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neonponders · 3 years ago

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I’ve never written Murder Boyfriends before, but @cuepickle ‘s art is just so lovely and powerful.

Based on this and this 💗 💜 🖤 (impending smut ahoy)

• • • • • • •

I just want to help, he’d said.

I just want to make things right, he’d said.

Steve said a lot of things. But he moaned incoherent words and exclaimed sounds he didn’t want anyone else to hear when Billy Hargrove steamrolled into his life, his feelings, and his goddamn morals.

Billy Hargrove wasn’t...right. He was twelve different shades of wrong, punctuated by Caribbean blue eyes and decorated with bronzed waves and curls. Steve knew he had a superiority complex, but he hadn’t known it was this bad.

Thing is, if he’d known, Steve couldn’t guarantee whether he’d change anything. Because knowing Billy Hargrove is a murderer would also mean Steve knew what his lips tasted like, and their softness against his neck.

All Steve had known was that Sheriff Hopper was missing, and his parents, being the upstanding white people that they are, deferred nearly every inconvenience to the police. And the police answered, because fat wallets keep their lights on, like everyone else.

But the Sheriff’s phones kept ringing. And maybe Steve had his own complex after so much time with Nancy, because he parked out front and strolled right into the Sheriff’s office.

The secretary wasn’t there.

Neither were the two deputies.

Steve tucked himself between the desks to pry apart the window blinds. Their cars were still here -

Steve’s head rotated at a sound he knew. He knew it in the way a memory piqued but he couldn’t place where or why. He followed it into the chief’s office...where Billy Hargrove sat at the desk - Hopper’s own chair - and ate a crisp apple from the strange pile in the waste paper basket.

“Billy?”

“Hi, Steve,” he smiled. Ankles crossed on the desk. A perfect, violet crescent framed the side of his eye. An indigo shadow rested in the inner corner of the other one. Either way, Steve’s first red flag was that he ached with concern more than itched for the nailed bat in his trunk.

“What happened to you?”

Steve thought the guy might choke, the way he tipped his head back to laugh while chunks of apple sat in his mouth. Naturally, it took him some time to chew and swallow before he said, “I finally stopped being afraid. And I started being responsible. Not the way he planned, though.”

“Hopper?” Steve frowned.

Billy did not answer immediately. He licked the apple like it might drip juice and beckoned, “Why don’t you sit down? I want to see you.”

The only lights on were in the main room where Steve stood. Ghoulish, fluorescent bulbs while Billy sat in shadow and vague, evening light hatching through the Chief’s window blinds. There was some kind of irony there: Steve in the fake, green-tinged light, and Billy in the natural...honest darkness.

Steve peeked behind him, surveying the room but finding no warnings apart from the negative space where people should be.

He stepped into the office -

“I’ve always liked looking at you.”

Steve paused on the carpet. Billy had said it loud enough to hear, but with enough air in it that Steve couldn’t tell if he was drunk or hadn’t meant to say it aloud. Then he tried to sit in one of the chairs -

“Over here. Sit on the desk.”

“What?” Steve blinked at him, suddenly very aware that the light gave Billy full view of his face but Steve only got the glow in that dark blond hair.

A strong leg pushed Billy away from the desk. The apple tumbled onto its pile of brothers, discarded as he pat the desk. “Sit right here.”

Steve shook his head all at once, beginning to backpedal out of the room. “This is weird.”

“No shit. This whole town’s weird. I’ve been reading some personal files in this room. I guess the Chief thought he was being smart, but...I’ve been hiding my whole life. I know where people hide things. A lot of things make sense in this place, now. The rat pack Max hangs out with. And you. A lot of things makes sense about you, Steve.”

Steve shrugged and his hands clapped against his thighs. “Okay? You’re not special for seeing my report cards.”

Billy’s features froze, but only for a moment, and then laughter burst out of him. “Steve, please sit down. God, I wanna touch you.”

Steve Harrington is a simple person. He’d officially been single for far too long, struck out every time he faced a woman - and a couple guys who were too scared or oblivious to do anything - and he just...

He wanted.

He wanted to be touched and if Billy was offering - Hot Stuff Hargrove, Baby Doll Eyes Billy - then Steve couldn’t help but take. He’d been so patient with everyone. He waited for Nancy to be ready. He accepted defeat when everyone walked away from him with rolling eyes or obligatory smiles.

Billy...talked. He talked and talked. He’d always been a talker; on the basketball court, barking orders as a lifeguard. Always talking, or letting his radio talk for him.

But Steve sat on Hopper’s desk and felt the warmth of Billy’s palms seep through his jeans. He held onto Steve’s calves as he talked. Talked about terrible things. Broken plates and abandoned things. Being the abandoned thing. Being the broken thing. He talked for hours before finally fucking Steve on that desk.

He’d started slow. Just unbuttoning the jeans and then leaving them alone. It would be another half hour before he took off Steve’s shoes. Every time Steve looked behind him - as if asking for someone to come in, to interrupt, to break this dark dream Billy wove around him - Billy said, “Look at me.”

“I’ve been looking at you, Billy.”

A small smile twitched on his lips. “Good.”

It would be another hour before he said, “I think my dad killed my mom.”

Less than a minute before he added, “He had it coming. Feel bad for my step-mom, though. But she was a screamer. So was the tall deputy. Things can finally be quiet now.”

Steve sat very still as arms circled around his pelvis and Billy just...hugged him. Pressed his face against Steve’s soft belly and inhaled his scent. Warm laundry and Steve Steve Steve.

He couldn’t be sure how things evolved into sex. Steve was already trapped in Billy’s web, so all he had to do was decide, to give the web a pluck and Steve felt the vibrations.

He planted his hands on the desk, lifting his ass for Billy to wrench the jeans and underwear off in one go. They got stuck on Steve’s feet, bunched up so Steve had to figure it out himself as Billy pressed himself over top of him.

The green desk lamp fell with an ominous clank.

Steve finally got a leg free and wrapped it around Billy’s ass the same time teeth found his neck. The warning bells that had been ringing since he got here felt far away; church bells too high over the town to actually make a difference in the goings-on.

Billy marked him up like he had paperwork to sign. Steve’s deed was his, and Billy moaned and grunted with every sigh he wrung out of Steve. Every squeeze to his waist made him moan, and he outright whimpered when Billy licked up his neck. For how much Billy gripped, bit, and sucked, he moved surprisingly gently below the belt.

“Gonna get lube later,” he said in that way again, traveling down Steve’s body as his thoughts escaped into the air. “I’m going to have your ass every which way, Harrington.”

Steve could only gasp as his tongue shoved inside him with no preamble. “I-I-I didn’t shower - ”

A guttural, breathy hum ricocheted from Billy’s throat and into Steve’s chest, knocking Steve’s head back like a rock on the way there. Billy’s stubble and gross wetness made Steve feel filthy in the best way. His cock lay heavily on his abdomen, spurting precum every time Billy’s hands squeezed the backs of his thighs.

Steve came like he’d never been touched in his life. His breathing picked up and he rutted against Billy’s face twice before making a mess of his shirt.

Billy took his slowly fading erection into his mouth, jerking himself off almost violently in a matter of seconds.

When Steve stepped outside, the air smelled like the sunrise even though only the faintest bit of blue had begun to dilute the darkness. And as the sun rose, Steve had never felt worse. It was like seeing a demogorgon for the first time, but instead of minutes, it stretched into hours.

People were dead.

Presumably Chief Hopper too.

Billy, he...he...

He showed up to Steve’s house with a smile and freshly laundered clothes. Steve had showered but looked like he hadn’t slept in a month. Billy only tipped his head back toward his car. “I’ve got two bank accounts freshly inherited. Let me buy you lunch.”

Steve wondered if Dustin’s comic book villains drove Camaros.

Billy bought him lunch. Bought him a chocolate milkshake too. Steve didn’t want to think about his ability to swallow those down so easily. Or how he interacted with the waitress like he wasn’t covered in red and brown love bites delivered directly atop Chief Hopper’s desk. He didn’t want to think what having all of Billy Hargrove’s attention on him did to his squirming...pleased...insides.

He didn’t want to think as Billy fingered him in the backseat.

They didn’t even fit back there but Billy moved with what felt like the strength of three men. It was arousing, being manhandled like that; any fear Steve ought to have held in his gut tapped its disapproving toe outside of the vehicle. The way Billy sucked behind his ear, gripped his hips so he could slot himself right in between Steve’s legs and rut his dark pink erection against Steve’s...

The way he bought Steve more milkshakes.

And a fresh tire rotation because his car veered to the left.

And filled him up in the darkness of Steve’s bedroom, making Steve bounce on his cock as he licked the taste of him off his lubed up fingers -

“You haven’t even kissed me yet.”

It just...came out.

The husky lust cleared from Billy’s eyes when Steve said that. Terror must have filled Steve’s eyes because Billy gently cradled the side of his head.

This is it. This is how I die. Wanting a freaking kiss from a psycho -

“I thought you’d be the one to do that.”

Steve blinked vacantly at him. He could feel Billy’s heartbeat inside his ass and the guy just smiled -

“King Steve. Never thought you were shy - mmph.”

Billy’s bravado melted against Steve’s mouth. He hummed as he felt Steve’s precum on his belly, soaking them both with what he did to him, did to Steve and all of his flawed moral systems.

Steve pushed Billy onto his back with his kiss, tongue desperately tasting and exploring his mouth as his fingers laced behind Billy’s neck.

Until Billy reached up and pulled Steve’s hands apart, just enough for the bases of his palms to sit on both pulse points.

Billy did it himself: made his cheeks go pink and his chest flush red. But Steve made his ass slap against Billy’s thighs. Made Billy’s jaw go slack and his orgasm slow. Made his eyes water and his chest heave when he could breathe again.

Maybe that was his chance. His chance to make things right.

But with an empty Sheriff’s office down the road, and still no one the wiser, Hawkins wasn’t living by any sort of right anymore. The only right that Steve knew, was Billy’s hands making him feel powerful and precious.

#harringrove #murder boyfriends #tw asphyxiation #ficlet #neonponders #cuepickle #hawt #murder boyfriends with a side of trophy boyfriend?

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himbo-buckley · 5 years ago

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Intimacy, Sex and Buddie (better known as I have a lot of feelings about this show, some of which are related to the before mentioned topics) - Part 2

G’day friends, family and lost travelers! Welcome back to another instance of: I read too much into things!

This is where we really dive into the Character analysis and it’s gonna be a fun ride!!! (well, maybe. For me at least because thanks to 3.16 I am living! That episode validated me so much and now I truly believe I am right)

This is part two of a three part Meta / Character Analysis, and while you probably don’t need to read part 1, I would recommend it, so here is the link:

part 1

Also:

I should preface this by saying this meta was supposed to be a lot shorter and only talk about how both Buck and Eddie use sex to distract their respective partners from whatever topic they actually wanted to talk about but since I decided to rewatch the show to make sure I don’t miss any such scenes, it has exploded a bit and taken on more topics.

I should also mention that I am a Buddie shipper and while I tried, you will find several references and arguments for the ship in this Meta, not all of which necessarily call for a romantic pairing but just: These two are deeply connected and you cannot look at one without discussing the other and they are each other’s strongest emotional connection.

I should also preface this by saying that the whole of the 118 has some obvious intimacy / commitment issues except Bobby (which is sort of surprising) but *John Mulaney* voice we don’t have time to unpack all of that!

On another note I cuss a little in this Meta because my parents let me listen to TicTacToe as a small child and after that it never stuck that cussing is wrong so, uhm, parental supervision is advised or something?

This Meta will so far have three parts (this is part two), one for each season and is organised by episode so you could technically follow along

So here goes nothing, Season 2: (Also called „Why is Ryan naked so much?“)

Episode 2.01:

I’m not gonna talk a lot about this episode, because I feel like it’s been analysed to death already. Important to know is that Buck hasn’t yet given up on Abby coming back (see the shower scene), he is very lonely and there is a lot of homo- erotic tension.

Basically this episode goes like this:

Buck *after meeting Eddie*: nooooo, Dad, I don’t want a brother! He’s better than me! Put him back where he came from!

Eddie *takes one look at Buck*: Ui, you guys lied, he’s an ass - I like it! This is way better! We’re gonna be friends!

And then Buddie decides to something stupid to prove themselves (to each other) and they end up saving the day and bonding.

Also Eddie saying: „You guys hungry?“ after the Ambulance blows up? Iconic! He is such a little shit.

Episode 2.02 / 2.03:

(I’m putting them together because two-parter)

This episodes truly proves how hard they’ve already bonded, despite Buck not even knowing Eddie has a kid yet, especially from Eddie’s point of view: I actually think he started seeing Buck as his partner first.

I love how he always takes charge, even in his first episode and expects Buck to go along with it - which Buck does (after some initial reluctance), because Buck is good at following orders and trusts Eddie. It might be an army thing, probably is an Eddie likes control thing. What is truly unique about Buddie, is the fact that Eddie defers to Buck’s judgement as needed, something he doesn’t do with anyone else, I think, unless the chain of command tells him to. Just look at how annoyed he is by Ali and her interfering.

That being said it really isn’t all to relevant for this meta, except to say: Interest- ing how fast they trusted each other and became a unit - I guess it’s true what they say: birds of a feather flock together.

Episode 2.04:

Here we get our first real insights into Eddie’s character (aside from that he is a little shit and likes to take charge) as well as some very nice shots of the man’s body, proving my theory that someone in charge really wants to get busy with Ryan Guzman. Which I am not exactly complaining about.

I do think however it’s a very noticable shift from the way they treat the other young, attractive guy in the cast. I talked about this a little in the first part of this Meta, how they went out of their way to hold Buck accountable and make him relatable, but refused to bank on his sex appeal, aside from a few scenes which mostly were about explaining why Abby reached out to him (and uh, we do not need to talk about how creepy that really was, do we?). Eddie though really gets sexualised from the get go. Or maybe that’s just me and I missed something? (Someone with more insight on such topics take the wheel? Because that really isn’t my area of expertice and I don’t wanna say anything false)

A main difference between Buck and Eddie at this point (or in general) is that Buck is always looking for connection. He craves emotional intimacy but it scares him because he cares too much and people keep leaving so he searches out physical intimacy - or he used to. Actually by Season 2 Buck is actively looking to connect emotionally with another person.

Eddie on the other hand isn’t even on the same level as Pilot!Buck, because he avoids both physical and emotional intimacy (except with Buck because, you know, steam engine). The episode implies that it might be caused by Shannon leaving, but the rest of Season 2 and specifically Season 3 show us that it’s an Eddie thing (likely caused by his upbringing if you fast forward to 3.15). And it really makes me want to know how Shannon and Eddie met and how long they had been dating before she got pregnant. Probably not that long tbh.

