#(Because all power comes from risk but that doesn't mean you have to be dumb abt it)

[mossdotjpeg]

[Act 3 spoilers]

[doki-doki-imagines]

Heyy can you do more of those angel reader with the mk1 earthrealmers? Pleaseeee they are so good!!! Maybe this time they are all down bad for the reader and the reader feeling very tempted? 😍😍😍🥹🥹🥹

previous part

Johnny Cage: -Every time he looks at you, he bites his lower lip and eyes close a little; his gaze is so intense… -You are not used to being desired, and you know what he feels for you is sinful. -But DAMN, sin never looked so appetising for you like right now. -You tell Johnny about this. It's all nice and hot, 'till your position isn't at risk. -He understands, or at least nods his head. You aren't sure he really understood anything. -The real question is: for how long will you be able to resist his tempting gaze?

Kenshi Takahashi: -Kenshi is gonna pull out all the rizz power that he has hidden for all this time. -He has been young and extremely confident, breaking more than one heart and stealing others. He can do it. -IF ONLY IT WAS THAT EASY. -His palms sweat, and more than once, he stuttered in front of you like a teenager in front of their first crush. -You find him so cute that you decide to kiss his cheek, your wings protecting you both from unwanted eyes. -You kiss him near the corner of his lips, his stubble scratching you a little. -Kenshi blushes immediately, stuttering without being able to say a word. He really is a cute man.

Raiden: -He blushes every time you get near him, but his body always searches for yours. -Raiden hopes that the light coming from your wings will hide his "dumb fool in love" expression. -They don't, and you find him more adorable each day. -It's after a long day at the fields that you decide to visit him, droplets of sweat running down his forehead. -"I think you need to refresh." Raiden doesn't even understand what is happening, your lips on his own, something like a flow running in his soul… -"See? Good like you just woke up." You pinch his cheek before going back to your room. Raiden actually refreshed, no sign of sweat or tiredness. -But damn, his heart is running kilometres.

Kung Lao: -He hates how you made him blush like a kid last time. It's time for revenge. -"Good morning, Lao!" You smile at him, waving from the window of your room. "…" Doctor, we are losing him!! Bring the defibrillator!!! -He has no chance against you, but Lao has no desire to throw in the towel. -"Don't try to be a sour fox, angels dislikes it." You tell him before your lips brush against his ones. -A punishment after one of his pranks. Is this the punishment for naughty kids? -Lao isn't sure he wants to stop.

Liu Kang: -He was already down bad he can't get worse. -As much as Liu Kang has to look like a respectable leader, he'll always try to sneak away to be next to you. -"Liu Kang." "Yes, dear?" "You like me, right?" "Yeah, you are amazing with all of us." "You know I don't mean it in that way!" -Making an angel lose patience isn't easy. Good job, Liu Kang! -Now it is a game of soft gesture and teasing glances! Who will lose first?

Geras: -He goes straight to the point. "I like you more than a friend." "!!!!!!" -You are mostly worried for your position, not sure angels are allowed to have relationships. -"I know what you are thinking. I checked, nothing bad will come from our union." -That's why you fell for him. Geras makes you always feel secure.

Bi-Han: -He fights you because he doesn't know any other way to get close to you. -But it's when you put him back on the ground, wings spread wide and flaming swords pointing at his throat, that Bi-Han understands that maybe you aren't that bad. -He always wants to train with you, nagging and nagging 'till you let go and do as he asks. -"If you want to go out with me, you should take me to a date." "Why when I can get you and improve my technique?" "Because if we keep fighting, I'll cut your throat open before we can kiss."

Kuai Liang: -He is so enchanted by you that Liang just lose the ability to speak. -So he spars with you, muscles going by memory so Liang doesn't need his brain. "Your scar-" "It reminds me of terrible memories." "It gave you a beautiful new light. Be proud of what you've become." You say, thumb brushing his scar near the corner of his lips. -He'll nod and blush. -If only this light gave him the courage to ask you out…

Tomas Vrbada: -He goes straight to the point! Well, Tomas stutters and blushes but won't wait much before revealing his feelings. -Also, because he was totally obvious. -Tomas grips your hand and tells you his feelings, a guy so big looking like a puppy while revealing his feelings. -He makes you blush… -"Will you go out with me?!" "Yes!" Your wings spread at your reply, white feathers surrounding you both. -You both look like fools in love.

[whetstonefires]

See I don't necessarily disagree with what seems to be the primary reading that Yue Qingyuan's shifu fucked him over, caring nothing for his needs or preferences and only for whether he was useful. That makes sense, it ties into plenty of the generational and societal themes of the story. It fits.

But iirc we don't actually get enough information to know that's what happened.

And the thing is it would be so in-character and also thematically appropriate if Yue Qingyuan absolutely did not explain his goals or why he was working so hard, because it was private and shameful and he didn't expect any sympathy, and there was a high risk of losing everything if he blabbed.

And also if he engaged with the existing ruleset with which he was presented, i.e. 'can't go off on your own on personal business until you've mastered your sword,' in the most negative and controlling manner possible, as absolute commandments.

He's a different kind of guy but he comes from the same background as Shen Jiu! It fucked him up also!

He is very very very not a guy who trusts the system to make allowances for him--even once he has all the power he 'does what he wants' and 'makes selfish choices' as a conscious transgression; not something he has a right to do, just something he can get away with so he's gonna. (And ofc he spends almost all the latitude he grants himself on sqq.)

And even less is he a guy who opens up easily.

He isn't too proud to ask for help or pity, so much as he just doesn't expect to get any.

So in this interpretation, he understood that rule as a non-negotiable barrier in his path, the target to overcome, and focused all his considerable will and talent on overcoming it through the sphere of action he felt he had control over.

And fucked himself up bad.

Whereupon his teacher, possessing absolutely no context for this dumb shit their star pupil pulled, did the only thing they thought might work to save his life, paying in the process no attention to the raving of someone deep in a psychotic break.

Like, I feel like there should have been a better, kinder medical option, but I don't know for sure that there was, so I can't say with certainty this was the kind of cruelty that derives from not caring enough.

And it really would be kind of elegant and so typical of Yue Qingyuan's fundamental tragedy if the real mistake was 'not confiding in anybody' the whole time.

And he was just so deeply sunk into the understanding that explaining and asking were useless that, even looking back, it never really occurred to him that maybe his mistake wasn't 'fucking it up when trying too hard to solve everything on his own' but 'assuming there was no help to be had, and that he had to do it all on his own.'

Like. What if this really could all have been avoided if he'd just trusted and communicated with the adult in charge of him? But of course, of course his history of trauma (neglect, child abuse, exploitation, being the One Responsible for the younger kids whom he could not keep safe) meant he was absolutely not going to do that.

It was basically impossible. For the person he was, the person the world had made of him. And that's always been the core tragedy the whole novel circles back upon.

People can only ever be themselves, and so very often the elements of self that let them survive until now are that which dooms them, that means they need someone else to intervene if they're ever going to be saved. Because your personal doom is always the thing from which you can't save yourself.

