#Bc its good plot wise but too long to write | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

maybevillage · 5 months ago

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my really really long rant about endwalker

i'm not kidding this is really long. spoilers ahead of course, like immediately upon entry. sorry i sound so angry the whole time

unfortunately for me and for anyone reading this, endwalker is one of those cases where i like/d so much of what happens that the many weak moments make me more critical of the whole than i would be if it was just wholly bad like stormblood, bc it's a waste of potential. a lot of the time the moments i liked would even be happening simultaneously with the things i find so problematic: cheap storytelling decisions, cheap moments that only serve as fanservice or for shock value that only detract from a characters’ pre-existing complexity, poorly done rehashing of elements from shadowbringers, a lot of hollow pseudo-intellectual arguments, rushed and underdeveloped writing in one instance and then meandering wastes of time immediately after….these issues are so consistent that rather than try to break up endwalker's story based on these things, i will just try to run thru the whole thing chronologically and hope i don't get too repetitive. that's why this isn't an essay with some pretense of structure. i'll do my best.

what's crazy to me is i thought endwalker was going to be my second favourite expansion. this was despite not caring about its original main conflict--i thought fandaniel just wasn't a compelling or even interesting villain. he comes out of nowhere. and he's also asahi so that association is hard to break away from bc i find asahi silly. and he suffers from the same writing issues zenos does, where nearly every cutscene with them did little to develop their characters further from the baseline, only reiterated what i already know bc they literally never say anything else: zenos wants to fight wol, he's bored with everything life could possibly offer, fandaniel will ensure zenos can fight wol through his towers bc he no longer plays to the tune of his unsundered masters... even though what fandaniel was promising to cause were the final days i just didn't really care. in the wake of shadowbringers the final days are like a pretty big deal, but something about reviving a catastrophe i had just finished wrapping up--i thought, naively--made bringing them back seem really thoughtless. i don't really need to see anymore final days...like how much more do i need to understand how bad it was? i mean i think shb did a pretty good job????? of making the final days seem pretty fucking bad. why not come up with something new because this is endwalker and not shadowbringers haha? the only fresh thing about this new uncooler final days was the motivation behind them. fandaniel wanting to bring about the final days bc he wants to die and thinks everything should die with him vs emet-selch's unwillingness to die no matter what bc the final days took everything from him and he needs to bring it all back. still, recontextualising the final days from a past event into a present issue ruins them to me. whatever, i thought, there's no way we're letting the final days happen so what does this matter anyways. there's no way.

so yeah post-shb into ew was starting to lose me plot-wise. not the end of the world (LOL?) though bc the atmosphere in the beginning was so subtle and fresh and rich like dew in the morning that i was willing to look past it. going to old sharlayan i liked a lot. i liked going there not as a more typical homecoming for your friends but to instead uncover the sharlayan forum's cryptic behaviour. this kind of intrigue was what i really wanted after the grandness of shadowbringers and i really do think endwalker gave me that for a while. i liked the opening scene on the ship a lot bc it felt exciting and uncertain and new, especially talking to hydaelyn. i liked how she had become such an unstable variable after originally being the most anchoring presence in the entire game: learning she's a primal, whether she's actually “good” after listening to emet-selch’s explanation of her origins and actions in shb, and the fact that her appeals to her champions have been fewer and fewer… i thought her meeting with you at the very beginning of endwalker was cool and foreboding. i also really liked the emet-selch narration btw, i thought that was a fun choice. who better to guide you into the final stages of your adventure than the person who left you with that final, most important task. i wish this had been the only callback to his character at all.

so a big part of why i like/d endwalker so much is all that atmosphere. and something i can't really put into words. it just felt cool and cohesive at the start. old sharlayan is one of my favourite locations now; i like that despite its rigidity and (to me farcical but w/e tangent) pursuit of rationality/knowledge, there's the quaint island charm and fresh winter sea and overgrown greenery and forest paths. i liked that the game enhanced the usual hubworld tour chore by having g’raha and krile follow you around to give you more personal anecdotes of the place, really gave it a more lived-in feeling, which really added to both them and the location. i also really liked all this charm and familiarity in tandem with the secret hostility of the place bc of the forum, having to sneak around and so on, sharlayan citizens not really recognising you somehow? but being very aware of a warrior of light threat to their way of life, even if i find that non-intervention way of life silly.

i also really liked labryinthos. it's a really creative place. i liked its uncanny false sky and controlled environment, and yet all the people scrambling about inside. and the music felt kind of magical like i had encountered another fairy area or something idk it all felt very whimsical. thavnair i really liked as well but i feel like my immediate impression of the place was kind of poisoned by the stereotypes, like the huge focus on trade and the first impression being undercutting foreign tourists but then i started to really enjoy the part where you run around with matsya and help him sell fish. i liked the mundanity and slow pace of that exercise bc it felt like a much more involved way of learning about thavnair and its current issues through conversations rather than the fetch quest slog, and this is one of the things i like a lot about the beginning of endwalker. the gameplay really improved i think bc they found more creative ways of having you interact with your surroundings, rather than having the usual running between npcs to fetch things for them or other chores. like rather than doing a string of quests and then being rewarded with development of the story, the gameplay simultaneously develops the story. like turning into frogs i thought was fun, testing nidhana’s aether lamp was fun, etc. it felt like they had better ideas about how to progress the in-between parts.

thavnair quickly started to upset me though bc it started to feel like the only relevance the location had was what they could give you for your military cause, that is, the scales. like alchemy is this place’s big highlight and its just the scales the scales the scales and the tower aughhhhhh!!!!!!! the tower!!!!!!!!!! i wish they had focused on something but i guess this is just to be expected with ffxiv...any interaction with a foreign ("foreign" as far as square enix eorzea is concerned) culture really boils down to how they might bolster your military efforts, the azim steppe for eg. so it felt like my concern for an individual (matsya) and the experience firsthand trying to help him with his day to day; the idea that every single person on earth is important and shouldn't be made to suffer, and helping that single person... was like overshadowed by something more focused on a “greater good", that is, the construction of the scales to defeat the towers to save the world ad infinitum. but if you played endwalker then you would know how this idea of only concerning oneself with a "greater good" and this diluting of the importance of an individual's life for the sake of this idealistic whole causes some problems for a certain someone..................so why didn't the game focus more on these themes? probably because at the end of the day it's a video game by square enix and you need a big boss to fight or something or bc this expansion is insanely unfocused i don't know. i feel like this concept about the importance of the small things that can add up to one life and how that one life is beautiful and important crops up with the significance of weeds despite its importance overall. i don't know if i think this is one of the main underlying themes of endwalker just poorly executed so as to not even be there or if i just wish it was one of its main themes. anyways i'm getting distracted, what i mean to say is thavnair gets dehumanised throughout the entire expansion in the most horrific ways possible so i guess this was just the start

moving on... i liked the part in garlemald a lot, which i didn't expect bc i don't expect this game to handle anything regarding imperialism well. i liked that the garlemald you finally experience, after it being one of your main enemies and this very proud nation, was just this dead quiet and ruined place. the quest where you follow that girl is another eg of how the gameplay was a bit more immersive, i think it helped me feel the loneliness and the danger of the place, that i could be a danger to this girl. that i really had to try if i wanted to help her. what i didn't like was alphinaud's and alisaie’s babying attitude towards the garleans? like ok yeah of course we’re gonna have patience and grace for GARLEMALD meanwhile lyse was losing her head at the ala mhigans whenever they disagreed with her. like sure arguing won't get anywhere but it felt like the twins were reckoning with children sometimes, it was so strange. but i did like that the game didn't shy away from making the garleans just unpleasant to be around at best, and an actual danger to you at worst. it's just better to me to make them harder to reconcile with so that there's no frustrating cheap shots at redemption but rather a good, sobering look at a society that's been totally and willingly misled. and i liked that alisaie's and alphinaud's attempts to help those garlean kids ended so badly, even though i'm not usually a fan of such cruel outcomes. it felt like we were seeing a garlemald not necessarily being punished for its actions more than we were seeing a place built on shitty ideals crumble bc of those ideals. i thought jullus was a good char and helped to carry that idea of disillusionment forward. i didn't care so much about sympathising with what he'd lost, but i did find it interesting how they contrast him with the legatus he's working under, who even while the place is in ruins is still more concerned with war than providing for the people relying on him. i don't think the part in garlemald is perfect by any means, like it doesn't do anything too brave, but ig it was a lot more subtle and complex in its storytelling than i expected. and it wasn't meaninglessly cruel. like i'm glad those shock collars put on the twins were only used to gauge jullus' emotional growth or something like him not wanting to activate them rather than them actually being fucking used which would have just made me close the game and not look back.

from here on is where i struggle to lock in for the rest of the story. starting with when zenos kidnaps you in the midst of the fighting at camp broken glass--i don't think i have ever been more immediately mentally locked out of a story. endwalker is darker than usual, trapping people in fleshy towers, two young girls lying dead on the ice, tentacles erupting out of tempered garlean soldiers... and so on. and while i don't personally like things that are overly dark or cruel, it's not that i think they're bad, just that with moments like that it's a lot better imo that a point is being made or they add something to the story, and that it doesn't feel soullessly random or disrespectful. unfortunately this stops being the case for the rest of the expansion..... like something about the weird eldritch feeling of fandaniel pulling you out of your body and putting you in a random soldier's was throwing me off immensely. it felt like i was playing a different game, like so disconcerting i found it distracting, because why would he not just do this to screw you over more often? i didn't understand them having access to such an unrestrained power. at the same time it was also just too wacky to really take seriously despite the apparent gravity of what was happening. zenos inside of my bunny girl's body??? i don't even understand why they did it? to piss you off?? the duty where you play as the imperial soldier was interesting i guess but i couldn’t understand what the meaning behind being made to struggle through that experience was... like didn't we just spend all that time sympathising with the garleans and wrap that section up already? why do i now need to sympathise with/experience firsthand what its like to be a garlean footsoldier? and it annoyed me because these parts felt emotionally rich, like stumbling across those garleans fighting that machine and trying to do your best to help them; dragging yourself across the ground to get to your friends before something bad happens to them, and running towards them before zenos hurts them while in your body--i thought all of that could've been really poignant if not for the actual situation being so silly?? they could have just kept some of those ideas, wol dragging themselves across the ground for eg--the extent to which they're willing to stop harm from reaching their friends (which reminds me of what vrtra says to you about the importance of protecting your friends the first time you meet him. but that was such a one-off moment that goes nowhere... i just wish ew would pick something, anything, to be a poignant message about love on planet earth if they want nihilism to be the main villain, and just stick to it)--and do something that felt a lot more relevant to the established story thus far? just felt totally pointless

what makes this worse is this ridiculous part is iirc right after fandaniel reveals that the entity tempering all of the garleans is varis reanimated as an ancient oh-so-important primal...?? like here's (what i thought was going to be) an actually important point in the story being sidelined for a moment that just goes absolutely nowhere. they certainly made it seem important for a moment, and i think this would've rounded off what was being said about garlemald well; the garleans are so taken in by the farce of their homeland that they think varis is calling them to reclaim their country over the radio, but all along what's actually causing their nation to fall apart is this monstrous version of their late emperor. the irony would've been interesting but they just do nothing with it... (i think desecrating a dead person's corpse by turning it into a monster is really weird btw, even weirder that they do it for no reason. whatever ew is weird.) i thought, considering that this plotline was being established from before endwalker started, that anima was going to take some time. not so. ffxiv would rather have you and zenos enact tropes from a disney channel movie. you merk that guy at the end of the tower of babil and from then on every important plot point the expansion could possibly have moves at fucking mach 567472838758745745

because why all of a sudden are you getting beamed up to the moon? and fighting ZODIARK? i was so confused when asahi i mean fandaniel was punching shit into that fuckgin allagan computer like fandaniel what the fuck are you talking about... i couldn't process anything that happened here. like i'll willingly put aside boring practicalities like why anyone can breathe on the moon, but not so much how fast this all happened and how out of nowhere--is this the reason fandaniel is also amon btw? so that he can use their allagan computers to do this? bc i honestly can’t find any other reason why him being amon is relevant when they revealed that in the tower of zot...like i dont get why that's important

and it doesn't get better after this is the sad thing to me. it doesn't pick itself back up. it is just extremely unfocused right until the endwalker. i was willing to move past getting rid of zodiark so quickly because it's not that i hold standard storytelling rules so dearly in my heart that i need the biggest final boss of the entire series to get a bit more gravitas. it actually ended up being a pretty interesting decision--dispatching the largest villain at the heart of the game being the catalyst for the biggest catastrophe you've ever heard of. like i like that wol gets played. but the entire mare lamentorum section that follows is disrespectful. this expansion suffers from some extreme tonal dissonance, bc how does wol learn that the final days are now upon them and then proceed to spend their time leisurely touring the moon rabbit facility to tell them that the clothes they’ve made for humans to wear isn’t fashionable? why on god's green earth does that matter at this current juncture? this part is one of the worst story-writing sinkholes in the expansion to me, bc why are the discrepancies between what the loporrits know of humanity vs what humanity is actually like something the story chooses to grapple with? we're building an ark to save humanity, and instead of approaching this in a contemplative or emotional way, the point of conflict they choose is logistics? in the expansion about nihilism? at best this conflict was overly realistic..... mostly it's just boring, and at worst the FINAL DAYS are now upon us, so why am i taste-testing carrots? how could the sharlayans, the most focused group of people on the entire planet, have been collaborating with the loporrits for decades and not even have one of the most basic aspects of staying alive squared away? i’m supposed to not only believe that nobody knew after all that time the lopporits think people only eat carrots, but also waste time on fixing this? whyyyyy would they even devote any time to this at all when there are so many more complicated and interesting ideas that they let flounder bc they rush through them at breakneck pace constantly? we just fucking killed zodiark! is this why they stick urianger up there to do all the fixing actually? to save time offscreen? maybe that's why they chose this asinine chunk of the story to start processing his character? though why they would choose to add more to a plate they can barely balance i don't know. i don’t even feel like getting into what they did with urianger bc it will just piss me off. i think only my love for rabbits and how i will never ever not find urianger precious were stopping me from putting a hex on square enix

