and Grim are newly given turn dark as they do a bit of magic for themselves. Crowley explains that those with a lot of magical potential need to be careful not to use too much magic or else it'll have negative effects, much like Riddle in Book 1. According to Crowley, overblot happens when you overuse magic.

But Book 2 has a contradiction in it: Ruggie is doing all the magic heavy lifting. He's constantly using his Ultimate Magic to act out Leona's plan. He uses a potion to triple his power and creates a massive stampede of people with magic, but who is the character who overblots later on? Leona- who doesn't use any of his magic until just before he overblots. He doesn't use magic, but he is brought to the brink of desperation and reminded of all his fears and insecurities.

The Blot

Crowley told us too much magic at once causes overblot, but we've seen seven times now how that's not actually the case. Each overblotter was brought to the brink. They were desperate, scared, anxious, isolated- these negative emotions brought them to overblotting. And though their lives were at risk, each overblotter was at their most powerful in the midst of it.

In each case, the person in question was close to achieving their ultimate goals. Riddle wanted perfection and order. Leona wanted to finally be worthy of a win at any cost. Azul wanted power over others because he had been isolated in the past. Jamil wanted freedom and to make his achievements known. Vil wanted real recognition. Idia didn't want to feel lonely again. Malleus wanted to keep his family together. In the moments before they overblot, their dreams are snatched away from them. In desperation, they have nothing else to lose.

Using blot doesn't necessarily lead to overblot, but increases the risk. It puts the user in a position where they're more vulnerable to fears and depression. It's why Crowley's advice for clearing blot in a magestone is just to rest, eat well, and take care of yourself- all ways to self care when you're mentally unwell.

To use light magic- the magic of the wish and the dream- is to put trust in others and to use joy and positivity and hope to achieve your goals. Using blot to the point of overblot is giving into desperation and fear and isolation.

And that is why Silver, Kalim, and Rook are the chess pieces: they- or their magic rather- are the key to defeating Malleus. The day will be saved by hope and joy and friendship. It's so very "my friends are my power" and so very cliche Disney and I can't wait to read up to the very end.

[verdantwyrm]

In Defense of Curly (Again)

This post is not about absolving Curly of his “sins” or anything, Curly is not an innocent angel that has done no wrong, no, he is morally grey as they come. But I will not stand for slander on my wife NO MORE. Curly is not as guilty as you would think, but neither is he Innocent. Anya is so much more than a victim, Curly is so much more than a bystander, and Jimmy is so much more than a rapist, they are multifaceted characters in a very multidimensional game. They’re all characters that have been individually crafted to tell a story, and everyone is avoiding that by reducing them to a singular note of events rather than their entire personality and even going as far to twist their dialogue and character to fit their own bias, ignoring whats actual factual and canon for the sake of projection.

So with that out of the way, let us begin.

────────────────────────────────────────────

A sense of timeline for better understanding.

Curly's Psych Eval (and by extension, Jimmys) was 7 Days before the crash. Curly does not know Anya is pregnant here. 

The birthday Party is 6 Days before the crash. Curly doesn't know here either. 

The Dead Pixel scene is 2 Days before the Crash. Curly doesn't know here either. 

Anya stealing the gun is 1 Day Before the Crash. Curly Finds out Anya is pregnant here and that Jimmy is responsible. Anya tells Jimmy about the pregnancy and tells Curly about it. 0 Days before the crash (The Same Day)

────────────────────────────────────────────

Pony Express’ Abuse

As for the first subject, I want to make it very clear about Pony Express’ Failure to comply and have any standard safety measures (most noticeably in the lack of locks) and the fact that they very often penalize their employees by taking from their pay and that they’re extremely lazy and known to cut corners for everything. The poster in-game tells us a lot about this if not backed up directly by the dialogue.

"Proper preparation prevents accidents, it is your responsibility to keep yourself and the crew safe. Medical expenses will be docked from person credits."

"Punctual delivery is our pride and promise- No matter where you are! Late deliveries will be docked from personal credits."

"Teamwork is the soul of success! When you have completed your tasks, always check on other tasks! HR complaints about poor team synergy may result in collective punishment"

"Sleep is the best rest after a long day of work, earn that rest! Don't overdo it or fall behind! Do not indulge in over 5 hours of forest, including leisure time. Sleeping over the allowed budget will result in disciplinary actions."

Neither Curly nor Jimmy are getting anything close to the required amount of rest for such a demanding job, with only 5 hours compared to the IRL guidelines for pilots to get an average of 10 hours of rest between shifts with 8 hours of sleep, it's also implied by Anya and Curly's own dialogue that he struggles to sleep. Which all together implies that they're both working 19-hour shifts every day. Every. Single. Day.

We see them both on shift at the same time multiple times during the game and Curly is the only one with clearance to make certain extremely important navigation decisions (like turning off the autopilot) and we can easily come to the conclusion that they are both extremely overworked, Curly Especially.

We can easily see that Pony Express are not shy to punish their employees and even goes as far as to routinely engage in collective punishment, and this is shown to be the drive behind a lot of Curly's decisions in particular, especially with how he reassures Anya that her stealing the gun case will not go on the performance log and reducing the chances of her being punished at all and to probably put the pressure onto himself in case Pony Express does find out. Given her precarious financial situation, she literally cannot afford to have her pay docked and Curly knows this.

Pony Express is known for its laziness, negligence and its ability to cut corners, they are also seen to not trust its employees by making everything have to go through him from axe usage to making a cake. To not supplying enough medical equipment, a fifth cryogenic pod to account for Daisuke or even to account for him at all. Curly himself even commented on how he should have made a bigger “stink” about the situation of Daisuke being thrown on the Tulpar last minute, which implies that he did raise this as an issue and a safety risk and was ignored.

I'm not going to take this as seriously but it is worth mentioning regardless because it is just absolutely Kafkaesque levels of absurd, They actively make it borderline impossible to report anything, so even if Curly or Anya were able to get ahold of Pony Express to send in a report, they never could due to the requirements and the prerequisites. It also implies that if you apply for a job there but refuse the medical evaluation, they can fine you despite the fact that you don't even actually work there yet.

Another classic example of Marx's theory is of the alienation in capitalism, wherein workers are estranged and separated from the products of their own labour. The crew had absolutely no idea what they were delivering, and judging by how much was put in place, they were never supposed to.

Marx's theory, the implementation of automation would negatively impact workers by depriving them of job opportunities that could have been filled by humans. This is strongly suggested to be the primary reason for the downfall of Pony Express and why the crew was fired.

────────────────────────────────────────────

Anya’s Assault

Anya being assaulted is never outright said, with an intentional layer of vagueness layered over the top with how she talks about it and how she mentions it to Curly. The words “Assault” “Rape” or even “Attacked” are not mentioned at any point, we only learn this through visual imagery and subtext of Anya mentioning the lack of locks on the doors, how unsafe she feels around Jimmy, and she would rather him not have the gun at all—fawning at his every response in a panic of upsetting him or escalating the situation. The words are never explicitly said as many other victims can sympathise with, saying the words out loud can be very difficult sometimes, and Anya’s vagueness was intentional on the happenchance that Curly did take Jimmy’s side. She was trying to put distance between herself and that possibility by being as cautious and as vague as she could, in hopes that Curly would pick up on the signs himself and come to that conclusion himself instead of Anya babying him and dumbing down the situation.

This is a believable reaction, especially when your abuser has any kind of power over you or other people, and he isn’t the only one either. Curly has just as much power, if not significantly more over her, which adds more to the fear of even mentioning such a thing, as mentioned earlier in my section of Pony Express' Abuse towards them, the possibility of being penalized with her– and everyone else –pay being docked because she made a simple complaint, was a very real threat, and even more dangerous after finding out about the whole crew being laid off. Jimmy tears her down every chance he gets, makes her feel little and even compares her to Polle in his hallucinations. And Anya knows that he and Curly have a very lengthy history, so her caution and anxiety about even mentioning the incident, let alone saying the word “rape” is borderline impossible for her. It’s a manifestation, it’s a verbal acceptance and confession that it’s even happened. Something she has been trying to avoid coming to terms with.

And when she does eventually tell Swansea what happened, as much as you want to think she told him- she most likely told him to not do anything, to try and keep the peace for as long as possible.

Again, her vagueness is not her fault, nor is it her responsibility. It was Jimmy’s responsibility to not abuse and rape her.

It’s also very present that Jimmy is verbally abusive to her, putting her down at every opportunity by ignoring her very talented medical skills by saying Pony Express only hired her to cut corners in an attempt to reduce costs because she failed Medical School and that she’s not a “real nurse” because of that, and how he constantly questions her skills despite keeping Curly alive for such a long time in such a state.

After being insulted by him multiple times, she fawns to get him to actually do something beneficial because she knows he responds well to praise, and he complies, all while still insulting and belittling her for being "weak" and "sentimental"

────────────────────────────────────────────

The Dead Pixel In The Room

Going to immediately preface this with a very big obvious “Curly did not know Anya was raped” warning sign to hopefully weed out the weak that don’t want to actually read this. You can leave now if you’d like, no hard feelings. This scene is supposed to be your first clue as a player, as well as Curly's. It's intentional to be like that, it makes the most sense chronologically as well because up until that point, we don't even know.

Okay, we can start now. First, off the bat, I want to talk about that dead pixel scene. And how both Anya and Curly have their own individual meanings behind It, and how both play into each character’s relationship with Jimmy. With Anya’s being a constant reminder of Jimmy’s presence, how it affected her and how it’ll always be there no matter what. And Curly’s is something that he knows exists, but cannot see for himself, because he’s too busy looking at the bigger picture. Even if he knows it's fake, even if he knows it’s an illusion.

He doesn’t doubt her here either, and even though he admits he cannot see it. He believes that it's there, despite this, and that it doesn’t ruin the image. Choosing to see the good, the beauty, of the bigger picture. The Dead pixel scene isn’t just about Anya, it’s about the both of them. And you’re probably asking how Curly hasn’t gotten the point Anya is trying to make, and thats again because she’s being intentionally vague here, and her comment about the lack of locks ties up pretty well with the previous two conversations she’s had with Curly directly. Complaining about Jimmy being weird during the psych evaluation and then her pithy comment about Pony Express’ cutting back expenses on their food and the comment she makes about the code scanner during the birthday party.

All of her previous conversations with Curly have been about their work or something going on in the ship or even with Pony Express directly. So it’s not unusual for her comment about the lack of locks on the sleeping quarters, it’s not random, it’s pretty on theme with the direction of how their conversations go, Curly wouldn’t pick up on that alone because it’s not a strange thing to say.

It's also very much shown that Anya trusts Curly, trusts him enough to not only confide in him first about the pregnancy but also allow herself to be open and friendly with him, even going as far as to try and get him to open up to her during his psych evaluation. She is also hiding behind his seat when she steals the gun. She feels the safest when she is with the real captain and how uncomfortable she is listening to Jimmy's orders to strip Curly of that title.

Every single time that Curly and Anya speak directly, he is always reassuring her, attempting to calm her down and her safety is the first thing he's concerned about when he finds out she's taken the gun.

And once she mentions the pregnancy, his priorities flip, again to her safety, reassuring her that she won't get punished for this. Once again telling her that everything is going to work out, that WE will fix this, WE WILL figure this out TOGETHER. He and Anya.

A key important word here is "what would you have done"

Would. Not, what will you do, no she's asking in past tense. The assault has already happened, she is reassuring herself here before telling him about the pregnancy that he is on her side, that he believes her and that her trust in him isn't misplaced.

And when he does find out she's pregnant, he still doesn't know exactly how. And it's important because it reflects back onto how Curly does ultimately behave when he does approach Jimmy. He doesn't know he's confronting a rapist, and his dialogue here proves that he does just think it was ultimately her choice, her decision. And the most painful part Is the very blatant unwanted pregnancy, not anything else.

Anya is still being intentionally vague here as well, as mentioned earlier. Curly did not actually know that Anya was raped, as the only thing that's mentioned is the pregnancy and that Jimmy is involved. Which is absolutely something to be worried about, regardless of how it happened, because they're on a ship. In the middle of Space.

Someone who knew would not react like that. Curly never once doubts Anya's words or her truth. And after Anya tells Culy about how she told Jimmy about her pregnancy, Curly says that she should have waited for him because he wanted to be there just in case.