[mageknight14]

I loved how NEO pulled the rug out with Rindo’s character. At first, he generally seems much more sociable and outwardly friendly compared to Neku and then the game quickly goes "yeah, nah, he’s a huge fucking mess too." He’s a good kid fundamentally at his core but he can also be whiny, hypocritical, passive-aggressive, and kind of insensitive at times. He has a tendency to be judgemental and harsh to the people around him while not acknowledging his own faults, like when he complains about Beat joining the team even though he saved their lives beforehand because he’s not Neku or when he gives Fret shit for fawning over Eiji Oji and Kanon while falling for Motoi’s BS. He’s so pessimistic about himself and others that not even a death game that heavily emphasizes the value of teamwork can get him to fully come out of his shell, which is where his time-travel powers come in AND EVEN THEN it’s a double-edged sword since on one hand, it forces him to actively step up to the plate and survey the situation to find the best possible solution, which leads to him slowly growing out of his shell, but on the other, it also leads to him becoming overly reliant on his time travel so that he can walk back from potentially life-changing decisions without having to worry about it since he has a magic reset button. Which ends up biting him in the ass. Hard.

He’s one of those types of people who is ultimately a thinker and planner instead of a do-er, but his being young and overly impressionable takes this personality quirk to such an extreme that he's foundationally useless to most groups. He’s the type of person who you have in a group project who sits around and does nothing, but then complains with the project does poorly because he couldn't be bothered to speak.

He's so unconfident and directionless that he uses effectively Instagram as a means to listen to someone who sounds like some 2deep4u philosopher post dumb flowery bullshit that effectively has all the meaning of "Drink water when you're thirsty." and he admits to finding such "deep" meaning in these posts that it supposedly helped him through life. Because he's 15 and doesn't know anything.

However, all of this makes him interesting as a character because he’s, again, still a fundamentally good kid at his core. While he’s shown to have a fuse, he is also the kind of person who has the ability to think his emotions through. That's what we ultimately see when he and Fret finally talk and drop their beef. The game depicting Rindo's capacity for self-awareness and emotional reflection is a positive revelation of his character strengths. He proves that he's capable of recognizing when he's in the wrong and knows how to apologize, a trait he shows quite a few times throughout the story, while also doing everything he can to set things right as well as be more understanding toward how his friends feels.

He’s kind of the guy who will drop everything to help a little kid out, even when there’s no tangible benefit to doing so and he and the others are shown to be on limited time, shows empathy to his friends/fallen enemies, and feels massive amounts of guilt for his actions, even if he didn’t know better at the time.

Hell, the entire endgame is fueled by his selfish yet understandable desire to save the people he cares about most from total erasure, to the point that he’s willing to risk thousands of lives to do so. But not only is he shown to be internally grappling with himself regarding his decision but he’s also willing to take responsibility and ensure that EVERYTHING goes right not just for himself and his friends but the people of Shibuya in general, in a parallel to Neku’s own selfish if understandable decision to put the bonds he formed in the original game (particularly with Joshua) over the actual city.

Characters aren't interesting simply by switching between 2 different character traits. They're interesting when all those traits are being expressed at the same time for reasons that are consistent within their internal logic. You gotta be a good writer to pull that off and you gotta know when to show off these dimensions during your story to achieve proper dramatic effect when the time calls for it and NEO I feel does this pretty damn well.

[expectopatronum18]

Unpopular opinion

Ron and/or Hermione should have died in the deathly hallows. And I say this as someone who loves these characters (probably Hermione more than Ron), but here me out

Now let's be fucking real, I really like ron, but he really wasn't skilled or prepared enough to fight in a war against voldemort, be it magically or mentally. And that's ok! He's still 17, he's not meant to be fighting a war. And to some degree he probably knew that the chances of him actually making it were pretty slim too. But he still stuck with Harry anyways coz there's no way he was going to let his best friend go through with this alone. Because that's who ron is, he'd rather die fighting beside his best friend, for his family, his muggleborn gf and for the cause than play it safe and hide.

Now coming to Hermione, things get a tad trickier here. Yes, she is very skilled and powerful and quick on her feet. But is she powerful enough to take on an army of adult DEs who've trained for years and have experience from the first wizarding war? To win against the darkest wizard who ever lived, who's said to be worse than Grindelwald, who's the most powerful wizard in the whole world after Dumbledore? No, I'd say she isn't. Because she's also fucking 17, she's not even done with school yet. But I think she'd live longer than Ron, or that there's a better chance of her making it out alive. But if she did die it would be extra heartbreaking coz a) Harry (and the readers) just lost 2 of the people who had been there from the very beginning, b) Hermione's parents would live on in Australia, not remembering that they had a daughter, not knowing that their daughter gave her life in hopes of saving her friend and creating a better world.

I majorly have 2 specific reasons for being this sadistic. The first one is the fact that the plot dumbs down it's main villain and his followers just to make the kids win. Voldemort (during Harry's time) is probably the dumbest villain ever written, he doesn't live up to his hype. People have already discussed how stupid his gof plan was. In ootp, during the DoM fight Lucius says that voldemort can't come get the prophecy himself coz the ministry is filled with ppl and he would risk revealing himself. But it's possible for 6 mostly dumb teenagers and an army of DEs, (who hv just escaped azkaban and are sought after by the ministry) to enter in undetected? Doesn't 👏 make 👏 any 👏 sense. The supposedly feared DEs who were trained by voldemort himself can't win against a group of teenagers. It's surprising how long it takes them to take the kids down in the DoM battle. The thing is though, this is out of character for ALL of them. It seems like they were dumbed down just so the MCs could make it out alive. Voldemort during the first WW started out as absolutely no one to having the highest class of the wizarding society obeying his every command. The whole wizarding world was so afraid of him that they wouldn't even say his name. The DEs picked out member after member of the original ootp, mostly coz they were outnumbered but also coz they're fucking death eaters. And ur telling me these guys can't fight kids? Pathetic. Also it doesn't make sense that most of the adults from the first war are dead but all the kids live. Like did the war become safer or sm shit? Instead i would have loved it if the trio got away with things in the first few books, but then realised what a war against voldemort actually means later on. But they won't back down, and they'll still stick with their friend and fight for each other and the cause anyways, and that vil have real, legitimate consequences

Now, the second reason is that it would have been an amazing but heartbreaking callback to book 1. Ron sacrifices himself in a game of chess and Hermione says that there are more important things than books and cleverness, like friendship and bravery. Ron's line of "It's you who has to go on Harry, I know it! Not me, not Hermione, you!" would have also come full circle. Back then they were still 11, so they could still get their happy ending. Now they're in a real war and the stakes are higher, but they'll stick to what they started anyways. Ron sacrifices himself so the other 2 can move forwards, Hermione's intelligence gets her further but she still needs to part with Harry. Harry needs to leave them behind and face voldemort alone because that's how it was always meant to be

And finally, it would have given us a more bittersweet ending to the series instead of that vanilla 'all is well' epilogue. Harry has lost almost every one he loved. But there's still life, there's still hope, and he lives by cherishing their memories and making their sacrifice have meaning. Kinda like the ending of the hunger games. Ik this is a kids book, but Harry Potter as a series is incredibly deep and deals with a lot of fucked up shit, so I think it could handle it if it was written well.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

Tw: lesbophobia, bullying, petty bitching about the Mean Girls remake and a subset of OG movie fans:

I Know. I KNOW its a me thing. But I saw a post that broke containment about the new Mean Girls movie how OMG REGINA CANONICALLY SINGS ABOUT GETTING GIRLS IN THE END SONG and my first response was "oh god, really?"