the following section of the story is easily the worst part to me in the entire game. like i would rather replay stormblood multiple times in a row than ever sit through the final days coming to thavnair ever again. i've already said bringing back the final days would just be bad; a disservice to the time spent on it in shadowbringers. what more is there to say on that front? nothing. and the way ew utilises the final days tells me that the answer is nothing. it just wanted to unleash the violence of that event on the non-white area and spends an insane amount of time doing it. i can think of no other time in this game where there is so much wanton death and destruction for no useful storytelling reason other than to relish in the cheap shock of witnessing violence, violence they are unwilling to inflict on its white areas, because even in garlemald you only see the aftermath of what happens rather than being in the midst of it. it was actually making me feel fatigued. it was just so much of the same thing over and over with no real meaning to any of it. and that's not to say that meaning justifies suffering, but this is a game.....with a story... first and foremost? there needs to be some kind of reason to move the story forward? but nothing new or inspired is being said, just "the final days are really bad"

i’m actually not even sure where to begin so i’ll start with a glaring issue: i hate that people turn into abominations. people “randomly” turning into monsters just feels too unwieldy--how could there be any sense whatsoever that that situation is controllable? even learning that it's caused by feelings of despair is shit because emotions are so vague, how could there be any worthwhile attempt to control your emotions, let alone while watching your loved ones turn into/be eaten by monsters? this entire part felt so wildly out of hand/unpredictable to me that every single moment onward that wasn't more or less focused on maintaining this extremealy volatile situation felt like an unforgivable lack of priorities. it was extremely distracting to have it hovering over everything; everything else felt absolutely inconsequential in comparison. bc what the fuck do you mean people are randomly turning into monsters?? also the stakes were already really high just knowing the final days were coming, so raising them that much higher felt unnecessary to the point of it being hard to believe. and then bc you know there's no way any character important to wol is going to turn into a monster, subjecting commonfolk npcs to this just feels absurdly cruel, and also just made it obvious how much of a cheap scare it all was, bc it can't have any real narrative importance as a result of only happening to random npcs. it was all so blatantly fake-deep. there was no meaning behind them originally being people except for the useless horror of it--the scions still referred to them as monsters to be put down rather than as the people they used to be, just like any other monster in this game. dynamis was more of a retroactive explanation for why people turned into monsters, rather than people turning into monsters bolstering any understanding of dynamis. in shb the sin eaters had some method to them that made them more believable. you fight them throughout the story rather than them just being dropped on you midway through, they helped provide a picture of what kind of world the first was, they were emotional diving boards for characters like alisaie to develop personal goals and so on and so forth... the horror of the sin eaters had a narrative purpose. in endwalker it feels like they didn’t know what to do but wanted to replicate parts of shadowbringers, but didn't know why those parts worked so well bc they're too obsessed with trying to shock their audience. this part just sucked beyond description.

and it just continues to get worse. how can you be the one writing the parametres of a situation and you create something that's literally unmanageable, so that when its only manageable bc you need it to be, it's just so obviously shit writing? my sister described endwalker's writing as really contrived, like when they need something to happen (and that thing is often a really bad idea) they just shove it in there at the cost of keeping their characters in character, or having their story threads--both the interesting ones and the stupid ones--fall totally flat. she says they shortcut the writing. and it's true. for eg, the characters literally don't feel like themselves at times, or get utilised in really moronic ways. like when wol just watches the satrap die, another cheap scare btw he literally gets grabbed an eaten in a way my sis (i was ranting to her a lot about this game ok) described as straight from attack on titan. just gets grabbed and eaten. and this happens to him for such asinine reasons: 1. so that this random asf plot point of vrtra revealing himself as the true satrap can bear fruit. for some fucking reason. i struggle to understand why this is important at all but i guess it's yet another little sideplot that ew just can't seem to resist adding to its already towering plate at the plot buffet, like whatever is going on with urianger and moenbryda's parents/the loporrits, or zenos who now spends most of his time offscreen, or the twins and their father, etc, bc ew likes to waste time 2. so that g'raha (???????????????????????) out of fucking nowhere can have a big boy moment and direct the scions and the people of thavnair in their time of need. what on earth was that scene supposed to be? fanservice? a reminder that g'raha was a leader back in the first? which blows my mind bc mere moments before he had a scene i really enjoyed despite the circumstances, where after a man witnesses his son get turned into a beast and then stepped on by another beast because endwalker is literally jacking itself off to suffering and expects me to be doing the same... g’raha goes up to this man and stops him from panicking and turning into a monster himself. while i don't think any of this should be happening, i thought it was a nice take on his character to have a more sensitive moment in such a harrowing situation. i don't know, have a character demonstrate some emotional skills instead of the usual fighting ones. ofc all of this i thought mere moments before disaster. why was any of this necessary? literally why not just have the satrap, i don't know, take charge of his country when he's needed most, even if he's only been a figurehead the whole time? why let him go out so horribly when he obvious loves his people with his whole heart just so that vrtra can step in without any sort of conflict? i don't understand the focus on vrtra at all

and it actually just keeps getting worse.. the following part where you have to find matsya's friends at palaka's stand was awful. the friends have a newborn baby, so it's obvious that only that baby is surviving bc ew is convinced you don't know how harsh the world is yet. that must be why this part is so long? i'm repeating myself but so many other things that shouldn't be rushed get rushed, only for ew to devote a lot of time to sections like this where nothing changes or develops except for compounding how bad it all feels. i think it was at this point actually, that i realised endwalker actually had some underlying point it was trying to make. it would've been impossible not to realise bc of how heavy-handed it is. i'm not even going to try and paraphrase bc it was so random the way it was introduced i thought i had missed some lines of dialogue or something when it happened:

the suddenness of this felt like when a writer forsakes trying to show what a story is about and instead opts to speak to their audience directly through poorly disguised self-inserts. like i know things are bad right now guys, but the preaching tone of this is jarring. like maybe if you spent some time trying to develop your themes you wouldn't have to be doing this endwalker. i know you need your final villain to literally parrot these ideas for the rest of the game, but if this was supposed to be such a core point of the story why wait all the way until now to just beat me over the head with it? was watching a child be crushed underfoot supposed to make elderly man of palaka using the phrase "at journey's end" seem profound?

anyways then you go and try to save matsya’s friend (the mother bc the father has now died, of course). this leads us to another forced decision that doesn’t make any sense: alisaie and alphinaud fail to kill a single abomination--just the one solitary abomination that was stalking the poor woman--so that we can see it fling her into the water and her corpse dangling on the surface. in what fucking world do alisaie and alphinaud, who have single-handedly dispatched numerous abominations prior to reaching this point, fail to kill just one of them between the two of them in a way reminiscent of a cartoon, one being knocked into the other and them both falling over? how is that fucking possible? and then to somehow make things worse, because that's still possible, despite the fact that wol spends this entire segment in palaka’s stand being told by alisaie and alphinaud not to leave matsya alone because he can’t fend for himself, the twins suggest sending him back on his own to deliver the baby to palaka's stand? why??????????????????????????????

this is what i mean when i say the characters get used in the most bullshit ways for the most bullshit reasons. it's like the game needs as much suffering as possible to happen so that it can make a worthwhile point on this later on (spoiler: it doesn't) so it pulls shit like this. why would the twins, who we just watched try to spoonfeed the garleans cereleum straight from the tank, leave matsya on his own if not solely bc the story needs the doomerism of the Resolute Citizen to ring true? and this is also what i mean when i say the scions try to manage a disaster that is just not manageable, bc they for some reason believe that bc they've taken care of the abominations they saw in the area, that means the area is safe enough for matsya to go back on his own? like are we just suddenly pretending the nature of these creatures doesn't imply that anyone can turn into one at any moment? everyone is ALWAYS in danger? we're just going to mill around while matsya weathers the most potent fear of his life running back to the village on his own, with the baby of his friends who just died moments before, while we all know that extremely negative emotions cause people to turn into the monsters? why are we doing this after we just went to so much trouble keeping people safe (or failing to, really)? forget turning into monsters for a sec, why are we even letting him experience such painful emotions at all? anyways the fucking baby starts turning into a monster because this is endwalker.. but i will say that matsya running and chanting that little piece up there about how life is suffering to try and convince me it's true calm himself down was one of the cutscenes i liked the most from this entire part, maybe endwalker in general. it was another one of those emotionally poignant and well-executed moments that just suffers from how much i wish it was happening under totally different circumstances. i don't even remember why one of us doesn’t go with him, like i don't remember what we were busy doing bc it was that unimportant--no wait, i remember! we were waiting for matsya to reach the total end of his rope so that when all things seem lost, when those monsters obviously show up on his path back to the village out of nowhere like they've been doing the past painstaking quest after quest of this entire part, estinien and vrtra can get this really cool moment of jumping into save him! it all makes so much sense now. i've never seen estinien do anything really cool before like diving down from the sky with his lance, so i understand how this was a really important moment that the game needed to make happen. also how vrtra really needs to prove to the people he can be a good satrap bc ahewann just died and all. yeah, i totally get it. perfect. just great.

what is the message behind despair turning you into a monster? we're about to get into it with meteion and try to convince her she's wrong--come out championing the idea that suffering is just one of the many aspects of life we need to accept, and yet we're going to preface that with a part where to feel despair is bad? you get punished if you do it? honestly?

whatever. elpis...we go here because we need to learn about the elpis flower. i'm thinking we're definitely just going to ask the watcher, right? like the guy on the moon who told us the name of the flower in the first place? and time is of the fucking essence here, so surely we just go back to the watcher and ask him what we need to know and come back? wrong. we're going back to the first. to talk to elidibus. i thought we killed elidibus? does nobody truly die in this game except for my favourite character? so wol gets sent back to the first, and there's this upbeat tonally dissonant little section where you catch up with some old friends like beq lugg and those kids you helped back in shb bc now is just the perfect time for pleasantries and remembering how good shadowbringers was. ew trying to relive shadowbringers was already something i was feeling out in thavnair fighting leagues of "terminus" creatures and not "forgiven" ones, and watching the carefully constructed horror and gravity of the final days get reduced to an average apocalyptic shitshow. so i can't say i appreciated this part. also people are indiscriminately turning into monsters. i can't help but have that hang over everything constantly until the end of the expansion.

anyways we go to the crystal tower and drag out elidibus even though i personally prefer when characters have their final moments and are properly laid to rest. like i hate to not only beat a dead horse but also reanimate said horse and then drag its corpse around. well fuck what i want. so elidibus willingly does this favour for us i guess and sends us to the past somehow with some useless warnings about how we won't be able to interact with our surroundings or change the past. i say useless because the former is just untrue, i'm not sure why he bothered to say it. the moment we step foot on elpis you get a nice gift of aether from emet-selch that renders you tangible and now you can proceed to live love laugh with him and hythlodaeus on elpis even though people are indiscriminately dying back home. and the latter warning, well. i don't know, that just seemed obvious. i'm kind of just a hater.

time to be positive again for a short moment, if you can believe it? emet-selch is one of my favourite characters. i enjoyed this new light cast on him...for a short while. i like his relationship with hythlodaeus and i really like hythlodaeus; i’m really fond of the faceless simulacrum version of him you meet in shb and i'm really fond of him now. learning about the unsundered world in person rather than through hearsay was interesting, and although i can't lie and say i don't think this all kind of felt like a huge tangent despite the important aspects of the plot that come out of it, i still like it. i guess it feels this way because a lot of big plot points have already been established, like the ark on the moon and the sharlayans' involvement and the final days, so this was all kind of too big to me to be coming this late into the story. it doesn't feel all that relevant to prior parts of the expansion either except for hermes, who has been poorly developed throughout, so okay, i get it. it's time to give one of the main villains some depth (i want you to guess if this is successful or not). hermes has a lot of qualities i really like. has a child, secretly nurturing a potent sadness, thinks differently from the world around him because at his core he’s too deeply empathetic…. even though i was still largely aware of the insanity happening back at home which i'm going to keep repeating, i still enjoyed elpis At The Start. the exposition of this part was easily better than its resolution. it was taking the time to develop hermes’ character so that you could see if the game was written well anyhow how he became the fandaniel of the present. i really liked his relationship with meteion too. it's getting hard to talk about what i like without simultaneously talking about what i don't like so i'm going back to criticising now, positivity over, sorry....

personally, i’d have been totally fine without any more development to emet-selch’s character. i think it was nice to see a fresh perspective on him and all, really rounds out who he is from what you know and what he talks about in shadowbringers. and i actually like a lot of the things he said throughout, not all of it, but a good amount of it was fun and sorely needed whenever hermes was being annoying, which was often. but there was a lot of times wehere i thought, i don't really need to be hanging out with emet-selch right now? i don't need my wol and emet-selch to be friends? considering who he is....? .............and what's going on back home? how many more moments showing how endearingly prickly he is do i need to see? like sure, i can enjoy this emet-selch fest in isolation of what's going on because me love emet-selch like it's not like i think these moments are bad or anything but i don't know, don't we have other things to be doing? i'm not diametrically opposed to fanservice, i like when things are kept fresh and lighthearted. but. well you know by now. about the people turning into monsters. i guess i just both enjoyed this part and wished it happened under different circumstances or in a different way or something, or maybe not at all, bc as things progress his character just gets more and more diluted.

