#I still don't have an ask tag

[loregoddess]

how do you think Anna got her scar?

Realistically I know that the game like, showed and told us that Anna's been doing a lot of dangerous work, even since before the war, and that she went and secretly trained with Archibald just so she could start doing dangerous scouting work in the first place, so she's just been doing a lot of combat and stealth training in general from a young age, and therefore logically her scar probably came from either an accident during training or work gone a little wrong in her youth but like...

There's another part of me that thinks she fell out of a tree as a kid and had a branch cut her face badly on the way down, and, as kids are wont to do, she kept scratching at the scab while it was healing.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

real talk having the 2nd worst new years eve yet 🤢🤢🤢 (throat infection, twisted neck, banged-about-foot, ego AND the rest o' me all bruised like misjuggled peaches 🍑🍑🍑)

im bent outa shape and suspectin the universe owes me 8 buck if anyone wannsa chip in

[kirby-the-gorb]

[lucabyte]

On autonomy, and what it means to be Obliged to Help.

Bonus:

[bloggingboutburgers]

...So what we need to live huh

What we literally need for our body to function

We've come that far now huh

[electoons]

I love the college of winterhold. everyone there is casually deranged and there's like an alarming number of students and staff who threaten you immediately when they meet you. it's always one of the first questlines I do. which makes it even funnier when you get made the arch-mage of the college. I'm level 12 and got through this questline knowing exactly 3 spells. what do you mean you want me to lead the college. this school CANNOT be an accredited institution

[kit-screams-into-the-future]

was having trans marty thoughts again and i came to a realization about this scene

[liauditore]

Equally Invalid

[firestorm09890]

Y'ALL. Y'ALL so for a long time I've believed that "the sun" in Meursault's story is Carmen, and I went to check Hell's Chicken's dialogue to see exactly how he said that he'd dealt with distortions before, and... you know what else he said?

To my knowledge, it is a phenomenon where an individual morphs into a form often unfit to be considered “human”. It has no known causes, and the appearances were all different.

Unfit to be considered human.

Meursault, who, in his book, was judged by the court to be soulless.

Meursault, who has EGO for Cyborgs who have been so mutilated they barely act like people anymore; a murderer who was experimented on until ceasing to be human; a sheep named after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a novel about the humanity of androids and the inhumanity of humans; and now a rose that can't help its bloodsucking nature, based on Carmilla, a vampire whose story emphasized the duality between her vampiric traits and her human ones.

Meursault, who answered Heathcliff's ironic question of if he had metal for brains like this:

I'm placing my bets now, that line from Hell's Chicken is foreshadowing for Meursault's canto even more than "I have witnessed a number of [distortion] cases in the past" was

[makiswirl]

can i just say. and this is probably a niche hill to die on. that i am so gobsmacked every time someone vaguely hints at the idea that jotaro doesn't care meaningfully for the other crusaders, usually particularly kakyoin and joseph, when those two actually tend to be the ones he reacts to being hurt the hardest

like he cares for his loved ones!!!! that literally plays into his character motives in every single part he shows up in!!! stop lying to me!!!!!!!

[loregoddess]

2am Temenos thoughts I'm now typing out in the morning: I like Temenos' English voice acting but it has a very particular tone. Do you think that has any influence on his (mis)characterization?

Oh hmm, y'know I hadn't considered that but you might be on to something, because voice line delivery does affect how people perceive a character, although I think part of it may be localization choices and direction of the voice acting as well. (I had way more thoughts on this question than I was expecting to, hence the cut bc of length).

Like, I've seen discussions about writing quality vs. quality of voice acting ("whether the character writing is good, or whether the voice acting carries the character" is a debate I've seen several times), and also I've seen people talk about how differences in the voice acting performances across different localizations affect how the character comes across differently (i.e. there's a series of videos that were popular after BotW came out where every cutscene was compared in all the languages the game had been dubbed in, with a lot of people talking about how Zelda's breakdown in the "Memory 16: Despair" cutscene seemed way more emotional in some languages than others). So like, the vocal performance does factor into audience perception, no argument there.

I went ahead and looked up compilations of Temenos's voice lines in both English and Japanese, and while I'm very much not fluent in Japanese at all, and therefore can't pick up too much on tonal shifts, I will note that a lot of the anger Temenos spends so much time masking seems to come through a bit more clearly in his JP voice lines (his JP unique battle line against Kaldena is sounds especially furious, and while the ENG delivery of the same line is definitely angrier sounding than most of his other ENG battle lines, there's something that feels a bit rawer about the JP delivery, at least to my ears).

This is no shade at his ENG VA, since I think the voice acting was pretty strong overall (although the recording quality of some of the lines is another matter, but again not the VA's fault), and I don't think the JP is better or worse than the ENG voice performance, since (recording quality aside) they're both solid performances, but they do have slightly different feels to them.