Curly even does it literally. The most important part that everybody overlooks is how determined he is to get to the cockpit as the ship is crashing. He knows it's crashing but all he can do is try, he could have run away, but he didn't.

Curly took responsibility multiple different times which is easily overlooked because so much happens in such a short time span that people literally think he had months between knowing about Anya being raped and then the crash when it was barely a day. Just like how people easily overlook the dead pixel scene and how it also represents something to Curly as well, and just like how people overlook Anya's "I told you so"

Curly's kind, forgiving and trusting nature is not inherently bad. It was how it was used against him in an extremely difficult situation, which is exactly what Abusers do time and time again. He failed Anya in such a delicate way and in such a difficult situation, but it's something to understand that Pony Express failed her first, failed her in all the most important ways by even allowing a situation like this to happen. It was Jimmy's responsibility to not be a rapist, but it was Pony Express's fault for even enabling that in the first place.

────────────────────────────────────────────

Curly's Trauma

A very common thing that people tend to overlook, and this is either because they subconsciously forget that men can be victims of abuse, or simply because they don’t care enough to consider Curly to be one– his relationship with Jimmy and what we can glean from is very abusive, emotionally and verbally and then soon later on physically. Curly is just as much a victim of Jimmy's mistreatment and abuse as Anya is, in their own unique and parallel ways, they both had everything taken from them. We can tell in Jimmy’s behaviour and the way he intentionally isolates Curly in the Birthday scene and the Psychological evaluation in the cockpit, Jimmy takes Curly’s weakness and anxieties and twists them around to isolate him from receiving any help or support from others.

Curly’s biggest weakness is his forgiving nature. We all talk about how Anya is a victim of Jimmy, and she absolutely is, but so is Curly. His first immediate response Jimmy's reaction to Anya announcing her pregnancy is met with immense fear and anxiety with the added soundtrack of what could be equivalent to the sound of Curly's heart racing. He freezes, he fawns, he panics.

Curly's good-natured heart, being lax, trusting and a constant mediator isn't inherently a problem. It was the circumstances that turned that so volatile. If Jimmy wasn't who he was and so readily abusive then Curly's character would not be that detrimental, and his actions would not have such a catastrophic impact. And everyone immediately boiling down those harmless traits and villainising them does much more harm than good, especially since the character they should be targeting is Jimmy, not Curly.

He is beyond terrified, and when he does finally get to Jimmy, he immediately fawns and freezes. He makes absolutely no mention of Anya or anyone else because all that mattered in that panicked situation was easing Jimmy down and resolving the situation. There was truly, absolutely nothing that Curly could have done that wouldn't have resulted in either direct consequences or collective punishment. All of Curly's thoughts, behaviour and actions were as carefully thought out as he possibly could in the short 24 hours or so that he was made aware of Anya's pregnancy and Jimmy's involvement.

He is trying to eliminate all potential problems in the situation so Curly can take the full front of Jimmy's rage. This again furthers the point of exactly why Curly wouldn't recognise the signs of Anya being abused as well because this is all so normal for him. He’s terrified of Jimmy, and an abuser's main tactic is to make sure that their victims never feel confident to speak up against them, or to ever seek out help from others. It’s why he never rushes to defend himself, he just lets Jimmy do and say all of these horrible things.

And Jimmy immediately stabs back putting him down. Twisting the blame and putting it into Curly. Like he somehow was a part of it all and that it was his fault.

Curly was and has been a victim of Jimmy's abuse for a very long time on an emotional and mental aspect that clouded his judgements and perceptions in the scenario which devolved into physical and medical abuse very quickly once Jimmy got his chance. And it is also true that Curly had a responsibility to protect Anya as a crew mate and Captain that he failed due to bias towards his abusers, and his kind and forgiving nature of simply wanting to see the good in Jimmy, which is also another aspect of what victims believe. Curly enables Jimmy's behaviour towards himself and even goes as far to completely blame himself for everything that happened in How Fish Is Made.

A lot of victims tend to surround themselves with excuses of why they’re abused, that it’s somehow their fault and that he’s done something awful to deserve it, that this a normal thing that happens, that Jimmy has his reasons to be like this and it isn’t his fault. People argue that Curly should have done more and that he "failed" in any regard is putting a huge expectation onto a victim like him of someone like Jimmy's relentless abuse and how it takes such an impactful toll on someone like Curly. Everyone who plays or watches the game looks over the very easy and subtle warning signs of this abuse and is too busy claiming Curly to be the antagonist here and holding him responsible instead of Jimmy.

────────────────────────────────────────────

Conclusion + Other Comments

Curly is not perfect, but he is not as guilty as everyone wants him to be. If you go into mouthwashing anticipating Curly as a cruel, selfish monster, of course, you're going to interpret him that way and twist everything he ever does or says to fit your narrative although he very obviously isn't that way at all and get upset when someone tells you you're wrong. You need to remember that he had a whole crew to think of, Curly is not judgement, nor is he the executioner. His hands were absolutely tied and for one reason only: Because Pony Express does, did, and will not care. Pony Express has it explicitly like this so you cannot do anything. So people like Jimmy who manipulate the vulnerable can prey upon his co-workers and get away with it.

The situation on the Tulpar is not as straightforward as people would like, I understand it's extremely cathartic to think of a situation where Jimmy gets what he deserves but it isn't realistic, and thats what this game is trying to say. Abusive corporations, exhausting capitalism, this environment breeds Abusers like Jimmy and victims like Anya and Curly. There was nothing that could be done. Pony Express is what doomed them all, they're the catalyst.

At some point, you have to understand and accept the fact that certain scenarios are simply just cathartic fantasies that simply couldn't have happened. They were all doomed, right from the start. It wasn't just Jimmy's actions (Although they significantly influenced the outcome), and it sure as hell wasn't Curly's inaction. It was Pony Express. I think something that a lot of people get mixed up in their interpretations of Curly is that he's not us, and we're not supposed to be him. Constantly projecting your own fears and experiences onto him to sway your interpretation of his words takes away from the already written-in-stone character he is. You saying "He didn't mean it" when talking about Curly saying he cares about Anya is not only incorrect, but it's YOUR projection onto a character that is already extremely upfront and honest about his intentions and kind personality. He is not malicious, evil, cruel, selfish or misogynistic, so saying that because you interpreted his words to be half-truths or him lying through his teeth to Anya and that his kindness is fake is literally obstructing his character.

Everyone wants them both to be perfect examples of victims and refuses to understand or even believe Curly's situation. Curly DID fail Anya but not for the reason everyone thinks he did.

They're both victims to the same man, they both believe in the best of people (although to their own detriment in a way) they want to find peace, and fulfilment in their career and life. They're so alike in such delicate and intimate ways, that trying to constantly paint Curly as this great, horrible oppressor over her does way more harm than good.

Curly's character is painfully obvious, very very upfront and honest. He is kind, constantly weighed down by guilt and anxiety about his future and career and is being abused by his so-called friend and the company he's working himself to death for that he absolutely hates that just discarded him like he was nothing. Like a lame horse.

Thank you so much to the Mouthwashing Mania Discord server for helping me with this thread! Specifically Mogs for their amazing analysis on Capitalism which can be found here!

Thank you for reaching the end of the thread, please don't be scared to share your thoughts in the tags or in my inbox, I'd love to hear them! good job! (っ˘з(˘⌣˘ ) ♡

[felassan]

John Epler in the BioWare Discord (August 7th, again) -

User: "Since the dialogue wheel is coming back, will our choices set our Rook as diplomatic/humorous/aggressive with varying tone and voice lines similar to Hawke being able to be blue/purple/red?" John: "Not to the same degree - we want to give you the freedom to play your Rook differently depending on who they're talking to (you might be kinder to your companions and brusque with authority figures, for example), but your tone choices will have an impact within a conversation and, sometimes, with specific characters across multiple conversations." --- User: "I have to ask: how muscular can we make the elves?" John: "Reasonably so. You won't be making any massive bodybuilders but like... Timothy Olyphant?" User: "As a follow up what about humans and qunari? Quite muscular a la arnold or big viking type? Or not so much that lvl?" John: "Larger lineages (Qunari, esp) are bigger by default so the upper bounds are going to be bigger, but for modeling and animation we did want to put some limits on it. But your Rook can look pretty reasonably muscled, regardless of lineage choice." --- User: "Are there any time-sensitive quests (in terms of gameplay time, that will fail automatically if not addressed in a timely manner), and if there are please tell me they're at least indicated as such in some way?" John: "There are quests that can go away and technically 'fail' if you don't address them - but, to be VERY clear, this is not an in-game timer, but rather as you progress the game's story forward. That said, we do try to sign post them as much as possible." --- User: "Does Rook ever get the choice to cuss?" John: "Yes. You'll know when you're doing it, and we leave it up to you to make the choice, but sometimes, cursing is exactly what the situation demands."

[character limit text break!]

User: "Does the bioware team read the other channels and if so do they think we're unhinged or endearing?" John: "Little of column A, little of column B. But I mean, I've been online for 27 years, the internet has ruined me as much as anyone." --- User: "all the Rooks we've seen so far are wearing purple, please tell me we dont have to wear purple" John: "Everyone else can wear whatever colour they want but you, specifically, must always wear purple." --- User: "All the games have had unique faction symbols for our protagonist (Warden, Champion of Kirkwall, Inquisition) I assume there will be one for the Veilguard Will the symbol for it get released before the game or is this something that will be revealed in-game/after it’s launched?" John: "Every faction has their own symbol - including the Veilguard themselves! You may have noticed it in some of the art out there." --- John: "As a general comment - one thing I want to be super clear on - even as creative director there are things I can say, and things we're not ready to talk about. I'd rather spend my time answering what I can instead of a dozen 'sorry I can't talk about that yet' - especially since this channel is on slow mode." --- User: "There are blood effects in combat after Rook hits an enemy. And I think a developer shared images of the blood effects on hit after the reveal. Will characters be covered in blood or other environmental effects? Like getting wet from walking in puddles or muddy from running on dirt?" John: "There are environmental effects that persist on characters, depending on the environment you're traversing. They're subtle, but they're there!" --- User: "how many tattoos can we choose from? are there also full bodied ones too?" John: "I don't know the exact number, but there are quite a few. Some are full body as well, though you have control over colours and opacity on a more granular basis."

[character limit text break!]

User: "Of the zones/areas revealed what was the most challenging to design?" John: "Each has its own unique challenges. Arlathan seems simple because - well, it's a forest, right? But what about Arlathan makes it different than places you've been before? How does it fit into the established lore? Minrathous is a different kettle of fish because we've talked about it extensively and in a way that meant it HAD to be grander and more impressive than anything we've built before, which can be a tall order. The team did a fantastic job on all the areas, though." --- User: "which faction has the best fashion, in your opinion?" John: "Crows. Largely because 'black leather and feathers' isn't a look I could pull off in the real world but I am glad my Rook can." --- John: "Alright folks. I've gotta head back to work, but please keep asking questions and I'll answer what I can as soon as I can!"

[source: the official BioWare Discord]

There was also this question and answer:

User: "Can we name our saves like in Origins?" John: "I had to double check because I was about 95% sure on the answer, but also, I've been on this project for its entirety and sometimes I remember features that we had to cut (or never actually built) - yes. You can name your saves to reduce confusion."

but the answer may have now been deleted.