i actually really liked meteion. i will say i’m really tired of non-human, overly childish girl children creature characters who become villains, because i think there's this concept where…idk how to say it? i wish i could find something that talks about this more... it's like the dehumanisation involved when non-binary characters or non-white characters are often not human (not that these things are done in the same way). but i feel like women or females ig are often the ones chosen to be non-human in this particular way...? like, when emotional labour is involved. or when it needs to be some taboo evil entity. it's like a guy and his part-animal female second lead or part-alien love interest or female-voiced ai system or android or abandoned girl he finds/rescues. it's kind of like the born sexy yesterday trope but without the blatant sexuality (i don't want to go on a tangent). quite often this weird quirky alien and playful girl child is a harbinger of destruction. take drakengard, for example, or fire emblem engage, or cc from code geass iirc, or veronica from fire emblem heroes.. there's apparently something about childishness and girlishness and innocence and corrupting that innocence or being fooled by that innocence that seems to incite fear of the unknown enough in people for villainous children to be a trope in general regardless of gender, but it was just something i was thinking about in regards to meteion's character, especially when she becomes evil. and this blurry line between her as a "being" with a consciousness and free well as GIVEN to her by hermes, and her as a "tool" to be used by him as well, doesn't really get addressed in any meaningful way at all. like sure, she doesn't need to eat but she can still enjoy candy apples and flowers, and can empathise bc often of her own volition she wants to cheer hermes up, but actually her ability to empathise is programmed; so let's send send her, this highly empathetic being (with consciousness and free will and tastes and personality) into the cold expanse of space for as long as it takes for hermes to find his answer, that's totally fine. why did he make it a girl? why couldn't they address the fact that the loneliest bastard in this entire game made himself a child? like i'm not saying there needs to be clear-cut definitions on what meteion is or why she or hermes take certain actions, but it feels like a lot of things regarding their characters are really complex and implied to be really deep, and then just don't go anywhere or are completely ignored or unexplained? and because these things are so present yet passed over, it leaves me genuinely confused about most of what happens on elpis and how these two specifically reach any of the conclusions they do once things start going south

like i thought what she and hermes were going to add to the story was going to be a lot more interesting and complex than what it turned out to be.....a banal mantra on the "mercy" of nihilism. i can barely reconcile what bothers hermes in the first place with what meteion concludes from her sisters' expeditions, like they almost feel irrelevant to each other. he's upset over man's lording over who deserves to live and the callousness of making and unmaking life. he feels sadder about the coming death of his friend than the average ancient, and doesn't want to accept meaningless platitudes about dying for the good of the star. ok, i agree with that. so he wants to know what meaning there is to life, if it can be so easily judged and discarded...? okay. so his answer is to....secretly create creatures without any of the rigourous testing they usually go through to prevent them from being dangerous, and then send them on a potentially dangerous and traumatising mission to answer his vague philosophical questions? like.......? so when she reports back traumatised and tells him every single society out there is suffering (which i just find so unbelievable btw), then the answer to his question must be that suffering is the meaning of life--which she figures bc she's an entelechy so i imagine she's highly susceptible to her emotional surroundings, and because his pseudo-intellectual question is so poorly framed (something only emet-selch points out in a throwaway line btw). and this alone spurs him on to allowing meteion to unmake their entire society in the most violent way conceivable? you literally tell him that the final days are coming as a result of his actions, but he's fine with it because he'd rather that than enact some policy changes at his workplace, or talking to someone? everyone seemed to listen and respect his decision when he suggested helping that creature learn to fly instead of just killing it, i'm sure he could've talked it out? isn't he in charge of the place? this entire section was so hard for me to follow bc i kept thinking something more complex was making everyone behave the way they were, when it was actually just totally senseless.

as an aside, i hate how they chose to make the way meteion reports information so cooly technological btw, it felt not only anachronistic but corny. i’m sure there's a better way to have her impartially report things without making her sound like she's reporting weather conditions on some distant planet in star trek. anyways, when you frantically search for meteion after she receives her transmission was another part that took up a lot of time for no reason. it just made everything feel so dire when i could barely understand why any of what was going on was such a big deal. and i’ll never be one to say that any bureau of anything should “detain” anyone, but why hermes was so frantic to prevent meteion from being brought to the convocation i just don't know. like he goes on the run with her so that he can hear the end of her report? is that really it? i just find it hypocritical that he doesn't want her to be sent to the convocation where they'll limit her free will or fucking whatever but he's totally fine with ordering the meteia into space? why am i being made to guess what the convocation is going to do to meteion when hermes is making it seem like such a big deal?? what fucking sense does that make? what on earth was he afraid of? their judgment? the convocation members deciding whether meteion is good for the star or not? could they not have just reasoned this out? aren’t they a "highly advanced" and "reasonable" society? like okay he sees through the veil of his utopian home but i just did not get a sense of how much it was bothering him at all, like i cannot stress enough how him going turbo feels like an insane jump from what his problems seemingly were. why did nobody stop to think this through or communicate to each other? is it because of the bullshit time paradox this game has trapped us in so that nothing we do will amount to anything anyways so we might as well make the most confused villain of all time be responsible for the biggest event in this game's history?

but it annoys me because meteion and hermes felt like such a waste of potential, maybe the biggest waste to me in the entire expansion. i was really intrigued by their wholesome relationship at the start, knowing that hermes was a main villain. and that he can't find connection or meaning in an otherwise "perfect" society, so he has to create it for himself and try to find it elsewhere, as far as the reaches of outer space... he wants to make what's hurting him stop hurting him. i like that he approaches such human desires with meteion despite her non-humanness, and that she can return those feelings to him. he wants to signify meteion’s return with a flower because they both like flowers… like those things we can’t put into words but share with others, moments, emotions, connections……..but nope. nihilism beam. it feels like the worst sort of retroactive writing ever. they didn't even think too hard about dynamis--this hugely important thing, except nobody has ever heard of it, aside from nidhana back at home? while members of the highest office in the most advanced society earth has ever had are left squinting.

and the entire section after you fight hermes just pissed me off. we kicked his ass so that we could stop him from inciting meteion any further, and yet we just let him hear her out anyways? he's yelling at you during the entire dungeon that he just wants the time to hear her out, we're chasing after him so that we can stop him from doing that, and then we just let him hear her out anyways? and then even when we do that she doesn’t even say anything different? she just goes right back to reporting on different worlds and how self-destructive they are and That's All She Really Proceeds To Say For The Rest Of The Expansion But Fucking Who Cares Anymore. so we let her repeat herself. this sends her into a spiral, because she's an entelechy who just got hit by a high frequency nihilism beam, but subjecting her to all that despair is only ever addressed by one of the scions in a throwaway line near the very end of the story in ultima thule... and then hermes...captures venat, emet-selch and hythlodaeus??? he captures two of the strongest characters in the game? did we not just kick hermes’ ass??? what is going on?

emet-selch: that's bullshit, and you know it's bullshit

hermes: *says more bullshit*

i really think hermes might be one of the worst villains in the game. it's a shame bc i think he's such an interesting character. i'm not sure why he started behaving like such an incel when he was right to be troubled by the things he was? why did they even bother have wol relate to him over experiencing sadness from loss if that just went totally nowhere? why does he behave so hypocritically? being saddened by loss leads to him setting the stage for the final days? him hating man's jurisdiction over other lives leads to him wiping emet-selch's and hythlodaeus' memories, and subjecting the entire planet to the worst test ever? he's not even morally grey or anything! just annoying! i saw someone say that it's even worse that he wants the ancients to prove that their life is meaningful to them, bc it's true, they do??? like isn't that what venat interrupts them from doing in the answers cutscene, calling back for that lost life? isn't that what you learn in shadowbringers? didn't an entire half of their population sacrifice themselves so that the other half could live? what the fuck else did they need to prove?

this part was pissing me off even more because i never even wanted hythlodaeus or emet-selch to learn about where wol came from or about the final days coming in the first place. i thought that was an awful writing decision. telling them just felt weirdly cruel to me considering elidibus explicitly told you there was nothing you could do to change it. maybe this is just my opinion, but why would anybody want to know that their planet is going to go up in flames and there is nothing they can do to stop it? telling venat i was like sure, she becomes hydaeyln so this makes a little more sense to me, but the other two…….? this is around when i was getting tired of the emet-selch cameo, because i don't really care to know what he thinks of his future self? i couldn't really understand what the point of any of that was? so it annoyed me even further that it amounts to nothing anyways when they get their minds conveniently erased. it felt like a fucking joke. why did we revive these characters, develop them, and then just treat them like tools...? like now that we're done using their powers and creation magicks--i thought, naively--we just toss them aside? like ohhhhh noooooo now they won't remember all the fun we had on elpis this is so sad......but at least before he got his memories wiped emet-selch, even though he definitely totally doesn't believe a fucking word i say, renews his shb vows to wol and leaves the future in my hands again? yeah, i totally wanted to hear him say that a second time. forget how deeply affecting and important a moment that was at the end of shadowbringers. i really needed to see him do that one more time in this shittier, more contrived context. that's really what i needed from endwalker. also i've been on reddit reading what people have to say about endwalker out of curiosity (ppl make a lot of good points that i haven't) and someone pointed out that moments before all this happens venat literally pulls memories from the aether around you so that we can watch hermes send the meteia to space. what on earth is stopping anyone from doing that for hermes, hythlodaeus, and emet-selch? but whatever, i already know the writing doesn't care how silly it is anymore. two of the strongest ancients get bound by a weakened hermes, only break out after the story conveniently needed meteion to start flying into space, and then venats lets her escape somehow even though doing so essentially dooms their entire planet. ok

so we’re back home and we have to go immediately help the thavnarians who are being punished for not being white again. the sharlayans were going to bring them to the teleporter to the moon in garlemald to start getting them on the moon, but oops, the final days have come to garlemald, so now we can't use the teleporter, so if you're thavnarian your life sucks. who saw that coming? absolute waste of time. so then we have to get rid of more beasts because we need to waste even more time doing something we already spent an agonising amount of time doing in thavnair. and then immediately after this we need to......wrap up yet another asinine plot thread endwalker is so obssesed with adding to it's already convoluted story: fourchenault excommunicating his children...? it seemed really important when he did this in post-shb, but materially nothing for alphinaud or alisaie really changed, everyone still gets into sharlayan no problem. ultimately i just didn’t really know why they chose to pursue this mini-plot at all because how many more pushes does alphinaud (i'm saying alphinaud bc he does not share that spotlight with alisaie lmfao) need to become resolute in his goals? he already does this throughout the series? they ruined arenvald's legs in post-shb so that alphinaud could become more resolute in his goals, why keep dedicating time to this? just keep juggling endwalker, just keep juggling. anyways we’re in garlemald, we calm the final days for now, zenos shows up out of nowhere to remind us he’s still in the game. and to be fair to him that was one of the most interesting cutscenes he’s had the whole time, and, get this--they have him randomly answer hermes' question? about the meaning of life? while talking to jullus? like jullus gets mad at him for not giving a fuck about causing what happened to garlemald, and zenos responds by saying: "ask any creature of this star and those above for answers, and they will tell you what suits their fancy. and they would be right to do so. what meaning there is to be found in the petty vicissitudes of your existence must be gleaned by you and you alone." like......? he just provides the answer right there in a conversation with jullus? did this expansion have any interest at all in putting any of its different parts in conversation with each other, or are we supposed to just try and build a good story like a puzzle, where the pieces, albeit interesting, don't actually fit together? weren't zenos and fandaniel working together at the beginning of the expansion? he should have just posed this question to zenos because the answer was apparently right fucking there, with the flattest character in the entire game, this whole time? whatever, i still liked this scene. alisaie putting a curse on zenos was very cool of her. so we're back in garlemald and....….tonal dissonance! puddingway shows up. cute scene where g’raha’s ears perk up also bc he's the one who hears the loporrits coming. just in case you forgot about g’raha, which is an oxymoron. and then maybe the second worst segment of endwalker...........we go back to labryinthos.

now i love labryinthos. i thought it was interesting we only collected one aetheryte the first time we were there, and i was hoping the place would be as intriguing to me as it first was when we got back. admittedly learning that the sharlayans' secrecy only amounted to contributing to the moon project was kind of a let down, but i thought maybe there was still more to it. i mean, an ark to the moon? the abandonment of one's home planet? it's not like the ideas aren't there. let's go back to elpis for a second. one of the moments that really stood out to me during that part was a throwaway line that emet-selch says to wol after hermes starts freaking it:

he's right. i don't think hermes found society so truly beyond help that he couldn't turn to any one of his peers for help before devising such a reckless plan. but i'm not trying to rehash my issues with hermes, more that i think an interesting parallel could have been made, possibly, with the ark flying to the moon as currenlty the most viable solution to the final days problem? challenging this notion of just throwing it all away as a last resort? especially because it's so obvious to me that by the end of this expansion nobody is actually going into space to start a new life out there; trying to sort out living accomodations and acquaint the lopporits properly with earth is just a waste of time. so why not pose the underlying question of the entire expansion, about what makes life meaningful, to the last bastion of hope in the entire universe--the sole planet amongst millions of dead stars that still believes in itself? would it not just be free real estate to try and connect this story's multiple parts together by ...connecting this story's multiple parts together? the scions say repeatedly how much they'd prefer to protect their planet rather than leave it, and everyone on earth vouches for you because they don't want to leave, either. could they not have made a connection in some way between that ark and the meteia's voyage to outer space? could the writing not have turned around and asked the actual inhabtants of the planet of that we've helped and saved and laughed with and broken bread with or whatever the fuck what they think about the meaning of life, now that they have to leave that life behind? i guess fucking not??? i guess endwalker would rather only highlight civilians when they're being turned into abominations to drive home the same points about life = suffering constantly, and not the points about how despite the suffering life needs to be lived? because they don't actually seem to care about challenging meteion's nihilism when that can just be lazily solved by beating her up at the end. hermes could have been learning to love the world he was on, the smaller things that make it beautiful. because that's what he does, he creates this creature that is built to understand him, and it does and it shares these small joys with him. but nope, time to waste time doing fetch quests in labryinthos. find every single researcher who is obviously losing their mind with stress in labryinthos and give them their government-assigned lopporit while this hectic music with only one minute's worth of loop value plays in the background. go and deliver these papers with alisaie and alphinaud bc if you do a former friend of their father’s will tell them that their father actually loves them duh that’s why he disrespects them publicly every chance he gets. go follow one of the lopporits around while they sample fruits so that they can learn to make food other than carrots. go and watch urianger reconcile with moenbryda's parents even though she died all the way back in a realm reborn. fuck you. also everyone is still just a bad day away from turning into an abomination. just in case you forgot.

that shit where asahi shows up to take fandaniel away for the final time might be top three most bizarre scenes in all of final fantasy fourteen btw. i almost didn't want to mention it, but i need it on record how silly i thought that was. we are in the final stages of this expansion and it still can't stop wasting time. did we see ardbert's thoughts on elidibus using his body? no. but asahi was who they chose to get upset about this? ok.

i liked the trial against mother. you might have noticed i've had very little to say on venat this whole time. that might just have to be its own post or something if nobody is sick of me by now. but anything to do with working together with your friends to overcome a trial is good.

