#Disclaimer I didn’t even look at a wiki through typing this this is just the bullishit I can remember

[countdown-til-sanders-take-over]

However long you see fit; though I'm partial to longer stories myself. The only stipulation is to make it "Interesting."

So it all starts out with Fredbear’s Family dinner, an old pizza restaurant run by William Afton and Henry Emily. Their gimmick being animatronics that can sing and dance and even interact with guests through two special “Springlock” suits, that can switch between suit and animatronic form.

The first victim was Charlotte/Charlie Emily the daughter of Henry who went on to posses the Puppet. We see that drive by murder by a strange purple sprite in I believe a Fnaf 2 minigame, as well as the Security Puppet minigame in Pizzeria Simulator. After this they presumably have to shut down this location, and the first (or one of the first. There’s a lot of fucking pizza restaurants) Freddy Fazbear’s is opened, this being probably the Fnaf 2 location.

Next would be the setup for Sister Location as old Willy Afton has already gotten into the murdering business and the next logical solution is to build the Funtime Animatronics, specifically designed to capture children for murder and experimentation with a substance called remnant, essentially soul juice. The other dead Afton kid, The Crying Child/Evan, could have died beforehand and would logically make more sense to have died first and that set off the experimentation, but Elizabeth’s room is already empty during Fnaf 4. Anyway one of these animatronics is Circus Baby, and despite her father’s instructions to stay away from her Elizabeth is enamored by Baby. On the grand opening of Circus Baby’s Pizza World she gets a little too close and the giant claw inside Baby grabs her, she dies, and is now possessing Baby.

Now that we’re already at least two dead kids in comes the first actual game, Fnaf 4, but it’s minigames come first. You are a young child who saw something that made you terrified of Freddy’s, but your birthday at the end of the week is going to be there. Most of the week is spent being tormented by your brother wearing a Foxy mask and getting scared by animatronics. An Easter egg on the tv reveals an actual concrete year, 1983. When it actually gets to your birthday your brother and his friends decide that it would be funny to have you give Fredbear/Freddy/Golden Freddy a big old kiss, but you’re crying, and springlock suits don’t react well to moisture. Freddy’s head snaps shut, and you’re horribly injured. The game play is you defending yourself from the Nightmare animatronics, nightmares on your deathbed. The final night ends with a flatline. You are now presumably the first spirit inside of Golden Freddy.

Fnaf 2! Summer of 1987! You are a night guard in a recently (reopened?) Pizzeria with some old withered animatronics and a weird Puppet. There are also a new wave of Toy animatronics connected to a criminal database, trying to keep someone out, but they’re acting a bit haywire. Or perhaps you just look a lot like the murderer. Throughout that game there are a lot of death minigames, showing a Purple man murdering children, or just the aftermath. There’s also one minigame, “Give gifts, Give life” showing that weird Puppet putting the bodies of four children into the four members of the main band, and for a split second a fifth child with Golden Freddy. If you play through the game all the way you get fired for “tampering with the animatronics.”

Fnaf 1! You are the night guard in yet another pizzeria, the phone guy tells you something about the bite of 87, that they might move around a bit to keep them from rusting up, and to survive the five nights! You do so, but you notice a ghostly fifth animatronic, a yellow version of Freddy, along with a Missing Children’s incident discussed in newspaper clippings. Five dead kids, five animatronics? You are yet again fired for tampering with animatronics.

Fnaf 5: Sister Location! William Afton’s name is confirmed within You are a maintenance technician for an underground rental service for the Funtime animatronics. You are told to control them by administering controlled shocks. Naturally, they try to kill you. But not all of them. One of them, Baby, tries to keep you alive. Over the course of the first four nights the animatronics are all brought to the “scooping room” and Baby is supposed to go tonight, but she already seems hollow. Regardless, you follow her instructions and take the chip she gives you, and she leads you to the scooping room. You get scooped, and someone is watching you. Ennard, an amalgamation of all the Funtimes, and they plan to use your skin to blend into humanity. In the custom night cutscenes you we that you don’t die, but you do rot and also turn purple, and you eventually vomit out the robot spaghetti. You are somehow still alive. At the end of Sister Location there’s a cutscene that reveals that you have been playing as Micheal Afton, going through the locations as a nightguards trying to atone for your father’s mistakes. He found his sister, and he is coming to kill his father. Fnaf 3 could have happened before or after, the voice is over footage of the ashes from the Fnaf 3 fire.

Fnaf 3! Night guard in a rotting Pizzeria turned horror attraction, and they just got a new attraction. A rotting golden Bonnie that was in a secret room boarded up room. Weird, it still works. As you play though you are haunted by the phantom’s of various animatronics, but the Puppet has a reflection. One of the minigames shows the purple murderer getting chased into the backroom by the spirits of the dead children, and he gets into the golden Bonnie springlock suit, but it’s raining, and the building is decaying. All the animatronic parts unlock and crush him inside, he should be dead, but he’s still twitching. All of these mini Agnes have been setting up to the happiest day minigame, where presumably Evan gets a proper birthday party and the souls of the missing children are set free. But one of them isn’t done, as Golden Freddy’s head isn’t shown with a light extinguished in the good ending. If you manage to evade Springtrap killing you, the game ends with the Fnaf 3 location mysteriously burning to the ground.

Fnaf 6: Pizzeria Simulator! You are running your very own Freddy Fazbear’s Establishment, but you have to abide by the specifications of paragraph four in your contact. Over the course of four nights four animatronics will apear in the back alley, and your job is to salvage them. First Scrap Baby, who according to a conversation in the source codes of Scottgames and Fnafworld, got kicked out of Ennard along to way. Molten Freddy, an amalgamation that apears to have the eyes of the Funtime animatronics inside it. LEFT-E, a new animatronic with suspiciously familiar stripped arms visible inside of it, and Scraptrap, because he always comes back. There are six different endings, two of which are important. The lorekeeper ending where the man talking to you through tapes explains various things like the scooper, how the Funtimes were made, remnant, and how Left-e was designed to capture the puppet. The true ending is after you’ve salvaged the animatronics, played the security puppet, fruity maze, and midnight motorist minigames all the way through to find their lore, and survived five nights. Uhhh probably better to just go watch Fnaf 6 Ending Brightened then listen to me explain it but the tape man id Henry, you are once again presumably Micheal. He’s gathered you all here to set the spirits free, and to burn away the last remaining bits of these murders. He sets fire to the building, and you and the animatronics burn with it. His daughter, your sister, and the spirits of presumably other murdered children are all set free. William Afton is finally dead, and it’s over. You can all rest.

Fnaf 7/Ultimate Custom Night: You are William Afton getting tortured in Hell, dying over and over, at the mercy of “The Vengeful Spirit,” or, “The one you should not have killed”. Or, simply, Cassidy. The second spirit inside Golden Freddy. The weird red alligator guy known as Old Man Consequences from Fnaf World tells her to leave the demon to his demons, to rest her own soul.

And with that, the saga is over.

So then Fnaf VR is released-

[hungarianbee]

Way of the Witcher: bits of lore

Disclaimer:  Post contains spoilers to the Witcher games These things may be canon-typical, but the following trigger warnings apply if you want to check out the cards: gore, monster dismemberment, needles, body horror, insects and spiders

“In a world plagued by horrors and monstrosities humanity desperately needed a new type of weapon to turn back the tide. Created by ingenious Alzur, witchers — professional monster slayers of exceptional strength, speed, and agility were tasked to end the threat once and for all. Organized into different schools they honed their craft and passed their knowledge onto novices in training. Some of them were destined to become the legendary heroes and protectors of humanity. Others — the very thing they were supposed to fight…”

Since the gwent expansion was anounced I followed it with rapt attention; every bit of lore is a gem in my eyes. I decided to write down my thoughts of the cards and lore pieces revealed in a post. Share that knowledge around, amirite?

The post references Gwent cards which were leaked (2020 november-december). The theme is mutation and everything that comes with it; namely sweet-sweet lore of the lesser known witcher schools: the Bears, Cats, Vipers and Griffins.

Tucker in, under the cut there is 4.5k analysis of each card that came out.

We’re starting with a theme, then work our way throught the 4 schools (each contain the following:  a leader, a mentor, an adept, a general witcher, a specific job, an item, a school relevant monster, 2  known witchers and a location), then go through a Witcher 1 throwback, Salamandra, and round it with a few new monsters and neutral cards. 

While I describe most of the cards concisely and all the known witchers and locations are on my blog, you might want to look the cards in their (small) glory: [DO IT HERE]

Sounds good? Here we go!

Edit: [this source is better]

The theme is mutation - be it monsters created by transmutation, witchers or salamadra

If that is true, there are monster cards that seemingly stand out: the Succubus and the Phooca

If we are to believe that they do connect to the mutation theme, then

(1) we can conclude that Phoocas (a rare, and more dangerous form of Nekkers; they can pull your head off by sheer force, watch out) are a natural mutation of the original species,

(2) but we’re still left with the Succubi (an inherently demonic creature). They might have chosen it because of its appearance: succubi have horns and goat-like legs. (Note: in the graphic novel “House of Glass” the succubus character has wings, but lacks hooves. In that sense, she could be mutated.)

Breaking it down into factions/schools (some of the cards can be paired up; these cards are interpreted together):

School of the Viper: starting with the vipers, because they are my favourite

Viper Witcher Mentor & Viper Witcher Adept: the flavour text says that the Viper mentors are exceptionally cold and ruthless, and that’s underlined by the story the art tells: the mentor busies himself with sharpening a blade, and in the background we can see the adept attempting to kill his best friend goat, as was ordered. The mentor watches this from the corner of his eye. Young Vipers are to kill their pets (which they nurtured for years) before becoming a fully-fledged witcher. The latter could mean that the boy depicted on the card hasn’t even gone through the Trial of Grasses.

Viper Witcher: On the card we see an unknown Viper crouching over a royalty he killed. I feel like this type of card is meant to represent what we think a general Witcher of said school would be like. Apparently Vipers just like to slay the nobility *shrug*. The flavour text informs us, that Vipers call their two swords “fangs”, and that their style consists of fast and furious attack aimed to overwhelm the enemy.

Viper Witcher Alchemist: Every school has a specialty; Vipers are proficient in potion or poison making. The right side of the alchemist’s face seems to have healed burn marks; a blown up concoction might have caused it.

Ivar Evil-Eye: So far there’s little to know about Ivar. He was either the Master of the Viper Keep, or the founder himself (gwent suggests the latter). He’s described as heavily scarred (facial scars suggests burns and slash marks too), and each of them has a terrible story to tell.

Warritt the All-Seeing: Warritt is a (newly introduced) Viper with heavy disfiguration to the upper part of his face: his eyes are sealed shut (possibly by burn marks, though his hair remains intact). The art shows Warritt drawing a modified version of the Supirre sign in the air to help with his loss of sight. As the wiki says: “Supirre is a Sign used for eavesdropping. Drawn on a solid surface, it allows the people near this surface to listen nearby conversations which would be normally inaudible due to the distance or background noise.” It was only used in Sapkowsky’s second volume of the Hussite trilogy (not yet translated to English), which is entirely separate from the Witcher novels.

Kolgrim: Fate laughed at this Viper. As a kid he was swapped by a weeper, saved by a witcher, than rejected by his own mother who believed that the fake child was the real one. Later, as a grown witcher Ivar instructed him to find a lost weapon diagram. On his journey he was accused - ironically - in White Orchard of kidnapping a child. Invoking a Temerian law, Kolgrim was told to cleanse their crypt (as seen on the card) then he can go. The truth is revealed in Witcher 3 - Kolgrim was beheaded by the villagers before he could even step into the crypt. To add insult to injury: the child was eaten by a drowner. The gwent card therefore shows the optimistic outcome: that Kolgrim reached the crypt and passed in battle. And what’s up with a crypt full of wraiths anyway? White Orchard is shady, guys. (Lil’ trivia: Kolgrim’s eyes are yellow-green.)

Vypper: Basically an overgrown snake that likes damp marshes (they even fight the local kikimores for territory). They only relate to the mutation theme by their nature - they resemble the “school’s animal”.

Gorthur Gvaed: The Bloodgate Keep is located in the chasms of the Tir Tochair mountains. It’s built so high were you to look down from the bridge leading into the keep, you would only see fog (one could wonder how the vipers trained in these conditions). The bridge is made so that you’d have to cross the lookout tower - it might have served as a check in spot. The post itself is circled by the stone coils of a snake; the top is open and has a huge lit bonfire in the middle for warmth-keeping and possibly signaling. Unluckily, it didn’t stop the Usurper’s army from destroying the keep.

Coated Weapons: They leaned heavily into the alchemy and assassin side of the school. Vipers coat their blades with an acidic liquid, so they can kill a man with a nick of it.

School of the Cat:

Cat Witcher Mentor & Cat Witcher Adept: On the adept card we can see a young Cat walking the tightrope blindfolded (they start with close to the ground and slowly increase the distance with time); the mentor is looking up at him. Like the Vipers, Cat mentors are nonchalant about risking the kids as seen from the flavour text: “If you fall, it’s over. Your nine lives are up, kid.” Furthermore, the background of the Cat Witcher Adept card shows the not yet destroyed Stygga Citadel. The Cat Witcher Mentor is in the same scene and we can see lots of potatoes and cabbages; cats definitely eat their veggies.

Cat Witcher: The card shows a Cat in the heat of battle mid-jump; his hood is up, blood is flying everywhere. The flavour text emphasizes that cats are known for their mad bloodlust, not stopping killing even after the enemy capitulated.

Cat Witcher Saboteur: A Cat perches next to the window, a smoking bomb in hand, eavesdropping on nobles. A rope is hung from somewhere out of the pic, possibly for a quick exit. Vesemir comments that these are many-a deeds the cats did that taint the reputation of witchers.

Gezras of Leyda: Gezras is a not yet known redheaded Cat witcher. Following the pattern he seems to be the founder of the Cat School. His flavour text shows that even back then (when the mutagens made Cats emotionless) they were inclined to dislike humans: “Take a contract from Aen Seidhe over a dh’oine any day, as you’re far less likely to receive a knife between the ribs in place of coin.”

Brehen: Now this cat embodies the Cat madness. He’s known as the Cat of Iello because he massacred everyone there. He was consequently shunned by all the schools, and he was even convinced that Vesemir put a kill order on his head. He met Geralt later in the 1240s on his way to claim the bounty for the princess. Thinking that Geralt was there to rob him of his chance of the bounty, Brehen took a priestess as hostage (this is what we see on the gwent card). Geralt managed to convince him to put away the blade, and they parted without crossing blades. When meeting with the striga he scoffed into her face that “she won’t be his first royal”. But his luck ran out. The Temerians buried him and fabricated the story of a cowardly witcher stealing their coin. I’m halfway convinced we see Brehen in the netflix series.

Gaetan: This boy broke into the fandom like a bulldozer. After the folks in Honorton cheated him of his pay and tried to kill him, Gaetan flew into rage and killed everyone there except Millie, a girl who reminded him of his sister. That’s the scene we see on the card. And then Geralt robs/kills him.

Saber-Tooth Tiger (Stealth): Another huge animal/monster related to the school. It’s story is this: “The prized possession of royal menagerie, until a commando of Scoia��tael assaulted the exhibition, released the beast, and set it upon its cruel masters. Since that day, it has acquired a selective taste for human flesh.” Another cat turning against humans.

Stygga Castle: An outside view of what we already saw on the Cat Witcher Adept card. It’s located on a cliff, and the sun shines into it just right (so that the Cats can bask in the light). The walls form a circle where they shelter the inner grounds, and a bigger tower emerges in the middle. The Castle could be reached by the thin bridge connecting it to the mainland, or by the cliffs (if one is brave enough).

Making a Bomb: Cats seem to have a specialty in bombs. Guess where Lambert got his interest from *winkwink*

School of the Griffin: lots of pairs in this one

Griffin Witcher Mentor & Griffin Witcher Adept: Compared to the other schools, this pairing is tame - the adept is climbing a tree to retrieve a crossbow bolt. We can see the mentor in the background. On the mentor card the adept waves down with the retrieved crossbow bolt in hand. It shows a kind of comradeship that’s not present in the other 3 schools. The flavour text emphasizes the importance of knowledge. Students are afforded to choose their final Trial: recite the entire Liber Tenebrum (Book of Shadows; one of Keldar’s favourite books) or steal a griffin’s egg. Noone’s chosen the former.

Griffin Witcher: The witcher is shown shooting down a griffin. According to the flavour text they prefer hunting with silver-tipped arrowheads instead of swords.

Archgriffin & Griffin Witcher Ranger: On the Griffin Ranger card we see the witcher crouching over track marks. On the archgriffin card he found the albino (or very old) monster, who’s already killed someone (probably a lumberjack, judging by the axe). According to the flavour text, Griffin Witchers are trained to be professional trackers; nothing can stop them to reach their prey. Even though archgriffins are considered the embodiment of courage, loyalty and fighting spirit, the gwent card corrects the notion that the Griffin Witcher were named after the monster. In truth, they got the name in honour of their founder’s mentor, a knight named Gryphon.

Erland of Larvik: Continuing the trend, Erland is the founder of the Griffin School (one of the two that are confirmed 100%). He’s from the first generation of witcher, mutated by Alzur himself. After the Order began fracturing he had a confrontation with Arnaghan (who’ll be the founder of the bear school). Arnaghad almost killed one of his brothers, slashed Erland across the face then parted ways with the Order and left Morgraig Castle with his own group. Seeing that the the remaining witchers couldn’t go on like that, he grabbed his 13 best friend and left to Kaer Seren, where (after purging it from spectres) he founded the Griffin School which focused on magic, preparedness and flexibility. His teaching emphasized knightly values (mimicking his long-dead mentor, a knight named Gryphon) in hopes that it would make future witchers’ life easier. It didn’t.

Coen & Keldar: The cards are mainly connected by background. Coen is finished killing what appears to be an albino arachas (but it’s definitely an insectoid), while Keldar’s taking notes. We can rightly assume that he’s updating their bestiary, since he’s one of the teachers/mentors who focus on gathering and sharing knowledge. Coen’s flexibility shows in the flavour text: “There is no such thing as a fair fight. Every advantage and every opportunity that arises is used in combat.” Not very knightly, is it?

Kaer Seren: The “Star Keep” Erland and his friends fled to. It was used by the Order’s mages to mutate witchers (that’s why it was haunted by spectres). It’s located at the edge of the Dragon mountains by the sea between Poviss and Kovir. It’s said to possess the great library, which later mages tried to get for themselves. They messed up: by bringing down an avalanche on the Keep, that knowledge was destroyed. The keep was badly damaged and many witchers died.

Target Practice: The Griffin School’s specialty is their precise aim - they “can split an apple in two from a hundred paces”.

School of the Bear:

Bear Witcher Mentor & Bear Witcher Adept: The adept card shows that young witcher are taught to catch fish by hand (just like their school relevant animal). On the mentor card the elder witcher leads a group of younglings in the mountains; possibly out to teach tracking. The cards are connected by flavour text. The young Bear witcher-would-be’s need to complete the Trial of the Mountain, which consists of them climbing Mount Gorgon (also known as the Devil Mountain; it is the highest peak of the Amell range) to retrieve a runestone. The Trial often ends with the kids frozen to death. The Bear Mentor card’s flavour confirms it: “If you’re unsure of the way, just keep a lookout for markers - the frozen corpses of would-be witchers.” This sounds ominous - don’t they collect their fallen?

Bear Witcher: Bears are solitary hunters as seen in the flavour text: “life alone can be tough”. The witcher in the pic just dismembered what looks like a ghoul (with a tail?).

Bear Witcher Quartermaster: This one I like. The Quartermaster is an amputee (missing one of his arms, which was taken by a bear; must have won that fight one-handed), yet they still found a job for him where he can be useful. His flavour text suggest he likes Mahakam mead.

Arnaghad: The founder of the Bear School, he never felt kinship with his fellow witchers. After attacking a witcher named Rhys over a contract, wounding him deeply from shoulder to waist, he returned to Morgraig, attacked Erland then left with his possé to found the Bear School - Haern Caduch - in the Amell Mountains. Later he almost died in a betrayal, which resulted in another schism and the foundation of the Viper School.

Gerd: Gerd’s a legendary witcher who fled to Skellige after allying with a Usurper instead of his daughter, who later issued a warrant for his arrest. He has a busy time in Skellige: first slaying a dragon, befriending the Jarl Torgeir, killing a bunch of sirens, losing so many weapon diagrams you wouldn’t believe, losing half his pay and silver sword on gwent, escaping Nilfgaard and managing to slay a striga, killing some of his pursuers, only to be caught up in the siege of Torgeir’s castle, where he died in the ruins. On the card he’s showing Bear-typical strength: he’s tearing apart a siren with his bear hands.

