#Anyway I'm getting off topic

[iguessitsjustme]

Hey I liked a lot your I hear the sunspot Maya post! I don't understand why there's so many people who have an issue with her as Kouhei's friend. She's doing what she thinks is best and you explained it so well 💖

Hi! <3

I am very glad you liked the post. Personally, I don't understand why Maya is such a divisive character and I just wanted give my perspective for why I, personally, do not think she is the devil incarnate. I always try to explain my point of view, especially if I know there is a large portion of the fandom that disagrees.

I know that there are people that vehemently hate Maya. I also know that there are people that vehemently defend her (I am one of them), but the way the fandom has been treating each other over this character has made me hesitant to post anything. So I am very happy to see that there are other people that don't hate Maya that have seen my post. There are also other people that have explained why Maya is such a good character just as well, if not better than I have.

[beneathsilverstars]

thinking about the hot moms at the daycare i used to work at....

[seventh-district]

Making Incorrect H:SR Quotes Until I Run Out of (hopefully) Original Ideas - Pt. 4 - Nuthin' but Boothill Edition

[Pt. 1] [Pt. 2] [Pt. 3] [Pt. 5] [Pt. 6]

[egophiliac]

Where can you play ride kamens? It looks fun looking at your blog but idk where to play

it'll doesn't start until the 30th, but there's some pre-release episodes/character bits that are scattered around the website and twitter! (the links to pre-reg/download are also on the website :D)

honestly I'm really enjoying it just based off of the pre-release stuff, these characters look like they're going to be exactly that blend of ridiculous and emotionally constipated that hits me so right.

[rockethorse]

The basegame wedding dress has a pregnancy morph??

[sergle]

I think my favorite thing about doing ginger red hair instead of cherry red hair is: lying to people about it

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[genericpuff]

Fighting off cold and flu has always been difficult for me and it's only getting harder as I get older. I find the transitioning from being "sick in bed" back to "functioning person" can often be the hardest part, especially when it comes to congestion which can take days if not weeks to clear up, so even if I'm able to walk around, do basic tasks, etc. I'm uncomfortable the whole way through. At least when it comes to my back pain, that's something that I'm used to and can predict and accommodate; getting sick is none of those things.

What's making it even more difficult this time around, compared to every other time, is the fact that I went from being healthy and medicated to sick and unmedicated. So that transition back into "functioning" is being slowed further by my returning inability to focus, to push myself through the uncomfortable feeling of doing literally anything, to be at peace with boredom.

Every single time I want to do anything that isn't laying in bed, it's met with both "I don't know if I'm physically capable of doing that because I'm sick" and "I don't know if I'm mentally capable of doing that because I'm off my meds."

And it's incredibly exhausting.

[blimbo-buddy]

”Damn I’ve been feeling kind of shitty about what I went through when I was 15-16. I wonder if there’s a way to get all these feelings out besides therapy”

SpottedLeaf and Anya:

[pink-octopede64]

a rambley shirt i made in animal crossing new horizons!

tried to replicate the one from the game shown in the 2nd screenshot

[tagidearte-spam-sb]

I find it funny how the fandom (or, at least, a part of the fandom I see a lot) has latched onto the "Moon is obsessed with rules" headcanon. True, he's the one that comes after Gregory for "punishment time", but...

Sun is the one calling the player a rulebreaker and kicking a literal kid straight into the less-than-friendly Glamrocks' waiting arms (for accidentally turning the lights off. As if Gregory would know touching a Freddy shaped security box would do that. If it even was Gregory and, idk, ""someone"" disabling the power in the daycare on purpose). Sun is the one nearly popping his circuits if you don't follow his instructions. Sun is the one threatening to release Moon on you if you so much as colour a page wrong. Sun is the one getting frustrated with Cassie if she screws up somehow (haven't played Ruin in a while, but I do think he freaks out if you approach him in the VR world after only disabling one - or zero - generators).

Moon on the other hand? Moon is fizzyfazzing vibing (well, not in Ruin for obvious reasons). Fulfilling his task and getting the kid? Sure sure, let him just jump from leg to leg first, and walk in a goofy way at an extremely slow pace (even Monty with no legs balancing himself on crutches would probably move faster), while giggling and alerting the entirety of the daycare to his precise jingly location. He only starts taking it seriously and entering the structures when you get some generators on, and even then he's still messing around. The robot cares more about his jester theatrics than his goddamn job. If Moon really does security patrols like many people believe he does, half of them are (or were, prior to the virus) probably him tormenting a poor overworked security guard (rip Vanessa, if you're out there...).

Don't take me wrong. I love a Moon who follows the rules to a malicious degree as much as the next person. And he does seem set on putting Gregory down to sleep and punishing him. He does seem intent on harming you in HW2. But let's be real, Moon doesn't give a shit about his job half the time - doing a goofy walk, riding a carousel... those are much better. If he gets to scare someone while doing it, jackpot for him. We only really see him struggle in Ruin, as far as I recall. Sun is the one running around like a bossy headless chicken trying to get everything in order.