[chironshorseass]

what bugs me most about the pjo show is that i know they could’ve done better. i knowwwww they could’ve been as faithful as they wanted to the books. for anyone saying “oh, but it’s an adaptation! it isn’t meant to be the same so stop whining that they took stuff out or that they’re adding things in different order!” well yes, i agree that adaptations aren’t meant to be a carbon copy of the source material for the simple fact that it’s adapting the source material into a different medium (television), yet it’s just that! a form of adapting the things that are unable to be channeled from, say, a book—or on the contrary, adding things that make sense for television but couldn’t be channeled into the books otherwise…all of this in a faithful manner. a good adaptation is one that stays true to the source material by properly adapting its themes, characters, symbolism, context, pacing, and the overall story/plot so as to not only be seen as a sort of love letter to the fans, but also to reach a wider audience.

just look at the hunger games! the movies are so faithful to the books to the point that most of the scenes are taken straight out of the books, dialogue and all. and they’re movies, aka less runtime than a freaking tv show and they still did it better. did the hg movies have to take a few scenes out? yes; they have only so much time to tell the story as it is told in the books. did they resume things, like the games themselves? also yes. but did most of the important scenes and character moments stay in the movies? also also yes. again, THESE ARE MOVIES!!!!! a medium much more limited than a freaking tv series with multiple episodes that have enough run time to add even more scenes from the books than what could be possible in a 2 hour (max) movie!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and yet they STILL changed so much that rly had no business being changed other than that the writers decided they felt like it because…..a lot of it im not even sure. and the worst thing of it all is that freaking rick riordan took part in script writing yet so much of the source material has been watered down???? they make a whole ass episode about a monster fight with the majority of the scenes from said episode not even present in the books instead of sticking to the perfectly good source material???? and by doing so they delete the small details that are very much integral to character development and plot???? huh???? the math isn’t mathing. don’t get me wrong, i do like some changes, but then i think: at what cost do they add these things when there was a perfectly good narrative without it? like, at what cost do we get the whole turning to gold sacrifice scene if they’re gonna take out all the fun details that make the lightning thief the lightning thief? for example the silly water park merch and then annabeth displaying her spider phobia and her mortification at going to the thrill ride of love with percy and then being broadcasted to olympus. this is just one episode, but they’ve been doing it in all of them. and u know, it’s not that i don’t hate-hate most these changes. again, what bugs me is that this was supposed to be a faithful adaptation. again, it’s a tv series, with so much more time to develop everything from the books. rick is behind it, who apparently hated the movies for how unfaithful they were. the cast is great. and yet…the script is so mediocre. the spark is lost. character traits are looked over in place for weird pacing and even weirder changes. if the hunger games could do it, then surely a pjo tv series could as well? apparently not? i really really Don’t Get It.

[lurkingshan]

hi there i hope you don't mind me asking for recs! this might be a bit too specific but do you know any (good) bls with age gap? i've only watched old fashion cupcake and minato's laundromat and i'd love to see more of that dynamic. have a good day!

Hi anon! I am delighted to talk about age gap bls with you. A few notes about how I define this:

I think of a true age gap romance as one where the narrative is at least in part driven by the age difference, not one where the characters are just incidentally different ages but it doesn't really matter to the story

The age gap needs to be significant enough that it puts the characters in different phases of life, so something like a college freshman dating a senior doesn't count

I also don't count supernatural stories where there's a massive age gap as a function of one of the characters being immortal, that's a totally different genre and narrative intent IMO

I will only include a show in this list if the age gap is between the main pair or a very significant side pair who has a lot of story time

So this means I would not be including shows like My Tooth Your Love or The New Employee where there is technically an age gap but everyone is adults and it doesn't really matter to the story. Or shows like Cutie Pie and Love in the Air, which do play with power dynamics somewhat based in age but where the actual gap is negligible and the story isn't about their age difference. Or something like Ossan's Love where there is an age gap pairing in contention but it's not actually the core romance of the story. Then there are shows where on paper there is an age gap between the main characters but the production cast actors the same age, so it never actually feels like an age gap story no matter how many times they write in dialogue trying to convince me that 28 year old is 40 (I love you dearly, Moonlight Chicken but please be serious).

So all that said, there are not as many proper age gap bls as you'd think! You'll note that this rec list is dominated by Japan and Taiwan, the absolute rulers of this trope. Productions in these countries love to dig into an uncomfortable taboo, and a true age gap romance fits nicely in that niche. Thailand doesn't play much in this space thanks to their branded pairs system that puts close-in-age actors together (and the couple times they tried large age gap romances were so terrible that I shan't speak of it). Korea has surprisingly done very little on this despite noona romance being one of the most popular kdrama subgenres. Where are all the hyung romances, I ask you??

With all that rambling out of the way, onto the list of age gap bls I recommend checking out.

History 2: Right or Wrong

An under appreciated entry in the HIStory franchise that pairs an overworked single father who is neglecting his parenting duties and the student he hires to help look after his kid.

History 3: Make Our Days Count

These two are technically a side couple, but they get near equal story time to the mains and they are an exemplar of a great age gap romance that gets the character dynamics exactly right to mitigate the uncomfortable power differential when one is an adult and the other is still growing up. My personal favorite age gap bl pair.

History 4: Close To You

This one's for the girls who like to tackle multiple taboos at once. Not only age gap, but also stepbrothers, with a bit of personality disorder thrown in for flare! And somehow with all that mess, they tell the story so well and make you believe. Do not @ me, I said what I said!

Kiseki: Dear to Me

I know many folks remember this show primarily for the side couple, but the mains actually have a very well done age gap romance between a gangster and a high school student he accidentally drags into hell with him. The plot of this show is absolutely not to be taken too seriously, just have fun and go with it!

Lovely Writer

The only Thai bl I think qualifies under the definition above and actually tells its story very well. This one is interesting because you get to see them both as kids and as adults and see how their age difference and its effect on their relationship shifts over time.

Minato's Laundromat

You already mentioned this one, anon, but I'm putting it on this list for posterity. A classic age gap bl with a romance between a repressed older man and the persistent teenager who worships him.

Mr. Mitsuya's Planned Feeding

Winner for most significant age gap in terms of years, this show is about a mid-20s editor who falls for a writer twice his age after meeting him on the job. So much glorious food and sexual tension.

Old Fashion Cupcake

Another one you've already seen going on the list for posterity. A workplace age gap romance with a younger man pursuing his mentor via foodie dates. One of the best Japanese BLs ever made, period.

The Pornographer

A maladjusted (to put it mildly!) man gets hit by a young student on a bicycle, and uses the situation to bring him into his home as a writing assistant. Things get pretty fucked up from there. This is one of my favorites and very under appreciated in part because you have to chase the story across two series, two shorts, and a movie to get the full narrative. Trust me, it's worth it!

[hotheadedhero]

The Velvet Weaver - Part 1

A/N: So, I see the occasional meme or story about Spiderman/Tmnt crossovers and it reminded me of a fic idea I had from years and years ago. After all this time, I have finally decided to write it

Michelangelo x Reader

Warnings: quite dialogue heavy (I haven't figured out how to do it effectively yet so sorry), sickeningly sweet reciprocated feelings, because, yes, I can write something other than angst, I swear

New York City: resident to a colourful array of personalities and no stranger to weird occurrences. Although, weird may be putting it lightly. You’ve bare witness to many peculiar happenings all across your beloved home, some scarier than others, the most terrifying of all being the attempted alien raid last year. It felt like a real-life doomsday; an end to everything and everyone you hold dear to you. People were ready to accept their fates but the strange spacecraft disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived. No one knows how. Any explanation curated by the news agencies and the police may convince the citizens but you know better, you have your theories. Or, you have one theory: New York has a group of secret heroes. It sounds far-fetched but it isn’t that different from your current circumstances.

Just before the attempted invasion, something bizarre happened to you - something spectacular. Granted, that’s not how you felt about it at first but you like how things have turned out for you and this given name, ‘Velvet Weaver’. You were a bit dubious about the paper's choice of vigilante name at first but it made sense; you took inspiration from the spider that bit you, giving you your powers, and incorporated velvet accents into your hooded jumper. It was actually rather cute for a spider, sporting a ladybug design on its back. At the time of finding it dead in your shirt, you wanted to burn all the clothes you were wearing but you rather feel bad for the little creature now. Who knew that all it would take to overcome a mild fear was to be bit by one and gain powers?

Safe to say, your hometown has seen its fair share of oddities, so you’re willing to bet a gamble on not being the only crime fighter in these streets. You take care of the day and these theorised mystery heroes the night. It’s as though you’re a team. Granted, a team that’s never met each other but you’re doing the same job, fighting the same fight - share the same ideals as far as you can tell. Assuming you’re correct in guessing that there are multiple of them, you would love to meet them all someday. There’s a reason for the mask, the hidden identity, but it’s isolating. If there are people out there who understand, maybe it won’t feel so lonely anymore. Until you cross paths, however, you’ll just have to continue this little solo act of yours.

The alarm on your watch beeps, signalling the end of your vigilante-ing for the day. As good a time as any. With the flick of your wrist, you connect to one of the many buildings that litter this city and propel yourself into the air. Your other hand extends to shoot another stream of webbing, this to and fro exchange allowing you to swing above the crowded streets effortlessly. Gliding through the air, the rush of wind against your body is invigorating, a reminder that you are alive and free. The city sprawls beneath you, a tapestry of lives that fit into the system, one you used to be a part of and now look at you. Whilst everyone is down there, you get to enjoy the spoils of being up here, watching it all turn into a blur, honking cars and chatter fading into the background. You smile behind the mask when kids point out your swinging form and jump around with unbridled joy. This really is a great job. If not for saving lives then at least for the happy stomps of children that look up to you.

As you approach the pizzeria, you catch a glimpse of the neon sign flickering - Pete’s Pizzas. You land gracefully in the alleyway just to the left of it, your heart still racing as you quickly scan your surroundings. The streets are packed with people enjoying their spring break, laughter and conversation filling the air. You take a moment to catch your breath before quickly wiggling out of the shoddily crafted clothes you dub your hero costume in exchange for your uniform, feeling the weight of your dual identity settle comfortably on your shoulders. It’s a juggle, especially with college, but something needs to pay the bills and last you checked, ‘vigilante’ isn’t a recognised career choice.

“Velvet Weaver,” you whisper to yourself, a corny smile creeping onto your face. “Hero by day, pizza delivery girl by night.” Somehow you feel like it should be the other way around.

Shoving your costume into your rucksack, you dart into the pizzeria, the bell above the door jingling cheerfully. The familiar scent of melted cheese and spices envelops you, a comforting reminder of your second- no, third life. 

“Hey, just in time!” your boss, Peter, calls out, his hands dusted with flour. “We’ve got a big order for the downtown crowd. Think you can handle it?”

“Do I think I can handle it?” you echo quietly, moving your hair up and out of your face and winking. “You can count on me.”

He only shakes his head at your typical enthusiasm, setting the last box to this tower of pizza for you to take. You’re going to have to drive carefully if these stand a chance of remaining intact. It isn’t as though your moped skills need a check but times like this make you wish you had a car just for the convenience. One thing at a time, girl. You have enough going on in your life without worrying about passing a driving exam.

Stepping back outside with your hoard of cooked dough, you glance up at the skyline. The sun is beginning to set, casting a warm orange glow over the city and you can only hope that the people of New York are making the most of it for those who can’t. You quickly pull out the order slip; the address is familiar, one you’ve delivered to before many times. That’s ideal. You can cut through the better-known shortcuts to avoid the rush. If only you could master the art of swinging whilst carrying pizza. You’d be there in no time. 

With the chosen route, you manage to miss most of the nastier traffic spots, getting to the building with some time to spare. As you step into the bustling lobby, you exchange pleasantries with the doorman - a gentle spirit whose oak-ish appearance still has you stumped for his age - and he greets you with a knowing smile.

“Hey, Cecil, how many have they got up there this time?” you ask as you walk past him, being mindful to raise your voice enough for his hearing aid. 

“Count your boxes again and take a guess,” he remarks satirically and slowly, although smiling enough that the wrinkles on his face almost cover his eyes. It reminds you of one of those dog breeds you can never remember the name of. “I’m surprised the floor hasn’t fallen through from the sheer mass of them.”

You snicker and raise the pizzas in your grasp. “Let’s hope these aren’t the last drop to the dam then, yeah?”

Fond of the joy you bring to his monotonous job, he quietly laughs with you before you have to disappear off into the elevator. When you reach the desired floor, you trudge along to the apartment in question, having it committed to muscle memory. You knock on the door, albeit trickily with the boxes, and it swings open to reveal a group of college students, laughter spilling out into the hallway. As they hand you the cash, you can’t help but feel a part of their joy, if only for a moment. It’s a fleeting connection, but it’s enough to remind you that while you may be a masked vigilante, you’re also just a young adult trying to make a living. This tightness in your chest threatens to throw you off your rhythm but you shake it off. The night is still young and you can already feel the pulls of the shadows calling you back into your other life, but for now, you embrace the slice of normalcy, knowing that soon enough Velvet Weaver will return to the rooftops, ready to face whatever challenges await her.