I personally felt the ENG delivery of the story dialogue lines often gave Temenos a sort of slightly playful but aloof tone, but either by choice of the voice direction or simply due to how the VA's voice naturally is, the anger (while it's definitely there) doesn't come across as noticeably angry or aggressively as I've seen with some other VA performances. Which isn't a bad thing per se, bc even in real life no two people show anger or even sound angry in the same way, and I think Temenos's ENG voice still works for his characterization.

And that's of course just looking at one emotion. I'd have to do a lot more digging (or replay the game w/ the JP voices turned on) to see how the voice line delivery sounds for scenes like Jorg's death or the ruins of the Kal.

Unfortunately, since I can't translate like, 90% of what's being said in the JP lines by ear, I can't compare them against the ENG localization to see if the word choice of the localization shifts the tone or implied meaning any (although for what I can translate by ear, the localization seems to be a fairly close 1:1 for the battle lines at least, and typically I don't have a lot of beef w/ localization when I can get my hands on fan translations of original JP text to compare/contrast). I do think the word choice for localizations affects how a character is interpreted, even with good localizations--except, again how said word choice is interpreted usually reveals maybe more about the audience than the author.

For example, I know a lot of people read Temenos calling Crick "Little Lamb" as flirtatious, and I guess I kinda get why that interpretation exists, but to me the nickname always seemed...not condescending per se, and not intentionally mean, but almost as if Temenos is teasing Crick for his unquestioning faith and calling him childish for it. As a result, my reading "Little Lamb" as "your unquestioning faith is childish, I'm going to tease you a bit about that until you've matured" makes it seem like Temenos is putting a lot more distance between himself and Crick than reading "Little Lamb" as a cute, flirtatious nickname does. Now, I rarely read romantic undertones to a lot of dialogue, and shipping is the least important thing to me when I'm engaging with a story, so my interpretation of that line probably says more about me than it does about the intention of the writers.

However! The vocal delivery of the voice line doesn't really give us any insight either, bc while I didn't hear it as sounding flirtatious, lots of other people apparently did. Now, it's not like I know what goes on with the direction during the recording sections, how much information about the characters and scene and story the VAs are given, and how that information, or lack thereof, affects how they voice act, so again no shade on the VA or even the voice direction as a whole, but as you noted, choices were made in the direction that made it so Temenos has a very particular tone.

Now again, it's hard to say how much this does or doesn't affect a person's interpretation bc, well, vocal and tonal interpretation isn't like, a science or anything. Depending on regional dialects/cultures, two people from different areas can interpret the same voice delivery in two entirely different ways (i.e. the "are city people, esp. people from NY, really rude or are they just from the city" discussions I've seen floating around about whether it's rude or not to walk into a deli and order your food w/out any small talk, and how it's more about where a person grew up that will usually inform their initial reaction to that question).

If I had to guess, I think the mischaracterization I come across for Temenos seems to stem from the fact that he puts of a façade 99% of the time, and rarely lets it slip. Unlike say, Therion, who goes through an entire arc and speech about how he's actually okay with wanting to care about and trust other people, Temenos rarely shows any vulnerability because his character arc wasn't about accepting vulnerability like Therion's was. Instead Temenos's façade plays into aspects of how he interacts with other characters, but isn't treated as an obstacle to overcome per se, which also means that the audience may miss that it's even there in the first place, mistaking the façade for the actual core characterization.

We get some indication of the "slipping façade" in the vocal deliveries, i.e. the angry "Kaldena!" battle line, or (if I'm remembering correctly) the voice lines leading up to the Arcanette boss fight, but the thing about Octopath is that it's only partly voice acted. Some of the parts where I read Temenos as letting his mask slip a bit, or otherwise him showing more emotion or vulnerability than usual, were in travel banters, which are entirely silent so we don't get to hear how the VA would have tried to navigate those scenes. Would the banters being voiced have changed interpretations and prevented popular fanon mischaracterization? Maybe, maybe not.

Possibly more importantly, Temenos's façade is notably friendly, or at least nicer than the "edgy loner who uses snark and sass to keep people at bay" façade that's on the opposite end of the "characters with trust and intimacy issues" spectrum, and most characters I've come across who seem to try to keep people from getting too close to them by being friendly tend to get mischaracterized by fans bc the "friendly mask" is so convincing and not as noticeably phony as like, being an edgy loner who's actively pushing people away despite craving friendship/love/etc. is. So this could just be a fandom thing in general, and not unique to Temenos or directly affected by vocal performances (i.e. Klavier Gavin from Ace Attorney is another character I read as masking a lot of trust issues and using friendliness as a means of keeping people away, and that is not a common reading of his characterization, at least not when I used to haunt the fandom, and AA has almost 0 voice acting so this isn't due to voice performance).

There is, of course, also the school of thought that "correct" interpretations don't exist bc everyone has their own experiences that are true to them and their interpretation of media is reflective of that, so I'll be the first to say that it's not that my interpretations of Temenos's characterization are more or less correct as compared to someone else's. And honestly like, it's a piece of fiction, so I'm not going to get upset about what the popular fanon characterization is, even if I personally think it's mischaracterization, bc I can also just ignore it.

