#<- a recent revisit of my teenage years

[youshouldseemeinadeerstalker]

Any character can be my blorbo as long as they fit the lyrics of Iris by The Goo Goo Dolls

[michi-chelle-draws]

🪽rin🪽

(full spicy image)

[meow286]

some ramblings today. with a little sketch and its tie down

drawing cats is always easy and almost automatic for me since theyre basically my foundation. so when i want to warm up on some concepts, theyre usually my go to.

recently ive been studying art again more seriously, really looking at where i was lacking and doing studies, reading a lot of art theory and reference books, life drawing, everything i can. getting better at grouping shapes, values, focusing on clarity of silhouette, simplifying information, have all become my priority. i really try to think the entire time im drawing now instead of going on autopilot. so even revisiting drawing cats occasionally, now feels new as im doing it with a new mindset/perspective on what i want to achieve. i tend to practice drawing 6-8 hours a day but the goal of where i want my ability to be still feels so impossibly far away.

i havent animated very much at all in the past year, and im trying to rekindle my love and drive for it, it scratches an itch in me that drawing never does. over the years of being a lonely teenager who tied their self worth to their online art presence, my self esteem was linked to how well i could perform artistically any given day eventually lead to me crashing and burning mentally. i could not animate without significant stress and feeling like i was going to throw up because i knew the end product wouldnt satisfy me. so i avoided doing it for almost a year.

i know a lot of younger artists follow me and its easy to fall into this trap, esp with how competitive it is and the incentive of social media attention. but it will make you miserable, and upset. even know i have to repeat to myself "its ok to make bad drawings" and that comparing myself to others has no purpose. this sounds overly dramatic since a lot of you know me as a former warrior cats animator, but ever since i made animation my career this thought process became increasingly difficult to escape and would affect my performance at work sometimes. i got a job working with dogs for a while since i didnt want to have the mental toll of doing professional work anymore. im trying to get back in the game now, almost reteaching myself art in a way. and ive been feeling a lot better.

im thinking of making some sets of cat anatomy tips, reference drawings, and my thought process when stylizing them to out up on gumroad for free. maybe some animation cycles and breakdowns too. if you read this far 😀 hi

[ifbrd]

Cipher Zodiac - Holding Hands with Enemies

If I’ve got my dates right, today is the 9 year anniversary of Gravity Falls ending. Consider this analysis and discussion my celebration post! (Not that I care to celebrate that my favorite show ended nearly a decade ago but anyway…)

I recently ran into this really cute little mini Gravity Falls fan comic by @the-meme-monarch. I actually first saw it Reddit (credit properly given) a few weeks ago (and hunted it down today to reblog lol) and people on Reddit were talking about how having Mabel hold Gideon’s hand in the finale was a weird choice.

I want to talk about that, but first I want to clarify a few things:

- This is not supposed to be any kind of like callout or attack or anything like that on you @the-meme-monarch. I love this art you did, it's sweet and adorable and it would have been nice to see in canon. I'm really worried you'll take this post the wrong way and think it's meant to be personal so I just want to assure you that that is not the case.

- I am making this a separate post, not a reblog to your post, because I don't want to hijack it haha. I want your post to just be about your lovely art, not the long winded analysis I'm about to give. So everyone please go check out that post!

- I definetly think this is a fair critism about the finale. Mabel, by no means, should have been forced to hold Gideon's hand when he couldn't just learn from his wrongdoings. With what I'm about to say, I'm not trying to say this was necessarily a good choice.

With those things said, I do want to play devil's advocate a bit for this decision.

Having Mabel and Gideon be next to each and hold hands, does serve a narrative purpose here, albiet said narrative purpose could have been executed a lot better, in my opinion (or, alternatively, wasn’t even entirely necessary)

Let me explain. Let's revisit this scene: Ford takes Robbie's paint can and goes around painting the Cipher Zodiac on the ground. People start figuring out where they are on the Zodiac and getting in position. Gideon makes a big deal about being next to Mabel, despite her asking him not to. Ford instructions everyone to hold hands. Pacifica remarks that she will not hold hands with McGucket's dirty hand, and her father tells her she should do the one thing no one in their family has ever done "touch the hill-billy" (a sentence that sounds terrible out of context). They start glowing and after the extras evacuate, Ford tells Stan to join. Stan refuses, taking this opportunity to have a conversation with Ford that absolutely does not need to be addressed in this moment. Ford passive aggressively thanks him, and then corrects his grammar which is also something that absolutely does not need to addressed in this moment. They start fighting and it all falls apart.

The narrative purpose that's being served by Mabel holding Gideon's hand, is to contrast Stan and Ford, and further emphasize how riduculous they are being in this moment. Mabel is choosing to temporarily let go of her ill feelings towards Gideon, for the sake of saving the world, and she's not the only one to do this. Pacifica didn't want to hold McGucket's hand, but did so anyway to save the world. While Stan is refusing to hold hands, Robbie announces that he has "never held hands this long before" and is "very uncomfortable" but he is also continuing to cooperate in spite of this clear discomfort. These are examples of members of the Cipher Zodiac, members who are children or teenagers with underdeveloped brains and are therefore more likely to act selfishly or immaturely, setting aside their discomforts for the sake of the greater good. Then there's Stan and Ford, two grown ass men, who both know what's at stake, know their family, their neice and nephew, could die if they don't defeat Bill, yet can't manage to put aside their hurt feelings long enough to do whatever the Cipher Zodiac was going to do. The kids can pull themselves together, why can’t the full grown adults?

In what way could this have been executed better? In my opinion, the best way to execute this would be to have has many members of the zodiac as possible be holding hands with people they have or had conflicts with. This would, in theory, make Stan and Ford the only ones who couldn't set aside their grudges, which would have made it more impactful.

Most of us know that the Cipher Zodiac wasn't originally supposed to mean anything, it was just supposed to look cool and mysterious at the end of the title sequence. It was thrown in to the finale because fans had spent so much time theorizing about it. If this hadn't been the case, if the Cipher Zodiac was actually something intentional that was planned from the beginning, they really could have preplanned this and made it impactful. They could have designed the Zodiac to have the symbols have to be in a specific order, and could have written the series with that in mind, to make it so everyone was holding hands with someone they had issues with.

Of course, that wasn't the case, but I still think this could have been done more effectively with the position the writers were actually in. Looking back on the series, I decided to photoshop the finale's Cipher Zodiac to be odered in, what I think, would have made this contrast in actions more impactful. I tried to order it in a way that as many people as possible had a problem with someone they were holding hands with.

The original:

My Photoshopped version:

My explanations, starting with Ford and going counter clockwise:

Ford and McGucket - they had a falling out, although they did make up mere minutes prior to this.

McGucket and Pacifica - what canon did, and the reasoning has already been brought up and was openly expressed in canon. Though McGucket doesn't seem to have any ill feelings towards Pacifica or her family.

Pacifica and Mabel - what canon did, these two did have a rivary for a good portion of the series, although they had more or less resolved that

Mabel and Gideon - what canon did, and I don't need to explain this, it's what sparked this entire post

Gideon and Dipper - these two hated each other. Dipper didn't like how Gideon harassed Mabel, Gideon was convinced that Dipper was coming between him and Mabel

Dipper and Robbie - these two fought over Wendy for half of season 1. And I don't think they every actually made any kind of amends with each other specifically.

Robbie and Wendy - they dated and had a messy breakup, although they did appear to make amends

Wendy and Soos - also what canon did. Look, Soos is the world's most perfect man, he has beef with literally no one, but he's on the Cipher Zodiac nonetheless, so he has to hold hands with someone, this is the only spot left.

Stan and Soos - Again, what canon did, and we can refer to the same logic as above, but I also think this can work to our advantage here. One the one hand, keeping in mind their father-son dynamic, Soos adores Stan and wants his affection, so I could see it being awkward for him to hold hands with Stan, whether nervous because "don't mess this up, Soos" or an overly excited issue. While Stan seems to care about Soos the same, he would never in a million years admit it, which would make holding Soos's hand potentially awkward for him, especially if Soos is being a crazy fanboy over it. On the flip side, like making the complete opposite argument, Stan not being cooperative when he has no problems with one of the people he's holding hands with, while nearly everyone else has an issue with both people they're holding hands with and aren't making a scene, could further emphasize the ridiculousness and immaturity in his actions.