Junod of Belhaven: Junod had a dubious background, but was thought to be the child of a brave dwarf and a giantess. He’s a huge man, with a big bushy beard and bald head. His sobriquet is false; he took it after Ivo, because he liked the ring of it. He was known as a strict haggler and a bit of a gambler. In 1243 he took a contract in hopes of cash (he wanted to forge the Grandmaster Ursine Armour). The subterranean monster was said to live in the caverns. Junod drew bear signs and wrote a warning on the wall (this is the scene we see on the card). He was however ill-prepared; the beast turned out to be a shaelmaar (a type of relic Gaetan slew once) that killed him in that very cavern.

Dire Bear: Once again related to the school in question, the Dire Bear is stuck with so much weaponry that it looks like a walking armory. Lots of witchers must have tried to slay it, yet it still kicks - just like Bear Witchers, it’s resilient till the very end.

Haern Caduch: Built into the side of the Amell Mountains, it’s the coldest environment of all the schools. As with the other schools, the Bears were forced out of it due to folk riots. It was left in disrepair to be buried under snow and ice (as seen on the card). It’s name could be translated as “Piercing Whiskers”.

Armor Up: As Bear’s are more likely to stand in the way of attack than dodge, they need to wear a heavy armour at all times.

Salamandra:

Roland Bleinheim & Gellert Bleinheim: Witcher 1 characters. They are thought to be brothers, leading the Salamandra organization. As drug lords one heads the fisstech operation in Vizima’s sewers (Roland), the other in the swamps (Gellert). The flavour text pretty much matches: both of them wondering what the other one is doing.

Salamandra Mage: The art itself was already leaked in China around 2 years back, and there were a few theories. One of them was that the man depicted is Zerrikanian, and I think that’s correct. Both the facial tattoo, darker skin, thinly braided hair and fire magic points in that direction. Azar Javed (a known Salamandra fire mage) happens to be a Zerrikanian escapee too.

Salamandra Lackey: A girl with the Salamandra-stapled mask runs from a city guard. The flavour text says the following: “Lackeys are expected to perform their first five jobs for no pay, demonstrating their passion for the gig.” The organization monitors from the beginning that only those remain who are extremely loyal to their cause.

Fallen Rayla: A little background for those who are unfamiliar with her: Rayla of Lyria was a veteran of the Nilgaardian Wars. She harbours anti-nonhuman sentiments after she was captured by Scoia’taels and severely maimed. The Rayla we see on the card is a mutant - in Witcher 1 she was supposedly shot down by Scoia’tael, and Salamandra found her close to death, subjected her to mutation. She was killed by Geralt.

Salamander: The card shows a bright blue spotted salamander. It has two tails and heads (possibly grown together?). The Salamander is a symbol of the organization. Metaphorically speaking it could mean, that Salamandra thought of itself as something untouchable: “best to avoid petting them, as the salamander, when threatened, secretes a deadly toxin”.

Failed Experiment: The card - ironically - thrives when it’s poisoned. The “experiment” only resembles a human in shape. It’s clutching the table ends, as if trying to escape still.  It’s fair to assume that they later dissected it: “even failed experiments can serve a purpose”.

Salamandra Abomination: A step further from the failed experiment - we see the results of pushing science’s boundaries. Only the skull is left intact, everything else of the body is covered with insectoid-like growths.

Stolen Mutagens: Gruesome organ harvesting. The witcher heart (?) glows, which is either an artistic decision (probable) or the mages sent magic into the body, and the mutagens light up (like angiographia). Three types of mutagens can be harvested: red (strength), blue (magic) or green (resilience). I headcanon that the amount they inject of the three types can vary - that’s how you get strength inclined witchers like the wolves (red), or big ass mothers like the bears (green).

Salamandra Hideout: There are multiple hideouts in Witcher 1 (outskirt of Visima, crypt in sewers and one in the trade quarters). The one depicted here is the fisstech lab in the sewers. It shows a dimly lit, cobwebbed room. There’s an elevation where a body lays on the table. The elevation’s floor is gridded, so the blood and other fluids can freely flow down into the sewer water, where many bodies are already discarded recklessly.

Neutral:

Alzur & Viy & Koshchey: Alzur was a charismatic mage and spell inventor, who created many horrible monsters, like the koshchey (with the spell: Alzur’s Double Cross) and the Viy (a huge centipede-like insectoid). He was also the one who did the lion’s share of work with the witcher’s mutation.

Cosimo Malaspina: Cosimo was the teacher of Alzur. He was known for his knowledge in hybridization and genetic modification. Him and Alzur were the true creators of the witchers sect. On the gwent card, three man are shown prodding at a mutated body. Cosimo (the old dude) is in the middle, Alzur might be the one on the left and that leaves Idarran on the right. His flavour text paints him as cold and clinical, someone without empathy: “Children keep asking him for gifts. He doesn’t know why, but it really helps with finding subjects for his experiments.”

Idarran of Ulivo & Idr & Wererat: Idarran was one of the contributers of the witcher experiments. He’s an expert in hybridization and genetic modification, whose teacher was Alzur. He was a pale kid who lived in the canals of Vizima and experimented on rats at the age of 5. He found beauty in gruesome creations, like the Wererat (a human-sized rat on roids) and the Idr (a big centipede-like insectoid). He’s disdained by Geralt for his many monsters.

Triangle within a Triangle: It’s a magic spell used to introduce a series of mutations and to greatly increase the mass of a given body. That way they can create huge monstrosities, like the koshchey. Adepts often confuse it with a pentagram which can lead to infernal disasters.

Selective mutation: The card shows a close up of a young man’s eyes - one mutated (catlike) one human. His skin shows his high toxicity level, ashen with prominent veins. He’s held down as alchemists prepare to inject a yellow concoction into the human eye. It’s possible that after the success of witchers the mages tried to recreate the changes in smaller scale, then unmake it in turn, unsuccessfully.

Witcher Student: This is not really a card, but I included it anyway. The card’s ability is - ironically - doomed, and to add insult to injury, its flavour text is the following well-known fact: “Four out of ten boys survive… at most.” It’s also a point for black humour that the gwent commentators added: the Trial of Grasses card boosts this unit significantly.

Berengar: He’s a Wolf School Witcher who blamed his school for denying him a normal life and consequently abandoned them. In Witcher 1 Geralt can decide to kill or spare him. In a letter he admits that he was a coward because he betrayed Kaer Morhen and worked with Salamadra in hope that they can undo his mutation. His card references a questline in Witcher 1, where he tried to reason with the vodyanoi (~lovecraftian fish people) to spare the village’s prize-winning cow, named Strawberry. This is non-canon; in the game Geralt takes over the quest to do this instead.

Leo: Another Witcher 1 character. He was an orphan taken in by Vesemir. He was a kind-hearted but hot-headed man, who had all the training but not the mutations and the experience - he never killed a man. The flavour text of his gwent card kind of mocks his death: “He would have caught the arrow if he only had some heads-up.” He’s burned on a pyre and his cenotaph can be found south of Kaer Morhen.

Geralt: Quen: The last classical sign that wasn’t yet a card. In the art, Geralt is wearing the Manticore armour

Snowdrop: She’s a not yet seen character; impish looking female bard with light blond hair (flowers braided on the side) who plays a medieval version of the fiddle to a rooster. There’s a horseshoe hanging from the hem of his pants. She’s also seen in the gwent: journey #3 launch trailer. She’s narrating that she was saved by Alzur. Alzur told her about his plans of creating witchers to fight the beasts of the Continent, and she admired him so much she spread his story (”let me tell you about the greatest sorceress to ever lived”). Their story will unveil in the next week, I’ll probably update accordingly. It’s also interesting that Alzur says in the gwent intro (regarding witchers): “Bards will toil to do justice to their feats.” As if his own successes and experiences will be mirrored in his creations. Projecting much?

Monsters:

Viy & Idr: both of them are centipede-like insectoids conjured by infamous mages (see: Alzur and Idarran)

Wererat: same can be said about this one. Idarran experimented on Vizima’s sewer rats since the age of 5. This human sized abomination was the end result.

Succubus: We already discussed how the “Succubus” doesn’t fit the theme. Other interesting thing is the surrounding of her - in the background we can see a skull full of some kinda of dark liquid; she’s also holding a goblet. I’m not saying she’s drinking blood, but if she does, it would shed some questions as succubi don’t need to drink blood at all.

Phooca: As nekkers’ rare big brother, phoocas are ogroids that have the strength to rip a man’s head off with their bear hands. According to the wiki, in Celtic folklore they are regarded as shapeshifting fairies.

Koshchey: A witcher 1 boss, koshcheys are spider-like abominations summoned by mages. The woman standing her ground in the picture is Visenna (Geralt’s druid mom). In the story she’s the one to kill the first koshchey ever created.

Spontaneous Evolution: Under the Red Moon the wolf mutated into an amalgamation of eyes and teeth. Malaspina possibly added something to the mix that proved unstable. The card’s name is kind of ironic - this change is not spontaneous (it was induced) but could be related to evolution (it would imply that this form is somehow advantageous to the current environment and helps adaptation). (Note: in my opinion spontaneous generation would be a better term: it’s the thought that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter.)

Hybrid: the card shows a two-headed wolf or dog. Pretty straight-forward.

Chimera: A creature created my Cosimo Malaspina. He combines the genes of a fiend and griffin, then added a trace of insectoid and wyvern. It kind of looks like a furred wyvern with antlers. Interestingly the frightener (an insectoid; a rare result of magical experiment) is also called a chimera.

Dol Dhu Lokke: a new monster lair location. The depending on how you translate “lokke” the Elder can be read as “black valley place” or “alluring black valley”. It’s so dangerous - housing many-a horrors - that even a witcher thinks twice before going near it.

Interesting tidbits

Coen has hair, which is weird because so far he was described in all sources as bald.

There used to be a card  that was also called Viper Witcher, which is now referred to as “Kingslayer”

The Bear Witcher’s face was drawn after one of CDPR’s employee.

The Koshchey’s card title has a typo: “Koschchey”.

Easter eggs (mainly in flavour text)

The Spontaneous Evolution card references The Powerpuff Girls intro: “Professor Malaspina accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction - compound X.”

The Bear Witcher card might reference a song of Baloo from the Jungle Book (The Bare Necessities): “Life alone on the road can be tough - be sure to bring all the bare necessities.”

[zaph1337]

Monster Hunter Rating 16: Diablos, Tyrant of the Desert

Remember when I mentioned in the last review how Cephadromes try to keep their packs as far from a monster called “Diablos” as possible because of how freaking aggressive they are? Well, speak of the devil and he appears! Get it, ‘cause it’s called “Diablos” and “el diablo” is the Spanish term for--you know what, let’s just talk about the dragon.

(How it appears in Monster Hunter 1)

(How it appears in Monster Hunter Rise)

Appearance: Like Basarios, Diablos are Flying Wyverns--which is to say, they fit the description of wyverns in real-world mythology. Though, uh, I don’t think wyverns are supposed to have giant horns and tusks blocking out their faces. Seriously, look at the Rise render and tell me how easy it is to find its eyes. These guys must have really sucky vision. They’ve also got a Triceratops-esque frill and heavily armored backs. Their tail is also interesting, both because it’s a club and because it looks like a pair of human lungs. I hope to God it doesn’t actually keep its lungs in there, because using the casing around your lungs as a club sounds like a terrible idea. It also has weird horse teeth, which you probably didn’t notice because the tusks and horns take up most of the face. We’ll get into why a dragon has those soon.

If I ever actually fought one of these things, I’d probably find it a lot more intimidating, but it just looks kinda comical. Okay, the MH1 render makes it look disturbing, but that’s mostly ‘cause the face is more visible than the Rise one and it has beady white eyes. It still looks like a very clumsy creature, and all it would take to rectify that, in my opinion, is to get rid of the tusks to make the face less cluttered. 5/10.

Behavior: So, why do Diablos have horse teeth? Because why have fangs when your diet mostly consists of cacti? That’s right, this dragon, which is named after the freaking devil, isn’t even a predator, it’s an herbivore. How often do you hear about herbivorous dragons? Probably not very, if I had to guess. The thing about being an herbivore in the desert, though, is that aside from cacti, there’s not a lot to eat. Even then, a Diablos’ favorite type of cactus is a variety of large cacti that can grow up to 12 feet tall, but those suckers are pretty rare, so Diablos are always on the lookout for places where they grow. This often leads them to fight with other Diablos or even predatory monsters over territory, ‘cause once you find a spot with plenty of good food in the freaking desert, you kinda wanna keep it. This is why Diablos are so aggressive: everything is a potential competitor for their space, so they have to be willing to fight everything. The only monsters that Diablos won’t try to fight are Elder Dragons (we’ll get into those later).

Okay, so normally I’d stay away from this topic, but I feel obligated to mention that Diablos have a breeding season, and that females in heat turn black in color; these Black Diablos are considered a “subspecies” of Diablos, though the games themselves point out that this is a misnomer as they’re, y’know, the same species. Black Diablos are still treated as being different enough from normal Diablos to be close to a subspecies, so I’ll talk about them some other time. As for regular Diablos, there’s not a lot to understand about them; they’re feared for their temper and they eat cacti. The fact that they’re herbivorous dragons, of all things, is still interesting enough to cover for how basic they are. 6/10.

Abilities: This is unfortunately where Diablos falls shortest. It has no ranged attacks to speak of, and it’s too heavy to fly for extended periods of time. It instead relies on surprising speed and overwhelming strength in battle, charging at opponents head-on and using its tail as a club that can easily shatter stone. Its powerful legs are also good for burrowing through sand, and if it’s ever trapped in said sand, it’ll use its wings to push itself out. It’s certainly dangerous, but not exactly flashy or interesting. 4/10.

Equipment: Aside from having Diablos’ color scheme and texture, something several of its weapons have in common is that they’re pretty blunt, even when they’re cutting weapons. A good example is the pair of Dual Blades called the Diablos Bashers:

I like how their heads each look like a half of a Diablos’ tail club. Speaking of which, how’d you like to use one of those yourself? Well, with this Hammer called the Diablos Maul, you can fulfill your fantasy of beating a Diablos to death with its own tail (Disclaimer: Zaph does not support having a fantasy of killing something with a weapon made to look like a part of its body. If you regularly feel the desire to do so, please seek out a therapist):

And just ‘cause I think it looks cool and I haven’t shown one of these yet, here’s the Diablos Gunlance, complete with shield:

A lot shinier and pointier than some of the other Diablos weapons. As for the armor, it looks basically how you’d expect it to:

I don’t like how the male armor has a helmet (that also looks like it has tiny fangs for some reason) while the female armor just has a hairband because wE nEeD tO sEe PuRdY gIrL. Listen, I’m straight, but I don’t want the armor sets for women to be designed for my viewing pleasure, even if it’s in a way that doesn’t sexualize them (though considering the chest-piece on her armor outlines her cleavage, I don’t think I can say that sexualization didn’t occur here). Other than that, the armor looks fine. The equipment as a whole gets a 7/10.

Final Thoughts and Tally: I’m kinda disappointed that a monster called “Diablos” didn’t turn out to be very impressive, but it’s far from a failure. I don’t really remember a lot of what its fights were like when I saw them on a MH Rise stream, but I do remember that Diablos was talked about as a difficult monster to beat, so it clearly has a reputation. Again, I’ve only played the Rise demo and know everything else (outside what the wiki says) from streams, so you’re not getting the opinion of an expert here. If I ever get the game (and I plan to), then I won’t be surprised if my opinion on this guy changes. But until then, 5/10.

[inr-lya]

Mermaid RP Request

This plot has been in my mind since- who knows when, lmao. Probs a few weeks ago, and since i’m having trouble finding rp partners on amino, I’ve decided to extend my search here to tumblr. 

As to not waste anyone's time, I'll say it beforehand that I'll be playing Muse B in a bxg or nbxg relationship in which I'm both the girl. I've played as the guy way too often; I miss my girl now. 🥺 and, this is a lit to adv-lit rp, maybe even novella if i’m really into it, and my responses are usually around 400+ to almost a 1000 words. Highest is just a little over 2000, but again, only if I’m really into it, lmao. Feel free to ask for my writing examples.

Before I get to the plot of the rp, let me list some information/rules of mine for compability’s sake.

General; 

♡ I'm over 18, so no minors, please!

♡ I use drawn and realistic FCs if you need pics of the oc, though I don't mind what type you use. Speaking of which, I’m from amino, so I have a wiki on my girl, and if you have amino too, feel free to ask for the link! If you don’t, feel free to ask me to copy paste the info to google docs or just ask whatever you feel you need for the rp :]

  ♡ I can play more than one character, maybe 2-3 max? Depends on their roles in the RP ig.

♡ I have no triggers, but please list me yours so I can avoid them.

♡ I'm not the type to send a message if you were to suddenly disappear, but I'd do it after 2 weeks because I'm tired of my PMs getting clogged up with dead chats. If you're still interested but you need more time, just let me know. I promise I'll wait, my ass literally never reached the middle of any 1x1 rp.

♡ Ngl, I'm getting busy af these days with uni life and plans being made with friends and family. I'm not complaining. I love it, and all I'm saying is I might not be able to reply often. It depends on how invested I am and the difference of our time zones, (mine's GMT+8 btw) but I'll try to give at least a reply every few days or weekly if you're willing to be patient with me.

However, the shorter the literacy, the faster and more often I reply. If we're doing just 400+ to 600+ words, I can reply multiple times a day. Also, I prefer this level of literacy for now, but I can fluctuate to longer responses.

♡ fyi, I'm very open to rp in discord as we can create a server with different channels for ooc chat, rp, notes, etc. If you're up for it, lmk! uwu

. . .

Rules

♡ If you're considering pm-ing me, please skip the small talk like “hey, how are you?”, and just straight-up give me details that you’d like to discuss about the rp. It makes me uncomfortable, lmao.

♡ Have good grammar, punctuation and spelling. I can ignore small mistakes or typos but not constant errors. (I can overlook faulty grammar, however, if you have the creativity to make up for it)

♡ Use 3rd POV

♡ No railroading.

♡ For romance, don't make your character fall in love with mine at first sight or after a few nice gestures unless being naive is a part of their personality. I prefer slow burn. Crushes are fine but don't make your oc feel like my oc is their definite soulmate or something, lmao.

♡ Don't spam me unless I've been absent for a week. I may be busy or not in the mood to RP, but if I'm not interested in continuing, I will let you know.

♡ Any drama, romantic or carnal interactions stay within the RP, do NOT pursue anything with me besides friendship or mere acquaintances, I swear this happens way too often and it's getting stressful. Speaking of which, don't make the RP just about smut like c'mon.

. . .

Okay! Now I can finally jump into the plot! It’s pretty simple, and unfortunately, it isn't mine to claim. I wanted to rp this plot with someone, but they didn't reply to me, and I have no way of finding them again so- yeah, that's the disclaimer if you think I'm stealing your plot or something.

Muse A is a marine biologist who spends their time either studying, finding inspiration for their upcoming projects, or simply take a breather all at the beach. This is where they find peace, where all of their worries melt away and nothing else matters except the present.

Muse A's favourite leisure activity is free diving along the coral reef, underwater caves and tunnels, and pretty much any nook and cranny they can fit into. They're graduating from their specialist residency soon and is searching for ideas and incentives for their thesis along the bays and coves. To be honest, they were looking to mostly procrastinate due to the pressure of a competitive environment finally catching up to them, perhaps a burnout they were trying to get over.

Imagine how they would feel upon discovering Muse B, a creature that had been believed to be a myth, one with an upper-body resembling a human, though covered in brilliant scales and specialised fins adapted to exclusively marine life, and the lower half of a fish, stranded within the abyss of a cavity that would've been completely submerged if it weren't for the extremely low tide that had kept the curious entity from escaping.

Due to Muse A's compassionate nature, they aid Muse B to their freedom, but as soon as an opportunity was in sight, Muse B fled without another glance at their saviour, never to be seen again no matter how many times Muse A were to return to where they were last found.

A few months had passed, and Muse A had since lost hope in their search of Muse B as there was practically zero evidence nor leads to help them unless they were to look any further towards the conspiracy theorists and their claims. They are now focusing entirely on their original, more believable research, unfortunately, they had picked the wrong day to go diving.

The weather had been anything but kind, the skies had gone dark faster than anyone could've predicted, and before Muse A could process what was happening, they were caught in the middle of a raging storm, thrown left and right by the unforgiving waves of the ocean before it all went black. When the light of the sun entered their eyes once more, they found themselves within a secluded area of the island, damp, wet sand beneath them and an image of a woman above, with shining doe eyes and...what is that? Seaweed on her head?

