#He was never even mentioned as a godamn option

[a-heart-full-of-dumb]

Dutch theatre producers stop milking Milan van Waardenburg's success challenge, level impossible.

Yes, he's talented, but please stop acting like he's the first Dutch actor to book success on the West End. He's not. He's not that special.

He's not even the only Dutch actor in Les Mis on the West End right now.

[four-rabbit]

Here lies Roman García Lopez

Roman is not dead, calm down

This is just a small oneshot from the ghost au about Roman coming out as trans to Remus when they were teenagers.

Warnings: swearing, hospitals, self-deprecation, misgender, mentions of transphobia, talks of death

Obs: in some descriptions I'll be refering to Remus and Roman with she/her pronouns, but thats specifically when I'm describing their thoughts and they are referring to themselves or each other with those pronouns, since Remus didn't know he was trans here and Roman is coming out. When I'm not describing their thoughts I'll be referring to them solely by he/him pronouns.

If you tag this as r*mrom I'll punch you

The twins used to be best friends. They would play in the backyard and braid each other's hair and laugh and cry and almost forget all the ways that the world was cold and merciless.

So so merciless.

The Duke analyzed his nails as if they were the most interesting thing he had ever seen and the silence was so dense it could be cut with a knife. He wanted to talk, he really wanted to. He wanted to talk about the last movie he watched and gossip about their classmates and make jokes that were questionable to say the least and wanted to see her sister laugh and look alive again. But what would she say? At this point, what did they have in common? What could she do? Open her mouth just to throw all that filthy that was inside her mind at her poor sister? Talk about her life and about how she was a disgusting piece of garbage? Ruin those few hours that they had together? Yeah, as their mother would always say, if you have nothing nice to say just shut up. 

The Duke felt like he never had anything nice to say.

"How is school going?" The one in the hospital bed started. Panic dominated The Duke's eyes and he didn't move for a good ten seconds, looking like he wasn't even breathing until he shrugged.

"As shitty as always, you know. The usual stuff" 

"I wish I was there" The Princess sighed.

"Nah, you don't, it's the most boring thing ever, I got a shitton of homework and also tomorrow I got a fucking chemistry test and I don't even know if I'm going to study, you got it easy, dude" as soon as those words left his mouth he regretted it "No, I'm kidding, that was stupid, this sucks too I know, but if I could I would just leave school, I mean who cares?"

"You can't do that. School is important"

 The Duke didn't say anything. He had a lot of answers but none of them were nice. And he wanted to be nice to The Princess, at least. He had lost everybody else, even Virgil, even Virgil, she was not going to lose her sister too. 

"Why did you call me?" Finally said.

"What?"

"Dad said that you wanted to talk to me. Specifically. Why?" 

"I have to ask you for a favor"

"What is it? Yes, I can get you drugs" The Princess raised an eyebrow at his brother.

"What? I'm sure it would make the hospital more interesting, no judgments."

"No. No, it's not that" he was so tense and that was stressing the Duke out. He closed his mouth shut because when he was nervous he rambled and when he rambled he always ended up saying the worst possible things. The Princess took a breath as if it was a battle to take the words out of his throat.

"I'm afraid that I'm going to die"

"A lot of people are" said before he could contain himself. That should have earned at least a chuckle from the Princess but he didn't make a sound.

"No. No. I mean- what I mean is…" he decided to just rip it off like a band aid "I feel like I’m going to die in a few days. I think-"

"Bullshit!" The Duke snapped without warning, startling his brother. "You have no fucking right to say that!" Is it really that easy to make him cry?

"It's true! I- I can feel it, okay? Death is following me"

"Death has always followed you, you stupid fuck, you're like a godamn death magnet!"

"Yeah but it's different now, I- look, how I know doesn't matter, I need you to do something for-"

"I'm not doing shit for you!" Ok that's a lot of emotion for someone who was completely numb the entire week, Duke's body has grown unused to feelings apparently, as he was shaking and burning and screaming and crying and wanting to curl up in a ball and die.

"Just listen-"

"Fuck you!" The Duke covered his ear to show that he wasn't going to listen but also suddenly because everything was too much. Too much noise, too much light, too much, too much. "I'm going to tell your doctor and she's going to say that's bullshit because that's bullshit you can't just die!" Yelled at the top of his lungs. She couldn't lose her sister, no, no, everyone but her.

"I need you to change my name in my gravestone!" said as loudly as his brother, sitting up. That took The Duke by surprise and he uncovered his ears in confusion.

"What?"

"When I die, mom and dad will pay for a gravestone and its going to have a name on it" 

"You're not-"

"Fucking listen to me! I don't want to die too, for fucks sake, but I need to be ready when it happens!" The Princess finally snapped in his despair to be listened to. His brother stopped and seemed to consider his options until, slowly, sat down again.

"What do you mean, [...]?" he said his brother's deadname.

"Exactly that. That name. It's not my name"

"Are you high?"

"Look" he ran his hand through his hair, frustrated "I had a lot of time to think. I- I did some research and… I- I'm not a girl" The Duke didn't say anything. For once in his life he had no idea what to say. "Yeah. I've always felt like that. Like something was… off. Wrong. That someone made a mistake when-" he gestured toward his body "I'm not telling mom and dad. They wouldn't understand, they never understand shit. But I know you will, sister"

"Wait, hold the fuck up, what are you saying? If you're not a girl, what the fuck are you then?" The Princess swallowed, scared to say it out loud. There would be no coming back if he did it. He raised his hand to compliment the teenager in front of him, shaking from head to toe.

"I'm- Roman. Nice to meet you." he was crying already, trying to not let his voice fail him "I'm your brother, I'm a trans man and I don't want to die just to be remembered by the wrong name"

Trans man. Trans. A word that was known but still sounded like a secret. Forbidden. 

The Duke looked at his brother's hand. Then he looked at his face, with his long hair and tears and all that fear in his eyes. 

And he understood, that was what scared him the most. 

"Something was off. Something was wrong. Someone made a mistake"

"I don't want to be remembered by the wrong name"

He understood every single word on a deep personal level, he knew that despair, that fear.

He shaked his brother's hand, who immediately melted in relief.

"Roman. You're going to live." Said with that same caring voice that he used when they were kids and Roman had nightmares and he would sing lullabies completely out of tune until his brother fell asleep, delicately cleaning his brother's tears. “You're going to live and you're going to make sure that mom and dad remember you right. I promise"

"But what if I-"

"No! No" The Duke interrupted, not allowing his brother to finish that phrase, not again. "You know what. You're coming with me" announced, starting to look through the closet for some clothes his brother could use.

"... what?"

"We are leaving this shithole" 

"I can't leave the hospital [...]!" deadname. 

"I don't want to be remembered by the wrong name"

The Duke closed his eyes and when he turned back to his brother he was smiling almost maniacally.

"Yes, you can" he found some sweater pants and a black tshirt "Here, put this on. This place is fucking you up. Mom is fucking you up, this is her fault. We are going out and you're going to live. You're going to live" an idea came to his mind "Do you want to cut your hair?" Roman looked at the clothes on his hands. Then at the teenager looking at him full of expectation. Deep down Roman knew. Staying there was not helping. It was making things worse, he knew even deeper down. And if he was dying he wanted to die by his sister's side.

"Yes. I want to cut my hair" admitted. He didn't hate his long hair, it was pretty and brushing it was relaxing. But he hated how it made everyone think he was a girl. "But mom will be pissed"

"What doesn't piss that woman off?" Exclaimed exasperated and Roman opened the smallest grin.

"Yesterday they gave me strawberry juice instead of orange juice and she threw an entire fucking tantrum"

"Exactly. If she was a little bit whiter she would be a textbook Karen" that made Roman giggle.

"She would. Are we actually doing this?"

"Of course we're! Now get ready, Princes- Princey" Roman smiled widely.

"I like Princey"

"I thought you would" Roman got dressed and The Duke gave him his black hoodie.