Look, I was never wild about the whole "Regina George was secretly closeted and that's why she picked on Janis to distract from her own feelings and save herself" fan theory but at least it was JUST a fan theory. And I know the original movie ending where it turns out Janis isn't even really gay, she was Lebanese and Regina got confused, and see she dances with a boy at the end, it's all okay she wasn't ACTUALLY a dyke!!!! - yeah I rolled my eyes too. Yeah, that was dumb and a coward's move, but idk. At least the movie itself, even if it copped out at the end by not risking having two of the protagonists be ACTUALLY gay in a teen movie...at least it seems aware that homophobic bullying is bad??

The original movie, whatever else you can say about it, or how it handled that issue or any others...at least tried to take that shit seriously. Janis was an outcast years after middle school who flinches at the idea of Damian telling anyone new about what Regina said about her for fear any new friends would abandon her immediately over it. Even Regina herself (blithely, callously, of course, but it's meant to be that) admits that the bullying Janis got as a result of Regina spreading those rumors about her made Janis break down, cut her hair and have to leave school temporarily over the rumors. Regina said that. Herself. With no remorse but she said it. The movie is a comedy, but it doesn't shy away from how brutal bullying of all forms can be. That's kind of the whole point of the goddamn movie.

But idk if the fans of this theory haven't experienced that much bullying themselves or its just a coping mechanism I can't relate to...that theory of "oh Regina's a closet case homophobe poor thing" just completely (to me) softens the whole thing, these fans do it to by making Regina in a sense, another victim. They may not intend it that way, but in the few times I've seen a Mean Girls post and my nostalgia got me scrolling a bit I've stumbled on this. Seen it in various places online and it always made me want to hiss like a wet cat because it's always like "omg poor Regina comphet sucks <333" and. Hork. Im sorry, hork.

Sorry, but I spent too much time BEING on the receiving end of that shit in middle school, getting called names and treated like an actual disease up until I moved to high school with mostly a whole new set of people over the fact someone spread rumors I was a lesbian, to feel anything but frustration over that. Yeah. I was Janis. I'll admit I can't be "objective" here. I never did any of the shit she does in Mean Girls in revenge, I never had the power or inclination, it wasn't a former friend who started it, but yeah I'm biased because that character was me. I know what it was like to be her because I lived it. And yeah, it kind of sucked!!! Did get better, but yeah. Was what it was.

It's a big part of why I've never liked the trope in popular culture that the loudest homophobic bullies are actually closet cases. It's not that "right wing politician caught soliciting blowjobs" has never been a headline but come on. Most of the people who trash queer people do it because they just hate us. Its trivializing of homophobic harassment to act like that's 1) a good explanation for most cases 2) much less an excuse and that's how it can be used. It'd be one thing if a self-hating person's mindset was like. Actually explored with depth and nuance as part of a story. But otherwise, nah. Miss my formerly lowkey traumatized teenage ass with that dismissive cliched shit.

So even the idea that the movie might be lending any kind of weight to that theory about Regina, however subtle or subtextual, that is??? Yeah funny lol, such iconic, very Representation. Fucking bite me. My lesbian ass is tuning right the fuck out. I'm not paying movie ticket prices to see this, if I'm gonna basically get the sort of person who would've made my life hell as a preteen and tween get turned into One Of Us with the expectation that's going to make me freak out with joy. Even if allegedly they did actually make Janis a lesbian (which, good for them if they did).

Of course, it could just be fans blowing something out of proportion but. Like y'all are not making me want to see this movie MORE and I was at best lukewarm on it having never seen the musical and being lowkey burnt out on the idea of yet another remake.

[gold-rhine]

Before the archon war trial arc begins we should get an event where all the archons and Neuvillette are present and you get to watch everyone's wherabouts like in that akademia tournament event, and Neuvillette keeps barely missing all the archons, like a Scooby doo bit.

Venti and Zhongli are actively avoiding him and coming up with dumb explainations for why they're chilling on the roof or fully left the premises(old man yaoi bait too)

Ei doesn't care she's ready to duel a dragon again but she's with Miko who DOES care and is leading Ei all over the place avoiding Neuvi

Nahida wants to have a civil conversation with him but she keeps missing him by chance because now Neuvi's running all over the place...

btw what do you mean, "ready to duel a dragon again"? i dont think raiden ever dueled a sovereign, the initial war between dragons and celesta happened waaaaay too long ago, and its during that war that sovereigns lost power. archon war when makoto came to power happened like, thousands of years later. so even if raiden murdered an electro dragon, which we didnt see mentions of tho, unless it happened at the very invasion of teyvat, the dragon would not be at full power. but thats like. zhongli territory old at least, i dont think raiden is that old. orobashi was most likely not a vishap, just a snake god, bc in enka they did experiments and torture on vishaps under his command and like. if he was a dragon, he'd know all vishaps are intelligent without tests.

the timeline is like. dragons rule and control the elements via authorities ->celestia invades ->war with dragons, celesta wins, most sovereigns are dead, all their authorities taken, BUT NO ARCHONS. celestia is powerful enough to keep elements under control by itself ->thousands of years pass, this is time of unified civilization and celestia being in close touch with ppl via heavenly envoys and sometimes nail-bombing->2 new descenders show up (we dont know if at the same time or not but im not sure), celestia has war with at least one of them, mb both, this drains their resources ->one of the descenders dead, the other makes truce with celestia, bc elements are getting from under control of celestia, i.e. risk of dragons regaining authorities ->celesta and descender create gnosis and give it to archons, this is done specifically to keep elements under control

sorry for digressing, yeah itd be funny. i think he should actually meet nahida, bc he already sounds sympathetic to her, she has rock solid alibi (being kept in a baby jail from birth for 500 years) and then one of the first things she did when she was out is to help healing dendro dragon. i just think nahida is under so much responsibility of always being the wise one and everyone else, and shes still a baby in a lot of ways, she needs someone older to look after her. honorary melusine

btw i dont think we'll ever get actual trials, i think we'll be confronting celestia before it can come to that

[cuprohastes]

Lunch In Space (Part 4)

There is an old Human tradition. We keep it alive to this day. When things are Very Bad(tm), for example, your shuttle is about to perform a high-velocity Lithobraking Manouver, you invoke the Ancient Words of the Ancestors. Usually "Oh, sh*t".

I, as I'm sure you're now aware, am culturally sensitive, and cultured, so when chunks of Oscar started becoming Free Range and my life support lit up red, and Oscar's little Atrix-face started doing some very worried little colour combos, I took solace in this hallowed and time-honoured tradition and went with "Ru-ROH".

Now you may be thinking, gee, having your life support blow out while flying around the backside of a planet while everyone is too busy to come to pick you up is bad.

I mean, sure. It literally is.

But what doesn't kill you instantly gives you the opportunity for a really slow, horrible death so you can appreciate it so much more.

I took the life support unit off.

Counter-intuitive, but there you go. I jsut clipped one of my lanyards to the bottom attach point and released all the clips.

All the connectors that move all my various essential fluids and gasses are on failsafe connectors. They close automatically because it'd be super dumb if they didn't.

So now I'm just using passive insulation and things are going to get very hot very soon.

I turned the Life Support unit over and found a... Space Squid. 

I mean that's what it looked like. This conical, bullet-shaped shell,  with tiny little thruster vents, and then on the bottom of the cone, a bunch of little tentacles, sensor windows and what looks like miniature tools.

At first, all I saw was the shell so I grabbed it and yanked it out. I screamed jsut the tiniest amount when it wiggled its tentacles at me, but then it folded up and glared at me, and tried to puff away. 

My mighty human fingers of course were more than a match for this.

My mighty human Brain took a few more seconds to catch up because Oscar wasn't loaded with enough coffee for peak human cognition and I did a comical flail and found two more of the little suckers trying to eat through Oscar's skin.