that's what i liked about ultima thule. at the same time, this is where the game finally just loses me forever. i think, somehow, even despite all the things i didn't like, the way the story is told i still enjoyed, even if what it was saying was often. bad. there's still a lot of moments i really liked despite it all. but after ultima thule i was just done. we get on the ark. great. i like that things don't go as planned because meteion intercepts our ship. but now meteion is finally here, which means it's finally time for me to reckon with the pseudo-intellectual nihilism she's been touting every chance she gets. it's hard for me to suspend my disbelief that every single society out in space wanted oblivion, but if that's what endwalker wants me to believe for the sake of its story making sense (oxymoron) then fine. ok. but that's all that's ever said. "life is suffering" "life is suffering" "the final days are really bad"

just the same pseudo-intellectual browbeating about how living just leads to constant strife and the most beautiful thing to do is to just end it all for everyone ever again. like sure, empath hears death cry repeatedly--i can see how meteion could change so permanently. i think that's fine. i doubt that's why she's so repetitive. i genuinely just 't think there's nothing anyone really had to say on this. and the thing is, we've heard this argument before? the idea that humanity is imperfect so they don't deserve to live? it will all amount to nothing, so why let it continue to exist? these are major points of conflict from shadowbringers because it's what emet-selch was always saying. the difference is that emet-selch is just an easily more interesting and fleshed out character whose arguments are largely more complicated, even if they're just as morally wrong. like it's extremely easy for me to answer whatever meteion is saying with a resounding no. and while i feel that emet-selch can also be easily disagreed with on what he believes, bc i do disagree--he at least introduces ideas that complicate the story and his own character. he challenges the scions on their hatred of primals--their god is a primal. he offers visions of a world where nobody has to struggle ever again, where strife doesn't exist, and so on and so forth. while that doesn’t justify his actions, nor do i think they should, i think he at least gives the characters something to think about. he throws their own actions back at them. why would the scions not want a world without suffering? when emet-selch asks alphinaud if he believes half of the sundered world would give up half of their number to save the other half, alphinaud is unable to answer because he knows that the answer is no. i don't think humanity should be tested, let alone with such an insane standard, but i at least think that the questions being asked in shadowbringers were interesting. there's a point to them. with meteion, all she basically says to the scions is that she’s going to fucking kill everyone they know and love in the worst way possible. nothing to chew on that wouldn't better be solved by just getting rid of the threat. i don't know why they even bother arguing with her ever. she doesn't even feel like a character to me in that last section of the game. and they keep trying to have her seem all scary by having her get really close to the screen or move around without warning which is all very silly to me. i at least did like how much of a threat she was, and the way thancred vanished, and then everyone finds themselves in that dark area in front of the ship wondering where he is while the ultima thule music plays for the first time, distantly and quietly. i actually really liked that part. i thought it was really moving. i wish it had stayed that way.

the first area of ultima thule was the best part imo. i liked the immense darkness and quiet and lack of wind and the foul air and yet, green grass. i liked the strange horror of being the only person at first who could really see the dragons, and then learning that estinien can see them too. i liked how that was the segue for his sacrifice. having those "final" moments with a specific scion each time until that climactic moment that pushes the group forward i really liked. i liked that thancred was no longer with them but still with them, a presence over them keeping them safe from harm. i found that very touching. but i was actually really confused while going through ultima thule becuase of how they visually shows what happens, like while the swirling vortex each scion would stand in was cool, and then standing to face off against that dark bird, i think what those things actually represented i just did not really understand what was actually being done or going on. i think that might be because dynamis suffers a bit from being just too nebulous or underdeveloped. i don't mind how abstract of a concept it is, i mean aether is used to do all sorts of never-explained things all the time.. it's more like... if ultima thule is going to be a place ruled by emotions, with laws different from what the scions are used to, it's hard for me to see how they were able to really draw any conclusions about where they were or what to do. it actually kind of reminded me of the logic of jojo's bizarre adventure where an attack only overrules another attack not becuase of some fundamental power scale the reader understands, but bc of what araki feels like contriving to get the story moving the way he wants. and that's fine because it's jojo. but this is ffxiv, so in my mind ultima thule should have either remained abstract and they don't try to explain the rules of the place so much, or they should’ve just made what was going on less abstract if they were going to try to logic the place out

what i mean is: the scene where estinien argues with that dragon so that he can overcome its despair is really cool. i liked that he turned into a cool wind. i liked that your friends sacrificed themselves for the sake of their home, that the power of their hopes for wol to overcome this final challenge was the only way they could move forward in such a stagnant place, as well as the only way they could be protected by meteion's violence. but after estinien does it--and he admits that he doesn't know how, just that it was the right thing to do--it feels like the writing immediately tries to specify what's going on so that there's some easy way forward the scions just have to follow the rulebook for, so that they can get to meteion. when urianger takes wol and g'raha aside i was actually just so lost. i don't know what it was i wasn't getting. i still don't. like to kind of say that there’s always one "individual" in these fake worlds who is despairing more than the others that can be located if they just identify a certain set of behaviours... this kind of just waters down what the scions are doing and the magic of being at the universe's end or w/e to me. we use language because of our inability otherwise to really express the depth of emotions and sensations that exist in this world, not the other way around--trying to box in something so complex through things like processes and so on...so to try and narrow down this part kind of rung a bit hollow to me. it was somehow both overexplained and underexplained at the same time. this might seem kind of nitpicky but i guess it was just hard for me to enjoy ultima thule when i was genuinely confused almost the whole way throughout. and bc the ea and the omicrons were so goddamn annoying. trying to do this slapdash learning about their societies at the very end of the game was just like...? okay? why bother, all they really care about is dying anyways. and then that final dungeon, ew's final attempt at replicating the wins of shadowbringers (the amaurot dungeon) with meteion's voice over. like who cares now meteion, you are somehow still just repeating yourself. endwalker is almost at it's end girl, i get it. everyone wants to die.

where i actually started to get annoyed though was where y'shtola says in no uncertain terms not to use the retcon crystal hydaelyn gave you to call their spirits back. y'shtola, you shouldn't have bothered, because you know wol is going to do absolutely that. why even have her say it? there is no sense of risk whatsoever because that crystal is involved. i still liked the sacrificing, but maybe they should have framed it in a way where it wasn't obvious that the scions were going to be totally fine. ew literally didn't seem ballsy enough to kill all of the scions, and i don't think it should've either. but then it just makes this all very wishy-washy. and even worse was when wol used it to summon HYTHLODAEUS AND EMET-SELCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY!!!!!!!! WHYYYYYYYYYYYY?????????????? i was so annoyed. i'm still annoyed. back when their memories got wiped hythlodaeus was like oh yeah by the way emet did you know that in the aetherial sea you can get your memories back haha? and i was like okay cool so when they die they can get their memories back, whatever, still don't think me and emet-selch should've been live love laughing on elpis. i didn’t actually think this game would be so juvenile as to let you get to meet them once more with their memories fully intact. i don't know why ew has to dot every i and cross every t and sign off every single bit of intrigue with the biggest fucking full stop The End ever where emet-selch is concerned, holy fuck man. i hated this decision so much. your friends SACRIFICE THEMSELVES so that WOL can face meteion. they believe that at the very end of everything, hydaelyn believes that at the very end of everything, WOL is the one who can defeat meteion. they all put so much faith in you. and the first thing you do is summon emet-selch and hythlodaeus because what? because you just can't fucking help yourself? just shit all over the importance of carrying your friends’ beliefs in you. christ i hated that. i loved seeing the elpis flowers grow all over that fake sun. why couldn't that have been wol who grew them, wol's turn to use dynamis to overcome meteion's despair, flowers that represent the hopes every single person on earth has placed in them to see their star to safety? why? emet-selch there for what? to set in stone his position as the Tsundere once and for all? is that it? to have him renew his vows to wol for the millionth time just in case you forgot that he wants you to take up the mantle of their future? i wish they would go back to never making emet-selch palatable and less hostile to the warrior of light, it feels like such a disservice to the character he was in shadowbringers and to just their characters in general like i do not want to be canon friends with emet-selch! it's not necessary! it's fucking emet-selch! what's even worse is that for some reason while the flowers are growing, emet-selch is just point blank explaining what's going on. he literally says something like, "these flowers are the hopes of everyone meteion you're washed. by the way, if you didn't catch that, wol. you can summon your friends back now." immersion gone. any sense of playing a game that actually gives a fuck gone. so we call our friends back, only to send them away again with the teleporter because meteion is just too strong for us. to be fair i liked that decision, but why fake me out a second time having me think yes, finally wol is going to face meteion ON HER OWN. and then have ZENOS show up? i actually just stopped playing and went to bed. genuinelly just fuck me. who fucking cares anymore.

and then after you finally get meteion to stop being emo and she offers to reconcile with you by sending you safely back to your friends it's like, actually i can't even accept this meteoin. because i have to go fight zenos now. and then it's crazy to me that after you kick zenos' ass for like the millionth time, we're literally on the edge of the world so i'm finally expecting him to say something worth listening to, he opens his mouth and says "you know, wol, this whole time... i've been so bored... and the only thing that gives me joy is fighting you...” like. stuck record. the writers dragged him all the way out here to be a stuck fucking record

i like endwalker btw. kind of. like i know nobody who reads this is going to believe me but i really do. if it had just, well. i don't even know. there's too much wrong with it. it wastes too much time and just doesn't seem to be able to let go. how is it possible that an expansion can make me tired of callbacks to haurchefant being important to wol? i've never felt that before. like how many more flashbacks to his grave does one need to have to know that when wol is fighting for their world they're fighting for their friends too. but this game just cannot let things go. it NEEDS to make that joke about alphinaud gathering firewood four more times. it makes anything i appreciated the second or maybe even the third time just upset me. they can't let anything go, they have to wave it in front of me like it's a dog treat and i'm a dog. a fucking dog with blonde hair and blue eyes

#i think the insane thing is this post is already immensely long and there's still so much #i had problems with #that i just had to leave out #ffxiv spoilers #endwalker spoilers #now that i've finally gotten most of this off my chest i can go back to playing post-ew now #great #just great

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isa-ghost · 6 months ago

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honestly its hard to come up with head cannon requests that already haven't been done but I've been thinking

so just to clarify, c!Phil wont be a separate person from hc/p!phil in the au now that its confirmed that they are both the same person lore-wise?

also in more detail, what are o and q Phil's goals/motivations for what they want to do next at this point in their lives and how will meeting each other affect those goals? like ik at this point Crowley is searching for his parents, but q!Phil has just been emotionally devastated by chay and llulah leaving his life and is presumably trying to find purpose in his life again? ig tldr; I'd love to hear what you think is going on in their brains goal/plan-wise when they meet each other and how it influences the plot?

Yes! I updated the original post so now it's JUST hc!Phil (who is also smpe, c, and q) and o!Phil) :] 2 Phils will be way easier to handle and write a formal fic for if or when I get a good plot idea. I have the foundation but not the Events, yknow?

The plot is kinda sorta the answer to your question.

You're absolutely right, Crowley is still determined to track down his parents, oSneeg, or SOME kind of closure about everything, all while narrowly scraping by bc he's currently the world's most cringefail excuse of an adult (mf grew up so spoonfed he doesn't even know how to do basic chores like laundry or cooking or dishes).

And qPhil (any abbreviation works for specifying him btw, or just say Phil bc we can clarify ccPhil easily) is indeed at a loss rn for what to do with himself. The isolation in Hardcore hurts after spending over a year with consistent company, but his 2 purposes in life are [ 1 ] his historian & architect work in HC and [ 2 ] (apparently) being a caretaker. But he has no motivation to go back to the former atm, and has no one to do the latter for,,,,, until he meets Crowley. ;) See where this is going?

Crowley needs someone to help him learn how to be a capable adult. And maybe some extra hands with tracking down his family and/or friend.

Phil needs a long-term distraction and company because his normal occupations are too daunting and the thought of being alone makes him physically sick.

Crowley is company in need of a mentor, a caretaker of sorts.

Phil is a goldmine of life experience and wisdom.

They're exactly what the other needs right now. But their jadedness and trauma are gonna CLASH at first.

Where are their heads at right now, you ask?

Crowley is not a people person (outside of oSneeg, "he's special ok >:(" ) and is gonna HATE swallowing his pride to ask for help. Also this old man is fucking annoying. And keeps calling him a tory. What the fuck is a tory. God, he's a nuisance.

Phil has, for the umpteenth time in his long long life, lost those closest to him with no "what comes next" in mind and not enough preparation for the goodbye that hit him. He's back to keeping people at arm's length to protect himself and his heart, he's back to hating the world and immortality, and back to being an aimless hermit loner. Which normally doesn't bother him but this time the people he spent time with wanted him for him, weren't using him as a weapon for their agenda or displacing their anger on him. They loved him and enjoyed his presence and he felt such and he hasn't in a long long LONG time, if ever. He had good kids who loved and admired him properly. He had everything he's, in recent history, lacked. And it was ripped away from him one way or another. He's bitter.

And the LAST thing he needs is this punk ass tory ass bratty ass incapable ass child of an avian trying his already worn-out patience and stressing his Constant Survival Mode ass out. Except he's not the last thing. He's THE thing.

And as soon as that clicks, that's it. Fine, fuck it. Might as well help this shithead find his way in the world. What else is he doing? No one else is gonna help this asshole when he treats people like THAT. Pog through the pain and take on the task. What's do I have to lose right now? 🙃 My wings? My sanity? Wouldn't be the first time!

And honestly? Getting on Crowley's nerves is kind of a nice outlet for things ngl. These two need to be a little bitchy, as a treat. It'll fix them. And maybe bond them.