"Hey," she gasped, relieved. The corners of her mouth curled into a smile, her lips still trembling from the thought that she was too late.

"I still haven't thanked you for the last time we met."

An unlikely, most bizarre connection formed between them since, but eventually, the reality of the situation presented itself. Will Muse A tell the world to further the scientific discovery and their career or keep it a secret to preserve Muse B's species' safety?

Alright, and that's the end of the summary! Please read them thoroughly and contact me either through PM or comments. I do not respond to likes.

I look forward to hearing from you! 💜

[swiss-cheeze]

We All Sin Agent Hotchner || Aaron Hotchner

Request: YES/NO

Gender: none, they/them

Warnings: oh jesus, murders (duh), talk of sins, mentions of abortion, talk of sexual and physical abuse, child molestation, mention of a drug addiction.

Description: you’ve killed 12 by murder and another 13 by proxy, as you get interviewed by Hotch and Reid they finally find out why you killed up to 12 and another 13 but when you start mentioning the teams owns sins you get rather bored.

Disclaimer: OKAY BASICALLY, background before you read? Your parents went through a divorce when you were 12 and then your mother sexally and physically abused you at age 13; this is why you killed 12 people, however the other 13 you killed by proxy because they were all sinners. You got someone else to kill them for you (mentioned in the fic), the background to this is because your mother was catholic, so you grew up catholic; you couldn't kill those 13 other sinners because it's a sin but the 12 you could because it was the year for the divorce but the 13 you couldn't because that was from the sexual and physical abuse.

Disclaimer: I AM NOT RELIGIOUS, this is all based off of research from my own questions over the years as well as the quick engine search for this fic. The ‘sins’ the team has commited are ones I’ve found on their profiles on the Criminal Minds Wiki and twisted it a little to the use of the plot; GIDEON AND ELLE ARE MENTIONED IN THIS FIC AS MERE MENTIONS, THEY ARE NOT IN THE TEAM (this team consists of the OG; Prentiss, Hotch, Reid, Morgan, Garcia, Rossi and J.J.)

-------

“Jesus Christ what should we do?” Emily questioned as the team stood around the round table. They caught the unsub of course, however they needed a confession, and you were not budging.

“Thirteen murders and twelve by proxy,” J.J. muttered and looked to the victim board, “that's a lot before we got brought in, is there any significance that we can use against them?” the team looked to Spencer who simply shrugged.

“The number 13 is considered an unlucky number in some countries,” Spencer started, “the end of the Mayan calendar's 13th Baktun was superstitiously feared as a harbinger of the apocalyptic 2012 phenomenon. Fear of the number 13 has a specifically recognized phobia called triskaidekaphobia which was coined in 1911” Spencer ended his little ramble but it still did little for the team, you hadn't done anything towards those facts or any others that Spencer could recall, same with your twelve additional murders.

“Well we have to find a reason otherwise (Y/n) could have bail and hit again in a few years,” Aaron said as he leant against the chairs, “there has to be something”

“When (Y/n) was twelve their parents split?” Garcia questioned, “and then thirteen was when they oh no-”

“What, what you got baby girl?” Derek questioned as he moved to lean over Garcia's computer.

“Umm, okay these are direct quotes from a medical? Thing?” Garcia questioned again.

“That sounded like a question Garcia, what is it?” J.J. said fiercely.

“Okay okay umm,” Garcia did a little more typing, “at age thirteen (Y/n) was brought into their nearby medical centre from their house, because they lived with their mum, and they always came in with multiple bruises ‘in the shape of hands, occasionally cuts and multiple sexual assaults’ oh poor baby,” Garcia mumbled her last few words, “sexual assault from their mum at age thirteen? That would suck”

“If that's all we have to work with then that's what we’ll use,” Hotch said as he gathered a few files randomly, “Reid i want you to go into the room with (Y/n), set up a conversation regarding their childhood, specifically ages twelve and thirteen; (Y/n) is used to alpha males and females, they won't be expecting someone like you,” Emily snorted softly as Hotch handed Spencer the random files.

“And what do i do with these?” Spencer questioned, they literally were all random files and were not in order, that bugged the poor Doctor a little but he knew better than to fix it.

“Look through them alot,” Hotch responded, “pretend to fall back on things you already know from the profile and the murders, try and look through multiple files at once; (Y/n) is a curious killer but knows what they’ve done and the reason, they like to play with their food and in this case food is-”

“People got it,” Spencer said quickly before ducking out of the door, down the catwalk and towards the room you were being held.

“Hotch,” Derek said suddenly, “you do know this is about you right?” the man said, everyone looked up confused as their unit chief nodded.

“That’s why i sent in Reid, when (Y/n) gets fed up and calls for me i'll go in and i'll get the final details we need” and with that Hotch walked out of the door and in the same direction as Spencer as Derek showed the rest of the team how it was about Hotch.

-------

“(Y/n), you were sexually assaulted multiple times at the age of thirteen, tell me more about that?” Spencer questioned, you didn't budge in your seat nor did you show any signs of knowing what he was talking about besides the slight flinch he noticed when he mentioned the age.

“Why,” you said softly, your voice came out gravelly, “what is it you want to know?”

“Well, it was from your…” Spencer flipped through multiple files, making sure to keep them out of your line of sight before landing on a random one, “mother” you scoffed.

“Bitch, slag, whore, slut,” was all you said in response.

“How?” Spencer questioned.

“SHE MOLESTED ME,” you blew up, slamming the table, “BEAT ME AND MOLESTED ME, SENT ME TO SCHOOL IN THE MORNING, THE ONLY SAFE PLACE I KNEW BEFORE I HAD TO GO HOME AT THE SAME TIME EVERY DAY TO HER HANDS, HER EYES, HER MOUTH AND SOMETIMES HER FUCKING FRIENDS,” you struggled to breath as your body vibrated from the added adrenalyne.

“(Y/n), i need you to calm down,” Spencer said, he didn't even flinch at your explosion but he knew the signs of an early panic attack, “what's special about you is that you have so much anxiety, self doubt and self loathing and yet you still lured in twenty five people to kill,” Spencer mentioned.

“Twelve,” you said in a low voice, “I only killed twelve i had nothing to do with the others,” your eyes flickered to Spencer who started packing the files; he had gotten half the confession.

“Thank you for your time-”

“I want Hotchner,” you said with a grin, knowing exactly what that meant as Spencer paused for a moment, “even you noticed it Doctor, you saw all those victims that look like him, high class, business, lawyers, close to the justice system…” you started pointing out the similarities.

“I'll see what I can do,” Spencer said before leaving the room. The click of the lock made you giggle, then laugh, then cackle. The team watched from the two way mirror as you had a slight psychotic break in the chair you were chained to.

“GIVE ME AARON FUCKING HOTCHNER,” you screamed, “otherwise ill have to kill his little boy~” you sang with an evil grin. The team stiffened as your words floated through the room.

“They wouldn't,” J.J. said, “we didn't profile accomplices,”

“No but (Y/n) did kill by proxy,” Hotch said, “anyone could have anything trained on my little boy,” the unit chief said before he opened the interrogation room and your loud gasp came through the monitors.

“Hotchie!” you exclaimed happily, your grin was sick as your posture changed and you sat upright.

“Don't call me that,” Hotch said calmly, “you just confessed to twelve murders, now we need you to confess to the other thirteen-”

“I didn't do it,” you said immediately, “I simply helped victims with their own troubles,” you said with another sick grin as you leant forward, “you've got your own troubles too don't you Hotchie?” you questioned.

“I told you not to call me that,” Hotch responded as he stared you dead in the eye.

“A dead wife,” you grinned, “murdered wife I should say, son who almost, kind of, slightly doesn't trust you. Why?” you looked to Hotch with a grin, “you’re never there for him the poor thing” you said with a fake pout, “i should know what that's like, divorced at age twelve, molested at age thirteen, wow what a rocky fucking year those two where huh?” you questioned with a grin as the room door opened and out stepped a delicious looking man who handed Hotch a file. You whistled low, “Sexy little things aren't you here at the BAU huh?” you questioned with a grin as he left, it wasn’t the doctor from before but that didn't matter, you had the man you wanted right in front of you as he looked over a file, “what's that?” you questioned with a jut of your chin to the files.

“Damian Field,” Hotch started, you barely remembered the name let alone the face, “shot execution style, was a pedophile on three accounts,” you grinned, so that techy finally figured it out, “Emily Guard, shot execution style, multiple accounts of stealing and piracy, Dellie Parafield, shot execution style, stealing, looting, poisoning her mother and-”

“Did you finally figure it out?” you asked, cutting off the man you loved.

“You wrote ‘sinner’, at each crime scene, that's why there's thirteen and when we didn't find you quick enough you came to us,” Hotch said, you grinned.

“Thirteen dead, not because of me, but thirteen dead,” you shrugged, “know why?”

“Your mother grew up catholic,” you grinned.

“We got every single one of those people to confess agent,” you said with a sick grin as the team watched on, “they confessed for every sin they committed and died respectively because of it,”

“You're a sinner,” Hotch said as if it were a fact, you scoffed.

“I aint,” was your response.

“You killed twelve and another thirteen by proxy,” Hotch reminded you, tears filled your eyes as you sniffled.

“That's not good,” Derek muttered as he watched through the glass.

“They deserved it,” you said softly.

“And you don't?” Hotch questioned.

“AT LEAST I SEE MY SINS!” you exclaimed loudly, causing a few of the team to jump, “if you realise your sins and apologise to the lord he will forgive, and he forgives me,” you nodded with a sniffle as tears trekked down your face, “he sees what i've done and he praises me!” you said with a laugh.

“Have you ever met god (Y/n)?” Hotch questioned, you rolled your eyes.

“What, you sayin’ i'm a liar too?” you asked with a grin, “that's a sin too Aaron,” you said with a grin.

“You're not a liar but you are a bad killer, you left everything out in the open and you led us right to you and when we hit a dead end you came to us,” Hotch reminded you again, “do you confess to twelve murders and thirteen murders by proxy?” he questioned again.

“No.” you grinned, “i ain't the one who killed ‘em!” you exclaimed again as Hotch stood up and walked out of the room. This only fueled your rage as you started thrashing your wrists in the cuffs they were being held by, “WE’RE ALL SINNERS AARON HOTCHNER” you screamed, you grinned as you felt the teams eyes all watching you from behind the mirror.

“Who's the accomplice?” Emily questioned.

“We’ll find out in a second,” Hotch said calmly.

“You think you’re safe!? From who but the lord!?” you shook your head, “Elle Greenaway,” you started, the team became rigid, “shot an...what do you guys call us? Unsub?” you laughed, “shot an unsub and you rid it off as self defense,” you held up a finger, “that's one sin agent Hotchner. Jason Gideon, stole hotel toiletries,” you grinned as another finger went up, “thats called stealing Hotchner, Derek Morgan, considered suicide after molestation,” you put up another finger, “thats three now Hotchner, Emily Prentiss, abortian at age fifteen,” another finger went up, “Hotchner im all for abortians and i dont personally find them a sin, however unfortunately thats not what catholics and christians see,” you grinned, “four. Jennifer Jareau, I unfortunately only recently found out about you even though you've been with the team for a few years. Fortunately for Hotchner it stays at four,” you waved your fingers in the air, “David Rossi,” you scoffed, “married and divorced three times,” you added three fingers and whistled, “that's added a lot to the load already Hotchner, up to seven now,” you sighed as you had to use your other hand, “Doctor Spencer Reid, wow” you laughed, “what? Drug addict, liar, that Lila woman who i'm going to add simply because i feel like it,” you waved both hands as much as you could and laughed softly, “damn, that Doctor is racking it up a lot Hotchner!” you exclaimed.

“Hotch we’re not getting anywhere with this,” Rossi said with a sigh as he looked to the saddened faces of his team mates.

“Just another second Dave, it'll work.” Hotch said, his eyes still glued to your frame, “when i was in their (Y/n) said ‘we’, there is an accomplice we just have to wait for their slip up” and that's when you did, it wasn't a slip but technically but you were bored.

“UGGGHHH,” you groaned, “Lily!” you exclaimed, “Lily Raymond, she's in our safehouse,” the team was about to walk away to find this ‘lily’ before you gave them a deal, “Aaron Hotchner i will give you the address if only you let us stay in the same cell, AND,” you grinned and bit your lip, “let me give you a big smooch,” the team sighed.

“Hotch you can't,” Emily said.

“If we want that address he’ll have to,” Rossi said softly as Hotch walked into the room and did just as you asked.

He kissed you.

[scentedmoviesaestheticempath]

Compiled cbw’s Kuraneo thoughts + theories

Warning : Don’t read if you’re a Kuraneo antis. For fellow Kuraneo fans, just because I write it doesn't mean you have to agree. There are multiple but no wrong ways to interpret the ship and my opinion below strictly follows the canon storyline. We don't need any reason to ship anything but considering their rocky start, it's fun to analyze what happen.

Disclaimer : HxH belongs to Yoshihiro Togashi.

Is it really a senseless ship?

Most complaints regarding Kuraneo is how problematic the ship is and the impossibility for Kuraneo to happen. The main problems are : Neon is a body collector, therefore it is impossible for Kurapika to be with her. Especially when she specifically collects scarlet eyes. Neon is also a shallow childish brat, while Kurapika is portrayed as a mature, cool-headed protagonist. But is it really?

Implications to be Canon

In January 2020 I spared my time to catch up with HxH. It really surprised me after I read the manga carefully, Kurapika was given the title of 'young boss/underboss' in Nostrade family. Whoever has seen the Godfather and read Cosa Nostra Wikipedia page would know that the title is usually given to a son. He could've been given the title 'consigliere'', but he didn't. There has been several changes in translation but he still is the Nostrade family leader(The Japanese version is Waka-Gashira(Young Boss), under Oyabun(Boss), while consigliere is Saiko-Komon). That gave me an assumption : "What if he is a Nostrade now?" I am not surprised since a man marries into a girl's family is kind of traditional norm in Japan (Reference : mukoyōshi (婿養子).

“ A mukoyōshi (婿養子) (literally "adopted son-in-law") is an adult man who is adopted into a Japanese family as a daughter's husband, and who takes the family's surname.

Generally in Japan, a woman takes her husband's name and is adopted into his family. When a family, especially one with a well established business, has no male heir but has an unwed daughter of a suitable age, she will marry the mukoyōshi, a man chosen especially for his ability to run the family business.[1] If there is no daughter, the candidate can take a bride from outside his adopted family (fūfu-yōshi: 夫婦養子). This is done to preserve the business and name of the family when there is no suitable male heir, since traditionally businesses are inherited by the oldest male heir. Mukoyōshi is also practiced if there is no capable male heir to run the family business.[1] This is a centuries-old tradition and is still widely practiced today. Many Japanese companies with household names such as Nintendo, Kikkoman, and Toyota have adopted this practice.[1] This adult adoption may take place in marriages where the woman's family is of a higher socio-economic rank than the man's family, where the woman has no brothers to be the heir to the family name, when the man has been disowned by his own family, or when the man's natural family comes from a notorious or shameful background and he thus prefers to hide his identity. “ 

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukoy%C5%8Dshi) (picture source : Kurapika x Neon Facebook page)

Kurapika and Neon are also paired in the Mobage which implies that the creator himself has approved the ship. There is a reason why Meruem and Bisky is not paired together.

Looking at Kurapika as a character

Now let’s look at Kurapika’s character. His character goal is to avenge his clan and collect all his brother and sister’s eyes. He’s shown to have strong prejudice against flesh collector and even decided to work for Nostrade family based on that reason. He went as far as planning to arrest them before meeting Neon. And even after meeting Neon, he convinced himself once again that in order to pursue his goal, he is willing to kill her (”If I have to kill her, so be it”, as rephrased my Melody). Yet he is also shown to be pleased when he is pointed as the head bodyguard, stating that “I didn’t think... It would work out so quickly” .He seems to have completely changed his plan. Because what is better than arresting/killing Neon? That would be having access to Nostrade’s family resources by being Light’s trusted person. And after Neon lost her power, Light Nostrade is shown to be losing his mind, being unable to function normally as a leader. Begging Kurapika to turn “Neon back to normal”. Kurapika does the job instead for Light, saying that “Don’t worry. I’ll handle everything.” At this point, he is the suitable guy to run the family. Considering his Waka-Gashira title, it is safe to assume he got the title by marrying her through son-in-law adoption. Looking at Neon as a character I am a big fan of aspoonofsugar’s character meta posts and the post about Neon’s Nen and Character insight brings a new perspective on how I see Neon.

https://aspoonofsugar.tumblr.com/post/176668230707/nen-and-characters-neon-nostrade Neon prefers not to be involved with people. She is clingy to her material possessions but not to people, as implied in her reaction to Dalzollene's death. While all her bodyguards and haters assume that she’s a heartless unempathetic character. The actual reason is related to her belief. For Neon, the present is the only thing that matter. She shows her empathetic side when Chrollo cried and Eliza broke down hearing Squalla’s death. She cares about the livings and her noble altruistic power reflects her character.

Regarding the son-in-law theory, I would say that she simply does not have a say in this matter when her family is crashing down. We are never shown Neon’s perspective on Kurapika  whether she likes him or not. I personally never ever once see a canon scene where Neon is implied to have crush on Kurapika. She had fluttering heart moment for Chrollo instead and I guess that's because Chrollo is one of the people whom has shown genuine emotions in front of her, just like Eliza over Squalla. Her appreciation to genuine feelings and honesty is probably caused by Light’s many lies in order to use her power.

We're told the story from Kurapika's point of view, therefore it's very easy to antagonize Neon like majority of her haters. But given Neon's appreciation to honesty and authenticity, who is at fault here? Kurapika just appears in her life, planning to use her and her family for his ends. He is just another Chrollo and Light Nostrade. (IRONICALLY This is why I ship their very unique relationship. But they do need each other for provision and protection, so props for Kurapika lmao) 

So if the son-in-law theory is true, is it possible for them have feelings for each other?

Of course it wasn't long before we got twists here and there. Neon's power disappearance from Chrollo's book, Kurapika referring himself not having the place to go home anymore. He seems to have so much authority to access Nostrade family resources without having a friendly term with them. Assuming they don’t have a normal loving relationship at the first sight makes sense. I don't think anyone marrying into Nostrade family will ever get their emotional needs fulfilled. Nostrade is never the traditional happy family. Neon is emotionally detached and Light only cares about power. They are the opposite of Zoldyck whom are sick in their own way. They only care about themselves and Kurapika is also one. He missed Gon's recovery and does not seem to value his own life. In other words. Doesn’t that mean Kurapika is only using her, then?

No. At this point, it means they need each other and it’s either they do like each other or simply have mutual physical attraction regardless how they feel.

(It is unfair to say Kurapika takes advantage of Nostrade family when Nostrade family themselves need Kurapika, or else, they will not function. Needing each other is not equal to taking advantage of each other, it is the basic of household.

As for the last part, I have seen many cases where even people who constantly says "beauty doesn’t matter” and proving their point by considering their spouses unattractive are STILL ATTRACTED PHYSICALLY to their spouse. Please feel free to disagree)

When we say that we like or love someone, we are experiencing interpersonal attraction—the strength of our liking or loving for another person.

Although it may seem inappropriate or shallow to admit it, and although it is certainly not the only determinant of liking, people are strongly influenced, at least in initial encounters, by the physical attractiveness of their partners (Swami & Furnham, 2008). Elaine Walster and her colleagues (Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman, 1966) arranged a field study in which college boys and girls were randomly paired with one another at a “computer dance.” After the partners had danced and talked for a couple of hours, they were interviewed separately about their own preferences and characteristics as well as about their perceptions of their date. Walster and her colleagues found that the only important determinant of participants’ liking for their date was his or her physical attractiveness. None of the other characteristics—even the perceived intelligence of the partner—mattered.

https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/initial-attraction/

When feelings are discussed : From my intrepretation, I always think people got it backwards about Kurapika and Neon. Kurapika has an icy facade, but he is the type of person who grow on people, while Neon is not. Even when he distanced himself from the other bodyguards at their first meeting, he is the one who cares the most about his "comrades"/teammates, he punched Uvo for killing his teammates. Neon, on the other hand, doesn't even flinch when she heard that Dalzolenne is dead although he's been the one who took care of her. She even made one of her servant as wall decoration. But there is a possibility she also grows on people AS LONG AS they’re still alive, that’s why she cared about Eliza. The problem is, once they’re dead, they become another story in the irrelevant past. That does not make her a bad person in grey HxH universe, but someone with different values due to her belief and upbringing. Kurapika demonstrates his understanding of her when describing her to Basho. In fact, he is the most understanding person that treats her nicely and does not harm her even though he had the intention to. Kurapika didn't think Neon losing her ability as the family downfall or disability, unlike her own father. As much as assuring everything will be okay when Light broke down in GI Arc. This is a huge revolution in her life because since Kurapika stepped in, someone is finally using her without the need of her ability.