With a few deliveries under your belt, you make your way back from the next one, the city lights begin to twinkle around you. It’s looking to be a good shift, steadying into a quieter night with bigger gaps between each order. Just as you arrive back at the pizzeria, Pete’s gotten off the phone, slumping into his next batch of dough. Uh oh. You recognise that look all too well and it takes all your might to not cackle at the poor man.

“And who might that have been?” You know the answer but it’s always fun to question in your sing-song sort of way.

“As if you need to ask,” he grumbles, rolling out the base and saucing it. “It’s that little admirer of yours.”

The smile stretching out your cheeks only makes him groan louder and he hides himself in his task. This particular admirer he speaks of has been a faithful customer since before you started working here; one of Kevin’s regular drop-offs that somehow turned into yours. Shift patterns change around from time to time. What are you to do?

Dramatically, you fall into the nearest wall, draping an arm over your eyes with an exaggerated sigh, “Oh, Pete, my oh-most favourite boss in the world, do we not have your blessing?”

He raises a floured brow and points at you with the ladle, flicking drops of sauce on the counter. “You’ll get my blessing when this guy stops askin’ you to meet him in weird locations, not to even mention the fact that you ain’t once seen his face. I don’t like it.”

Well, he’s got you there, no point denying that. Despite the laughter you’ve shared with this one customer, not once have you seen what he looks like and he always orders his pizzas to be brought to run-down buildings. You’re also almost certain that he’s using a pseudonym, too. Who in the 21st century is called ‘Michelangelo’?

You would be worried about having some weirdo stalker on your radar if you didn’t think you could handle yourself. You know you can. No question about it. And even after everything, even if there are still doubts in the back of your mind, your “danger sense” as you call it - the title is a work in progress - has never once gone off around him. It only ever rings in your nerves when someone intends to inflict you harm. With all that said, he’s really just a sweet guy: playful flirt, very complimentative, a good spirit, plus he’s one of very few who gets your humour. One may or may not say that you’re developing a little crush on him but that’s strictly confidential, much like most of everything else in your haphazardly organised life.

“I’ll be careful, Pete. You know me,” you say, attempting to sound more confident for his sake.

Pete knows that you’ll do what you can to keep safe. That isn’t the problem. It’s everyone else in this damn city he doesn’t trust. He grumbles again and reminds you about speed dial for the hundredth time before you can disappear again with the order and scoot off. You know he worries and that this all comes from a place of care. You almost wish you could tell him about your abilities just to calm his nerves but chances are he’d only become more concerned seeing as you put yourself in harm's way every day. All the more reason to live a life of secrecy, not only to protect yourself but those around you, too.

The location looms ahead, its cracked walls and broken pillars giving it an eerie charm, but you brush off any lingering doubts, reminding yourself that you’ve faced far scarier things in your life than a creepy building. Besides, your instincts have never let you down before. You park your scooter just outside of the half-reconstructed car park, finding the irony in not using it, and carry the boxes the rest of the way. This must have been one of the structures that got damaged during the alien fiasco. Weird. This guy has chosen a few of those for these drop-offs, now that you think about it. A harmless coincidence, or does it mean something?

“It’s pizza time.”

Your voice echoes around the piles of work sand and concrete as you step further into the mouth of the ground floor. It’s a strange phrase and you’re not entirely sure how it started but it’s become the calling card to announce your arrival. One of the support beams has a small hunk of money beside it, so you walk over there and place the boxes down on a slab of concrete just to the right.

“My pizza hero!” you hear him bellow with excitement, making you smile. 

“Ah, well, you know me,” you say casually, “just saving the city one slice at a time.”

You hear him laugh as you crouch down to collect the odd assortment of change. It’s part of the routine: he remains hidden and you pick at the chump change he’s left out for you but you don’t mind. A paying customer is a paying customer. You’ll be more shocked the day he chooses or manages to use something larger than a 5 dollar note.

You haven’t even had a chance to count it before you hear him speak again, “Sorry, babycakes, I’m a dollar short this time round.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’m sure I can make an exception for my favourite customer,” you muse, leaning back against the pillar. 

“You’re the best!” He shifts around behind you, and it takes a lot not to peak around and see him. “You sure I can’t make it up to you, though?”

“Can I see you?” you suddenly ask, not having a chance to think before the words blurt out of your mouth. Knowing that he’s just on the other side of this concrete beam is pulling at your curiosity more than usual. It takes a hot second until you realise and you breathe out a casual attempt at laughing it off. “I promise I’m not the superficial type.”

Despite how rude you feel, he’s quick to respond in his usual jovialness, “Aw, what? I was told this would be a blind date.”

“I’m not entirely sure that’s what they meant when they called it that.” You shake your head but you’re not offended by his attempts to hide the true nature of his secrecy. That would make you a massive hypocrite. “But, hey, who am I to get into other peoples’ business? I’m sure you got your reasons.”

“Thanks for understanding. I’ll have that extra dollar next time.” 

“You better,” you joke, pushing yourself off from the tall, grey column. “Have a good night, Mikey.”

He wishes you the same and you leave a little slower than usual. Every time you walk away, you’re reminded of that Greek story about Orpheus and how he couldn’t look back at his wife until he left the underworld. It makes you wonder if, like that story, you would risk losing a faithful customer - someone you consider a friend at this point - by merely chancing a glance at him. You’d hate to tarnish these interactions over being nosy, so you prod along and scoot off, preparing for the rest of the night ahead of you.

Bright, blue eyes watch you whizz off and make a quick grab for the boxes before having to disappear, too. With each interaction you share, Mikey becomes more guilt-ridden. Personally, he sees no problem with revealing himself to you. It isn’t as though he and his brothers haven’t got human allies at all. Okay, so you may have a shock to the system but everyone gets over that eventually. Much like with everything else, however, his brothers’ words are final. “Keep anything about your identity to a minimum,” they’ll say, “and don’t eat all of the pizza!”. Right. If they didn’t want him to eat it, they should collect it themselves rather than leaving the leg work to him. At least, that’s what he would have said - all changed when you blessed him with being his favourite pizza delivery girl. A very pretty one at that. Even where his brothers warn him to be careful, he can’t stop himself from stealing the odd glance when you don’t notice.

You’ve only ever and continue to be friendly with him. He always tries in his best efforts to make you laugh during the short encounters because he reckons you just have the sweetest laugh he’s ever heard. The guy falls more and more in love with you every time you talk. That’s why it kills him a little more each time when he can’t just walk out in front of you and say, “Hey, it’s me,” with a big grin and open arms. Even as he jets back home on his board, twirling through various sewers, he tries to think of ways that this can happen.

Namely, he thinks about how the humans he and his brothers befriended became their friends in the first place. They met April after she was caught up in that subway station - an indirect save but a save nonetheless. Vern, granted, was via her and Raph trying to save his brothers from turning into green mulch. And then Casey after he helped April with those Foot soldiers. All instances that have something to do with danger and being saved. Are they only allowed to meet people under those circumstances? He doesn’t want to wish danger upon you. Not ever. It’s just one of those times where he kinda, sort of, maybe wouldn’t mind if it meant finally being able to reveal himself to you. He could totally rescue you and finally ask you out on a date! No more eye-sore buildings or abandoned warehouses.

The mutant slumps back into the couch when he arrives home and exhales lethargically. Living in the dream world there, Mikey. For now, he’ll just have to make the most of those few minutes he gets during each delivery. This pizza, however, will not be savoured the same way. He flicks the TV on and dives into the beautiful disc of flavour, barely catching the string of cheese off his lip when the news broadcasts its latest interesting scoop.

“... back on our ‘Velvet’ hour, New York’s very own costumed crusader has done it again, this time preventing a public bus from falling off the Brooklyn Bridge after a massive crash.”

Mikey leans forward in his seat as the screen cuts to a scrappily recorded viewing of the very events from earlier today. Sure enough, The Velvet Weaver is swinging around the side of the bridge, performing impressive acrobatic abilities, and shooting a sticky substance from her wrists to create a large blanket of webbing, preventing the bus from toppling over into the water. Heroics is one thing but he loves how this chick does it in style, truly taking claim to friendly badass in his opinion.

“And to think, her efforts are still unrecognised,” the reporter continues when they show her again and the camera pans out to reveal their guest, the head of the New York Police Department. “Chief Vincent, despite what you’ve said in previous press conferences about the dangers of this figure, The Velvet Weaver continues to prove that she is a guardian of the people.”

“With powers that can’t be mitigated whilst she roams around doing as she pleases. Police officers go through years of education and training before they are entrusted with people’s lives, yet this girl thinks she can handle that responsibility because what? She’s strong? She can climb on walls? One of these days, she’s going to mess up. What then? We can’t guarantee that she won’t go into hysterics, or even what will become of our people when that happens. We could have a super-powered breakdown on our hands. Either she can come quietly and reveal herself under peaceful pretence, or we will have to bring her in by force. For the sake of civilian safety and resources, we’d like to avoid the latter.” She then turns to face the camera, addressing it directly. “I believe I am being more than generous with these terms. The choice is yours.”

Chortling mockingly, Mikey blows raspberries at the TV and kicks back into comfort with his next bite. “Kinda hypocritical.”

“There’s nothing hypocritical about it,” Leo says as he comes for his box of pizza. “She doesn’t have just cause to be responsible for innocent lives.”

“Someone sounds jealous.” Their red-clad brother joins in, sharing a glance with his youngest as he takes part at the expense of their leader. He’s not particularly keen on this self-proclaimed protector of the city either but poking fun at Leonardo is much more fun.

“Jealousy has nothing to do with it, Raph. She’s a kid playing dress-up, not thinking about the repercussions of her actions.”

“And here I thought we were the only ones.” Donatello is the last to come for his food, leaning back in his chair with a slice. “That hypocrisy you were talking about, Mikey?”

“Yeah! What makes us so different?”

Leo’s head bloats up with the oncoming headache and he pinches the space between his eyes. Why do his brothers have to be so argumentative when it comes to these things? They know as much as he does why this is a problem. At least, he knows that Raph and Donnie do. He shouldn’t always have to be the one to spell it out.

“We are a team. We’re trained, we make plans. We don’t just rush in without thinking. She’s got no backup, no structure. It’s dangerous.” His fingers jut out with every reason he has to give, and he knows he could give plenty more. “She’s just out there acting on impulse, and that’s reckless.”

“You’re just mad because she doesn’t follow the rules.”

“Rules are there for a reason, Mikey.”

“Well, I think she’s cool,” he continues to defend, even when the other two don’t. He knows any word on his side was just at their leader’s expense, and when his brothers leave the debate completely, he mumbles to himself, “It’s nice to know we’re not the only crime fighters out there, ya know?”

Sure, there’s the police to consider but they’re more hardstrung on the do’s and don’ts than Leo is. What a shock, right? The only exception to the rule is how the chief has allowed them to continue protecting the city as they have done for the last few years. Maybe the same could be true for this new hero on the block if they can just talk it over. He has hope for that possibility. After all, there are a lot of questions he’d like to ask her. She must have a cool origin story or something.

Mikey is halfway into his pizza when his brainiac brother’s computer starts blaring. Guess that’s enough of lazing around. They’ve got some action for the night! Although, talk about bad timing. He hasn’t even had a chance to finish off his food yet. No time like the present, ay?

___

Honestly, I could have kept it as one part like I originally planned but it's become a longer story than I first intended, hence, I gotta break it up a bit

I'm going bed now

[meglosthegreat]

"It was fun, but it got a little boring by the end" is perhaps the most common review of Veilguard's combat that I've seen. No one seems to have strong opinions about it, overall. As far as things to have beef with this game over, it doesn't even make the shortlist, really. I mean, it was fine.

But hell, I'm not above being petty, especially when it comes to this game. So amidst all the other things wrong with this game, here's my hot take: Bioware doesn't understand RPG combat, and why it's useful in, you know, RPGs, as they ostensibly claim to make.