#Birds of a Feather AU #qsmp #qsmp philza #philza #q!philza #osmp #osmp philza #o!philza

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narwhalandchill · 7 months ago

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Honestly. thinking back on it (am mega late yes) even though i like. ultimately enjoyed going thru fontaine AQ as an experience in terms of its emotional core and payoff with characters like navia neuvillette n furina having very strong writing and characterization i do think the overall AQ lore and worldbuilding is probably the messiest in the entire game and feels like all of its opportunities and potential was underutilized the most and thats just. Unfortunate

like yes its inazuma thats the most infamous for how shitty and rushed its execution was (and rightly so) and yes it Also had its share of issues with nothingburgers like the whole statue thing going nowhere or how shoddily constructed the entire it-was-all-the-fatui deal was

but i still think it has a stronger ground to stand on like. all aspects of the story if just slightly differently written and centered around better in-lore reasoning and logic. Are internally consistent with the world ya know. and would have produced a good story. like it could be fixed easily. no need for me to go Full Rewrite here but like just to make a point:

a shut-in deity paranoid and trauma-stricken is ignorant to her peoples wishes and enacts an eternal rule that stifles their hopes and dreams. discontentment in the nation (NOT just the vision holders it shouldve been ALL inazumans divided on this i s2g) has been on the rise but only outside forces stoking the flames push it into overdrive as they seek to exploit the unrest to get the gnosis. couldve brought the whole "peoples faith powers the archon" if they wanted to pop off bc then the fatui by sparking the civil war are Directly weakening eis power like Thats solid! less ei was innocent and only the fatui led to the bad stuff more. ei is flawed makes shit choices and leaves an opening for their operations etc etc etc.

foreshadow signoras past and distrust of the gods in like a tense encounter or two early on (ritou maybe?) where she hints at a deeper reason behind her actions. no need to trauma dump just have her like idk mock us for seeking the archons for "help" in finding our sibling slash truth of the world and coincidentally use wording that directly alludes to what we already heard from dainsleif earlier abt the cataclysm and archons sus so its like an Oh Shit. she can namedrop or allude to venti to imply its personal or sth to further recontextualize her actions in mondstadt as well.

and so on. like then fixing the rebellion (ppl join for other reasons than just the VHD so its a more common cause etc maybe some ppl dont care abt the decrees as much but the drafting of civilians into the ever expanding war effort goes too far) and stuff like that. inazuma had the ingredients for a consistent good story they just fumbled it completely

whereas fontaine tells like. a much stronger and more hype emotional core journey for its focal points as u go thru them but also it just. Genuinely falls apart if you poke at the setting and world for a bit too long its really just swiss cheese and that sucks

like as much as i Do love the narwhal in a very normal and sane way i still think story wise it absolutely goes into the signora tier of mishandled AQ boss fights except Even worse than hers bc. signora Fits inazuma even if she was handled poorly. but with the narwhal (and by extension childes entire presence as happy as i was to see him at all) its just... kinda random? and got pretty much brushed aside even during the AQ like we get the opera hall cutscene and then theres a THIRTY MINUTE cutscene with focalors before the actual fight happens like way to just. eliminate any urgency from the situation bruh. and then at the end both the narwhal and childe kinda just got plot deviced into hyping up skirk and surtalogis name drop. which rly fucking sucks. 99.7% of fandom never reads the AQ fight boss drop to consider the narwhals a sentient thinking feeling entity and not just a dumb big pet bc skirk called it that etc.

childe in general i dont think im necessarily like. as negative on the way he was handled as some ppl are (tho the general sentiments are 100% shared) but its still very much like. a disappointment w his lack of presence and voiced lines and in terms of how a lot of the intrigue set up in the AQ Especially the oratrice judgement just got shrugged off all "who knows 🤷‍♀️" like Are You Serious. and also p much using him as a neuvi hype device like . I saw it i knew ppl were going to be insufferable abt it & was right

i also saw a comment talking abt how childe Being the purple guy inside the narwhal just corrupted or sth wouldve given him a more heightened presence during the boss fight and while im a hater of that concept for other reasons (mostly the. narwhal must have malicious designs for ajax thing) i cant disagree with that take in terms of the story aspect. like if the narwhal ate him when he fell back in (which i kinda? assume mustve happened lmao like where did he Go 😭😭) it Wouldve been a much greater moment for sth like that to be there.

But bc i personally dont like the Brainwashed Puppet Angle i think how id have done it is just. sure make the purple guy more reminiscent of ajax n his fight style maybe even FL . But. feature an actual fucking cutscene in the stomach of us realizing its Not Him. but instead its the Narwhal Emulating Him as a spectral summon thingy. bc it ate his dumb unconscious ass for safekeeping or w/e and is now copying his homework of "use a manifestation of the other as a combat technique" (v romantic btw. soulmates real). like DUDE we had childes earlier AQ appearance Actively Bring Up this EXACT thing! he uses a hydro construct mimicking the narwhal as a combat technique bc of how their encounter rewired his brain chemistry. and now the narwhal needs to improv a more humanoid angle to combat in its stomach after it ate us. so like pov ur the narwhal whats the closest point of reference to draw from at that moment?

Oh Right. the guy ur been fighting for 40+ days . Your guy (derogatory) 💀 like they have a telepathic link who knows if it could just straight up cross reference Our combat moves from the flashes its getting from childes memories of seeing us in action and utilizing that.

like it wouldve been so sick and still left the nature of their connection relatively open ended. like it ate him skirk would be separating them at the end and maybe comment on it a bit and his whereabouts during the entire thing wouldve been Way Less confusing. The knight dude being a mimic of ajax' battle technique would thematically connect to the golden house fight and his hydro whale technique and its just. the current electro dude is just so Huh. like its a good jumpscare and i love the OST obviously but it getting No Lore NOR cutscene sucks so bad

(And like if they wanted the combat design to be so that theres no cutscene interrupting the transition between being swallowed and entering the stomach phase just make it an AQ exclusive one. and if we cant have traveler talk and logistics of bringing paimon/neuvi to make the shocked observation of "is that.... him? no... its just an imitation???" or w/e . Just have us FLASH BACK to childes own fucking dialogue as the phantom him is summoned to face us where he mentions 1) traces of the narwhal on him and 2) the basis behind his hydro summon technique. so traveler can have a silent !!!!!! Realization that he got ate or whatever and now his narwhal is stealing his ideas jsjskdksirigkf)

Anyway i swear this wasnt just abt those two im so sorry . but like yeah its just a fucking shame and also the narwhal being just like . Means to an End in the prophecy feels kinda meh but like i dont have a solid idea on how that would even rly be fixed but yeah. underutilized my both beloveds

Back to fontaine general stuff tho i kinda do think that . hoyo almost missed the trees for the forest w it all if u will excuse the mid metaphor . like they told a very strong emotional story w neuvi and furina and navia But it came at the cost of a highly illogical lore and worldbuilding and its just An Issue if u dwell on it even a little bit and its rly a shame

like they were going for this justice theme of maybe AI justicebot is not The Way (TM) and people viewing court as a spectacle rather than a show of justice but then went never fucking where with it in terms of Maybe This Needs Changing . they made that entire champion duelists a thing despite it being So fucking stupid fundamentally like it just relies on nobody with enough raw power to just solo any duelist ever getting into the ring

(no credit for this tho this was a comment thread i ran into on leaks sub. there was also a point made abt how childe dueling and winning against clorinde when hes accused wouldve been such a great moment of like both showcasing clorindes role and linking to their earlier sparring and holding back thing and also that maybe the system sucks when this is possible and while i get the story needed him in jail so he can reunite w his narwhal . im now mad this didnt happen. give him a W in combat hoyo.)

like theres this entire thing about flawed justice in fontaine that is present in the 4.0 story but then it just...... Disappears. Bc AI justicebot was anti celestia archon deleter all along and it finished its job so its no longer a fundamental ethical issue for the legal system and fontaines ppl to grapple with and confront shit like childes sentencing. And furina wanted dramatic trials bc of what she was told by focalors but since she retires its now just neuvillette whos super fair so everything is fixed .

im not as big of a hater of act III as some but like thinking abt these things further makes me like it less and less like Yes they wanted this meropide vs regular fontaine dichotomy explored and all but thinking of it is just. i wonder how worthwhile the opportunity cost was in there (i have no correct answer btw)

bc . if you keep the childe jailed bc justice AI bot. they shouldve shown the people responding to it . bc that entire highly controversial judgement is Literally accompanied by the solving of the serial disappearances case AFTER multiple ""culprits"" had already been imprisoned for it which i actually forgot (thanks same reddit comment for reminding me) like Whats with those people then????? and just. Everything to do with the entire case including childes deal shouldve been a much bigger social upheaval anyway like ik stuff like furinas SQ shows ppl personally affected in the aftermath but i mean in bigger scale.

And Then if we like run a bit with this alternate hypothetical idea of childe no diffing the court system (clorinde im sure youre powerful but like i put more faith in those ruin guards that lasted 4s against FL than u girl) so hes simultaneously kind of a criminal let off scot free but also its so stupid to think a guy thats like 25 at most is involved in a 20yr old solved case it couldve been actual source of political discord. and like if you need to get him to the narwhal for plot reasons its Rly Not That Hard theyre obsessed with each other bro gets pinged a whale call once and its like yes honey we jailbreak for reunion tonight (hes going to throw hands Immediately bc hes the toxic battle maniac one). also yes ik they wrote it weird so technically ajax cant duel after the oratrice decides hes involved which is major intrigue point (that canon wasted but oh well) but like. they couldve written differently idc. he couldve even gone off investigating why AI bot considers him guilty on his own and then jeepers!! speedrun glitchless any% spawned into the primordial sea!! hes missing! but like this isnt a well articulated idea whatsoever lmao im just winging some shit

meropides existence in general was also just weird. again i enjoyed the character writing it enabled for wrio and the HotH trio and despite disliking childe just being MIA i do like how the storytelling around his escape expands on his social intelligence and street smarts still. but as an entity the fortress is just sorta there as a system that Obviously shouldnt be Like this when its literally the other side of the coin to fontaines Already dubious legal system but then they went the whole. its a gathering place for exiles (still a prison)!! a home for those alienated by the surface world after so long (so why KEEP them in there that long)!!!! protectors of egerias secret (okay Sure. but whats the need post prophecy then)!!!! And its like. okay im not about to uhh. overstep my understanding of the risk a chinese company limited by often nebulous and inconsistent censorship would take if they went for a full on prison reform/abolishing angle w the writing like i dont think that was in the cards. But it still means meropide as a system just falls apart if u think abt its existence critically At All and its hard to say whether fontaines writing omitting sth like it entirely wouldve ultimately been better for the overall focus of the story anyway. but yeah

and its just. im sure theres even more that i havent even noted here (logistics of nobody drowning in the flood & rest of teyvat being unaffected etc etc) bc this is just a rant ramble not a coherent analysis but my point in all of this is that the abundance of issues like these just kinda add up so that by the end its kinda like fontaines simultaneously the AQ that id say has the highest highs in terms of its best moments and strongest emotional beats and how much heart it carries . Like im not taking that away from it.

but its also the AQ with like genuinely the messiest fucking groundwork in lore and larger worldbuilding implications whose aftermath leaves the most plot threads barely explored or just discarded altogether by the end and its just?? Such a weird mess like i very much enjoyed it despite the problems and for me it still overtakes sumeru in many aspects but i cant pretend those problems arent there . like consistency of writing and lore accounted for sumeru is still the best AQ

(oh also. the fact that to my knowledge no fucking fontaine NPC Ever reacts to the events throughout the AQ is fucking insane. like other nations could get away w sth like that better but. THE ENTIRE NATION FLOODED. How the fuck arent they talking. ppl in meropide post act IV abt the close call. ppl who saw the narwhal in the opera house in V. Like . HUH???)

but yeah its . A weird situation w fontaines writing as a whole . & yes im giga late to the discussion HSJSJSKSI but oh well thats my brain for ya

#anyway if i somehow missed an array of NPCs reactinv to the events thatll be embarrassing lmao but #i kinda doubt it usjsjdjdiriskdkt #its sooooo weird i swear . like fontaines rly just the cinematic drama above all else #idk if the writing was just a mess to begin with or if there were like rewrites happening #where some initial version of the story utilized the setting and things like ajax n the narwhal much better #but then they shifted gears at some point maybe to veer away from the justice system being fucked aspect #to avoid the . furina neuvi actively responsible for these problems angle bc problematic playables are a Thing #i do have a bit of a foil hat abt cut content w childe specifically bc he isnt voiced in acts III and IV #final cutscene is only in cn . so its kinda giving hasty rewrite couldnt get ahold of all VAs #but yeaaaaaa idk #also i didnt even MENTION #pre fontaine. anyons remember the pollution and energy crisis thing??? hinted at by NPCs????#like that shit sure got irminsul'd 💀💀💀💀#rambles #genshin #long post #hmmm is there enough narwhal or childe brain rot for it to go into the tags. maube not

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cxncrie-a · 9 months ago

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Anonymous asked: Hey, are there any HH roleplayers you recommend to check out?

Unprompted Asks || Always Accepting

God a LOT actually. I'll only name a few though so this post doesn't become super long.

@leftrib/@perditicn - Always gonna recommend this person, this is my buddy Hound, and while they're a slow writer their stuff is ALWAYS worth waiting for. They also like to plot and discuss things extensively which is a VERY big bonus for people who like to talk things out on how muses would respond to things / each other and see where things can lead, especially when it comes to plotting, etc etc. They put a lot of thought and love into their characters and writing and it certainly shows.

@shadowzgather - Another instant recommend. I've been writing w/ Tera since joining the ducktales / dwd fandom. Their main two is Pentious and Valentino but they've also recently added a few ocs, Abel, and Alastor. They're a good writer with interesting takes on their characters. 10/10 would recommend. { They also just reminded me that they recently added Stolas, mb }

@xluciifer - goofy fella, does a REALLY good job with Lucifer and puts so much thought into him. They're always a joy to read with their threads, don't let the fact they're mobile bound turn you away ! They put a lot of effort into their blog and the character and it certainly shows.

@demondads - SAM. 10/10 WOULD RECOMMEND SAM. They have another blog too i'm pretty sure its @thestupidmeanone which is Church w/ a HH AU on it. Sam's a JOY to talk to and a joy to watch on the dash and write with.

@plxgue4two - I haven't seen MUCH thread wise but what I have seen i've enjoyed a LOT. Bug has SO much passion for this OC and she's SO well written and thought out. Just { chefs kiss }

@hellshoard - I've been following them for awhile but I gotta say I'm glad I FINALLY got to start writing with them and I would 100% recommend them as well. The mun's a sweetheart { and chaotic } and the muses are great.

@fearedelight - Sal is another one I recently followed but they also have some REALLY neat ocs + i love their takes on their canons, especially Mammon. { sorry Sal i've been snooping in your HC's } They're also super nice and easy to talk to.

@vietat0 - I see a lot of eve's around but I think this is probably the first one I've gotten to write with and they've def got an interesting take on her imo. Worth checking out + mun is really nice.

@arachnaemboss - and last but not least, this Zestial, I haven't gotten to write with them but I very much do enjoy the portrayal. I'd recommend checking them out if you haven't yet.