So yeah! That's what I think should have been done for this to be most effective! Or just not putting Mabel by Gideon at all would have also been great!

I'm curious though: Does anyone else have a different way they'd set up the Cipher Zodiac than what I did?

[battleaxeproficiency]

a hero, fundamentally

-- commissions || ko-fi

redraw of my beloved Bogbreath (she/her) original drawing under the cut <3

redraw of this traditional piece from 2019

bogbreath is a very important character to me, one that i latched onto and used almost like a sona when i was a teenager. it felt really satisfying to see her development as a character and my own development as an artist with this piece . bog has fallen by the wayside in recent years but shes still very central to me and my art and it felt really really good to revisit her . everyone go redraw your favorite old ocs NOW !!!!!!

[elderwisp]

HEYHEYHEY WISP!!! as always i freaking love yer visuals and the effort you put on your edits so i gotta ask this fun Q for ya:

show us your first ever edit of all yer OCs vs their last edit !!!

FLO i would like u to know i sat and looked at this message for thirty minutes and YELLED. omgg this is about to be so rough HAH. i opened up my cloud storage and broke out into HIVES OH GOD ok but i will do it! I'll also add the dates in the alt text :D

Atlas: Glad to know he has those silly ears- Also, these are a decade apart? OMG

The rest under the cut bc Tumblr said no to condensing the photos on desktop U_U

Frances: Frances had a pretty cool design! Also I remember it took me hours on learning how to add that drop shadow in photoshop BAHAH

Kai: Kai spawned later on after I wanted to expand Taryn's family. In his most recent update, I did reference his TS3 model a bunch!

Taryn: JUMPSCARE! Taryn went through a lot of changes, actually in revisiting her folder, I got the perfect ideas for her tattoos! So I guess that's a plus but yeah, when I was a kid, the time I joined simblr, I thought every sim needed to be stark white. That was a thousand percent not it at all and I'm glad I grew from that

Icarus: Icarus was one of the newer additions, so I really tried to stick to how he looked in TS3 just a bit more elevated! Although his personality is where the shift really happened

Dan: Dan was born because I felt like Atlas needed a friend. Man I do love their friendship many years later!

Theo: Aaannd Theo is the latest edition so there is no TS3 counterpart! Theo spawned in after I spent some time in CAS and I was like,,, They're really cool *plops into Tessellate*

Gabriel: Gabriel was originally an angel in an old supernatural RP I was apart of. He had these like cool black wings in my mind and YEAH! haha but I loved him sm I was like, he's joining the crew. Fun fact, he was also another contender for Frances' romance options. I have thought about it a lot lately, and although I wouldn't pursue it, the thought does sound nice :")

Ares: Ares is older than any of these goobers by a longshot. He was the child of a main character in a youtube series I did as a teenager,, ahh de nostalgia of those summers,,, anyways he looked rough those genetics were NOT working with him sksks

Gum: Gum was named after Gum in JSR and I wanted to play around with a super bubbly character however as time proceeded, I do like the alternative fashion with the contrast of the bubbly pink hair <3

Syx: Syx is such a cool cat through and through

Rowan: Ok I'm gonna be so honest with you, for this one, I COULD NOT I COULD NOT DO THAT TO HIM AND SHOW YOU GUYS HIS oldest picture. I'll describe it to you, the year is 2015, he looks like a posh douchebag standing next to Taryn- It's literally seeping with male manipulator SO i'll give you his first appearance on this blog when he went by "Unnamed"

(HE LOOKS LIKE MAXXIE FROM SKIN HAHAHA)

Ok you know what? After going through this I was pretty impressed with the growth. It's also pretty neat to see that I've always had an experimental phase with editing. Idk I just think we all experience a lot of different emotions and when I think of art and editing, I never want to feel like I'm doing the same thing twice. I've always enjoyed that fluidity in creation and I don't think it'll ever stop. Under the cut I've included some of my very first edits with TS4 and now that's pretty shocking in comparison to now! Also thank you for this question I had a lot of fun putting it together and being vulnerable for some parts! (ㅅ´ ˘ `)♡

+ earliest ts4 edits below ↓

[preludicrous]

i know found family is a really common trope but the way it works in bungou stray dogs, especially with regards to the armed detective agency, really has me foaming at the mouth

like, the armed detective agency was familial from inception- a lot of found family media has a group of people coming together for work or for some other reason and slowly developing close bonds resembling a family dynamic, but the armed detective agency was quite literally created to be akin to a family unit. while circumstances brought fukuzawa and ranpo together, the armed detective agency was conceptualized and established primarily due to fukuzawa recognizing teenage ranpo's need for compassion, guidance, safety, and protection - i.e., recognizing that ranpo would need a family as he was an orphan. the ADA quite literally is created to be a family for ranpo. yes the tripartite agreement was part of it, and the crimes too complex for the police was also part of it. but ranpo needing a family, a group of people he can lean on, who are safe for him who protect him, was, in my opinion, the biggest reason for the ADA to exist

and also, during atsushi's entrance exam, dazai and fukuzawa have a conversation about atsushi's candidacy. like, yeah, atsushi has one of the most powerful and important abilities in the series, and i'm sure that must've played a part in what they decided, but dazai and fukuzawa both agree that strength is not what makes someone an agency member. atsushi's entrance exam doesn't have him showing off his tiger's claws, or his regeneration, or his deduction prowess, it's just a test of his character, a test to see if he is a safe person to bring into their family. he has the potential to be an incredible agent, and the gifts to become a powerful ability user, but what convinces dazai to invite him into the agency is almost certainly oda's dying wish- dazai invites atsushi because atsushi is an orphan, because he has nowhere to go and nowhere he belongs. because he is in need of a family.

when they invited yosano, she's completely traumatized and not able to use her ability in any way, and yet she's the first person they invite, despite being at her lowest, despite at the time having little to contribute in terms of strength and detective abilities nor the desire to, because she needed a family and they wanted her as a part of theirs

kyouka was a skilled assassin, but she's also an orphaned 14 year old girl with a kind heart who needed to be given the chance to turn her life around, who needed people around her who supported her and saw the good in her

and don't even get me started on dazai

given all this, its no wonder all the members of the ada are so fiercely protective of it

i was recently revisiting the bsd anime and during episode 1 kunikida says something like, "we're not some charity organization picking up orphans off the street" but like, they kinda are

[funkii4-blog]

I know I just made a super long negative post regarding the show’s current state but I wanna make a more positive one;

Everyone has of course taken note of this since it’s a good sign and is wondering who could get further explored next so I wanted to mention how this could work with who in the gang:

Mario: not necessary since he’s already the big central protagonist masco guy (idfk)

Meggy; extremely not necessary since she gets significant roles all the time and just had a ton of attention. I like to say she’s this show’s equivalent of “they’re my favorite oc so I’m gonna traumatize them the most”

4: not really necessary since he’s been so central this year unless they either take the chance to fix whatever weird shit they’ve been doing with him lately or further explore his internal character post-saga stuff (guilt over IGBP, etc)

3: well duh, the stuff with his struggling cafe and his insecurities as mentioned in trash friends needs to be revisited. I know a LOT of people that want that back

Tari: they started a development storyline for her over a year ago in western spaghetti that still hasn’t been revisited much of any; the closest we got was the Clench debut episode but we all know the controversy disaster that that episode caused… hopefully they’ll feel confident enough to use her more again after all that soon

Bob/Boopkins: I don’t really know what they’d do with them depth-wise tbh, sorry to fans of those two. I guess since Boopkins is basically a teenager now there could be stuff with him maturing a bit but since Bob is already the oldest in the gang that wouldn’t really work for him

Saiko & Kaizo: they have a band that was debuted 2 years ago that they forgot about

Karen: she was recently revealed to canonically be an ex-assassin before she had her kids so it has to be related to that imo

Melony: she’s been seen taking up creating manga of her own in honor of Axol since he was an artist before his death so more with that

Swag & Chris: I’LL TAKE LITERALLY ANYTHING AT THIS POINT THEY BARELY APPEAR ANYMORE AND THEYRE MY FAVS GLITCH PLEASE-

[if-whats-new]

~ SMALL TALK… ISSUE 1 (2025) ~

> WITH HARRIS POWELL-SMITH @hpowellsmith

BY BRIAR AND PETER

Joining us is an award-winning narrative designer and writer: Harris Powell-Smith! Author of the Crème de la Crème series, “Blood Money” and many more!