"I Yeet Thee!" I told them and yanked them off and threw them in the direction of away.

The first little guy was with me but still sulking. I think it was out of gas, to be honest.

So that leaves me inside Oscar, who's rapidly becoming a sauna.

Luckily, I am just covered in tools, patches, and other Fix-things stuff so I started checking the life support pack.

Not good. Squiddy had already chewed some quite important stuff - the valves all closed, but now there's no way to re-circulate a lot of the air supply.

A bit about life support. It's not just a couple of bottles of air mix.

There are coolants, thruster gasses that you just top up while you work, water, which is circulated through Oscar's inner lining, the uh, Yellow and Brown lines, and then the Scrubber which is kind of a back-up and also means you can go longer without an umbilical, or without large air tanks. It also prevents the inside of Oscar from filling up with condensation.

So anyway, the thruster tank and the air tank were basically there but unusable.

Two of four of the batteries were cracked. They got isolated by the technical process of just pulling them out. They're not supposed to be dangerous, but why take the risk?

Oscar was a nice toasty 40ºc by the time I got the life support back on and I almost cried when the cooling started to pull out all that heat.

And then I almost sobbed because Oscar told me I had three and a half hours until station rendezvous and approximately two hours and twenty minutes of life support.

So I shut almost everything down. Inspection lights, most of the computing, interior displays, and after one last use, the uh waste processing.

That got me an extra 40 minutes of power. What else?

Well duh.

My power tools have bi-directional charging. I plugged them into my utility ports and hey OK, now I was only 5 minutes shy. OK.

So what else?

The Scrubber - It's running out of... scrub-ability.

There's a thing you can do that you should never, ever do, because it's suicidally stupid and bad. Honestly, I've always wanted to try it.

I turned the temp down past freezing and told the auto-doc to go to Oetzie mode. 

Now, this isn't an official process. It's one of the macros I've developed in bored moments - I submitted it to a couple of trade journals, both of whom told me I was a dangerous lunatic.

So I asked the Most Dangerous Human.

Miranda is a mutant. She burns 4000Kcal a day sitting still. Her IQ is supposedly about double or more than a normal Genius. She hates her life. Literally everyone in her species is kind of sad and bumbling and unable to grasp concepts she finds simple.

She lacks intellectual stimulation, and just craves novelty or anything that might make her feel for a moment, that she can be part of normal life.

When I met her she was running a comic book store. 

She's considered the most dangerous living human because nobody can figure out if she's going to take a nap, then re-write the rules of linguistics, develop an AI that will take over the Human race or stub her toes and decide to eradicate all living things in a Light Millenium.

As someone who's spent an afternoon shovelling food into her and listening to her do the most hilarious routine on why Comic Books should be weaponised, I can tell you that she has no more ill will toward anyone who doesn't write Justice Interplanetary than the common dog owner has for their pupper.

But Stever Aronnomis and Gixy Lurraine? Your days are numbered. Especially after Issue 17.

Anyway, Mir-Mir took about eight hours and re-wrote the Oetzie protocol, and got published in about 19 interdisciplinary publications. She was nice enough to credit me with the original work, and that got me a job and a weekly visit from the People In Black to check that I'm not also a supervillain or plotting to steal people's essential fluids to make Tsin sports drinks.

Anyway.

Oetzie mode gives you near-fatal hypothermia. It's not quite suspended animation but it's close as you can get while maintaining a really good chance of waking back up.

All I had to do was program a really simple little macro that would ping for immediate assistance and flag the file with re-animation instructions.

Already I was getting chilled. My teeth were chattering and I was trying to relax and jsut lket it happen. My littel budd the spac squid was stuill floting her. gabe it one o th deb bat  klklklkkkkkkkkkk

Ow.

Seriously. I was feeling very disoriented. Everything was too bright and I felt very woozy and my jaw ached, but apart from that, the pins and needles, the way all my clothes felt like broken glass and the uncontrollable shivering, I felt surprisingly not dead.

Also not in Oscar.

I was having trouble focusing my eyes, but hearing I could manage.

Two Tsin were discussing eating me.

Voice One: "Well he's dead. I say we just ask. You know Humans - it's either 'no, you can't because we have a whole bunch of traditions and sacred laws that cannot be broken' or 'haha yeah that's what they'd want' and then they ask you if you want some sauce."

Voice Two: "Yeah but... what if the othre humans get upset that we asked? What if they think we killed this one to get the meat?"

Voice one: "They were in an un-powered EVA suit with no air, and the life support running colder than the Caffeteria Freezer. I don't care what stupid plan they had, not even a Human can survive that."

This is it. The moment that I have been living for all these years. You always hope one day you get the chance, and now finally it's my time to shine!

I sat up and said "Do you two mind? I'm trying to get some sleep."

Their horrified screams were like a warm bath. Ahhhh!

[fantasygerard2000]

Frogs and Stars

As I have written before, Wish was unfairly criticized for a number of reasons. Some are understandable while the rest are just straight up dumb. One of these dumb criticisms is that Wish copies from the other and older "better" Disney movies before it, which I find hilariously stupid to begin with is because Wish was deliberately made to be an homage to those movies.

The film that it is most compared to is Snow White, given that Snow White is Disney's first animated feature and that Wish is a centennial film for the studio. Not the entire company, the studio that made most of the films Disney is famous for. It's important I specify that.

The reason why I find this comparison dumb is that it's just too easy. Snow White is a classic so any film released today by the same studio is gonna be compared by way-too-young boomers who think "old good, new bad". But there's one film that's more comparable to Wish as they're highly similar, The Princess and the Frog.

Now, I like Princess and the Frog. It's one of my favorite Disney movies. However, it has more problems than Wish, which I find funny given that PatF is praised for something Wish was needlessly hated for.

You see, PatF was made to be a return to the classic Disney formula that defined the renaissance era. So, stuff like it being hand drawn animated, romance, talking animals, musicals and a villain, are things that you think would make a good Disney movie. However, those things are the problem. They wallpaper over the films problems and distract you from them.

PatF has an otherwise good character focused story, but because it has the need to be a Disney Princess story, it has to include things the define the the renaissance era and complicated the plot. So things like Tiana being turned into a frog so she and Naveen must find a way to break the curse caused by Dr. Facilier all feel like they're there for the sake of the formula.

Coming back to Wish, both films have a similar theme about achieving dreams. PatF has Tiana preach about working hard to achieve her dream while Asha learns that people need to achieve their dreams themselves. Both characters don't need to learn a lesson as Tiana is forced to get a partner because of her status as a Disney Princess while Asha doesn't need to learn given that her motivations don't require her to.

Tiana gets nagged a lot by her own friends and family to settle down and get a partner, but her childhood friend Charlotte and eventual husband Naveen are highly supportive of her opening her restaurant that they both risk their own dreams for her. Asha already has a family and community she loves and she risked herself just so she can return the wishes that rightfully belong to them.

This theme extends to both films villains. Magnifico and Facilier cheat their way to achieve their goals as Magnifico lies and manipulates people to remain in power, Facilier lies and manipulates to gain power. Both tried to sympathize with their respective heroines with then understanding the struggles of an unfair world. However, despite being a popular and well liked villain, Facilier has a lame goal in comparison to the villains.