This didn't start with Veilguard, though Veilguard is obviously the subject of this post. It was apparent since before DAI that they were gravitating towards action combat, and I had a lot of problems with Inquisition's system at the time. But Veilguard took it even further, doubling down on their pivot away from RPG mechanics. And, well, I don't think a proper RPG system could've saved this game. But it could've given the game something it desperately lacks - replayability.

RPGs are long games, are driven by the premise that most players will not follow the exact same path towards the end, and above all, are designed to be played in as many ways as possible. This is why character classes exist; why there are multiple weapons to choose from, and why there are more party members to pick from than can fit in your party at once. This works when you consider the other hallmarks of RPGs: different story paths, dialogue choices, and romance options. Variation outside of combat compliments variation within it, and this makes a good RPG something you can play several times and have a completely different experience each time.

And more than that, the mechanics of an RPG compliment a game that could take anywhere from 80-100 hours to complete. You NEED that level of choice within the game mechanics to get you through that long a game, and Veilguard's problem is that it has the length of an RPG, but the combat system of your average 30-40 hour action game.

Of course, there are excellent action games out there that are also up in the 100-hour range, but what these games do that Veilguard did not, is put the majority of focus on their combat systems. Elden Ring is probably the best example of this, but of course we wouldn't want a Dragon Age that's like Elden Ring, really - Dragon Age needs to have more going for it than just combat. And if you can't build your whole game around its combat system, then you need something that has the longevity to sustain a 100-hour runtime.

Everyone bemoaning the lack of direct companion control is absolutely correct - their lack of damage output and usefulness compared to the player renders them basically meaningless in combat. But what this also does is make any kind of customization of their abilities or their gear next to pointless. Even if you could replay this game and build them differently - which you can't, let's be clear - doing so would not make a single iota of difference in combat.

And Rook themselves - well, consensus is that the game starts to get boring about 40 hours in. That's roughly the place where you've gotten enough skill points to specialize in one thing, and though, sure, you could theoretically refund all your points and try something else, by that time you've gotten enough points to acquire all the skills in the general tree anyway. It doesn't help that the gear system is such that whichever items you happen to get early will probably be the ones you end up sticking with. It definitely doesn't help that the enemies in this game severely lack variation, and once you've fought one dragon, you've fought them all.

You know what would have helped? Giving people multiple ways to approach combat. Giving us enemies that require a different approach. Giving us companions that you can build out in interesting ways. Giving us, in short, a reason to play this game again. Because if you're going to create an 80-100 hour game that has very little else going on mechanically, then the very least you can do is make sure your combat is actually fun for the full 100 hours.

[dilutedconfusion]

Lost Star

Eustass Kid x F!Reader (Part 1) Real World AU

OH and this is going to be angsty. Angsty with a sprinkle of stupid dialogue if you will.

Summary: You and Kid are long time best friends but you just so happen to find yourself in a risky situation, curtesy of your bladder and too much alcohol. Most of this story takes place over a phone call between you and Kid. One where one of you is crying, until both of you are crying. Enjoy <3

Warnings: None I think??

Word Count: 3.5k

Part 1 Part 2

On a late Wednesday night, Kid didn’t expect to be getting so many calls. By the blaring white lines cast in a blurry glow, he managed to make out the number 12:22 am on his alarm clock. The insistent buzzing of his phone against his nightstand nearly making him want to tear it apart with his teeth.

What does a guy have to do to get a little fucking sleep around here?

He could nearly feel the weight of his eye bags tugging on his pale skin. The warm embrace of his bed feeling more and more like a tomb he’d be comfortable dying in.

But of course, once the ringing had stopped once, which earned Kid a hearty yawn and the closing of his eyes, it started up again. That same persistent buzzing was rumbling against the wood. It felt so invasive Kid nearly thought a swarm of bees had crawled into his ears. Nesting for the night or maybe having some kind of buzz off where one had to be louder than all the rest. But if this was a buzz off he knew his phone would win by a landslide.

Using his forearms he bent them to prop up his bare chest off the soft bed. Not willing to fully sit up he just slapped his hand against the nightstand in a lazy attempt to pick up his phone. But instead of picking it up he knocked it right off the table, the small rectangle of light falling to its doom and crashing against the wooden floor.

“Goddamn it,” Kid mumbled under his breath, brushing his tossed hair out of his eyes and sliding closer to the edge of the bed. The phone was still ringing. Now buzzing loudly against the floor and most certainly pissing off his neighbors below. He managed to lean off the bed just a bit, his long arms coming in handy to scoop it off the floor.

Rolling onto his back with a content sigh he stared at that small rectangle of light that had thankfully stopped buzzing. He read the caller's name in his notifications with little tears of exhaustion naturally pricking the corners of his eyes.

“Y/N?” He mumbled out to himself, his frown of annoyance now turning into one of mild confusion. You were known to blast his phone with multiple calls at a time. You had done it when you swear you saw a dog that looked just like Kid and to Kid's utter dismay, it did indeed not look like him cause that dog was fucking ugly. You had done it when your car broke down nearly a thousand times. Using your ‘my friend is a mechanic’ card to get his free help. You had done it on nearly every holiday that you weren’t together and though he feigned annoyance on those calls, he secretly liked it.

So basically without a doubt, you would weasel your way into finding any excuse to call him. Kid didn’t think that this night would be any different though he made it very clear he wouldn’t answer late-night calls. He wasn’t about to give up his precious sleep to hear your languorous ass talk about the meaning of life or what kind of cheesecake you would be if you were a cheesecake.

But still, he opened up his phone to check if you had texted him, which of course you didn’t. Scrolling through his notifications he noticed 15 unanswered phone calls from you in the last 20 minutes.

Eyes widening in a mix of shock but mostly annoyance he spoke, “What the hell is this woman thinking??” He looked over each call, they seemed back to back from what he could tell which only ticked him off further. But before he could even think it through you called him yet again, his phone vibrating loudly on the soft metal of his prosthetic.

He didn’t want to talk to you. Hell, he was about to put his phone on sleep mode and roll over without a thought. But it was the fact that you’ve never called him this fervently before that made him hesitate. You usually just quit around 4 unanswered phone calls. But this time was different which meant either you were drunk or something bad was happening.

So with a half-asleep limb, he clicked the answer on his phone. Putting it up to his ear as he let his back sink deeper into the mattress below him. “What do you want?” Was the first thing he said without hesitation. His voice much lower and more gravelly than usual due to the late hours.

Though of course, he didn’t hear your voice respond on the other end. Instead, he just heard what he could only assume was a light wind breezing against the microphone and the sounds of footsteps thudding softly in the background.

Did she buttdial me? Was the first thought that rang through his mind but it couldn’t be. You called him consistently for the last 20 minutes. You just hadn’t noticed he answered.

So he spoke again, using a bit more effort so you would hear him. “Do you not hear me? Put the phone to your ear dumbass.”

Kid immediately heard a light yelp come from the other end, followed by a pausing of footsteps before your haphazard ass finally spoke through the phone. “Kid?”

“Who the fuck else would it be? You’re the one who called me bolts for brains.” Kid grumbled, rubbing his hand along his face to try and wake himself up just a bit more.

“Ah…um yeah yeah I umm called you.” Kid noticed right away your voice sounded a bit more slurred than usual. Like you had a gobstopper in your mouth preventing you from saying something coherent. He squinted his eyes as he stared at the ceiling, trying to piece together what the hell was going on.

“Are you drunk and calling me late at night? What the hell Y/N?” He didn’t feel like he needed to be mean. But if you were seriously about to say you spam-called him for the last 20 minutes because you were bored and drunk he was going to throw his phone across the room.

It took you a second to reply and he could hear the way your breath hitched at that question. “Ah umm maybe. I don’t know Kid, it's just that something spooky is happening and I’m scared and I’m cold and I missed you.” Again you sounded like your brain was hollow at the moment. Though your words made Kid slightly concerned hearing the whole ‘I’m scared and cold’ bit.

“I swear are you fucking with me right now? What do you mean you’re scared and cold?” Kid was about to roll his eyes hard if you complained about something stupid. You being drunk wasn’t something he saw often especially considering how shitfaced you sounded. But his sass was palpable at this point despite all the flashing red signs that should be telling him something was wrong.

“I don’t know. Ask the forest. Who knows why these things are always so cold and spooky? It’s just like…natural law or whatever.” And with that, Kid paused.

The forest? What the hell does this girl mean by ‘the forest’?

“Is the forest a euphemism for something? What are you, sitting on your bathroom floor complaining about how cold it is?” He was trying to piece together a scene in his mind. One where you were bored and drunk for whatever reason so you called him in your bathroom. Hopefully, you weren’t drunk because you were depressed over something stupid again. But by the soft sound of your voice, you sounded more scared than sad.

“I wish the forest was a bathroom. I just peed by a tree and a little bit of it got on my pants. That…doesn’t make me a piss baby does it?”

Kid's face contorted into a mixture of disgust and complete confusion. It woke him up a bit more to his annoyance but it couldn’t be helped. What you had said was just too much for him to even remotely understand. But what worried him more was the fact that you weren’t giving up this whole ‘I’m in a forest’ joke.

“Y/N…where are you right now?” Kid's voice dipped into something more serious. His lower register rumbled in his chest as he nearly growled out that answer.

“The forest. Have you not been listening to me? I peed on my pants and I’m cold and I’m scared so I called you.” You sounded like you thought he was stupid. Like it couldn’t be more apparent where you were and Kid was just letting the facts fly right by him.

But as he pieced together not only what you said but the sounds coming through his phone it slowly started to make sense. The howling wind hitting the mic. Your footsteps sound a bit crunchy as if you were walking on grass. He could even make faint creaking sounds and even a few birds in the air around you. Chirping in the late hours of the night as the rest of the predators came alive.

“Y/N…please don’t tell me you’re actually in a forest right now.” Kid didn’t want to believe it. Because if this was a prank then it was a mean one. He couldn’t believe he missed all those background sounds earlier. Him and his tired brain lacked all the sense of keenness it usually held.

“Yes, I’m in a forest dummy.” That made his stomach sink fast like a pound of lead that somehow slid down his esophagus and gut-punched him from the inside. He sat up in his bed immediately, his spine cracking loudly and his vision blurring around the edges.

“Why are you in a forest? Actually, why the fuck didn’t you tell me sooner?! You’ve been talking out of your ass this whole time!” He yelled at you, his voice raising drastically in concern. “It’s midnight you dumb fuck. Why in the world are you out there?”

“Gosh Kid don’t yell at me! I just needed to tinkle and this was the only place.” Your voice went an octave higher and became increasingly whiny as you spoke. Kid nearly wanted to crawl through the phone and wring your neck.

“The only place you could pee was a forest? Have you never heard of a bathroom fuck-nut?! Why the hell are you in a forest in the first place?” Kids anger was making him get ahead of himself. Each word that left your slurred and intoxicated lips was not what he wanted to hear.

This is why I hate it when she gets drunk. She gets stupid and makes me clean up her mess.

“Fuck-nut? What kind of insult is that? I’m not a fuck-nut.” Your voice became more strained as you spoke. It sounded like you were on the verge of tears. Though the reception for some reason was getting more and more hazy as the call went on so Kid paid no mind.

“Y/N!” Kid was nearly gripping his sheets out of pure anger from this conversation. He shouldn’t be yelling this late at night, he knew that. But his stupid best friend was becoming more stupid by the second.

You took a second to respond. Leaving Kid to just listen to your soft sniffles on the other side. It made his muscles freeze in realization.

I’m screaming at a drunken and vulnerable Y/N right now. What the fuck Kid?

“Don’t yell at me. I-I’m already scared as it is. I just wanted to call you 'cause I didn’t know anybody else that could h-help me.” Your voice sounded so frail. Kid could nearly see your tear-stained face painted on the blank wall across from his bed. It made his heart lurch in the cage of his chest.

“I…I won’t do it again. Just tell me what’s going on. No more deflecting or talking about something else. I need to know why you are in the woods this late at night.” Kid used the most reassuring voice he could muster up. He’s dealt with your crying self a couple of times. Like when that guy who in Kid's opinion was a complete waste of space rejected you. Or when one of your relatives died a few years back. He had been there to awkwardly try and pick up the fragile pieces of your heart. So he could only hope he could use that learned sympathy now.

