#Boss 1 defeated!

[asskylosaurus]

This the crack team of specialists I've hired to kill the cast of team fortress 3

[aria0fgold]

I always think of my team as one of the worst out there due to being a pretty casual player in hsr but seeing the many ppl struggle to defeat aven's story boss while it took me two tries (1st try was me underestimating it so I didn't bring Geppie like I normally would thinking Luocha can handle it. He couldn't). But I was actually one of the people that managed to beat that guy in a short amount of tries without food buffs. Maybe my team isn't so bad after all... (They're just not fit for MoC which is something I desperately need them to fit in).

[sexy-mothman]

Anyone here got demons souls remake and is willing to invade me and let me kill u bc no one is online anymore and I need help with getting my karma or whatever up

[eggs-can-draw]

Kick butt, and then go home to argue about who’s gotta get monster ooze out of the costumes

it's always Naegi (how unlucky lmao)

[peridots-pixiwolf]

[Start ID. An ULTRAKILL screenshot of the end of level P-1: Soul Survivor. The screen displays that OP took 181:33 minutes to complete it, or just over three hours, got two kills, and ended with 3355 style points. They also died 238 times, leaving the level with a D rank. End ID]

easy boss

[genshinmp3]

Golden Dreams from The Shimmering Voyage Yu-Peng Chen, HOYO-MiX

[clovermusic]

Gotta make a new version of this one I love this song

[sadlazzle]

started another elden ring playthru last night cause the strength build is jst in prep for ng+ rn, and i seriously hav no idea what this build is actually gonna b. at first i was jst gonna do my first sorcery playthru but do it right this time, then i considered sorcery/bleed, and now im thinking int/faith ?? this build is all over the shop

[whateveriscatchy]

x

[toastsnaffler]

getting home from work and playing 5 straight hours of elden ring.... crops watered etc

[oflgtfol]

augh my head hurts again and my chills are coming back

[yumenosakiacademy]

kind of funny how they were like "defeat the team star bosses in any order ur free 2 choose" but then the pre- n post-base raid talk all very clearly show tht there Is actually an order n u kind of mess things around timeline-wise by not doing it the way they intend-but-never-tell-u.

[devotedlystrangewizard]

ultrakill throws you in the most chaotic hellscape battles and then at the end you go "wow that was fun!". you died 8 times

[famousblueraincoatmp3]

it snowed like 1 cm again today it was all gone girl i cant do this😭

[kafus]

please let me introduce you to NeverHappy, my most beloved pokemon ever.

i found her as a budew on someone else’s save file after buying a used copy of pokemon platinum. the name “NeverHappy” was a pretty obvious joke about how budew evolves from happiness, and since the previous owner was going to keep her in a box forever, never use her, and never evolve her, she would never be happy. this activated some feral response in my brain and i decided no. she WOULD be happy. i was still replaying through all my old gen 4 games at the time but i traded her off to my other gen 4 files for safekeeping until i could do stuff with her.

oh trust me game. i would.

so you might have thought my plans were to simply evolve her and beat the game with her, get her to level 100, maybe even EV train her - but i had much bigger plans. i was going to ribbon master her. the ribbon master challenge, or the process of “ribbon mastering” a pokemon, is getting every single ribbon possible on a pokemon from the game it was caught in to the most recent game it can be transferred to. if you weren’t aware, that’s a LOT of ribbons. there are 40 in gen 4 alone. i had a lot to do.

(the above clean screenshot was taken by backing up my cartridge save and screenshotting a battle video in emulator. however, i did all of this on my actual DS! i don’t like playing on emulator. not as fun)

i had to beat every contest (normal-master rank in all 5 categories) and do a bunch of other random stuff but my favorite part of the process was defeating the battle tower... 6 times. the battle frontier contains the most challenging battles in gen 4 by far, as opponents have good stats and competitive movesets. there’s 6 battle tower ribbons in gen 4 - two for singles at different points in the win streak, one for doubles, one for multis /w NPCs, one for multis /w another player (i just played with myself on two dses), and one for ranking up in the wi-fi room, which is now accessible again due to fan servers restoring internet functionality for gens 4 and 5.