Neon’s loss of ability actually sounds like a parallel to Pairo when people around them refer them as "not normal" for having less functional leg and no ghostwriter ability. They were also both supposed to be under his care/companion when the accident happened. This leaves a huge question mark for me of how Kurapika interprets her at this point. Is he only using her or he feels responsible? or both?

This leaves us some possibilities if their relationship was merely based on physical attraction & mutual benefit or if it is indeed more.

The first possibility means he likes her enough to marry/sleep with her but still barred from prejudice to consider her as his friend. (Even this is debatable, Kurapika simply could be a private person and given that his clan was living in hidden presence, it's only normal if he want to hide Neon's presence too. Also "Traditionally, part of the Mafia code is to keep the wives and mothers out of the loop of confidences for their own safety" is an actual study from The Independent,UK.)

And Neon also likes him enough to marry/sleep with him but not enough to get involved in his life. (Or is she? Sometimes I have to remind myself HxH can't be seen through normal perspective because no hunter is fit for normal family life. So maybe Neon's dismissive attitude makes her the perfect one for him)

The second possibility means they are in loving relationship off-screen. I'd say this is a very high probability because based on personality analysis above, both characters are capable of growing on each other. Another note : Neon's design is strongly based on Princess Luna from Level E, where she is a love interest to Prince Baka. The story take it lightly despite being "king x revolutionary" couple. And while for us, it feels like a long time. For the in-universe characters, black whale is only like a month of work CMIIW. 

But either way, I’d say they do harbor some sort of affection in canon. We have a negative perception on arranged marriage, assuming the affection is not valid because it is a form of Stockholm syndrome. I will quote my argument straight from Quora where the responder had successfully arranged more than 40 marriages.

“Not every western theory is a reality. I think those who do not know the basics of arranged marriage speak at will and trying to create a fear syndrome against a successful system...”

“...Those who shun arranged marriages can live as they wish. Law does not prevent them to be at liberty. They have no business to criticize a system which is far better than other ways of creating male female relationships. Stockholm syndrome belongs to Stockholm... They are civilized enough to live in a system where there is nothing to lose. Stockholm syndrome is an illusion.One should not insult a culture without knowing an iota of that system. “ https://www.quora.com/I-feel-that-the-affection-after-an-arranged-marriage-is-basically-a-form-of-Stockholm-syndrome-What-is-your-opinion-on-this

Or maybe, there is nothing between them yet and these implications are just a foreshadow to what’s planned for them

What if she’s dead?

Some people would say Kurapika killed her but that is totally impossible and out of character. Her death is only assumed by the Phantom Troupe because her power dissapear from the book. Nen is extremely flexible concept even in-universe and there are many ways to work around that. Also in contradictive, Kurapika managed to take 9 pairs of eyes from 'the mafia's daughter' without killing anyone. I doubt he would do nothing after Chrollo stole her ability. I assume it would be insulting to Kurapika if people say he let Neon to just die considering he takes his job seriously and inheriting Nostrade name.

And frankly, I don’t care if she’s dead. Kakin war arc & Dark continent arc will also take approximately 20-40 years to finish. Whether she’s dead or not I’m going to enjoy my time with my interpretations based on canon implications given. And if she is indeed proven to be dead, I’ll accept it and just have fun in the fandom. I respect Togashi as the author.

Why don't the Nostrade just adopt Kurapika without the marriage?

I dunno, better ask mafias and Japanese. Because based on this theory, they clearly like to keep it in the family, I'm just reading my references.

cbw’s Final words

This theory is inspired from baby foreshadowing theory in reddit (page: HxH craziest theory), which inspired me to write my fic. Which, inspired me again to write this son-in-law theory.

I am combining implications from “Cosa Nostra”, “Waka-gashira”(The similar organization structure), “Godfather”(How Kurapika gain Light’s trust), “Son-in-law adoption”(Underboss in Sicily organization structure), Neon&Kurapika paired cards in Mobage, and Princess Luna from Level E as spouse from opposing faction(The base for Neon’s character)

Whilst the western sources about obtaining the title in mafia marriage is abundant, the sources regarding obtaining the title in yakuza marriage are Until Death Do Us Part and & GTA:Liberty City

Toshiko Kasen: My husband is samurai, Mr. Toni. He is very strong... but very, very bad. He only married me to become waka-gashira in Liberty City.

https://www.grandtheftwiki.com/index.php?title=A_Date_With_Death&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop

(Page 161 Until Death Do Us Part)

Honestly after my last note, I gave it another thought and I couldn't possibly see another explanation of why he could be a Nostrade family boss. If anyone asks me, I refuse to ignore the implications Togashi gave and say they're canon 100%.

Given Kuraneo’s complex relationship and their neutral interaction, its brilliance lies in how flexible people can be in interpreting them. I enjoy many different kind of interpretations. My favorite thing about Kuraneo is although we never get any implication that Neon ever noticed Kurapika, many fics describe it as the other way round because from Neon’s POV it would be liking someone that embody her fetish. I especially love this headcanon, love it when people portray Neon as deviant.That escalate from 0 to 100 real quick. Being a part of Nostrade also means Kurapika gets to accept his past as something that shapes him to be the man he is today. But honestly, I just love hateships and their big chances of hating while loving each other.

I would say that whatever off-screen and how readers interpret their relationsip and feelings is up for us to decide until HxH truly reach the ending. And that’s only if Togashi is willing to disclose their relationship. I would be happy if they become canon, but if not then I’ll still ship them just like how I will still ship Pitou x Kai and Chrollo x Kurapika. Naoko Takeuchi, Togashi’s wife said once in her interview that she likes seeing different interpretations of Sailor Moon from her fans. I’m a Sailor Moon fan too and I wish to respect her view by applying the same to her husband’s works.

Thanks for reading!

[bluepluto03]

mcu spiderman rewrite/au i may or may not do

ok so first quick disclaimer! i do not hate the mcu spider man movies in any way!! i actually enjoy them quite a bit and have seen homecoming like 4 times! and i absolutely adore all the actors in the movies, especially tom, zendaya, and jacob 

but the problem w/ the mcu spiderman movies is,,, they’re just not spiderman. at least from a writing/thematic perspective, which sucks bc so much other stuff about them is great! like tom holland is the perfect peter parker, which is why it seems so close to being right, but with the way the script is actually written... it’s just. not spider-man. 

i feel the need to explain all this/my problems w/ the movies b4 i get into the actuall au idea/plot, so please bear with me for a sec

for context, I’ve loved spiderman my whole life. i’d watch the cartoons when i was younger, and then went back and watched them all again when i was a bit older and figured out how to pirate stuff lol. i didn’t really know how to get into the comics, so i just kinda read wikis and got second-hand info from fanfics and the other movies

to me, spiderman, (at least, peter parker spiderman,) was always about like... a kid, who saw the world was broken and fixed it because he could. he had the power to fix stuff, so he did. 

as a kid w/ mental illness and a not so great home life... that was something really really important to me. to see another kid out there, who’s been through some shit, but finally has the power to make stuff better, so he is! and it would make me think, maybe i can change stuff for the better, someday, if i just get my chance

but,,,,, the problem is mcu peter parker isn’t that. 

instead of becoming spiderman bc he knows there’s bad in the world and wants to fix it, suddenly his motivation is impressing tony stark?? and don’t get me wrong i don’t hate tony, but the way they wrote his and peter’s relationship basically trapped peter. he could no longer be his own hero, bc he was tony’s successor. and that's never who peter parker’s spiderman was?? he was never a follower, he was a trendsetter. he didn’t become spiderman for approval, hell he had dozens of newspapers constantly slandering him. 

honestly the following in someone else’s footsteps thing was always a miles morales thing. he had to step up to the plate and fill the shoes of a spiderman who had already existed for years and was beloved by the whole city. obviously thats not all he is and simplifying his character to that is incredibly obtuse, but i bring it up bc tbh alot of stuff w/ mcu peter parker is just straight-up ripped off from miles morales. like how peter now goes to a fancy private school, is no longer poor (which is a huge thing w/ peter parker’s character in like every other incarnation), has a living father figure, and is bffs w/ ned, who is a straight-up rip off of miles’s best friend ganke. (for the record tho i adore ned and jacob i’m def keeping him in my rewrite,,,, also i’m glad he’s in the movie bc having a plus sized poc protagonist thats not constantly mocked is incredible) 

so, i’m complaining about all this stuff lol but ur probably wondering how exactly how i wanna fix it lol,,,, 

first, give peter an arc thats more than just..... i want tony to believe in me. my idea for that is basically a type of thing where he learns to rely on others! bc like... peter isn’t good at working w/ others lol, he’d much rather do it all himself so no one else gets hurt. (like in the andrew garfield movies where he just,,,, webs his gf to a car so she can’t run into danger lmao) 

the plot would start at a similar ish position to homecoming, though tony never recruits peter for civil war. tbh not sure if it even happened but we’ll disscuss that later

peter’s been spiderman for a few months, after a trip to oscorp left him w/ a radioactive spider bite. currently no one knows about it, and he’s doing a pretty ok job of dealing w/ everything on his own. until he takes down a big bad, lets say rhino for now, and gains a ton of publicity. after stooping a hudge disaster he’s suddenly in the limelight, and catches the attention of one norman osborn, aka the green goblin 

now, quick sidenote. green goblin is genreally seen as pretty goofy, but there are comic versions of him that are legit terrifying. if im being honest i didn’t even know about that version until i read aloneintherains fic birds eating other birds so ig thats kinda ish how i’m imagining this version of norman? though alot more composed, like the man who could someday turn into that 

so norman becomes intrested in my boy peter, and starts sending ppl after him. possibly the sinister 6, but uhh maybe not bc tbh i think this “rewrite” needs to be split into 2 “movies”/works and i might wanna save that for the hypothetical pt2 (btw if i write this it won’t b for a while cause i got other stuff going on but ig if ppl are intrested i might write some snippits/make more content for it) 

so basically the main plot is peter dealing w/ all these big bads on his own, doing ok at first but later getting really fucked up, and eventually revealing himself to ned and mj which ends up being the only way he can save the day in the end. by relying on others! yay!! 

thats it for the main plot, but don’t worry y’all we got other stuff going on too lmao 

so, for one. my boy peter is realizing he has a crush and just,,,, freaking tf out. (i have yet to decide if it’s on ned or mj. or both. sue me) the crush isn’t definitely resolved in p1, but i imagine there’d be some cute thing of him suddenly realizing and freaking out and almost revealing his powers. 

thing 2! tony stark! he is still in here, and still a mentor to peter, but in a pretty drastically different way. one, he doesn't know about peter being spiderman. he doesn't even suspect it lmao. he just gets involved bc of.... some sort of reason bc peter is so smart. do i know why just yet? no. does it matter? probably but i’m writing this pretty late after i had school all day so i’m too tired to care 

bc tony basically gives peter a real internship/mentorship type thing, peter now has access to all this tech!! and all these funds!! fucking lit!! so he changes from his pajama suit to the fancy one, tho he actually built it!! which i feel like him making his suit is a really big really important part of his character. so it doesn't really have all those random things tony added, tho peter might add stuff himself. he gets Karan as a like assistant ai as part of his internship but she never gets put into the suit

for the fist part tony plays a super minor role but like,,,, the first part is about osborn taking an intrest in him, and him confiding in ned and mj. the second part norman is become progressively more dangorus and peter has to fight him and stuff, kinda proving he is strong enough to be spiderman/be trusted to the whole world, beyond just ned and mj. also him actually getting together w/ either one or both of them bc...... bc i want that. 

oh btw idk if tony finds out or not in p2? if he does it’s either at the end or in a scene like the one w/ may bc like. please imagine the shenanigans of peter and ned (who both have high intellegence but low wisdom) in tony’s lab, obviously trying to hide the fact that peter’s spiderman. like he walks in on them and peter looks all frumpy bc he’s been trying to change real fast, and ned’s shirt is messed up bc he just stuffed the mask down the front of it, and mj is just. chilling behing them. so tony just like assumes stuff and is like....aight.... have fun.... 

oh btw the last big change that i didn’t really have anyway to insert natrually into this,,,, so remember how i said ned was kinda a ripoff of ganke? well, the writers claim he’s a “composite character” so i figured, why not give him traits from other famous spiderman side character so he actually is a composite character! 

so like,,,, throughout p1 it’s referenced that ned has a kinda dickish estranged ish dad that he hates and his mom doesn't really like but kinda forces him too... theres some mentions of his dad wanting him to transfer to a private school and being kinda rich, bur he dosen’t want to bc he knows his dad is a total dickead,,,, anyway end of the movie we find out norman osborn is ned’s dad, and ned hates him even fucking more bc it’s like bitch?? u tried to get my (maybe) bf murdered?? tf?? and its lowkey bc he can’t reveal peter’s id, but then in p2 after norman takes matters into his own hands and tries to kill peter on his own ned just fucking yells at him while the man is in jail and is like fuck u lmao 

soooo thats my really messy au idea!! i’m really tired sorry if this is hard to understand or rude! for the record i have nothing against the ppl who adore these movie’s, i just think they could be better! 

[demethinkstoomuch]

Deme Rates Villagers, Part 4: Bulls and Cows

Disclaimer: Images are from the wiki, all good dogs, my ratings are mainly just there because “Deme gives her abstract thoughts on villagers” is hardly a catchy thing.

How now, brown cow? I’m asking because it’s time for me to rate some animals! These are both fairly small categories, so I’m jamming them together because it is odd to me that they are not together.

Angus

...Well, this is a bull, I guess. He’s got a little hair. Color scheme is pretty basic, not bad, he’s got a little bit of hair, he’s got maybe eyelashes? Or wrinkles? I’m not clear. He sure exists.

Choice / USDA Grading Scale

Belle

Belle is sure a cow. Just a cute little cow with nice eyes, which honestly? Works. I feel sad that we never saw Belle again, probably because there’s another villager that looks just like her, except without the cute eyes.

Also, she makes me think about a Story of Seasons/Harvest Moon-style Bubble Cow. 

Bubble Cow 1 / 2

 Bessie

A blue cow. Funnily enough, she has a nearly identical fella, who I think of as kind of a twin brother, who has made it further through the series’ progression than she has. This is a pattern with cows? Weird identical doubles, one of which was abandoned? 

1 / 2

Carrot

Oh, hey, she’s like some sort of odd, not entirely developed, food villager! Like, she’s not full-on Tangy or Ketchup, but she’s carrot-colored and carrot-named, and that makes me grin. I feel like improvements to her model could make her even cuter, it’s a shame we’ve never seen her again. Food villagers are good, actually.

7 carrots, please /10

Chuck

He’s not a brown cow, but he is a brown bull. He’s kind of Angus, but angrier and with less going for his design.

Not Even Choice / Beef

Coach

Finally, a fun bovine who still exists! Coach, with his illusion of 5 o’clock shadow and his big, hooky eyebrows, really does have a coach-ish vibe. Not, like, Survivor Coach, but that high school teacher who teaches some random subject of little importance, mainly there to coach a sports team or something. Which is odd, because the man I think of in this slot -- though there were quite a few at my High School, but only one who really liked being called “coach,” and he taught study skills (on my schedule due to my schedule being absolutely bonkers in my Junior and Senior years. I spent about half of those classes sitting outdoors near the window, psychiatric orders. We all understood I didn’t need anything it was providing, and so could goof off.) -- was clean-shaven. I have limited ability to recall faces, so I cannot tell you about his eyebrows. Either way, this Coach gives me that vibe, and so, I smile with a certain sentimental fondness.  I am sure he would remind everyone in the classroom that he is making them do ACT prep because Coach loves them. I am sure he does.

 High School Study Skills Coach / Coaches That Come To Mind (So, below Survivor Coach, but above Cartoon Coaches)

Now we’re on a roll! After much deliberation, I have decided that Naomi is cool. Naomi is a good example of cartoony kissy lipped villagers, done with enough extra style that the lips feel like part of a package with her blunt-cut hair and her vivid eyeliner. One gets the sense of a particularly editorial supermodel or something off of her, which is the sort of character-building vibe I like a lot in an Animal Crossing villager, and it makes the contrast of her vivid make-up and vivid fur into something that feels like a thing, you know? 

Fabulous, darling / Snooties

Norma

Oh, isn’t she cute! She’s just got this very rubber-hose era of animation with her eyes, which just makes her adorable. Otherwise, she is just a cute cow. I think I considered her for if I did a Harvest Moon-themed town, because you kind of need a cow, and I like her more than Tipper, below, because Norma has funky little eyes. Honestly, I probably did her a disservice by not marking her as my favorite cow villager when I filled out a meme, but I suppose I wasn’t thinking.

7/10! A real rating for just a cute cow.

Oxford

Well, he gives me very little to have an opinion on, but I like his heavy brow. 

|:[ / 10

Patty

An acceptable, cow-ish sort of cow. Looks like a friend.

shrug, I dunno, 5 / 10

Petunia

Is she multicolored, almost like a cow Bob? Don’t know, don’t really have a feeling, will never see her again. 

Rodeo

Look at this fantastic hellbeast! He and Roscoe the horse make a good pair of demon creatures. In Rodeo’s case, he is helped by his tiny, high up eyes, which are beady red eyes you could imagine shining in the darkness of some sort of underworld... The big smile makes it kinda goofy, but that’s kinda good.

666/10

Stu

Hey, it’s Bessie, but a boy. Like, if he were named Babe, I would applaud a concept, but I don’t know they were going for a big blue ox thing. I don’t know what Stu and Bessie are about. Why was only Stu saved from the dustbin of time, and Bessie abandoned? I call foul!

2 / 2

T-Bone

Naming a bull for a type of steak and then doing nothing with that, is kinda weird, send tumblr post. Also, why are his eyes positioned there? They are too big and tall for that.  Why are his eyes trying to escape his skull? Why do eyes want to be free?

Put those things back in the section of their face where they came from / or so help me!

Tipper

So, Tipper is the other ordinary Holstein cow. She started appearing in Wild World, right after Belle stopped appearing. Why? What’s with that? I put her down as my favorite cow at some point, but I think I am wrong. And baffled. I will add, though, that she’s pretty alright for a normal little cow. Her sleepy eyes and smile give her a dopey but peaceful feeling. And she still reminds me of a Story of Seasons classic bubble cow.

Bubble Cow 2/2 

Verdun

Another villager I never could have seen. His eyes make him feel, not unlike a few other villagers from days of yore, like a Conker’s Bad Fur Day character. It’s not a bad look.

Nintendo / 64 (Technically, as an E+ character, he was for the Gamecube. But Conker was for the 64, so here we are.)

Vic

Oh, I just realized, right at this moment, that the dark brown of the bottom of his face is probably meant to evoke a big Viking-y beard, isn’t that precious? Because of course he has a viking theme, which turns his bull horns into the horns of a helmet, which is just fantastic. I love it. And he has freckles! Vic is great, I’m happy to close this post off on my realizing something fun about a villager I like! 

10 / 9 , Happy Leif Ericson Day, everyone!

So, the cows and bulls were... Not my favorite, but they sure are mysterious. So many odd doubles half-forgotten. Why? I feel like I need to unravel a mystery.

[solitaire-dreams]

What’s Your Type? : Pokespe Fire/Water/Grass Dexholder Analysis

DISCLAIMER: Honestly, I've only read RGB, RS, DP, BW, and SM arcs in full; and parts of the Yellow and B2W2 arc. So, any information outside of these arcs is coming from Bulbapedia and is liable to be incorrect.

When it comes to the world of Pokespe, rather than the anime where we follow the never aging Ash Ketchum, we now total about 21 dexholders (our protagonists).  Each dexholder is fairly unique from one another, yet one thing always tends to be in common between them. The same thing that's always common when we pick up our consoles to start a new Pokemon journey. Picking our starters.

In the world of Pokespe, the standard starters aren't guaranteed to be the first Pokemon they will receive—quite the opposite actually—yet they will always gain one of the traditional starters at some point of their evolutionary line on their journey. (The only two exceptions are Yellow who was created for the Yellow games where Pikachu was the starter, and Whi-two or Whitley because they ran out of Unovan starters). This often has us classify the dexholders into grass, fire, and water varieties. Though this categorization goes deeper than a Pokemon in their party, but plays a large role in their characterization.

Each of the dexholders in each category share a trait that connects all of them, and will provide useful for other predictions (skip to the end if you just want to know what the other prediction is). This post is focused on breaking them down one by one.