One thing to notice about the episode is that it parallels Eddie both with Buck (neither wants to date one of those girls, both deflect about their reasons) and with Abby - watch 1.03 and 2.04 back to back, both are about a character taking care of a special needs family member, both have another family member consider them stuck when they themselves do not and both feature Buck trying to help (passively by talking to Abby on the phone vs. actively by having Eddie and Carla meet)

Also as I pointed out in another post the conversation about dating is kind of similar to the car conversation, and I really am clowning now - which is why I will not try and parallel the conversation between Maddie and Buck with the one between Bobby and Buck in 1.09!

I still don’t fully understand the need for that scene (you know which one) aside from being another instance where the boys get sexualised and giving us our first insight into Eddie romantically and also the first time he uses Christopher as a shield (also not the last).

The general take away from the episode is that Eddie is bad at asking for help and Buck is bad at asking for permission which means they fit really well - because Eddie doesn’t have to voice his needs and Buck doesn’t have to feel bad about steamrolling him.

In terms of the overall theme of this meta your main takeaway from this episode should be:

Buck - no longer substituting physical intimacy for emotional intimacy but also not seeking out emotional intimacy, both because he has a connection through Maddie and is building one with Eddie but also because he still considers himself spoken for, though the episode ends with him realicing he might not be (and then he keeps realising, because he is one stubborn mf).

Eddie - avoiding both physical and emotional intimacy and using Christopher to deflect, mainly because he doesn’t have the time for either (but still getting a connection through Buck, thanks to someone just punching right through his boundaries)

Episode 2.05:

no relevance, our boys are barely in it

Episode 2.06:

Well, if you want to write about Buddie crumbs than yeah, definitely important. Also, you can draw a definite parallel between Abby and Taylor, because Buck knew both their voices before he saw their faces and built an emotional connection to those voices. This fits because, well, Buck is afraid of emotional intimacy, but when it’s just a voice it’s easier for him to let himself be vulnerable cause it’s not an actual person.

Plus, considering the thing with Taylor is one sided prior to their meeting, he isn’t actually cheating on Abby. Or so Buck thinks. (Also Taylor doesn’t have a chance to hurt Buck and leave him because you know, she is not aware he exists?)

Also Eddie talks about becoming a firefighter because he missed the camaraderie of the army - aka the emotional connection he had with his squadron (is that the right term?). So technically he did actively try and seek it out - to a point at least. Because, as I will discuss in Part 3, Eddie may consider the 118 his family but his relationship with the other three firefighters in not on the same level than the one he has with Buck.

Episode 2.07:

Let’s all give a warm welcome to Shannon Diaz! I like Shannon, I think she is great (I also think she and Eddie are similar because they both run away from problems which is why they would never work out - unlike another possible relationship mentioned sporadically in this Meta, hint hint ;) ... okay, moving on)

We learn that „not in the picture“ means Eddie is still married, which begs the question how much Eddie has told Carla and the 118 about Shannon up to this point (as little as possible), what they assume about her (probably the worst) and if Eddie ever sets the record straight (I’m assuming yes, because while Eddie doesn’t share - Eddie is also protective of his family and Shannon is his family for better or worse - I really wish they didn’t kill her off and instead played out the divorce storyline because there was so much chance for growth! Although that was probably too similar to Athena and Michael, which is why they didn’t do it. So they fridged her. Damn, and I am still salty about it.)

I really love when she comes to the house, because we learn so much about them as a couple. Like how her eyes grow warm when he opens the door but Eddie’s don’t but then he goes in to hug her (and you can really tell that Ryan Guzman is an athlete in the way that he always acts with his whole body and conveys so much through movement). And the fact that Shannon immediately pushes to meet Christopher (probably because with Eddie you need to push, because he is very stubborn and also in need of control), and her saying she never thought Eddie would be into something so fancy? Yet another insight into Eddie’s character and into his upbringing, which while probably not poor seems to have been fairly modest.

Also love how they fight almost right from the get go, implying that it is their normal (as proven in 3.15). They really never stood a chance!

There is a lot of backstory we get through their fighting, both at the house and at the school, most notably that even in marriage Eddie was never able to fully open up to Shannon - aka be emotionally intimate with her. Which made her feel very alone.

And I don’t wanna defend Shannon and her actions because other people have said it before and this is not what this Meta is about but I can see her point of view. With Eddie and the way he just always needs to be in control and make the decisions she probably thought she had to do something drastic to get him to notice her and her struggles.

Interestingly enough Eddie is emotionally vulnerable with Shannon at the end when he tells her that he understands why she left and that he misses her, but then he immediately kisses her and look, we don’t know what happens next but we can guess from the latter episodes.

And look, tbh with Eddie it’s a little bit harder to draw the line between physical and emotional intimacy than with Buck because Eddie’s love language is touch and actions, so technically in a way he is always emotionally intimate when he is physically intimate (probably why he didn’t wanna go out with any of the girls in 2.04 - Eddie, different to Buck, can not just separate feelings from sex, while Buck has a hard time reconciling the two)

On Buck’s side of this Meta he finally comes to terms with Abby leaving, which doesn’t have too much relevance for this meta except there are a lot of parallels between Buddie in terms of: how long is too long to wait - because while Eddie pretends to have given up on Shannon, he actually hasn’t, whereas Buck outwardly is still waiting for Abby but on the inside has given up hope - something they both come to terms with in this episode

Episode 2.08:

Fun fact: The german title of this Episode is Lovestorys. Can you guess if there is anything of relevance in it?

Okay, first off for the millionth time, in case you haven’t read part 1 or you aren’t convinced yet or maybe you just forgot: Evan „Buck“ Buckley was never a sex addict. Kay? Good.

Also, remember when I said the show doesn’t sexualise Oliver the way it does Ryan? Yeah, this episode exactly. Buck has sex twice and we see less of his body than of Eddie just getting out of bed. Is it a contract thing? Was Ryan always running around naked on set? Did Oliver refuse to take his shirt off? Is he always cold because he’s vegan? Should I figure out Twitter just to ask the cast these questions?

(Also, remember when I said with Buck it’s mostly Girl on top, yay, it stays true)

In terms of actual relevant story, there’s that woman on the freeway (highway? Idk guys, I’m not from the US) reinforcing that Buck has finally accepted that Abby and him are over and then there’s the Taylor Kenny - story, which is sort of just beating the bush of sexual vs emotional intimacy with Buck trying for the latter and only finding the former (remember the Brunette from the Pilot? Yeah, that’s why I’m reminding you).

What I like is the fact that, after spending so much time calling out Buck 1.0 (and they should, because stealing a fire truck? Twice? Babe, for realsies?), this episode went: look, maybe girls like meaningless sex, too? Although, technically they have been telling us from the the beginning, that those girl were using Buck in the same way he was using them (again with the Brunette) - Buck just never understood that until Taylor.

We also get the soulmate scene with the very sweet couple, once again, rein- forcing how lonely Buck is and how much he is craving love and a connection and stability. That really is what his character boils down to at the end of the day: a lost kid trying to find his place in the world. And now I’m sad.

As for the Ali storyline, oh man, I’d really rather ignore it? Not because I have anything against the character per sey it’s just - we get to see their first meeting and then 5 episodes later their first date and by the end of the season they are in love love except by Season 3 she is gone? And in between she is hardly ever mentioned? So I really don’t know how to comment on their relationship in terms of this meta and what it means for Buck except: I think it was one of those right times right moment kind of things and Buck is sort of transfering a lot of his wishes and needs and feelings onto her, but their relationship has a weak foundation, which is why it ended so fast (except we don’t know how fast it ended because there is a 5 month gap between Season 2 and 3 and the breakup gets mentioned one (1) time. Soooooo...)

And Eddie, well, he was in the episode.

Episode 2.09:

I like this episode a lot and it tells us so much about Hen’s issues, but in terms of this meta: no relevance!

Sidenote: I do always forget they did Hen before they did Chim. Then again this episode in general feels very disconnected because there was no prompting, no connection to the present.

Episode 2.10:

Ah, yes, that one! The gift that keeps on giving in terms of Eddie and this meta (and also Buddie, but I’m trying not to be ship-y around here)

(One tiny sidenote though, I do think we see Eddie roll of off Shannon, and, while I don’t want to reinforce some stereotype about Top and Bottom, because I am not a gay man and therefore not qualified to comment, with Buck it’s generally girl on top? So Buck usually lets his partner set the pace while Eddie prefers to be the one in control? Okay, you know what, let’s just say it fits with their characters and maybe they match and leave it at that?)

(also, again with the Ryan shirtless, I mean, not that I am complaining, it’s just ... yeah, please, someone who knows this stuff come talk to me about it and explain because I don’t know and maybe I am seeing things?)

(sidenote #3 with actual relevance: They did not mention Buck’s girlfriend even once. They never do until the final.)

First of, this episode proofs what I said before: With Eddie there is no separating Sex and feelings. It is interconnected („We are working things out.“).

Also there is a point to be made about Eddie and control. So far we have always seen Eddie be the one in control and make decisions and this is our first real indicator that it actually bothers him, that maybe he wants someone else to tell him what’s right or wrong, too.

I’m gonna fast forward a bit, because we are nearly at the end of Season 3 irl and so far we have seen Eddie ask for help several times but only with two people - Buck and Lena - he actually takes the advice. I don’t want to say too much because it really fits better in Season 3, but wether you ship them or not, it is noticeable that out of everyone Buck is the one Eddie let’s help the most. The one he trusts the most.

(Man, they are both just two lost boys looking for their home, aren’t they? (and now I am sad again.))

There is also the topic of trust brought up, which you know, we hear about a few times from Eddie, and it really is such a big thing for him, isn’t it?

To fast forward again, that is one big difference between Eddie and Buck. Both struggle with self worth and trust but while Buck’s biggest problem is that he doesn’t trust people to like him, if they actually get to know him (or if they even want to get to know him), Eddie just plain old does not trust people? Because Eddie is a pessimist, so he doesn’t even try to connect, while Buckeroo trusts way too much and too easily and he is such an optimist and gives away everything and then he still isn’t enough - and then and only then does he give up hope (which is something we see happen in canon maybe twice? With Abby, maybe with Ali, and with Christopher, but again, Season 3 you guys!)

These two really are the different sides of the same coin, huh?

In relevance to this Meta, Eddie is trying very much this whole episode to be open and vulnerable and he struggles so much because he is very scared. The main issue with Eddie is always (and specifically with Shannon) by making himself vulnerable, he opens Christopher up to getting hurt as well (and vice versa because he can’t let Shannon into his son’s life without letting her into his own life) and this is what we see him struggle with in this episode and also what intensifies his already existing issues with intimacy throughout the show in general, his need to protect his son.

It should be noted that in the end Eddie puts Christopher’s wishes above his own well-being which is in fact what he will always do because Christopher is the most important person in his life.

As for Buck in this episode, well, after having so much development in his last episode, he really was there more as a sounding board for other characters. However I will mention that, after the show points out the whole thing is none of his business twice, Eddie then turns around and makes the Shannon thing Buck’s business, because well, connected and all that. Trusting and giving up control. Emotional intimacy. Just repeating myself now.

Episode 2.11: No relevance.

Episode 2.12: No relevance.

Episode 2.13: No real relevance.

There is the scene in the hospital between Buck and Eddie that reinforces the peas in a pot thing they got going on and a reverse from the Christmas Episode when Eddie asked Buck about what he should do. Here Eddie acts as the sounding board (even though Buck has already done the thing but then so has Eddie by hiding Shannon).

This is also yet another instance of Buck trying to help another person with no regard for his own safety but I’m with Eddie here: I have sisters as well. I too would do countless stupid things to save them with no regard to my own safety and I’m a girl - I was not raised on the believe that is was my job to protect them from harm like both Buck and Eddie probably were (because gender rolls).

Also Buck thinks it’s his fault that Doug even found Maddie and Eddie explains to him why its bull. To reinforce the whole connection thing, it is very noticeable that these two always give each other exactly what the other needs - with Eddie from the get go always working on building up Buck’s self worth and Buck always lending a hand to Eddie and taking control when needed (remember Carla? That was Buck taking control for Eddie because Eddie didn’t know what to do).

There is also the short scene when Shannon comes to the hospital and it prob- ably did a lot to help rebuild Eddies trust in his wife.

Episode 2.14:

STOP MAKING EVAN BUCKLEY WORRY ABOUT HIS FAMILY 2k21 (because it’s too late for anything before that)

It’s also our first real: Eddie can be a dumbass, too sighting and there is that one scene (you know which one) which in text is not shippy at all, but ended up in every gifset because Oliver is looking at Ryan like he wants to eat him alive.

Aside from that, this episode really isn’t about them and that’s okay.

Episode 2.15: Crime is hard. That is all.

Episode 2.16: No relevance.

Episode 2.17:

First of all, Eddie is not shirtless? At the beach? Damn, what’s wrong, 911? Is it because Gavin was there? Have you used up all your contracted shirtless scenes by now? Did Ryan find out he was the only one running around set half naked?

Also poor Eddie, you know, you’d think getting married your done having those: what are we - conversations and then bam: there it is again. He really can’t catch a break, can he?

Also I know it’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: Eddie Diaz is not in love with Shannon. Maybe he has never been or maybe he just stopped at some point, but right then and there he isn’t in love with her. He does however love her deeply (she is after all the mother of his son) and she is his family which is sort of where the problem in their relationship lies. Because Eddie, who has problems with trust and intimacy, frankly doesn’t care enough about Shannon (and also doesn’t trust her enough) to try and be open and vulnerable with her, which is what he needs to be in order for them to work, a fact that Shannon seems to be aware of and have accepted.

(Because if you have to wait for a sign on what to do in your relationship, yeah, you already know - you’re just not accepting it.)

And this episode is so heartbreaking and I just had to stop myself from ugly crying because Shannon loves Christopher so very much. And I just hate that they killed her off, so in my mind I have already half plotted a fix it fic in which she survives because that was just unnecessary angst.

Though that’s the topic of another post.

In terms of the relationship-story I am similarly floored as I am by the „Help!“ scene because (at least for me) this is the first time I have seen media really address that yes, you can be a good parent and still not be ready for a serious relationship because those two things are very different. Sure, you sometimes see examples of it through subtext but never before has it been so outright stated.

And I like that both Shannon and Eddie ask themselves that question, but come to a different conclusion - or actually they don’t. Like I said above, for Eddie this relationship fits because it’s easy and he doesn’t have to change or better adapt. He can just keep avoiding the hard stuff (being vulnerable) and still have the good stuff (sex). And then Shannon might be pregnant again and look at his speech at the restaurant: He is basically saying our child is awesome, so we should get back together because if we make such awesome children than we can’t be that bad together. And that is so very wrong, which Shannon understands.

The problem is, that Eddie doesn’t fully understand why their marriage hasn’t worked in the first place. If you tie it into 3.15 Eddie Begins, I think for Eddie, the reason why Shannon left him was a little to get back at him for leaving her and a lot about feeling left alone and being unable to cope with raising their child alone, but all of that is gonna be different now because he will be there for her physically and emotionally as he is no longer in the army! So the issue is solved. They should be a family again. Even without a new kid. After all: they love each other.

