#11 YEARS AND IT'S MINE!

[bbbbbbbbatman]

My take on the whole 'the JL gets mad at Batman for having a child soldier when he gets robin' thing goes like this:

The League is having a fight with Batman saying it's wrong to bring a child, especially with no powers, into fights with supervillains and it's irresponsible to put children in danger

And Batman interrupts with "so you take him then"

And the League just kind pause, like "huh?"

"One of you can babysit Robin for a week and then we can revisit this discussion."

They're a little confused but eventually Wonder Woman agrees to take him in.

She returns with him a week later. "I apologize Batman, we have misjudged you. I adore him but please take him back now."

(she couldn't get him to stop sneaking out to fight crime without physically restraining him)

[thegreatyin]

this is literally the greatest day of my life.

proud to announce that today i finally achieved my video game white whale (got the heavenly onyx cloud serpent)

[evanzbuck]

RAFAEL SILVA appreciation series: ↳ working out pt. 2 (for @nelsonnicholas @pragmatic-optimist @sunshinestrand)

[surskip]

johnny chaos compilation

[expelliarmus]

[m-eltdown]

[bri-cheeses]

“how can you not like Snape but like Regulus, Barty, and Evan?”

Because, in my mind, Snape was a bitch (derogatory), and Regulus, Barty, and Evan were bitches (affectionately)

[thanatika]

yeah i agree with your point about survival mechanics and i feel the same way about the lack of combat mechanics. "why would an educated city doctor need a weapon" because shit is hitting the fan in every way impossible and pretty much everyone is walking around armed... also why am i supposed to believe the the fact that he's a man of intellect will somehow provide him with food? i don't think anyone is going to be too eager to share food during an outbreak intellectual or not...

+ follow up for the previous ask but actually my favorite quest from the original pathologic is the day 11 bachelor quest that involves shooting down soldiers. i think it really drives the point home about how this random fuckass guy who is supposed to be battling a plague doesn't even have the time to do that anymore because the people in charge are asking completely irrelevant things of him now and he's at a position where he cannot refuse what is being asked of him. like i think it was good storytelling that even as the guy who lowkey wants to deal with the plague and solve its mystery you still have other, more pressing, less interesting and or pleasant tasks to complete

i agree! honestly, i feel this way about the combat mechanics even more than i do about the physical survival (food, health, illness, sleep) mechanics. because sure, i can see how it makes sense for daniil's position of authority to mean that his basic needs are somewhat provided for -- although i don't think it makes more sense than what we got in the original game. i've never seen anyone bring up "isn't it kind of unrealistic that the bachelor isn't given lots of food during a massive food shortage?" as a plothole that needed to be resolved. the townspeople generally don't like him much, and most of the people with power don't either, except for the kains. sure, maybe it's kind of weird that you can go see the kains while broke and on the verge of keeling over from hunger, and they won't do anything to help you, but... the kains are pretty self-centered, and they're so goddamn weird that maybe they forget that you need to eat food to live anyway. and it's half-implied that the powers that be are ultimately giving daniil this role as a convenient way to kill him, so it makes sense that they would put no pressure on the town authorities to keep him alive.

(and honestly, artemy is taken under the olgimsky's auspices as much as the kains take daniil's under theirs! which is to say, selfishly, with ulterior motives that are more important to them than the well-being of their healer, but... the olgimskys are set up as the wealthiest of the 3 families financially, as well as the ones with the most access to food, given their control over the meat industry. so if anything it's "weirder" that artemy isn't more materially provided for, though to be clear i don't think there's an actual plothole there either way.)

but anyway, you could handwave it and say that daniil's position of privilege and authority gives him more perks than he got in the original game, but the amount of fighting you have to do to get through town is... kind of an unavoidable physical reality? like you're given so many sidequests that you often wind up walking around town after dark, and that's when the bandits come out. is the idea that the bandits would be too scared to attack him because he's so important? because that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and even pathologic 2 establishes that he's seen as a valuable target by the bandits:

and then there's the quests where combat plays a more direct role in the story itself, like getting involved in saving andrey from the firing squad, or killing guards to break artemy out of prison, or the quest where you have to kill var in attempt to stop the arsonists (which i include on the same tier as the other ones because i really like the quest journal entry he has if you complete it where he blames himself for willow's death. it's a good character moment.)