Note: Since I was tempted enough to reblog an incorrect pokespe quote where green was the name given to the male character, for the rest of this blog, Green is the male character and Blue is the female. Got it? Good.

First off, we'll start off with the fire type dexholders. Most of you might notice some obvious similarities:

Yet, there is also one very obvious exception:

Green here doesn't tend to shout, especially as much as the other fire type dexholders. So, then what is the factor connecting them? All of them still have a very fiery spirit, and more accurately, is their strong determination towards achieving whatever goal they have. They will pursue it no matter whatever or whoever lies in their way; often leading to causing chaos or bad relationships with other people in their wake.

Green is extremely focused on becoming a strong trainer. Upon his first appearance, he is battling Mew with Charmander to train it and shows no remorse when Red tries to battle it and his Pokemon faints; rather looking down on him for not “noticing anything” during the fight. This determination continues throughout the first arc, as further demonstrated when he tries to force his way into Saffron City after Team Rocket attacks Pallet Town and takes his grandfather.

Gold has the notable trait of having a one-track mind, where he focuses on something so much he will pursue that relentlessly, and ignoring anything else that doesn't pertain to that. Though, this trait manifests itself most when Gold pursues “pretty girls” such as the Kimono Girls, gym leader Jasmine, or even Crystal upon first discovering her.

Though it still can translate in the pursuit of Gold's goals, where he initially receives a Pokedex because he wanted to use it in battle, and urgently attempts to gain a unique specialty during the GSC arc.

Sapphire's dexholder title is specifically “The Conquer” in reference to her earning 8 gym badges in 80 days. She unrelentingly goes around the region to defeat the gym leaders—causing her to start off on the wrong foot with Ruby. And she turns it into a bet to reach their respective goals in 80 days all because it stemmed from a promise she made with her childhood friend to beat the record of Red when it came to the Pokemon League.

Pearl's title is the Determiner, one he received after bonding with Azelf—the lake guardian of Willpower. He managed to bond with Azelf because he completes whatever he starts; as clarified by Diamond in the arc. Determiner, willpower, completes whatever started...yeah, this screams dedication to a goal. Especially when you consider the focus Pearl gives to Dia's and his comedy routine.

For Black though, no matter how well I could paraphrase it, I will just quote this article (bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Black_(Adventures)): “Black is a young man who aspires to be the Champion of the Unova Pokémon League. He has been dreaming of this since childhood, nine years to be exact. However, these dreams fill his head to the point where he cannot think about anything else and any attempts to cause him to pass out from mental exhaustion...Due to his dreams causing him to forget about other things, Black has the tendency to do things without considering the consequences of his actions and their effects on other people.”

I think the above proves the point well enough.

Also, I would like to briefly mention Y. While Y isn't a fire type dexholder (she's a water type), since there is no fire type dexholder in Kalos (Malva doesn't really count), she is a kind of water/fire dual type with her personality. Y shouts more than most of the other water dexholders and exhibits a more solid determination to pursue her goal of becoming a Sky Trainer, even when this runs into direct opposition with her mother's ideas for her.

Lastly, we wrap up the fire dexholder with our latest protagonist, Sun. Sun has the goal of collecting 100 million yen. Acheiving this goal has been Sun's whole time in Alola in the making. He relentlessly pursues money, even prioritizing reaching his personal goal than helping the Alola region against the Ultra Beast invasion, leading him to get sucked into Ultra Space with Solgaleo.

Next up is the water type dexholders, which personally I found the revelation most interesting. It would be difficult to derive a personality solely from the type this time. Unlike fire which is associated with offensive battling, or grass which tends to be connected to defensive, water is viewed as the balance between the two. But, this doesn't really provide any clues into what is the common thread between all these dexholders. My findings, however, were that they all tend to be secretive.

Miss Con Artist (Blue), our first water type dexholder, is literally a con artist. Her whole livelihood is based of lying and keeping the truth about her real intentions to trick people into doing whatever she wants. Plus, she has her own secrets that only come to light much later into her appearance in the first arc and beyond. Her pathological fear of birds is only hinted at during the Team Rocket battle and confirmed during the Pokemon League when battle “Professor O”. Even more shocking was her childhood under the Masked Man, who trained her because of the promise she showed as a trainer.

This transitions nicely to our other dexholder who was raised under the Masked Man, Silver. And he so happens to be a water type dexholder as well. While Silver does not purposely keeping his life before the Masked Man close to his chest, it is revealed that Silver was the son of Giovanni, an insanely big secret that heavily impacted his character.

Ruby, in order to pursue his love of contests and oppose the beliefs of his father, refuses to battle at the beginning of the RS arc. This in turn hides his amazing battling skills (plus the fact he has a FREAKING CELEBI). Additionally, when it comes to the climax of the arc, he hides from Sapphire the plan he had to team up with Courtney to control Groudon and Kyogre. While still intended for her safety, it is still another massive lie and withholding of the truth on his part.

Platinum may not be thought of as being secretive, but the speech she makes after learning Dia and Pearl weren't her bodyguards begs to differ. Most of the lies she reveals in that speech were white lights told to make her not seem inferior and were obvious to the reader, but it still goes to show that she lied a fair amount. Her wealth and connection to the Berlitz family were also discovered rather than told by Platinum. And most obviously, she hid her real name of Platinum until this time! This whole journey, her companions didn't know what her true first name was!

Lack-two or Blake is another dexholder who has lying built into his occupation. Blake is with the International Police and working undercover during the B2W2 arc (Please give us some form of closure! #freeblack2k19). He literally has to keep his true intentions of hunting down the remnants of Team Plasma from his fellow classmates. Additionally, his true personality isn't shown to others either; he puts on a womanizing and flirtatious front when he truly an emotionless officer.

Y is honestly the least secretive out of the water dexholders, but that can also be attributed to her odd Volcanion (a fire-and-water type) fusion. It may not be obvious, or not in a way you expect, but Y does hide something—her feelings. Dealing with the human depression that is X and three of her other friends while trying to all live on their own and dealing with fallout from her mother on top of one of the most cruel evil teams yet? You think she would break down, or someone would help her; but none of the characters we follow demonstrate this concern! theviolenttomboy made a short post that summarizes all the sh*t Y goes through (theviolenttomboy.tumblr.com/post/146359425406/figured-out-why-i-cant-ship-y-with-absolutely), and how she has to deal with it all on her own. In order to keep the group alive, she has to hide her emotional distress. A problem not even resolved by the end of the arc.

Finally, we arrive at the grass type dexholders. Honestly this was the most tricky for me to pin down. Mostly because we have dexholders like Dia and X who have personalities that couldn't seem more different. So, I had to take a look back, and that's when I realized something. Both of the previous characterizations centred around how they achieve their goals. Fire type dexholders barrel through whatever obstacles are in their way and water type dexholders hide information as they pursue their goals. This gave me the clue of what to analyze for the grass type dexholders and this is my conclusion:

The way grass dexholders approach their goals is the most “healthy”. They are able to self-intrinsically motivate themselves when life discourages their goals and try to achieve them in a way that doesn't tend to hurt others as much as the other two dexholder categories (most of the time).

Honestly, this probably reminds you of a generic shonen protagonist, so it is fitting that the dexholder who started this characterization was the most shonen like character of all: Red. Red is able to convince himself to keep working towards his goal of becoming the strongest trainer, despite the obstacles he faces in the form of Team Rocket or people like his rival discouraging him from developing into a stronger trainer. The way he aims to be the strongest also doesn't harm many people, if people are affected, it tends to be accidental.

Crystal manages to stay firm in her goal of catching all the Pokemon even if the other Johto dexholders just see her as a girl at first. She can motivate herself to keep working towards it, and with the caring and give-back nature of Crystal, she is certainly not harming anyone on her path to reaching her goal. Minus a few face kicks to Gold.

Emerald certainly faced a lot of adversity that pushed him down. Becoming an orphan at a young age and made fun of for his small height, initially actually causing him to go against the foundation of grass dexholders being able to motivates themselves by resulting in a dislike of Pokemon and his stature. However, he develops this grass mindset as the Emerald arc progresses, finding what he enjoys, what makes him unique, and cultivating the confidence needed to be himself—even if life is still against him. Plus, while I can't speak for much of his actions in the Emerald arc (because I haven't red FRLG yet, and I know the events are directly connected), his title of the Calmer which stems from his ability to help Pokemon feel relaxed means he is at least not harming Pokemon much during his adventure.

One of the biggest character moments for Diamond is him managing to self-intrinsically motivate himself to pursue a goal despite opposition. In this case, the goal being to stop Team Galactic and his opposition being his best friend Pearl. Regardless, he succeeds in standing up to him and working towards thwarting Team Galactic, with the worst harm caused probably being Pearl's shock at Dia standing up for himself.

White seems to exhibit a peaceful way of pursuing her goal surrounding her talent agency for Pokemon. When her goal switches after Gigi leaves her for a bit, White's new focus on getting stronger at battling is still approached in much the same way. One where she convinces herself to keep working towards improvement and does not negatively affect people along the way.

Then we have the enigma of X. X doesn't seem to follow things of “motivation” or not inadvertently bringing down others with him, but that's only when his goal isn't clear. When we start with X in the XY arc, his goal is to stay in his room; locked away from the outside world. In this context, he meets all the criteria: he ends up convincing himself to work towards his goal of staying a shut-in, despite all the pleas to change this from his friends; and most of his protest to stay inside is silent and doesn't directly or physically harm his friends.

Lastly, our final dexholder is Moon, who also conforms to this characterization fairly well. Moon is able to pursue whatever she considers a priority, unaffected by outside influences. Whether it be praise from her work early on in the SM arc, or not listening to reason before chasing after Sun in the wormholes when he is taken away; leaving Alola to face the Ultra Beasts alone.

tl; dr : Each dexholder approaches their goals differently based on the type of their starter. Fire dexholders have strong enough determination to barrel through all the obstacles to their goal, knocking down everything and everyone in their way. Water dexholders are secretive and hide important information as they work towards their goal. Grass dexholders have the “healthiest” way of reaching their goals, managing to motivate themselves to keep working towards it when life tells them otherwise.

This information may be touched on again in other posts I'm planning: a follow-up talking about the “Bronze-age” progression of dexholder characterization, one about predicting what the Gen 8 protagonists of Pokespe will be like, and another discussing trio characterization.

~Thanks for reading and I'll be back soon!

[yes-i-write-fanfiction]

The Gift

WARNINGS: almost suicide mention (it’s faked and she doesn’t actually die or get injured from it), slight non-con, dub-con mention (past sexual assault is briefly talked about), depression, obsessive behaviour, angst, (not a tragic ending but not a very happy one I don’t think…)

Summary and Disclaimer: Okay, I haven’t had the chance to actually read any of the comics and my knowledge about these characters come from the wiki and of course these tumblrs :P I wanted to write a semi-continuation of the Yandere!Deadlock/Drift head canons which are so beautifully done and so inspiring.

Basically what you need to know is that this is an AU type of situation (based on my limited knowledge of the timelines) where Deadlock only recently became Drift again (within a human lifetime, I think is what I’m aiming for), but as a Decepticon, he had taken a bunch of humans prisoner aboard of ship with other Decepticons. He grows really attached and yandere-like to one human in particular and then after her apparent suicide, he defects. Fast forward a couple of years and he is on the LL with everyone else and is more or less accepted as Drift. But on board there are a group of humans who are sort of helping out/doing their own mission. They call on someone with a vast knowledge of alien flora and it turns out to be the supposedly dead obsession of Deadlock. And heavy angst ensues as Drift is forced to confront some of his most shocking and disgusting crimes as Deadlock. 

…

It wouldn’t make things right. Nothing could make this right, but he still wanted to try. No, he needed to try. Some masochistic part of him craved something of a reaction from her. Maybe, for closure, he reasoned. Or maybe, he was craving her attention again. He never seemed to get enough of that.

The former ‘con managed to find her alone. It wasn’t hard after he memorized her basic schedule and the common routes she took to get to places. 

He stepped in front of her. Predictably, she froze and then stared at him with those cautious eyes. 

“I have something for you.” He put down a box on the floor between them. 

She looked at it briefly and then back up to him.

Drift nudged the box closer to her. She began to walk backwards, eyes dodging around and looking for an exit. Quietly, he took a step away. “If you wish to leave, you m-”

She didn’t even wait for him to finish his sentence before she took off running down the hall. A stab of agony went through him. 

A part of him was furious with her, the old, possessive part that risked his reputation and status as a Decepticon. And a large part of him felt as though he was punched straight through his chassis. He deserved this- hell, he deserved more than this. He remembered every bruise, every word, every invasive touch- he remembered. 

Why would she accept a gift from him when the gifts he used to give her were laced with such heavy expectation? He used to buy her things that he thought she would like for so many reasons. The liar part of him reasoned that it was a sadistic form of torture- to make her feel like she was his object. To control her outward appearance was his way of claiming further ownership over her. 

But the real reason he bought them was far more fucked up. Deadlock wanted to have something of hers that she could only give willingly. He wanted her to voluntarily come to him, to join him while he slept, to smile at him with genuine kindness and to ask him about his day- how he was doing, all of these sickening things. He wanted to share his glories with her, to have her eyes shine with approval and admiration. Rather than seeing her wince when he talked about the success of his missions.

It was so easy to disturb her, and to see her tear up. That got old fast. And maybe that was why he had craved something else from her. 

For the most part, he had pretended not to notice her general disapproval and her glaring unhappiness. But he couldn’t ignore the fear and disappointment in her eyes when he returned to their- no, to his habsuite. “Did you miss me, pet?”

One time, she rolled her eyes and he got so mad. That was the time he starved her for three days. 

No food, just water. 

Back in the present, Drift stared at the elegantly wrapped box. It was supposed to be a peace offering. He plucked it up and on his way back to his room, he crushed the box with his servos. There could be no peace between them. He had done too much to her and as much as he wanted to have her securely in his grasp again, to hold her close to him- it was wrong. She would never want him. Ever.

The only moment he though she did was when- well, it was before she left. She figured out what he had wanted (what he still wanted). Really, it was only a matter of time. Drift tried to remember exactly what it was that set it off. 

Maybe, it was when he walked in and heard her sobbing. Not quietly either. She had been sobbing so loudly. It was a heartbreaking sound, and one that filled him with immediate concern and anger. Did someone hurt her? Was she in pain? 

He rushed across his habsuite and threw aside the coverings on her cage. “I’m here, I’m here,” He murmured to her. “What is it? What happened?” He had never heard the human sob like that before. It was so distressing.

A quick scan revealed that she had sustained no further damage from when he saw her last. Her ribs were bruised, yes, but those would heal given time. She was okay. 

Well, she was upset but she wasn’t hurt. Deadlock wasn’t sure what to do. On the one hand, he could have shouted at her and told her to stop, but on the other hand he was overcome with the insistent urge to draw her in close, to hold her and to have her in his arms. How come she had never done this before? What did it all mean? He held her close to him and made shushing noises.

She quieted and her breathing evened out.

After that, she began to do exactly what he wanted her to do. It was like she read his mind, saw into his guiltiest fantasies and accepted them, and accepted him. He hated to admit it, but seeing her slow smile got him through some of his tougher days. He could always look forward to coming into his habsuite and seeing her, talking to her, and holding her.

He got low at some points and made some pretty serious declarations, stroking her small body and promising that he would never allow anyone to hurt her. She needed him and she knew it. 

It was even more pathetic later on when he realized it was all an act. She played him so well and got him to deliver her means of salvation without even realizing it. A few plants, to liven up the place. Glass vials and a chemist’s station to occupy her time since she ‘always wanted to be a biologist.’ Oh, which planet was the ship docking on? One with an oxygen rich atmosphere and a few high tech colonies? She couldn’t see it, that’s okay. If he could just talk to her about it, that would be great. He was such an idiot. 

A fool in love. 

Finally someone accepted him, for all of his flaws and all of his confusion. They could see past that and they accepted him. It filled a hole that he never realized was there. It got him by and it made his life, all in all, better. 

It was a fragging lie. All of it.

Deadlock had been enraged when he discovered the means of apparent death. 

Suicide.

Drift remembered how he could have stared at her body for much longer than he did. He just held it instead and swiftly deposited on the planet that she had been so keen on seeing. Well, now she got to see it and be on it. He brought all of her stuff as well, as a little shrine to keep her company. He didn’t want to abandon her body but practical considerations had to be kept in mind. 

There was no time for a burial and a fire would draw too much attention. He left her on a rock formation, in front of a large body of water. A beautiful tomb for someone as beautiful as she was. 

And even that was a lie.

Drift nearly had a spark attack when he saw her. Actually, he thought that he was seeing a ghost.

“Getting her to work with us isn’t going to be easy, especially considering that Megatron is on board, but we need all the help we can get.” The human liaisons were recruiting people with interplanetary expertise, and she was one of them.

“Megatron destroy her home?” Someone guessed rather bluntly in the din of the meeting room. 

“She was held prisoner and tortured for seven months aboard one of his vessels.”

“How did she escape?” Another ‘bot asked.

Drift was frozen, staring at her image. 

The human’s expression changed from grim to one of astonishment. “It’s incredible, actually. She managed to get a hold of some alien flora and made this poison that slowed her heart down to near death. I guess the ‘cons were sentimental because they dropped a bunch of human stuff around her body when they got rid of her, and she used that to trade for some equipment and to call for help. The rest is history.”

She was alive. A part of him died when she died, and now she was alive.

And- oh Primus. He thought that the guilt was bad when she was dead, but now that she was back- oh no.

It was so much worse. 

..

Then, she was on board along with her Merry Men, as she liked to call the team of humans. Drift didn’t tell anyone. He couldn’t. Physically, it seemed he was unable to speak about her. He watched from the shadows, not daring to make his presence known.

One day, she caught him. 

Drift expected a lot of things as she opened up the supply closet to retrieve some more equipment. He expected her to scream, to start yelling, crying, or maybe to even run and call for help. Instead, she stared up at him with a calm expression. Her mouth was almost twisted into a smirk as she got what she needed and walked away.

Deadlock hated to be ignored. Drift had no choice. 

She knew that he was on board then, and worse, she recognized him. Why would she come on board if she knew he was there? Did she have no sense of self-preservation-? She faked her own death and risked actual death to get away from him. 

No. She had no sense of self-preservation left. That was gone a long time ago. 

The more she ignored his presence, the more obvious it got. That made things worse. Her role was of the utmost importance and Drift was an asset to have on field missions where stray Decepticons were involved. 

It was one thing when she refused to speak to him on the Lost Light, but it was another thing to have her ignore him during dangerous jaunts out onto alien planets. She refused to get into his alt mode to get back to the ship, making the humans have to change their partners mid mission. 

Everyone was irritated.

“This needs to stop, you can’t keep this up. It’s bad for morale.” One of the humans- her superior- scolded her. None of them knew. She kept it that way. 

The other human tried for a more diplomatic approach, “This planet is dangerous, these weapons are dangerous,” They gestured to the precarious load on the mech that had held all of the humans originally. “You can’t keep ignoring him.” They told her in a quieter tone, gesturing to the ex-con subtly.

She blinked as her expression morphed into one of surprise. “Oh man, you can see him too?”

Her superior snapped, “I am serious! You need to stop this behaviour at once, and step into his alt form, that is a command.”

“I would literally rather die.” She said losing her smirk.

That hurt Drift on so many levels and in so many ways. He understands hesitation and fear. He understands anger and vengeance. This is vengeance. 

“I get that you don’t like Decepticons. I don’t like them either. They destroyed my university, but you can’t go treating every former ‘con like the one who-”

One of the humans grabbed the officer. “Stop it.”

“What do you think you are doing?”

“We’ll find another way. Just. Stop. Talking.”

It wasn’t until they were back on the ship that the proverbial cat was let out of the bag. Drift wasn’t sure who figured it out or how.

Word of what she had said got around and people quickly put two and two together. She had preferred to die over being his pet. It was no question as to why. Even if the crew hadn’t seen her scars along her body- raking down her back and up between her thighs- they would have sympathized. He was recruited personally by Megatron for a reason. Deadlock was and always will be terrifying.

The marks on her body were made visible when she wore shorts or skirts. She had no qualms about showing them either, but any Cybertronian who saw them noted the possessive nature and significance of them. One liked to stroke cute things. One liked to mark things that they owned. 

They knew that she was claimed by someone awful- someone who was cruel and unusual. Someone who tortured her and as far as they could guess- it was in some very intimate ways. Bite marks on her shoulder were impossible to hide at the best of times and their size and shape gave a clue to their origin.  Whatever ‘con did this made a very public claim on her body. 

When they found out it was Deadlock who did this, there was a great outcry on the ship and the human in their eyes became something of a celebrity. She had been forced to stare at and work together with her abuser for months now. It was ludicrous for her to be expected to entrust her safety to the one who left scars all over her body, save for her face which had been left unmarred. It was easy to see why; she was a pretty little thing. 