I think it's because Moon is the one who directly says "you must be punished" and harms you? But even then my man jumps on the table, does a goofy move, and flies off to give Gregory some time to hide for their little hide and seek game. Sun is the one getting freaked out and throwing you out without any preamble after the lights turn on.

Again, not shitting on anyone. I just think it's so funny. I legitimately cannot imagine Moon being that serious unless 1) a real intruder is at the pizzaplex, not some snotty kid; 2) Vanny tells him to; 3) something actually dangerous is happening and he's not high on whatever virus is going around.

[bitegore]

okay i am actually writing the Experimentalist First Aid metapost right now.

Beginning statement and caveats - I have no reason to believe this is canon and basically don't, except that I like it better. However, it literally would be indistinguishable from canon for the most part for various reasons outlined below, so like, you can't prove it's not. Canon compliant canon divergent headcanon territory.

Also, this is about G1.

I think First Aid is many things.

First Aid is a big giant fucking baby and he has the experience of someone who has been alive for Ten Total Minutes. First Aid is not old enough to have properly-tuned self-preservation instincts or an understanding of what will and will not be able to kill him. Unlike everyone else, he handles this by being a giant soft baby (affectionate) and going "I don't want to go fuck around with things that can kill me" and hangs out inside, where he gets his fill of Necessary Exciting Stuff(tm) with Ratchet and the other Autobots. However, he's still got the ravenous desire for Experiences, and this turns into

He fucking loves learning. he loves learning so much. He doesn't want to get hurt but he wants to know everything. Sometimes he needs to go out and do stupid things for that, but he'd rather learn from someone else's experiences first.

He is a medic. He likes to help people, but he likes to help people by taking them apart and getting elbow-deep inside of them and rearranging things, which is usually the kind of thing that human people get squeamish about. Even granting that Transformers are not as squeamish or flinchy about gore as humans are, being the person who gets to watch their friends get grievously injured and then stick your hands in there and mess around with the wound is pretty heavy for some (most!) people! But I think it would be a strange reading to say that First Aid doesn't like to be a medic, so this clearly doesn't bother him the way it might bother someone else. He doesn't like when his friends are injured, but the actual process of surgery - cutting them open or digging into a wound to clean it out, that sort of thing - isn't a problem for him, which leads into

Even by TF standards, First Aid is remarkably unfazed by injuries, gore, and insides-currently-outside than someone else his age would probably be. And that means I can get away with the next few parts...

I read First Aid as a sadist. In the autonomous, just-kind-of-happens sort of way, not the "I'm going to menace you" sort of way people sometimes interpret that statement. People get hurt in front of First Aid and he finds himself fascinated by the injury and immediately concerned with fussing over them in particular, partially because it's his job to pay attention to the wound and partially because there's something about pain and injuries that fascinates him beyond the confines of his job.

First Aid also likes his job, and he likes doing a good job, which means he's not aout to just start banging anyone up to hurt them for the hell of it because his job is to fix them. I don't even imagine sadism is particularly uncommon among doctors, because frankly it only makes sense to me that the characters literally hardwired to cut people open might have something making it so they don't feel bad when they cut someone open. Which would mean it has to be easy for them to maintain an Autobot standard of professionalism, which doesn't really prohibit being buddies with your patients (see: Ratchet) or, like, certain human standards of care around privacy and freedom from experimentation, but does broadly prohibit being needlessly cruel to your patients in a way they themselves aren't on board with. So this doesn't interfere with his job at all, basically; it's just some extra thing he has on the side for the most part.

First Aid is a big giant fucking baby and he has the experience of someone who has been alive for Ten Total Minutes. First Aid is not old enough to have properly-tuned self-preservation instincts or an understanding of what will and will not be able to kill him. Unlike everyone else, he handles this by being a giant soft baby (affectionate) and going "I don't want to go fuck around with things that can kill me" and hangs out inside, where he gets his fill of Necessary Exciting Stuff(tm) with Ratchet and the other Autobots. However, he's still got the ravenous desire for Experiences, and this turns into

He fucking loves learning. he loves learning so much. He doesn't want to get hurt but he wants to know everything. Sometimes he needs to go out and do stupid things for that, but he'd rather learn from someone else's experiences first.