While most villains want to become a powerful ruler, kill someone out spite and jealousy or in the case of Gaston, forcibly marry a person not interest in them, Facilier wants to get rich. Despite literally having the powers of the Loa, he needs Lawrence disguised as Naveen to marry Charlotte so they can inherit her daddy's wealth. I mean, his power is limited and couldn't take over New Orleans if he wanted to, but that's just the result of the writers wanting to bring back villains but not knowing that kind of motivation he should have.

He also have a problem Rasputin has in Anastasia. Both are unnecessary villains who are there for the sake of the trope and don't even interact with the lead heroine til the climax. Tiana is only aware of Facilier from Naveen and presumably rumors about him given that he is nicknamed the Shadow Msn, suggesting he is a local shady figure.

His status as a popular villain is carried entirely but the aesthetics of Voudou and Keith David.

Magnifico on the other hand is a unique villain as most have a goal they want to accomplish, he already got his. He's already a king and in control of Rosas, in fact is only motivated is to remain in power and control, hence why he created the wish system. It's only after discovering that he could absorb the wishes for more power he wants Star for himself for their magic. He's quite simple compared to Facilier's complicated scheme.

Disney's films with a black main character have always been messy . Tiana was announced as the first black princess but was a frog for most of the movie. Ethan Clade is finally their proper gay main character in an animated film was forgotten by audiences due the lack of marketing. And Asha being misread as a selfish villain and only liked in fanon as the love interest to their imaginary golden boy.

Disney was criticized that they didn't commit into making Naveen and Tiana a fully black couple but Wish fandom is doing just that with Asha and Starboy.

At the end of the day, Wish and Princess and the Frog are films that have flaws, one just happened to have those flaws overlooked and the other accentuated.

[disgruntledexplainer]

AI

i think a lot of people really misunderstand what the actual threat that "AI" poses is. AI is not going to try to wipe us out for any reason intrinsic to it, because AI is not capable of having intrinsic motivation (thankfully). rather, AI is a problem because it increases the power of those already powerful, and further marginalizes anyone who isn't powerful. In other words, the problem with AI isn't AI itself, the problem is those who use it, who are altogether too human.

Two major threats come to mind, both of them incredibly obvious when you think about it.

First, corporations will naturally favor any innovation which cuts costs or gives them an edge over their competition, regardless of the consequences to both their workers and their customers. Those in charge of the corporation will always seek to automate any part of the company that isn't them to cut costs, even if it is significantly less efficient or more infuriating to work with. This means that, as with the agricultural revolution and the various periods of automation during the industrial revolution, we are on the cusp of a massive loss of employment across all sectors as humans are replaced with machines.

however, this will be worse than previous periods, because while in previous centuries the removal of some jobs would introduce new jobs to replace them, such will likely not be the case for jobs replaced by AI. Further, certain occupations which we had assumed would be safe have turned out to not be safe from automation at all. Nobody seemed to care about how automation will destroy jobs until "AI art" became a thing, and do you know why? because everyone assumed that creative work was safe. and while algorithms cannot truly match an actual gifted artist in skill and creativity, it doesn't need to, because it's just more convenient, and much more cost-efficient to generate an image procedurally rather than commission it.

maybe next time the art community will take the threats posed to the working class by automation more seriously smh. But i guess it's too late now.

And when I say that corporations will replace humans regardless as to it's efficiency, I mean it. Have you noticed that almost no major company has an actually useful customer support system any more? it's all automated, and it's all useless. Some companies are flat out just not hiring humans for customer support any more, instead relying on a series of generic automated response trees that do nothing to solve the problem and just make the customer angry. What's to stop them from doing the same thing, but with everything from marketing to janitorial work?

AI will continue to replace jobs over and over again until the only jobs left will be the ones that are actually doing the replacement themselves. In other words, at a certain point we will reach a point where the only jobs are government jobs, high-level corporate jobs, and the engineers who are designing the AIs. And if any engineer is stupid enough to design an AI that can design other AIs, that job may be gone too.

the other major problem with AI is what happens when it gets into the hands of government agencies. Which it already has, to an extent. We have been using simple, dumb AI in drone targeting systems for quite awhile now. Despite the fact that it doesn't really work and gets civilians killed more often than not, governments still use this software because it doesn't put their own men at risk. Likewise, the government will almost certainly begin employing robotic soldiers as soon as they become available, even if they don't work very well, because it means they aren't putting their own people at risk. But often in war you need people to be there, in order to make judgement calls. What if a lazy commander tells the machines to "kill everyone in that bunker", but the bunker turns out to be a civilian residence and now dozens of civilians have been killed? The issue here is that AI WILL obey whoever orders it to do something, regardless as to if the order makes any sense or has been negated by unforeseen circumstances.

all this to say that if AI destroys civilization as we know it, it will be because humans told it to. in order to survive, we must restructure society, remove the focus from profit and place it on human dignity. We must deliberately employ people even if it would be cheaper not to do so, because not doing so will have horrific repercussions. Also because it's the right thing to do.

while we're at it, it would probably be best to decentralize government and corporations so they don't get the chance to do something like this. *cough distributism cough principle of subsidiarity cough*

[atopvisenyashill]

What if Aemma had lived?

viserys still makes rhaenyra princess of dragonstone, because daemon is still gonna say that dumb ass “heir for a day” comment regardless of whether aemma lives or not and otto is gonna tattle immediately bc he hates daemon. so most of what comes next depends on if aemma can have another living child - because viserys will expect her to keep trying (look at alyssa, alysanne, and daella for why) even after he’s named rhaenyra heir. and aemma may very well have another living child - look at rhaella & naerys, both forced to give birth quite young, both having a string of stillborn babies in between their oldest and youngest. that’s when things start getting a little tricky.

because like - what precedent is viserys trying to set by naming rhaenyra? what precedent is otto trying to set by pushing daemon out of the way? they are both very unclear on the legality of the whole damn thing, which is part of the issue; it seems they both want to push the “king chooses his own heir” reading of 101, except of course otto then pushes for the “no woman can sit the iron throne” reading later, and “king chooses his own heir” is just never gonna work long term!

Bottom line is, if Viserys wasn't going to fully commit to Rhaenyra as heir by making the succession for the Iron Throne follow absolute primogeniture, or even something as silly as "the heirs of the first wife come before the heirs of the second for the IT", just anything that has a rule besides "the king does whatever the fuck he wants", he never should have named her. All of his issues stem from naming Rhaenyra and then not protecting her claim. If Aemma has a son, it enables Viserys to continue refusing to make decisions because he doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, which is going to cause a succession crisis. If Aemma has more daughters, or no children, it might force Viserys to think slightly more critically about what Rhaenyra being heir means (because he has no male back up heir to threaten her with). So if Aemma has a son, we're still getting the Dance, and potentially a worse one. If she can stay Queen and have no children that will threaten Rhaenyra's claim, there's a chance for a peaceful transfer of power but it relies on Rhaenyra, Daemon, Viserys, and Aemma being normal about everything so, you know, there is still risk there.

[kuvvydraws]

Based off that train post- How does Praetorius feel about humans that don’t follow the rules of their own like signs in public and the like? Does he not care as long as monsters (and himself) are unaffected by whatever outcome comes of not following those rules? Does he have opinions about it or is it not even a concern with whatever else he has to do initially surfacing? (I’m so interested in Praetorius, I want to study him under a microscope)

[This is a long one, I had a lot of fun with this]

As one of the personifications of rules Underground, Praetorius happens to like them a lot — that tends to happen when you say jump and everyone else immediately asks how high. The issue about power is that it's so easy to abuse it, and in a society caged by aristocratic and semi-tyrannical laws very few individuals have the chance to take it. Enforcing new policies is easy, because there's virtually no one to oppose new ideas, and because those who could don't really have the expertise to make a solid argument against the new ideological current.