“I was…at this party. It this whole bonfire next to the lake thing. There was like…a lot of booze and it tasted really good. Like really really good Kid, it had lemonade and sliced fruit in it. Oh, and they had these speakers strapped into some guys' truck bed. I was twerkin' up a storm ya shoulda seen it.” Your voice still sounded sad and strained as you spoke. As if you were emotional about how ‘awesome’ this party was to the point of tears.

Kid's hand instantly smacked against his forehead. Rubbing his face and stretching the deep lines of his eyes bags and permanently frowning corners of his lips. Forcing himself to just groan and hold back all the fiery frustration lumped in the back of his throat.

God, how much did she drink? She’s usually never this emotional. Or this stupid.

“Y/N quit talking about the booze and the party. I get it. It was good. Tell me why you called me. Like exactly how you ended up in this forest alone. And try to calm down a little. I can’t handle the crying.” Kid couldn’t help but sternly push you off the topic of the party because if he heard you talk about twerking one more time something in his brain would short-circuit.

You sniffled softly into the mic once more as if you were swallowing down a well of tears. “O-Okay…I can calm down. The party ended a little while ago. People started packing up and driving home for the night. I called an Uber because ya know…alcohol. There’s a main road close by so I just needed to walk down this trail to catch my ride. But I needed to piss like SOOOO BAD. I was seconds away from shooting a piss rocket down my legs from how bad it was. So I went off the trail a good bit. Ya know, so nobody would see my lady bits. But I think I got like…turned around on the way back to the trail.”

The whole time you were talking Kid could nearly feel his blood pressure rising. A cold chill ran across his spine as his body twitched and went rigid. It was like he was hearing the most idiotic yet horrific joke in the world. But the problem right now was that it wasn’t a joke and it was happening to you of all people.

Oh no.

“Y/N…how long have you been walking around aimlessly?” Kid almost didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to know because if you said what he was thinking, then there was a high probability you were dead lost.

“Ummm…I think about 30 minutes? I don’t know exactly when I left to go piss but it's around that amount of time. Plus I fell over a stupid log and got a boo-boo on my leg.” Your voice sounded so ignorant as you said that. As if you didn’t realize how bad your situation was. Kid couldn’t even respond right away. He was too lost in the questions of how the hell you were going to get out of this mess.

“Kid…you there? I…uhh have a backpack. I brought water and a flashlight. Plus I’m wearing that jacket. Ya know the one you bought me for my birthday with the little skull on the sleeve? It’s my favorite.” Kid felt his heart sink once more.

She’s wearing that jacket? While lost in the woods?

“I didn’t buy you that jacket just so you could get lost in the woods with it you asshole.” Kids voice became void of all frustration. Just grumbling and low as he contemplated his life for a moment. “Did you try yelling so someone could come find you? Maybe shine your flashlight through the trees?”

“Yeah, but I think everyone already left.”

Well, shit.

And with that Kid started to get up from his bed. Letting his wide feet land on the cold wooden floor below him he turned on his bedside lamp and started making his way towards his closet. Letting the closet door softly swing open before he quickly put the call on speaker mode.

“Kid…what are you doing?” Your quiet voice floated up to him. He set the phone down on a shelf in his closet before yanking out a gray hoodie and some black sweatpants to cover up his mostly naked body.

“Coming to get you. Now find a place to sit and stay there. No more walking. You’re getting yourself more lost the more you walk around.” He grumbled out, shoving his leg through one of the pant holes. He could feel the ghostly chill of goosebumps crawling all over his skin. As if bugs or the cold hands of ghosts were tracing the lines of his scars. And even though he was hating every second of this, he supposed you were hating it a lot more.

Though with the amount of jokes she’s making maybe not so much. But she always makes jokes at the worst of times.

“But shouldn’t we call the authorities? Or maybe even Killer? I just called you cause…I missed you but you don’t have to do this alone Kid.”

There was a softness in your voice that dragged his attention away by its heels. He paused in his closet. Frozen still for just a moment like a statue of disarray. “No. Just me. No cops. I don’t need them seeing my face and I don’t need their half-assed help. Plus Killer works early shifts, I ain’t dragging him to help me on this one. So quit questioning my abilities and let me help you.”

His voice was so stern you could’ve sworn the foundation he built those words upon was made out of solid gold. There was no changing his mind on this one. No matter how much you tried to erode his logic with your tears of worry. So you just feigned a smile that no one could see and spoke, “Okay. I trust you, Kid. Always have, always will.”

Kid could feel those words echoing in the caverns of his mind. As if they were being written on his flesh itself. But he paid no mind or at least that’s what he wanted to believe. He had more important things to do such as saving your helpless ass.

You looked around at the forest engulfing you. It was thick in all directions. No tower, mountain, or really anything to give you a point of reference to where you are. The little flashlight you brought was doing an unsurprisingly half-assed job. The dark was almost too dark. The moon barely peeking through the tops of the trees leaving you amiss in a world of darkness seemingly built for your own demise. The wind was howling and you could catch the far-out hoo of an owl doing little to subside your fear. Though everything was green and lush so it looked soft enough sit down on.

“Okay…I’ll sit down. I’m ummm…by Lake Folsum. Ya know the one off the highway going towards the South? There’s a little dirt road you can take but it cuts off to that trail I was talking about. I gotta be somewhere around there.” You mumble, taking small steps forward and looking at a rather tall oak tree in front of you. You leaned over and felt the dirt, trying to make sure it wasn’t too wet before settling down on it and leaning your back against the tree.

”Alright. It’ll probably take me 40 minutes to get there. 30 if I break a couple of laws. Just wait for me okay?” You could hear Kid shuffling around on the other end. His breath hitting the mic and floating into your ears. You heard the faint jangling of what you assumed was him picking up his keys. Followed by the door of his apartment opening and closing with a subtle lock.

“You’re not gonna hang up on me right? Don’t leave me alone out here Kid. I need you.”

Kid let out a little grunt at that. Your voice sounded so delicate it made his throat tighten. Both of you have been friends forever but if anything insults were more regular then whatever the hell you were doing right now. It made him feel weird. All this ‘I need you, I missed you’ bullshit sounding so strange coming out of your mouth. But he wanted to believe it was the just the alcohol talking. That you were scared and had called the first person you could think of which was him. He wasn’t special by any means and he didn’t expect you to ever rely on him like this. But here he was, about to come to your rescue and he was going to do it all by himself. To try and be the strong reliable friend he wishes he was. He just couldn’t let another person down.

So he picked up his pace just a bit. Forcing himself to go down the stairs two steps at a time to make it to the parking garage. His mind a brewing storm of worry and fear though he would never say it out loud.

It's up to me to help her. I can’t break. Not right now.

“I would never leave you. Don’t ever assume that.”

A/N: I already said this shit was going to be angsty…which can lead you to assume a lot of things. So uhhh yeah be prepared for that cause I already have a mild outline of what this story is going to be and just thinking about it makes me sad. But I’m VERY excited for said sad so it’s okay. When the time comes we can cry together in the comments <3

[teffiyx]

let's talk about mouthwashing!

spoilers for the game. duh.

trigger warning for abuse, SA, death.

i feel like we all know how complex the story telling for the game is yet theres still people that don't seem to get it entirely. i decided to ramble about that. im sure others have done it before me but let me ramble about my hyperfixation god damn it.

this is the first out of 3 posts so strap in. the 3rd one is a LONG one. second post | third post

before i start a few disclaimers: i am rather new to mouthwashing so i do not know EVERYTHING. im just talking about my own interpretation, if there's any missing details pls inform me!

Anya is a shy and timid character!

this of course is not true but i've noticed a few people that still cling onto this interpretation of her. even though its not a vocal group that has this idea, i'd like to talk more about this.

Jimmy is an unreliable narrator, we were given that knowledge with a scene where we see multiple working cryo pods post-crash, despite us knowing there is only one functioning cryo pod.

so of course, knowing that information, most people would start to realise everything we went through as Jimmy post-crash, it was all biased, we were in the eyes of an abuser, and we trusted the words he used to describe Anya as part of her character. that's also part of the horror for this game in my opinion. the horror that i agreed the views of an abuser horrifies me.

"He - It just hurts him so much. I can't stand the noise."

"...You did make it through nursing school, right?"

"Pony Express sure does know how to cut corners, if nothing else."

-

"I was hoping you could help me with Captain-"

"Curly."

"Right, sorry ...w-with Curly's medication?"

"People have to be worth their titles."

"Don't you think, nurse Anya?"

"...Y-yeah. Forget I asked."

these two different conversations happened in the same scene at the start of the game. after going through the game we can see now how Jimmy talks to Anya is downright insulting. maybe some people have picked up on it during their first playthrough that the way he talks to her is not normal, but we didn't think much of it. but now, now things are different.

"Anya never got into medical school because she's... well, let's be real."

"And how many employment years Swansea got left in him?"

"Daisuke will be fine, mommy and daddy have him covered. So there's that at least."

"But you."

"Headed for bigger and better, right?"

this string of dialogue came 6 days before the crash, when everyone is gathered for Curly's surprise party and Curly decided to drop the news that Pony Express is letting them all go. (this dialogue will be brought up again for something else.)

he was almost insulting everyone sitting at the table, yet in this string of dialogue, he completely disregards Anya. summing his point about her as "well, let's be real.". it shows how much he views her, which was practically nothing. but first-time playing, you didn't think much of it. because he also insulted everyone else.

to summarise this whole thing, Anya as a character is not shy or timid, it is simply how Jimmy views her. but even so, we probably will never know how Anya is truly like. because even when she mentions this won't be her worst moment, she is only remembered as a poor crew member that god abused and assaulted by another member, which is, her worst moment alive.

[coraniaid]

I don't think there should be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot and I don't have any reason to believe there is going to be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot and I would not watch a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot.

But, that said, if there were to be a Buffy reboot I think a big (small) change that would improve the show a lot (especially in its first season) would be to have a much broader pool of recurring student characters from the very beginning.  Not just the Scooby Gang and Cordelia, but ideally almost all the students we see in the first season should appear in multiple episodes and, if they die, they should be talked about at least once afterwards.  As it is, Season 1 is full of ghosts: characters like Amy and Harmony who will go on to be somewhat recurring but aren't quite there yet, and characters like Jesse and Cordelia's boyfriend Kevin (remember him?) who only exist to die and are not mentioned before or after. Most of the show's recurring minor student characters will only be introduced in Season 2.

In particular, I think the characters most ill-served by this in canon are, in order of first (and often only) appearance:

Jesse

I actually think the concept of Jesse – as a sympathetic character who is killed in the opening episodes before we really get to know him – is a good one.  Beyond any possible shock value of his death, it's a useful way of establishing that people can and will die in this story, and of stating out loud the setting's rules for vampires ("you're not looking at your friend, you're looking at the thing that killed him").  On the other hand, the execution is pretty awful because it is immediately clear that Jesse is not the same status of character as Willow and Xander (he isn’t even in the opening credits), he is not actually sympathetic at all (he seems to exist to answer the question "what if Xander Harris but Worse?"), and large parts of the fandom (and later writers of the show itself) will decide to completely ignore what the show is telling them about how vampires as a concept on Buffy work and why Buffy is not only justified but morally obliged to Slay them.

But the most egregious thing about Jesse is, of course, that after his death in The Harvest he is never talked about again.  I honestly think that just a couple of lines of dialogue spread out over Season 1 (Buffy blaming herself for Jesse's death while worrying whether she’s making a positive difference as a Slayer, say, or Xander mentioning Jesse as a reason for disliking vampires, or Jesse being named as one of several mysteriously missing students by Principal Flutie) would go a really long way to fixing that.  

A brief cameo appearance in Nightmares wouldn't have hurt either.  (Just months ago Xander failed to save his best friend from vampires and was taunted by the demon wearing his corpse and had to watch him turn to dust in front of his eyes, so of course he’s terrified of … clowns.  OK.)

Amy

OK, for real, if I were in charge of creating a Buffy reboot I would be very tempted to just add Amy to the Gang after Witch.  She knows that magic is real!  She knows Buffy knows magic is real!  She seems to be on friendly terms with both Buffy and Willow when the episode ends! And yet she vanishes after her first appearance more quickly than Marcie Ross.  