NeverHappy was randomly caught in the wild and did not have a competitive nature or stats, so i figured that she would just be tagging along in the back while i took out all the win streaks with 2 good pokemon, but she ended up clutching out wins in times of dire need... multiple times. she even ended up being necessary in the wi-fi room to stall out prevalent hacked pokemon like no guard sheer cold machamp, which hits 1 hit KO moves every time, with a gimmicky and convoluted leech seed + substitute strategy.

i could go into all of my team members and the excessive lengths i went to get them all (don’t even get me started on my shiny competitive latias from pokemon emerald) but that’s a story for another day.

by the end of gen 4 i was extremely emotionally attached and she was already becoming one of my favorite pokemon, now with 40 whole ribbons after days and weeks of effort.

i have ribbon mastered pokemon before, so all of my save files in gens 6, 7, and 8 were already set up to transfer neverhappy into and grab all of the ribbons. i had a lot more battling and little tasks ahead of me. it’s really cool how ribbon mastering forces you to interact with pretty much every feature of every pokemon game.

and so i transferred her! gen 5 doesn’t have any ribbons, so it was just an intermediary to transfer into gen 6. at this point, i had also acquired a shiny luxray from pokeradar chaining in platinum named Nightlight, and i was ribbon mastering them together, but once again, a story for another day.

first into gen 6... getting the super training ribbon was really annoying but the battle maison was pretty easy. i had a team in multis with terrakion and a whimsicott with beat up that could 1 hit KO all of the boss battle’s legendaries in one hit LOL

then gen 7... this one went by pretty quickly but i opted to get the best friends ribbon here instead of in XY or ORAS because it was really simple to get with rainbow pokebeans, since all you have to do is max out affection and it only takes a couple rainbow beans to do that in USUM.

and gen 8! you can see nightlight to the left in this picture. by far the hardest part of gen 8 was getting the ribbon awarded for winning a battle in master rank in online VGC against other players. i definitely had to grind that one for a while.

then, she even got an award in BDSP for being a pokemon originating from the original diamond/pearl/platinum games, which was really cool.

oh, and since i had cloned neverhappy back in gen 4 with a glitch so that i would always have a copy of her in her origin games, i was able to take this neat picture! how the times have changed LMAO

luckily she was even a part of PLA’s roster and i was able to take a picture with her there, too... which actually might end up being important since there’s an invisible flag somewhere in the game’s code that gets turned on when you take a picture with your pokemon in the photo studio, which could potentially become a ribbon in the future in another game.

so, trainer Platina from 2016, you were wrong! NeverHappy is in fact happy now and has done more than most people’s pokemon have seen in their entire lifetime. she is my most cherished pokemon and i love her more than i love myself. i think i would die for her

i abbreviated this story a lot because i didn’t want to make this post longer than it already was but i was randomly inspired to talk about this today since SV is coming out soon and there will be more ribbons to collect for any of my ribbon masters that can be transferred into SV, which got me thinking about her. my journey with ribbon mastering has taught me more about pokemon games than any normal person should ever know and if you were interested in any details i left out or how i accomplished certain ribbons (including battle frontier strategies) feel free to shoot me an ask! :D i love talking about pokemon at any time any day of the week.

[burntoutdaydreamer]

To Write Better Antagonists, Have Them Embody the Protagonist's Struggles

(Spoilers for The Devil Wears Prada, Avatar the Last Airbender, Kung Fu Panda 2, and The Hunger Games triology).

Writing antagonists and villains can be hard, especially if you don't know how to do so.

I think a lot of writers' first impulse is to start off with a placeholder antagonist, only to find that this character ends up falling flat. They finish their story only for readers to find the antagonist is not scary or threatening at all.

Often the default reaction to this is to focus on making the antagonist meaner, badder, or scarier in whatever way they can- or alternatively they introduce a Tragic Backstory to make them seem broken and sympathetic. Often, this ends up having the exact opposite effect. Instead of a compelling and genuinely terrifying villain, the writer ends up with a Big Bad Edge Lord who the reader just straight up does not care about, or actively rolls their eyes at (I'm looking at you, Marvel).

What makes an antagonist or villain intimidating is not the sheer power they hold, but the personal or existential threat they pose to the protagonist. Meaning, their strength as a character comes from how they tie into the themes of the story.

To show what I mean, here's four examples of the thematic roles an antagonist can serve:

1. A Dark Reflection of the Protagonist

The Devil Wears Prada

Miranda Priestly is initially presented as a terrible boss- which she is- but as the movie goes on, we get to see her in a new light. We see her as an bonafide expert in her field, and a professional woman who’s incredible at what she does. We even begin to see her personal struggles behind the scenes, where it’s clear her success has come at a huge personal cost. Her marriages fall apart, she spends every waking moment working, and because she’s a woman in the corporate world, people are constantly trying to tear her down.