Although, there is also a sort of fanonization that's become more frequent in fandom spaces where even characters with less complex writing get mischaracterized (simplified, smoothed over, etc.) in favor of popular fandom trends. Again, not the devil per se, but it definitely an unusual trend that I've seen an uptick in. It's almost like a commercialization of fandom, except maybe not as malicious...yet.

Anyhow, I've gotten a bit off topic, and this will be an endless set of tangents soon if I'm not careful.

So uh, yeah! The shortest answer to your questions is, yes I do believe the vocal delivery of a character's lines will affect how that character's characterization is perceived and interpreted, although there's other things that affect interpretation as well (word choice for the writing, audience's personal tastes/experiences, trends in fandom, etc.), and that a mix of these things will weave into whatever the popular interpretation and fanon characterization for that character becomes. But also everyone will still come up with their own unique interpretations of characterizations, so non-fanon interpretations will always exist as well.

[flying-cat]

I saw a tweet about how Katsuki would just keep inviting Izuku to his agency because he Needs to win him over and then a reply saying like "what if he already subtly asked a lot of times and Izuku just didn't get it" and it made me imagine

💥: You know, it would be nice if I could get a new hire.

🥦: Oh yeah I hope you find someone!! You've been spending an awful long time on paperwork lately, it'd be nice if someone could help you out with that. :)

💥: ok. Yeah Thanks I'll Try ;!#(*.!)#!god fucking dammit

(next day)

💥: It would be SO NICE if I could get a new hire who could SPAR WITH ME at MY LEVEL so that I DON'T HAVE TO HOLD BACK ON THEM. MAYBE THEY COULD EVEN SURPASS ME.

🥦: That's definitely true. You could also just ask Todoroki-kun or Kirishima-kun though! I'm sure they would come to your agency's gym and spar with you sometime. :)

💥: AM I ACTUALLY DEAD AND IN HELL

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I've seen the last '"g-d made you perfect" that I can handle, and it's led me to a realization about how I think of g-d.

I don't think we were made perfect. We were made human. And, if I'm honest, the only perfection in my mind is g-d, and that sense of perfection is what differentiates humans from g-d. If humans were as perfectly-made as g-d, I for one wouldn't see the point in following, believing, trusting, caring for, or loving g-d.

I guess for me, I see the ways in which humans alter the Way We Were Created that I really don't think it's right to speculate as to if there's a limit to altering our abilities or bodies. For instance, as a trans person, I've definitely been inundated with this idea that because g-d made my body "perfect" that I shouldn't alter it ever, but isn't that a dangerous precedent? Is it really so, that our bodies are magically made perfect, as g-d that to even tamper with the idea of change would be the same as cursing g-d? I really don't think that's compelling.

I love thinking about just how much g-d is placed into people, but I don't think it warrants restricting the ability to learn, create, grow, or change. Thank g-d that He created the ability to change!

[blueskittlesart]

what do you think about zora design? about past and current designs? how would you change it? actually!!! what are the zora (and other races) like in your sword of fate au???

got distracted by the second question. look at my little guys:

these are some of the current (working) designs!! from left to right it's sheikah, zora, hylian, goron, and gerudo! these aren't necessarily the average builds/designs for each race but they're the most important character from each race lol. sword of fate takes place really early-on in the timeline, so the culture and separation of races is still kind of loose especially among the humanoid races. the current generation of zora is basically the first generation to call themselves zora and attempt to establish a government or hold any authority alongside the other races of hyrule, and because they're kind of a young race i imagine they're less fishy and more invertebrate-like in this stage, hence my jellyfish princess! (her dad is a giant squid lol.) the sheikah are descendants of the original surface humans, whereas the hylians and gerudo are two seperate sects that both originally came from skyloft. the hylians built a few villages which each have their own distinct vibe while the gerudo took a more nomadic approach and roam the desert in small independently governed groups. The gorons are the most well-established race at this point, having been on the surface a lot longer than basically everyone else, and so they have a much stronger culture and shared identity than a lot of the other races that are still kind of getting their footing.

[rin-sith]

Pls tell me I'm not alone—

[immult]

it's crazy to me that the only way you can fail the matron's test is by trusting your best friend or mother and caring for their plight. but not as crazy when you know they're a follower of the betrayer and a ruidusborn though, right?

imogen sounds so defeated when she asked if trusting her mother was bad. then imogen repeating the same again to the hells with this really helpless look. because the matron, a near-omniscient being, has written off her mother as something too rotten to be trusted.

"you know your mother best in the end" the way that does not change the fact that YOU have viewed her mother in the worst light. it's killing me but i have to love the consistent portrayal of the holy, at every level of the realm, putting the burden on others to find goodness or redemption in ruidusborns. but until proven otherwise they are personally fine with reducing ruidusborns to caricatures of an evil turncoat.

the matron of ravens was not there when the gods, despite luz/sarenrae's insistence to give it a chance, decided to distrust the rotten fruit and plucked it right off from its tree, setting off their own end.