@pompedia - I lied I have one more, pom I have followed for a long time and while she only has charlie and emily she writes them SO well. 10/10 give love

@waywardsculs - ALSO BECAUSE THEY POPPED UP THREATENING TO LOVE BOMB ME I'M GONNA THROW THIS MF ON HERE TOO BC I ACTUALLY AM VERY INTERESTED IN THEIR MUSES AND THEY ALL LOOK VERY NEAT GO GO GO GO GO

#★ ► ᴛʜᴇ ꜱᴛᴀʀꜱ ꜱᴘᴇᴀᴋ. ◄ ⌠ Out Of Character ⌡#★ ► ʟᴇᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ꜱᴛᴀʀꜱ ᴛʜᴀɴᴋ ʏᴏᴜ ♥ ◄ ⌠ Ask Answered ⌡

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caelumsnuff · 1 year ago

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What keeps you here (listening to Redacted, slightly engaging with fandom, writing for it)? I don’t mean that in the annoying ‘omg why are you here if you’re gonna complain’ way. As I think it’s heathy for a fandom to discuss what could be better about their fandom space and what works and doesn’t work for them in the media they’re consuming (and even as someone who enjoys 99% of this place, this fandom’s ‘don’t even say that you don’t like a thing’ is unlike any fandom I’ve ever been in, big or small).

I’m asking ‘cause I’ve been listening to Redacted since 2021 and it became a fixation, but recently I feel it fading a lot (I don’t find the narratives as compelling anymore with Quinn and Avior being the recent ones, HBS was just okay even tho nothing quality wise changed to me, even my enjoyment of the podcast has waned (and I listen to a ton of podcasts of all types so that should have been the one thing that stayed lol, but they are inconsistent then come back and talk about Pokémon Go only for 70% of the episode every episode lol so I think that’s what’s not helping).

So what brought you here and what keeps you here now? What do you think will keep you engaging with his work? What do you think will (or could be) what makes you step away (whether abruptly or gradually)? (Sorry for all the questions. I’m curious. Hope you have a lovely day!)

Thank you for the ask! I know this is long and a little word soupy perhaps, but i hope you can glean some coherent meaning from it.

Under the cut bc long.

I've been here since very very very early in the channel. Like...... 2020 early. I was getting back into listening to rp asmr after having a small interest in it a few years earlier, and i came across redacted, a lil baby VA. Redacted had some unique qualities in the rp asmr scene, and if we're being honest he still does.

My brain kinda decided to hyperfixate on Redacted, i think because he had plot heavy audios and that wasnt super common in this genre of rp. And in the beginning, the plots were actually decently good in terms of writing and whatnot.

At some point along the way, that fixation became something of a special interest eventually. Probably sometime around early 2022 when i decided to join the discord to finally see some fanart and maybe make friends with people in this fandom. That kinda sent me down the rabbit hole of realizing "oh shit yeah these people have wildly different interpretations of these audios", which started to irritate me in regards to a certain magical therapist and i ended up writing a fanfic about it after being afraid to write for literally most of my life. I got very mixed responses, but some people were really kind and expressed gratitude for my writing and that made me actually want to be a part of this fandom, even if i stay in my own little corner. After that point i started to engage with the content far more critically, and decided that i care about his videos too much to not talk about them and critique them.

I can't really tell you why i stay here, not exactly at least. I think plot-wise the videos have declined in quality greatly, which i started paying attention to. I have been known to enjoy bad media. Like a lot. I watched all of Voltron, all of Vampire Diaries, 13/15 seasons of Supernatural, the Twilight movies, and i fucking enjoyed them. Im just a fan of shit media. Its really fun to critique as well! But like..... I don't think Erik is an all around shit writer, i think he's really good at some things. Character building (the base of a character at least), universe building (for the most part), and the line writing is really good actually, i enjoy them. And i think that he's decent when writing darker content and plotlines, look at the Adam plotline, the Ivan plotline, Imperium AU etc. So i guess the answer is i enjoy critically engaging with it and actively critiquing the art, as well as being attached to the characters and the universe. I have kinda yoinked the characters and they are now my little barbie dolls to play with.

Tbh i ignore most of the fandom bc i just..... simply do not care what people i dont know think about me. I think that majority of this fandom has demonstrated not just a lack of critical thinking skills, comprehension of fandom etiquette, and media comprehension skills, but also a lack of basic human decency and kindness. I do not care what people like that think of me. I know who i am, my loved ones know who i am, and im not gonna let children on the internet stop me from making the art i enjoy.

I take breaks from listening to videos every once in a while (like 2 months at the beginning of this year), but i always end up coming back. I guess im curious as to where this all is going, and i really really do want to see this man get better at writing which..... hasnt happened yet but i guess im patient enough to wait lol. I think he hit a new low recently though. I think the Quinn storyline is the first time that the bad writing actually made me like... angry. Like i was MAD, like shaking laughing in my bed mad. It took me an hour to cool down like what the fuck was that man 😭 If i think about it too hard ill get all riled up again.

I.... don't know what would make me step away tbh. Idk what that would take, but i guess it'd have to be worse than the Quinn arc, which is setting a pretty high bar.

So yeah i think i stay here because i love the characters (or the ideas of them), as well as the universe, and i think writing fics for them is really good practice for me. There's also some very sweet people in this fandom who have been nothing but kind and encouraging to me, and i do not want to let these interactions i have with you guys fizzle out just yet. I may not know yall or directly interact with yall a lot, but i really do love you guys in this little corner of the fandom ive carved out.

#ask #anon #I feel honored that i genuinely influenced people in this fandom #if i think too hard about it i WILL tear up #several people have told me they admired me and i.......... on the floor sobbing about it

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cheswirls · 4 months ago

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quick tangent for i think uh.. like problems i have w writing that i've noticed lately

idek how far back it goes but i make a lot of notes before actually writing for a piece from start to finish. i flesh things out in my head or think of a detail to elaborate on later and jot typically everything down that i can bc my memory sucks and ik i'll forget it later of i let it set too long, or if not forget then it'll be hazy and all the details won't be there.

the thing abt this is that 1) i write most notes all in a big blur and separate big thoughts by semicolons in lieu of any other punctuation, and i feel like most of the time i'm jotting everything down as i think of it (as it is in my head) so i don't have to waste time on coming up w correct wording or what makes sense, i'll figure out what makes sense later yknow? so it's all a giant stream loosely punctuated and if you read it out mostly it'd sound like someone speaking.

which leads to 2) a lot of extraneous detail accumulates and the bits and pieces that DO end up sounding eloquent i end up liking enough that i wanna shive a phrase or line into the story as is. which is !!! part of the bigger problem, exhibit a

when i come up with something for a story, i want to somehow insert it into the story no matter what. this means that i have trouble letting go of older ideas that no longer fit, but it also means (and this is the main problem i feel i have) that i feel the need to put a lot of extraneous elements into the story just because.

sometimes this is fine!! but sometimes, like this past week skimming old notes for a wip fic abt a yr old, i feel like this is not great and that i could be going abt it all in a better way.

let me give an example. i have a fic where a character is not quite human, is adopted by human parents for power gaining purposes later, is never told they're not human and ends up running away at a young age, but starts exhibiting non-human qualities later in life.

also, this fic is from the pov of another person in conflict with the one above. they meet after the first has already run away from home, so from a story perspective, there is no reason that the pov character should know any of the information i listed above. the story is about them trying to figure out what exactly the other character is, species-wise, and both of them are not on good terms so there's no opening to inquire directly with each other to puzzle it out.

what i've realized is that this plot point is interesting and can add to the story, but not as a direct quote, because it doesn't fit and would hinder the narrative to introduce. however! just because it can't fit doesn't mean i can't use it indirectly. idk where to go just yet, but today i thought about tossing aside a mention of the parents and such directly and instead using that information to build characteristics. i know it happens and that this person experiences it, so i can use that to puzzle out how it influences them, maybe showing how it contrasts them to the pov character, or possibly alluding to it as what's probably necessary information that the pov character simply doesn't have ('if i could just figure x out, if i just knew about y, then i could solve for z')

which is to say that uhhhhh basically! i'm slowly realizing that there are (probably better?) ways to use extraneous information besides directly. i usually don't worry about padding a story, but i have written plenty before where there's a word cap and for that purpose i feel like this will be helpful to keep in mind so the "padding" can be reduced but still serve its purpose.

it helps too that i never really delete my notes, so it's not like all the bits and pieces i think are ingenious are gone forever jus bc it doesn't make it into the story. i've thought abt actually taking screenshots or straight up copy/pasting some of my fic notes here, especially for completed fic i'm not liable to think abt again in terms of editing, as a sort of archive but also jus so i have somewhere i can point my fingers at and say 'oh look! i wrote smth cool come look at it!'

anyway this isn't uh anything tangent and i need to learn to kill my darlings i think first before i can implement this idea, or perhaps starting this way (with indirectly adding to a story) will enable me to do that better (discarding unnecessary things altogether). again bc i'm writing fic for fun i'm not rly stressed abt forming a perfect cohesive story that cuts out irrelevant details bc if i'm writing for me and i like those details then why not? but i do also think overall this will help me improve writing quality and i'm excited to test some things and go from there :) even if i like where i'm at now, i also think challenging my comfort when writing is never a bad thing bc i'll look at smth i write now a yr ago and go oh! i've definitely gotten better!

#as im typing the ending (and im sure ive said this before)#im again being iffy abt usng tumblr as a storage space bc ik how easy it is for accts to be deleted (on accident or no)#and also like.. idk tumblrs been around for yrs but i also realize its not a permanent thing and could go under at the drop of a hat too #(jus like any other website ever like tumblr isnt special but its that general idea yknow)#i did get a external harddrive that i still need to put my laptop everything on so if (pls dont jinx plsplsplspls) my #x yrs old computer dies suddenly i wont have lost everything and can have some manner of relief in that #i do put a lot of things on tumblr so i can delete them from my mac so ig im jus acknowledging thats uhhhhhh not a good practice #i also write directly to tumblr A L O T so maybe sometime soon i need to go and pull off what isnt also somewhere else by default #anyway NONE OF THIS is what the rant was abt btw this is jus a side tangent #i need to put smth up later but i thought i would get these feelies out first #until then!

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spikeinthepunch · 7 months ago

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i am playing Alan Wake 2, after after Alan Wake 1 (well. i gave up on playin bc i was not a fan of the gameplay and just watched a long LP). i think AW2 falls in line with what i see as like.. "cinematic video games that are basically movies". i know a key example of this are games like The Last of Us. These games are story focused, but they also really keep you on one track. Not just in the sense of a linear story, but physically (in game). I find these kinds of games don't often give you a lot to do in terms of branching off location wise unless its for a collectible, so even then its minor. Additionally, these games are basically always realistic in graphic/art style. I think in general theres been a huge rise on realistic looking games now that tech gets better, but it pretty much dominates this kind of game.

but what is on my mind as i play AW2 and this 'type' of game... well, im all for a story focused game. but these games i feel lack more and more significant gameplay where i kinda wonder if im "playing "playing" it at all. There are a few things considered "gameplay" in this game im sure but I will be real 90% of it wouldnt call that at all. Gameplay? Explore and fight enemies and solve some pretty simple puzzles (many of which can be considered side content anyways). What isn't actually gameplay to me? reading letters, looking at pictures, and sticking them on a wall in your mind palace. Looking at a scene and Alan saying its a new plot point he needs to write, so you open the window and click it so it happens. That's... not gameplay, its just a slightly extended way for you to see the story continue. And thats not to say all that is bad-- its simply a device to tell the story and its kinda neat i guess. But this isn't what I see as significant gameplay. You could entirely leave those actions out and it would be fine, but it would admittedly make the game feel more empty in terms of stuff to 'do' (which may be a bad sign lol)

the topic of "game that feels like a movie" is complicated. because you cant claim theyre bad because of the lack of gameplay (but its a critism to make if it doesnt help the game) because obviously.... we got the genre of... walking sims. and well, people have a lot to say about them in terms of gameplay too. i have played a number of walking sims that i love but i also guess the "point" of them is walking, you know that going in? but it doesnt make a point against the games i am talking about. because little unique gameplay doesnt mean you will have a bad game.

i like games focused on stories, i love them. and its certainly my attraction to games like AW2. i have played games that feel like im watching a real good movie and i absolutely love it when i come out on the other side feeling like i took part in that "movie". but i think where i feel detached in some of them is where you the player, get further disconnected from the main character(s). And I think this honestly happens more when you dont have gameplay that really lets you interact with it as a video game enough. less and less gameplay present and undirected interaction with the world, more and more scripted paths and forced direction. walking sims dont tend to feel similar to games like TLOU or AW2 not because they dont have combat, but because walking sims are usually presented entirely differently despite what could be said about lack of/simple gameplay-- you the player know youre walking around, and typically youre doing so to explore which already leads you to a game with open opportunities as a player, you dont know what coming in your path and thats the sense of discovery I feel like i lack in these other games. the script is written, your path can be forced. if it is too forced, too restricted then it doesnt feel like im getting to play much of a game.

the video game feels like a movie in a way i dont find appealing, when i feel like all i am really doing is moving my character on a path i must take and wait for the moment i need to shoot, then walking on the path again to the next area. to where else to look unless i need ammo. no where else to look unless i care about some random side items. (all of which i dont need at all if i font want them, and dont take me anywhere outside of my intended path) the video games that feel like a movie in a good way are ones that despite being heavily story focused, it allows enough options in gameplay and in world to let me still feel free and up to my own devices even when it does get back on track and put me in some clearly directed scenarios. i want to be excited to be in the video game's world so that i can have balance and be just as excited to continue even when they game puts me on some tracks i need to go through to see the story, before going back to feeling like a video game.

its all up to preference on what genres people like. but the AAA scene is becoming quite saturated with these linear story games with ultra realistic graphics. they look great and they can tell great stories. but sometimes i am not sure i feel like buying a $60 game that maybe... doesn't really make me feel like i am playing a game. admittedly i had expected a bit more from AW2 and its not offering much else for me to do with the gameplay.