"So you won't get recognized" explained.

"I'm sure nobody is going to try to arrest me if they see me sneaking out, thank you very much. Also what was the last time you washed this? It smells like shit" actually Roman would never comment on it out loud but his sister was generally a mess. With hair that wasn't brushed in days and wasn't washed in an even longer time, smudged make up all over her face and dirty baggy clothes. If only he had connected the dots before it was too late.

"I'm sure you'll survive" replied sharply, opening the door.

The hoodie didn't help.

" What are you doing here Ms. Garcia? Do you want anything?" The first nurse that saw them was quick to ask. 

"Ahn…" The Duke opened his mouth to explain. Then close it again.

"I just wanted to take some air, my sister came to visit me and we thought it would be cool to go outside real quick" Roman came to rescue him.

"Your sister…" slowly her gaze went to the other teenager "Oh, you. I'm not sure I can allow that. Not without your mother's permission" 

"You can come with us, then! My mom wouldn't like to know that you're keeping me stuck in my room. Like a prisoner" the nurse looked worried. Their mom had a reputation around the hospital and it wasn't a good one.

"Just five minutes, okay?"

"Wonderful!" Roman winked in his brother's direction, who opened a smile and they were both guided toward the front of the hospital, where there was a small decorative garden. 

"What now?" The Duke whispered, gesturing toward the nurse with his head, she was way too close. Roman looked around and his eyes stopped at one specific point. 

"There"

"What?"

"There's a cat"

"I don't see anything"

"Its because its not alive" the animals souls were the easiest to attract and even control. "Her" Roman said in an almost sing-song voice. The cat tilted its head, an empty hole in the place where its left eye was supposed to be and, without warning, threw itself at the nurse, emitting a meow that from her perspective came out of thin air and made the poor woman scream in surprise.

"Now!" And Roman started running. His brother only stopped to giggle before running too. When she noticed that the kids were missing they were already far away. 

"Fuck, that was fun!" Roman exclaimed as he recovered from the run, still breathing with some difficulty. His brother enjoyed the feeling for a little longer. He almost felt alive for a minute. 

"Of course it was, it was my idea"

"I mean I was the one who fooled the nurse, all you did was stutter"

"Oh, shut up. It's not my fault everyone likes you best"

"Everyone is stupid. You're the cooler twin"

"Don't you come at me with your compliments!" Roman laughed, a genuinely laugh that filled his brother with happiness and warmth. 

"Right. What do we do now? I'm still totally down for that haircut"

"Well first of all we're going to steal some scissors because I'm totally broke-"

"Oh my god!" Roman exclaimed in disbelief "My own sister! Wanting to make me a criminal!"

If you get to be brother why do I have to be sister?

Remus ignored that thought for the time being. 

"You're not going to regret it! We can steal some chocolate too!" replied, putting his arm around his brother's shoulders. Roman rolled his eyes.

"Oh my life would be so dull without you" The one that would call himself Remus in the future smiled. And I wouldn't be alive without you, thought to himself.

[justjstuff]

Sacrilege

My first contribution to the SethKate fandom! A quick oneshot during the break between s2 and s3, ending in post-Amaru territory.

Summary:  Kate wasn’t laughing now.  

There were silent tears streaming down her cheeks, her mascara smudged beneath her eyes and her brows knitted unhappily. Seth drank in the sight of her, something coming loose inside his chest at the same time that his heart dropped somewhere near his feet. 

“You’re not real,” he whispered.

A short story about Seth dealing with his grief.

Read it on AO3 or below the cut :)

Seth didn’t know exactly how he found himself in that unfamiliar office in the middle of the day. Richie had taken to Jed’s like he was born for it and Seth had stayed quietly in the background—a place he had never been comfortable being, that had always been Richie—but he found himself being unable to do anything else. He gave orders, kept Richie’s feet firmly on the ground while his brother played boss, but kept to himself otherwise.

  It felt good, in a way, to see his brother look so sure of himself, to see Richie feeling comfortable in his own skin for the first time in ever. Still, it was hard to miss that there was sadness and regret buried deep beneath his brother’s Hugh-Hefner-robe-wearing exterior. In the week that they had taken over Jacknife Jed’s, Seth had time to see the cracks in his brother’s armor and to feel his own shock wearing off. That morning seemed to have been his breaking point.

  It was something simple, really, that managed to bring him to his knees. Something that he had never expected could take his breath away and send him to the kind of panic attack he hadn’t had since he was a teenager. 

  Mornings at Jed’s were like the middle of the night everywhere else. There was a certain kind of quiet that took over the compound, like everything was still and Seth could take a few moments to himself. He started making a point to have breakfast by himself in the kitchen while everyone else was asleep. 

  They still didn’t have much in their kitchen. Malvado hadn’t actually stayed where they chose to operate from and the employees had only deemed necessary to keep a coffee maker there, but they’ve been slowly building it up instead of using the bar’s kitchen which was frankly annoying to do when they had to cross the parking lot from their bedrooms to get a beer. The fridge and stove were the first to arrive and now they actually had plates and fucking cutlery, it was starting to feel not exactly like home but definitely more like they weren’t staying in an old warehouse for a couple of days. They had the option of using Malvado’s underground facilities at Jed’s but had ultimately agreed that they would feel safer working from the warehouse behind it instead. 

  Then he saw the toaster. 

  It was this ugly bright red, which probably meant Richard had been the one to get it; a clunky piece of metal right in the middle of the stainless steel countertop that had already been there before them. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make Seth’s carefully constructed defences crumble like they had never been there in the first place. 

  He had tried so hard, just so fucking hard to not think about her ever since that night. He had gone back to the blood well with Richie and Scott but there had been no body, only a bloodstained white sheet stuck to the wooden boards. The sight of that blood, Kate’s blood, had sent him straight to the nearest bottle of whiskey and his brother had been right there with him. The next day, there had been no more mention of her and Seth had pushed everything deep down.

  And then the godamn fucking toaster.

  The tilt of her jaw and the amused little smile as she said, “Not funny.”

  Her hand in his after a nightmare.

  The way her hair caught the sunlight after a dip in a shitty motel pool.

  The quiet sigh she always let out before forcing herself to get out of bed.

  The hurt, the anger, the guilt of it all but also the reluctant almost shy happiness he hadn’t allowed himself to feel, but was undeniable all the same. The partnership they had, the heartache.

  The fucking heartache.

  Quite literally, his chest felt so constricted Seth had to remind himself that he could actually breathe and that Kate hadn’t taken away his ability of doing so when she left. No, this time she hadn’t left. She was taken. 

  Seth stumbled back to his office. It wasn’t exactly an office yet but there were two desks and a kind of decently stocked bar and that’s all Richie and him needed. Seth didn’t think twice about uncapping the whiskey and downing a few desperate gulps before coming back for air. His throat burned but he wasn’t sure it was really from the booze and as he blinked at the bare wall in front of him he didn’t even have enough strength to pretend he wasn’t blinking away tears. 

  He didn’t know exactly how long he stood there, drinking himself stupid, but by the time the bottle was almost gone it had gotten a little easier to breathe without the fear of having his chest explode with the pain of it all. It wasn’t enough, though. 

  Looking at the bottle reminded him of the few times he had shared a drink with her , the way she would giggle and wipe away a drop of whiskey from the corner of her mouth. It was almost like she was right there with him—it felt so real for a moment that he could hear her small laugh, could smell her in the air like the afterscent she left on his pillow from spending the night there after a particularly horrible nightmare. Seth put the bottle down. 

  In a mindless haze, he reached for the small key in his pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk with clumsy fingers. Inside there were only two things: Kate’s cross—the one Richie had seen Scott take and then throw as far as he could in a fit of rage, and then had gone to collect—and his drug kit. 