⟶ Hello, Harris! Welcome to Small Talk. We are absolutely thrilled to have you here with us! Before we officially begin, would you mind sharing with us a bit about yourself?

Hi! I'm a narrative designer and game writer who's worked on a few indie and mobile games including the multiplayer King of the Castle and the mobile Love Island tie-in game. Currently I'm freelancing and mostly creating choose-your-path text games with Choice of Games, which I've now been doing for eight years.

I'm most known for my dark academia Crème de la Crème series, and most recently released Honor Bound, the fourth standalone game in the series!

⟶ Now, onto the questions! Can you tell us how you started your IF writing journey?)

My very first experience with interactive writing was as a teenager, making NPC mods for Baldur's Gate 2 with my then-girlfriend, now-wife. Along with being a lot of fun, doing that gave me an understanding of branching dialogue, conditional text, and scripting, as well as how to playtest effectively, take feedback, and tailoring dialogue to fit within an existing game.

Then life happened and I didn't do much of that kind of writing until ten years ago, when I learned about Twine and started making games using it. That led me to publishing IF with the now-defunct sub-Q Magazine which was a great initiative that paid well for interactive fiction. From there I revisited Choice of Games which I'd played a bit previously, started publishing with them, and then began doing other work in the games industry.

⟶ Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew before starting IF writing?

Scope creep is a massive thing, and it's important to try to mitigate it where possible when planning and while writing. But... although I'm great at working within restrictions that other people put on me, I have a tendency to spread past most restrictions I put on myself, like a large cat overflowing over the edges of a small box. My CoG game Noblesse Oblige, the one in which I kept the closest eye on word count, ended up 40,000 words longer than I originally intended. Honor Bound, which I intended to be shorter than my previous game Royal Affairs, is over 100,000 words longer. So I haven't really internalised that advice for myself!

⟶ You started your journey into IF games with Twine. Was there a particular reason for that. Was it largely due to the loss of sub-Q Magazine? And what led you to try out CScript after?

Heh, it's more that with my Choice of Games titles, I have more freedom than I have with other projects so I have more leeway to go bigger with it!

I learned about various IF communities around the time that my friend Maz Hamilton made their Twine game Detritus in 2013. I felt inspired by playing lots of Twine games, decided to learn myself and made my first game, Aquarium! I liked that I didn't have to be a programmer to understand and use it, and that I could play around with lots of reactivity to the player's actions.

Alongside that, I rediscovered Choice of Games and got very into their catalogue. I learned ChoiceScript - again, I appreciated that it was beginner-friendly with potential for more complexity if I wanted it - and started three or so games which didn't go anywhere. But when sub-Q Magazine contacted me to ask about reprinting one of my Twine games it was very exciting to hear that people would pay me for my writing!

After publishing more IF with sub-Q, I applied to write for Choice of Games and went from there. That said, though, I carried on making games with other engines like Twine, Raconteur (which I don't know if many others have done!), Texture, and ink, plus various in-house studio's engines. So although I'm mostly working with ChoiceScript right now (which I love!), there's always been a lot of overlap. There are advantages to different tools for different kinds of projects!

⟶ You’ve written quite a few academia inspired IF games. Is this a genre you’re a big fan of? Is there a genre you’re looking forward to trying next?

Yes, I've enjoyed a lot of books in academic settings, including in boarding schools, ever since I was little! In adult life, I especially enjoyed Laurinda by Alice Pung, Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. And when I'm writing, I enjoy putting player characters in situations where they have rules guiding them (whether that's school, social etiquette, a workplace, family obligations, a reality TV show, etc...) and they can work within those rules or push against them. I also like exploring the gaps and tensions between work/school and the outside world. Plus schools are a hothouse of intense emotions and boarding schools have everyone living in each other's pockets - making them great places for drama to ensue!

⟶ Honour Bound just came out recently, congratulations! Even if it’s not your first project, it must be quite exciting. Any post-release thoughts you would like to share with us?

Thank you so much! Releasing a title never gets old, so I've been very excited (and nervous) around this time. For people who don't know Honor Bound, in it you play as a disgraced, injured military officer who's been reassigned to guard a teenage prodigy at a wilderness boarding school for the children of the rich and famous. You can recover or trash your health, career, and reputation, and befriend, romance, or backstab your colleagues, and thwart or enact shady schemes.

I love Honor Bound and I'm really proud of it! It was really fun to write from the perspective of an adult in the Crème de la Crème setting and explore another part of the world. The small town and school in which Honor Bound is set feel like real places to me that I'd love to visit, and I really fell in love with the characters - the PC as well as the NPCs. The PC can develop such different personalities and go down different paths and I'm delighted to be hearing about people's adventures.

I learned a huge amount from writing Honor Bound and developed a lot of skills doing it. I'm a little sad to leave it behind, but excited for what I'm doing next!

⟶ Besides Honour Bound and your other amazing creations in the Crème de la Crème universe, there are also shorts available on your Itch.io page. Did you always plan on making several games or did that idea come later?

Haha, I wasn't really planning anything when I first started writing IF! I was just experimenting and writing things that I enjoyed making and that I thought I'd enjoy playing, and learning different things that IF tools could do along the way.

I certainly didn't think I'd be doing this as a job ten years on! (I do very much recommend starting with shorter pieces when learning new tools/languages - it's much easier to get something finished that way, and I learn something with every project I complete.)

⟶ What’s your process of deciding how many choices the readers get? That’s something many have a tad bit trouble finalizing.

It depends a lot on the kind of game and scene it is. I like using the choices available to show something about the PC's state of mind and priorities, as well as inviting the player to choose what actions they want to take. It helps with setting different tones a lot! think a lot about what the effects of the choice are, whether it splits into major or minor branches, has mechanical effects, or is self-expressive for the PC, etc.

In my Choice of Games games, and with some of the other games I've worked on, there have been style requirements to always have at least three choices. With CoG work I usually write more like four or five because I like the variety. I tend to lean towards 3-5 even if I'm just writing something for myself, depending on the kind of scene and set of options... but there are always exceptions. Having two choices or even one can be effective too!

⟶ How do you deal with the complexity of branching narratives? Are there moments when you feel frustrated?

I plan it out in quite a lot of detail in advance - if I try to code and write at the same time, I get bogged down. I can still change things up and make discoveries as I do each type of work, but it helps me not go down as many rabbit-holes as I would if I didn't plan...

That said, frustration can definitely happen when I've planned something more complicated than I intended and I feel tied to it, or when I go down a path a little too long before realising I need to change something. Both those things can be mitigated with experience, planning, and clear intentions, but it tends to happen at some stage no matter how many games I make - it's in the nature of it!

⟶ How do you get inspired? It’s different for everyone, but we are curious about your inspiration process—after all, a good story comes into being from the first spark, correct?

I get inspired by all kinds of things! Sometimes from games, books, film, or TV that I've enjoyed - or didn't enjoy as much as I hoped, or that I'd like to explore myself from a different angle. Sometimes from art, technology, nature, current and historical events, scientific facts and developments, or something that happened in a TTRPG session. Often, something will sit in my mind for a long time before I use it for something. For my first CoG game, Blood Money, I liked the idea of magic powered by blood because I wanted it to be harmful to the person using it; various pieces of folklore and myth include ghosts being attracted to blood, so putting that together helped me think of the magic mechanics. For Crème de la Crème, I liked the idea of writing a mostly non-violent game, as Blood Money was very violent, that still had high stakes; I'd also been wanting to write a school story for some time as I enjoyed that kind of setting. I love the process of developing a PC, mechanics, and goals from an initial set of nebulous thoughts.

The big thing, I think, is that I try to be open to a wide variety of ideas and inspiration, and not to limit myself. Taking inspiration purely from one area - whether that's the type of media being read or played, or the genre, or tone - means missing out on a lot of richness and texture. So I always recommend that people who want to start writing IF explore a lot of different kinds of writing and games. (Really that's good advice no matter how long you've been writing!)

⟶ What about writer’s block? Many people suffer from it. How do you deal with your creative block?