Some of the members of the Court reached their positions by birthright, the rest climbed up there by merit, through intelligence, violence, ranks or feats.

Once Praetorius becomes the Commander, he also becomes the highest security authority, and thus he starts implementing such rules unopposed. He watches the Underground change by his hand, he sees the good, he sees the occasions where he must backtrack... It's still a powerful feeling.

Aboveground, things are a lot more complex. Bureaucracy is a thing. So are departments, and subsections, Secretaries and Governors and the likes. The abuse of power looks quite different, and you have to keep jumping through hoops just to get the smallest thing done... It's a hassle.

When it comes to rules, Praetorius is fundamentally in their favor. He likes rules. He thinks they're there for a reason. He knows someone made that rule and put it there because otherwise something bad would happen.

He also understands other people are idiots, so some rules might not make sense. He's not not a hypocrite. And some rules are dumb. It's all based on his own personal criteria, so he might be tooting his own horn, but he truly believes he's in the right, so that's the end of the argument. Because other people are idiots. And he's not one.

In the spirit of collaboration, Praetorius does care, in theory, about rules and citizens regardless of their species. He becomes a public figure the moment monster Surface, and he wants to gain the same reputation he already had as fast as possible — which is a bit harder now that he's not allowed to beat up people on the street.

He manages.

Eventually, since it's really difficult to mistake him — literal representation of Death dressed in a military uniform coming down the street looking like he could rip your entire spine off and extract it from your throat — from anyone else, Praetorius does gain some of his remarkable notoriety back. Not many monsters dare share his infamous acts and brutality willy-nilly with humans, it's more of a need-to-know secret, but once word gets out about how there's a beast buried in his marrow even humans start threading carefully around him. Just because he's abiding to "human rights" and "laws" on the Surface doesn't mean he's scared to use monster law to his advantage.

No one wants to risk that, and the way monsters behave around him is contagious, so humans learn relatively quickly to mimic that carefulness.

Praetorius is a curious guy, and on top of his monster law knowledge — because he either wrote or improved the rules himself — he busies himself studying human law. In the end, he has to know the patterns human society beats to, so studying the moral backbone of the collective seems like a good place to start as any.

Eventually, foreseeing the eventual merging of monster and human civilizations, Praetorius' drive is to keep himself at the peak of the food chain, if not as the Monster Commander, maybe as a New Ebott's Commissary, or whatever title would mean he's the top dog people answer to.

[bonniehooper]

SUPERNATURAL REWATCH, 1x17: "Hell House"

-Wow, they really couldn't decide how they wanted to do the "previously on". I know being annoyed about this is stupid, but it bugs me, what can I say?

-Is this the prank war episode?

-Also, Dean, that is not safe to do at all while driving. You guys risk your lives every day fighting creatures that want to kill you, but sure put yourself in a preventable situation because you want to prank Sam.....

-So, I wonder if the EMF wasn't working right, not because of the telephone pole, but because it's not really a spirit.

-Ed and Harry have arrived!!!!

-Dean focus!!!!

-I still can't believe that a dumb joke ends up getting this poor girl killed.

-Oh yeah, the spirit is actually a tulpa.

-Ed: "This is our ticket to the big time. Fame, money, sex...with girls."

-Ed: "WWBD. What would Buffy do?" Harry: "I know, but Ed she's stronger than me."

-Okay, but how did they get the bottle off of Dean's hand?

-They're using that dumb thing from the restaurant to lure the cops away?

-Ed shouting "the power of Christ compels you" at the ghost is so stupid, but so funny.

-Interesting way to defeat the villain of this episode. Just burn the house down and hope it doesn't come back.

-Sam, you're so mean, but also it was way too easy to trick Ed and Harry, so I can't completely blame you.

[failing-to-write-again]

Part 2 Jean Gray S/O Mukami Edition

sorry for the delays not to get too personal for privacy reasons but I've had an accident that's made typing slow plus with my exams wrapping up it's safe go say I got busy lol.

Eve had been taken by the Sakamakis and causing quite a fuss. Yet Karl their saviour had promised to make up for it only to have this risk thrusted upon them.

Unknown strength forcing them back from their approach and a familiar look in her eyes. Like a falcon in a cage ever thinking on how to get out. In a sick sense they realised they were staring at a mirror of their younger selves, as if they were somehow the monsters that had harmed them.

Ruki

You would think being previously human himself this dumbass would've realised that he's not smart from having some fangs. But no violence instead, sure he has a dark past, is old, and is basically in a cult but that doesn't excuse hurting others.

His inferiority complex, especially when it comes to women because ✨mummy issues✨, are going nuts. Every part of his little noggin is cycling through ideas of ways to turn off your powers or break you down to where you don't think you even try. Of course the mind reading throws a particular wrench in the plan.

Ruki shows every sign of his control issues being trauma responses from his past and while that's definitely a real issue it ain't your issue. You aren't a member of the cult that sends these girls you haven't been raised in such a toxic environment to view yourself as needing to be this female savior figure. Ruki is almost attracted to it but there's so much confliction going on. And you're fully aware how the smartest play is to never let on you know his parents names, his nightmares, his scars and his fears.

Kou

Oh boy. Kou is not as impatient as a Sakamaki, he also is better practiced in manipulation with people other then previously mentally broken down girls. He's not dumb enough to rush his hand as much as he hates it. Your a cat, independent and impossible to herd in his mind. Of course unlike a cat you aren't about to come sit in his lap regardless of how nice he acts.

That's when he learns your mind doesn't only affect the external but can also pry. Pry. Pry. Pry. Such a naughty little kitty you are hiding the truth from him so sneakily.

He decides there and then he'll be the one to kill you he just isn't sure how yet.

Yuma

Uneasy but by far the most receptive to it. Maybe it's favoritism but I think of the four Yuma is the most receptive to humanity but has been hardened and still values his brothers more than clinging to humanity.

You're useful in the garden, you're not fragile, and you're not taking part in the messy charade that is the vampire feeding cult. He does have an issue not being able to easily drink but I think he's the most likely to be able to work around it. ON ONE CONDITION...

It's the mind reading I'm getting so repetitive here and I know this may look lazy but let's not lie to ourselves. All the Diaboys got trust issues so mind reading is well out their comfort zone.

So as long as he knows about everything though its chill. The giant and the powerhouse dynamic means you have a relatively chill existence, until either you eventually escape or you and Yuma run off.

Azusa

Big fan but doesn't understand the true meaning ya know?

Dude gets a kick out of it which is an issue for you with the whole being left alone and not harassed by vampires thing. You learn pretty fast to be gentle pushing him away to try minimise his attempts to get you to hurt him. I don't think he'll care much about the mind reading he'd just see it as more reason to be punished.

I also think he won't even careto buffer the attacks of his brothers, thus adding to your stress. Needless to say it's setting up a weird dynamic.

If you're his flavour of fucked up it might be fun for you but that's pretty fucked up.

If not, you've now got this shadow to try shake.

Maybe in a post therapy world you be his protector but as it stands you refuse to be another tormentor.