  It seemed almost sacrilegious to put those two items side by side but Seth didn’t care. After Richie had silently passed the necklace to him when they’d been drunk that first night, it had taken residence in Seth’s drawer, which Richie had adamantly kept away from. Besides, it felt like a sick sort of comparison to Kate herself. She was everything good, his moral compass, a godamn fucking angel with soft hands and bright eyes, but she also had darkness inside of her and she hadn’t been one to shy away from it. 

  The kit wasn’t the same one he had during Mexico, which Sonja had thrown out the first chance she had. No, this one was new, Seth had bought it just a few nights ago. At the time he didn’t exactly understand why he had done it, despite the craving for it going away and then coming back every once in a while, he had been absolutely certain he never wanted to go through withdrawal again. Maybe a part of him had known he would need it, maybe his subconscious knew it was only a matter of time before Kate’s death became too much. 

  Seth went through the motions of prepping the hit without thinking about it. All he felt, all he could concentrate on was how much everything hurt and how much he didn’t want to feel anymore. It wasn’t his body craving the chemicals, it was his mind craving the silent bliss of not feeling. 

  Seth tapped his arm, a familiar routine of trying to find a vein, but either because of the booze or because he had grown unused to it, he couldn’t. He put the needle down, the sound of it smacking against the bottle echoing as he fumbled for the tourniquet to wrap around his bicep.

  He could hear her crying.

  It was, to his greatest regret, a sound he had been familiar with and it made him reach for the needle faster than his alcohol drenched brain could process. Seth pressed it to a bulging vein but only held it there for a few long moments as Kate cried. The tip scratched his skin before he dropped the needle. His hands were shaking too much and he couldn’t help but think that usually… usually she would be the one to pick up the needle and help him finish the job. 

  When he looked back up, Kate was there. 

  She was exactly as he remembered her on one of their good days. The white sundress she had only worn once falling to the top of her thighs, the red bikini peeking through its spaghetti straps. She had bought it all in a cheap gas station one morning and forced him to stop at the first motel she saw that had a pool to spend the afternoon there. He had been twitchy about being so close to the border but they had spent the previous couple of days stuck in the Corvette so he let her waste the day by the pool until he had come across an American family at a small restaurant he had stopped for food. Seth had booked it back to the motel to find Kate floating on her back. 

  He hadn’t let her stop for anything, just pulled her arm until she got out of the pool and guided her back to the car with his hand fighting to find purchase on her wet shoulder. He had expected her to snap at him while they sped down dusty backroads but Kate had only laughed. She had given him shit for everything later and insisted he owed her for making her leave behind the first dress she had worn in forever but she hadn’t been mad. Hearing her laugh had made that day be one of the first that felt light after the Twister. 

  She wasn’t laughing now. 

  There were silent tears streaming down her cheeks, her mascara smudged beneath her eyes and her brows knitted unhappily. Seth drank in the sight of her, something coming loose inside his chest at the same time that his heart dropped somewhere near his feet. 

  “You’re not real,” he whispered. 

  Kate didn’t reply, didn’t even react in any way other than the tears that continued to come. But still, her green eyes stared right into his, and she didn’t go away. Seth wished she would. He wished she never left. 

  The sudden rage that overcame him wasn’t entirely unfamiliar, but it still took his breath away, consumed his body in the flames that he sometimes wished had taken him. It wasn’t exactly anger, or rather, it was more than that. It was grief , swallowing him whole and drowning everything that made Seth Seth. He threw the whiskey bottle at her, the sound of it breaking on the wall behind his desk not quite covering the sound of his knees crashing on the floor. 

  Seth cried. 

  He wept like a fucking baby, like he hadn’t done ever since his mother had left him. He cried until his head hurt, until he couldn’t really smell the spilled whiskey and couldn’t see the blank wall where Kate’s ghost had stood. And that’s how Richie found him.

  Seth had no idea how long his brother had called for him, only realizing Richie was there with him when he felt a hand on the back of his neck guiding his head to rest on a fluffy robe. Richie didn’t say anything and neither did Seth despite all the words he had clogging up his throat.

  I miss her, he wanted to say.

  I wish it had been me instead, he couldn’t help but think.

  Yet he stayed silent. Until maybe a few minutes later, when he muttered, “‘m gonna throw up.”

  His brother never mentioned that night with him. Ever. Even when Seth pulled him aside the day after to reassure him that he had thrown the smack away, Richie only replied with a quiet, “Okay,” and a stiff nod while he avoided his eyes. They didn’t talk about it and the urge to shoot up never came again. 

  He still saw her from time to time, mostly when he was close to blackout drunk and never as clearly as he had seen her that first night. Kate was always wearing something from one of their good days and she was never crying. She only watched him quietly as he fought with himself to keep her in the corner of his eyes instead of staring at what everyone else would think was nothing. 

  Six months later when he was in Santanico’s fighting ring, he saw her again. For a few beats he thought it was another hallucination, and it was enough time for the other guy to knock him down, but she was still there when he looked up. 

  Seth knew almost immediately that it was her. The unfamiliar red hair, the heavy makeup she had never used, the clothes that he had never associated with a happy time. It wasn’t a hallucination. Seth knew that despite how surreal it sounded, the person who stood in the crowd was Kate Fuller. 

  Everything after that was a fucked up nightmare. 

  Six months of grieving Kate had taken a toll on him. Seth worked hard to keep things going, he took care of business when Richie was too busy posturing as the Boss and he kept a tight ship running. He kept swinging, even when he felt like he didn’t have much strength, because he had learned many things growing up but giving up wasn’t one of them. So he pushed everything down and kept going, but by the time all of the Amaru bullshit had to be dealt with he just didn’t have anything else to give.

  Standing there at the gates of hell, Seth was done. His brother was gone but he still had Kate, at least for a little while. He had wrestled her out of death himself by force, he had refused to accept she was going to die in that church. His hands didn’t shake this time when he found a vein with the needle.

  Letting Kate walk through those gates was the hardest thing he had ever done. His brother was gone and if he lost Kate too he would have absolutely fucking nothing to keep him going, he would have done anything to keep her safe. But then she had said it.

  In the eyes of the people I love. 

  Seth knew that in that moment she was acknowledging him as part of her family, he knew that he couldn’t take her choice away, not when she was looking at him with that look on her face. Time to let go, partner. Seth did. He let her go. But only because he knew he was right behind her; if there was one thing Seth was certain it was that he was going to Hell when he died and he didn’t plan on staying a second longer without his family. There wasn’t much of a plan, really—try to save her brother as he went down swinging, then try his best to find her and Richie on the other side. 

  Only he didn’t die.

  Not only that, but Richie and Kate came back and Seth’s luck finally seemed to have turned around because in the end they were all alive and there. That Kate went with them when it was all over was another kind of miracle. 

  Months later and Seth still didn’t know how his life had turned out this particular brand of okay. 

  He wasn’t doing any more mid level-boss work since the Lords had all died, and despite the fact that sometimes the work was mind numbingly boring, he still spent a lot of his time doing what he really loved—planning for a job and then driving off into the sunset with the two people he cared the most about. 

  He had taught her some things back in Mexico but it shouldn’t have been enough to make her so smooth during their jobs. The kid was a fucking natural, and Seth caught himself sometimes being distracted in the middle of a bank robbery, looking at her in her semi-formal wear. No matter what type of clothes she wore to fit in between the two suits, they were always white. He didn’t ask about it, just like he didn’t ask about the gloves she wore sometimes even when they weren’t on a job. 

  Kate was far from healed from her ordeal, but as the months passed she got closer to okay and then okay sometimes turned into happy. And that’s all Seth ever wanted for her. 

  It had been a nice day. They had robbed a bank south of Austin and had made it out before the cops even realized what had happened, making it almost all the way down to Port O’Connor where Malvado’s operation had a nice safehouse by the beach. They spent the rest of the day counting their loot, checking the news and lounging around the house drinking and talking and laughing like they usually did.

  By sunset, Seth’s not-so-happy thoughts had returned in full force.