And look, those are all fair reasons and true but the thing Eddie doesn’t understand about relationships in general and his marriage to Shannon in particular is that she also needs him to be emotionally vulnerable with her. Shannon needs Eddie to let her be there for him, just like he is trying to be there for her. Because relationships are always a two way street.

SO obviously this is where the episode ended. There were no more scenes af- ter that. Nope. Bit weird how it was so short but you do you, 911, you do you!

And well, Buck was there too.

Episode 2.18:

I’m just gonna come out and say it: Ramon and Helena are bad parents. Flying to your daughter-in-law’s funeral only to bad mouth her and then try to take your son’s son away again? Yeah, I do not like your style. I wonder how much of Eddie Begins was already planned at this point or if they built that plot about his family for 3.15 based on this episode. Huh. We might never know. (except Twitter)

Also me thinks Eddie choose LA because of Pepa and Abuela, not because of Shannon. She was probably just a bonus.

As for Buck (and Ali): the actors seem to have had fun doing those scenes? I guess? Other than that it’s a little cringy and very out of nowhere and probably more caused by the show having money left over and deciding to built a new set. ANd damn what a set. I wonder how Buck is supposed to be able to afford that because that apartment has probably about 50-75m2 considering there is a kitchen and a living room as well as a room behind the living room and probably an extra room in the upper floor as well (someone do a floorplan and also tell me why Buck needs so much space and wether they think I could move in with him. My apartment is not this nice and LA isn’t that long a commute).

Point being I don’t know why they brought Ali back in the first place, especially in this episode. She was never mentioned after their first date, so why? Just to give people something to discuss during hiatus?

There was no point to have those two incredibly lovey dovey scenes only to have that scenes about what he wants to do next because all those scenes? Would have worked just fine with, you know, his sister (except a little different because incest). Who actually has the what if you can’t go back to being a firefighter - scene with him. So why have a girlfriend you barely introduced and never used before? I’m not mad, 911, just confused! (Fuck me, I really am getting twitter)

As for the topic of this meta, there really isn’t much too tell. Ali honestly doesn’t figure into things except to create more abandonment issues.

I should point out that this episode reinforced the whole Buddie connection thing - from Eddie holding Buck’s hand the whole while he’s pinned to saying „Almost (back to normal)“ to Buck going to Eddie’s ceremony despite probably still being on somewhat of a bed rest.

Other than that, that’s it for Season 2. Whew!

Before I let ya’ll off the hook, though (look, you’ve read it this far, you can now just bear it a bit longer) I wanna comment real quick:

Compared to Season 1 Buck barely had any character development (mainly because he had so much in Season 1 and sometimes stuff like that needs to settle - real life would be the same way)

Eddie however has nearly no development at all and in fact as of Season 3, not a lot has changed in that regard. His issues just became more obvious. Which is something I actually like a lot, because one: he went through a lot of shit in a fairly short amount of time and two: he is such a stubborn and reserved character, anything else wouldn’t be in character and ultimately feel rushed. Plus, because this is his personality it’s feels like we’re actually getting to know him like you would a person in real life? Piece by piece, no unnecessary exposition. Or maybe that’s just me, I don’t really know anything about storytelling.

I also want to comment on Buddie real quick because it would be dishonest if I didn’t and also it’s just glaring me in the face:

The thing is, while I do not necessarily believe they have any intention of making them romantic (because I have been burned too often and just recently by a show that liked to praise itself for its diversity (so a heartfelt fuck you to Sera Gamble and who ever decided to kill off Quentin Coldwater, because that character mattered so much and you destroyed it)), I do think we are right when we talk about connection and parallels and being each others person and just generally being each others closest relationship. Because they parallel their stories so much and they connect them so often and they did do it from the get go like as early as Episode 4 - which was already written and probably already shot by the time Episode 1 aired. So there. I said it. Buddie is real, wether it’s platonic or romantic, it is real. And that also matters!

(although of course if they went with romantic? That would matter a bit more! Tim Minear, listen to me, you could make TV history! This would be bigger than Supergirl making the sister gay in the second season! Ya’ll would be legends, revered by fans for years to come! Also I’d bake you a cake?)

And there you have it! Season 2! We made it! And only like 2000 words more than Season 1.

Can you believe at this point I have written nearly 10.000 words on these two exceptional characters and their issues? And it’s technically only one issue, like I’m ignoring so much stuff just glaring at me right now!

(also on a side note, this is where I tag @angelcamael , who asked me to do so and @greyhello because she inspired me to write this meta in the first place and while it is now ... no longer about that original topic, I’m still gonna tag her)

#buck meta #eddie met #911 meta #evan buckley #eddie diaz #buck #buddie #911 #911 fox #mine #textpost #season 2 #buddie meta #meta #my meta

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mannatea · 5 years ago

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Pokémon Shield: A Review

DISCLAIMER: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS HERE!

First, my credentials/gaming history, so you can see if my opinion is valuable to you or not. I would like to make it clear from the start that I do not consider myself a ‘gamer’ by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a filthy casual at best.

I’ve been playing video games since I was maybe eight or nine years old. I’ve always enjoyed dabbling in a variety of genres, and have a great appreciation for the work that goes into creating each and every game, no matter the intended audience. Some of my all-time favorite titles include Tales of Symphonia, Fire Emblem (7), Final Fantasy IX, Legend of Dragoon, Chrono Cross, Tetris, Bust-a-Move, Project Gotham Racing, Ecco the Dolphin (PC,DC), Roller Coaster Tycoon, Harvest Moon (N64/PS1), World of Warcraft, and of course our beloved Pokemon!

I started with Pokemon Red, and enjoyed it immensely, but Silver stole my heart and my imagination. My brother and I used to sit at the kitchen table with guide books open and notebooks at the ready to craft and create new, extremely cool teams. I sank an unbelievable amount of hours into that game, and into Pokemon Stadium (1 & 2), Hey You! Pikachu, Pokemon Puzzle League, and even Pokemon Pinball. Unfortunately after Silver, my interest waned. I was an adult by the time Emerald debuted, and while I was initially charmed by it, found my interest waning quickly. I bought and played Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, SoulSilver, and Black & White, but didn’t beat any of them. I felt like the magic had…disappeared somehow.

But when X and Y released in 2013, I binged on Pokemon X, beat it, and for the first time since childhood started breeding a competitive team just for the heck of it. I also found myself really enjoying Pokemon Sun a couple of years later (though the post-game of breeding didn’t really do it for me this time).

They lost me with Ultra Sun/Moon. I wanted to like them, really, but it was too much of a rehash, and too much handholding (like the originals were, and I could only stand going through that once).

Now here we are with Pokemon Sword and Shield. They released just a few days ago (15 November, 2019) and the controversy has been wild. It seems to me that everyone has some kind of very strong opinion, and a lot of people are very angry.

Pokemon has always been one of my favorite franchises, but my history with the games is far from spotless so I like to think I can manage a mostly unbiased review, though of course everything in this post is my personal opinion.

Here’s what I’ve done in the game:

40 hours played.

200 pokemon in the pokedex.

Main story and post-game story completed.

I played with no specific self-imposed rules and was not spoiled for hardly anything before I started playing.

The Game’s Introductory Sequence [8/10]

As is standard for the franchise these days, the game flings you into the world with little fanfare regarding customization. Rather than the intro being a dialogue of sorts between your character and a professor, you are now instructed to choose what you look like (from a sparse few options) after typing in your name.

The first ‘cinematic’ is pretty boring, but I think the attempt at immersion is genuine enough (the idea being that your character is watching Leon’s broadcasted fight on your new smart phone). My character has a better house in-game than I do in real life. I’d kill for all that storage in the kitchen!

My biggest gripe with the introduction is that it reminded me too much of Sun & Moon’s introduction—in the worst of ways. I wouldn’t say it’s slow-paced, but the constant interruption by other characters is about enough to make a person rage-quit. Luckily I’ve been blessed with a lot of patience; it makes tedious content easy to bear (so long as it’s not difficult), but even I was feeling antsy before the first hour of the game was up, just because Hop and Leon never shut up and I was chomping at the bit to Explore.

Considering this is the first thing a player experiences…I really feel it could have been improved, especially the dialogue, but there were a few really positive things about it, too. The outdoor BBQ was a nice touch (considering everyone knew we’d be going off on Adventures in the morning and all), the game does let you avoid having to learn how to catch a pokemon (your mom slips a few pokeballs into your bag at one point without telling you and if you use them to catch pokemon, Leon will not teach you how to do it later), and I feel like as far as introductions go, this one was fairly short when compared to Sun and Moon’s introductory period.

While I’m being positive, the game plops you down into an idyllic little English countryside and not only do you get to enjoy that aesthetic, but the Slumbering Weald is probably one of the prettiest/most charming places in the game, and you get a peek at it early on!

The Starter Pokemon [5/10]

I’ve experienced worse? I wasn’t spoiled for any of the starter pokemon’s evolutions starting out, and while I didn’t exactly hate any of them, I sure didn’t love ‘em, either. I named my Scorbunny “Chad” on the assumption that he was likely to turn into a chad, though I’m not sure that accurately describes the pokemon I ended up with. Clearly modeled after soccer players, my Chad is a cocky all-star jock. They went all out on his Pyroball animation but Double Kick can see itself out of my house. No love in this club.

I just really wish I found any of these starters or their evolved forms to be charming, but they’re not. Rillaboom is basically George of the Jungle but 3% less of a himbo, and Inteleon is Greninja’s younger brother in accounting.

Gyms, Gym Challenges, & Game Balance [6/10]

This is probably one of, if not the, most debated topic over at Reddit. Is the game balanced? Are the gyms too easy? Are they making this game for 5-year-olds suddenly?

Eh. I do think the game is, perhaps, Too Easy, but a game being easy isn’t a shortcoming in and of itself. Check out my section on the story and characters for more on this topic, but I’ll post the short of it here, because it’s relevant: if the gameplay is going to be easy, we either need an option to make it more difficult, or the characters, story, and world have to carry the game in such a way that the easy gameplay still feels fun.

Shield had, uh, none of that going for it, unfortunately. The plot is lackluster (more about this later), and the gameplay wasn’t able to pick up the slack. In other words, the gameplay didn’t make the game feel Substantial in any way.

Which is kind of bad, considering Dynamaxing is a new feature!

The biggest issue for most people was the Experience Share. It’s turned on by default and there seems to be no way to turn it off. You get insane amounts of XP for defeating and catching pokemon, and your whole team seems to level pretty evenly even if you only occasionally use some pokemon in the party.

I personally played the game with the default battle option (where it asks if you want to switch out to a new pokemon when the enemy is going to send out a new one) because I barely remember half the pokemon in the game’s typing. Knowing the name of what’s coming next doesn’t always help me. (How’s that for an embarrassing truth?)

I personally liked the experience share, though I feel having the ability to toggle it on/off (or even on for certain pokemon and off for others) would have been ideal. The idea with having it on all the time is that your team will level fairly evenly so you’ll be able to switch in any of your six pokemon to battle without having to struggle through leveling some of the weaker ‘mons up individually. Additionally, it enables you to easily replace a pokemon on your team mid-game if you so desire. And I did (I replaced my shiny Orbeetle with regular cotton candy Rapidash).

My team at end-game was as follows:

Cinderace (Chad)

Greedent (Moriah)

Thievul (Penelope)

Liepard (My)

Corviknight (Octavia)

Rapidash (Calliope)

As you can see, I have no grass pokemon, no water pokemon, and no electric pokemon. I have two dark types. My move coverage mostly sucked throughout the game, because Thievul had 3 dark moves, and My had 3 normal moves. I’m an official idiot, thanks for coming to my TED talk. Usually I can struggle through no matter how garbage-tier my team is, and this game was…no exception.

I steamrolled the first few gyms and their challenges even though I wasn’t vastly overleveled for any of the content. After the ghost gym (which was easy for me with my dark types) I’d say the difficulty level went up slightly, mostly because my brain has refused to hold type advantages/weaknesses that came after Gen1. I feel like most original type weaknesses made some kind of sense to me and I was never able to incorporate dark and steel into that mix, let alone fairy.

At any rate, once you fight a pokemon once, the game will tell you if your moves are super effective against them or not. I remember people complaining about this feature when it was added (in Sun/Moon I think), but I like it. It doesn’t actually help a lot if you don’t know what the moves do/aren’t looking at move power/effects, but it’s useful for my sieve of a brain in a pinch.

Hop as a rival was almost never challenging. He always starts with the same pokemon, and his team is fairly easy to sweep. That might be kind of the point, but I wish you could have encouraged him to take the starter that’s strong against yours for a bit more of a challenge. Yeah, it’s not much, but it would have been something. Marnie is a better rival than Hop in the sense that she’s actually a better battler, but I swept her team pretty easily too, every single time we fought.

The only real challenges in the game were fighting Raihan (I only had one very weak fairy move and no ice to counter his dragons) and Leon (he definitely outleveled me). On Leon I had to use revives and potions!

The gym challenges started off as pretty cute (herding Wooloo, pipe puzzle maze) but quickly grew into lazy boring doldrums (basically gauntlet fighting of one kind or another). I guess I’d say ‘nice try’ for these and say I don’t really care if I see them again or not unless they’re going to actually give it a real go.

Overall, the story part of the game felt balanced enough for me personally but if I’m being completely unbiased: it was too easy to get levels. I could have wandered around less/caught fewer pokemon as I journeyed and enjoyed more of a challenge, but I just…gotta catch ‘em all, y’know? Most people do! GameFreak should have known this and designed accordingly.

The big issue with game balance feels like it comes…after the game, and I don’t mean the post-game so much as the Max Raid Battles that require other people, but the NPC trainers you can battle with are legit trash at what they do, which kind of forces you to find other trainers, but…

Online Compatibility & Features [3/10]

So I think the rating speaks for itself, here. The interface is confusing, the stamps are annoying, and the ability to see other players but not interact with them in any meaningful way is rage-inducing (and not just because of the FPS drops).

X/Y had a better online system!

Sun and Moon was better!

I don’t know why we regressed. I’m glad they kept the “wonder trade” (renamed to random trade, I think), because I always did enjoy doing that, but the GTS was the best idea they ever had and they abandoned it for random trading? I don’t want to trade with randoms? If I wanted to do that, I’d just do a random trade in the first place!!! The inability to put what you’re looking for into the stamp that people see? Oversight. Or just bad design. Probably both!

I’ve never hated a pokemon online experience more than this. I’m just astounded by how bad it is. I tried to join max raid battles last night and kept being told the event was over, but the stamps just…didn’t refresh? For HOW LONG? I can’t even tell you because I don’t know, and I couldn’t find a way to manually force them to refresh. It’s like they update every 15 minutes instead of every 15-30 seconds (which they should if I’m browsing for trades to make or battles to join). There are ways around this (according to Reddit) but the interface should be intuitive and easy to use by default.

