#***AND THE FACT THAT THEY KILLED A FUCKING LEVIATHAN WHICH ARE SUPPOSED TO BE IMMORTAL***

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

i feel as though we are not properly discussing the implications of the fact that gillion now doesnt remember ANYTHING the tree told him and is also now compelled to be a better more obedient soldier. whatever the hell that means

[swaps55]

.

Here we fucking go. 

We have a glorious moment, one of the best of the trilogy. Anderson dies, and Shepard has to get up. 

What do you need me to do.

No protests. No arguments. There is only the mission, and Shepard isn’t done. It’s the very essence of Shepard, the heart and soul of what makes them such a magic character. 

And we follow up that moment with this bullshit. 

I’ll take this moment to remind folks that in the original, vanilla ending, there was no explanation of the reaper origins. Shepard couldn’t ask questions. There was just, HEY. Pick a color. 

So to my jaded self, the Extended Cut and Leviathan are merely attempts to sleep in the bed they made. 

The biggest mistake BioWare made was attempting to explain the reapers. They are supposed to be unknowable. Beyond our comprehension. Yet here, in the final moments, they are distilled into something completely knowable and understandable, at the expense of everything the trilogy spent three years building. 

“The reapers are not at war with you.” 

Yeah, except you gave Harbinger understandable motivations, an ego, an obsession with a tiny organic, and a vendetta. You made the impersonal Cthulhu monster something with a very personal agenda. Those two ideologies are in direct conflict with each other. 

“Who designed the Crucible?” 

“You don’t know them, and there is no time to explain.” 

WHEN THE FATE OF THE GALAXY HINGES ON IT, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY MAKE TIME. Honest to god, this translates to, “we dunno, fuck off.” 

Now onto the color coded choices. I’ll further point out the reminder that the vanilla ending included no voice over, no slideshow depicting the outcome and consequences, no memorial for Shepard. It was literally exploding relays in three different colors, with no other differences between them. At all. 

The Extended Cut is a direct response to the uproar, which included the following: 

“The relays exploded. Everyone’s dead.” BioWare, astonished at this assumption, somehow forgot they put out a DLC that makes it explicitly clear that destroying a relay releases a titanic source of energy that would wipe out a system. So Extended Cut? Comes out and says, “everything that was broken can be fixed.” No why, no how. You have a decimated galactic economy, the bulk of half a dozen armies stranded in a single system, and the codex clearly states we do not know what kind of material the relays or the Citadel are made from. So...how do we fix all of these things in the next few lifetimes? Fuck you, that’s how. 

“...how the hell did my love interest get on the Normandy??”  Because in vanilla, there is no goodbye scene. Shepard runs to the beam, never looks back, gets blown up, then stumbles to the beam. There is no injured squad mates, no evac, no tender goodbye. One second they’re there, the next they’re exiting the Normandy on Lame Jungle Planet. Which is why Harbinger so patiently waits for Shepard’s ship to come take the wounded love interest away, because we had to have some reason for them to wind up on the ship, and there isn’t a way to do it that makes sense, so have a tender goodbye and don’t think about the fact that the Normandy apparently could have just dropped you right off at the front door and saved everyone a lot of time and trouble. 

“Why did the Normandy flee?” In vanilla, there was only the cutscene of Joker frantically mashing buttons while consoles exploded around him, with a swelling instrumental cacophony that ended with a discordant shriek, suggesting total disaster. When I first played it, I somehow thought, to my horror, that I’d killed Joker. And guess what? Joker and your love interest exiting the Normandy on Lame Jungle Planet is just where the game ended. That music is the credits music. That’s where the journey stopped. Not ended. Stopped. The only other scrap was the voiceover by Buzz Aldrin and a pop up saying, ‘you did it! buy our DLC.’ So the Extended Cut added a cry from Hackett to run from the Crucible, though there’s still no reason given for why, aside from ‘energy is bad for technology,’ and apparently the Normandy is the only ship that somehow winds up stranded on Lame Jungle Planet.

If the Crucible was essentially just a giant EMP that nukes all technology, then everyone is basically fucked, and how do you ‘outrun it,’ since it goes everywhere??

Fuck you, that’s how.   

The choices themselves can fuck themselves, too. Attaching strings to the trilogy-spanning goal of destroying the reapers is a cheap bait and switch. A human being somehow being turned into an immortal vessel to puppet the immortal machines is a complete disaster waiting to happen. Human minds aren’t meant for that, and we’re given no context or information on how that’s supposed to function. 