  He was leaning on the doorway to their back porch with a beer in hand, watching Kate as she slowly made her way down the steps so she could bury her toes in the sand. She had changed out of her white jumpsuit from that morning into the tiniest cutoffs Seth had ever seen her wear and a green tank top. Her red hair was moving with the breeze coming from the ocean and it almost reached the waistband of her shorts with the way her head was tilted up towards the last rays of sunshine. 

  She was heartbreakingly beautiful. Kate had always been pretty and the sweetness of her eyes and face had always drawn his attention in a way but now there was a certain kind of sadness to the angle of her eyebrows and the look in her eyes that somehow managed to capture his attention even further. There was confidence in the tilt of her chin, strength in the way her shoulders were never hunched and sharpness in her unbridled laugh but there was also sadness. Seth loved every single part of her. 

  He would never dare say it out loud to fucking anyone, but he couldn’t keep lying to himself. The truth was he couldn’t even tell when he had fallen in love with this girl. 

  The thing that scared him the most, though, wasn’t exactly telling her any of it—he was very content living in her shadow, with her as his partner and his brother by his side. Seth didn’t need her to love him in a way other than platonic . What scared him in moments like these was the thought of losing her. Again. If anything happened to her, if she left because she was fed up with them or, God fucking damn it, if she died , he now knew that these moments were the ones that would haunt him, her tiny shorts and the faded green tank top, keeping him company in the corner of his eye.

  Kate sighed and Seth shook himself from his depressing thoughts. She had moved back up the steps but hadn’t stepped any closer to him, her arms around herself and goosebumps on her arms.

  “You should head inside,” Seth said, his voice so rough he had to clear his throat before continuing. “It’s getting colder, at least grab a jacket, Princess.”

  Kate didn’t acknowledge his words, only stared up at him deep in thought, her green eyes catching the last light as the sun disappeared below the horizon. Seth sighed and stepped forward, leaving his beer on the railing so he could close his warmer hands over her biceps. He rubbed her arms and raised an eyebrow at her in expectation. 

  “You looked so sad,” she whispered and he stopped his motions immediately. 

  Seth cursed himself for not being more careful, but only sighed in response, squeezing her shoulders once before stepping back and reaching for his beer. She snatched it before he could, taking a long pull from it with her eyebrow raised as if to say, “If you won’t answer me, then I’ll drink it all.”

  Seth rolled his eyes and moved past her, shedding his shoes and socks as he went. He was just buzzed enough that he didn’t question the sudden urge to feel the sand beneath his feet. He had changed into more comfortable jeans and a t-shirt, and the hems of his pants were getting dirty from the sand, but he didn’t mind. He just closed his eyes and enjoyed the last bit of sun on his face before Kate spoke again.

  “You know, the first time I saw your feet I blushed so hard I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to put some cold water on my cheeks,” she said suddenly. 

  “ What? ” Seth turned around so fast he thought he might have pulled a muscle. Kate had sat down on the top step, she was hugging her knees to her chest and looking at him like she deeply regretted saying anything, but she didn’t back down, even when he blinked dumbly at her.

  “Not like that , you moron!” she said with a frown, though her cheeks were getting pinker by the second. Seth couldn’t help but laugh as she exclaimed, “Shut up!”

  “No, I’m sorry, go on about my feet, sweetheart,” Seth said, stepping closer to her so he could take his beer back. He took a sip and handed the rest of it to her, something unwinding in his chest at the sound of her embarrassed giggles. Kate took a long gulp of the cool beer before letting it drop on the step next to her. 

  “I just mean that it felt… intimate, I guess.” She shrugged one shoulder, somehow managing to look both shy and confident. “Like I was seeing you be vulnerable or something.”

  Seth propped one leg on the step beneath her, bracing his elbow on the railing so he could lean down closer to her. There was a soft smile on his face that he couldn’t hide no matter how hard he tried and his only consolation was that Kate’s cheeks were darkening still. 

  “I get it,” he let her off the hook, snorting a bit. “I had that same “oh shit” moment when I walked in on you only wearing a towel a few days in.”

  “Don’t be creepy,” she whispered teasingly and Seth rolled his eyes.

  “Not like that ,” he threw her words back at her, a smirk pulling at the corner of his lips briefly. “It’s just that I’ve never realized how… ready you were at all times. It’s like you carried yourself like a goddamn soldier on the battlefield, ready for anything thrown your way, you know? Confident and sure of yourself, always. But that day I caught you off-guard and… I guess I just realized how tiny you looked. Made me think of how much I needed to take care of you, to protect you.”

  There was a beat where they just stayed quiet, neither of them knowing what to say after their small confessions and Seth letting his eyes look anywhere but at hers while feeling her gaze heavy on him. 

  “What were you thinking?” Kate asked in a small voice. “Before?”

  “Kate,” Seth sighed again, met her eyes for a brief second before bracing himself to push off the railing so he could put some space between them. Kate stopped him with a hand on the loose fabric of his jeans on his shin.

  “What were you thinking, Seth?”

  Goddamn it, he couldn’t deny her. Not when she was looking up at him with that beautiful, sad face of hers, not when her voice felt so fucking quiet and intimate, especially not with the way he could kind of look down her shirt from where he was standing above her. 

  Without meaning to, Seth started rambling on like a fucking amateur.

  “When you died,” he started and had to take a deep breath after saying that dreaded word, “I was in a really bad place. I kept… I had these visions of you. I mean-” and now he was full-on babbling, “I had a vision of you once, but that was because of the heroin and after that one time I never did it again but…” Seth let out a harsh breath and looked up at the darkening night sky so he wouldn’t have to look at her. “Every time I saw you, you were wearing something from a day during our time in Mexico where things were good. Or at least not as bad as usual. The days where I could get you to smile. And now… Now sometimes I think during these happy days that if you’re gone again, I’ll be seeing you in these clothes.”

  Kate didn’t immediately say anything, the only sound between them the waves crashing behind him and the rush of his heart beating in his ears. So Seth kept going, as if he hadn’t made a fool of himself enough.

  “I don’t think I can take losing you again.” He muttered it so quietly that it felt like a confession, whispered at the feet of her altar. 

  Kate stood up slowly, swaying slightly because they were both tipsy by that point, but standing tall and sure, towering slightly above him because of her higher ground. She slowly reached for his hand and pulled him forward until he had to change his position to stand a few steps beneath her. Her hands were cold in his but she wasn’t wearing her gloves and Seth could only feel grateful for the feel of her skin. She held his hand between two of hers like he was the one who needed warming up, but Seth didn’t mind. He squeezed her back.

  “We’re both going to die, Seth.” She said it so bluntly Seth’s eyes snapped back to hers but she didn’t stop long enough for him to say anything. “If we have it our way at least, we’re both going to die and that’s the only certainty we have. The only certainty anyone has ever had, Seth. This is the way things have always been.”

  “I know, but,” Seth tried to interrupt but Kate wouldn’t have it.

  “You don’t need to protect me, okay? We’re partners , that means we have each other’s backs. I have your back and you have mine.” She squeezed his hand tightly and there was something in her eyes that made Seth almost forget to breathe. Kate gave him a tiny smile, one that held so many things Seth didn’t know what to make of it, only that it made his heart speed up and, combined with the lack of breathing, left him feeling a little dizzy. “We can’t change the end but we can make sure these happy days are as happy as they can be, right?”

  Seth was nodding before his brain caught up with him. Fuck, he loved her so much. He would agree with anything she said as long as she kept looking at him like that, kept holding on to his hand like she was.

  “Yeah, honey, alright,” he managed to say, his voice kind of hoarse. He felt his ears warm when she giggled a bit, like he was a goddamn kid again with his very first crush. He didn’t even know it was still possible to feel those fucking butterflies. 

  “Good,” Kate said, her voice final as she smiled slightly at him. “Because I’m going to kiss you now.”