Risking certain death to get away from the ‘con was sensible, even.

One of the Autobots said to him in a particularly nasty tone, “Good job, Decepticon. Do you even remember her?”

“Everyday.” He managed to admit when he managed the process of intaking air. 

Rung had been made aware of the troubling situation and was called in to try to soothe the boiling tensions. “It would be advisable to prevent further contact between the two.”

…

Her other form of vengeance started to show itself as the situation got more and more dangerous. She became as reckless as possible. It wasn’t hard given the perilous nature of her job; going down to alien planets, hunting mythical flora and other things to help the LL along with their given quest. 

To some, it seemed that she was showing that she wasn’t a coward despite the ‘easy way out’ she took. They were concerned that she would think that they would judge her for such an action. 

But the truth was only known to Drift. He had claimed her. He had gotten close to her and he got possessive. Only he could inflict any pain on her. And when she became his sole comfort- playing into his developing desires and dependence on her- he became even more possessive. Nothing and no one would hurt her.

He told her that time and time again. Deadlock whispered to her how he would destroy anyone who came near her, about how he would protect her because he always protects what is his. Then, he told her how much he loved her. She had begun to cry in his grip but she was smiling.

He thought that she loved him too. 

He thought that maybe Primus was smiling down on him and giving him a fragging break for once. He said that he would never let her go and that he would always keep her safe. 

That was not the intended plan.

Now, she actively threw herself into danger every chance she got, or so it seemed. Drift hated it. It claws at him. She had to know that this recklessness just made him want to scoop her up in his servos and hold her close to him and never, ever let her go. But, he can’t do that now, and she knew it.  After nearly killing herself by going into an insecure airlock, with only a thin piece of rope around her to save some random piece of equipment from being blasted into space, Drift’s expression mirrored everyone else’s. Shock and outrage. Why was she doing this? 

The smug look she gave Drift told him why. 

You can’t touch me.

________________________

Wow. WOW. I really enjoyed reading this one, it kept me on edge the entire time! I love how you made Drift still want her but he’s aware that she will never want him and he accepts that. It’s both heartbreaking and genius. And the way you wrote the reader, how she is full of spite and in need of revenge, it feels very believable and I enjoyed it that the victim finally got their revenge, even if by dangerous means. You did such a great job on this one and I hope you write even more. I look forward to reading whatever you send to me!

[momestuck]

Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim... volume 18!

Imagine I edited the final shot of End of Evangelion here to put trolls on it. That’s more effort than I’m actually willing to put in. Imagining it is probably almost as good.

This chapter is fittingly called “Of Endings, Many”.

The opening narration is kind of pointed and sarcastic. It jokes about saying trite things like ‘the circle is complete’... and then goes elsewhere.

“You’ve got enough friends, now you need answers-” - and then it interrupts itself, realising it’s just the intro screen.

I wonder who writes the intro screens?

This time we have... another jadeblood, and also a final pair of purplebloods, the second troll pair.

Lanque

Lanque is written by the mysterious “V”, who previously managed to get us to lick a clown’s armpit and then wrote some interesting things about intertextuality. I have high hopes!

Content warning: Lanque’s story deals explicitly with sex with a man, in a situation of dubious consent on the player character’s part.

Lanque’s theme I’m sure I recognise from Homestuck proper, though I’d have to do some digging to see what it’s reprising. It’s called “yall know i just do the music right” - another James Roach piece.

It begins with us getting a call from Lynera. The narration somewhat uncharitably says “that nutty bitch is exactly the sort of destabilizing influence your life needs right now”. In a positive, not sarcastic way at least.

She wants to start making friends herself...

The narration is really in a hurry this time around. We reprise the party background from the last episode.

I appreciate the kind of breezy enthusiastic chaos in V’s writing.

We’re in a cape, bra and fishnets. A perfect outfit for the final chapter.

Wow the narration just isn’t giving a shit anymore. Final chapter striking hard.

We try to figure out whose hive we’re going to... and oh shit, it’s Ardata’s. First troll we ever met, as well. The party is described as a “frathouse rager” - which, Lynera acknowledges, is not her scene at all.

Is the narrator already drunk? Or is Ardata fucking with our head again?

Ardata declares that it’s a ‘kiiickback’ for all the ‘world’s fiiinest iiinfluencers’... and neither me nor Lynera is invited. Apparently she heard about it from someone called Lanque, who’s also not invited.

What is up with this narration? It’s coming across like a standup performance.

At that point, Ardata drops a... nsfw warning on us.

I didn’t actually realise this volume had an ‘accompanying mature content description’. I think what I’m gonna do is... obviously I’m gonna play the chapter, but I will put specific content warnings before sections of the post that have potentially triggering content, and if there are explicit images, I will pixellise out any explicit bits before I embed them in the post. spoiler alert: this ain’t exactly Ladykiller in a Bind there.

That’s a hell of a warning, huh. Especially given the previous armpit-licking chapter by ‘V’ was about at the absolute limit of sfw horny anyway. Fuck knows what they’re about to inflict on us now.

Also: James Roach’s track name is starting to make sense. Apparently he wants to distance himself from this episode, semi-ironically at any rate? God, what are we in for.

So, presumably the ‘oof, you’re too scared’ link takes us to an abrupt end to the chapter, we’ll check it later. Let’s go on in.

Quick soapbox: as much as I hate the kind of shallow analysis that throws around ‘problematic’ as a summary judgement of a work - nah actually, you can’t just disclaim shit under ‘challenging or controversial material’. By the same token that you can write whatever shit you want in a Homestuck computer game, critics - and random nerds on the internet, which is to say, the entire audience of this game - can discuss it however we find appropriate.

Nevertheless, you haven’t actually done anything worse than make me lick a clown’s armpit so far, and we can approach challenging themes in a way that says something meaningful and important, so let’s see what you have for us, V. To be honest I’m expecting some kind of portrayal of sexual violence given all the disclaimers, but who knows.

The party sounds like hell.

To Lynera, who remains glued to our arm, it’s ‘more than she was expecting’. But before we can leave, Lanque arrives.

I was wrong about what I thought was Lanque’s theme. Lanque’s theme is a slow, mournful saxophone piece. Maybe the music before was Lynera’s theme, and I just forgot how it went?

The narration mentions a ‘curious red stain’ on Lanque’s shirt. They’re obviously going for a whole ‘sexy vampire’ type thing with him. Maybe a Twilight parody, with Lynera in the Bella role? That would be a little dated, though.

I vaguely recall that it was said at some point that the jadebloods were all women. Which makes me suspect that Lanque is a trans guy, and this story is gonna touch on themes of transness and such. That could be something I completely confabulated, though. I’d check the wiki but no doubt it’s been updated by now, and I don’t want to spoil myself on this arc.

He seems to be in a flirty mood. Not sure how old either of these two are supposed to be.

Oh yeah. The knifemeter actually hasn’t shown up in this episode so far. He expresses surprise that Lynera has friends. Or at least, friend.

Eesh, this guy gonna be another Zebruh?

Lanque asks about us and we blather about being an alien, and also general disaster.

It’s really hard to get the sense that this is a loud party where we can barely hear each other over the noise, given both the narration and the soft jazz background.

He says something about not biting unless asked. So if it’s not already obvious... either a genuine rainbow drinker (hey, if Kanaya could do it at age 6 sweeps/13 years, no doubt he could at age... whatever age he is!), or someone who likes pretending to be one.

Anyway, our protag is apparently not overcome by friendship lust at this point, and tries to play wingman and put Lanque’s attention back onto Lynera. This... doesn’t go as well as expected.

(2.43 sweeps, that is - about 5.3 years)

Hmm, why would that be? This could be like, a transphobia thing? Do trolls have that? I’d say of course they fucking do, but apparently they don’t have homophobia, and their gender system... well who the hell knows how troll gender works, having all the signifiers of gender in the real world but none of the material consequences.

Anyway, Lanque calls Lynera a ‘nasty little bitch’. But then immediately says he’s not one to criticise.

So... maybe it’s not a trans thing? We’ll see. Lanque continues being a huge dick, suggesting that Lynera is interested in him because the ordeals are coming, and she wants to take the chance to fuck before they roll around.

Lynera is kind of... not surprisingly pretty hurt.

The narrator challenges Lanque on his rudeness without a choice.

Ah, the classic ‘she deserved it’ defence. Second only to the ‘it didn’t happen, but if it had, they would have deserved it anyway’ defence.

The protag demands to know why Lanque even invited Lynera if it was just to have such a huge go at her like that. Lanque’s explanation is... kind of unclear.

It’s not like she got much of a chance to defend herself there. So far my impression of Lanque is: this guy’s a huge cock. Or possibly a huge nook. Idk what the troll equivalent is.

The narrator decides to ‘Switzerland out of’ this conversation. They say this out loud, of course. Who needs an internal monologue, these days?

Lanque invites us to stay - we’re ‘much more interesting’ anyway. Eesh. I’m inclined to look for a ‘fuck right off where’s my pepper spray’ button, but that’s just me being a lesbian I guess. (Pepper spray is also illegal in the UK. I’m pretty sure.)

Yeah, you said it. He says he’s got ‘less time to waste than most’.

Bryn sees a meta joke about the narrative structure, Bryn clicks the screenshot button.

(Speak of the screenshot button, I had to rebind it to make it easier to paste the screenshots, you see in Ubuntu-- oh, you’re asleep?)

Anyway I kind of expected a choice around about now, but no, we barrel forwards, and end up dancing with Lanque. He takes our hand and leads us to another part of the house.

At that point, Elwurd shows up! I wonder how much of the cast is set to make an appearance in this chapter. If it’s all 35 trolls we’ve encountered so far, this is gonna be a long chapter!

Elwurd seems to be Lanque’s dealer. Not sure what drug she’s selling exactly. Apparently ‘you a drone?’ is the Alternian equivalent of ‘you a cop?’...

Anyway, Lanque buys the drug, and peer pressures us to take it. We’re like, nuh-uh.

We did not, we tell him, ask him to buy drugs for us.

I’m proud of you, protagonist. At the beginning of this story you’d have done anything to get a friend.

At that point, Diemen makes his reappearance. We really are going through the entire cast here, huh.

Yeah. That one’s just too obvious.

Anyway, undrugged, we get to dancing.

God, V, we get it, you want to fuck trolls. The narrator goes with it, though.

I find it kind of interesting how, like... our protagonist in the beginning and ending sketches is pretty much like, a marshmallow, indicating that they represent some kind of AFGNCAAP. But over time, little assumptions leak in. For example, we’re some kind of American nerd - our education system included a ‘high school’, and we had the option to learn Spanish there. We are relatively physically unfit. The wordplay suggests we know English.

Sometimes it’s deliberate - clearly someone made a choice to make it so that our protagonist has opinions about rap and knows a bit about professional wrestling, to suit the themes of the chapters. Those aren’t like, presumed traits assumed of the Homestuck audience, but things that kind of carve out a specific identity

So yeah... we’ve already had the whole ‘cheese person’ thing in Fozzer’s route, and here they’re straight up declaring the protag has pale skin. (Which doesn’t mean they’re white, necessarily, but they are apparently not Black, say.) I think that’s kind of a shame - a wasted opportunity.

Homestuck has already traded a lot on the ambiguity of its characters, which the fandom tends to read as implicitly white, except for like, a relatively small corner. This came to a head at points - most infamously the ‘CAUCASIAN’ controversy during the trickster mode phase, when Hussie ‘jokingly’ declared that his previously ambiguous characters (shaded pure #FFFFFF white, implying a ‘blank slate’) were ‘CAUCASIAN’ in bright flashing letters - at least while in trickster mode. After backlash, the panels were left as-is, but ‘CAUCASIAN’ was replaced with ‘PEACHY’.

Friendsim could have been an opportunity to improve the record a bit, especially as its narrative explicitly addresses many questions of societal oppression and occasionally makes explicit analogues to racism. But... they didn’t do that. Alas.

Anyway, moving on.

Apparently I’m very predictable because the very next panel addresses this exact line of thought.

I feel like this and the ‘not racist’ joke in the previous arc by ‘V’ are kind of... well I don’t know anything about ‘V’, and what they might be intending by these jokes. Here, it’s kind of parodying the whole thing in Homestuck rather explicitly... but whether it’s like, challenging it? There’s definitely a reading that’s like... pointed sarcasm, challenging the source material’s noncommital laziness.

Hey art interpretation is hard lol.

V’s writing is unusually striking, in a way I’m not quite sure how I feel about. I will think more about that once we’ve fully explored this chapter.

Things are getting pretty meta. He comments how we’re paper thin and he can see our blood. We’re like, ok, so you’re a vampire then?

This is the kind of thing! Writing that’s like... on the edge of like, telling a story and just directly talking to the reader, pushing us to engage with ambiguity and metaphor.

To release the tension a bit, the narrator does a ‘sexy dance’.

Anyway, we don’t get to find out what Lanque really thinks of our sexy dancing. Because at that point, Bronya shows up. Lanque decides it’s time to go.

...to a respiteblock, where else. So much for this being a friendsim and pointedly not a dating sim.

We are, it seems, safe. Lanque politely asks if we’d like to kiss. There’s another reminder that this is a very nsfw not for kids scene about to go down in this room right now.

So that’s apparently going to be our decision here. FUCK THE BOY/DO NOT FUCK THE BOY

...no, that’s not our choice. We’re kissing the boy no matter what. This is also portrayed in first person view, because consistency is important!

Apparently our blood tastes ‘sharp and dangerous - like a weapon’.

I feel like this is about to answer a whole fucking lot of fandom questions. At least as far as Hiveswap canon is concerned - arguably a separate entity to Homestuck canon, though obviously, like an expanded universe, designed to be read almost exclusively with intertextuality in mind. An elaboration, I guess.

There’s more like... hey check it out we’re going NSFW. Still nothing like a choice button yet.

One thing I find interesting is like... while this game is packed with lesbians of various stripes, and evidently many of the writers are gay or bi women, all the trolls who get really horny scenes have been boys. (Two of them written by ‘V’, admittedly). Mallek first with his shirtless scene, then much more recently Marvus, and now Lanque.

Also look at these guys. Pretty sure V has a type.

Anyway, the narrator makes the mistake of saying something vaguely derogatory about buckets.

Not sure like... what he finds derogatory there. Mentioning ‘buckets’ vs ‘pails’ (might be a distinction between reproductive and non-reproductive sex?), or saying that he doesn’t seem to have one? He says it’d be his first time.

With an alien, huh. *xenofucker fist bump*

Instead of a sex scene, we get a lore drop.

Once he gets shipped offworld, there will be no more ‘sneaking out of the caverns’. To Lanque, this effectively means his life will be over. This is his last chance to fuck!

A little overdramatic, dude!

Before we can get to it, Bronya interrupts.

So we get interrupted by Bronya. This is finally our choice point. Do we dob Lanque in, or do we fuck?

Regarding ‘problematic’, the main thing I’m seeing is like... Lanque is, at best, barely of age. Since he’s talking about getting shipped offworld soon, I’m guessing he’s close to troll adulthood. In terms of real-world narratives, this is taking on the general tone of ‘college story’ - complete with allusion to a frat party.

I think like... I’m going to read this whole visual novel, and write what I think about it. However, I can also totally understand why you would not want to read this kind of ‘first time’ story. So I’m going to leave that branch to a readmore at the end of the post. Above the cut, to give you all some kind of ending, and we’ll go down the ‘call his mum’ branch. Lol it’s not nearly as nsfw as they make it sound, there’s nothing that really need readmores, nevermind this lol.

Bronya busts the door open and tells him to get dressed immediately.

Lanque gets his mean streak back on, and goes in on Bronya now.

He does love the word ‘bitch’, does Lanque. He tells her she’s not actually his lusus (oh yeah, lusii... it’s been a while since we’ve seen one honestly. The last one was the goat.) She slaps him. He pretends like it was a sex thing.

This is not pretty. Bronya launches into a lecture on Lanque: sneaking out, being an ass to Lynera, and...

Yeah, maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get further involved.

Apparently he’s not deterred by the fact that we literally called Bronya up to get out of fucking him, and adds us on Chittr before he leaves.

So that’s an ending. Sweet look, protagonist.

But it’s not the ending ending. We get a final screen.

Sure, I want to understand. Is this going to be some kind of direct artist-to-reader commentary on what they were trying to accomplish with that chapter?

The text box turns white, and the font changes. I bet this is Doc Scratch. So no, probably not that. In fact, this segues straight into the epilogue. I think there are different versions of the epilogue depending how you approach the final chapter, or else we were supposed to play the other branch before Lanque, so for the sake of putting the epilogue at the end, I’ll save it for a future post. (I’ve already written it up.)

Now, the other Lanque branches. First of all, refusing at the NSFW notice.

So they poke fun at the reader for like, not accepting the NSFW notice. Uh-huh. You know that Steam doesn’t automatically give a mature content warning if you’ve set up your account that way right? Which I guess is my own fault lol.

Anyway, doing this leads to like... a totally different arc, and a totally different canon. Huh, I genuinely expected they’d like just end the story there.

It’s a cozy party now, apparently.

This version of Lanque is... different.

For one thing, he’s got a flower crown. And instead of soft sexy jazz, we have a pretty piano piece. He says hi to Lynera and me.

Hmm. Not entirely un-hornified, then.

Lynera gushes wildly about us, recapping a whole bunch of plot.

It turns out, rather than taking drugs and having sex and other such risqué things, this party is a chill poetry reading.

So I realise this entire branch is just like, an extended joke at the reader. Look how un-edgy this is. We’re going to support our friends and read poetry.

In this one, instead of asking to kiss us, he asks to hold hands before we read poetry. And he says this is a poem about a past relationship, and it might be a bit raw.

We get Lanque’s poem, in full.

I was going to copy-paste the whole thing in, but it’s quite long, so let’s be uncool and respect copyright or whatever because my fingers were getting tired. It is quite good... addressing loss, and memory, and the lingering influence of a past relationship. It makes me wish I had ever developed the ability to appreciate and comment on poetry, because I feel like I just don’t have the vocabulary to comment on it, or what it might connect to, or anything else. The narration agrees: raw, emotional.

I imagine, though perhaps this is presumptuous, it is reflecting something quite real in the real life of ‘V’.

Lynera also gets the chance to read out a poem. She happens to have one on hand. It’s about Bronya, sure enough, and her loneliness and alienation.

Afterwards, she is self-deprecating.

This version of Lanque is kind and reassuring - the complete opposite of his persona in the sexy branch.

We leave with Lynera after hugging it out. Reading her poem, and being with other trolls in this way, seems to have really helped Lynera. There’s another pointed bit of defensiveness at potential critics.

Soapbox: This is the state of discourse, where the complex feelings we have in relation to fictional works must get flattened out into strict ‘rules’. A character can easily support lesbian and bi interpretations; it can be a relief to bi people and upsetting for lesbians when one of those possibilities is ruled out by having her express interest in a man (not that this, ultimately, rules out lesbian interpretations, since a person can of course be mistaken about their feelings).

To lesbians, it is perhaps likely more salient that many characters they identify with end up expressing attraction to men, and this can seem like yet another instance. To bi women, narratives about picking a ‘side’ are perhaps more likely to be salient, and it can be relief to have an explicitly bi character.

The only conclusion we can draw is that gender is a hellish system of punishment and exploitation, and we should seek to be kind to each other and also abolish it forthwith, write our own stories, and abolish the stranglehold that capital holds on all aspects of our lives including the symbolic media we use to understand the world.

All that said, this repetitive defensiveness about ‘problematic’ writing does kind of annoy me a bit, even if I can understand where it comes from. Let your work speak for itself.

Anyway, that’s enough huge essays (I say, falsely). Let’s finish out the branch.

“...right?”

This branch finishes out with a poke at the whole structure of the game so far - the good endings, bad endings, and so on. We’ve not made a friend, but we have made a stronger connecting with an existing one.

I’m not sure how seriously we should take that given the way ‘valid’ has become pretty much a joke word, if this is still an extended dig at the audience, but there we are.

That was a surprisingly long and rich branch for a first choice, which is kind of nice, actually.

If we click ‘no’ on ‘do you want to understand’...

We just get a game over screen with us sitting in our watchtower looking sad.

So now... it’s time for the nsfw section discussed above. Except... it’s a total fakeout.

First of all, we get an implication that it’s not his first time at all. Anyway, then we get to it. Which is to say, we get a fade to silly anime joke. God, this is like those old 4chan stories where they’d set you up for a sex scene and then rickroll you or something.

We get a ‘dorito faced anime boy’ joke I guess?

Afterwards...

Lol.