He is a medic. He likes to help people, but he likes to help people by taking them apart and getting elbow-deep inside of them and rearranging thigns, which is usually the kind of thing that human people get squeamish about. Even granting that Transformers are not as squeamish or flinchy about gore as humans are, being the person who gets to watch their friends get grievously injured and then stick your hands in there and mess around with the wound is pretty heavy for some (most!) people! But I think it would be a strange reading to say that First Aid doesn't like to be a medic, so this clearly doesn't bother him the way it might bother someone else. He doesn't like when his friends are injured, but the actual process of surgery - cutting them open or digging into a wound to clean it out, that sort of thing - isn't a problem for him, which leads into

Even by TF standards, First Aid is remarkably unfazed by injuries, gore, and insides-currently-outside than someone else his age would probably be. And that means I can get away with the next few parts...

I read First Aid as a sadist. In the autonomous, just-kind-of-happens sort of way, not the "I'm going to menace you" sort of way people sometimes interpret that statement. People get hurt in front of First Aid and he finds himself fascinated by the injury and immediately concerned with fussing over them in particular, partially because it's his job to pay attention to the wound and partially because there's something about pain and injuries that fascinates him beyond the confines of his job.

First Aid also likes his job, and he likes doing a good job, which means he's not aout to just start banging anyone up to hurt them for the hell of it because his job is to fix them. I don't even imagine sadism is particularly uncommon among doctors, because frankly it only makes sense to me that the characters literally hardwired to cut people open might have something making it so they don't feel bad when they cut someone open. Which would mean it has to be easy for them to maintain an Autobot standard of professionalism, which doesn't really prohibit being buddies with your patients (see: Ratchet) or, like, certain human standards of care around privacy and freedom from experimentation, but does broadly prohibit being needlessly cruel to your patients in a way they themselves aren't on board with. So this doesn't interfere with his job at all, basically; it's just some extra thing he has on the side for the most part.

I think that's all the requisite readings.

In sum, this gives us a guy who relaly likes being around people in pain, who also likes being the guy to help them out of it, and likes to learn. He's encouraged to do all of these things by the people around him, because he's not being concerning about any of it- he's just dedicated to what he does and he's good at it, and getting better every day.

And by the same tokens, you have a guy who really, really badly wants to get to take someone apart over and over, because he wants to see how they work on the insides and he likes the way they look when they're in pain, but he doesn't want to fuck over his friends, comrades, patients, or teammates, and everyone he's interacting with is at least three of those things.

Plus we get G1 First Aid's pacifism, which is a strongly-held ideological standpoint that First Aid maintains - he won't fight, he won't carry weapons, but he will work as a medic. We can interpret that this isn't a squeamishness issue for him by the asme tokens I established earlier - that he's much more okay with getting into the guts of his friends and coworkers than the average person would be - and also by the fact that he was built in a military context and everyone else is a military fighter of some sort. if he were reluctant to hurt people because of anything shy of serious personal convictions, I am convinced that the Autobots around him could have convinced him otherwise. His position is profoundly difficult to maintain in an active war zone, aftr all.

So even beyond standard Autobot ethics, First Aid does not want to hurt people. Yet I reconcile this with saying he is an innate sadist anyway, because they're not mutually exclusive. It really just means that, like, First Aid can want to take people apart all he likes; he's just not going to do it to anyone until someone asks him to.

As an aside, in my corner of fandom anyway, it seems like we talk a lot about characters who kind of throw interpersonal concerns and care for those around them to the wind in order to chase their own hedonistic desires (see: Vortex, Overlord, Motormaster, Megatron, etc) or otherwise, put bluntly, just kind of don't care that much about their partners' and playthings' consent even when they have it. And that can be a lot of fun, obviously; I like them. But as of late my friends who shoot the shit with me about consensual kink in Transformers have been busy or we haven't been talking about it for a while, and I've been missing the other side - the exact same desires and interests, just harnessed, controlled, and managed, not because First Aid has to but because he just, like... feels like it. It's what he wants to do. And, like. yeah the Autobots wouldn't be pleased if he turned out to be some sort of turborapist, lol, but he's the first person to decide he's not going to run around doing harm. I tie it into the pacifism. Part of this reading is because this is my reading; part of this reading is because I want to insert even more contrast between the characters I see First Aid Aid played alongside than I'm already seeing when I finally sit down and write about him myself.

So what this boils down to - all together - is that First Aid wants someone to ask him to take them apart.

And he likes to learn.

So the first person to catch his attention and walk him through opening their chest up is going to get to see him catch his brain on every shiny new edge he's not used to seeing outside of a medical context, and he's going to go over and catalogue every single part and take them out and put them back in and he's going to do it over and over until he can do it without looking and then he's going to do that to everything else, too. He's going to pick up every style of play fast and hard, but I read him landing hard on the "roleplay is kind of silly, I like bodies" side of domination. And I think he'd enjoy domination a lot.

He's a good student and a quick study. He likes to learn. He's enthusiastic and comfortable being taught, too. It would be very easy to turn him into a service top, too, to talk him into being an extension of your own hands and guide him through doing what you want.