[dmclemblems]

Honestly, what irks me the most about Golden Wildfire is not that Claude decides to ally with Edelgard to destroy the Central Church - it's one of his reasoning for doing so: that this would (maybe, "hopefully") end Edelgard's war because if she keeps going after Rhea's death it would be "nothing more than blatant aggression". So, the game is really trying to tell me that her invasion of two sovereign countries wasn't already an aggression? lol - and Leicester isn't even haboring the Church.[1]

[2] it's so dumb to believe that Edelgard would stop bc it would "make her look bad". It's already bad to invade two countries who never did anything wrong to you. It's bad to invade a country to use their bridge (Leicester), it's bad to invade a country bc they offer shelter to your political enemy (Faerghus). Even if Dimitri knew he risk an invasion by doing, it's still Edelgard who wages war first, not the other way around. So, how it'll make her look, was clearly not her concern. And besides

[3] it would not be that hard to come up with another reason to keep on fighting the Kingdom. GW wants us to believe that Claude got Edelgard in a position where she ("hopefully") would consider to give up. But all I can see, is that he made it so much easier for her. Now the Kingdom doesn't have the military support of the Knights of Seiros anymore. And not to mention that Dimitri's legitimation can be questioned, now that the Church is gone. Same for every other Kingdom noble house.

[4] maybe this'll lead to a new civil war in Faerghus. Not to mention a possible religious war between the Western Church and the maybe new Northern Church (or whatever they come up with as a replacement of the Central). So, I don't see how this could be a good or even hopeful ending for Faerghus. And I don't see how anything will stop Edelgard from continuing her conquest. She has no reason to, other than "it would be blatant aggression". But it already was, and she didn't care lol

Oh for sure, I definitely don’t like that either. He’s banking on her ending her war even though he openly states he knows that she’ll come for them next (this is around like chapter 11/12 that he admits to knowing that, when he talks about how she’s using him and the Alliance but how they’re using her too).

I don’t think it means to say what she already did wasn’t already blatant aggression, but that her continuing even after a pact was made would (also) be that. If she continued after all was said and done, then she’s the one who broke the pact and the Alliance has no reason to hold back or be worried about fighting the Empire. Basically, Claude fully expects her to break the pact when the Alliance refuses to submit to them and unify Fodlan (i.e. retaining their independence and not being under Edelgard’s rule). He’s anticipating that she’ll break the pact anyway, so he’s kind of just eliminating the Church so that she either stops because she “achieved her goal”, or he can prove she was lying to everyone that her real reason for war was the Church.

In other words, Edelgard says her reasons for this war are because of the Church (in both games), but that’s not the whole truth. Her goal is to remove them from power and then take over full power in Fodlan (i.e. her conquest). In order for her to take full power, Rhea needs to be dead and gone because she can’t do that with Rhea around (both because Rhea is a leader in power and because if the Church is gone, Faerghus losing a lot of its political power too, which for Edelgard is almost two things accomplished at once).

Claude knows her war won’t end at Rhea. Hopes had a really dumb way of putting it, especially with him explaining the dumb way of putting it (i.e. he’s supposed to be the smart one), but he knows if Rhea is dead that Edelgard won’t stop. That means he can prove her goal is conquest and that she didn’t tell everyone the truth, still planning to eventually wage war against the Alliance again to overthrow them if they don’t submit to her. What he’s really doing is exposing her for being a would be conqueror. You’re right that Edelgard doesn’t care how it makes her look, though I’m not sure if Claude knows that part.

With the Church gone, yeah, it puts the Kingdom in a much worse position for the war, and that’s part of Claude not thinking things through or not caring. That is, either he didn’t think of that as a consequence, or he just doesn’t care what happens to the Kingdom and its people. Though he personally has no desire to rule over the Kingdom or annex it or anything, Edelgard wants exactly that. If the Alliance sits back and does nothing and the Kingdom loses to them, Fodlan would just be Leicester and Adrestia until Edelgard continues the war and attacks Leicester next.

Granted, I don’t like that Claude is basically having hundreds of the clergy killed as well as Rhea just to prove Edelgard is actually out for conquest and not really doing this just to end Rhea’s rule. It’s kind of like, well I need to prove a point so you have to die, and conveniently I don’t like you anyway so it doesn’t matter to me if I have to kill you. Not only is it very un-Claude-like, but it’s just nasty in general that he’d kill someone just to be like “okay so we killed her enemy, so now she has no excuse to attack us if this was really her goal, but it wasn’t so she’ll attack us anyway”.

As for Faerghus, yeah, it’s not a good ending. Dimitri would have to find a way to convince people that he should remain as their king so they can fix shit and recreate the structure with the Church gone. Even if he could though, yeah, a potential civil war could happen and that’d just lead to more people dying which is like... so much for Claude not wanting needless deaths. Claude screwed them over a LOT in GW and... why? For what? What did they ever do to you guys???

Ah yes, BUT THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO--!!!

[kaija-rayne-author]

10.1 in review series for Dragon Age Veilguard

70 hours in, 68 actual gameplay

Obligatory I'm not an asshole disclaimer, feel free to skip to the cut.

Something came to my attention. I need to make it crystal clear that I utterly love the diversity in DAV. It's fantastic. I'm also a heavily left leaning, non-binary, queer as fuck reviewer, editor, and author.

I'm on media blackout while I play this, so I'm only getting second-hand info on how awful it is right now in the DA Fandom. Please be safe and take care of yourselves. Arguing with incels and white supremacists is completely pointless. They sea lion worse than an actual sea lion. Your mental health is important.

Though, every single time the anti-queer brigade comes out for a new DA game, I sit there thinking 'have you bozos ever played any DA game, like, ever?' My guess is nope.

Spoilers for Dragon Age Veilguard

Section 9 is here.

I haven't played yet today. I have to take my immunoconpromised ass into a world that doesn't give a shit about my life to get groceries. How do I know they don't care? They don't mask. It's as simple as that. If you care about immunocompromised people, people like me recovering from almost dying, pregnant people, old people, many children, people with immune affecting issues like long covid, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia... goddess, the list goes on, if you cared? You'd mask. It's the number one way to help us survive. And no, us masking by ourselves doesn't work very well. Everyone has to.

Anyway. Yeah. Gotta risk my life for groceries because I can't afford delivery.

I was just sitting here, and I think I figured out some of the many issues that are bothering me about this game. The great big missing I've been trying to figure out.

They didn't make Veilguard for the adult gamers who have desperately wanted it for so long. They made it for children and teens.

Epler even outright said they'd changed things hoping to draw in a younger section of gamers. (In one of the first q&a sessions after the gameplay reveals.) I wonder if he bothered to do any market studies to see if that demographic would be interested?

I can only judge by my two gaming kids because I'm on media blackout while I finish this game. But no matter how much they dumbed it down for kids, they still have absolutely no interest in Dragon age. They're far more interested in indie games than anything a triple A studio puts out. Their opinions on Triple A studios are so low it's honestly ridiculous. They don't even understand why I love games put out by them.

So, the devs removed things that would make it more likely a parent would let their kid play what is still listed as a M level game (ESRB M for mature).