Anyway, in this branch, he doesn’t add us on chittr. Lol.

So yeah we die of shame. Welp.

God I can’t believe I thought this would actually go there. Of course it would be a joke at the audience.

Looking back, well, you know, reading the metaphors: he’s a predatory guy and lied through his teeth to get into our pants. Obviously it’s not his first time; obviously he’s not about to bugger off to space and never have sex again T_T, obviously the shit he said was just to get us to fuck; this isn’t just cheesy narrative tropes but within the fiction him playing the protagonist in order to get us to fuck. Complete with the whole attempt to drug us, and make it very unambiguously rape. (Which no doubt Elwurd knew). He got us to explicitly consent before we did anything, but also did enough shady shit so as to make that ‘consent’ kind of questionable when viewed later.

Viewed in that light... what I originally thought was just someone writing a horny fantasy about a hot dominating guy who’s totally into you~ is actually like... a pretty sharp piece of writing about shit pulled by men. There were plenty of warning signs - the ‘objectifying’ way he looks at you, the way he attempts to drug you, etc. I would like to imagine that IRL, rather than taking it as a piece of fiction, I wouldn’t be vulnerable to the same tactics. (Well, obviously I wouldn’t from a guy, at any rate). But it’s kind of a nicely written piece to make you feel stupid and taken advantage of afterwards like... why the fuck did you go along with this.

Though given that this kind of thing is something that people like... actually go through, I feel like they could have warned for it better than ‘challenging and controversial material’. Yes, that might have robbed it of some of its power; but it would also mean that it wouldn’t trigger people who have trauma over this exact kind of thing.

So.

“V”.

Honestly, my strongest feeling about “V” is one of respect. Both their stories have been a weird blend of cheeky, challenging and playful, with some very astute elements and an enormous amount of energy and intensity. They’re prepared to fuck with the reader in ways both silly (lick the troll’s armpit!) and rather more serious (this whole arc), they fuck around with canonicity and narrative structure in creative ways... I wonder what else they’ve written?

There remains only these two clown twins, and the epilogue.

Barzum and Baizli

To finish out the set, we have another pair. The Alternian text says ‘The Soleil Twins’, so I guess that’s their surname. The twins are written by Kieran Miranda, who previously wrote Azdaja, Stelsa and Charun.

The story begins with day nearing, and the protagonist friendless. They get the idea to like... head over to relax with Skylla, but before they can, they run into a house.

A very haunted looking house.

An easy choice for us to begin. ‘No fucking way’ naturally skips this arc, right?

Nope, back at the house. We get another choice: leave left or right. I picked left. I doubt it matters.

Yep, that kind of house. We can’t escape.

After a struggle, we reach the door.

Inside, we immediately pass out with a sense of nausea. Lovely. This can only go well. We hear something like bugs skittering away.

The mansion does at least seem to be explorable. Unfortunately, the door leads to a portrait gallery full of clowns, which is not the most welcome place to end up.

Someone tunes one of the portraits. It turns out to be a TV. Dramatic piano chords come in.

Oh hey it’s some friends.

Their shtick is that the one on the right finishes the one on the left’s sentences, the one on the left speaks in all lower case, and the one on the right speaks in all caps.

They want us to find them. They’re very bored you see, and want to play a game. This is, I understand, an allusion to the Saw series of horror movies, in which I gather a person places people in buildings full of sadistic traps, monitored by various cameras and a small puppet with spiral cheeks. So I guess that’s us now.

We get our first real choice.

I think the door is too obvious. If there’s not another exit, we’ll have to take the door anyway - though that’s likely a different branch, realistically speaking.

We discover a hidden door. Behind it is... a hole in the ground.

I guess we have instant-death options later than usual in this chapter. Our final thought is about the terrible loss of our Chittr profile.

Well, that’s fine. Let’s see what happens if we go straight into the house instead of wandering around.

Approaching the house immediately just skips the wandering around; the text is the same. It was a fake choice. Skipping forward, let’s see what happens if we take the obvious door, not the hidden one.

As we move down the hallway, the lights come on and the walls start bleeding. Lovely. Glorious sense of interior decoration. Tip top.

Beyond the door, we end up in another dark room. Maybe this one will be more of a true CYOA, with death options in every room.

But no. Not immediately, anyway. Ropes come out of the ground and tie us up. The two trolls who were watching us make themselves known.

Carnivalish music kicks in. We finally get a clear view of our captors.

Baizli right (allcaps), Barzum left (lowercase). I’ll try to remember that.

The twins say some predictably sinister stuff about removing our intestines (acid tubes, in trollspeak). The narrator grumbles about once again being reduced to the status of ‘torture muppet’.

When we express a desire to leave, Barzum and Baizli swap both demeanour and capitalisation rule. Now Baizli looks sad, and speaks in lowercase, while Barzum is pissed and speaks in caps.

These two twins, in the tradition of creepy twins, seem to share one mind. Which means they can hardly prank each other! They need someone else.

They rev up a chainsaw and suddenly... we’re back in the same room we started.

Looks like we’ve had another bit of time fuckery from The Powers That Be. Compare Fozzer. The loops kick in, faster and faster. Glued. Buried alive.

Having read the epilogue, all I’ll say is that it seems like someone is trying very hard to push us onto a timeline that ‘works’.

There’s a joke about time loop movies which I don’t get because I haven’t seen very many time loop movies.

After ‘20 or so’ loops, we decide we’ve had enough. But we get a choice of what to do about it.

Let’s try ‘Fuck this.’ first.

This turns out to mean attempting to intimidate the twins instead of begging them to release us.

While they’re baffled by this display, we make a break for an air vent. Surprisingly, we make good our escape. There’s a mention of all our jogging training with Stelsa, which happened in a non-canonical timeline - there was a whole thing about it! - but fair enough. Guess that’s another thing that persists between timelines. Or maybe the protag just thinks they went jogging with Stelsa in this timeline.

We find we’ve missed a bunch of texts from Skylla while we were out, and plan to head over there. But alas... the space loop is still in effect.

We end up back at the house. Unable to escape from the pocket dimension, the branch ends...

So let’s try the other option: ‘remember who you are’.

Come, try to remember...

And that is, of course... FRIENDSHIP. This time, we have something to say to the clowns (after ensuring we haven’t pissed ourselves).

Not killing us is apparently a novel idea for the twins. Or rather, they didn’t plan to kill us - just cut us up a bit, unaware that we wouldn’t heal right back up. The protag corrects the misconception.

So now we’re teaching the creepy clown kids the meaning of friendship. Novel!

The lights come up and they put on a little circus show for us. Apparently this building is not their hive.

They show us various other dangerous-looking circus tricks with the torture/circus equipment. Ah, says the narrator, so risking their lives is these kids’ hobby.

It turns out these kids hatched from the same egg. They tell us they do in fact share a mind entirely - one mind, two bodies.

And at last we end up chilling out and sharing stories.

With this friendship established, we sense a shift of some kind. We take this as a sign that the door might have finally opened.

Not only is the door open, but the ‘pocket dimension’ has dissipated too. The power of friendship! ...or fulfilling some secret design of whoever created the pocket dimension. Mmm.

How touching.

There’s a fakeout victory jingle, which turns out to have been a prank. They explain that... the creepy blood seeping walls and so on were their ‘chucklevoodoos’, but as for the time loop... Not them at all.

“Do you want to understand?” asks the prompt again. Time... for the epilogue.

[qvault]

(Very) Basic Intro to Hash Functions (SHA-256, MD-5, etc)

This is going to be a basic introduction to hash functions. I will assume most of my audience is here to gain an understanding of why hash functions are used and the basic idea of why they work. My goal is to explain it in a general sense, I will be omitting proofs and implementation details and instead focusing on the high-level principles.

Why Use A Hash Function?

Hash functions are used all over the internet in order to securely store passwords, find duplicate records, quickly store and retrieve data, and more. For example, Qvault uses hashes to extend master passwords into private encryption keys.

A longer list of uses here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Uses

I want to focus on several important features of hash functions, arguably the most important features.

Hash functions scramble data deterministically

No matter the input, the output of a hash function always has the same size

The original data can not be retrieved from the scrambled data (one-way function)

Scrambles Data Deterministically

Think of a Rubix cube.

I start with the cube unscrambled. If I start twisting randomly, by the end I will end up with something that does not resemble anything close to what I started with. Also, if I were to start over and do the exact same series of moves, I would be able to repeatedly get the exact same outcome. Even though the outcome may appear random, it isn’t at all. That is what deterministic means.

Determinism is important for securely storing a password. For instance, let’s pretend my password is “iLoveBitcoin”

I can use a hash function to scramble it:

iLoveBitcoin → “2f5sfsdfs5s1fsfsdf98ss4f84sfs6d5fs2d1fdf15”

Now, if anyone were to see the scrambled version, they wouldn’t know my original password! This is important because it means that as a website developer, I only need to store the hash (scrambled data) of my user’s password to be able to verify them. When the user signs up, I hash the password and store it in my database. When the user logs in, I just hash what they typed in and compare the two hashes. Because a given input always produces the same hash, this works every time.

If a website stores passwords in plain-text (not hashed) it is a huge breach of security. If someone were to hack that site’s database and find all the emails stored with plain-text passwords, they could then use those combinations and try them on other websites.

No Matter the Input, the Output is the Same Size

If I hash a single word the output will be a certain size (in the case of SHA-256, a particular hashing function, the size is 256 bits). If I hash a book, the output will be the same size.

This is another important feature because it can save us computing time. A classic example is using a hash as a key in a data map. A data map is a simple structure used in computer science to store data.

http://www.ingenioussql.com/tag/key-value-store/

When a program stores data in a map, a key and value are given to the map. When a program wants to access the value, it can give the appropriate key to the map and receive the corresponding value. Data maps are good because they can find data instantly. The key is used as an address that the computer can find immediately, instead of taking hours searching through millions of records.

Because keys are like addresses, they can’t be too large. If I want to store books in a data map I can hash the contents of the book and use the hash as a key. As a programmer, I can simply use the hash to look up the contents of the book instead of trying to sort through thousands of records by title, author, etc.

How Do They Work?

Here is the real challenge of writing this article. I’m going to keep it extremely simple and omit the actual implementation details while giving you a basic idea of what the computer actually does when it hashes some data.

Let’s walk through an example algorithm I’m making up on the fly for this demonstration, LANEHASH:

We start with some data to hash

iLoveBitcoin

I convert the letters and numbers into 1’s and 0’s (All data in computers are stored in 1’s and 0’s, different patterns of 1’s and 0’s represent different letters)

iLoveBitcoin→ 100010100000101111

At this point we go through various predetermined steps to transform our data. The steps can be anything, the important thing is that whenever we use LANEHASH we need to use the same steps so that our algorithm is deterministic.

We move the first four bits from the left side to the right

100010100000101111 → 101000001011111000

We separate every other bit

101000001011111000 → 110011110 & 000001100

We convert those two parts into base 10 numbers. Base 10 is the “normal” number system that we all learned in school. (all binary data really just numbers, you can look up how binary is converted to base 10 easily online elsewhere)

110011110 → 414

000001100→ 12

We multiply the two numbers together

414 *12 = 4968

We square that number

4968 ^ 2 = 24681024

We convert that number back to binary

24681024 →1011110001001101001000000

We chop 9 bits off the right side to get exactly 16 bits

1011110001001101001000000 → 1011110001001101

We convert that binary data back to English

1011110001001101 → “8sj209dsns02k2”

As you can see, if you start with the same word at the beginning, you will always get the same output at the end. However, if you even change one letter, the outcome will be drastically changed.

** Disclaimer **

On the steps where I convert from English to binary, and from binary to English, I followed no pattern. Don’t let that confuse you. There are many different ways to convert binary data to English and back, I just didn’t want to get hung up on that in this article. Here are some references on that subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

Thanks

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[hannahindie]

In Which Han and Sandee Get Distracted

Disclaimer: @escabell and I have no clue about what we’re talking about. What I will tell you is that when we looked up A/B/O stuff, we got even more confused and left with more questions than we had answers. Those of you that understand and write about it, I commend you and hope that you aren’t offended by our goofing, but it was too good not to write something involving us grandmas knowing nothing. Anyway, this is just ridiculousness. I pretty much just took our conversation and flipped it into what would happen if the Winchesters walked in on you looking for fanfiction. But then we got distracted. I’m not even going to bother tagging anyone in this because it’s just silliness, but I hope you get a chuckle out of our shenanigans. Also, it’s not beta’d, so any spelling/grammar mistakes are alllllllll me. (P.S. We have nothing against A/B/O at all. We literally just didn’t know what it was and decided to Google it. It wasn’t our best plan. You guys could probably educate us better than what we found. lol)

“They’re gonna kill us if they find out we are looking up fanfiction about them, you know that right?”

I shrugged, “Yea, well...maybe they shouldn’t leave us alone in the bunker. I’m bored, you’re bored, and we have the internet. I can’t be held responsible for what happens next.” Sandee raised an eyebrow, then slowly smiled and nodded. “Also, if we get caught, we’re equally to blame. I’m not going down alone.” I opened my laptop, “Tumblr or….what else is there? Google?”

“Just go to Tumblr, grandma.”

I pulled up the website and signed in using my old account, “I haven’t been on here in years. Let’s see what we can find…” My eyes were immediately assaulted by very naked genitalia and I scrolled down incredibly fast, “Who the hell did I follow that that was an option? Geeze.”

Sandee laughed, “Yea. Like you don’t remember.”

“Shut up,” I mumbled. “I guess I’m just going to look up Sam and Dean Winchester fanfiction. That should do it.” It immediately pulled up page upon page of fanfiction. “Anything in particular we want to look for?”

Sandee shrugged, “I don’t know. I recall this being your idea.” She squinted at the screen as I scrolled, “What’s a ….reader insert?”

I clicked on it and quickly skimmed the page, “Looks like you just add your name as you read it. Not gonna lie, I just tried to pronounce the y and n together. That’s going to be a thing now. A girl has no name. Only Y/N.” I went back to the top of the fic and began reading out loud, ‘I woke up to the feeling of warm leather pressed against my cheek and the smell of gunpowder and whiskey flooded my senses. My vision was blurry as I rubbed the sleep from them as flashes of last night came back to me. Suddenly, I felt a muscular arm tighten around my waist and I suddenly remembered who I was with. Dean Winchester, the man who’d been raised from hell. I was going to have some explaining to do.’ Huh, I should try my hand at this. We both have pretty good experience with the Winchesters, don’t you think?” I wiggled my eyebrows and Sandee smacked my arm.

“You aren’t writing that down. No one needs to know about that.”

I looked at her wide eyed, “I meant hunting, what did you think I meant? What kind of person do you think I am?” I looked at her for a moment then gasped, “You sly dog, you! I was just kidding! How...when...you know what, I’m just….let’s look for more fanfiction, shall we?” I continued to scroll then stopped when something unfamiliar caught my eye. “What...is…this?”

“What?” Sandee leaned forward to look at what I was pointing at.

“A/B/O. What does that mean?” I scrolled through the fic, and though there was some description, still didn’t answer my question. “It looks...complicated. I think I’m going to google it.” I pulled up a second tab and opened Google: what is A/B/O? “Oh, cool. There’s a wiki page for it. Let’s see…” I could feel my eyebrows furrow together as I read and Sandee waited patiently for me to explain. “Sandee, I’m not entirely sure what to tell you. I mean, I get it, but then...I don’t.”

“Just tell me.”

I grabbed my glasses and put them on so that I could continue reading. “Let me just make sure I read that right...okay. So apparently it’s Alpha, Beta, Omega. Like wolves, I’m assuming. So there’s that pecking order. Although it appears that the Omegas can be replaced by Betas, since they are the lowest on the food chain, if you will. Or they can be super valuable because they’re rare. I’ve read it both ways.”

Sandee shrugged, “That’s not that hard to understand. Why are you confused?”

I took my glasses off and tossed them on the table a little harder than necessary, “Are they people? Or are they werewolves? Or neither? Just wolves with human qualities? All three? What are they?”

“It’s fiction, Han. It can be whatever the writer wants, probably.”

I waved my hand, “Like HELL. I need to know.” I scrolled back up to the top, “Oooo, related pages. What the balls is knotting?”

“I don’t know that you should click on that, Han. We can just read it and appreciate it for the wonderful writing. Do you really need to know all the terminology?”

I raised an eyebrow, “Are you telling me that you are not the least bit curious? If we are going to read this, after the writer clearly put in a lot of time researching these things, don’t you think we should understand the subject matter? C’mon, Sandee, join me. Follow me down this wikipedia trail of information we never thought we’d need to know.”

“Okay, fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I clicked the link and we both leaned in to read what Wikipedia had to say. Sandee looked over at me and grinned as I frowned at the information I was reading, “I told you.”

“Listen, I have nothing against it, this just doesn’t have a ton of information and for some reason all I can think about is a human shaped wolf. I’m having trouble picturing it. Wikipedia is not super helpful here, and then it just gives me more links to vague information.” I sighed, “I just wanna know what knotting means, man. These writers have put a lot of work into these, I want to know what they’re talking about. The internet is hard.” I backtracked to the original page we’d found and skimmed over it again. “Now, hold the phone.”

Sandee looked back at the computer screen, “What?”

I pointed at what I had just read, “Read that. You read that and tell me how that would work?”

I watched as Sandee’s mouth moved silently as she read the paragraph I’d pointed to, then scrunched her nose, “Well...I mean...I don’t know. They’d probably just do it like you would normally do it.”

“That says that Omega males give birth. How in the hell does that work? Do they...where….how? HOW?”

“Why don’t you just ask Siri?” She pulled her phone out of her pocket, “Siri, can an omega poop a baby?”

“OK, I found this on the web for ‘can an omega poop a baby?’ “

“First of all, that British voice is condescending. I feel like he is judging us. Also, those search results are not helpful. I don’t care about babies pooping, I care about Omega males pooping out babies.”

Sandee grabbed the computer and began typing, “The answers are there, you just know have to know where to look.”

I crossed my arms, “So you know where to find information on males giving birth to what may or may not be wolf babies?”

Sandee shrugged, “I have a particular set of skills.”

Meanwhile…

“I wonder what the girls have been up to today. It’s been awhile since they’ve been left on their own. I hope they didn’t get too bored.”

Dean shrugged, “Sammy, they’re grown women. They can entertain themselves. They’ve got Netflix, and who knows, maybe they even decided to do some research. Hannah and Sandee both like to look stuff up, I’m sure they found something interesting.” Dean put the Impala in park and both Winchesters made their way from the garage and up through the kitchen. Dean put a hand out to stop Sam.

“What?”

“Do you hear that?”

“It sounds like Sandee and Han talking, why?”

“I wanna know what they’re talking about. If we’re quiet enough, we can probably eavesdrop a little.”

Sam frowned, “Why would you want to do that?”

Dean smirked, “I wanna know if Sandee is talking about me.”

Sam crossed his arms, “And why would she be….oh. Oh. Dammit, Dean. Seriously?”

“I’m not gonna mess it up, Sam. It just happened, and it’s awesome. Got anything else to say about it?”

Sam smiled, “Nah. Let’s see what they’re talking about.” They crept into the library and stopped just outside the door.

“Why don’t you just ask Siri? Siri, can an omega poop a baby?”

“OK, I found this on the web for ‘can an omega poop a baby?’ “

“First of all, that British voice is condescending. I feel like he is judging us. Also, those search results are not helpful. I don’t care about babies pooping, I care about Omega males pooping out babies.”

“The answers are there, you just know have to know where to look.”

“So you know where to find information on males giving birth to what may or may not be wolf babies?”

“I have a particular set of skills.”

“What the hell?” Dean couldn’t help but exclaim as he and Sam walked into the library. Both girls paused, then slowly turned to face Sam and Dean. “What are you guys doing? What’s this about men pooping babies?”

Hannah grabbed her laptop and closed it, stood, and slowly backed towards the other doorway as she threw a quick glance at Sandee, “We will never speak of this again.” She bolted, leaving Sandee to deal with the two very confused Winchesters.

“Well, you see...there’s this….we were looking at...you know, there’s not a good explanation for this.”

Sam laughed, “Yep, you’re meant for each other.” He shook his head and walked out of the room.

“Seriously, what were you guys talking about?”

Sandee laughed, “It’s probably best that you didn’t know. Although it’s become very apparent that Han is literally a grumpy old grandma when it comes to using technology.”

[child-of-hurin]

vardasvapors replied to your post: kareenvorbarra replied to your post “[[MO...

i don’t remember this since it’s been ages since i saw mulan, but tbh the gradient colors does *sound* like an artistic choice (maybe one that didn’t come off too well), maybe to convey the sort of minimalist aesthetic of some types of chinese art? idk though of course since i don’t recall what they looked like…

disclaimer: I’m not chinese and I haven’t studied chinese art except for fun as an amateur artists so I might be totally wrong, this is really just my opinions/impressions, so if I’m saying some shit here don’t hesitate to correct me!