C’mon, guys, you can do better. This is legitimately embarrassing in the year 2019.

Music [5/10]

There are some really magical tracks in this game, and there are some really terrible tracks. It doesn’t feel at all cohesive or thematic. I absolutely hated the gym battle remix; it was worse than the regular gym battle music. I feel like the gym battle theme would have really caught on if they didn’t have any other synth sounding tracks in the game, but they kind of do, so it blends in instead of sticking out as a bop.

Notable nice tracks were Hulbury, Glimwood Tangle, Slumbering Weald, and the desert route (which I can’t remember offhand). Some of the better music reminded me of the soundtrack for Tales of Symphonia, which is high praise coming from me. Unfortunately for every good track there were probably 3 forgettable ones.

There wasn’t anything particularly engaging when it comes to the music here, but it’s at least passable.

Graphics, Design, and Animation [6/10]

I should clarify that this is 6/10 for a pokemon game, not in general. I don’t expect flashy realism in a pokemon game and neither should you. The graphics are adequate most of the time, but the animation leaves a lot to desire when you look away from the pokemon that feel like they were Chosen Ones (and received a lot more attention).

Rapidash, for example, is using the same base model and animations it’s been using since it’s been in 3D. I’m not going to claim since Stadium, but holy cow the animations are for sure the same as they’ve been since at least X/Y for all the older moves. I’m not impressed.

The characters all have dopey expressions on their faces always. The models just use one talking animation loop and it almost never changes. The main character still looks on like a smiley face emoji when turmoil occurs, and though this isn’t as bad as it was in Sun/Moon, it’s still…kind of jarring?

The Wild Area looks kind of bad sometimes, and some areas in the actual game were lackluster compared to what they should have been. Ballonlea is the town you step into after walking through the (honestly) magical Glimwood Tangle, and it’s this charming fairy wonderland…with two houses and a stadium the size of two billion football fields. Uh. Okay? You’re telling me they destroyed how much natural habitat to make this gym? It just doesn’t jive with the scenery/theme out there, especially considering Opal’s theatre is tiny. And it’s not just that I think the game is lacking thematically (though it clearly is), but there’s this…laziness to the design when it comes to places like Ballonlea. It could have been SUCH an enchanting town to explore, but it was two houses with nothing important in them and a sports arena that feels completely at odds with its surroundings. (In this town you do learn that an NPC you spoke to earlier was a ghost, but it’s not as if this is very important information/goes anywhere, really.)

Spikemuth, for all its flaws, was at least memorable. I can’t say the same for most of the towns in this game. I really enjoyed the music in Hulbury but you best bet I had to look it up to remember the name of the town! Time is partly to blame. We don’t spend a lot of time in each town, and we have no real reason to go back to them aside from visiting the nearest Pokemon Center to heal and rest up. But I would argue that, beyond that, the individual designs just…don’t feel memorable because they’re not memorable. The names are mostly meh (every time I see Ballonlea I think of Bologna for some reason), but without anything else to connect to the place as more than just a place…there’s no reason to remember any of it.

Like the music, these are all passable, graphics more than animation, animation more than design, but that’s all there is to it.

Camping and Cooking, Feathers and Fetch! [4/10]

I don’t actually have a lot to say about this. It’s a cute idea, and it’s fun maybe the first ten times that you do it, but then it’s just really boring. The game is terrible at explaining how to create different curry dishes, but it’s almost idiot-proof. I’ve yet to fail at it.

But I’m not sure I care about it, either?

You get like 1/100th of the amount of berries you need to cook while you journey along, so it feels disproportionate. I dunno. Just not a fan.

Playing with your pokemon is the only real joy that comes from camping, but its fun is limited. When you’ve tossed the ball a few times, or watched Liepard smack the feather toy a while, it has that, “Okay, I’ve seen it!” kind of feeling to it. That doing well at cooking can heal your party/cure status conditions is incentive to do it, but it’s faster to just fly to a pokemon center and run back on your bike most of the time than to pitch a tent with your ‘mons.

I feel like there should just be…more you can do when you’re camping together. I’m glad Pokemon Amie is dead (it was cringey), but it felt more personal than this.

I wish I had more to say about this feature, but it felt tacked on and lackluster after I camped a few times.

Dynamaxing, Gigantamaxing, and Max Raid Battles [4/10]

The urge to give this a zero was high, but I am making an effort to be balanced.

That said, I hate dynamaxing. Gigantamaxing is almost the same thing, it’s just Worse Somehow. Until yesterday I thought they were basically the same thing (and that some pokemon just got extra cool dynamax forms). As it turns out, they’re not the same thing at all! Or rather, they are, but they’re also not?

Dynamaxing makes your pokemon grow large and gives it these generic MAX moves that it can use in combat (Max Knuckle, Max Flare, Max Strike). It lasts for three turns and then your pokemon reverts back to its regular ‘ol self.

Gigantamaxing is when your pokemon grows a little larger than large, gets a special Look, and gets the same generic MAX moves (but with special effects added to them). Oh, and better stats.

At least, that’s how I understand it.

Both are great for Max Raid Battles, where you team up with NPCs or other players and take down huge dynamaxed pokemon that are out in the wild.

Neither is a fun feature as part of the actual gameplay. I guess as a gimmick it works all right, but just like Z-moves it has a long annoying animation sequence, and like Mega Evolutions only some pokemon get to gigantamax (everyone else is just a pleb, I guess). I dunno. I just didn’t find the concept very engaging…maybe because it seems evil and wasteful in-universe, and this is more or less stated in the game itself, but what-the-hell-ever, we’re just going to keep doing it ‘cause it looks cool!

It’s just too goofy a concept for me. Maybe if Dynamaxing doubled or tripled their size, I’d find it more understandable and more aesthetically pleasing? I hate seeing my pokemon, or the opposing pokemon, grow 50+ feet tall and scream at three billion decibels.

(For the record I never liked Mega Evolutions or Z-moves as a concept, so it’s not like I’m nostalgic for a different gimmick. That said, at least I’d accepted Megas as a thing, and Z-moves were overall not too groundbreaking or gamebreaking.)

The design of dyna/gigamaxing is to connect it with specific places so that you can’t just max your pokemon in every battle and sweep every team you fight against, but it still feels like it gets used too much. I’m currently at a point where I find having to dynamax feels like a chore.

Considering this is what the game tried to sell itself on in the initial trailer…? Yikes? I don’t know. I think some people are more ‘okay’ with the concept of dyna/gigantimaxing than others, and I think I’d be fine with it if we only had dynamaxing. Introducing both just feels like overcomplicating things for no real reason, and maybe also poking a little hard at the hornets’ nest that is the competitive community.

Because now you have to go out and grind gigantamax pokemon to catch one, so it forces you to do the thing you might not like to get a pokemon that can do the thing you don’t like, because it’s objectively better in combat? But really, who knows? Maybe these overpowered phenomena will end up banned, anyway.

Despite my disdain for this release’s gimmick, I do think Max Raid Battles are pretty fun, at least…when I’m not getting my ass completely kicked while some NPC trainer’s Eevee is using Helping Hand… It’s actually pretty enjoyable when you can somehow find other people using the y-comm and take on a gigantamaxed pokemon with the help of actual human players. But y’know…good luck using that…lol.

Overall I think the biggest downfall of Dynamaxing/Gigantamaxing is that it doesn’t really add anything of substance to the game. I don’t think it makes it more fun. It’s also not necessary for max raid battles (this could be a phenomena we don’t understand yet that randomly seems to affect wild pokemon, just like with the UBs—hell, Anabel and Looker could return and claim this is all related to that stuff and I’d probably find that believable enough). So what does it add? Flavor? Culture? Nah. It’s just kind of there.

Post-Game: Is That All? [3/10]

Post-game in Sun and Moon was the Alola version of the Battle Maison, breeding, and a somewhat lengthy (for a post-game) story where you assist Interpol agents Anabel and Looker in hunting down and capturing Ultra Beasts. The plot was somewhat woven into not only Sun and Moon’s storyline (Lusamine’s shenanigans), but also borrowed from the Sapphire/Ruby reboots and X/Y. If you didn’t already know Looker from Ruby/Sapphire/X/Y, or Anabel from Pokemon Emerald, you’ll still probably find them somewhat compelling/interesting as characters. Also, they did a really good job in Sun of making circumstances seem dire—of showing instead of telling you how dangerous the UBs were and how important it was to protect the people of the towns and villages you’d visited throughout your adventure.

Shield has… Max raid battles, a battle tower, and…breeding. Oh, and a storyline about the legendary dogs that barely makes any sense and is plagued by really irritating new characters.

The terrible truth is that the post-game of Sword/Shield is embarrassingly bad. You’d think they’d want to outdo themselves with every release. Sun and Moon hit it out of the park with their post-game content. Most people enjoyed the hunt for UBs, or at least the characters of Anabel and Looker. Sword and Shield have…. Sordward and Shielbert. DID I STUTTER?

They’re terribly designed characters, and so insulting as to not really be any fun at all. The Pokeball Guy mascot is Actually Fun; these dudes aren’t. They’re barely even villains? It was an excuse to try and pull what Sun and Moon pulled, but it didn’t work. I never felt like anyone was in danger at any point, probably because magically everyone was evacuated before I even arrived on the scene to stop Sordward and Shielbert’s vile schemes. :U Oh, and because I felt little or no connection to any of the towns I visited along the way, let alone the gym leaders. Maybe if these guys had showed up partway through the game and we sort of knew who they were already, this wouldn’t seem so out-of-nowhere, but it was, and that made it even worse than it had to be.

When it’s all over, you get your legendary dog (I named mine Goodest Boy), but it wasn’t a fun storyline at all. Who are these guys? Why should I care about them? I cared about Looker and Anabel because they came onto the scene and showed that they cared about each other as people (and showed it, multiple times). These guys? They wreaked havoc and didn’t even go to jail. At least Rose went to jail!

I don’t think the post-game is terrible so much as I think it’s underwhelming, especially considering what it came on the heels of. I don’t expect More More More from every game, but I do expect improvements to be made. A decent post-game storyline is all I was asking for, and I didn’t even get that.

But there’s the tower and you can breed pokemon and train EVs and all that stuff more easily now, so…

Characters, Story, and Worldbuilding [4/10]

Let me put this as delicately as I can: I’m not a fan.

I could easily rant about bad character writing, bad stories, and weak worldbuilding for hours, but I’ll limit myself because 1) this is a pokemon game, and 2) nobody really looks for exceptional characters here.

As I said earlier, I feel like Sun and Moon did it Better. Most of the main characters in Su/Mo were likable, interesting, had a fun design, or were amusing. Not so in Shield.

Hop has a terrible name (literally a million names to choose from and they picked this?), but the biggest crime he commits is that he doesn’t get a satisfying story arc at all. When he got down about himself I had hope there would be some cool development, but there wasn’t. He ended up getting his crap together and making a Team and Picked a Strategy (which still involves sending the sheep out first I guess). And then randomly in the post-game decided he was going to be a professor…lol.

I felt like 20 different people wrote that plot, because it was terribly cobbled together and didn’t flow at all. Natural progression would have been nice.

Marnie barely has a story and barely develops. Piers seems to kind of have more ‘meat’ to his character but not a lot is done with it.

The gym leaders are otherwise really meh. Okay, so Nessa and Sonia are pals. Gal pals. Pals that are gals. Gals that are pals. Great. I don’t think we ever see them talk so it doesn’t matter. Melony has a son…and it’s just a nod to the other game where her son is the gym leader instead? Boring.

Bede is an asshole with a sob story who doesn’t really get redeemed but gets the redemption option anyway. They could have REALLY done something amazing with this guy but chose not to. His backstory is actually pretty interesting! But they didn’t utilize it worth a damn. And also he was right about the mural soooo…

Sonia was maybe the best character in the game, and that’s just from a technical standpoint. She had development, she developed, she grew as a character. Emotionally, though, I felt detached from her. Maybe it was being called a child all the time that did that? I’m not sure. I get that the protag is a child but I’m living independently and doing well for myself so maybe have a little respect idk… Especially when the first 2/3 of the game you’re told the adults will handle things, and then randomly you’re interrupted every fifty seconds to take care of other people’s nonsense. :|

In fact, I felt emotionally disconnected from pretty much every character. I didn’t really like or feel for anyone. Hop came the closest (feeling guilty about losing a battle cause it might make his brother look bad), but the bad dialogue options and inability to actually cheer him up was frustrating more than anything.

There are zones that are breathtakingly lovely (Slumbering Weald! Ballonlea! Glimwood Tangle!) but all the rest are more or less forgettable. The characters are connected to the world…sorta, but there are times it feels like they force-connected them through dynamaxing and dialogue accents instead of trying to make characters who naturally fit into the world. Like I talked about before, Opal’s gym felt completely disconnected from the reality of her environment. She lives there for a reason. Doesn’t the stadium’s presence jar her? How many fairy pokemon lost their homes when that thing took away tens of acres of forest? What’s the story here? Or anywhere for that matter?

Spikemuth was a waste of space but at least it felt like an attempt to show us a poverty-stricken area… Unfortunately it all fell flat the second they used two models for Team Yell! Team Yell could have been really cool, especially if they’d had different models with their names (challenged by Team Yell Grunt Sierra/Troy/Nellie/whatever), and the same team yell outfit/clothes/paint on. Then we could see these are just regular guys and gals from this poor area who want to cheer on their hometown girl!!!

But that was a weakness throughout the game, because Team Yell were all gym trainers, and all shared models…just like all the other gyms. It felt lazy to me. The outfits can be the same, but way to go making all the models literal clones. That’s just laziness.

The villains are all meh. Rose? Of course he was a villain. The problem is that he’s not a villain for being a capitalist pig or anything. He’s a villain for wanting to fix a power issue that’s 1,000 years from happening. Meh motivation. If it was 50 years away then we have a compelling villain! But no, not 50. A thousand years from happening. And he can’t wait five fucking minutes.

Oleana was boring.

Leon was exactly the person he was the entire game…

The taxi service is a cute idea, and a nice gameplay addition, but it doesn’t really add anything to the world because they didn’t make the effort to integrate it.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough.

The short of it is this: I walked away from this game not really caring about the world or any of the characters. I don’t even have a favorite character. I can’t remember the last time that happened to me. YIKES.

The Wild Area [8/10]

I don’t want to cover this for too long, because I feel it’s been done to death, but the Wild Area is what the whole game should have been. Or at least, more of the game. I don’t expect we’ll ever get a fully open-world pokemon game EVER, but this foray into the true 3D tells me that it could be a lot of fun, actually, even in somewhat constrained environments. (Oh, and with a good map.)