  “What?” Seth’s whole world stopped. It felt like she had pulled out the steps from beneath his feet and taken his breath and any cognitive function along with her. Kate only nodded, her cheeks darkening again, her eyes never wavering from his. 

  “Yep,” she said. “It’s okay if you don’t want it to mean anything, you know? I mean, I do, but it doesn’t matter because a kiss is never a bad thing, right? I guess there are some situations where it could be but not like this, okay? I’m just making this happy day happier and I really do want to kiss you, have wanted for quite a while to be completely honest, and if you want to forget about—”

  Seth could see how she was going from confident to uncertain and embarrassed the longer he stood there with his dumb mouth hanging open like a goddamn fish and his eyebrows trying to see if they could merge with his hairline. He snapped out of it suddenly, and without even realizing what was going on, he was reaching forward to kiss her. 

  Seth didn’t kiss Kate like he wanted to, taking his time, being gentle and careful. He kissed her like he knew she wanted to be kissed, like he wasn’t afraid to break her, like he knew she was the strongest fucking person on this earth. And she was.

  He buried his hands in her hair on the back of her skull, his thumbs tilting her jaw down so he could kiss her better with her standing above him. Seth didn’t know who exactly deepened the kiss, maybe it had been him, but it didn’t fucking matter because now he knew how Kate Fuller tasted and he could die right there and die the happiest man on fucking earth. He slid his hands down until they found their way to her back pockets so he could pull her closer to him, their chests touching as he went up one step.

  Kate’s arms were around his neck then, holding him close, as if he would ever willingly part from her ever fucking again. Richie would just have to deal with the fact that their next jobs would have to be handled with Kate hanging off his neck like that. She pulled away slightly, taking a few gasping breaths but he pulled her closer without even opening his eyes, kissing her once more and then another one after just because he could because she really wanted to kiss him. Had for a while now.

  When Seth finally managed to break the kiss again before either of them passed out, he was standing on the same step as her, her tiny feet on top of his as he held most of her weight up so he could keep kissing her.

  “Oh,” Kate gasped slightly, her eyes shining bright even as her pupils were dilated. 

  Yeah, Seth agreed with that sentiment. He huffed a laugh which she echoed, then breathed her in before diving back in to taste her smile. Truth was, it didn’t really matter how it would all end. He had already gotten the happily ever after he wanted, this was fucking El Rey. 

  His brother safe and happy, Kate’s arms around him and the sound of the crashing waves welcoming the dusk and waking them up at dawn. 

[unclerippuascension]

Autistic infodump about Balan Wonderworld or whatever the fuck

Man it really does suck that Balan Wonderworld fucking crashed and burned because unlike Mighty No. 9 I feel like there was some glimmer of goodness in there. Not in terms of gameplay, that’s borked because Yuji Naka still thinks we’re in the fucking 90s where games had one godamn button gameplay and yet also has 80 powerups (seriously what ganja was he smoking, is he ok?), but I mean the story. Which is so weird because the implimentation of story in this game was so passive agressive, like Yuji Naka didn’t want a story but Square was like “No no, you work at our company, you put a fucking story in your game”

Like... there’s clearly story here, but there’s no dialogue. Not having spoken dialogue isn’t a bad thing, but you need to have story shown off in another way and Balan Wonderworld doesn’t do that. That’s especially bad when your story relies on making us care about the struggles characters have. And the people who made this game knew that because they made a fucking light novel that explains everything about everyone. I just WHAT

Was is it too much for them to have a part of the pause menu where you can get a short biography of the characters you’ve met? Kirby Star Allies did this and that game didn’t have a story as big as Balan Wonderworld’s! Not to mention the novel really pulls a FNAF novel where it explains so much important lore that ain’t NOBODY who isn’t in the fandom is gonna read, hell with how much this game flopped I don’t even think anybody in general is gonan read it. Stuff like: did you know Balan was created by Lance, that weird hentai tentacle guy who’s kind of the Reiali  of this game? (apologies to Nights fans if I fucked up the name) YEAH, ME NEITHER, YUKARI HAD TO TELL ME. Their whole thing is basically this one meme in case you haven’t read the novel like me

I want you really think about how much of a mistake this was. Don’t pull a FNAF novel series if you’re making a game, there are ways to impliment story without it being JRPG levels of involved. Again, just have short blurbs as an option in the pause menu.

Speaking of Balan, they really did my mans dirty. It’s like the one Spongebob meme, “You used me...TO BRING IN PLAYERS”. You do not play as Balan in this game, you do QTEs. I never played Nights, Sonic was my Sega fix, but if I was a Nights fan I would feel so cheated. He’s got so much potential, and he’s probably a more developed character in the light novel, but here? He’s just the hook, and once you bite the rest of the game is just....

yeah.

Again, they could have had stuff for Balan that wasn’t QTEs. Maybe some gameplay like Nights? I get that the game isn’t a Nights game, but maybe have his short segments be little snapshots of that kind of gameplay? Please the game is so horrendous, people would find the game tolerable if they had the gameplay version of that cold glass of water in the middle of a marathon. 

Also maybe cut back on the powerups, do we really need 80 of them? So many of them make other powerups obselete, this isn’t a Megaman game, Mr. Naka. We do not need 80 powerups that are all more or less recolors of each other. It doesn’t help that most of these costumes are ugly as sin, useless (serious, who thought Box Fox was a good thing, I just want to talk), or are just a recolor of another powerup. I heard there were originally going to be 40, but even 40 is too much. Your character has three slots for power-ups, have it be three powerups per world and make them permanent additions and not something you need to re-acquire because yes that’s a thing. To bring up Megaman again, imagine if you were using a powerup and you died, and now you’d have to battle the robot master again to get it back. It’s not exactly like that but its on the same track.

Yukari said this while we were talking about this topic, but Balan does feel like a game that should have been some kind of animated series or something. When this game is in cutscenes it is genuinely impressive with how it handles the conflict of the characters, well the characters who actually have compelling problems that you need to solve by Psychonaut-ing it into their heads. What do I mean? Well one world is around a little girl who’s cat got hit by a car, and the event made her so scared and upset that she is now afraid of cars and streetlights because it reminds her of that tragedy. That’s relatable! Even if the game doesn’t translate that, you’re still theoretically helping a child grieve the loss of a pet! And then the other guy is some smug old fart who got beat by a rival and isn’t the champion of chess anymore. Too my knowledge the game doesn’t really scale these problems like where the problems the characters slowly become more ‘intense’. Like the first guy you help is a farmer, but I feel like the chess guy should have been first because his problem is like... dude just get over it, you’re gonna lose nobody is perfect. 

The worst part about all of this is that Square Enix told Yuji Naka he had one chance to make a platformer, and he pretty much wasted it with how this game was handled. I am pretty damn worried that Balan will be like Geno and Mallow where Square just never fucking uses them again, maybe not AS bad as Geno and Mallow but in that similar ballpark

It really does kinda suck, my guys. I just wanted a cool game with a funky clown-looking dude, man!!!

[kareofbears]

persona 5 royal: my thoughts after finishing it five minutes ago

disclaimer: the only reason im writing this is because 1) i have a lot of thoughts and feelings that i need to write down and if i dont ill explode and 2) i want to be able to find this when p5s eventually drops so i can compare my thought processes. if you do not agree with what i’m going to say, that’s cool! just block me or ignore this post. 

now for the sake of sanity, i’m going to try and narrow down this entire list into chunks because this’ll probably be very very long and very much about me just screaming about stuff that i liked, loved, and don’t like. i will be spoiling both the original persona 5 and persona 5 royal, obviously, so i hope you finished both!

1) Akechi

so yes. Goro Akechi. Everyone’s favorite murderer. I’m going to by spewing a lot of hot takes, and this is probably going to be the spiciest: i am in the most intense love-hate relationship with this brown haired antagonist because jesus christ is he a complicated son of a bitch. I know i’ve complained in the past about how much Atlus often struggles with utilizing a character well, but that does not at all relate to Akechi in any way, shape, or form. 