The vast majority of the times I have trouble writing, it's because of outside factors - life stuff, stress, health, etc. So in those circumstances, my being blocked means I need to pay attention to those factors to avoid burnout. Trying to power through causes problems, so rest and protecting my health are what I try to do then.

The rest of the time is usually due to me trying to push through a scene that doesn't feel strong enough, or doesn't feel true to the characters involved, or doesn't quite work for some other reason. The "block" is a signal that I need to change something. When that happens, talking to someone is my first port of call. Sometimes just talking it out (like "rubber ducking") is enough for me to recognise what that change needs to be; sometimes it involves a more in-depth discussion. Either way, it always helps untangle things and put me back on the right track.

⟶ How do you create characters that a player can connect with? And characters that feel real?

I like creating characters with specificity. They might start with a general feel or inspiration - in Honor Bound, for example, I knew I wanted the parent of the PC's teenage charge to be a single parent who was a romanceable character. But it's important to me to quickly drill into the details of what makes them feel authentic and specific. Great characters are more than what players want them to do, or being a vehicle for a trope, or attractiveness.

The characters I love best are the ones who feel like they have their own minds, while being responsive to the player's actions. When writing IF, there's a great opportunity to invite players to engage directly with characters, and that responsiveness is what makes them feel real.

⟶ For you, has there ever been a moment when you felt a deep connection to a character(s) you wrote?

I feel that a lot! Pretty much whenever I'm writing. For some particular moments, though... the PC eavesdropping on a conversation between Hartmann or Delacroix with their parents in Crème de la Crème; Pascha climbing on rocks at the beach in Noblesse Oblige; Hyacinthe talking about success and failure in Royal Affairs; Savarel talking about burnout in Honor Bound.

I feel a particular connection with the Honor Bound PC - partly because they're the most recent PC that I wrote, and partly because there's a lot of self-expression that the player can do and explore. I really enjoyed giving players the chance to personalise their PC's life and to write responsively to it.

⟶ Do you have a character that you think is slightly difficult to write as compared to the others?

Characters whom the PC already knows well can be challenging because of the knowledge/familiarity gap between the PC and the player. A lot of the family members in Blood Money were like this; the PC's family and their guard Asher in Royal Affairs; the PC's old friend Denario and the PC's mentor, Alva, in Honor Bound.

Asher in Royal Affairs was especially difficult because at least the PC hasn't seen Denario for a number of years! But with Asher, they've been in close proximity for many years before the start of the game and it would have been easy for interactions to lean too hard on assumed past feelings or experiences. So it was a juggling act making interactions feel fresh with them while keeping a sense of familiarity and giving options for the PC not to want to hang out with them!

⟶ Is there a character whose backstory was the most fun to write? Why?

I enjoy writing characters who don't want to talk about their backstories, so the process of finding out more about them can be an emotional experience in itself. Honor Bound is very fresh in my mind and I'm feeling very affectionate towards the characters in it at the moment so I'd say Korzha the aloof teacher, Fiore the anxious scientist, and Savarel the thoughtful workaholic priest... For various reasons, they aren't immediately forthcoming about things in their life and history, and it was fun writing the points at which the PC can discover that and get to know them better.

⟶ Would you choose a happy ending or sad one? Why?

The joy of writing games is that I don't have to choose a single ending. Sometimes the endings have similar tones - some of my Twine games have bleak endings, like Heretic Dreams or Thanksgiving. But sometimes they can vary a lot more and I love exploring that! I do enjoy making sure that a less successful, or sad, ending has a lot of emotion in it, to make it feel worth playing.

For playing... I have a lot of fondness for endings that allow me to have ambivalent or bittersweet situations. When I played Love Undying: A Kiss Before Dawn and Stars Arisen, or indeed the non-IF game Pathologic 2 this year, I didn't have "perfect" endings but they were very satisfying and reflected where my character was at. So things don't always have to go my PC's way to end on a note that feels good.

⟶ Just recently you officially announced a new project. Could you tell us more about it? What can we be excited about?

Ooh, I will keep most of it under wraps for the moment! But for now I will say... it's a second-world fantasy game, there's a great deal of peril, a lot of creepy magic, and a selection of intense and complicated characters who I can't wait to write!

⟶ How would the person you were when you started this journey react to how far you've gotten?

Oh gosh! Honestly, ten years ago I couldn't have imagined that I'd still be putting my work out there at all, still less that people would pay for it or that it could possibly be my job. Life was so different then as well in any number of ways! I think they'd be shocked and intrigued, and wonder how it happened. Which is how I feel sometimes myself, haha!

⟶ Do you have any advice for people who want to get into IF writing?

Experiment with short or simple writing first, and try different styles to figure out what you do and don't like, and don't expect to write something perfect on the first try. Play lots of different kinds of games. Have a solid sense of what your intention is, while also taking feedback into consideration. And most of all, enjoy yourself!

ONCE AGAIN BIG THANKS TO HARRIS POWELL-SMITH FOR SITTING WITH US!

IT WAS LOVELY TO HAVE YOU!

[mmmmalo]

I haven't thought about homestuck in years but I began to reread it recently, and I remembered highly enjoying your analysis so I came to revisit, and I'm rather surprised by the turn it's taken. Genuine question to satisfy my own curiosity, how come your analysis shifted so heavily from possible trauma and teenage issues to homophobia, transgender readings of so many characters, and the grotesque?

First up, I'm moved that you thought of my blog when you revisited the story! Thank you for stopping by.

I think I would sum up the change as... various factors compelled me to reframe the way I approached paranoia in the comic? Like you said, I used to be all about character's individual psychologies: John with the fear of being judged, Jade with the latent hostility toward Grandpa, etc. But sometimes the fears were bigger than individuals. Homestuck cracked its first Obama joke in reference to Deep Impact, a movie about people for whom a black presidency is an event comparable to cataclysmic flooding. The poorly received Skainet Systems lore made a sly reference to racist birther conspiracies, asserting that Obama was born in another timeline instead of another country. Dirk lays out a story (which he outright states was gathered from conspiracy theorists) where a tyrant, who speaks a distinctly Black flavor of English, eventually floods the earth. Between instances like these, I eventually inferred that Homestuck itself takes place within a conspiracy theory -- and a self-consciously racist one at that -- which raised more specific questions about unreliable narration than Homestuck was already encouraging with its meta motifs.

At various points, characters make revealing Freudian slips -- Karkat summoned an image of Jade "making out with herself" when he was trying to critique what she was "making herself out to be", for instance. The pun revealed an embarrassing, private fixation. When I was still focused on character psychology, I had some luck finding Freudian slips that weren't openly teased, which provided further insight into the characters' psyches. After shifting into the conspiratorial mode, I eventually applied a similar idea to the story at large: if certain word choices in the narrative are designed to reflect proximity to certain societal hatreds, then finding them allows us to piece together the paranoid conspiracies about the hated groups in question, which structure the narrative. I whimsically dubbed this activity "Slurquest". The allusions to homophobia and transphobia found via this approach made it easier to spot the same motifs in individuals.

The recent turn towards "the grotesque" (by which I assume you mean porn jokes) basically amounts to me catching a fairly simple joke: why does Problem Sleuth combine a film projector with a contracting waste disposal pipe? Why are allusions to sun-blindness accompanied by torn up toilets? The answer is gay pornography, within its utility for shock: the old internet practice of linking people images of huge distended assholes, to their displeasure, for laughs. Terezi's sun-blindness is on some level a repetition of Hussie's old gag "the elf saw a picture of a penis and started to cry", with the red sun acting as an abstracted goatse -- this is why Dave, whose apartment is haunted by the Red Sun, is likewise haunted by Bro's gay pornography. This ongoing sun/ass symbolism makes it funnier when Dave uses the phrase "privy to what I flame broil below" to describe Terezi smelling his ass.

That's the short of it, at least

[rusty-eevee]

I found my first mystery dungeon game ever!! It somehow ended up under our dishwasher, and when we replaced it recently, my parents found it. This is the only Pokemon childhood cartridge I still have after most of mine got lost or stolen, and it's so exciting that I found my first copy of Explorers of Darkness!

This is what got me into mystery dungeon in the first place! Gates was the one that I played the most when I was young, which got me to fall in love with the series, but Darkness was the first one I played.