I enjoy the idea of the Wild Area, but I think its usefulness is limited without the appeal of having more pokemon patched into the game later. Until I get sick of it, though, it’s a pretty neat concept, and it makes hunting for new pokemon to catch a little more fun than it usually is. I like that they kept the overworld pokemon in this area as well as on the routes you have to travel; it feels like more of an adventure to dodge a huge Steelix and scoot closer to see what that yellow thing is in the grass you can’t quite make out. :)

Basically: fun concept that is enjoyable for now but has limited enjoyment. As far as negativity goes, I don’t have much to complain about here that I didn’t complain about in the Online Compatibility section above.

The Pokemon Themselves [6/10]

I was challenged by @hijauindah to list my top five favorite new pokemon from the game, so here we go!

Nickit (cute design!)

Boltund (smooth, well designed—not too cluttered)

Ponyta/Rapidash (MY LITTLE PONY… I think Rapidash could look better, but I’m just glad they cared enough to try something new with them…)

Frosmoth (Super pretty pokemon design.)

Dragapult (Nifty design.)

Most of the new designs are just…okay. There are a lot I don’t actually care for. But I’m biased; I just want more creature-based pokemon that look like they could exist and function in the world they live in. Some of these designs they come up with look like they’d have died out ten thousand years ago due to being Poorly Evolved lol.

Final Thoughts [6/10]

The worst part of the game for me personally was probably feeling like I was getting interrupted constantly by other characters. JUST LET ME PLAY. But the best part was definitely exploring the new areas, catching a shiny 2 hours into the game, and getting to the end more or less with the team I started with.

The individual scores don’t add up to a 6/10 (they actually add up to a 5.16/10) but I think it’s worth noting that I did have a fun time playing through the game, I intend to hop into the breeding stuff, and even though I don’t have to keep max raid battling and stuff, I probably will.

It’s far from the 9s that it was getting by certain people from certain places that won’t be named here, but it’s not as if it’s a dumpster fire game. I don’t regret the money I spent on it, and I hope to keep enjoying the game for a few more months (albeit more casually than I did over the weekend), but I hope GameFreak has learned from its follies and puts its best foot forward with the next game, because I will not manage to be this forgiving again.

#pokemon sword and shield #pokemon #pokemon spoilers #pokemon review #long post #really long post #pokemon swsh #i didn't really edit this so sorry if there are any typos

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scifrey · 6 years ago

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The following first hand account was found amid the research papers of Rachel Belanger. The date on the entry marks it as Belanger and Munson's first official meeting, and matches CCTV footage transcripts of April 10th, 2032 taken in the Kingston Penitentiary, Domestic Terrorist Wing (Kingston, Ontario.)

[Image - grainy screencap of a brunette woman in her early 40s, dressed in jeans, a tee-shirt, and a zippered hoodie standing outside of a jail cell; inside a man, early 30s, in a bright orange prison jumpsuit is laying on his back on the lower mattress of an otherwise empty bunk bed.] Fig 1. Rachel Belanger as seen with Oliver Munson, a.k.a. The Futurist, a.k.a. The Professor, 10:47am April 10th 2032.

I want to put our first meeting in my own words. Tell my own story, before I work through this god-awful jumble of notes. I’m putting this at the top, a prologue of sorts, if a research paper can have a prologue. I just want it clear what I was thinking when I first spoke to him. I just want it on paper that the way this ended isn’t the way I thought it would when I started. I just need people to know that. Okay? This wasn’t supposed to be how this went. I didn’t mean for this to happen.

He was laying on his back on the bottom mattress, long fingers tapping out a metronome in the silence of his cell. One, two, three. Perfectly matching the tempo of the second hand on my wristwatch. I’d heard that he did this, and made a point of glancing at my watch as I walked down the corridor to see if it was true. They said it was an unconscious habit - counting everything, all the time, eyes skimming along floor tiles, and light fixtures,freckles. Alone in the perpetual twilight of his grey cell, he counted the seconds. Likely because there was nothing else to count.

“Yes?” he said when I’dd stopped right outside of his cell. At that moment, we were the only living things in that corridor. The guard had stayed on the other side of the door, leaving us the illusion of our privacy. I pointedly did not look up at the surveillance cameras.

Cut it out! I thought to my nerves. Fearing a man a trapped in a cage was a ridiculous waste of adrenaline. He couldn’t hurt me. He couldn’t even reach me, if I was smart and stayed far enough back from the bars. And I already had two degrees that said I was smart.

I was so stuck in my head, counting along with him, that I forgot he’d spoken. When he got impatient enough, he added: “And what is it that you’re wanting of me, Miss?”

His gaze was directed into the shadowed corner of his cell. He had already dismissed me with his body language without even bothering to look at me.

Insulting.

This was not how I wanted this to go.

I felt my hands tightened slightly over the tablet computer I was holding, and I took a deep, calming breath, forcing my fingers to unclench. I’d been prepared for this, too, I just had to remember that I had. The warden had mentioned that he had uncanny insight when she had been signing the permission forms, granting me clearance to speak with the man dangerous enough to have a whole corridor of the jail to himself.

“How could you tell I was female?” I challenged, if only to try to get him to turn his face to me. I didn’t like being ignored. Especially not by people like him. Alright, so I hadn’t said anything right away and I probably should have, but most people would at least afford me the courtesy of eye contact. “And how do you know I want something from you?”

“Your footfalls.”

“I’m not wearing heels,” I countered.

“But your stride - short legs, with that distinctive gait caused by a woman’s wider hips. Purposeful, so you’re comfortable in your position. Authority, or backed by some. Not heavy enough boots to be a guard, and no distinctive scent of gun oil. My lawyer used to wear only Manolo Blahnik, before she stopped visiting me, so you’re not her. Your shoes are cheap; they squeak slightly. If you were a politician on a tour, there’d be others with you, and your shoes would not squeak. Therefore, you are here for some personal reason. You want something of me, or else you wouldn’t be here at all, and it’s something likely to make you - or me - uncomfortable to discuss, or you wouldn’t be alone.” He sighed and shifted over onto one shoulder, dropping his hands to his side and turning his face to the wall. “I assure you, Miss; whatever it is, you cannot embarrass me any more than I already have been in my considerable lifetime. I am now quite without shame. So ask, and then do me the very great favour of going away.”

Jesus.

I felt like all the air had been drained from my lungs, like I had been the one who had just delivered that speech without a breath. I forced myself to inflate them, and resisted the urge to whistle, blinking under his steamroller pronouncements.

“Right. Wow. They told me you were a regular Sherlock.” It wasn’t flattery - more of an attempt to get him to open up more. Say something else. Look at me.

He didn’t look. He just snorted. “Ha. Except that I exist. The Great Detective was a character invented by an admittedly logical though inextraordinary man and is therefore as constrained by the imagination of his creator as I am by these bars. Doyle was a supremely analytical man, but he was no genius himself. The conundrums he fabricated and their equally fictional solutions are - heh - elementary.” He chuckled slightly at his own cleverness, but it was a sort of hollow, half-dead sound. Like he was laughing because he thought he should, and not because he wanted to. “So I say again: ask what it is that you wish to ask, and then go away.” He sneered, and I only knew he was sneering because of the way he added: “Please.”

Okay. So this was going to be a little more work than I had expected. But that’s alright. I was a psychologist, wasn’t I? Not the therapist kind, but I knew the human animal all the same. I could do this. I just needed him to look at me.

The need seized me in a way I didn’t expect. Didn’t know what to do with, except to give into it. But that wasn’t what he Did. He as one of Them, but the things he Did wouldn’t account for this feeling. It was all me.

So I gave into it. Challenged again. Pushed. “Right. Blunt. Just like the text books said.”

“Textbooks. Pah.” He made a snorting sound in the back of his throat, flopping his free hand as if waving away a bad smell. His shoulders curled tighter. The tips of his fingernails appeared around the curve of his upper arm, pulling furrows into his electric-orange sleeve.

For a pregnant moment, I just watched the shift of his hair - dark brown, thick, curling slightly at the ends - against the prison jumpsuit collar. The juxtaposition between the colours was stunning, distracting like a shifting pile of leaves on the lawn in autumn, oddly magnetic. Pretty.

“Your questions?” he prompted peevishly when I’d been staring too long again.

“Right,” I repeated, a verbal reboot, my brain finally chugging over from buffering to operational. “Er, I’m, ah, I’m writing my PhD thesis on Vigilantism, and I thought… that is, if you don’t mind… I have some, well, like you said, questions. A list.”

“And I may have some answers,” he rejoined, waving one pale hand through the weak light. “But why on Earth should I gift any of them to you, Miss…?”

I didn’t see any point in withholding my name from him. It wasn’t like he could do anything with it, not in solitary confinement, not with his sentence so long that I’d be long dead of old age before he ever saw the outside.

And besides, I was planning to publish the paper, so it’s also not as if he couldn’t get his hands on a copy later and read my name on the cover if he wanted to.

And lying was something you could read in a person’s body language. He’d read so much in just my walk; I would never get what I wanted if I lied to him about something as inconsequential as my real name. Especially since he would probably know exactly who I was if he’d just look at me.

“Rachel Belanger,” I answered.

He rocketed upright, the crown of his head ricocheting off of the steel support rods of the bunk above him. Startled by his sudden, vicious movement, I couldn’t help the little jump back. I was reminded unpleasantly of a cobra thought dead suddenly rearing up and striking. Only a cobra that - when he finally turned his face to mine - looked miffed and ever so slightly embarrassed, like it had also accidentally bitten its own flickering tongue.

“Ow, bloody… damn!” he said, rubbing the top of his head. One of his eyes was screwed shut, pain-summoned tears turning dark lashes into wet spikes in the outside corner. The other eye - so dark it was nearly black, shot through with yellowy mud-brown flecks - focused on me accusingly.

Like it was my fault he wailed his head off the frame, or something. It kind of was, I guess, because it was my name that surprised him. Maybe I should have had the warden introduce me like she’d offered, after all.

He rubbed his head a bit more, and then both of his eyes and his mouth dropped wide.

“Recognize me, do you?” I asked, feeling sardonic and peevish. It was the verbal equivalent of an eye roll, and it had taken me the better part of my teenage years to perfect it. But it was perfect. It would never have worked so well on my mother otherwise.

He said nothing, didn’t rise to the bait, I felt the wave of frustration crest. He was finally looking but he wasn’t… wasn’t what? The verbal eye roll had never failed before.

A furrow gathered between my eyebrows, the one that made me look exactly like a brunette version of my mother, I could feel it. “I was afraid you might see it. Look, I’m aware of your history with all that stuff, but honestly, I’m not here about that. This really is for my research.”

“Oh, Rachel,” he breathed, and stood slowly, eyes never leaving my face. Slowly, shuffling as if he was an old man, he approached the bars.

Well, he was an old man. Even if he didn’t look it. He was probably around a hundred years old, near as anyone in the system could figure, but he’d kept his personal history well shrouded. If he had indeed been a child when photography was young, there wasn’t any evidence. The first visual records Rachel was able to find were of him his late twenties, just before the outbreak of World War Two.

But he appeared to be in his his early thirties now, slight crow’s feet digging in and getting comfortable beside his eyes, frown lines bracketing a thin-lipped but mobile mouth. His hair was still dark and thick, if flat and ill cared-for. His voice rough with disuse, but still that rich, compelling tenor that had been described in hundreds of newsreels and newspaper interviews before.

He stopped right in front of me, forehead touching the bars just so, hands wrapped around the two directly between us. His posture was relaxed though. He didn’t grip the bars in white-knuckled fists or lean his head against the cell door as if yearning for freedom. He just accepted the steel’s silent offer of support and stood there, breathing. Existing.

Drinking in my face and exhaling wonder.

“Oh, it is you.” His focus dropped down to my lips, then back up to my eyes, quick and only partially involuntarily. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who found my conversation partner strangely magnetic. Or maybe he just recognized the shape of my lips, too. He waited to see what I’d do.

I took a decided step backward.

He burst into laughter, quick and dark. It echoed, slapping against their bare concrete and metal cocoon, ringing along the side of my head, ticking at myears.

“Now you fear me,” he said when he had calmed himself enough to speak.

“Shouldn’t I?” I asked. There was a tremor in my voice that I didn’t expect. I wasn’t scared of him, not really, but I was finally unnerved.

His behaviour was… odd. Yes, there was the counting, the deductions, but more that that he was… wrong in some way. He was strange. He moved like the weight of the years he’d lived were literally tugging on his spine, but looked like he should be in the prime of his life. He spoke like a gentleman, a remnant of the early part of the twentieth century, and yet he was as blunt as any person my own age. He was in a jail cell and couldn’t hurt her, and yet he behaved as if he held all the control.

“I don’t know,” he said, eyebrow arched. Challenging me back.

“You are The Professor,” I pointed out.

His shoulders immediately slumped and whatever amusement had been dancing in his gaze was extinguished. He looked so completely miserable for half a second that I actually regretted putting it the way I had.

“I don’t like that name,” he said. “Not at all.”

“Well, it’s not like you’ve got any other.” I refused to let him make me feel bad about it. It wasn’t my fault.

“Of course I do,” he said. He flicked a look up at me through his eyelashes, a startlingly coy and innocent gesture. It was almost little-boy in its blushing innocence. Had he done it on purpose? Was he was trying to play me? And if he was, to what end? “I had parents. A normal childhood. Of course I have a name.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Of course I’d never envisioned him as having parents. As a child, yes. But as part of someone’s family?

Never.

“Sure,” I said, because I felt like I had to respond somehow. “Of course.”

He raised those dark, dark eyes to me, lids narrowed, expression inscrutable. Was he studying me again? Weighing something? Finding me lacking somehow? Or was I in turn reading to much into it? Something flickered in those yellow flecks of his, and he straightened to his full height, squaring up.

“Olly.”

I couldn’t stop the involuntary gasp. I sucked in a breath, bottom lip fluttering against my teeth.

He told me, I thought, brain suddenly filled with hysterical warning lights. He told me. I didn’t dare say anything, stunned that he had chosen to confide this, his one last great secret, to me. Would he give me his family name, too?

No, he just remained silent, assessing my reaction, gaze darting over me face and cataloguing, calculating.

“Why would you tell me that?” I finally asked, unable to stand the harsh quiet. “Me of all people, knowing who my mother is? Was. Why me?”

“It seems…” He rolled a word around in his mouth, as if testing its ripeness before letting it escape: “Appropriate.”

My fingers tightened on my tablet and I forced myself to relax them. Again. Nerves this time? No, anticipation. Confusion, yes, but also…

This was exciting.

“Thank you, then. Olly,” I repeated softly. Then I jerked my chin at the door that was between us and the guard. “You know, I’ll have to tell them.”

“Of course you will,” he allowed. His stance relaxed a little, hands back on the bars. A carefully constructed artifice of pleading. I don’t know how I knew it was artifice, why I could see through it so easily. But I knew. “But can you hold onto it? Just until… until we’re done? Keep it just for yourself, for now?”

I hesitated. Making a promise to break a rule now, at the start of their relationship, meant that he might attempt to extract bigger promises later, to break bigger rules. On the other hand, the point of this was to build the relationship itself, and if a little white lying was what it took...