I’ll say this now: He is a character I genuinely, truly hate, yet he is the one I want to hear from the most. He is someone who is a bad person (yes, he is a bad person) but whenever he comes on screen he makes me sit up, he makes me pay attention to him because that’s just the aura he exudes. He is a character who i would never, ever waste my time defending or justifying his actions, but every minute joker spends with him is a minute i want to stretch out as long as possible because he is just that good of a character. He is interesting, he is well defined, he is smart, he is clever, he is sassy, he’s a motherfucking asshole who’s never had a vibe check in my life and i still hate him. Goro Akechi is what Star Wars wanted Kylo Ren to be, and that allegory may not make sense to many people but it works for me so i’m saying it. It’s to the point where writing akechi in a fanfic makes me sweat because in my opinon capturing the essence of akechi is near impossible unless you know what you are talking about (i do not mean that in anyway to discourage people from writing him, im just saying that I am a coward because i will never be able to write a good akechi). Anyway, bottom line is: i despise him but my eyes are always glued to him at all times.

back to the main point-- Atlus absolutely nailed this character and every single addition they put in for Akechi. I’m so damn thrilled that you actually have confidant hangouts with him because every single time you talk to him, it services not only the plot, but it perfectly does what it is supposed to do: it makes you like him, but also leaves the player slightly unnerved. they do it so casually that I might have trouble explaining it, but bear with me: everytime you hangout with him, he always does or say something that unhinges you just a little bit, it leaves you asking ‘wait why?’ or ‘but how did you know that’ or ‘why are you saying that?’. akechi is constantly playing mind games with you. and not only that, adding backstory to akechi (moreso than in the original) is just fucking fantastic. he’s always been a fully fleshed out character but after playing royal, goro akechi actually exists in my mind, and i still hate him (but also i dont. but also i do. anyway)

2) the ending

just finished the game and this is the point where i am at odds with p5r for the first time. the ending to p5, in my opinion, was flawless; everything was perfect and had meaning. from the shot of akira being shown to not wearing glasses anymore because he no longer feels the need to wear a mask (character development: he was very unhappy at the beginning of the game and now he’s happy with his friends--i love it), to his friends being the one to drive him home (amazing, he left his home town and came to shibuya alone via transit, and one year later he’s now leaving with all of his best friends in a van they rented just so they could stay with him as long as they can--it’s perfect, i love it), and also all of them seeing how large and infinite the ocean is (because now there’s unlimited options for them because they all have a new perspective on life). 

But....none of that is there in p5r. it feels impersonal. no one drops him off at his hometown, he was still wearing glasses, and there’s no grand metaphor about what they all achieved. 

Now, i am not a (complete) moron. I know why they had to change it: it’s because of persona 5 scramble (i think). they wanted to set up a plot for the next game and i feel like thats the reason why persona 5 royal’s ending suffered for it: they were too focused on the next plot that they forgot to focus on the sentimental ending for p5r. don’t get me wrong, seeing akechi in the train station absolutely made me lose my shit and made me scream at one in the morning, but i think they lost the core meaning in doing the other stuff. i did not like the focus on maruki and kasumi (will be talking about them later), cause i feel like it took away from the ending, and i also didn’t like the fact that the whole joker outfit in the reflection thing (but i will be letting it slide since it was during the after credits anyway). So while i do love one (1) new aspect of the final cut scene, i still adore and stan the one from persona 5. 

3) the entire last semester 

i’ll be quick: the final palace? the best palace. fight me. it’s fantastic, it’s innovative, it’s interesting, and most of all, the palace ruler is actually the best one in the entire game and i know i wont be the only one to say this. maruki is not a villain: i know for a godamn fact that im not the only one to say that i almost agreed with his deal of allowing the reality (damn i almost agreed twice) because why wouldnt you?? it’s literally a perfect reality! the only reason i didnt agree is because i knew the game wouldnt want me to agree and would force me to have the bad ending! anyway, i love the last section so much. the palace design is interesting, the antagonist is brilliant (who doesn’t love a morally gray antagonist?), and finally, the payoff of kasumi happened and it made me silent for ten minutes. the entire reveal of her being sumire and kasumi being dead is just so genuinely shocking to me that it nearly broke my neck.

what actually broke my neck was the initial incident for the third semester. seeing everyone in this wild alternate reality made me so unsettled that i literally got a stomach ache. i saw morgana as a human and nearly passed out. shiho in the underground? wig. ryuji saying he’s on the national pedastal for running? literally my eyebrows just popped off my head. fucking WAKABA? FLATLINED. brilliantly executed and i love the initial akechi and akira buddy cop movie vibes in the beginning it was just so fun. 

one huge part of the third semester for me though, was of course, akechi. seeing him completely throw away his ‘charming ace detective’ speil was the most refreshing and interesting and not to mention, hilarious part of the game. he does not give a fuck about anyone and he is not afraid to let you know. he is the biggest savage and the most insane person on the phantom thieves group. he’ll roast you, he’ll roast your boyfriend, he’ll roast fuckin anyone and it’s fantastic. not to mention his dialogue is killer: he says the most bat shit insults ever and my favorite example is when you go up to him near the end of the game, you know, to hangout with him and be a nice guy, he just does not hesitate to say ‘what, you came just to see me? just the sort of brainless sentimentality i’d expect from you.’ i LOVE IT because why the hell would he try to be nice? the jig is up, he’s got nothing to hide. and he owns it. atlus seriously nailed akechi in this last semester and it’s brilliant and i love it.

4) everything else 

- one small thing that pissed me off in both games (but especially this one) is how many godamn fake out deaths there are. Morgana has one, Akira has one, Ryuji has one, Sojiro has one, Maruki has one, motherfucking Akechi has two. it just hurts me!

- sumire is an amazing character who has depth and she is lovely and my biggest complaint is that it feels like atlus shoved her in. like, she feels like a new addition to the game, you know what  i mean? maybe its because ive played the original p5 first, but you know, it’s not a big deal. but i love her so much

- on the topic of sumire, i cant say that im completely super duper happy with how different she felt from the other thieves? im sure that’ll be explained in p5s but she just got so much screen time that it just truly made me confused?? maybe im just a horrible person, or that’s just a really hot take. but anyway, yeah maybe im bitter because i really wanted to see extra hangouts/school trips during royal, but didn’t really.

-baton pass? literally orgasmic. it made turn base battles so damn fun and the addition of darts and billiards made me foam at the mouth it was SO SMART AND INNOVATIVE AND I LOVE IT ATLUS I LOVE YOU ATLUS YOURE SO SMART SWEETIE

-small thing, but making spells like ‘dormina’ actually useful just made the game so much more fun and dungeon crawling became something i truly, genuinely looked forward to

-being able to give gifts to my bros? absolutely incredible. thank you. side note: seeing akechi happy from giving him a multi vitamin cracked me up. side side note: giving ryuji a fuck ton of weights and him just smiling made my heart so happy i love that boy so much

- ah this game just looked so GOOD! i thought the original looked good but they really went all out. im not kidding, the smallest details in everyday life or even just normal cut scenes were out of this world. especially stuff from the third semester its just OOF good JOB atlus i love you buddy

-ahhh thieves den! how can i forget? i love it. at first i was a bit iffy with it since it really felt like persona 5 (undoubtedly the biggest game atlus has created) was just jacking itself off. but as time goes on, it became a huge addition to the game and seeing characters’ insights and extra lines of dialogue became super duper interesting and a highlight of the game for me. and don’t even get me started on how much i love love love the photos they added of them hanging out! so lovely, a bunch of them made me tear up

- i know it’s literally impossible, but i feel like the game just forgot that akechi is a person who can wield multiple persona and i just wish that could’ve been messed around with during Palaces

- showtimes are so, so crazy and i get so embarassed whenever they play on my tv because they are just outlandish and unashamed but i love them so so much it just defines persona’s personality 

-because i love ryuji: i prefer the final conversation you have with him aka ‘whaddya mean? you’re there’ but there’s still a lot of really tender and sweet moments like akira genuinely telling him that he’ll miss him, and also the fact that ryuji wants you both to send each other your times through the exercise watch so you can still race ahhhh i love him so much yall

so, overall, this game is better than the original p5 because of the extra content we get. if persona 5 was the perfect dinner, persona 5 royal is that same dinner and you get to enter the dessert buffet. it’s brilliant, it’s smart, it’s hilarious, it’s heartwarming, and it’s undoubtedly my favorite game of all time without exaggeration. while i do prefer the final cut scene (and final dialogues with some characters) in the original persona 5, in the overall experience, persona 5 royal is superior in my mind. i would willingly get amnesia to play this game again. 