I never managed to beat it as a kid, and I just kept restarting it over and over again, trying different teams. The furthest I ever made it back then was Amp Plains when I kept losing to the boss (I'm pretty sure it was Manectric? Could be Luxray, not sure).

I never even got to Dusknoir's betrayal or Grovyle or any of that until I was a teenager and watched my brother play the Wii U's version of Explorer's of Sky.

I checked the file on it, and it was one that I'd just restarted. I was an hour and ten minutes in, and I'd only just gotten to the guild right after naming my team.

I was a Turtwig with my deadname, and my partner was a Chimchar who didn't have a nickname (my brother convinced me that nicknaming your Pokemon was weird for some reason? So when I was a kid, I didn't nickname them. I could probably make an entire post of all the things my brother said about Pokemon to mess with me, lol)

My team name was POKEMON in all caps, which I don't even think is the default? I guess I was just thinking, "Well, they're Pokemon, guess I gotta name it Team POKEMON). My name had lowercase letters so I know I knew how to do it back then, the caps had to have been deliberate.

I restarted the file, and I'm going to do a liveblog of me playing the game! I've seen a couple of people doing them recently and it seems really fun! It's going to be cool to revisit the Explorer's series, especially since I haven't played Darkness or Time in almost ten years I think, and I'll get a chance to see how different it was from Sky.

[flutishly]

The lull before the storm - revisiting the days before Hero's birthday, a decade later

Note: This post contains spoilers for Nothing Much to Do.

I'll admit, I haven't been keeping up with the NMTDaily in recent weeks. I'll watch the videos a couple weeks late, in chunks. It feels entirely unlike how I watched NMTD when it was originally released (obsessively, as the episodes came out; I never used subscriptions, so I'd check the channels directly pretty much every day), but entirely reflective of where my life is today, a decade later.

I'll be away this weekend, leading into the 10-year anniversary of Hero's 16th birthday and the radio silence that followed. I'll probably write more about the actual videos when the time comes (hey, remember when I spent hours micro-analyzing a tiny video only for the full-length scene to emerge within that same day? I should be embarrassed by that than I am), but for now I find myself thinking about how the tension ramps up and how the story of Much Ado About Nothing and NMTD's interpretation feels different in 2024 than it did in 2014.

There's a lot that at the time I feel I was less forgiving of, interestingly. Maybe it's because I'm older, but I find myself feeling sorrier for the boys this time around. Claudio's anxiety and self-consciousness feels more... forward. Pedro's need to people-please and "lead". Ben's intense need to be liked and appreciated. Ironically, even as their behavior seems even more "inappropriate" today, I can't help but feel that there's something about it that I better understand today.

Hero herself somehow feels more mature. There's something about watching with the retrospect of a decade that makes the coming punch hurt all the more. It's been long enough since my last rewatch that I'd forgotten so many smaller details, like the way the girls have their sleepover or the fact that Hero has her own charming relationship with the camera independently of Beatrice. (I'm not sure why I'd forgotten these moments specifically, but it's interesting! I suppose it has something to do with the fact that I always clicked with Bea more as a character, but in this rewatch I feel like I'm finally seeing the version of Hero that many of my friends from the NMTD era always saw.)

Hero seems more mature and Bea seems more childish. Ten years ago, Bea was just a few years younger than me; she was immature, but not so different from where I was in life. Now, both Bea and Hero feel like teenagers and I'm very much not a young adult anymore. I look at both of them and think how fragile they are, how much they're taking on themselves at such a young age (independence is wonderful, but do they have the love and support of a good adult mentor?). I think of Bea's discomfort talking about Ben and her fear of being hurt. I think of Hero's open love and trust. I think of how both will soon be heartbroken by the same event, in very different ways.

Hero's birthday is one of those plot points in the world of literary webseries. It's iconic for a reason. And I know that as things "unfold" this weekend (and are only revealed next week), I'm watching it from a very different place than a decade ago and with a completely different mindset. But I suspect that the sadness and anger I felt then will not be completely obliterated. I suspect that I'll still have a moment of anguish for Hero, for Bea, for shattered dreams and the end of innocence.

----

One final aside: I truly love the writing on NMTD. Time and again, I'm impressed by just how richly the characters are drawn, by what a beautiful job The Candlewasters did in translating a classic text and making it feel so very real. I feel so lucky to have experienced this show as it was released in 2014 and yet again lucky to watch it now.

[starrysmiling]

old men analysis time!

okay pokemon unbound tumblr, let's talk about the old men.

for context, recently i've observed some discussion about professor log making the rounds and after some intense discussion with @avielex, we'd like to clear up some misunderstandings about log which we don't believe are true. i will narrate the majority of this post, but the ideas here have been put forward and agreed on equally by both avi and i.

furthermore, as a basis, we have tried very hard to only view the player as they are depicted in the game, without our personal player characters' influences (as well as without our personal biases for jax and ace respectively).

as for this analysis, apart from debunking the myths about log, i also want to lead into arthur and how he's portrayed as a parallel to log, and showcase the differing relationships between log with ace and player, and arthur with jax. so without further ado...

re: log 'forcing' the player

first and foremost, a common opinion i see of log's role in the story is that he forces the player into running his errands, and turns them into an ideal champion as part of his rivalry with arthur. while i do not doubt that he asks the player to do multiple things for him, and i also do not doubt log's rivalry with arthur playing a part in his spurring the player towards being champion, i do not believe that this behaviour constitutes forcing — or grooming, which is a word i've seen being thrown around as well. let's take a look at log's lines when he asks the player to run the first errand for him:

Prof. Log Ah, yes, [Player]. You seem rather capable... would you be willing to help an old man out with a little something? Yes, this is a splendid idea, your father was well known for helping others, after all. It's only fitting that his [son/daughter] would follow in his footsteps. As for the task, in Bellin Town, at the Poke Mart, I have a package waiting for me. I would go get it myself, but I'm a bit too busy with my own research, and so are all my assistant researchers... Don't worry, I already informed the clerk that someone would pick it up in my stead. Since you have your own Pokemon with you, it shouldn't be too difficult.

this is a pretty standard request for help. an old man, who clearly requires a walking aid, wants a teenager/young adult (assuming that player is at least 17 years old, as confirmed in the flashback in the shadow base revisit) to go down a mountain and retrieve a package that he is not physically fit to collect himself. (and also, he doesn't have the time to do so.)

while there is no option for player to refuse the request (or in fact any of his requests), we should also note that player does not appear to be unwilling to complete this errand! further along in the story, it's noted by jax that player has a certain look on their face when faced with something they don't want to do, and this doesn't appear here — but you know when it does appear? when player tries to leave frozen heights without visiting their mother, and log says the following:

Prof. Log [Player]! What are you doing? I told you to check in with your mother! ...Don't look at me like that. Didn't your mother ever teach you to listen to your elders? Go see her!

the only thing you might point out in the first dialogue sequence is that he brings up aros. while this could be rather insensitive, i believe this is because aros is likely a strong role model to the player, and someone who many people look up to. however, i don't believe that this is considered forcing rather than a crude persuasion technique, as 'forcing' would imply that the player is unwilling. (also, note that this is the only time log brings up aros in regards to errands.)

the next errand he gives is filling out the pokedex. since this is something player can do passively while doing other things on their trainer journey, i don't think there's much forcing in this one. while this can be considered pushing some responsibility on player, it's also not critical to the tasks at hand, and every mainline pokemon game professor asks the player to fill one out anyway. as for giving one to ace... well, it is sorta true that ace doesn't get along with log, so player is log's best bet. (more on this later!) i'd have to agree that this one is a little forcing, but it's also important to note that player doesn't object to it either.

and now let's get onto the third errand: going to see arthur in dresco town. by now, player has seen the lab in the shadow base (and gotten conked in the head for it), saw a legendary pokemon being captured with log's master balls, and the profeessor has told them that this could be Big Trouble. at this point, refusing the professor would be less reasonable, no? do you help an old man who needs a walking aid relay some critical, possibly world-ending news to someone who lives two towns over when you've seen the evidence with your own eyes? to me, if player has any ounce of empathy, it would not be surprising for them to accept this errand without hesitation!

those are the three errands that prof log asks the player to run at the beginning of the game. it is clear that player does not repeatedly try to refuse log's errands, and that log does not force (or groom) player into running the errands — and nor does he repeatedly bring up aros in order to persuade player. i will get back to the main plot as the "fourth" errand in a bit. in the meantime...

the quote-unquote ideal champion

as for the "turning player into an ideal champion" part, i believe the only thing that alludes to this is jax's dialogue at the league (before battling him, and the dialogue for winning against him):

Jax This whole time, Grampa Arthur has been training me as his replacement - by having me fight against threats to the region. I'm sure that's why Prof. Log had you run these errands too... He and Grampa always did have a bit of a rivalry, ha ha! But now that a worthy challenger has appeared, someone I respect, this is going to be a fun battle!