But, failing that, having Amy show up more than once a year in the high school seasons would be a start (especially since the show implies so much is happening to her behind the scenes each year).  Let her be a friend of Buffy's who doesn't know anything about Buffy being the Slayer.  Have Willow at least think about asking her for help with Angel’s soul curse!  Pull the trick the writers used in The Wish (and never used again) of having Willow talk about her as if they're friends even in episodes she's not appearing in.  Show us Willow spending time with her rather than Buffy during Dead Man's Party!  Remember that this character exists even when she’s not on screen!

Lance (and his various bullies) from The Pack

Hapless victim Lance is basically a proto-Jonathan and, if I were remaking the show, I would just lean into that fully and simply replace him with Jonathan from the very beginning.  

It would be tempting to do the same thing with Kyle and Heidi and the others, too: rather than retroactively introduce multiple new characters who apparently used to bully Xander in Seasons 2 and 3 that we’ve never met before and never will again (how big is Sunnydale High meant to be?).  

The obvious problem with that is that the show tells us that the Pack remember eating Principal Flutie alive, which means rather than hanging out in school giving Xander and Willow a hard time when the plot requires it they should probably all be in therapy for years.  But you can fix that while fixing The Pack as an episode by just ... not having the fact Xander not only remembers assaulting Buffy but lies about it to her face presented to us as a punchline?  Have Xander forget what happened to him. Have them all forget what happened when they were possessed, and then Kyle and Heidi and the others can be conflated with Inca Mummy Girl's Rodney and School Hard's Sheila as and when required.

Owen

This requires slightly more work, but I think Owen and Scott work better if they're the same character too.  Rather than Owen promising to stay friends with Buffy and then never appearing or being mentioned again, or Willow telling Buffy she "wasn't ready" to date Scott before Season 3 as if he even existed then, just make Scott somebody that we've already met and who Buffy had previously briefly dated pre-Angel.

The challenge here is that Buffy breaks up with Owen because she doesn’t want to get him hurt and she’s still very focussed on keeping her identity as the Slayer secret and only letting a handful of people know.

But that fits into the wider theme of Season 3 perfectly.  By this point, Buffy’s let far more people know than just Willow and Xander.  Xander’s girlfriend Cordelia knows, and Willow’s boyfriend Oz knows, and Buffy’s own mother knows, and none of this has caused the world to end.  Why shouldn’t Buffy try dating a normal guy who knows she’s the Slayer?

(And I think everything about Scott works better if he’s somebody we’ve seen before – somebody we’ve seen Buffy be romantically interested in before – rather than suddenly appearing only to disappear almost as quickly. Scott is meant to represent Buffy trying to reassert her claim to a 'normal' life after everything that happened with Angel last year..  What better way to do that than to try to start things over with the one person we do see her trying to date on the show before Angel? How much harder would Scott's rejection of Buffy hit if we'd seen that the pre-Angelus version of Buffy really did get on well with him and would have expected to make things work?)

Kevin

The end of Season 1 features, back-to-back, two of its best episodes.  In Out of Mind Out of Sight, we focus on Cordelia Chase.  We're reintroduced to Cordelia's friend Harmony and we meet Cordelia's current boyfriend, Mitch.  (Who is attacked by Marice Ross, but survives.)  In Prophecy Girl Cordelia briefly bonds with Willow while talking about how much she likes her current boyfriend, Kevin, only for the two of them to discover him dead, killed by vampires on school grounds.

Wouldn't the death in the latter episode work much better if those two "current boyfriends" were the same person?  Wouldn't we care more about Kevin's death if he was somebody we'd actually met before? 

But let’s go further than that: at the start of Season 2, in Some Assembly Required, we meet Chris, whose brother used to date Cordelia but tragically died. Chris tries to bring him back, and his brother pursues Cordelia.  The show doesn’t mention – or doesn’t remember – that Cordelia already has a tragically dead ex-boyfriend, one who died only two episodes ago.  Why not fix that?  Why not identify Chris’s brother Darryl with Kevin as well?

Make Mitch/Kevin/Darryl a single character, and then we would achieve that rarest of sights on Buffy: a minor character who we meet an episode before they die and who is mentioned again in an episode after they died.

And wouldn’t that almost make a potential Buffy reboot palatable?

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

i think you're onto something with the romance novels world and plot points needing to mirror the kind of outlandishness of the love story. bc the main characters are already inherently acting absurd just by falling madly in love in a month or whatever and then if you add in the contrivances of romance tropes, it starts to feel like whiplash trying to pretend the characters live in any sort of grounded "normal" world. Like when the author adds in a family conflict subplot where the MC is like in absolute shambles because her mom said something slightly passive aggressive at lunch. that reads as more jarring to me than like conflict being something ridiculous that her mom doesn't want her being a marine biologist bc they come from a long line of fishmongers. Give me absurd drama to match the over the top dialogue and character emotions, I knew it would be unrealistic it's a romance novel! I guess this applies more to romcoms, but the same would apply I think to an analogous serious scenario. Or at least that's my take on it

okay so having just finished genuinely the most boring romance novel I have ever read in my LIFE I'm going to expand on this a little so thank you for sending an ask that gives me such a great platform to do that

I personally generally prefer a romance that just gets fucking silly with it, like really outlandish. A Lady for the Duke (Alexis Hall) is obviously the dream, being a whole swoony historical trans-affirming fantasy, but contemporary fake relationship stories can also be fun in their sheer ridiculousness, like Love, Hate, and Clickbait (Liz Bowery), which I actually liked, and Unfortunately Yours (Tessa Bailey), which I did not like but was very funny. and let's not forget queen Helen Hoang's Bride Test, which has a premise that dances perilously close to human trafficking but all works out in the end!!!

BUT HAVING SAID THAT. I don't think that something needs to be totally implausible to be a good romance. two of my very favorites romance novels anywhere ever are Helen Hoang's Heart Principle (no one should be surprised Hoang is on her twice I adore her) and Akwaeke Emezi's You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty. both of these books are very grounded in reality but with very uncommon situations to heighten emotions and add urgency; in Hoang's case it's a character's adult autism diagnosis + death of a parent and in Emezi's case it's a very sudden and #problematic attraction coming out of absolutely nowhere. the stakes are very real, mostly centering around being true to yourself v disappointing your family, but the circumstances are still wild enough to make you say "god DAMN" and keep turning pages. hell, I'll even be extremely generous and include Mistakes Were Made (Meryl Wilsner) which is kind of a flop but does have the intriguing premise of "what if you were fucking a milf but her kid was YOUR BEST FRIEND and it was a secret?"

those are like the two sweet spots TO ME, and this book I just read (which was Thank You for Sharing by Rachel Runya Katz, I feel so bad putting it on blast but I know people are going to ask) really solidified it for me because TYFS didn't fall into either of those categories. I'm going to say something absolutely insane, which is that multiple times while I was reading it I found myself wishing that the book was fanfic, because on its own it just... didn't bring a lot to the table? it falls into the grounded category but doesn't really bring any of those heightened stakes to the story, it's just 330 pages of people in their late twenties complaining about dating and their office jobs. if I wanted that I could just ask my group chat! there's nothing particularly particularly gripping about watching made up strangers do it!

but then I was like oh hang on... if this was two fictional characters who are usually fighting with swords or throwing cars at each other or something this would be so gripping. it's literally the coffee shop AU principle, right? like seeing people in a very mundane setting having an office job and going to a bar is very shrimpteresting when they're normally defusing space bombs. I was explaining this to my housemates and I couldn't think of a straight couple to apply it to (the book is m/f) so I said Naruto and Sasuke, which is crazy because I've never seen a single episode of Naruto, but like. idk Naruto being a museum curator who has to work with Sasuke, a marketing specialist who he had beef with a summer camp 14 years ago, sounds kind of compelling, right? definitely more than just two people I don't know.

there's a post on here that I think about a lot that talks about why advertising a story with tropes doesn't work for original fiction as well as it does for fan fic because knowing the tropes is more helpful when you already have a sense of investment in the characters and their personalities, and I think this is related to that! I think sometimes you NEED to have a wider sense of scope for the characters for them to be interesting in a very mundane setting!

ANYWAY. much to consider, etc.

[incorrectelswordquotes]

Do you remember when the job progression quests had dialogue cutscenes and difficult quests? Each town had its own gear and you'd have to drop blue-background items to upgrade it. And it was character-specific too. Ice statues had to be crafted, and the ingredients would just pile up in your inventory. There was Unique equipment for every region you had a chance to drop after a boss battle, and it'd be shown in the chat. Plant Overlord's accessory was the top trending thing. Rena was blonde and did a flip when she double jumped. The first field introduced was the one between Hamel and Velder. The level cap was 40 and it was *hard* to get there.

I sure don't miss a lot of this stuff, but looking back, it feels like a wholly different game.

i played around when the game was still like this for the most part, except the level cap at the time was 70? and then over time it jumped to 90 but my middle-school/high-school ass couldn't keep up. actually, i remember seeing the new UI the game has for the health bars and that was already enough to throw me off. not that it looks bad, but i remember seeing this UI for the longest time:

vs this:

like as much as i miss the one i got acquainted with, this new one is a lot simpler and cleaner? yet it retains that cartoony vibe with the slanted bars so thats neat. and then there's THIS:

i'll admit i havent played during this era but man this looks busy af. it was simple yea, but something feels off about it. like i love the look here too but it kinda clashes colors-wise. there's not too much of a difference between the original UI and the one after it but i could tell it needed slimming down.

while i was gone i also learned that the previous privately-hosted server VoidEls was shut down but was eventually replaced by another, which is fair enough i guess.

"Each town had its own gear and you'd have to drop blue-background items to upgrade it. And it was character-specific too."

this was both cool and annoying, for me personally at least. it's cool in that every town having gear gave you a way to progress before getting even stronger gear. sort of like a jumping-off point for every town you got to as they handed you their own version of stuff you could use. and you could emulate their aesthetic by wearing their gear. the annoying part is that constantly switching gear means item management is necessary to prevent your inventory from maxing out, and not every item looked good on you. if you didn't have skins? tough luck. (my memory might be wrong here so please correct me if i messed something up)

"...job progression quests had dialogue cutscenes and difficult quests?"

THEY GOT RID OF THOSE!? maybe im jaded but as a writer, i liked seeing the player-characters' personal struggle as they progressed through a job-specific mission. those short cutscenes let us see what they're really like. even if some of the requirements really were trash. i still remember spamming the same dungeon over and over hoping for a quest drop (or multiple) so i can move on. but after hearing the story was consolidated to be one singular, linear path regardless of who you played, maybe they streamlined the job class progression system too?

update: yea it seems you still have to spam dungeons to upgrade to Master Class but it looks less tedious than before for previous class ranks.

"Plant Overlord's accessory was the top trending thing."

boss accessories were the bane of my existence so this makes sense. it seems like it's unobtainable, as many overworld zones and dungeons have since been removed based on what i just looked up

im assuming Plant Overlord isn't fightable anymore or only shows up in some elite zone now so rip

"Rena was blonde and did a flip when she double jumped."

i didn't know this. in fact when i checked her wiki page, the change was because her hair wasn't green enough despite her class art showing her as having green-hued hair.

speaking of the wiki,

holy fucking shit thats a lot of classes

[transformers-mosaic]

Transformers: Beast Wars - Second Chances - Page 22

Originally posted on February 2nd, 2011

Story - Mike Priest Art, Letters - HdE

deviantART

wada sez: The sunrise seen here, and the ripple effect in the final panel, both evoke similar visuals from Dinobot and Depth Charge’s storylines in the actual Beast Wars cartoon. See below for Mike Priest’s original script, titled “New Dawn”, and some thumbnails, along with a little afterword written by Mike Priest just for this archive!

Beast Wars: Second Chances- Page 22

“New Dawn”

By Mike Priest

-

(FIRST PANEL:  Dinobot in robot mode, sitting on a flat rock outside, with the future Mount St. Hilary behind him.  His sword is stuck in the ground, with one of his clawed hands resting on its hilt.  He seems relaxed and yet vigilant at the same time.  It seems like dawn- the first hint of the sun is peeking out, catching Dinobot in a shaft of light.)

DINOBOT:   (Narration box) I find myself with purpose again.  A noble purpose.  A lofty one.