I didn’t get to cover everything, but this is definitely most of what i wanted to say. if you actually get to reading all the way to the end, thanks! it means a lot. i hope we can all enjoy persona and look forward to persona 5 scramble together :-)

[pass-the-bechdel]

Buffy S2 E2 ‘Some Assembly Required’

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?  

Yes, three times

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?          

Five (45%)

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Six

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Episode Quality:

Has its pros and cons

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Cordelia and Willow pass talking about the science fair project, and later Buffy and Cordelia pass in the library. Buffy and Cordelia pass after Cordelia’s attacked in the locker room. 

Female Characters:

Buffy Summers

Willow

Cordelia

Jenny Calendar

Mrs. Epps

Male Characters:

Angel

Giles

Xander

Chris

Eric

(undead) Daryl

Other Notes:

Great, now Angel is jealous of Xander. Hey, PSA to every man in Buffy’s life: She’s not dating any of you. What she does and with whom is none of your godamn business. Thanks. 

“Speak English. Not whatever they speak in-” “England?”

Xander, full of contempt, going “Angel” just because we haven’t driven home yet that they’re both jealous for Buffy’s affections.

The most unrealistic thing about the show about monsters is that Cordelia and her cheerleader friends don’t monitor each other in the parking lot for safety. That’s just how women look out for one another. 

Thanks, show, for ruining the song My Girl for me. 

There are two cheerleaders named Joy and Lisa but it’s unclear whether the one who actually talks is Joy or Lisa so I can’t count her towards the female characters count or Bechdel passes. 

It’s unclear how they managed to revive Darryl if a major plot point is that brains can’t be corroded by formaldehyde and Daryl’s brain presumably went through the same treatment as anyone else’s. 

This episode wasn’t particularly great or memorable. There was some good: Buffy and Cordelia supporting each other, Cordelia appearing more like a real person in general. In fact, I’m digging Cordelia this season way more so far than in season one. The bad is that they seem to be cranking up the Xander/Angel rivalry. Any time the other is even mentioned, one of them gets close to blowing his lid. While Buffy is angry with Angel for this in the beginning of the episode, it just leads to him admitting that he’s jealous, which, okay. Fix your actions anyways. And nobody tells Xander to just get over his godamn crush, already. Buffy has made it clear that she’s not into him and in any realistic friend group the constant hitting on her would cause them all to be uncomfortable. Other than that, it’s an okay episode, and on we go. 

Editor’s Note: there’s one really, really big problem that this episode just does not get into at all, and that’s the part where Eric and Chris are building Daryl a sex slave. In context, the whole idea is softened by being presented from Daryl’s sympathetic perspective: he’s a sad undead dude who never asked to be brought back as a living corpse, and he just doesn’t want to be alone. Aww. The fact that the ‘solution’ to that is to build him a girlfriend who will be forced to stay with him forever and comfort him and meet all his needs whether she wants to or not is very much glossed over; the villainy of the episode is all about the idea of killing a girl first in order to make the desired sex doll, with a side of ‘you shouldn’t mess with natural order’, and the part where the end result of building Daryl a girl to his specifications without regard for her identity as a person (living or undead) includes total disregard for her autonomy and consent is just...ignored. Daryl even rejects the idea of trying to have a relationship with a living girl, when Cordelia tells him that she’d be willing to stay with him without having to die first, and sure, she’s lying in order to avoid being killed, but the fact that Daryl would rather have her murdered first so that she’ll have ‘no choice’ but to stay with him as his Bride of Frankenstein, that stands. Daryl doesn’t want a woman with options, because he wants to force her to be ‘his’, because he wants a sex slave. Eric and Chris want to build him a sex slave, and Chris having a change of heart because killing a girl is a bridge too far doesn’t actually make him a good guy, because he was still happy to BUILD A SEX SLAVE so long as the body parts were already dead (and since, as we saw with Daryl, the mind/memories/personality of the person are revived from death along with them, there’s really no loophole here to make it palatable). Does slash-happy misogynist Eric even suffer any repercussions for this debacle? Are we supposed to be content with Chris ‘learning his lesson’ regarding reanimation of corpses, and nevermind the part where he perceives women’s bodies primarily as sex objects? The true horror of this plot doesn’t even begin to be laid to rest through Daryl’s second death, and that’s only reinforced really by the way it is book-ended by scenes revolving around Angel and Xander’s jealous coveting of Buffy’s affections. Honestly. Grotesque.

[pangtasias-atelier]

F/E/5 Thoughts

In short, FE5 is the oldest game that's the most playable. And it's extremely fun despite its age and bs mechanics. To the point where I'd recommend it to newer players with a minimal spoiler guide.

Having played it first back when the best translation patch was literally unfinished and with gibberish menus, the new patch is so wonderful and it comes with great quality of life changes. Like, you can actually fucking change the position of your units and look at the godamn map! Plus you can see growth rates and how they're affected by scrolls. And speaking of scrolls, the ability to fiddle with a unit's growth rates is so fun.

In terms of actual gameplay, the capture mechanic is such a fun mechanic of seeing broken stuff the enemy does, and getting to steal so that way you can use them against the enemy. The fact that you can steal several silence, sleep, and berserk staves makes it so that you can just use them as you please for the most part. And that's even mentioning all the rescue, warp, and rewarp staves you can get to further open up your options. And this all helps to create a meta where staves are the best weapons in the game and I love it since it helps fe5 play differently compared to other games where you just equip a javelin/hand axe and place a unit in front of a bunch of enemies.

All the staff units are a blast to use and I'm glad cause I always use a lot of magic units in basically every game. Though the magic system is pretty bad in Thracia since anima is split into a triangle and each branch of magic basically only has 2 or 3 tomes to use which sucks. And all it is is a basic tome per element at the lowest rank and then a siege tome at the highest rank, which is pretty lame since it is a downgrade from Genealogy which is the opposite of all other weapon types.

Dismounting is so annoying to deal with but it's actually a bit fun trying to play around that and it is a nice way to try and reel in cavs+flyers from being absolutely broken like every other Fe game. Especially since they're forced to dismount indoor maps and get reduced stats and forced to use swords which they can't use mounted, for most cases.

Despite all this, Thracia is still just such an unforgiving game and most of it is just due to the bullshit the game throws at you. Which makes it so unfair for new players, but on a second playthrough, Thracia was such a fun experience and I'd definitely recommend it to others. Especially since like Thracia enemies aren't too threatening, it's more so the stuff the game tries to pull on you.

In terms of story, it's definitely not as much of a revisioning of fe4 that people make it out to be and it's fun to see events from fe4 play out in fe5. The final boss is definitely a let down and kind of just a random thing they threw in to remind us "loptyr church bad!" But the final map is incredibly fun since your team is split into six groups lol. The story does a much better job of making you feel like gen 2 of Jugdral is an awful time. Especially as a byproduct of Lief not being able to use a holy weapon and that he's effectively just a normal dude in comparison to others but despite that, still fights on and inspires others. Which is a common theme with a lot of Thracia's recruitable cast since basically no one has holy blood, and the one unit that does absolutely breaks the game when you get him lmao. Though I’m a contrarian because I never recruit him in favor of a much worse character. And during the route split where you can recruit like 3 great units, I go the other route to get 3 mediocre ones cause I like them much more.