Jax Wow, [Player]... Looks like Prof. Log picked a worthy challenger after all! ...but no, seriously, congrats! You're now the new Champion of Borrius!

you can imply here that jax believes that like how arthur was training him to be his successor, log was training player. it's important to understand that characters don't always have the information you have, and may misunderstand the situation accordingly. log certainly does note that player has grown much throughout their journey and has achieved much in the timespan of the plot, most notably in tarmigan town, and again at the entrance to victory road. the dialogue for the latter is as follows:

Prof. Log [Player]! Arthur just relayed the good news to me! Thank goodness you're still in one piece! And of course, thank you! You, Jax, Ace... you all gave everything you had to save Borrius. Of course, I've been told not all has been resolved with this "Aklove", but that's something you can worry about later, I suppose. For now, you just worry about that empty seat, meant for the Champion!

this comes after ace and arthur have both told the player that they should aim for the champion title, so it's possible that he heard off one of them that player was going to challenge the league. (arthur's dialogue is a bit easier to miss since you'd have to talk to him before you beat the league, but he says the following:)

Arthur Now that everything is at peace once more, why don't you take on the Pokemon League? I'm sure someone with your skill could easily become the Champion.

in all, this reads more like genuine support rather than forcing the player into becoming champion. considering that player has already been urged to go for the champion title, log's support here, which is only gotten once the player reaches victory road (and thus already is intending to go to the league), does not seem to be persuasive at all.

i personally think that if log was giving training to player (and even ace, too) through his errands as jax says, it would be so that they can grow into respectable, kind people who will help others when they come across people who require it — arguably, the sort of person that aros was. none of the errands the professor sends player on are geared towards training pokemon, unless you count filling out the pokedex.

log's actually quite nice, y'see...

okay. now that we've got that under control, let's look at the other big opinion about log: he's a crusty old man — crusty meaning easily irritated in this case. we have a very good window into this behaviour through ace, who is clearly at odds with log almost every time they meet. however... i don't think log is being rude to ace with malicious intent; if at all, log is kind and caring, but the way he expresses that care is not shown in a straightforward manner. additionally, it's important to consider the amount of information each character knows about the other and how much they understand each other before jumping to conclusions.

let's review ace's history and goals first. ace has just moved to borrius a week before the plot begins, and log is ace and melony's legal guardian. ace's goal is to find his parents, who have not been seen in ages. this is all shown through this conversation between ace and log in the beginning of the game:

Prof. Log I was planning on giving Ace a Pokemon of his own someday, but now I don't have to! Ho ho ho! Ace Someday? I've been here a whole week, and you made it sound like I was gonna get one any day now! Prof. Log Well, of course I was always going to give you one, Ace! There are plenty of errands I'm too old to run myself, after all! It's just that... well... you seem to be insistent on going off on your own, to look for your parents. I keep telling you, no one has seen them in years! Even if they are somehow still in Borrius, finding them is much too big a task for you alone. I was waiting for you to accept that fact before giving you your own Pokemon, but you refuse to listen to me! Ace I'm more than capable of doing it on my own, old man. You may be my "legal guardian" or whatever in Borrius, but you sure don't know anything about me!

ace is brash, headstrong, and will do anything to achieve his goals; if you've played through the entire game, that should be quite apparent as a major trait of his character. he is clearly pissed off that log won't support him doing what he wants, and i understand that log sounds condescending and rude to ace on a first glance...

...however, consider this: you're an old man who has just gotten two 18-year-olds under your wing. one of them keeps running off alone to god-knows-where without a pokemon to protect himself from danger, without listening to advice and going off alone, or even the foresight to see that his task of finding his parents would be like finding a needle in a haystack. log is saying all of this because he is trying to keep ace safe. the reason for their conflict is because ace and log's values and perspectives aren't aligned: ace thinks log is being overbearing and not respecting his goals in that his answers are so close and log is stopping him from getting them; log thinks ace he needs to calm down and think before rushing headfirst into danger. the most important line in this dialogue is this one:

Prof. Log I was waiting for you to accept that fact before giving you your own Pokemon, but you refuse to listen to me!

clearly, the professor is willing to support ace! but he wants ace to understand his viewpoint and be able to take responsibility for himself before he can fully trust ace by giving him a pokemon. he even says that the task of finding marlon and ivory isn't something that ace can do alone, which again supports the implication that he is willing to help him achieve his goal. am i saying that this is the right way to talk to kids who won't listen to you? no! the way he says these things can definitely be inconsiderate, but you have to remember that he believes ace is going into danger and he's the one responsible for ace if he gets hurt.

(also, you might think hey, but log is forcing ace to run errands, too! well, presumably log is also giving ace and melony a roof over their heads and taking care of them in some way, and log clearly isn't at his physical prime. if he wants to feed all of them and can't walk properly then of course he'd get ace and melony to help him out. unless you're a very ungrateful sorta-grandchild, or you've got better places to be like ace, you'd probably hear your poor grandpa-standin out lest he kick you out into the snowy forest.)

also, earlier, we noted these lines by log, too:

Prof. Log [Player]! What are you doing? I told you to check in with your mother! ...Don't look at me like that. Didn't your mother ever teach you to listen to your elders? Go see her!

log's an old man. he's a bit old-fashioned. you wouldn't really blame him for believing that respecting your elders is important, yeah? that's what he thinks ace isn't doing. and ace really isn't respecting his elder, actually, but ace is just like that as a character. that's what gives him charm.

...which brings me back to the main plot as supplementary evidence that log is actually just looking out for the younger ones in town. it's very important to note that he tries to discourage arthur from involving the player in his arguably very dangerous plan to stop the shadows. the following dialogue happens after arthur tells jax to stop the shadows:

Prof. Log Well, [Player], I think it's time for you to head home. You've completed your errand, and I'm sure your mother misses you. But still, I'm surprised that you managed to get here so easily... I'll have to brag to your mother about what a reliable errand [boy/girl] you've become! Ho ho ho! Arthur Now, wait just a moment, Euler. I know Jax is capable, but I believe this young [man/lady] may be just as useful. [Player] has had prior experience with these "Shadows", and Jax very well might benefit from the extra assistance [Player] could lend. Prof. Log Assistance? Arthur, [Player] only became a Trainer very recently... Is that... is that Dresco Town's Gym Badge? To think that you'd make this much progress so quickly...

and even after arthur insists that player joins in the plan (and then again after they come back from cinder volcano with jax), log tries to reassure the player's mom so that she doesn't worry about her child going off to fight an enemy about 10 times their size:

Prof. Log Alright, [Player], you may follow after Jax. I'll... tell your mother you finished my errand, and you've left home to take the Gym Leader challenge. Yes, I think that will do it.