And Synthesis? You’re asking one person to directly violate the bodily autonomy of every single being in the galaxy? With zero explanation given for what that means other than a few utterly abstract sentences, how it works, what it changes, and what the consequences will be, good or bad? Fuck right off. 

Is my interpretation of the endings completely and forever impacted by experiencing the vanilla ending after playing ME1 when it launched in 2007 and waiting five years for the finale? Yes. I won’t even pretend that I can take an unbiased look at Extended Cut, because all I can see is how blatantly and poorly it tried to respond to the backlash. 

Beyond the incompressible narrative choices, the plot holes, the confusion, etc., the worst sin the original ending made was not giving the player an emotional release. There was no closure. No end. It just stopped. That haunted me. It sounds stupid to say I lost sleep over the ending of a video game. It sounds melodramatic and entitled and obnoxious. But I did. This world and these characters meant everything. I’d like to think that after having lived through a pandemic, it’s a little easier to understand why the fictional places we escape to so we can forget about the real world feel like a lifeline. It may be stupid that a video game means this much to me. But it does. And I have never gotten over how that ending made me feel, and I have never forgiven it. 

The only thing the Extended Cut does is provide an emotional release, in the form of goodbyes to your love interest, an ending slideshow, and a voiceover telling you all the ways the galaxy isn’t actually fucked, even though it is. For a lot of people that’s enough, and that’s a good thing. Emotional release is a big deal. Even if the ending isn’t satisfying, having somewhere to put your emotions makes it a lot easier to swallow. 

This is the first time I have experienced the ‘true’ ending since EC came out in 2012, and now that I have the achievement for finishing the game, I never intend to do it again.

I’m going to go boot up the Citadel DLC, which is the love letter send off the trilogy deserved, and what BioWare was capable of giving us all along. 

They just...didn’t. 

[dramaplustautology]

Edgy Fish Dating Sim - Basic premise + Protag Bio

I’m already stressed and it’s only the beginning of Summer so I thought up some ideas for a hypothetical merpeople-themed visual novel for Mermay! 

So I wanted to have 4 routes but I couldn’t think of another sea creature besides crab and a friend suggested Vincent the lost ninja turtle so that’s a no go. We’re down to three because i never want to hear fuck and turtle in the same sentence again.

Anyways! To the actual thing!

Originally just a cool story idea but when i bounced it off a buddy, they asked me when the freaky fish fucking was going to happen. Well, shape of water got Oscars so I don’t have to hide the fact that I’m a horrific scaley though we’re not going to go super super eggville. 

So picture an endless sea where the closest thing to land you’ll get is the arctic. It’s bountiful with endless forests of kelp, huge coral countries, leaving no crevice unfilled. Lives go on forever and if you get tired of that, you throw yourself to one of the Three Eyes of the Storm. 

If there happens to be too many people around to be comfortable, a storm brews around one of three huge sea monsters. You have the Leviathan, a huge serpent who’s movement through the ocean creates the currents. Then there’s the giant octopus guy (i will come up with better names later) who holds the reefs up with his huge arms. Last is the giant shark with teeth that can tear the sea in literal half. He just goes wherever and eats things. When things get too crowded, they choose which places and which people to cull.

Though they aren’t the only super giants, they hold “something” that makes them able to hold sway over the seas like gods. 

But deep below is the Abyssal Plane. The sunlight can’t reach this place and the inhabitants know death. They survive on marine snow (like leftover food that trickles down from the surface which also includes body parts), bones, and each other (meaning mostly that they eat each other but teamwork isn’t out of the question)! 

The closest thing they had to renewable food and resources were undersea vents that pumped out heat from magma flows beneath the bottom of the sea. Those would be quickly populated and quickly stopped working so the Abyssal Plane inhabitants evolved to become these crazy nightmare monsters that fed on each other. It wasn’t fun even though they’re awesome being translucent, multiple eyes, crazy huge teeth, and all that stuff.

It’s said that the merpeople of the Abyssal Plane are all descended from the first who were born from pearls made by giant clams that lived by the deep sea vents. One of these pearls fell into one of these vents but instead of melting, became tempered by the heat, taking in all of its energy before hatching and splitting the earth. The Merperson that came from this Pearl was the only one who could swim up to the surface, survive in the Sun, and stole from the Eyes of the Storm. They robbed the surface of its bounty in the process, introducing Death to them and taking the Bounty of the surface to the Abyssal Plane. Bringing prosperity and immortality to the bottom of the sea, their attributes were shared among their fellow merpeople who then went on to call them the Progenitor or the God of the Abyssal Plane. 