But only to a point. Because he's still a pacifist, so you can't use him to hurt someone else, unless they're also asking for it. But, hell, he's part of a combiner team... I bet that would come easy to him, too, once he does have everyone's consent.

In a few thousand years, I think First Aid is going to maybe be one of the biggest kinksters in the entire Autobot faction, or he's going to have extremely narrow and extremely specific tastes. But he's going to get there through experimentation and he's going to get there through his fascination with anything new, which right now is everything.

Last bit is that - I think his instincts are not fine-tuned, self-preservation-wise. I think his social instincts are just as bad. you develop those over time, after all, and through experience, and he doesn't have that. And he's a pacifist because he doesn't want to hurt Decepticons. Very sweet, certainly, but the Decepticons are like... kind of dicks lmfao. The way of things is not very complicated because there are so few Transformers around and alive; eventually First Aid is going to run into a Decepticon. The question is if he ever ends up on good terms with someone from the other faction - or if he already has - or if he gets himself hurt early and learns to avoid them fast. But even with the latter, I don't think that's how he'll stay. I think he wants to experiment. I think he wants to learn and do more and learn more. So eventually he will run into a Decepticon who is also willing to play the way he's willing to play, and they will end up making, if not friends, then at least some sort of positive interaction and First Aid will...

...well, he's never going to stop being curious, huh. That would be boring. But his morals and standards for his behavior are either going to stay ironclad or they won't, and either way it'll be interesting to see what happens. Because there's no bottom to where First Aid might go, eventually.. as long as he's being asked for it.

[aibouart]

Work doodle tax

He/him

[fragmentedblade]

The "Dan Heng is Dan Feng" dogmatics annoy me a lot. It entirely brushes off one of the most interesting and prevalent questions posed by the game, incarnated by several characters and stories that give the question different hues with different potential answers, and a constant also in HI3, like a thread waving the two games together

[hatterladz]

Let's Talk Cuphead's Monster Complex

I've deleted and rewritten this a million times trying to put this neatly and maybe find sources but SCREW IT we ball!

So the thing I think about with Cup's monster complex [what I've deemed his "I'm a bad person" thought process, he is but that's not the point] is how it protects and damages him

Like this guy is out here talking to all his pals pre-Labyrinth and going "You might've destroyed xyz with the intent to kill but I actually killed people and I know your not as bad as me cuz I said so" which CANNOT be good for his mental health, sure it makes everyone else feel better because I don't think they fully process the fact of Cup comparing their wrongs with his and how that's not good

I think we see the point of it being at it's worst within the Labyrinth when he's debating killing himself in order to beat the Devil, which ya under first glance is him debating on ultimatum but it's genuinely suicide ideation we saw there. The idea "better people are better without me" [<-I'll get to this in a second]

This self-destructive pattern is what pulls Cup to the points where he's at now. He's a bad person, being a bad person [aka associated with the mafia] will lead to bad things happening to the people around him which is his fault [his thoughtprocess nobody else's] because it was the result of a chain reaction of his own decisions, so now he's trying to make good decisions to protect the people around him

But he can't leave and those things that are actively still a threat to the people he loves. So then he picks up this idea that he can help them by being a better person but also by utilizing his skills that he's learned from growing up in the mafia. So it's never enough improvement but he's trying, that's what he tells himself.

Because it's how he protected Mugs, do the dirty work, so that Mugs didn't get hurt. Take the hard hits [literally and figuratively] so when he finds other people he cares about, but now holds a higher standard for him as a person, he finds himself at a problem

The easy answer is lean on what he knows, the hard one is learn new things to handle the situation, rely on other's around him and trust them, and that not every bad thing is his fault

And after the Labyrinth, after Mugs took control of the Devil situation [he didn't end up in that position, he took it from his brother], when he's forced to heal and recover, is when he finally starts to internalize some of that, is when he finally actually starts to improve as a person

And this is when we discover one of Cup's greatest fears that was hinted at in the Labyrinth, he's terrified of losing everyone, just like he lost his parents when he was 3, just like he was forced away from Elder Kettle, and more then what he had to deal with as a teen. With the only grounding force being "At least Mugs is with me"

And I don't just mean loss as in physically gone, I mean morally and emotionally as well. You can see this fear with Holly, imagining a future with her. Imagining all the ways he could lose the girl he knows right in front of him.

This is when he falls back into older habits, when he's afraid, then when he's guilty because he just ruined another good thing didn't he? When he's kissed by Fanny and reminded that he's just a crook, he couldn't do something good without there being something else. And then he kills Winky.

Because Cup doesn't like acknowledging his worst feelings. He knows they're there. He just doesn't want to see them.

[approximately20eggs]

hello tumblr mutuals. should I cope by ignoring my homework and thesis for a while longer and instead catch everyone up on all the ocs I made since the last time I was brave enough to post about any of them on tumblr