Ooooh, no. We can't have rogues picking locks and doing all the stuff rogues are supposed to be able to do. Why? Because that means kids will be delinquents doing the same! (The trust in the ability of older kids to understand the difference between a fantasy video game and real life is astounding, I tell you. /s)

Everyone is just so... nice. None of the romanceables have anything tooooo controversial about them. Blackwell Inquisition was a child murderer and lying about being a Grey Warden. Dorian was a spoiled, enslaving Tevinter rich boy (he did actually have a growth arc in Inquisition). Sera was a thief and a Red Jenny (people who worked against the entitled, rich nobility as needed to protect people without power). Varric (even though you can't romance him) was a thief, liar, cheater, and someone you wanted at your back in a fight because he fights dirty. Cassandra was bigoted, hide bound, and intolerant of any faiths other than Andrastianism. The Iron Bull was a failed Ben-Hassrath double agent. The ben-hassrath are a combination of spies and assassins, among other things. Whatever was needed to defend the Qun. Cullen was a drug addict and such a horrible person in the previous two games it actually made me physically ill to try to romance him. Solas was, well, Solas. Who we all know had a lot of bad in his background. The only romance option in Inquisition that wasn’t dirty was Josey. And if you do Romance her, you find some dirt on her too.

I could say the same for almost every Dragon Age Romanceable in the entire damned series. They've mostly been not the greatest of people and when the writers were doing their jobs right, there were growth arcs for them that made them better people during the game. That's part of the fun of games with Romanceable characters. Picking out which broken bird fits your type of broken to romance. (And we're mostly all broken in some way.)

But all the romance options in Veilguard are... well, boring. They're nice, safe, decent people. And since most people have some darkness in them, it's probably not working for others as badly as it's not working for me.

If they're already nice, safe, decent people (even the fucking assassin!) then there's no room for growth. No room to learn that character and feel like your presence in their lives might give them a light to help them strive to be better people. They've truncated any potential for growth arcs for all of them. I'm a Romance author. When you're designing characters for Romance, they have to have a balance of flaws to good points. Otherwise they're just poorly designed characters with little potential to get hearts throbbing and knickers in a twist.

No wonder the romanceables aren't working for me. None of them have flaws big enough to make them well-rounded characters.

Moving on.

Have you noticed there's no blood splatter? I'll check if I have the energy to play after risking my life to get food. But I don't recall seeing a toggle for blood splatter in Veilguard. Like it or hate it, the blood splatter is very much a thing in games like these. They usually have an option to turn it off, but it's usually there. Especially in Dragon Age, blood splatter was a thing. A big thing. Hells, their logo was a blood splattered dragon for at least two games FFS.

And honestly, having my characters coming out of hard fights looking like they've been through a meat grinder is part of the reason I enjoy games like these.

The choices for dialogue are also usually pretty 'nice'. The 'sarcastic' option usually isn't. The angry/strong one isn't either. It's all just... boring. And I'm into Act three now, so I'm thinking my hope of 'maybe the dialogue will get better' is probably an impossibility at this point.

The simplified plot points, the puerile storylines, the lack of dirt on the romanceables, the lack of growth arcs, the completely ridiculous cutting of 90% of the dark horror elements that made these games so good... we've lost all of that because they made this game for kids. And I highly doubt kids will be interested. So they've fucked over, and at least in my case, utterly pissed off the older gamers who have loved Dragon Age for so long, and very likely failed to attract younger gamers, too.

Congratulations on learning the lesson of who your fucking market is. It's crucial in any kind of content creation to know who you're making the thing for, and to not deviate from those genre expectations toooo much. Otherwise, you just have a mess of a disaster like Veilguard. They shot for two wildly dissimilar markets and failed both. Even the cartoony look of the art style is much more like a game for kids than anything like a dark fantasy game for adults.

And like... it's still listed as a mature rated game. So what, exactly, was the point of ruining Dragon Age like this? Many parents won't let their kids play M rated games regardless.

It's just so depressing. If they'd actually made this game for the people who had been praying for it for so long? It probably would have been phenomenal. As it stands, I'll be shocked if it doesn't sink Bioware. And if it doesn't, I'd think it because of bribery more than game quality.

I do have to say that you can decorate more than I thought. But you have to buy everything. And they're themes, so there's no intermixing possible. Like you could have Elven windows with Alamarri rugs and a Ferelden throne in Skyhold? All gifts from either people or cultures you'd helped, which tied it all together and connected it to the world... you can just change themes for the Lighthouse. It changes everything, and again, you have to buy almost everything. That really removes a lot of depth from the game.

People call all the collectibles and gifts etc from the previous games 'filler'. But, frankly, that's a very uneducated opinion of what that 'filler' is supposed to do in fiction. The 'filler' (which is an actual technical term in writing fiction, and those things aren't filler) collectibles and quests gave depth to the games. It tied the world of THEDAS into the world of the player character. It's called world building in writing circles. And what confuses me is that I don't recall anyone having to do any of that. If all you wanted out of the previous games (especially Inquisition) was a fighting game, you could do that. None of the world building collection parts locked you out of any quests that I can recall. If you did enjoy deeper world building and collecting things, you could collect to your heart's content. There's none of that delicately intertwined, beautiful worldbuilding in Veilguard. It's stripped down to the very bare bones of mediocrity.

At heart, Veilguard is not a role playing game. It's a fighting game. And not even a very well designed one. My rogue should never have aggro. That's not how this is supposed to work. Why they felt going from a successful history of role playing games to a stripped down, poorly world built fighting game is just beyond me? Whoever made that decision honestly needs to be fired.

They marketed this as a role playing game. The expectation was for a role playing game set in a richly detailed, deeply world built environment.

And we got a fighting game so stripped of world building that it's sad and just... boring.

Oh, heads up if you're disabled with any sort of disability that affects your hand eye coordination or ability to move your fingers quickly on a keyboard or controller. Don't buy this game. Even on the lowest setting with no death clicked on, you need a great deal of manual dexterity to use this crappy new fighting set up they've come up with. They definitely didn't think of physically disabled gamers at all in developing this. I'm just lucky my particular physical disabilities don't affect me that way. Though my hands are in agony from keeping my not-a-rogue out of the dragon on one side, stone wall on the other situation the fucked up aggro set up always puts me in.

They did bring gifts for companions back, which would thrill me if I actually had any desire to romance any of them. Which I honestly don't. And in games like these? It's often hard for me to pick which one. I often have to install a polyam mod so I can see the other romances because I'm usually so hot and bothered and just captivated by a Romanceable character or three that I won't be able to not romance them. Meaning I need the mod if I'm going to see the other romances.

I'm physically and mentally incapable of not romancing Astarion BG3. (I've tried!) Halsin gets me every time too. Those are markers of excellent character development.

There's none of that in Veilguard.

Emmerich, and as much as I hated his intro story, The Wigmaker, Lucanis are the only slightly interesting characters to me. Bellara is sweet and awkward, but they reduced her neurodivergent qualities so much it feels... off, to my neurodivergent ass.

Neve is so suspicious and bitchy that I have no desire to even try to romance her. I want to shove Harding off a cliff.

Davrin is really suspiciously similar to Halsin BG3. Big, more blocky than usual for an elf, wants to do good, carves wood... but where Halsin really works (because of his deep character development and darkness) Davrin, while definitely hot and with an amazing voice... just falls flat.

Emmerich is a doll of prince charming manners and adorable fussiness. He's probably the character next to Lucanis who actually has the most darkness to him.

I really wanted to love Taash. And I like them a lot, but their 'you must choose only one' thing showed up really fucking early in the game. I didn't feel like I knew them yet, so they're just never going to work for my demisexual ass unless I actually replay this (unlikely?) with a polyam mod and basically plug my nose and close my eyes and leap into a relationship with them far earlier than I'm really comfy with.

So, there's some clarity for me on what's missing and why.

Even Genshin Impact has more draw for me as an adult gamer than Veilguard does. And that is absolutely a game targeted at teens and early twenties folks.

It's an old saw in content creation. But Know Your Market is a saw for a reason.