Thracia feels like it probably would be a nightmare to figure out without a guide, but you are given the option to succeed and later on you can throw the bullshit right back at the game and succeed very well for it. So it’s a fun experience that no other fe game quite replicates in where having a bunch of staff units is a great thing.

Also screenshots of scroll abused characters I enjoy lol. Like, I genuinely love Mir/an/da and I'm glad she was added to feh. And I unironically enjoy Hicks and it was so fucking mean that he got last in cyl2

[severemanifesto]

Did y'all know that I had to stop playing Harvest Moon: Animal Parade because I thought about it too hard and could not physically bring myself to play it anymore? 

 Settle in. Get a drink. I’m not censoring this, I’m not shortening it. I’m gonna present it to you the way that I would tell it to your face. And it’s a doozy.

May I present, Sev Thinks too Godamn Much; An Essay.  

 I went after Wizard, because of course I did, got him his weird-ass mushrooms every day on the dot and married his ass. Like right off the bat, FUCK the seasons, FUCK the animals, I’m gonna marry the fucking Wizard, step one, step off Harvest Goddess, I’m gettin me some. Unfortunately for me, and where I’m at as a semi-functioning human being, there’s a bit where he mentions something to the effect of like, first there was the island, and then there was Wizard. Like he’d been there forever right? So cool, he’s immortal. I can roll with that, I think.

 I think /wrong/. Because then I come across something online to the effect of “I like to think Wizard puts something in the lunches he makes to allow MC to live longer”. Which. Begins. The fuck train that is my thoughts. 

Holy shit, I, the character, am Mortal. He, the Wizard, is not. Holy fuck, he’s going to have to bury me. Not just me, fam, oh NO, his whole family. Me, our kid, grandkids–this dude will now from this moment on spend the rest of fucking /eternity/ watching what remains of the people he loved grow old and die, again and again. And if the line runs out? Fuck, dude, he’ll have no one. 

Well gee, Sev. I hear you think to yourself if you’ve managed to read this far. Seems like you should be in bed, sleeping, it’s one in the morning what are you doing up–NO. What you’re really thinking is, yeah I mean but probably not right and even if so, is it that bad? My dude, I am META with this shit. Not ONLY is Wizard going to bury the people he loves, he’s going to do it because /I chose him/. 

Thats right. We’re getting into the SHIT of it now. I CHOSE HIM and because I found him aesthetically pleasing, he is now doomed forever. 

If I hadn’t chosen him, he would not have found happiness (re: he would remain the same character, which is, as with all bachelors/bachelorettes, inherently lonely so that MC can alleviate said loneliness). He would have watched me date and marry someone else, and BECAUSE the potential for marriage has to be present, there’s a part of him that would Know that it was almost /him/ becoming a part of something greater, something more important than the entirety of this world–the MC. 

 MC is the end all, MC is the only creature in this world endowed with free will, MC is basically a god upon themselves. MC decides whether your life is happy or sad–whether you are fulfilled or not, whether the crops grow, whether the sky falls, whether they FUCK AROUND FOR A MILLION YEARS INSTEAD OF FIXING THE TOWN. It is not /only/ in MC’s power, but it is the only salvation that a NPC has. To be chosen, to be liked. That is the end goal. The happiness of a bachelor/bachelorette depends on MC choosing them over everyone else. are we done…?

 FUCK NO WERE NOT FINISHED YET STRAP THE FUCK IN /LISTEN/. If the end goal is to be chosen by MC, then there /was no choice/. Which brings us back to FUCKING Wizard. Either Wizard spends his life never being as happy as he could be and (whether he’s cognizant or NOT it doesn’t matter) watching the only chance he had galavant around with someone else, OR I choose him. I pick him, me, MC, the only God that matters, the god of free will. And he loves me. Of course he does, that’s what he’s meant to do but you don’t understand. It’s not just that he loves me. It’s that he is not allowed to love ANYONE ELSE. Once he is with me? He’s done. Just me, only me. Forever. 

With most NPCs that’s not a problem ok we both gotta die sometime. BUT NOT WIZARD. Wizard will bury MC. He loves MC more than anything. He gives up his character for MC, leaves his house for MC, rethinks his ENTIRE LIFE for MC (which I may remind you is A VERY SUBSTANTIAL AND LONG LIFE). 

And he will bury them. 

Not just the love of his life, the only meaning to his life that there can be. 

 Not just the meaning of his life, but their child, whom he would love as well. He’d have to bury them, too. And their children. And their children. A whole lifetime of saying goodbye over and I’ve and over again to the only thing in your life with any kind of meaning. He will never fall in love again. He will never know true happiness again. He /can’t/. Because I chose him. And that marks him irreparably as mine. Forever. Even though I know for a fact that I am mortal. 

And when I die, I will take his happiness with me in a /very/ real and /very literal/ way.

 And now we come to the reason I had to stop playing. 

With all this in mind. 

What do I do now?

 And that was what fucking killed me. 

 Do I keep playing? Knowing that when he looks at me, the character is gone, replaced by someone who’s only purpose in life is to love me? To follow me and my routines, to be an accessory for the rest of my life? Until I have died, and our children have died, until his purpose is gone and leaves him with nothing but graves? Do I continue playing knowing for a FACT that his whole life was chosen on a whim by a capricious god–me?? 

Or do I erase it? 

Do I erase it knowing that this is it. This is Happy Wizard, this is his only chance. This is his only real chance at being happy. And beyond this, he will watch me choose someone else. And he will never know happiness. Even if he doesn’t know, even if he doesn’t remember, he will feel a pull like a moth to a flame and he will desire me and miss me and compete for my affection if I let him. 

And don’t misunderstand, along the way, I fell for him. Not just in looks but in mind. Quiet, underspoken, but heartfelt in a way that resonates with me. The “dates” felt natural to me. I was actually really excited to see him during them–I mean damn. You know you’re in it when the quiet kid tell you he loves you. 

So do I erase my game, taking with it those memories of a happy life, taking with it our child, who’s existence gives Wizard more joy that he’d ever known? Do I take it, And set it all back to zero, to when he is alone? When he will never /not/ be alone? Fuck Witch, fuck rival marriages (is there rival marriages in AP? Listen, it doesn’t MATTER the POINT is that they are HAPPIER with YOU) fuck anything else that could happen to him, if you don’t choose him he will live out his days in misery. 

 NOTE, IF YOU WILL, THAT ALL OF THIS RUNS UNDER THE ASSUMPTION THAT HE IS /UNAWARE/ OF THESE EVENTS. WHY???  Because imagine for a moment that, true to his mysticism, he DOES know. 

He KNOWS that to love MC is to suffer.

He KNOWS that it will mean the sacrifice of everything he is, so that he will be easier to interact with. 

He KNOWS that he will never love again. 

He REMEMBERS timelines when they were not with him. He REMEMBERS cold nights and lonely days, watching them with their new child and partner and KNOWING how /very close/ he was to having that happiness. And STILL being forced to play it through. Still loving MC. Still ready to trade an eternal lifetime of sorrow for a fleeting moment of the only happiness he could ever know. 

Mind you? Way before Undertale. Way before Wreck-It-Ralph. FUCK SMASH UNDERMAN™.  "Video Games Have Feelings" ain’t got shit on me. I was /here/. I was /right here/. 

I haven’t touched it since. I can’t bear to. I know that I will be faced with two options, two immutable options. And I just….I can’t fucking choose. I can’t do it.

I joke about this whole shit haha, real funny, talked myself out of a video game based on morals and meta. It’s not a joke. I can’t make this decision. 

So my Harvest Moon: Animal Parade game is frozen in time. Preserving that moment of happiness for all involved. Where I chose Wizard. Where we are expecting a child together. And just before everything falls apart.