“Of course,” I said. “And Olly’s short for, what… Oliver?”

He raised his head again, searching for something, boreing. Whatever it is, he didn’t find it, and that seemed to disappoint him. He turned away, putting his back to me. It was either cowardice or a show of arrogance. He rested his slim shoulders against the bars between us, another faux show of contemptuous relaxation. But his hands on his elbows, crossing his arms over his stomach, the white knuckles? He was upset by something. Protecting himself. Closed off.

He shook his head slightly. I was momentarily enchanted by the play of his fine hair across his day-glo collar. “I’m certain your mother could have deciphered my legal name, should she have been bothered to try. It is not that great of a secret, no matter that I’ve destroyed my original government records.”

“But you never told the courts. The cops didn’t know. Your own lawyer.”

“You’ve done your research, brava,” he countered. He folded his hands at the small of his back, long fingers cupped in in my direction. I resisted the inane urge to reach through the bars and meet them halfway. His palms were calloused and scarred - half a century, maybe more, of laboratory work had left a map of nefarious deeds etched into his flesh. Acid and scalpels and gunpowder.

I cleared my throat instead, and took another little step back to separate myself from him more, if only mentally. Then I called herself ridiculous. Relationship, trust, they were what I was here for. “Why tell me?”

“I don’t know, Rachel. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always felt that intelligence ought to be rewarded. Perhaps it’s because you started it.” His voice was heavy with meaning that I couldn’t parse.

“You mean, coming in here alone?” I tried to clarify. “There’s a guard at the end of the hall. And the warden gave me an emergency buzzer.”

He chuckled again, nearly soundless. More of a puff of breath than a laugh. “We’ll call it that if you prefer, Rachel—” He lingered over my name, caressing the vowels, and I couldn’t suppress the way it made my spine shiver a bit. It wasn’t sexual attraction. It was… awareness. Of being the presence of something more than oneself. The coolness of the room had already made my skin pebble with goosebumps, but now they tightened. The hairs on my arms stood straight up and the nape of my neck prickled. “You said you had questions? A list?”

“Right. Right! Yes!” I said, and blinked a few times to force myself not to lose my focus. There was a purpose to all the banter.

“There’s a chair by the light switch.” He waved one hand to the left, indicating further down the hall where a metal folding chair leaned against the wall. It was covered with a visible layer of dust. He must not get many visitors, I realized. Even his lawyer had stopped coming, the one who wore the ludicrously expensive shoes; he had said so himself.

I dragged the chair over to his cell and settled down in front of him, unfolding the keyboard I’d rolled into my pocket. As I waited for it to synch up with tablet I’d perched on my knees, I studied the line of his back. He didn’t seem tense any more. Not even really miserable. He just looked… comfortable. Like my presence didn’t scare him, or annoy him, or confuse him at all.

Like he… liked me. God knows what he’d read off my face, and my clothes, and my posture to cause the sentiment.

It’s possible he did like me. I had no way of telling, short of asking him. And I’d rather save my questions for answers that I needed for my paper.

Dear god, I thought. Imagine, someone like The Professor - Olly - liking you.

“Ask away, my dear Rachel,” he said as soon as my tablet chimed its readiness.

“Right, well…” I cleared my throat and read my first question off the screen: “You’ve been charged with various crimes ranging from plotting acts of terrorism to first degree murder, but would you actually consider yourself a —?”

“No, no!” he interrupted, making me cringe back as his voice rang into the empty corners of the hallway, bouncing across the ceiling. His fists clenched by his side and they shook, digging white indents into his flesh. “Ask me your real question, Rachel. Ask me the one I can hear spinning through that grad student brain of yours. Stop being so damnably intellectual and follow your heart.”

I looked down at my screen, confused. “These are my real questions,” I protested.

“No. Those are the questions pre-approved by your ethics committee. But you didn’t decide to sit for Vigilantism to ask what I think about my past actions. You can read all that in my court transcripts and my Wikipedia entry. You’re not here for character analysis and motivation dissection. You want my story. You want to know why.”

He couldn’t have stoppered up the breath in my throat any more effectively if he had actually reached through the bars and wrapped his fingers around my neck.

“How…” I began, the word crumpling up behind my teeth, heart slamming against my ribs. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath and tried again. “How do you know that?”

He chuckled again and slid down the bars and plopped cross-legged into the dusty, cold cement floor in front of my feet. “I know more than you think, my dear Rachel. I always know more than anyone thinks I do. I know exactly what you want of me.”

I had no idea how to answer that. What to do? I asked myself, staring down at my - yes - pre-approved questions. Boring, useless questions. I had these answers already. I’d already culled them from the court transcripts and the records and the things they’d found in his lairs when he’d been arrested.

No one, least of all me, had actually expected him to talk to me. These were all things that they’d said I could ask because no one had thought I would get to ask anything.

I tapped my fingers along the side of the tablet casing, one tap per second, echoing the tick of my wristwatch as I thought this over. His own finger followed along, making the bars of his cell chime with the gentle percussion of his thumbnail.

Right.

Fuck the committee. This wasn’t an opportunity I was going to throw away that easily. Even if it cost me my PhD.

I had been handed and opportunity that no other researcher, journalist, lawyer, person had. Olly had chosen me. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t about to waste it.

“I have voice recording software on this thing,” I finally said. “Can I turn it on? And then we can… I don’t know. Start from the beginning?”

“Of course,” he wuffed. “Yes. Of course you would ask that. Okay, okay,” he agreed, descending into cryptic muttering for a moment before shaking out his shoulders and clearing his throat. “I think this is appropriate. If I was going to tell anyone, it ought to be you. It’s fitting. Very well then. Turn on your recorder, Rachel.”

So I did.

#manuscript #snippet #manuscript snippet #writing blog #The Maddening Science #J.M. Frey #am writing #writing #writeblog #writing community

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crystalelemental · 5 years ago

Text

Well, I’ve beaten Awakening. Again. On hard mode this time. Thoughts below.

Okay, for the first half of the game? Hard mode is substantially more tricky than Normal mode, but completely sane in its challenges. Around Chapter 16-17, things get a little ridiculous with the power of some enemies and the reinforcements. At this point, things get out of hand. Again. Because the only way to get more experience for my units without grinding or relying on the DLC, is to clear the children paralogues.

Now, I know the paralogues are not meant to be completed at once. Gerome and Nah have way harder paralogues than the others, so I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to go after theirs later on. But the problem is...children characters break the game in half, especially if you know about how skill inheritance works and plan around it. Getting Maribelle to have Galeforce before recruiting Morgan and Brady was devastating, because then we had three powerful mage units whipping around the field, blasting enemies apart and getting a second turn. Once we had all three, it was over. And that didn’t even account for getting Severa with the same treatment and ability to go General and Great Knight from Frederick, allowing her to run Aegis, Pavise, and Luna alongside Galeforce by the end of the run. Like...things got ridiculous really fast. The kids, as non-promoted units starting out with two of the best skills they inherit, just shoot through levels on the other paths like crazy, and are able to get all the best skills they could want. Especially when they inherit a healing class like Gerome or Brady. They just cycle so quickly through War Cleric and get Renewal, and then go to their optimal class where they learn other skills, and now have all sorts of crazy benefits. Like...you do have the option to not run them, but at that point, why would you not? The game’s made so easy once they arrive.

That said, I did try to avoid using them. Right up until Chapter 21, where we actually needed their full power. But before then, I decided to seriously use Say’ri and Tiki, who went down their flier paths. They’re both really good. REALLY good. Tiki has ridiculous growth rates, although her skillset isn’t particularly impressive. Say’ri has fantastic skills to inherit, including Galeforce, and has decent enough growths to keep up with the others. She needed a bit of hand-holding to catch up to the other adult characters, but once on par, she took off. So those added characters are pretty good. It’s just a shame about the lack of support conversations, but hey, they can support each other, which actually works out pretty well for both. The only one I wasn’t particularly impressed with was Anna. She’s decent, but I never felt like she was keeping up with others, like, say, Libra. Who has the same role as a healer with some offense and utility, but actually had astonishing growths. She is useful for picking locks, considering how weak Gaius is, but once you get a kid, you can just reclass them to Thief and pass along Locktouch, invalidating her entirely.

All that is mostly to say that Awakening...feels like it’s terribly balanced. Like, really terribly. Hard mode follows the same progression as Normal: the beginning phases are difficult, but once you get the kids, you kinda just steamroll your way through the rest of the game. It’s no wonder they nerfed children in Fates, honestly.

Oh man, speaking of Fates, let’s talk about story, because they invited that comparison themselves. Here’s the thing: replaying it, Awakening’s story really is not that strong. The overall plot itself is, frankly, a bit all over the place. Like, there are three distinct parts that are technically tied together, but they still feel really disjointed. Gangrel’s war is setup for the importance of the Fire Emblem, and explains for about five seconds the damage that Chrom’s father did to the continent in his holy war against Plegia, but it never really expands on that. It’s a strong bit of history that they unfortunately don’t do enough with. Part 2 is the war against Walhart, and honest to god, this is the reason I call the plot disjointed. Why is he here? Yes, Aversa and Validar explain later that Walhart was also seeking to end the reign of gods like Grima, and his desire to end the reign of gods is a nice twisted parallel to his ancestors now that I’ve played Echoes and know about his continent’s history, but...why is he here? The entire war almost feels irrelevant. It sets up the whole aspect of the jewels for the Fire Emblem, but that’s just introducing a new fetch quest into the story that it didn’t really need. The most impactful part of Act 2 is the introduction of Lucina and the concept of the future children, but the war with Valm feels like it could’ve been removed entirely and had no issue. Like they needed some kind of catalyst to set the stage for introducing Plegia, introducing a conflict that would lead to Plegia having an upper hand in the third act, and giving us the jewel piece so Robin had some sort of gambit to pull against Validar. But I feel like all of that could’ve been accomplished without this guy! The second act of this game is by far the weakest, offering almost nothing substantial to the central plot of Lucina’s destroyed future and the resurrection of Grima. We’re told later on that Walhart’s ambition involved taking down Grima, but most of his presence is spouting nonsense about ending the era of gods while mostly just subjugating people under his will with no explanation for what he’s doing. Act 3 returns to this, but it’s mostly then a quick run of maps, some of the shortest and easiest in the game, frankly.

Nothing about the story is particularly bad, it just feels like the three acts are heavily disconnected. There could have been more to tie these parts together into a whole, but it’s mostly left to a bit of exposition that Aversa gives late into the game, explaining that everything was as Validar wished it. It just would’ve been nice to have a bit more cohesion, even if it were just coming from Lucina tying together how things are meant to go. Like, she mentions the Basilio thing, but not why his death was so important to the flow of history. A bit more on those kinds of fronts would’ve been nice.

What the game does excel at, however, it characters. Man are they good. A lot of the adults characters are a ton of fun, and all of the kids are fantastic. This is a game that has a lot of emotional impact because of what the characters are going through. The main plot may feel disjointed, but that doesn’t at any point lessen the impact of events and reactions to what’s occurring, and this game draws you in more effectively than most. It’s a little unusual for me, but I think some of it is nostalgia. I really loved this game when it came out, and grad school was an incredibly rough time, so this was a nice outlet. It’s really noticeable on this one, especially at the outset of the game. I’m talking like warmth in the chest kind of positive memories.

My point here is: Awakening may not be the most complex story, or have the most balanced of gameplay, but it’s still a ton of fun, and has a fantastic cast of characters. I honestly think Awakening will wind up being a game that, much like Blazing Sword and the Radiant games, I’ll come back to routinely just to pick up and play for fun. It’s not a challenging game, but hey, sometimes you just want to relax, you know? And I feel like that’s the sense Awakening has. It’s a relaxing game that’s easy to get engrossed in, and that’s all it needs to be.

#awakening hard mode run

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chubigans · 7 years ago

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My First GDC: 2018

It has become something of a yearly ritual where I get an email from Mike Dailly over at YoYo Games asking if I’m going to GDC, and I respond with my reason of why I’m not going. I’m in the middle of game development, I’m in the middle of something, literally anything that was going on right at that moment was enough for me to skip another year of GDC. Maybe next year, maybe in two years, who knows.

This year was different, in that I didn’t really have any particular reason not to go. My game was fully released, I was in a good place as far as patches go, I had money in the bank. This was the year. I had to commit. I knew if I didn’t go this year, I would never go.

It’s not that I didn’t want to go, it just became easier to say no. That came hand in hand with a lot of things in my life, I think. At that moment, I had reached a breaking point. I was tired of letting myself be the only reason I wasn’t going to do something.

Yes, I responded, I am absolutely pretty sure I’m going this year, maybe, and I’ll let you know at the end of January for sure, or maybe early February.

I’m not particularly out going, though I’ve been making hard strides to do so over the last few years. The hard part of going to a convention, I would soon realize, is that I didn’t have a team to bring along with me. It has mostly just been me and freelancers over the last few years. Someday I’ll change that and open my own studio. I had hoped GDC was going to be helpful in showing me that path.

One of the first talks I attended, Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way, seemed a great place to start. I had somehow misread it and assumed it was talking about the Spiderweb Solitaire game on the Xbox 360 that I really enjoyed playing. Looking it up now, there’s not even a game that exists that is called “Spiderweb Solitaire” nor can I find anything like remotely resembles the game in my head so I am at a complete loss as to why I thought any of this.

“A lot of you probably don’t know me or any of these games” Jeff Vogel said as his array of titles was displayed on the projector, most of which were hardcore RPG games. That’s a weird path to a Solitaire game, I wonder how that happened? It was a fantastic talk, with lots of humor and self-depreciation. He commanded the room easily, which was completely full, many of whom who knew exactly who Jeff Vogel was, unlike me apparently. It didn’t matter, as by the end of the session, I was a fan. It was a great start to my GDC week.

On Tuesday I had a chance to go to the Humble party, as well as the NoClip documentary that was showing later that night with a live Q&A with Danny O’Dwyer. The doc seemed like a natural place to be- I really enjoyed NoClip’s docs, I wanted to meet Danny, and the social interactivity would be low. Perfect.

Outside on the street, I was frantically looking for the entrance to the screening room. The entire center is a maze of doors, stairs, exits and entrances, and by the time I had found it I had wasted twenty minutes. As I walked up to the door, someone exited. “Session is full.” I couldn’t believe it.

I stormed back to my hotel room, mad that I missed it, angry at myself for being so stupid in not finding the entrance fast enough. There was still the Humble party, something that I likely wouldn’t have gone to if I had been able to go to the screening. I felt that all-too familiar feeling of having myself be the one reason not to go somewhere. In a sense, maybe I was going to the screening so I didn’t have to be left with this decision of not going somewhere because I was too afraid to do so. What was I scared of, really? No one knew who I was, and if it’s not something I liked, I could leave easily. I grabbed my coat, opened the Lyft app, and somehow found myself on the way to a party.