Prof. Log I'll head back to Frozen Heights, [Player]. I'll explain to your mother that I've seen you off, and you're on your way to the next Gym Badge. No sense in letting her worry, after all.

you might note that he's more polite to player than he is with ace. that's probably because player doesn't disagree with the things he says, doesn't have ace's attitude, and isn't running off on their own straight into danger — they're even coordinating with arthur (who log obviously trusts) to make a plan before they go!

anyway, to conclude this section: i don't think ace ever really comes to understand log's intentions and respect him by the end of the game, but i hope this at least proves that log is truly just kind and wants to look out for the young ones, and his conflict with ace is not out of malice but out of worry.

and as for the other old man...

the main plot here is certainly a good place to swerve to focus on arthur as a contrast, who i believe is actually the one who is less kind of the two old men. seeing the way he treats jax and player is a stark contrast to the way log treats ace, in a weird uno-reverse sort of way.

overall, arthur is portrayed as a wise historian who was the previous champion of borrius, and acts as the leader of the group against the shadows and light of ruin. one thing that immediately stands out to me when i go through the script is that... you can barely point out any flaws. he's knowledgeable and wise, people trust him, and as a leader he knows exactly what needs to happen and how to proceed through with his plan. he never truly comes into conflict with anyone like log does, and as a supporting character, he doesn't get any true character growth like jax does. the lack of content where he does something outside his assigned narrative role leads to this section being more theory than proper analysis, and some of his influence is better seen through jax's struggles instead of through himself.

nonetheless, arthur clearly knows his place in-universe, as he takes control of the conversation and the plan quite quickly after the apparent goal of the shadows becomes clear. notice that everything major that happens in this scene is because of an order from arthur:

Arthur Not yet, Jax. First things first, I need you to fly to Frozen Heights and bring Prof. Log here.

Prof. Log What do you think should be done about this, Arthur? Arthur Jax will fly out to intercept these "Shadows". So far, he's shown himself to be a quite capable Trainer... And as you know, Euler, I've been training him as my successor, so I believe he's our best hope. He'll confront these "Shadows" and stop them before they reach Moltres. Prof. Log Of course. That seems like a very reasonable plan, Arthur.

arthur is the one who insists that player be included in the plan, despite log's concerns. i could even argue that arthur is the one forcing player to join in the story, and not log:

Arthur Now, wait just a moment, Euler. I know Jax is capable, but I believe this young [man/lady] may be just as useful. [Player] has had prior experience with these "Shadows", and Jax very well might benefit from the extra assistance [Player] could lend. Prof. Log Assistance? Arthur, [Player] only became a Trainer very recently...

arthur never even asks for player's (or jax's!) input into this whole plan — they're just kinda standing there the whole time. the way he talks about them — jax will do this, player will do that — implies that he sees player and jax more in terms of their potential, their skills and experiences that could assist in his plan, and deploys them like a commander deploying troops. hell, note that he calls player (and by extension jax) useful, like they're tools. chess pieces. in stark contrast, log's first thoughts when player is dragged into the plan are to act on a protective instinct to prevent player from jumping into what he perceives is a very dangerous task and to think about what to tell their mom, who is being kept in the dark and will likely worry about her child.

in other words: arthur is like a chessmaster, and player, jax, the shadows, the light of ruin... are all pieces in his big game of mind-chess. and he has the confidence and experience (as former champion, most likely) to back himself up.

(making a side-note here to say that arthur's guidance, his confidence, his legacy... all are huge contributing factors to jax's growth. as we know, jax is trained to become arthur's successor, and early-game jax shares an (over)confidence in his being able to thwart the shadows. when he's defeated, he realises he's yet to reach arthur's level and expectations, and through arthur being a near-perfect role model and player literally showing up out of nowhere and being better than him, it absolutely destroys his self-confidence and drives him to be more reckless in a bid to prove himself. it doesn't work. it's player's influence again in the distortion world and then the champion battle which starts to turn his mindset around.)

this objective side of arthur brings a shade of doubt to arthur's kindness to player when he's sending them out to cinder volcano, or even his faith in jax (specifically jax, since he's the one who fails, but player would also be included here) when player meets him in dehara city. it's interesting to think that instead of telling player to mind their own limits, he's telling them that they could be a liability if they get hurt:

Arthur Don't force yourself, [Player]. If you feel you are too injured to continue, then you must fall back. Jax will help, if it comes to that. Good luck, youngster.

it's also interesting to ponder where arthur's trust in jax comes from — is it in jax himself, as his grandson and successor? or is it in the training and experiences that he's given jax?

Arthur Oh? You say Jax wasn't with Zeph? That gives me hope... he must still be out there...

Arthur If they have taken Jax... no, I'll try to stay optimistic. Jax is a resourceful boy... But lately, he seems to be contacting me less and less... and with less pep, every time.

...but arthur never actually seems to show much worry towards any other individual, so it's hard to determine just how much of each he holds.

from this it's possible to theorise out of this that arthur rarely takes emotions into account, especially when brewing his plans. it's likely that this is from his experience as champion and having to act in a leadership position, though again, it's unclear what the duties of the champion of borrius are. his dialogue after player beats the post-game suggests that he isn't so aware of how deeply his influence runs in jax's image of himself, and doubts the way he's been training jax:

Arthur He... well, actually, he came to see me just before. He told me about how the pressure of trying to live up to my legacy was messing with his head... All the more so after the setbacks against the Shadows ad the Light of Ruin. I admit, perhaps I was asking too much of him... So I told him that he should improve himself, for his own sake, not mine.

...but because this also represents a change in arthur's view of jax, it's hard to determine whether he was so considerate about jax's feelings before. nevertheless, his support of jax is a wonderful backbone for the growth he does offscreen before he returns as a title defense challenger for the player.

and when you compare him to log, you can clearly see who the kinder one is by thinking about where their priorities are when faced with issues. it's quite neat to consider that the very kind-presenting arthur is much less considerate of his own grandson than log, who seems to just throw metaphorical hands with ace (who he's known for a week) every other time he shows up!

once again, as a disclaimer: arthur just doesn't talk as much as the main characters and doesn't get into conflicts the same way as log, so please take this above section with a grain of salt, as it's mostly theory and speculation.

so! in conclusion! hopefully that leaves you a little more informed about the old men and why they act the way they do. i'm not the world's #1 fan of log nor arthur by any means, but i do believe that it's important to truly understand the character before making untrue claims about them. (and you're still free to dislike them, in whichever case, but now you can hate them accurately!)

[fuckoffbard]

I’ve been on tumblr since I was about 15 years old. I deleted my first account when I went to college because I thought I had to ‘grow up’. I regretted it so much.

I started this account in 2020 when I needed an escape from my dad’s bad health, healing from an abusive relationship, and just generally feeling lost. I made 4 good friends whom I speak to regularly - 1 I’ve met in person twice.

I’ve been away from tumblr since like 2023. Life got busy and I just didn’t have fandom in my heart anymore.

Recently I’ve been struggling with burnout at work and life in general. My therapist encouraged me to revisit things that have previously brought me comfort. I rewatched shows I loved as a teenager and made some nostalgic playlists.

But then I saw Sinners and none of my friends had yet, but I was burning up to talk about it with other people who loved it as much as I do.

And I knew exactly where I needed to go. 🥹

Tumblr is the home that always leaves the porch light just in case. It never judges you for how long you’ve been away, just welcomes you in like no time has passed.

I’ve been back on tumblr for a little over a week now and my happiness and feeling of connection has doubled.

It’s good to be back.

[geek-fashionista]

The Origins of the Trainwrecks Universe

Just... bear with me.

In the year 2001, I created a character named The White Maiden. According to legend, she was a sickly young woman who gave her life to protect her home planet from an outside threat. In actuality, she was a star spirit, and the threat was her twin sister, who had become a black hole. The White Maiden sacrificed herself to subdue her twin, leaving her lover, a knight, behind.

The knight's name was Julian Luna. The White Maiden was Whitney.

Two years later in 2003, while I was still living in Hawaii, I created two characters named Ray Kingston and Felicia Moreau. The plotline of their story was basically Horimiya but with class differences (Horimiya did it better). They lived in Waialae-Kahala because Felicia's family had money for days, and I never actually wrote their story down.

We skip ahead another three years to 2006. My now-husband, realizing I was crazy person, created a set of characters to interact with the imaginary people I'd split my psyche into. Whitney's twin sister Desiree was seduced by one of them. Whitney was also seduced by one of them but that's not as important. And the recently created Makoto, who had been turned into a monster by the darkness inside her, was saved by James, the Prince of Darkness.

Typical teenage edgelord shit.

In June 2006, I moved to Washington State at the beginning of summer vacation. Bored and friendless, I revisited some old stories while my characters and my now-husband's characters got busy in the Sean Paul sense of the phrase. Whitney's twin sister Desiree (my literal shadow) gave birth to Jasmine. Luna was accidentally created when I tried to draw her mother with short hair. Whitney adopted Sebastian, then had two more sons before her uterus gave up. Duke came out of his mother's womb with a camera in hand... until I made him an assassin. Makoto became the victim of my attempted Hallmark Christmas movie, where she meets an annoying little boy named Dimitri with a hot single doctor dad. Then she got seduced by my husband's mind, a higher being, and Dimitri became biologically hers and a genius. And then she got back together with James and they had a daughter before Dimitri died and Makoto was so bummed that she jumped James and got preggo with triplets Leo, Victoria, and Twylight in 2009.