The Main Character is a direct descendant of the Progenitor, born when their species was on the brink of disappearing. They grew to their late teens in an empty dark city with only their parents and the spectre of the Progenitor hovering over the Abyssal Plane. They have a feeling that the disappearances have something to do with the Progenitor stealing from the surface. Plus, the Progenitor made it clear that they want to keep what they stole despite there being no one left in the Abyssal Plane. Though what they stole keeps the Progenitor immortal, over anything they just want to keep the surface suffering. The Main Character doesn’t feel that it’s right so they decide to take what was stolen back to the surface.

Once they succeed in their quest, the Protagonist knows that they will die. But it’s the right thing to do. 

So the protag is sort of a cross between an Angel Jelly, a Cone Jelly, and some other cute monster traits.

The MC is a real cutie and the sea creature friends they make at the surface had mistaken them for a cloud that had fallen out of the sky when they first met. Then once that misunderstanding’s cleared up, they’re mistaken for a human that had somehow managed to get stuck in the middle of the Ocean.

I have a thing for white hair so they have snow white hair and huge eyes that the fish friends mistake for gold discs. They’re petite in almost all ways. Tiny mouth, tiny nose, and they’re quite short but are wearing a billowing white dress or some other clothing, I dunno, that trails behind then as they swim.

All of this is a cover for what they really look like. See, they’re in disguise because they don’t want the Progenitor or anyone else to recognise that they’re actually a deepsea merperson.

Their mouth actually splits open super wide with tons of sharp teeth they could use to tear, bore, or just splinter bones like they prefer to do. They have a vestigial nose because their skin is extremely sensitive and can feel a shrimp twitch its leg from miles away. Said skin can also turn almost completely translucent like a lot of the things that live in the midnight zone.

As for the eyes, they’re real and can see very well in the dark but hurt a lot when they try to move around in the sunlight. That’s why they keep the rest of their 12 eyes closed. They got 6 eyes on each side of their face. The two topmost are the huge gold discs and the other ten are much smaller. All of them usually turn red in the dark but after one of the fish buddies tells them that unlike the creatures in the deep, most surface fish can see red from really far away, they try to make them blue like their photophores (like biolights/lines on the body that light up). Related to the photophores is the tastefully frilly white dress. It’s used to hide bulk of their body under the skirt.

During the Progenitors time stealing from the surface, there used to be an island sized jellyfish that drifted from place to place. It could trawl entire civilizations and was big enough to swallow whales but since it drifted, everyone could see it coming and avoid it but it was just a huge nuisance. It was only super dangerous when a whirlpool or storm flung it really fast. That was until the Progenitor killed it and stole its body.

Currently, the giant jelly’s body is furled up underneath the MC’s dress. It’s basically grafted to their skin so their poisonous blood, stinging cells, and photophores line the thing. Plus underneath all of that are their own super long tendrils (like in the pics but wow in that documentary, they’re SUPER long). There are only two of them sticking out of the bottom of their spine but they can stretch for miles and the MC can move them at will. At night, the photophores light up in a pretty blue colour that attracts other fish. They bite, get stung, get paralyzed, and then the MC apologizes because they didn’t mean to let it loose. The tendrils are supposed to be wound up tight around the treasures they’re going to return.

Otherwise, unlike other merpeople or humans even, the MC just has stubs. No tail or legs, just stubs. The dress is also hiding the fact that they got no tail. They use the finials on the Jelly’s body or their tendrils to move. With it all furled up, they have to flap their arms to get around.

Ok but as for a name to refer to them to make this easier for later, I’m going with Lariat.

[yourplayersaidwhat]

Don't sass the Angel of Death

The characters in this are Azrael the Angel of Death (played by Y) and Dareios who is possessed by a snake demon/deity that calls itself Leviathan (played by me). Dareios is immortal thanks to Leviathan, and Azrael doesn’t like immortal humans, so Y and I are trying to figure out how they would interact.

Y: Okay but Azrael’s blades usually conceal themselves as scissors imagine a typical teenager in a hoodie (Azrael’s human appearance) threathening Dareios with scissors. I wouldn’t be sure whether to laugh or call the cops.