I found this on the wiki:

An important element of Bacher's design was to turn the art style closer to Chinese painting, with watercolor and simpler design, as opposed to the details of The Lion King and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.[37]

So your line of reasoning proceeds but... like, as much as traditional chinese plays a lot with negative space, it does so in a way that always feel very grandiose, and with the purpose of conducting your gaze through the image, so... if the inspiration came from there, I still think it’s a very shallow perception of that type art, if all they got was “minimalistic not much going on”? They’d have to have upped their game in well-placed details and interesting compositions, but instead most of the space feels confined, and more often than not your eyes only have the character in the very center of the screen to focus on, and that’s not really very chinese in terms of anything:

now take a look at these:

(i find this forest particularly offensive tbqh)

(and these tents too)

(didn’t this deserve to be more interesting?? The throne room? Why are there so few people in china and why is it so dark is the emperor moving somewhere else)

There are some moments i liked too ofc! Like I really think the whole sequence in the snow is pretty good... probably because the sheer amount of white means that the background artists actually needed to do some space play, so, even though there isn’t anything gorgeous like in their other animated movies, i feel like the composition gets a little more interesting and dynamic and less centralized... There are also pretty scenes when Mulan is in the garden.

I also found this bit:

Bacher further studied more than thirty-five film directors ranging from the silent era German Expressionism, British and American epics of the 1950s and 60s, and the spaghetti westerns for inspiration for composition, lighting, and staging that would establish settings that enhanced the characters,[38] 

IMO this makes way more sense in terms of general directing inspiration, with the whole objective composition and lack of background definition tbh? 

[hindbodes]

(New Weak Developer Post)

Ugh... Jesus. OK, so it’s been like 8 months. 8 months since I made one of these posts. It’s such a long time containing so many teacher-to-student fuckups that not only am I not working on Proto-Square anymore, but I’m not working on the game development project that replaced it anymore. That game was Quad, now I’m working on something else.

It’s a simpler game, and for that to last I’m making it an endless one, but that also means I have to teach the engine how to execute functions that can make the small amount of features last. Obviously I want collision, and obviously there’s going to be enemies and stuff to do and achieve which dynamically expands off of its base components to achieve more than a small amount of code in a linear has-ending game normally would.

Right now I’m struggling with collision.

What you see here is a debug screen which is made almost entirely of my own coding efforts. The green square is controlled by ↑←↓→ and it can’t go through the permanent dark grey ground. I wrote the code to stop it from falling through myself, and technically it barricades entry from the bottom, left, and right sides as well. The physics there works almost flawlessly. So what’s the problem??

I’ll tell you the fucking problem. That’s a single rectangular object defined by one large, somewhat clunky array, that I basically don’t want to rewrite all over again. And the game is going to have dozens of collidable tiles on screen at a time. And they’re randomly generated by a specific seed. This brings us to the blue blocks near the vertical middle. Those are all part of an array that goes in one direction, left to right, with randomly generated number values. Theoretically all I would need to do is make a modified copy of the original greyground code and for loop it into every correct value of the array’s result, right? Haha, fuck no, time to go back to Qcode.

Ugh... I hadn’t realized how ineffective this tutorial could be. I mean, yeah, it sent me on my way (much more than Goature did, at any rate) and basically enabled me to start work on Proto-Square, but there’s such a crazy amount of things that are told, but never explained. Now that I think of it, I can’t remember a single time he explained the meaning of for i, v in pairs (I just checked the FLs episode. It’s not apt), or the importance of delta time, or even the thing about some graphics cards not being able to handle non-powers of two graphical dimension figures for image files. Goature brought those up, probably. In this instance, we’re looking at a very large, convoluted spread of code here, that isn’t just put into effect here, but in three or four other places total within the same project, using wacky four loops and functions that I don’t really understand. I don’t understand. That’s the fucking problem. I’ve watched the tutorial start to finish twice, and even tried to reconstruct the damn thing in my own fashion, piece by piece, and it’s still an enigma. That’s not right. It’s a fucking tutorial. If he wanted to make a tutorial for people who were really good at Lua already, he should have disclaimered that at the beginning, or even just not made a tutorial at all because those people look like fucking Mary Sues from where I’m standing and can probably pull elite programming knowledge out of their asses whenever they want. And Qcode did not have that intention, because episode 5 was about functions. An episode which is after the one covering the more complicated concept of For Loops, for some reason.

In Qcode’s last episode, the physics episode, (which is also the end because it is an orphaned series) Qcode straight up recommends you not use his code, and that you use a library instead. I’ll tell you AAAALLLL ABOOUT libraries soon, but first a few other things.

My most obvious and straightforward complaint with Qcode’s physics engine is that the layout of the code, ESPECIALLY in the screenshot above, is really that it’s non-user friendly, cluttered, and confusing. It’s ultimately a mess of v1′s and v2′s and greater than symbols. This segment would be OK if there were better comments and longer variable names or something, but there’s another problem with this code. It sucks. It’s buggier than flying backwards into water because you jumped on a slope in Worms Armageddon. The solutions he puts to (some of) them in the episode feel like bugs of their own kind.

As I said, he mentioned libraries before he even typed it all. Libraries being the free to use code that other people make and share that cover topics like graphical displays, procedural generation, AI, and physics. For some reason, I did not know where to find these. For some fucked up, abominable reason, that I swear created a bad present after altering the fucking timeline, instead of finding the Libraries page button on the LOVE Wiki I Google searched for a library that made tiles collide.

Tile Collision.

I ended up finding this, and nothing else anywhere, on a page that seemed to have fucked the search algorithms, dedicated to a library that a creator (named Minh Ngo, go prank him) had named just a bit too literally. For a while I was calling it “Tile Collision Master” as though that was its full name, as that’s what I had read on the website, basically. I blindly rushed into adding this thing to the Proto-Square project, turning it into a bugged out mess that I could have fixed, probably, but I just didn’t care anymore.

I left Proto-Square behind, having finally let go of any attachment I had to the concept and assets of the game.

About a month later, I came up with something else, and put together a testing directory for figuring out how to make my plans work out before risking the integrity of a fully-dedicated game folder. It was called Tiles Test, and I was to work on it, using the same Tile Collision library, until I had a decent, functional codebase for Quad, but that didn’t work out because I needed concave and convex curves for the map to look how I thought was good, or at least a bunch of varied slopes. The readme was confusing as hell, with no tangible, useful information about heightmaps and whether it was possible to change them and make my own or not (I had assumed it was). I took the discussion to the Love2D forums, and in the ensuing feedback I thought about Minh Ngo, and quite quickly developed a grudge. His library was either misleading or broken, and neither are things I want to tolerate. Tiles Test was left behind.

Hardly more than a week later, I started a new set of experiments: Super Tiles Test. It essentially started when somebody in that same thread suggested I use Box2D instead.

Okay, here’s an addendum, or something. Fuck your advice for two reasons. 1: I have no idea what Box2D is or that it’s part of LOVE already under a different name, so why the fuck are you title dropping it with that? I had to go back to the thread and ask them how I was supposed to “convert” Box2D’s thick C++ exoskeleton into LOVE Lua terms before it was cleared up that all I had to do was read the articles for love.physics. 2: You saw the diagram I posted, fuckwit. I needed concave curves as well. LOVE.PHYSICS CAN’T PRODUCE SMOOTH CONCAVE CURVES.

Super Tiles Test was successful, and after starting Quad I settled for many varieties of slopes. It still looked reasonably smooth.

Quad was a “birds-eye-view” simplistic WASD movement project, one with personally-prized writing and something that I’ve grown quite attached to. As you know, it’s shelved. I want to finish it, but right now I can’t. It is struggling with collision. For those who want their sharp-sight rewarded: yes, congratulations, this is the second out of three fucking times that a project has been just about capsized because the road to collider physics is for some batshit crazy reason impossible to walk down unless you’re someone else. I’ll explain the rest of that soon, but first, here’s why the Quad “cavern” failed. I find love.physics actually quite easy to use. It’s already “installed” unlike everything else one typically uses, and the documentation is all right there on the wiki, with me ultimately being able to read the answer to every baseline question I had. Love2D’s own wiki says it’s “not even remotely simple to use” and “a ten-ton hammer designed for heavy-lifting”. But I don’t think it’s terribly hard. I think it’s way easier than EVERY other confusing fucking library-implementing process I’ve tried, and like I said, this point will come up later.

The problem with building Quad’s environments came up when I got into defining the shape and properties of each slope. Of every slope, 1 through 20, not counting the four rectangular half blocks. This proved to be a very slow, tedious drudge of a job, involving copying, changing an adjusting the same unsightly number values over and over until each triangle worked. That sucked, but after what’s happened recently I think I could stand to go back.

I went to the L2D Discord and sent a query. I just wanted to know if there was a simpler, less terrible way of filling in the forms for all my slopes to exist. It was confusing, as usual. In part because in a lot of places there was no possible way of me understanding exactly what they meant, much like how an ant doesn’t understand a Sega Saturn, but mostly because they didn’t understand what I was saying. Oh, of course. I just love it when I ask questions about how to improve my coding and that happens.

Ultimately, we talked about the logistics of the project, and despite this being a solo effort of mine, and these people having no idea who I really was or how capable, they “encouraged” me to make a really simple game for my first game, and I listened. Oh how stupid I was. I think I want to go back to Quad right now. I think it’s twice that I’ve had advice about what kind of development difficulty level I should make my first game at from a north-western straw-optimist on The Internet, and I’m never taking it to heart again. Basically that was me looking at the huge towering task ahead of me and talking myself into trying a much easier something else. That happens a lot, not within strictly the realm of Love2D or standalone game creation. It’s burned out a whole bunch of fineliner artworks and custom Minecraft maps as well. This time, the thing that came next was a randomly generated gem collector. RGGC. This game has been in development since early last month. It seemed to be going well. I grew my attachments, and really thought I could win this time. Unfortunately, I’m in the situation from this post’s first act. RGGC is fucked in the physics department. I tried using the free libraries, I tried re-learning what is taught by Qcode, it doesn’t work. What especially fucking sucks, though, is feeling retarded by use of paranoia manipulation by what everybody says are “simple” collision physics libraries. I downloaded two of these things, two good looking ones, (without any of the silly and hilarious and unacceptable innuendo names) and tried to put their modules in the game. Oh fuck this ordeal. Do you have any idea how annoying the directories and documentation for Fizz X and Bump.lua are? There are numerous, complex arrays of files of .lua and .png in places, which I don’t understand now but would be perfectly reasonable if there was a text document explaining the fucking mess. “But just look at the readme!” Thanks genius, I didn’t know I was 4 years old. Of course I read the fucking readme. I look at the readme, I iterate over it with Ctrl F inputting strings like “install” “use” “how to”, I try to read through, I find NOTHING, and then I fucking give up. Want me to demonstrate? Well despite these files appearing to have all the information you need and appearing to be well presented and organized, reading them feels exactly like this:

That’s not me trying to exaggerate or make comedy, that is legitimately how inconclusive, red-herring-mapped, and confusing those things are to read. This is exactly why I gave up on libraries and spent the last week writing my own physics code. But it’s fucking hard to, I don’t know much about Lua for loops in relation to getting information from an array and using it, and I just don’t understand the relationship between Qcode’s AABB function, calculate_collision function, and the for i, n in pairs loop that’s apparently meant to tie it all together. I did it once, but that was basically copy-pasting in Proto-Square and not a good collision system, hands down. The people who make libraries seem to think their target audience is simultaneously people who are just starting up with game creation, and people who are way more experienced, enough so to just pull the knowledge of how to use the non-descript library out of nowhere. It’s like, jesus, these are probably amazing tools that work just fine, but you’re straight up not letting me use them. I can’t be expected to look at a large, complex machine and knows what buttons to press when I’m just beginning to build my first ball machine out of K’nex.

At this point I actually can’t tell. I can’t tell if me ever making a game is real or not, that there’s no giant conspiracy or universe simulation bullshit with a hard-coded rule in it saying I can’t succeed. Sure, you can tell me it might eventually happen, but I feel like that’s comparable to a pitch made to a sperm cell about what it will be like to climb trees, when he hasn’t been born yet. Until you’ve really reached that tree and seen it for yourself, how can you really know you’re not the only one who will never climb it?

My outlook on game development has changed. It now is an angry, resentful one, vaguely aimed at everybody else who works with LOVE games. An outlook that sounds like blatant paranoia. I want to succeed but right now it’s like the universe itself is opposing me. It’s bad enough that I already live in a country with a negligence of games industry that’s actually opposing me. It’s been 7 years. I’m trying my hardest. I know how to code. I’m not a stupid person. I feel like even game development support figures are actively trying to disrupt my progress.

[mightbedamian]

#TMIishTuesday #46 - The Trumpet - But why?

Hey there mighty people of the internet! And welcome to issue #46 of #TMIishTuesday - my weekly Tumblr post about what goes through my weird mind and what you guys want to know more about. It can be something very personal, it can be something political, it can be completely pointless - but in 99.9 % of the cases, it involves opinions. And mine as well. // Last week I talked about make-up. On girls, but more about it on guys: Society's general perception of it, some male YouTubers who look ACE with make-up, and my opinion on whether or not men should or should not wear make-up. Not telling you to read it, but… YOU SHOULD! // Disclaimer: I can't treat certain people the same as everyone else. People who just disrespect of groups of people for one, and only one, reason: Belonging to this group. And by saying this, I do exactly that, I know... And I’m still gonna do it. You know, if they were at least a little bit open-minded or didn't treat people like they're sh*t, I'd respect that. I wouldn't cheer for them, but everyone has different opinions - and that's awesome! But I won't respect people who hate on others for having one attribute that the haters don't like: Gender, sexuality, race, color of skin, this list goes on and on. Okay, so if you're not living on the Moon (and even then), you'll most definitely have noticed that the U. S. have a new president. For the reasons stated above, I will not call him by his name, but rather refer to this person as "the Trumpet". Not much of a difference anyway, right? And now you know who I'm talking about, we can start this post. Did I mention that it's about reasons why this person could even become president? Oh, I didn't? Well… Now you know! There are obviously lots of reasons why the Americans eligible to vote voted like they did. I pick three that seem most important to me.  1. The devil vs. the deep blue sea With the elections coming up one thing that I read a lot in polls and assessments of the candidates is: "I can't possibly choose between two inacceptable candidates." As expected, Democrats and Republicans had voted two extremely opposing candidates to go for president - Clinton: the impersonated establishment who still lives on her father's achievements as president and who is rather conservative for a Democrats candidate. And - the Trumpet: the impersonated American dream: business man, self-made millionaire, the exact opposite of the establishment, who bluntly told his opinions on basically everything, even when not asked about it. And I had the impression that people didn't feel that ANY of the two would be a good president. But given the American political situation, with only these two parties standing a real chance to win the election, most people did choose to distribute their votes between the devil and the deep blue sea - or simply didn't turn up to the polling stations. 2. Jobs vs. trade There is a common misconception that many Europeans might have fallen for: The Trumpet's only focus seemed to be on immigration politics. Constructing a wall at the U. S.-Mexican border and getting rid of TPP* and TTIP* trade agreements, before the latter was even signed. These seemed to be the Trumpet's only political goals. At least if you believed European media. Oh my, were we wrong! The Trumpet actually got lots of votes in the Mid West states promising people to get jobs. Of course that's part of the getting-rid-of-TPP-and-TTIP deal. But that's not what was the most important aspect of this issue. The U. S. still suffer from the global economic crisis that was sparked by the failure of the banking industry in the late 2000s. The most important promise of the Trumpet was jobs. Jobs, jobs, and more jobs. And, please correct me, if I'm wrong, dear Americans, but to me it looks like most Americans don't bother too much about what is going on in the world, if the U. S. is not involved. Am I wrong in assuming that? And to be honest, it's looked to me like that over the last few years/decades. Rather, you guys are more focussed on your own country. You know, I'm not a big fan of overly demonstrated patriotism. But it makes sense that you voted the Trumpet then: He promises to get you all into jobs again. Sure, that will work. But there'll also be massive inflation, if he basically closes down foreign trade and goes back to producing everything domestically. But people don't seem to see that. Or they ignore it. Well, if you don't see it, let me give you a quick tour, okay? The Trumpet wants to put import tariffs into place again against any country out there. Sure, most still have import tariffs - the EU certainly isn’t the norm - but over the last couple decades there has been worldwide understanding that we should thrive for lower tariffs and less trade restrictions. In 1947 32 nations signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which wanted to "reduce tariffs and other trade barriers" among the signing countries. Over the years, with globalisation hitting in more and more, more nations joined the agreement and tariffs and trade restrictions got less and less. Based on the work that had been done under the GATT framework, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was established by 123 nations in 1995. A huge part of this hard work is at stake now that one of the biggest economies of the world threatens to leave the WTO. As I'm typing this, the Trumpet has just announced that the U. S. will not ratify TPP. A small step for a Trumpet, but a huge one for humankind. Anyway, I'm drifting off. And the effects of the U. S. leaving the WTO and other international trade policies could fill another #TMIishTuesday. Let me know, if you are interested in that! * TPP - Trans-Pacific Partnership * TTIP - Transatlatic Trade & Investment Partnership 3. Ego vs. opinions This might even be the most important factor that got him the crucial votes in the swing states* which ultimately led to the Trumpet winning the entire election. All the way during his candidacy - in the internal Rep duels as well - he has been very straightforward about basically anything he represented. He made clear his goals basically on day 1 of the Rep internal campaign and, from what I can tell, he sticked to them. All this "The U. S. don't need any foreign trade" thing, all this "I don't give a f*ck about minorities" hatred, all this "I'm the king of the world" behaviour - it was there from the very beginning. And even if Clinton didn't change her campaign too much, too - just by not letting anyone exert ANY influence on his campaign, the Trumpet really presented the "I am me, I won't change for others" attitude. When most candidates try to take on some viewpoints of the other candidates of their party to rule out competitors, he didn't do that. Cause he didn't need to. The whole "I won't change for others" thing was already bearing fruit. Many Americans are apparently still looking for a father figure to look up to. And that's EXACTLY what they got. ...Although you might argue that someone, who is as bold as the Trumpet, is not exactly a father figure… Granted, but he's definitely "the strong man" the people were looking for. And I guess the Americans just thought Obama didn't take measures drastic enough to cope with the (perceived as well as existing) problems the U. S. were faced with. * swing state = "a state that could reasonably be won be either the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate" Finally: Judging from the younger history, it just made sense that a Republican was elected president: The last three presidents all took two terms in office - and after each 8 year period a president of the other "big" party - Democrats and Republicans - was elected into office. Right, I'll leave you with that. This post turned out way more subjective than I planned to. But I never promised that. And remember how I started this post? "Disclaimer: I can't treat certain people the same as everyone else." I guess, that's exactly what's happened now. Sorry not sorry! :P Before I go, please let me know what you thought of this post and what your thoughts on the new president are. Do you hate him, do you respect him, do you like him? Place a comment, tweet me, dm me, or do anything else you can think of to get to me. Oh and today's TMIish Queer Shoutout goes to: Anyway Köln TV, the queer YouTube channel of youth centre Anyway in Cologne. I stumbled across the their YouTube channel last week and really liked the videos in which the team took to the streets to interview the people of Cologne on queer topics: Can they tell who identifies as straight, lesbian, or bi just by appearance? Does it work better when the choices are straight, gay, and pansexual? What do you imagine gay sex to look like? And the one that I liked best: How do people react when they are asked to film two guys for a minute and suddenly one proposes to the other right in front of the Cologne Dom cathedrale? Their videos are well thought of and, most of the times, involve strangers they meet on the street. If understand German, check them out and drop a sub! As always: Next #TMIishTuesday next Tuesday. If you have any questions in the meantime, just ask away. Whatever you’re curious about - I don’t bite. :) Until then: Stay mighty! Linkage: - Wikipedia on TPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership - Wikipedia on TTIP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership - Wikipedia on swing states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_state - Anyway Köln TV channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/AnywayKoelnTV - Anyway Köln website: http://www.anyway-koeln.de/ Oh, and here’s some self-promo: - Last #TMIishTuesday: http://mightbedamian.tumblr.com/post/156001271441/tmiishtuesday-45-guys-cant-wear-make-up - More #TMIishTuesdays: mightbedamian.tumblr.com/tagged/tmi - Poll to decide next week's topic and more very cool stuff: www.twitter.com/mightbedamian - Even more very cool stuff: mightbedamian.tumblr.com