Over the next decade, I whittled what was probably 20-something characters down to six: Sebastian, Jasmine, Luna, Duke, Dimitri, and Victoria. While the others disappeared into their own universes or passed into The Slums (my subconscious), this group stayed together, trying out different stories until they found their home. But they have all retained elements of their pasts:

Luna, the otherworldly star spirit, born as her mother died.

Dimitri, half-human half-other, too smart for his human side to handle.

Sebastian, burning with anger against God after being stricken blind.

Jasmine, who inherited her original mother's original sins.

Duke, who hates Dimitri because he has half his heart inside of him.

And Victoria, playing the piano in an empty room on a moonlit night.

Now, if you'd like to hear about all the different lives they've lived, be sure to tune into their individual character development diaries as I write them on Substack... eventually. Bonus material for later seasons. :D

[nitrateglow]

Spooky Season 2024: 23-31

House (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)

A teenage girl nicknamed Gorgeous and her friends travel to her aged aunt's house for the summer, not realizing the aunt is a people-devouring ghost and her house is one giant supernatural booby trap.

House reeks of the '70s with its psychedelic visuals and rock soundtrack, and yet it never feels "dated" to me. Okay, maybe I'm not the best person to judge that considering I binge nickelodeon-era one-reelers for fun, but House is so bizarre and uniquely its own weird thing that it transcends its original disco-era milieu. Beyond the goofball humor and erratic editing, House is concerned with the usual in gothic stories, mainly how past traumas linger on into the present (in this case, the aunt's grief over a fiance who went missing during WWII, and Gorgeous longing for her deceased mother).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Siegel, 1956)

A small California town is overtaken by an alien species who replicate and replace the humans living there. Transformations result in soulless beings devoid of all emotion.

The original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is often boiled down to being a Red Scare allegory. Both of the times I've seen it, I feel it is so much richer than that. You could read it any number of ways and I think that openness to interpretation is what has made the story so ripe for retelling over the years.

While slightly overshadowed by the 1978 version these days, the 1956 adaptation remains a damn great horror movie in its own right. I usually don't care for the alien invasion movies of this period, but this one is genuinely chilling with a minimum of tension-spoiling cheese (not that I'm against cheese). The camera angles become more tilted as the situation grows more dangerous and the perspective more warped. The filmmaking hits harder because the earlier scenes are filmed in a blander, more straightforward way too. Good stuff.

The Sitter (dir. Fred Walton, 1977)

This creepy little short film take on the babysitter urban legend was later expanded into the feature When a Stranger Calls by its director Fred Walton. Aside from the opening 20 minutes, I find When a Stranger Calls a dull trek and so I tend to just revisit this tight little short film instead. However, it does lack Carol Kane... maybe I should just rewatch the opening of When a Stranger Calls every year?

Regardless, this is still an effective movie and worth seeing. You can find it free on YouTube.

Dracula (dir. Tod Browning, 1931)

Count Dracula-- a suave, mysterious nobleman who happens to be a bloodsucking member of the undead-- moves to modern England to snack on the populace.

Dracula is not my favorite of the Universal horror classics. Part of me sympathizes with its critics, who find the narrative clunky once it leaves Transylvania. I'm also not fond of Helen Chandler's rather vapid Mina-- not just because the book's Mina is a fabulous heroine and deserves better, but because the character herself seems little more than a breathing prop. Being slowly turned into a soulless, bloodsucking monster should be horrifying, but neither Chandler's performance nor the film hammers home that urgency.

Still, there is much to admire about Dracula. Its primitive qualities enhance the horror, particularly the lack of soundtrack and the sense of stillness in much of the blocking, Dwight Frye being a little freak extraordinaire, and Lugosi's performance. He truly appears uncanny, his deliberate speaking and gestures adding to the sense that Dracula exists outside of the present, that he should have been in the grave long ago. Few films capture that classic gothic atmosphere so well, the decay, the tattered decadence.

Wait Until Dark (dir. Terence Young, 1967)

When a shipment of heroin hidden in a doll is inadvertently brought into her possession, a recently blinded housewife named Susy Hendrix engages in battle of wits with a trio of dangerous criminals out to get the drugs back. Complications include: Susy not knowing where the doll is, the criminals turning on one another, and Susy having to work out her own psychological vulnerabilities. The conflict escalates to violence, especially when it becomes clear the criminal ringleader Harry Roat is willing to torture Susy just for his own entertainment.

I think anyone who follows this blog knows what I think of this film-- I adore it beyond all reason. I have written a lot about it (if you're interested, I recorded an entire commentary track for it two years ago), so I'm not going to repeat too much. It's a great one-location thriller with engaging characters, a slow-burn sinister tone, dark humor, and one of the best final confrontations between a hero and villain in movie history. It feels like a movie specifically designed to appeal to me. Come to experience Audrey Hepburn being badass, stay for evil beatnik Alan Arkin racking up a body count.

The Lighthouse (dir. Robert Eggers, 2019)

Two lighthouse keepers descend into madness when stranded on a remote New England island. Homoerotic tension, disintegration of identity, seagull's pooping in inconvenient places, mermaid sex fantasies, and lots of possible gaslighting ensue. And what of the mysterious light inside the lighthouse, an entity that seems to be almost supernatural in its pull?

I rewatched this with my youngest sister who usually doesn't like horror at all. We both had a really good time though! The film is undeniably creepy, but there's a lot of dark humor present too. It doesn't take the edge off the chilling scenes, but it does prevent the experience from getting too grim, I think. Of Eggers' current filmography, it's definitely the closest to being a comedy, if only because Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe have a sinister odd couple dynamic.

A Page of Madness (dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926)

When his wife is committed to an asylum, an old man takes a janitor job at the institution. The wife's mental condition strains his relationship with his daughter and future son-in-law, and then the janitor's own mind begins to lose track of the line between delusion and reality. Trippiness ensues.

I first saw this film on TCM in the middle of the night, which may be the ideal way to view this surrealistic silent classic. It was designed to be experimental compared to conventional Japanese movies of the time. There are no intertitles at all, so following the story can be confusing, even before the protagonist starts to lose control of his perceptions. However, it's like nothing else and worth seeing for those who want a movie that marries 1920s surrealism with expressionistic dread.

The Phantom of the Opera (dir. Rupert Julian, 1925)

A mysterious "Phantom" is haunting the Paris Opera, blackmailing, bribing, and even murdering to make sure Christine Daae, an aspiring singer and the object of his obsession, will be the ultimate prima donna.

The Lon Chaney POTO is a weirdly nostalgic watch. I was obsessed with it as a teenager and watched it often. I still adore it. Chaney's performance is nothing short of brilliant and the gothic sets remain spectacular. I love Chaney!Erik's lair and the sense of size it has.

SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING

I used to dislike the ending to this version, where Erik is unredeemed and there's a big chase through the Paris streets. While I would have preferred the ending as originally filmed, in which Erik releases Christine and dies of a broken heart, I admire the direction of that last chase and Erik's final, memorable gesture of contempt to the mob about to claim his life. It's perfection.

Castle of Otranto (dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1977)

Maybe counting this as "horror" is a stretch. It's an odd beat of a short regardless. It's framed as a mockumentary in which an academic argues that the events of the seminal gothic novel The Castle of Otranto really happened, but not in Italy (as in the original text), but in Czechoslavakia. This mockumentary is intercut with animated segments depicting key episodes from the novel, such as an oversized helmet falling from the sky to crush the villain's heir to death (yes, that actually happens) and all the quasi-incestuous drama between the characters.

Most reviewers come to this film because they're fans of the director Jan Svankmajer. They know nothing about The Castle of Otranto. I'm the opposite: I know nothing about Svankmajer, but I have read the gothic lunacy that is Otranto. I enjoyed seeing it adapted in some form and the metafictional elements of this short ape similar conventions throughout gothic literature in general, only in a very '70s way.