Me: “Well as long as they don’t run with them” - Dareios

Y: I think that’s gonna be the least of your concerns somehow buddy

Y: Honestly tho I know for fact that the first thing Azrael says to Dareios is “the fuck are you”.

Y: (I have this idea that Azrael is the only angel who swears)

(here’s where we switched to actually being IC or OOC)

Dareios: “I could ask you the same question, but I already know the answer: rude.”

Y: OH SNAP

Me: I love it when Dareios goes all sassy.

Azrael: “Politeness gets you nowhere, certainly not when facing death.”

Y: But seriously Azrael looks like a moody teenager so I doubt that would be taken seriously

Dareios: “Assuming I will answer your question…”

Dareios/Leviathan (talking at the same time): “…Which of us did you ask?”

Azrael: “Cursed be the English language. The ‘you’ was plural.”

Y: 'Cursed be the English language’? Who says that???

Me: Azrael, clearly

Dareios: “That is a very old-fashioned phrase for a kid like you”

Azrael: “Now who’s the rude one. Show your elders some respect.”

Leviathan: “Excuse you!?” (pretending to be insulted)

Azrael: (snickers) “You clearly haven’t seen me before. Understandable, since you’re immortal, you don’t know what Death looks like.”

Dareios: “I know what Death looks like, but it never holds me long enough for me to register its true appearance.”

Azrael: “Well now you do. And now I have to correct the natural order.” (takes out scissors)

Dareios: “Going to cut my thread of life, or whatever it’s called?”

Azrael: “Oh no. I take offense to immortal humans, I’m going to get up close and personal with this.” (separates the blades of the scissors and turns them into a dagger and a sword)

Dareios: “Well, you definitely shouldn’t run with those.” (makes magic sword appear out of thin air)

Azrael: “I’ve been doing this since the dawn of life. You should be worried about yourself.”

Y: Dawn of life, is that even a thing??

Me: I guess it is

Dareios: "I’d like to see you try. Maybe I will stay dead this time. I doubt it, though.“

Azrael: (suddenly holding the dagger to Dareios’ throat) "Don’t patronize me, WORM.”

Leviathan: “I take offense to that.”

Azrael: (steps back) “And I take offense to you. We’re even now, huh?”

Leviathan: “Guess so.”

Y: Okay but (her other two characters) standing on the sideline watching these two duke it out

Leviathan: “Question. Can an Angel of Death die?”

Azrael: “Are you an idiot? Of course I can’t. If I died, no one else would. The natural order would be a mess.”

Leviathan: “Another question. Do you think you’d be able to kill a god?”

Azrael: “I’ve done it before. The real question is; is it your time to go? I know the human passed his long ago. That must be corrected.”

Leviathan: “My dear host will not pass his time until I allow him to.”

Azrael: “Unfortunately for you, you’re not in charge of either fate or destiny. All I have to do is wrench control from you for just a second. Then he’s gone.”

Leviathan: “Gone for how long?”

Azrael: “Forever. He’ll be dead.”

Leviathan: “Will he? He has died thousands of times before, and I brought him back every time.”

Azrael: “This time is different. You haven’t dealt with me in person before. When I close the gates, they won’t open for anyone.”

Leviathan: “I’d like to see that happening.”

Azrael: “I told you, didn’t I? You’re not the one in charge. I am.” (reveals wings)

Leviathan: “Oh, really? Who is stronger, an Angel or a God? Time to find out~”

Azrael: “Such arrogance. I was here before you, and I will be here after you. Those words, I’ve heard them before. Yet I am here, and they are not.”

Leviathan: “Were you here before me? Well, I suppose you were in this exact location before I was, but that’s not the point.”

Me: Leviathan no. Stop sassing the angel of death.

Azrael: “The moment life was invented, I was there, ready to claim it. Such is the natural law of things.”

Leviathan: “Would that make you the first or the second creature alive?”

Azrael: “Second after God. I was a force of nature at first. Then I chose to serve Him.”

Leviathan: “That makes sense. Now, I guess we have talked enough…”

Azrael: “You are a fine conversation partner, I must say. Not many people ask me things other than 'why me?’.”

Leviathan: “I know the answer to that already, so I don’t need to ask. Now, are you going to kill me or not?”

Azrael: “Yes.” (runs him through with the sword)

Me: Well that escalated quickly.