#ALSO like... in aw2 i legit end up being given scenes where i am just watching a video #like stopped in the middle of levels to watch stuff lol #i love the story and all but like. just sit me in front of an actual movie at this point

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boyfhee · 2 years ago

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OKAY IM BACK 🤩🤩 ( after some self reflection on my attachment to take two ) NGL I DIDNT EXPECT YOU TO GIVE ME A SHOUTOUT OR EVEN FOR ME TO HELP PLAY A PART ( even if its a teeny tiny bit ) IN THE ENDING ??? you can literally imagine my surprise when i opened the app after a goodnight sleep to see a new update and mentions of me in the a/n 😭😭 the ending was so fhdjsnjsnsks BITTERSWEET. it was so nice to know that they all found comfort in each other ultimately ( despite it not turning into something romantic wise at that moment ) and being such good friends ?? it really shows their growth as characters which behaved selfishly to ones that were willing to accept each others shortcomings whole heartedly ( at least imo ) . although yn doesnt have an endgame (cries cos my imaginations were running wild at the slightly open but not so open ending if you get what i mean ) , it feels very realistic that wonki hasnt moved on yet — especially since this happens a lot irl ( i never experienced it before but ive seen my friends go through it ! ). i think it was a very well written ending considering how you couldnt make everyones wishes come through ( talking about the readers choice of endgame ) but yet still delivered one of satisfactory level. it was such a wild ride watching ynki make every mistake we as humans could make. miya was truly a test - she was testing my patience half the time 💀💀💀. but miya also serves as a reminder to everyone of how easily it is to unknowingly cheat on your partner without having to lay a single hand or even touch the person. emotional cheating is JUST AS BAD AS PHYSICALLY CHEATING IF NOT WORST ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ i kinda feel bad (?) for wonki though because even though they were given closure and time to heal, it always felt more like a right person wrong time kind of thing so they will never be able to properly move on imo. IT MAKES ME EVEN SADDER THAT IT FEELS LIKE YN GETS THE HAPPY ENDING AND WONKI GOT A HAPPY ENDING TOO BUT IT COMES WITH A CHANCE THAT THEY MIGHT NEVER BE ABLE TO GET ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED WITH YN EVER AGAIN. its really giving “ feels like we have matching wounds but mines still black and bruised and yours is perfectly fine “ < the exit - conan gray >

okay i feel like i should stop here before i get carried away and keep repeating the same points but more aggressively with each sentence 🥶🥶 i was actually a pure literature student before i graduated from school and its been a while since i had graduated so it was really fun to be able to make analysis on characters again as well as figure out plots through diction 🤩🤩 i cant thank you enough for writing take two because it gave me a chance to put my literature to good use, it wouldve been a real shame if i studied so hard just for me to never use it ever again. thank you thank you thank you thank you.

please have a good rest and all the best for your studies ! i had national exams last year and it absolutely beat the crap out of my brain 😭😭 had me tearing at every math question and feeling hella defeated. its going to be tough but you can do it !! take as long as you need for your break ! you absolutely deserve it after dropping that bombass smau 😩😩😩😩 i will look forward to your return with full excitement ! take care ~

- 🎐 ( its been a pleasure being one of take twos biggest fans - self proclaimed )

WINDCHIME ANON HEHE HELLO 💗💗 no bc a shoutout was a must bc ur ask helped me pick the direction i wanted to go with the ending. and i was so scared bc ppl were hoping for a ynwon ending but i gave them kind of nothing i was like 'what if they dont like' BUT FUCK IT BC IN MY EYES YN DOESNT DESERVE A HAPPY ENDING JUST YET . tbh the whole point of the friends part was that they were willing to give their relationship another try despite the mistakes, call that character development. and miya was created solely to tell people how important communication is. none of this would've happened if riki told yn about miya, if yn told him ab meeting miya, if riki told yn ab his plan, the communication was gone on so many levels. the thing that ruined ynki, if you ask me, was the lack of communications. not miya, not jungwon, not media, not fans, but yn and riki themselves. SO CHIYUV NATION, COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY. ALWAYS. take it from me i love clearing things out and it always ends well unless u start phrasing things wrong ( dont do it )

AND ANON WE R GETTING A PART TWO WITH SEPARATE ENDINGS let ur imagination run wild again ☝️☝️ that conan gray lyrics r so ksdjfhhs fits so well fr. AND OMG HI FELLOW LIT. STUDENT i had science but also had eng on the side, spent my youth editing drafts and analysing proses and poetry it was fun . everyday i think about ur asks ab take two and it makes miso happy (sunghoon hi) bc they rlly made my day U ARE THE BIGGEST TAKE TWO FAN i will give u that medal 🥇

#—🎐anon.#@ : tt

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igarbagecannoteven · 2 years ago

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okay i’ve listened to 5sos5 a handful of times now so i think i have a general vibe check in my head so! i thought i’d do a track-by-track bc that’s what the Cool Kids™ are doing and i am but another lemming rushing towards the cliff that is the trends of the 5sos side of tumblr. also this got so fucking long so if you read the whole thing you get as many gold stars as you want lol

Easy For You To Say: this is the song that stayed stuck in my head after I listened to the whole album. It’s incredibly catchy and has heaps of good lyrics! Admittedly I don’t really follow the entire narrative but I think that’s more of a me thing than a reflection of the lyrical content. (and i do get most of it! there’s just a few threads i have yet to tie together.) i love the play on words that is “a piece of peace of mind”. sonically it has me bopping my head to the beat basically the whole way through! I think it’s in a good location in terms of the album as a whole

COMPLETE MESS: definitely a single for a reason! it’s one you can shout-sing along to which is always a plus i like the rushing sound leading into the chorus/other different moments, and lyrics-wise i love that it can be read as platonic or romantic love :)) that’s how you know they’re catering to me. also! michael’s part! the way it changes the tonality/meaning and the way you can hear him smiling as he’s singing!! and of course the fact that all of them sing on it!!! we love to see it! my main con is that it’s pretty repetitive lyrically but still i won’t hold it against them. this song makes me want to write a fic that would fit the title “you make me (a) complete (mess)” so badly but alas i have yet to come up with a plot to match its energy

Bad Omens: i LOVE the way this song plays with leaving the “else” off the phrase “you love somebody else” it’s soooo narratively interesting and i would love to see an angsty unhappy ending songfic that utilizes this concept (if anyone wants to write it *eyes emoji*) i like the way it loops very nicely (it fades in and out in the same way which is satisfying) (and possibly a metaphor for the futility of the relationship? but maybe i’m reading into things too much lol) the line “I should have known right there and then you were a runaway” feels like a very 80s lyric (and not just bc it reminds me of runaway by bon jovi lol) i will say i am not as in love with it as everyone else seems to be (idk why it’s the big hit out of the non-singles?) but it’s not bc it’s bad, it’s just probably not going to have me obsess over it

Take My Hand (Joshua Tree Version): if any song deserves to be called vibey it’s this one. i think the musicality and the lyrics really work well together in this song, especially for the verses. there’s an almost melancholy feeling to it and now that i’ve listened to it several times it’s started to resonate with me more and more. like a lot of the songs on the album i’m not sure how often i’ll go out of my way to listen to it, but that’s more bc this album isn’t necessarily in my go-to genre than a measure of the song's individual worth. i feel conflicted about the extension to the song, bc on the one hand behind the scenes-type stuff! the voice note vibes make me soft! But idk if it actually adds anything to the song on its own,, like if i didn’t love the band i don’t think it’d really do too much for me. also what is he saying the background! it doesn’t sound like all the same lyrics! let me hear it!!! omg i forgot to mention the “few more souls on the bus now” line it’s just *chef’s kiss* no notes nearly made me cry when i heard that bit live ngl

Me Myself & I: another banger of a single (that is a bit too repetitive for its own good) it’s catchy it’s fun to sing along to and i honestly don’t have much else to say about it lol

CAROUSEL: the first time i listened to this all I could hear for the first,, minute? at least? was a taylor swift 1989 lost track and i have yet to totally shake that off lol. (see what i did there?) driving metaphors!!!! there is a tiny part of me that’s reminded of u2’s city of blinding lights during the chorus (which is a compliment btw) but that’s just bc i’ve listened to that song way to many times lol. it’s a good song, but i honestly have very few opinions about it other than why is it capitalized?? is it tied to the other capitalized songs somehow??? 5sos tell me what your thought process is!!!

Older: skip! sorry y’all it’s just not my vibe i rarely like piano ballads as it is and i just think that it has several places where they *could* have done something cool and then didn’t. i will say seeing the performance of it in the tofu live show did melt my frosty heart but not enough for me to add this one to my liked songs.

HAZE: idk why it’s titled what it is but it’s a bop! I love the way the vocals swap off; it’s done quite cleverly imo and i think it shows the different strengths of each of their lyrical styles well (if i’m right that the vocals match some of the writing credits) it’s vibey it makes me want to stick my arms and pretend i’m cruising :)) also thematically it’s a little like a dog waiting impatiently by the door bc their person is out and about which i love

You Don’t Go To Parties: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this song!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the cashton vocals!!!! the bass!!!! the car metaphor!!!! also the repetition of the number five anyone?? clearly they’re 555sos fans /j also they’re totally referencing the maine in the second verse right guys? guys? but in all seriousness i love how visual the storytelling is! the lyric “racehorse trippin' on the dirt that you got on me” is very !!! especially bc the beat for the verses almost “trips” over itself (although maybe that’s just me reading into things lol) also i am very happy that my opposite vibe-check wish/comment that i made way back when they first dropped the titled kinda came true bc it’s def more of a banger than people were predicting :)) we love to see it. i am ignoring the fact that the title is capitalized incorrectly but telepathically i’m telling them to put their song titles through that capitalization checker next album

BLENDER: !!!!!!!! banger of my heart!!!!!!!!!!!!! this is def my favorite of the singles it’s just *such* a bop i will never listen to this song without remembering bouncing around in the very tiny cabin i was quarantined in at the time this song dropped and honestly i don’t hate it! this song makes me smile every time i hear it i love the line “ricocheting off the bed” even though i’m honestly not sure i’m interpreting it right i love the bassline i love how danceable it is!! i don’t have anything coherent to say lol it’s a bop idk what more you could ask for

Caramel: i don’t have the vocabulary to talk about the instrumentals in this song but it’s a vibe! it’s a song that demands you move your shoulders and i’m lowkey here for it. the harmonies are tasty the chorus is catchy the bridge is mmmmmmmmmmmmmm i’m fascinated by the choices made in the outro but in a positive way? altho i could take or leave the acoustic bit tbh. in a less positive note, we all agree that the only reason it’s named caramel is bc there aren’t a lot of songs named that and they wanted a certain number of one word titles, right? bc unless there’s some deep meaning i’m missing there’s no reason for that to be the title (that being said i’d love to for there to be a secret meaning please tell me 5sos i want the secret caramel knowledge) the other negative of this song is that it’s inevitably going to start a debate over the right way to say caramel (which isn’t the way they say it in the song fyi)

Best Friends: when i first started listening to the album i took a moment to accept the fact that this song could be a love song and that i’d be okay with it and then it was a friendship song and i got to breath a sigh of relief lol. the chorus is wonderful to shout with your bff (this has been tested 😊) it captures this younger feeling compared to the other songs on the album and i vibe with it! the line “life is like a poem written on a bathroom wall” is *such* a good lyric and conjures up such specific images! it’s a banger it’s a song to bounce along to i could see it in a jukebox musical as like the happy triumphant near-the-end song

Bleach: talk about a mood shift! (i think this is the song that reminded me of maisie peters? i’m pretty sure) i love the swapping of the vocals, it does something different in this song than in the previous songs which is fascinating to me! i love the line “everything i was spinning down the drain” it’s just. yeah. it’s a good quiet song for the album; it fits in well and is a good breath in if that makes sense

Red Line: a train song!!! i can’t wait to listen to this on my next train ride y’all don’t even know. it’s got vibes and a cool concept. that being said it’s not a huge standout song on the album, but not through any particular fault of its own; i don’t think it’s going to be one i listen to a ton (other than on public transport lol) i do like how the standard version closes out with the train door sound, it’s fun!

Moodswings: i love how the song makes me sway in play (you could say that i’m almost swinging) (get it? it’s a play on-[gunshot]) i would love to see an apocalyptic take on this song tbh (“through bloodshot eyes the sky is fallin’” anyone?) i think it’d make a deliciously angsty songfic! also love the self-destructive and codependent nature of the lyrics i just think that they portray it well!

Flatline: a bop! it’s a great “first love” love song it’s catchy it’s got some slightly strange lyrical undertones in the pre-chorus that i would love for someone smarter than me to analyze bc otherwise i’m going to coming up with a truly unhinged explanation (and that is a threat) i can def see why it’s a bonus song but still good!