The climax of the movie, and the moment that leaves the viewer most disturbed, does not feature Miranda abusing Andy worse than ever before, but praising her. Specifically, she praises her by saying “I see a great deal of myself in you.” Here, we realize that, like Miranda, Andy has put her job and her career before everything else that she cares about, and has been slowly sacrificing everything about herself just to keep it. While Andy's actions are still a far cry from Miranda's sadistic and abusive managerial style, it's similar enough to recognize that if she continues down her path, she will likely end up turning into Miranda.

In the movie's resolution, Andy does not defeat Miranda by impressing her or proving her wrong (she already did that around the half way mark). Instead, she rejects the values and ideals that her toxic workplace has been forcing on her, and chooses to leave it all behind.

2. An Obstacle to the Protagonist's Ideals

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Fire Lord Ozai is a Big Bad Baddie without much depth or redemptive qualities. Normally this makes for a bad antagonist (and it's probably the reason Ozai has very little screen time compared to his children), but in Avatar: The Last Airbender, it works.

Why?

Because his very existence is a threat to Aang's values of nonviolence and forgiveness.

Fire Lord Ozai cannot be reasoned with. He plans to conquer and burn down the world, and for most of the story, it seems that the only way to stop him is to kill him, which goes against everything Aang stands for. Whether or not Aang could beat the Fire Lord was never really in question, at least for any adults watching the show. The real tension of the final season came from whether Aang could defeat the Fire Lord without sacrificing the ideals he inherited from the nomads; i.e. whether he could fulfill the role of the Avatar while remaining true to himself and his culture.

In the end, he manages to find a way: he defeats the Fire Lord not by killing him, but by stripping him of his powers.

3. A Symbol of the Protagonist's Inner Struggle

Kung Fu Panda 2

Kung Fu Panda 2 is about Po's quest for inner peace, and the villain, Lord Shen, symbolizes everything that's standing in his way.

Po and Lord Shen have very different stories that share one thing in common: they both cannot let go of the past. Lord Shen is obsessed with proving his parents wrong and getting vengeance by conquering all of China. Po is struggling to come to terms with the fact that he is adopted and is desperate to figure out who he is and why he ended up left in a box of radishes as a baby.

Lord Shen symbolizes Po's inner struggle in two main ways: one, he was the source of the tragedy that separated him from his parents, and two, he reinforces Po's negative assumptions about himself. When Po realizes that Lord Shen knows about his past and confronts him, Lord Shen immediately tells Po exactly what he's afraid of hearing: that his parents abandoned him because they didn't love him. Po and the Furious Five struggle to beat Shen not because he's powerful, but because Po can't let go of the past, and this causes him to repeatedly freeze up in battle, which Shen uses to his advantage.

Po overcomes Shen when he does the one thing Shen is incapable of: he lets go of the past and finds inner peace. Po comes to terms with his tragic past and recognizes that it does not define him, while Shen holds on to his obsession of defying his fate, which ultimately leads to his downfall.

4. A Representative of a Harsh Reality or a Bigger System

The Hunger Games

We don't really see President Snow do all that much on his own. Most of the direct conflict that Katniss faces is not against him, but against his underlings and the larger Capitol government. The few interactions we see between her and President Snow are mainly the two of them talking, and this is where we see the kind of threat he poses.

President Snow never lies to Katniss, not even once, and this is the true genius behind his character. He doesn't have to lie to or deceive Katniss, because the truth is enough to keep her complicit.

Katniss knows that fighting Snow and the Capital will lead to total war and destruction- the kind where there are survivors, but no winners. Snow tells her to imagine thousands upon thousands of her people dead, and that's exactly what happens. The entirety of District 12 gets bombed to ashes, Peeta gets brainwashed and turned into a human weapon, and her sister Prim, the very person she set out to protect at the beginning of the story, dies just before the Capitol's surrender. The districts won, but at a devastating cost.

Even after President Snow is captured and put up for execution, he continues to hurt Katniss by telling her the truth. He tells her that the bombs that killed her sister Prim were not sent by him, but by the people on her side. He brings to her attention that the rebellion she's been fighting for might just implement a regime just as oppressive and brutal as the one they overthrew and he's right.

In the end, Katniss is not the one to kill President Snow. She passes up her one chance to kill him to take down President Coin instead.