“Yo welcome to the Folsom Street Foundry we got a ton of pizza so be sure to head to the back and grab some slices!”

As I shifted through the crowds I became acutely aware of how I looked: head darting back and forth, aimlessly wandering through people, not really with any purpose or direction. Immediately I looked to see if anyone was doing the same thing, and there were. I went up to introduce myself to them.

There is a certain relief when the first thing I tell someone is that I don’t normally do these things and I’m a bit nervous and they respond in the same way. If you don’t go to parties, you don’t go and meet people who also don’t go. It was only at GDC where you felt like you were surrounded by equally nervous people who were in the same position as I was: doing something out of their element. I talked to one person, then three, then five and ten. It got easier and easier.

“Hey we just got another batch of pizza delivered everyone, so come grab a slice or three because we have way too much pizza! Seriously let’s all go to town on this pizza, don’t be shy!”

What I found to be the easiest thing in the world to enjoy were videogames, which were stationed all around the hall. The power of videogames can always bring a group of people together, and I found myself having a great time with several people who had never played a game of Gang Beasts/Duck Game/Nidhogg and other games on the multiplayer circuit. I did a high five with someone when we beat a Cuphead boss, explained the dynamics of Duck Game to three other people who I easily steamrolled over but kept it close to make it exciting, and lost miserably in Gang Beasts, one of the few games that seems to level the skill level even if you’ve played it for years. None of these experiences were particularly new to me, but the added dynamic of strangers in a new city playing and having a fun time was a warm comfort blanket in a cold city.

“Last Call is going to be at 11:30 everyone, and please be sure to grab a few slices of pizza because we still have plenty! Let’s all enjoy some pizza!”

I did another round of aimless walking and found a random sofa with two people sitting in it, one of whom looked like Rami Ismail. Is that him? That totally looks like him! I quickly grabbed my phone, pulled up his twitter profile, and compared a photo of him. I am 75% sure its him. 85%. Did more photo searches. 95%.

He got up, and I asked, hey are you Rami? Keep in mind that whatever the correct way to pronounce Rami I did the opposite of, that I am 100% sure and I will never look it up to find out otherwise.

“Yes I am!”

“Hey, my name is David Galindo! I made Cook, Serve, Delicious!”

“What?”

“COOK SERVE DELICIOUS!” (I would typically tell people who I am immediately because it was an easy way to remind myself that I wasn’t some kind of fraud/phony and that I actually deserved to be there, a nice side bonus of impostor syndrome).

“Oh yeah!”

“I loved Luftrausers!” (I love Luftrausers).

“Thanks!”

“This is my first GDC!”

Someone came up behind Rami and wanted to introduce him to a friend of his. My time was up, but I was happy. I did it. I started to walk away.

“Wait wait!” Rami told them. He turned back to me and gathered his thoughts for a quick second. “What are your goals for GDC?”

My goals? I literally had no other goals that night but to talk to someone, let alone talk to an industry star. I found myself answering, “to learn,” which is just about the most generic stupid thing you could hear anyone say.

What surprised me the most is that Rami didn’t want to brush me aside, he wanted to make sure we finished our conversation before talking with someone else. That meant so much to me. I got a firsthand account on why Rami is so loved in the industry.

“Look I’m going to be real with you all: we ordered way too much pizza. Please, please take some, we have to throw it all away after tonight. Please! We have so much pizza! Please!!”

The next night, around the time Rami was getting his GDC Ambassador Award in front of a massive audience, I was inside the screening room for the last film in the festival, called Insert Coin. I was determined not to miss this one and showed up about an hour early in the rain. I struck up a conversation with some people in line, which had the added benefit of being in a mostly empty lobby. In a city where a quiet space was about medium yelling to the person next to you, the silence filled the room. I never appreciated a quiet conversation more.

As we ushered into the theater, I saw a crowd of people come into the theater. Oh my gosh, I told the person in front of me, do you know who that is? It’s Ed Boon!

She didn’t respond immediately. “The creator of Mortal Kombat!” I followed up. “Oh, yeah, of course!”

The documentary was not finished, and we only saw three segments with some temporary audio mixes, but it was immensely entertaining. Setting up the rise of Midway in the coin-op arcade glory days, the film talked mostly about Mortal Kombat and NBA JAM in the segments we saw, with some of the familiar beats (Mortal Kombat: corrupting today’s youth?) and some truly astonishing revelations I had no idea about (NBA JAM made one billion dollars in revenue…in quarters.)

The lights went up and questions were asked to some of the Midway people in attendance. I was somewhat unfamiliar with the history of NBA JAM, which was the main focus, and I missed out on that golden era of arcade gaming. But I was determined to ask a question…something, anything. I quickly put together some ideas in my head.

“Ok, a question in the back?”

Something to do with the rise of arcade violence? No, that was covered already. What about other NBA games? I didn’t know enough to reference anything. I wanted to ask a question, but finding an actual good question was harder than I thought.

“Ok how about you?”

Maybe Mortal Kombat? What about its competitors? Think of some…Eternal Champions, Primal Rage, yes, those games make me feel like I know what I’m talking about. Ok, I can do this!

“And time for one last question…yes?”

“Yes, how did y’all feel at the time about competitors nipping at your heels with cookie cutter games like Eternal Champions and Primal Rage?” (Nice, I nailed it.)

“Hah, actually we have a Primal Rage dev here today!” He points to a man in the front row, who immediately looks behind him to see who asked that question.

There are so many more stories I have to share, like the moment where, upon finding out that PixelJunk Monsters 2 was announced, I made a dash to the Chunsoft booth which turned out to be a conference room, slid some money under the door and tweeted about it, and by the end of the day ended up getting a hands on private demo by none other than Dylan Cuthbert himself (due to the tweet, not the money). I am confident that I was the biggest PJM fan in attendance, and if they didn’t know it then, they knew it when I was asking a ton of inside ballpark questions as the demo was played.

Another story is being able to meet some people for the first time and tell them how much they changed my life. Meeting up with friends that I only knew online but finally met that week. Meeting new people, but not enough new people, something I’m already working out in my head for next year. Feeling a renewed sense of purpose, of loving game development. Experiences I’ve never had before. Moments I’ll never forget. Moments just for me.

For that one week, game developers took over the city. That’s what it truly felt like, with our badges flopping around all over downtown. You could not be in the downtown area without passing by a fellow convention-goer.

As the conference ended and I left one last party that Friday night, I made a quick detour to Super Duper Burger to grab a shake. I walked back down to my hotel one block away, and I saw many people walking but no one was wearing a badge anymore. No one was left from the conference, no one was walking to any sessions, there were no other events or parties to attend, and I suddenly felt very alone, back to how it always has been. Maybe I should change that.

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iknaq · 7 years ago

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Keeping It In The Family - (Part 13)

(Okay, I’m thinking probably just one more and this one will be wrapped up BUT I had so much fun that I am thinking I may start a new series to finish telling the stories of GiGi and Peggy and the twins and Peter. That will go up on AO3 when I get to it.)

@freudensteins-monster

MASTER POST LIST

'Okay, seriously dude. I can't decide if that's super scary or kinda hot.' Bucky smirked and pressed a little closer, looking over her shoulder as she mumbled about it being both, making him chuckle. He'd swung by the lab after a mission and he was still in his TAC gear, curious about the photoset Darcy was working on that Petey had taken of Tony and Steve visiting the local children's hospital. Pepper had agreed that Darcy could start some social media accounts for Avengers PR as long as she made sure there was all the proper release paperwork for people and it had to make it past JARVIS - who was uploaded with parameters set by Pepper and Maria (no sensitive content, no location tags unless otherwise approved, etc, etc - it was enough to make his head spin). 'So, doll...we haven't had a chance to reschedule that date.' 'No, we have not. What were you thinking? And have you gone to see Peggy yet? And you know, I never asked, is this like weird between you and Steve? I mean me going on dates with both of you?' 'No, I'll try to do that after I shower. I was thinking maybe a movie and we could order something, your pick. And we never really talked about it...huh, we both mentioned interest and I always just figured you'd let us know, ya know, ladies choice...' 'Oh geez, would you talk to him and make sure it's all good because if you leave it up to me then you're both gonna be stuck with me forever because I'm greedy like that and you're pretty.' Jane snorted and looked up from papers she was reading on the other side of the table, prompting Darcy to crumple a piece of paper and throw it at her friend. Jane just brushed it away, pointing a folder at Darcy. 'Don't you need to be heading upstairs to meet with the kiddo's tutor?' 'Awww crap, okay and I know what you're trying to do. J, Jane is not allowed to turn on the quantum-thingamajig without Bruce, okay? At least he pretends to follow the safety procedures.' 'Yes, Ms Lewis. I shall make sure the quantum field augmenter is not turned on without Doctor Banner or the proper safety protocols.' 'Damn it, Darcy! This is my project and I don't need a babysitter.' 'Yes, yes, you do. You evaporated one of the bots and made DUM-E have a robot panic attack. Imagine if that had been your fleshy squishy body. Now figure out how to stabilize it and MAYBE we'll talk about you turning it on. I'll be back after I make sure this tutor isn't some kinda psycho, shit, I haven't even had a chance to read their files. J, can you transfer that to my tablet? Let's go, Buckster, you need to get showered.' He followed after Darcy as she muttered at her tablet, flicking through the files rapidly. The corner of his mouth sneaking up a bit, she was just so animated all the time and had unwittingly become the wrangler of the teenagers, as well as the scientists now. With Pepper busy running the Stark empire and much of the Avenger's business, May finding a job helping Pepper with the charitable organizations and the rest of them often on missions, that left Darcy to look after the three teens. And considering she wasn't that much older than all of them, she took the role in stride, Wanda and Pietro having especially latched on to Darcy. Darcy had moved into the apartment across the hall from Jane, staying with the twins for the time being with May and Peter taking the apartment across from Barton. Both he and Steve (and everyone really) had been trying to spend some time with all of the teens, getting to know them and trying to get over the awkwardness of interacting with Peter. How the hell are you supposed to act when you find out you have a kid via crazy Hydra experimentation? He wasn't sure what had gone down with Nat and Peter but they'd spoken and Nat had come out looking shaken but things returned to almost normal between the two, with Nat taking on trying to teach the twins some fighting, as well. Since they were still trying to learn the extent of all their powers, Pepper was still worried about sending them to school so everyone eventually agreed that a tutor was the best route, May and Peter's sudden move to the tower being attributed to her new job. But, that also meant having to run background and security checks and conducting interviews which had all fallen in Darcy's lap. She was still muttering at her tablet when they reached his floor, pressing a kiss to her temple before heading to the apartment and cleaning up. He snuck into the garage, taking Stevie's bike and heading off to see what Peg wanted to talk with him about. He was about to knock on the door when he heard the laughter coming from inside, hesitating a moment before tapping on the door and wandering in at the beckoning. Eyes wide as he entered and saw Lorraine sitting beside Peg. He never really got to know Lorraine besides seeing her around the base but Peg...well, she was something else. The moment he met her, he understood why Stevie had fallen head over heels. 'James! Oh, James...look at you, still as devilishly handsome as ever.' 'Good god, Peggy...look at that jaw, still as sexy as it was all those years ago.' Bucky felt all warm around the collar, shifting from side to side a bit as he approached the bed and pressed a kiss on Peggy's cheek before offering one to Lorraine, as well. 'Ladies, you look as lovely as ever.' 'Would you look at that, even Hydra couldn't strip the charming off this man. Now, James, do you know why I asked you to come?' 'Mmmm...not really Pegs, I wanted to say hi but I get the feeling that you got a bit more to say than that...' 'Damn straight I do. Are you ever going to tell Steven that you love him and have always loved him? And don't try and deny it mister, I remember the looks you would give him.' 'I...uh uh...I...' 'I know it was a different time but I had thought about broaching the subject with Steven if it weren't for the fact that we were in the middle of the war. And then the train...he was heartbroken after that...I'm so sorry for what they did to you James but you're both still young and you should be happy.' 'Can you just imagine that much handsome in one relationship? You throw my girl in there and their children will be gorgeous.' 'Oh hush, Lolly. Don't overwhelm the man but she is right, Lolly said you also had an eye on Darcy? So, what's stopping you?' Bucky blinked, looking back at the two women, feeling completely steamrolled by the little old ladies. 'Uh...I have a date with Darcy later and I mean...Stevie...he...we never. Aw, shit. He doesn't feel that way. He was in love with you Peg and now he's got it bad for Darcy.' 'Oh, my darling boy...Steve loves you as much as you love him, he just hasn't acknowledged it yet. Now, we have tea shortly and you should go woo our lovely girl but please James...Bucky...just ask and see? I do love Steve and I want him happy and you and Darcy, as well.' 'And you, young man, I'll tell you the same thing I told Steven. I have a gun that Peggy taught me how to use, you treat my great-granddaughter right, are we clear?' 'Yes, ma'am.' He left the building in a daze and by the time he got back to the tower he was just grinning. He had a date tonight but had a quick stop to make first. Wandering into the apartment he shared with Stevie, glad to find the man in the living room. He stopped, looking over Steve's shoulder almost the same way he had with Darcy just a few hours ago. 'Hey, man...is it cool if I go on a date with Darcy? She was worried about things being weird with us.' 'Why would they be weird? I figured it was ladies choice. Where have you been?' Bucky had to stifle a laugh since that was exactly the same thing he had said. 'Went to visit Pegs...Lorraine was there with her. How can two little women in their 90's make me feel so bloody terrified?' 'I know...but Peggy was always that way, I think she rubbed off on Lorraine, sounds like they had an interesting friendship after it all.' 'I'd like to hear more about it sometime...okay, I'm gonna go take Darcy to a movie and get some grub. Hey, Stevie? Pegs said something to me and it got me wondering...' She had to have said something to Steve, as well, judging by the not so surprised look on his face. 'Oh, yeah?' Ah, why the hell not? Bucky leant over the couch and gave him a nice big smack on the lips. 'How about tomorrow I take you out?' Steve was still sitting there with a stunned look on his face when he left the apartment to go see Darcy.

#mcu #mcu au #wintershieldshock #darcy lewis #steve rogers #bucky barnes #peggy carter #private lorraine #keeping it in the family #the avengers #jane foster #jarvis #my writing

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jmsebastian · 7 years ago

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Dragon's Dogma, Open World Gaming, and a Fool’s Errand

Open world games just really aren’t for me. This is something I started to finally realize during my playthrough of Breath of the Wild. Tying the do-what-you-feel approach to a series I’ve enjoyed as much as Zelda seems like it would be the magic formula to allow me to finally understand the major appeal of these types of games. Sadly, that did not happen. It was an enjoyable enough experience thanks to its leanings on classic Zelda mechanics and some more modern action game tropes, but I just did not care very much about exploring the world at large. Unlike games such as Skyrim, which have huge worlds filled mostly with empty landscapes, at least Breath of the Wild had stuff in it. There were tons of people, lots of collecty things to pick up for obligatory crafting, horses that still can’t compare to Shadow of the Colossus’ Agro more than a decade later. I cared about none of it. Everything I did in that game was with the singular purpose of beating it so I could say I did. I should have learned my lesson.