(SECOND PANEL:  Dinobot peers over his shoulder, still seated, looking at the Ark’s resting place.)

DINOBOT:   (Narration box) Behind me, the past…and the future!

DINOBOT: (Narration box) And once more, I find myself its guardian.

(THIRD PANEL:  Dinobot looks to the rising sun, now standing on the rock.)

DINOBOT: (Narration box) I will not falter.  I will stand tall, even as some…

(FOURTH PANEL:  Depthcharge, robot mode, in knee-deep water, wading out into the ocean.)

DINOBOT:   (Narration box) …descend back into the depths.

RAMPAGE:   (Unlinked dialogue bubble) You could have let it end.  You could have granted us peace.

(FIFTH PANEL:  Different angle, Depthcharge is up to his chest in the water now.)

DEPTHCHARGE:   Guess it’s just not in my nature to grant you even a moment’s peace.

RAMPAGE:   (Unlinked dialogue bubble) And you think this will be any better?  Being trapped with me?

(SIXTH PANEL:  Depthcharge is almost completely submerged, only his head from his optics up is visible now.)

DEPTHCHARGE:   I’m not your prisoner.  I’m your jailer.

RAMPAGE:   (Unlinked dialogue bubble) You’ll live to regret this.  Live forever.

DEPTHCHARGE: I’ve accepted my fate.

(SEVENTH PANEL:  Depthcharge has vanished under the water, leaving only ripples and bubbles.  We see the sun has risen in the sky, as reflected on the water’s surface.)

DEPTHCHARGE:   Have you?  

I'm proud of what me and the others accomplished with "Beast Wars: Second Chances", but it was a long hard road getting to a finished project.  It was an interesting exercise to work with multiple writers on a single cohesive story, but I do think we ended up getting in each other's ways most of the time  We all had specific visions and ideas, not all of them saw the light of day, and the finished project had to be rather ruthlessly hammered into shape just to get to the finish line.  The story itself is functional, but I can still see the flaws within it, flaws that I admit exist even in my own original pitch.

For one thing, someone just conveniently arrives to "switch the plot off" in all versions of the story, be it the Vok (in my original pitch) or Starscream (in the finished project).  Actually, a lot of my gripes revolved around Starscream.  I don't think we made it particularly clear that Starscream was gonna keep Terrorsaur's body at the end, and I still am unsure why he'd need a CR chamber on his final page.  

I remember fighting for Starscream to appear in his War Within body in the Ark, but it was eventually decided it would be his G1 form to maintain consistency with the original material.  Even then, the artist ended up drawing his Masterpiece body for the finalized page!  I even pitched that Starscream should go find Skyquake's body so he could become Machine Wars Starscream, but that would have probably been too complicated too.

All that said, again... I look at the finished project and am proud of it.  Some of those pages and covers are absolutely beautiful- I particularly love Daniel Olsén's cover of the entire cast in beast modes and I even have Jeffrey Witty's Dinobot/Depth Charge Wolverine-homage cover framed on my wall!  I always worked well with HdE and he brought a certain distinct flair to my scripts in this and several Mosaic pieces we collaborated on.

I don't know if I'd ever want to repeat the experience of trying to write a focused 22 page comic story with four-to-five other writers.  However, even with any squabbles we may have had, I had so much fun exchanging emails within the creative team and they were all passionate, talented people.  I'd work with any ONE of them again anytime (one at a time, this time!)

[pixelprofligate]

this is another Fallout London post. more of a rant but still:

because GOD this is really not good. maybe im just like really critical of stuff but so much of the mod just doesnt add up to...anything? most of the quests are uninteresting or outright present you with dialogue options that outright contradict themselves or basic established lore of the world they've set up, so many locations are near empty and boring as hell to try and explore, with a SIGNIFICANT number of the marked locations having literally nothing to find in them, some of them actually having nothing in them at all, there's tons of NPCs, both generic and some named that have, and i dont mean this hyperbolically, literally no dialogue at all, the mods full of things that are just wrong about britian, like posters calling the tower bridge london bridge, the combat encounters are regularly boring because all the factions are functionally the same in terms of equipment, lots of the weapons you can use have blatantly anachronistic modifications like actual real modern day attachments, all of the "new enemies" are just model swaps that use the same skeleton and movesets and often the same exact sounds as base fallout 4 enemies and often aren't even properly rigged for the skeletons they used (like the fucking assaultron replacement that just constantly clips thru its own model anytime it moves at all because they gave it a skirt it was never built to have), and on top of all of it, the mod itself just breaks all the time. there were multiple times quests couldn't progress because NPCs just didn't say the line of dialogue they were suppose to, completely softlocking their quests (this happened with every single main faction at least once), and to top it off most of the assets actually used in this mod weren't even made for it, most come from the Capital Wasteland Project, but even things like the terminals and most of the guns are just straight up from other mods. also, multiple terminal entries were just outright written by AI. and im not saying that like "oh theyre just poorly written so i assume its AI" i mean the lead dev in their discord fucking confirmed it and said he had no clue it happened. like i get a lot of people worked really hard on this, and i dont want to shit on them, but to call this mod "one of the best things fallout has seen in years" i think is a massive disservice to everything else fallout related weve seen since even 76 came out. this mod is a mess of ideas that rarely add up to anything interesting, with a story that gives you no real reason to care or engage with it, that leads to a fight that fucking sucks so much the final battle is terrible (you're forced into a melee fight with a weapon that isn't any of yours on a tiny catwalk where you have to beat the same guy TWICE in a row, and then he gets great mouse detectived), and ultimately never feels fulfilling. it does so little actually interesting with the factions it made or the area its set in and the fact people absolutely adore this mod fucking baffles me. this mod is not good. i genuinely want to know what people like about this because i cannot understand a single aspect of it, ESPECIALLY the people saying this is better than like, base Fallout 4 itself.

[evelhak]

I’m curious about a few: Propinquity, Anem and Bitchberg (a great name, lol)

Well, you've already read about Bitchberg by now from the previous ask. :D

Lol, I actually winced a little when I saw you asked about "Propinquity" since it's the current working title of my Akashi centric fic, and I know you don't find him that interesting. It's still just a bunch of "notes" (=bits of monologue and dialogue that come to me and I have to write down so I won't forget). I haven't actively started this fic yet, since I can't really write multiple projects at the same time. I will probably have to finish another shorter fic after The Luminous Things, before I get to this one.

I know the opening lines, though:

Winning is like breathing. Sometimes I wake up, gasping for air, but my lungs seem to have fallen into a partial state of paralysis.

Or something fairly close to that. The idea has been in my head for a long time, because I really enjoy digging up ignored dimensions that kind of naturally follow from whatever is going on in canon.

There is of course one thing in this fic that could interest you: The main love interest is an OC. :) You know some things about Azumi already. Here's a snippet that will probably serve as her introduction in the fic:

I absolutely pretended to be the empress of this micro-utopia, growing up. Not because it was mine to conquer, or control. Because it was mine to know. To pick apart. Explore, taste, and merge with. A little pocket of wonder in this huge city, a bubble with its own rules. That's what I came to realise pretty soon, anyway. About the world. How different, how illogical and ultimately unsatisfying it was, compared to my shrine, my home, my own ecosystem, my island of undisturbed ground. It frustrates me that the rest of the world doesn't know how to do it. Live and let live. Give and take. Circle of life. A system that works. Because I was born into it. An heir to it. Happiness.

Micro-utopias are a huge element in my whole fic series as it progresses, and there are several kinds of them, Azumi's home life being its own example. Utopia is generally something I'm really interested to write about, especially because a lot of people claim you can't write interesting utopia without making it dystopia in the end, and I very much disagree with that, as people are always imperfect, so you don't need to add any intentionally awful circumstances for a story to have conflict, if you're writing believable people. For me, the key to what makes the most out of utopia is to centre it around whose utopia it is and why. This got slightly off topic, these are just themes I really like exploring and since my fics are my playground, I definitely use them for exploration of things I might want to write later in a more polished form in my original fiction.

The working title "Propinquity" came while I was writing a chapter in The Luminous Things where Kagami ends up lost in Kyoto (it's complicated) and spends the night in Azumi's place, where he has many enlightening conversations with Akashi. (Azumi and Akashi are already together in my main fic timeline, their own fic will cover how they got together, among other things.)

Here's a snippet from the chapter also titled "Propinquity", which I haven't yet posted anywhere, so things might still change a little, but for now, Akashi muses something like this in it:

"[Propinquity] is the central theme of this shrine. Things develop, and change, and prosper in propinquity. It rings true, doesn’t it? Right things, wrong things… so it really matters what you surround yourself with. It’s not enough to know and think. You have to see, and taste, and touch… A plant wouldn’t grow from the understanding that it needs water, if it never got it. It would still die from poison, no matter how informed it was. Azumi knew all of this, so bone deep. That’s why she was disappointed with the world. That’s why she retreated back to her paradise. I think that’s what caught my attention at first. How she had a physical place to go to when she needed to get away."

I probably would not have developed any need to write a story about Akashi's love life on my own. (Well, it's not all there is to it, but it is a how-they-get-together type of story). It was the influence of my ex, who's a big Akashi fan, and as I have probably said before, Azumi was originally her OC that we worked on together a lot. Eventually I grew attached to Akashi and Azumi together, and now I have my own version of the story.

I don't think I actually read any Akashi x OC fics myself, but my ex read them and complained about them, usually, and I picked up on two pretty common patterns, which I didn't want to do: I didn't want the OC to be 1) poor, or 2) have a similar family dynamic and childhood trauma as Akashi. This is because I wasn't interested in dealing with the power imbalance that tends to come with very different socioeconomic standing, and I also didn't want to write a relationship where people get stuck in validating each other's trauma, and it takes them a long time to grow beyond that phase because their relationship is centred around how similar their experiences are. I wanted to hit that sweet spot which I like the most, a relationship that centres around growth, having enough common ground, and being inspired by things about the other that you've never experienced before, or even believed really exists in the world. The kind of relationship that makes you feel that you want to fill your own gaps, and a key factor in that is the proximity, or, propinquity to a person you can rely on, because they don't have the same weaknesses as you. I just really love writing about people who are good influences to each other.

A lot of this fic will also be about dissociation and trauma. Yay.

Anem, then, is another original novel I've started multiple times without being completely satisfied. The premise is pretty classic religious cult + good girl/bad girl dynamic, or at least would seem like that in the beginning.

Here's how I seem to have described it on my website at some point:

Dina is a good girl. She picks up flowers every morning, to put on the altar of her family’s home. She’s chaste, she’s beautiful. She fears God. Semira is a “Wild One”, she rarely goes to church, she speaks out of turn. She could be beautiful, if her hair wasn’t so short. Dina doesn’t think it’s her job to save Semira. After all, if the Fathers don’t know how to help the girl, how could she? But Dina keeps ending up spending time with Semira anyway, and the more she does, the stronger the big black swirling something grows in her stomach. There’s clearly something very wrong about Semira. And there’s something wrong about the woods surrounding their isolated village. Dina knows she’s supposed to stay away, but Semira keeps going into the woods.

It has a lot bigger world and anything but clear-cut themes and dynamics, even though it may seem like that in the beginning... and it's one of those early projects that are sort of everything, because you're not good at narrowing it down yet. It's like a dystopian supernatural medieval fantasy horror philosophical cult story I wrote just to barf out everything I was thinking in my early years of studying theology. It's certainly a cult story, but is the cult the big bad or the world around it? It's certainly a queer story, but is it a love story or a hate story? It's certainly trying to say something, but what? No one knows, not even me. It's a big mess.

I'm also starting to feel like I'm dealing with every element and theme I have in this story, in some other story too, and coincidentally someone from my writing group actually just got a book published this year that has a strikingly similar setting and themes, (we both wrote them without knowing about each other) and even though it shouldn't, it does kind of add to my confusion to what to do with this story. I do still want to write it at some point, but it's a big question mark that sort of just pops up from below the surface every time I'm not actively thinking or writing about another project.

Some angsty pictures of Dina, also drawn in my early university years (Oh Lord how obvious my Arina Tanemura influences still were in the way I draw):

Yeah... at least they are accurately dramatic to the story.

Thanks for the ask. I hope there was something entertaining. <3

For anyone curious, here's the WIP list.