hell, even in pathologic 2 itself, one of the biggest Bachelor Moments is on day 11, when you have that big dramatic convo with him after he killed a soldier for the papers he was delivering. plus one of bad grief's idle dialogues in patho 2 is commentary on the bachelor being "quick on the draw" and that he "already shot someone". like he just straight up is not living a combat-free existence. and overall, combat isn't just a good tool from a mechanical perspective, heightening the stakes and placing pressure on the player (though it is), it's also pretty important for him on a thematic level imo, almost as important as artemy and his "rivers of blood". in patho classic, daniil has this early interaction with the inquisitor:

which, thinking about it from a doylist perspective, was probably the writers' attempt to make it sound more plausible that this random medical researcher from the big city was competent with multiple types of guns. and i appreciate them coming up with that hint of backstory to cover their bases a bit, but with those bases covered, i think the fact that daniil ultimately spends more time shooting people than he does prescribing medicines for them actually does a lot for him thematically? i mean, if his whole thing is that he's this "tempted destroyer", someone who frames his career as a combative battle with death rather than a quest to save people's lives, whose "default" solution is to raze the town with artillery because he's too limited by his rationalist worldview and military upbringing (and bitterness over being manipulated and sabotaged) to come up with a solution that saves the any remaining infected survivors on his own. plus the way that clara frames artemy and daniil as two sides of the same coin in being violent destroyers and killers, who without player intervention will immediately devolve to running around chasing each other down in what's either an insanely dedicated tom and jerry LARP or some really elaborate foreplay. imo, that whole dichotomy (which is pretty core to the game, as the idea of dichotomies are core to it in general) works so much better with the way they're both presented in classic, stalking around with gun/scalpel in hand. hell, not to mention the effect that spending 12 in-game days trying not to starve and getting killed by bandits or guards or worms or soldiers every day would have on the player, and the way it would make them feel about the town and their natural projection of those feelings onto dankovsky, who is a perfectly fitting vessel for them as the avatar actually undergoing those virtual experiences.

ultimately i think they are mainly going this direction out of a desire to do something more creative and original, which is fine... it just seems a bit silly to me that they keep saying "well obviously that doesn't really work for the bachelor's scenario", when, well... even as recently as patho 2 in 2019, they seemed to think it fit his narrative pretty well! i'm also guessing that a lack of combat won't be that bandits are just no longer roaming the streets at night. it sounds more like pathologic 3 is set to be more of a nonlinear experience, where you'll probably fast travel from place to place instead of having to walk across town so much? so you'll be avoiding bandits just in the sense that the gameplay will be avoiding them. i guess i'm hoping that at the very least, there's still the implication of the crunch of not getting enough sleep or food and the threat of being stabbed to death while trying to get through town occurring to dankovsky in the background, even if those mechanics are deemphasized in favor of more macro-level town resource management, time control, and sherlock holmes fruit ninja or whatever the hell they were on about back in 2022 lmao.

[harbingersecho]

happy new year

[whateverthought]

Gael was born in 80AC, Daemon was born in 81AC and Aemma was born in 82AC

do you think they were friends? could they have been friends?

[mintyyyjades]

[kyouka-supremacy]

That fic from Akutagawa's pov that remarked how although Dazai had left a bomb under Chuuya's car, at least that showed he had thought about him before going, while he never cared enough to spare a thought for Akutagawa.

[shire-ivy]

Do you think Merlin still walk past that lake once in a while, waiting. Do you think he is here, somewhere, around this earth with us. Waiting for when Albion's need is greatness.

[guzhufuren]

while usually i don't want to be close to celebrities and actors from shows i watch, i wish i could meet Lee Taevin once, just to deeply sincerely thank him and let him know how big his impact was

[pain-is-too-tired]

It's so funny seeing people people joke about reading TLH and found "Where's Percy??? Who's this Jason guy???"

Cause that was not my thought process when started HOO

I went in thinking "Oh! Percy will be a background leader type character like Firestar was! :D" (because, despite people joking about it, Firestar really was just leading his clan after the first arc. He was not getting dragged into prophecies left and right until right before his death)

I was wrong of course- but I was going in use to different protagonists each series. especially in the dynamic Rick wrote HOO in versus how he wrote pjo.

You know what I WAS thinking for a good bit there before it became bluntly obvious he was a son of Jupiter/Roman.

I was considering the theory that Jason was a monster that had his mind wiped for some reason? Like that Couch Hedge was suspicious of him because of that but Jason just didn't know about his background or anything.

I even was like "oh, could he be one of those wind spirit things their fighting???" When he start flying during that fight and all that...

Yeah. That was my thought process. Let me tell you I was not bored with Jason's first few chapters, whether it was because of that or just in general I couldn't tell you.

Anyway. I'll defend my boy to this day.

[lvstharmony]