Emotions: i want a proper rock cover of this song so fucking bad please i would pay real people money for it i think i deserve it!! michael’s voice is, of course, *chef’s kiss* i do wish the lyrics weren’t so,, broad? if that makes sense? i think the bridge threw me off lyrically the first time i listened to it bc i was like ‘yeah i get this feeling’ and then the bridge was just. not relatable lol but that’s a me thing (and now part of me’s like ‘are there some sarcastic undertones?’ bc i’m here for it if they are) but yeah i don’t really know how i feel about this song yet i think if i get my hard rock cover then it could be my next favorite song but until then it’s just a sort of vibe ig

Bloodhound: swapping vocals to change the narrative!!!! we love to see it!!!! very tasty bassline the beginning of the chorus makes me giggle a little it’s a funky beat i’d love for it to get a cheesy halloween themed music video the bridge makes me wish i could step dance (is that the right phrasing?) everyone who’s said michael singing “he took an L” is perfect is so correct i am mind melding with you

TEARS!: this songggggggggggggggggggggg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you may call me predictable for saying this is one of my favorites but come on. how i could not love this song??? once again the cashton vocals coming in clutch i mean this really is a song for the rhythm section in all the ways! the line “i’ll feel better if i let myself sink deeper” is really going straight for my jugular and i am 100% here for it. it’s such a good exploration of these kinds of depressive states and i just!! hrghhhhhhh also their voices on the last “alive” in each chorus????? SO fuckin tasty i want to eat that one note. the bridge reminds me strongly of something but i can’t think of what it is :(( also ashton’s voice on “fifty rounds of uppercuts i’m bleeding”???? i am going to throw myself into a pit. i understand why they made it a bonus song from a stylistic standpoint but also why. it deserves to be on the main tracklist. it’s got a great mixture of the style of superbloom but make it 5sos and i love that for it! my only complaint is the title like. wtf guys. like yes that is what it sounds like when it’s said in the song but that doesn’t make it title material! but that’s okay i forgive them since it’s such a banger <3

#i wish i'm joking when i say this is longer than the majority of my fics on ao3 lol #sheesh i really to ramble lol #5sos5 #track by track #the trash talks #this might be incomprehensible who knows

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6blackfilin9 · 3 years ago

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I love your Anko fanart! Tell me, what are your views/headcannons on Anko X Kazuku?

hThank you so much for the ask, finally I can answer it

here is my big thank you for the waitng

In a nutshell, the shipp was created by accident while me and my buddy were working on our first Naruto AU in 2019, where Kakuzu and Deidara survived their shitty plotholes end eventually ended up in Konoha

Yeah

so, the shipp’s birth date is july the 1, 2019

anything like classy, aristocracy kind of tension-filled passionate gothic romance with playful, psychological games & hurt/comfort vibes with slight scent of rivalry is KakuAnko

Basically, they are: a very, very old man with absolutely horrendous background who’s trying to finally have his mother*cking 10 or 30 years of peace, and a rather young lady with a rocky youth who’s being good & noble yet has very strong antihero tendencies

You know, I think they do have potential, since, in fact, they seem to be very similar, at the core

They are both very pragmatic realists, the people of logic and reason, yet if Kakuzu’s irritability doesn’t affect him a tiny bit due to his ideal self-control, Anko’s can lead her to quite bad places, sometimes. They put their interests in the first place, and even though she tries to attach them to Konoha’s, she still has ‘personal’ things (I’ll write ‘bout it lower*). Their mindsets are so complicatedly organized that, at some point & way, it prevents them from having many close people, and makes them very hard to see through and predict

Both of them are very flexible & adaptive, independent individuals with similar outlooks on plenty of things and high intellectual level. They clearly can find plenty of traits that they would highly respect and adore in each other

Here I will speak mostly for “why and how” kind of things, bc both of them are terribly tricky to accurately figure out. But there will be some headcanons too

So, there are still some odds about them, due to the strong difference in their occupation, like, in plenty of cases they are really tricky to be brought together, because:

- Of the job

In original, Anko is a Konoha’s special jounin, and she is very dedicated to serving the country. Independently of whether she likes her job or not (depends on the plot), she orienteers at the people, at society’s gain from her work. So, accordingly, in any other AU her job is somehow connected to civil service, whether it’s something police-like, connected to science, or something like CCG in Tokyo Ghoul

Kakuzu, on the other hand, is a hitman and a persona non grata in literally all the five big countries, Konoha too (which makes it barely possible to bring them together in the original universe without hard complications or heavy drama. But still possible). He orienteers on his own gain alone, but, depending on the job, it can include others’ gain, too.

This detail makes him a saint once he holds supervising position in some company or any high position in the government (the better the working conditions of the staff now- the more money in the prospective), and the sheer nightmare once he has it on the opposite side of the law. Him as a mob boss is a complete different topic for discussion, but to get the point, in this case, the trouble isn’t him increasing the level of criminality (its rather vice-versa), but taking hold of too much control in the high and underground structures. Even as an ordinary hitman he’s rather tricky, since everything depends on the case

In most of the stories, they come to some sort of compromise, and how hard it is to reach it depends on how shitty his job is and how attached they are to each other at the moment

Like, in the above mentioned Shippuden AU and Harry Potter AU (which I also wrote with my buddy) everything went like clockwork, because there they are both more or less on this side of the law, in Tokyo Ghoul AU (which I also wrote with my buddy) it is a bit more complicated, with her being in-law and him being very much outlaw, in the Avatar AU (which I also figured out with my buddy, but we never happened to write it) it is also pretty smooth, with both of them being outlaws and then jumping out to the glory after all the shit is done, but in another Shippuden AU of mine, this all would be just a motherfucking bloody disaster

- Kakuzu is actually a hard nut to get attached to anyone

He lived too long to be truly afraid of anything, though. Its mostly because he doesn’t really need to get attached to or become close with someone to satisfy his need for communication. The man can get along with anyone once he wishes to, he can have countless acquaintances and plenty of buddies, but he doesn’t have many comrades and barely can call anyone a friend. Because he is used to lose everything and everyone he ever had or happened to have, because of his inhumanly lengthened lifespan.

It requires time for him to get used to the person, and then, eventually, in some cases, spend plenty of it to get attached

Plus, for him, due to his profession, each close connection is a really great responsibility for him. In most cases, he’d think twice of weather he is ready to take it or not

Though it of course has the personal factor, too

In Anko’s case, she has a grand privilege by being a very intelligent and keen woman, not just in cognitive plane, but in emotional, too. High emotional intellect is actually a rare trait, so she automatically stands out of the crowd for him. Even though it won’t guarantee his alliance, it will grant her his high respect and some sort of sympathy

- Kakuzu is, technically, an asshole

He does have his moral compass, which includes a great amount of common social morality, but he also has that “I am working” state

Even though Kakusu has a set of professional principles, and he still acts accordingly to what he thinks is right, one and the very same situation can be solved diametrically different once the context changes from working to casual and vice versa

This, and him being very independent and quite antisocial, makes the degree of assholeness depend on various factors

This can lead to major conflicts of interests, and if they are possible to have any compromise or not is strongly attached to the circumstances. After all, both are very, very prideful and dignified people

- In other words, the only major issue for them would be morality questions. It’s possible to make the case acceptable for Anko, since both of them ain’t truly squeaky clean, along with Kakuzu being willing enough to watch his borders

- She is provident and doesn’t really need a lot of money on a daily basis, which is much of a joy to him lol

- *they both seek for the stable ground, first of all

Taking in consideration the life conditions Kakuzu had in his youth (despite war state, he still stably had family, friends, grand respect from everyone, home, warmth and food) and how terribly he was torn out of his secured social environment, I believe what he seeks through all his bounty hunt and other money-connected manipulations is stability. Sustainability he had back then. The only way to have it in the conditions of our existent world order is to have money (and a very good mind and luck)

Anko has indeed much more altruistic motives, yet it’s still not that simple. It seems to be, on the first sight, yet considering the “Orochimaru related cases” and her very wayward behavior toward them, it’s clear she keeps her own motives and needs in mind oh so well. The service she has is very well payed, it allows her to do what she likes or believes is right, and to have the living conditions she finds comfortable. And only here, relying on the made sustainable basis, she does what she does

- Thus, they both illustrate the principle “first help yourself, next help the other” just right

- She knows she can keep an eye on him, yet it’s clear for her that her influence isn’t borderless, as well as telling him off some stuff is kind of a not wise thing to do. So in the majority of cases, she never interferes

- This is not common, yet he can actually change some plans if the situation is serious and the compromise can’t be found. He is that kind of person who works on a further prospective, and in this context, this would be the relationship with his loved one

- While Kakuzu is quite conflicted and has very reserved controversial persona, Anko is both controversial, conflicted, and sort of two-faced, on top of that

She is a very sincere, cheerful and humbly honest human being, yet she has some darker natural traits of her character that became rather strong with age and traumatic experience. Cunningness, guile, ways-depend-on-the-case and a bit of ruthlessness, that is. Moreover, she has some unsolved personal issues, which makes her even more twisted.

Like, remember the time when she confronted Orochimaru during the exam? And Kabuto, on the war? Getting rid of them is indeed beneficial for Konoha, but it’s clear that for her it is personal vendetta in the first place. She wouldn’t have tried to do this alone, otherwise, because these two are rather dangerous ones, to say the least.

She uses greater good to cover her real motives (even though it is not truly complete bullshit), and seems to have a terrible habit to keep silence about really important things, which makes her quite prone to lying, in some cases

And sometimes it very badly pisses Kakuzu off, since it makes her prone to doing useless but dangerous shit too

Yet this not any kind of separate hidden side, it is integrated into her personality, and coexists with her bright one. That’s where her violent humour comes from, for example.

But Kakuzu, on the other side, is completely monolith individual, yet sometimes his mindset can create contradictions when it comes to something important to him. but it's another topic

And seeing these layered constructions, and motives, they can pretty finely predict each other’s behavior. Not super-neatly, but they for sure see the basis. This is what helps Kakuzu to prevent Anko from doing some stupid shit, sometimes

- Anko has a role of an indicator for the people who don’t understand and see the changes in Kakuzu’s mood sometimes, since she usually reacts quite openly. Yet, when she has the same unreadable mask of cold, or one of guile, it’s a nightmare for them

- They prefer the non-verbal way to show their feelings, even though Anko is obviously the more chatty one

- They don’t say things such as “I love you”, or other sensual stuff like that really often, believing it to be some sort of cherished words that shall not be spelled mindlessly

- Anko isn’t majorly into PDA, but she fancies it much more than Kakuzu does. She has her whole moments of studying something with her hands, whether it’s a hand, scar or face. He’s more into passive display of affection, like wrapping an arm over her waist or leaning to her or something of this kind; they can allow themselves to (not sexually) kiss in public though

- She knows he doesn’t like to walk hand in hand due to considering it a youthful thing, so there are times when she intentionally walks holding on to his sleeve; generally they walk separately in order not to bother each other, but sometimes they walk arm in arm (like an old Victorian couple lol)

- Being older and wiser, Kakuzu eventually upholds some kind of mentoring position, yet he never considers himself any kind of a teacher or master to Anko, believing her to have a good head of her own. He is just insightful enough to break something through to her or give a word of advise

- This, combined with his highly powerful demeanor, also makes him have the leading position in their relationship

- Anko respects him much enough to fortify this, entrusting with plenty of life questions (like organizing the family budget), even though they make the majority of decisions together. Mostly because he is truly wise and highly experienced individual.

- This makes him one of the very few people Anko would actually listen to and take their opinion in consideration

- So basically they have equal relationship with some tendency to patriarchal order

- And it is, really, mostly economically-based disbalance, with him earning much more than she does

- Yet they never have any financial-based issues, since both of them keep in mind and respect the contributions of each

- There is major power play here, too. He has the absolute might, she has seduction. Anko loves how he makes her want to submit to him, let him have all the power, so she likes provoking him. And she knows he adores it, loves the subtle control she has over him

- They don’t have conflicts in their everyday life. Each knows how to avoid pissing one another off

- He cherishes her playful demeanor, her intellect. Combined with her cunningness, it allows her to rival him, in social sphere. The way she constructs her phrases, the way she speaks, mimics, moves, how bewitchingly it suits her feminine snaky features makes his blood boil and heart melt

- Both of them, actually, have rather specific kind of dry, dark humour. Kakuzu’s is very cynical, satirical, quite often menacing and subtly demeaning; Anko’s is very sarcastic and quite dirty, even gruesome and rather violent

- Sometimes they “fight” verbally as a form of a play. In some circumstances they may sound pretty vile, so some unobservant people mistake this for display of hate

- In general, Anko is the one to heat things up with her playful demeanor, which can include provocation and rivalry, and Kakuzu is the one to keep this energy in borders, accumulating it up to much more intense states

- They both put the comfort in the first place when it comes to household. Everything must be cozy, useful, silent and super clean

- Yet they are both very unpretentious and modest, really

- She absolutely adores when he is showing his serious, severe side, or powerful demeanor. She finds it incredibly suitable for him. She also likes how his real age is sliding out in this or that way. Like, even though he has rather young face (that of 37-40 y.o.), his eyes give away that he’ve seen oh so much more than it seems; the grumpy noises and grunts he makes, the lazy attitude in movements and the way how rapidly he finds a comfy pose once he has a chance to take a seat

- They are both rather patriotic, yet while in the most stories Anko’s feelings mostly lay towards the country she lives in, Kakuzu’s more often lay towards some places, so called small motherland.

- Kakuzu actually could be a source of deep, strong admiration and delight for her, despite all of his bullshit. The unbreakable will he has, mighty burning heart, all the wisdom, talents and mind. Being sent to fight god damn Hashirama, clearly a genius of his times, financial & management genius at the least. And, still, after all the hard times he’ve been through, he maintained the very strong sense of dignity and nobility, even though slightly twisted due to the profession and abnormal lifespan

- And the very same things can serve as the source for her chagrin: with all those traits, he could have been so much more rather than a criminal. With all the gifts he’ve got, he could have been of great use to society. He’s much easier about this, since his prospective is much wider and embraces decades (and in some universes even centuries) instead of months & years, and he knows that he’d be switching sides throughout his life, being on this and that side of the law, yet he still is a bit uncomfortable once it’s brought up

- They are deeply into science, which makes them atheists. He’s into medicine and human biology, she’s into chemistry and reptilian biology; both of them are nuts for physics, history and psychology

- They solve complicated physical and mathematical problems together time to time. She is the first one to have tea-breaks due to losing her temper over it, he tries to figure things out right until you can sense the smoke coming off his head

- Actually, they do have a stumbling stone aside from job & morality complications. And this is Anko’s attitude towards Orochimaru

What she does is basically ruins her life very-very slowly, maintaining the issues she has and planning to make him pay for all he’s done

Kakuzu knows exactly what is really going on with this attitude and why, but he can’t really do anything about it. Like, he knows he can’t make her change her mind or put something into her head

All he can do is really nothing but try to explain how those things are working, and even this option is basically a landmine field for him. At some level she does understand that he could probably be right, yet she just refuses to go back on her mind. And this is actually really dangerous, so at some moments they can fight quite badly about it

- He’s scared shitless to lose her, though; especially like that, even though he knows clearly that he will, anyway, sooner or later

- he knows that losing loved ones ends up with sheer disaster for him, yet he isn’t afraid to pay such a high price for those six, five or four decades of being with her. Because these decades are that of a paradise ones for him. Wife and family, as well as stable job, incomes and life conditions, are some sort of physical definitions of sustainability he craves. Especially family, yet it’s far ahead to plan

- The fact that he will have to bury her one day makes her rather depressed, as well as the knowledge that the only thing she can really do about it is to try to bring him as much happiness and comfort as possible before she dies

thank you, i'd say more, but it's too much already

#my art #naruto #naruto shipuden #akatsuki #naruto akatsuki #akatsuki kakuzu #kakuzu #naruto anko #mitarashi anko #kakuanko #they are very entertaining disaster

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