Fast forward several months and I’d begun to itch for a new fantasy adventure. There are more types of these games than I could ever play, so there was some care taken to ensure that I chose wisely. Reviews, game play samples, wiki entries all helped lead me to choose that next game. That’s why Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen now takes up a substantial amount of space on my hard drive. On the surface, it was exactly what I was looking for. You can customize your character to a large degree. It has fantastic animations that feel responsive without being finicky or making the combat too easy. There’s still weight to your actions, so you can’t Bayonetta your way out of trouble or anything, but it is much faster than the From Software games of the world. So, perfect then. Fantasy hole filled.

Dragon’s Dogma is an open world done very poorly. The point of the game, at its most basic, is that you have to kill the dragon that stole your heart (which sounds suspiciously similar to the 1996 film Dragon Heart, but sorta kinda reversed). Having your heart stolen somehow makes you an Arisen rather than spelling your instant and everlasting death. Being Arisen means it is your destiny to kill the dragon to reclaim your heart. There’s no way around saying it, it’s a stupid premise. First, as an Arisen, life seems exactly the same save for everyone now calling you Arisen and the huge scar on your chest. With no practical difference in life pre Arisen and post, there’s simply no inherent reason to pursue getting your heart back. The game makes that your goal, so it’s your goal. Unfortunately, there are a lot of less clear cut goals in between.

For all its problems, at least the game’s framework is concrete. It’s easy to understand, and that’s a lot more important for games than is often acknowledged. Maybe some players don’t need the game to provide motivation through narrative, but if I’m going to spend a lot of time leveling up and fighting the same battles over and over again, it would be nice if it felt as though what I was working toward was going to pay off. Dragon’s Dogma made almost no effort in this regard.

At more than 30 hours in, I didn’t feel as if I’d learned anything that brought me more understanding of what was going on. In those 30 hours I fetched some herbs to heal local sick people, went to an outpost so that a Hydra could be triggered and I could lop one of its heads off, learned about the slave class called Pawns (whose lack of free will and incessant need to repeat themselves was profoundly disturbing to me), chased a boy around a village with no endgame, and murdered a fort full of goblins that were maybe somehow in cahoots with the dragon that stole my heart? At no point did I feel like I was doing anything of my own volition, but instead was just carrying out tasks handed to me by middle managers who didn’t want to bother putting in any effort for anything. If my character’s life was this unfulfilling, that makes the lives of the Pawns that served and died under me even more tragic.

The focal point of the numerous problems that arise comes from task management. Games like Dragon’s Dogma don’t know when you’re going to do any particular task, and it’s crammed with so many tasks and subtasks that there’s a need by the developer to bring how the game manages task out into the player’s face. That means I see little bubbles above the heads of people I need to talk to (as towns are filled with people who have no value to me as the player and simply exist to make the town feel like a town). It also means when I talk to them, a graphic appears and a sound effect plays alerting me that a task has begun. When I complete the task, my screen is splashed with experience points, money earned and more sound effects disrupt the natural ambiance of the scene to tell me I did a good thing. It’s a Pavlovian trick and robs me of any genuine sense of accomplishment.

This is not motivating, it’s demoralizing. The sheer number of things to do feels insurmountable. Since their relevance is impossible to know when undertaking a request, you sorta just go through them in order. They take you back and forth across miles of terrain, so even accomplishing something small takes a significant amount of time. Typically you’ll do something like seek out a witch in a forest. Part one of that quest is to find the witch. That means running around a shrouded wood until you uncover the witch’s house. The second part of that quest is telling the person who told you to do it that you did it. There’s a certain realism to this that, I can’t deny, has a certain charm. That charm quickly fades when you realize that you’re running back and forth along the same path, listening to the same information be mindlessly told to you, with the same enemies popping out to attack you “unexpectedly”.

This world is huge, yet the space between major points is bogged down with filler.

There is fast travel in the world of Dragon’s Dogma, thankfully. Unfortunately, you can’t really access it until you make it a good way into the game and can purchase the items that let you warp to certain places you’ve already been. It’s on you to investigate the items you can buy from vendors in order to discover that you can fast travel at all (there is an even worse fast traveling mechanism built into the original version of the game that’s not worth explaining for its lack of usefulness). Fast travel helps make things more bearable, but the fact that it needed to be included (and then improved for the PC release) highlights just how much of a wasteland the game takes place in.

The expansiveness of the world makes for another problem, which is that it’s very difficult to tell if you’re within a reasonable level to kill the enemies and beasts you stumble across. Even the weakest enemies are hard to kill alone. This is done to keep players from steamrolling their way through the game and to account for the possibility of three Pawns accompanying the player at any given time. For any enemy of reasonable strength, you’ll have to chip away at their health bar, focus on areas of weakness to gain an advantage, and manage the battlefield for extended periods of time. Isolated, this makes for interesting scenarios and is the most enjoyable part of the game, by far. It is taken to the extremes much of the time. The amount of damage you deal to enemies that are in your league and those way out of your league is difficult to determine even several minutes in sometimes. This means you can get yourself in unwinnable scenarios pretty quickly if you aren’t careful. God forbid you chip away at a Manticore for thirty minutes before realizing you’re not where you’re supposed to be.

Running into obstacles too difficult to tackle at the player’s current level can be a great way to guide them through the game’s intended route, but it’s at odds with a game that is supposed to allow you to do what you want when you want to do it. Most of the time, fights are really only difficult because you’re simply outnumbered or the mythical creature has a seemingly limitless supply of HP, and not because the enemies themselves are tricky to figure out or have complicated move sets. The flexibility of the combat allowed for through the Vocation system, the target points that exist for the larger enemies, and the adventuring party nature of combat all feel like elements meant for a game more like the original idea for Shadow of the Colossus than an Elder Scrolls style open world RPG and makes it feel as though progress is never really being made.

The dots represent the number of health bars this guy has.

There’s no easy cure for this sort of design. Dark Arisen has an additional component, Bitterblack Isle, that feels like the counterpoint to the main game. It offers a nice respite from the mind numbing openness by being more focused and self contained. You are taken there and you just have to dungeon crawl and kill everything. You are free to explore, but progression is more carefully planned and feels both genuine and rewarding. Sadly, Bitterblack Isle’s difficulty as a whole makes taking it on in the early game a pretty extreme exercise. I spent roughly half my time playing on Bitterblack and it was ruthlessly punishing for my characters. By level 30 I managed to find a bit more success, but getting to that level on Bitterblack alone would have meant cheesing the easiest of the island’s enemies hundreds of times. Given the choice of doing that or doing the main quest, I felt forced back into the main quest where I could get experience for far easier, if crushingly boring tasks. This pretty much killed any motivation I had to keep playing.

I probably had the most fun decking my character out in equipment more than anything else.

Maybe that’s my problem with open worlds. For all there is to do, games like Dragon’s Dogma seem to rely purely on the will of the player to push them forward, even when their designs seem to actively discourage moment to moment enjoyment. There’s something exploitative about the genre that just rubs me the wrong way. It’s not fair to make me be a messenger boy for an hour just so you can reveal some more details about a plot that barely holds together when it’s finally all presented. No reward in these games will make filler worth it. Games being big for the sake of being big live on the idea that value lies in the sheer amount of time that can be spent playing it, and take it to their most fallacious logical conclusions. I can only hope that in the future I’ll see the warning signs earlier.

#dragon's dogma #capcom #dark arisen #rpg

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pathfindersemail · 7 years ago

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A personal update

it’s a not-so-fictional account of what I’ve been up to. Read below the cut.

Warnings: lots of problematic, like bullshit drama I’ve been dealing with

Philadelphia is a city that likes to hide how old it is. One can see it in the peeling paint of those stucco houses, lined up and bunched up along narrow streets once named after trees. A quiet stroll through Osage is Idyllic enough, but ask around, and you won’t have trouble finding someone whose ears are still ringing from the bombs.

It is a quiet enough city. One could write in it, in fact. I have had more time writing than I ever did, and I spend much of it doing so – essays, annotations, assignments, and conferences. If three hundred years ago, across the Atlantic, we as a people once witnessed the “republic of letters,” then one could say now is the era of corporatized letters: a series of professionalisms, click-bait polemics, and cold, dry musings. This isn’t to say that previous epochs had more authenticity or some sort of “real” intellectual engagement compared to us. Whatever alienation I may feel in this time of “writerly production” perhaps isn’t a sign of “changing times” so much as it is a sign of what profession I undertook and how knee-deep I am in a rigid, capitalist structure.

But the “saving grace” of course (and your parents will tell you this; your professors, your neighbors, your well-intentioned liberal friends) is that you live in a nice house while sitting on a nice porch, drinking your own brand of coffee, and typing away on a laptop with parts and plastic taken out of the Congo some months before. One could almost forget the life sucking labor of typing – key by key – some halfhearted argument about whatever it is we’re fetishizing for the week, so long as libations flow. Your colleagues will celebrate this cycle, in fact. They love gentrification. They love being able to drink artisanal beer (if that’s a thing) for less than $6 – a cost-effective strategy that throws the poorer groceries, housing projects, and markets under the steamroller. More importantly, they love being able to walk around West Philly at night, because neon lights and open-air pop shops are much safer (so I’m told) than down trodden stoops.

Of course, all these things are okay, because – you must understand – a lot of them think they’re saving the world. I’m sure Chaucer could have been a progressive had he been a twenty-first rather than fourteenth-century figure. Or, interestingly enough, grasping around in the dark for some obscure metaphor as your “theoretical praxis” is the “mode” nowadays. Either way, we will save the world with all this work, some day. And when an older academic throws around phrases like “our work is important,” no one in the room ever bothers to qualify that statement so that people take it as “our work could be important” and not inherently so.

I walk the streets with my friend. He recommends for me to go with my boyfriend to some fancy restaurant. I look at him, and I want to tell him that I am looking at him more than I should; later that night I will have a fight with my boyfriend about why – maybe – we should break up, but it will end with us realizing that we aren’t quite ready to do so yet; and the cycle will cycle on; and I will see my friend the next day, and I will look at him and wonder whatever it was I was thinking that night.

Instead I open up my word document, type away for the next half hour or so, and then I cajole about on my porch. I would smoke, but I just quit. Talking feels like a chore too, but at least Philly is the type of city that lets you get away from that, at least a little bit. I wave a hello to my hair dresser across the street. I think she secretly hates me, so I start looking for other hair dressers (she’s a very good stylist though); but a part of me wonders if I am just being paranoid, and I risk inconveniencing both ourselves by looking for another hair dresser 20 minutes away.

At this point, I can’t wait for the next social engagement. It is a week away. Free booze and lots of dancing. I have no time for such things, but it is the only time I’m able to not regret my decision to move; and to flirt with my friend; and muster up just a little more courage to break up with my boyfriend. I’m not exactly sure where either directions are going, but at this point I’d be happy to be left alone.

The trellis on my porch is beautiful. It has no vines or ivy to boast, but I’m sure in its many years life once crawled around its diamond-shaped holes. Soot and rain mark up what would have been an anemic coating of eggshell white. I place my bright, polka dotted umbrella next to it. Neon colors puking about. Then I sit back, and contemplate some more.

#personal #drama #but i wrote it aesthetically

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8ball-the-angry-marine · 8 years ago

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Had to make this a post in itself

I looked back on a reblog of all the bitching about how the New England Patriots winning the Super Bowl is an example of white supremacy and President Trump’s congratulating them of their win is indicative of that.

Yeah no, I saw that game. I wanted Atlanta to win, but only because I think Tom Brady has enough Super Bowl rings. The Falcons needed their turn (well really my team, the Redskins need it more, but that’s not gonna happen anytime soon). The game was a good one with going into the shitty halftime show I thought Atlanta was going to steamroll the Pats, but New England made an awesome 2nd Half comback and won it all in overtime. Great game and a prime example of two professional teams getting to do what I only (and many others) dreamed of doing while in High School.

But then we got the massive amounts of whiners that think the Pats winning is because of racism in America.

These are some of my favorites. They’re so butthole-clenchingly cringy.

First off at this point I am not even surprised they can even relate this to racism or Trump, but really is this the example they need to prove America is racist?

Well I did some looking into and here is my conclusion:

According to varying sources from the last couple of years (2012 to 2016), around 60 to 70% of the NFL’s players are African American. That’s a fucking lot. An article dating back to 2008 (although dated) gives a good idea of why with percentage breakdown of the positions for the: team https://www.quora.com/Why-are-most-of-the-players-on-the-New-England-Patriots-offensive-and-offensive-lines-white

An article by Sports Cheat Sheet (which got their information from Forbes) counted down the top 15 highest paid positions in the NFL and I did a little tally on just which race is paid the most to see if the posters up there have an validation on favoritism in the NFL. You can see whose who here:

http://www.cheatsheet.com/sports/highest-paid-nfl-players.html/?a=viewall

but the summary is that out of the 15, 7 are black, 7 white and 1 is what I put under “other” (being any other race besides the first two), but really it’s Olivier Vernon who is a Miami born that looks like a mix between Cuban and African-America so it could be 8-7 (Black being more), but I’m not 100% sure. Point is that it’s pretty evenly spread.

Going back to positions, overall the only spots that have the most unbalance in race is place kickers and punters (according to the 2015 NFL roster 100% of the place kickers are white and 99% of the punters (1% being African-American).

Referencing an answer from References.com: “ The black players are most commonly found in the positions of wide receiver, running back, fullback, defensive end and linebacker. While there are a high number of black players in the sport, there are relatively few black coaches. Approximately six percent of the coaches in the NFL are black. These numbers can change at any time with players being traded, released, placed on injured reserve or retiring. Another notable figure regarding the race of NFL players is the number of unsportsmanlike conduct calls. Black players receive 92 percent of these calls compared to white players. “

Now why would that be? Short answer: personal preference. For the 10+ years I played football, everyone wanted to play a glory position (no homo): Quarterback, Running Back, Wide Receiver or any Defensive Position; basically any place that you could get noticed, your name called out and potentially scoring a touchdown or getting a highlight on the post-game reel.

I’ll go back to the memories of playing High School football since I had a school fairly diverse. I can remember that most of the Offensive Line was white, mixed for Defensive Line, the Quarterback usually was white and the other positions that got to run the football, catch it or rushed for tackles where primarily African-American. I can remember that most didn’t want to play offensive line as they felt they were the next super star that was going to be the team/school hero and felt they were fast enough and tough enough to do that. They didn’t wanna play the position that required barely any recognition other than when the Defense gets through and little to no change of scoring a touchdown. Why? I honestly can’t say. Some wanted to be the next Dion Sanders or Ray Lewis: playing in the Professionals after winning the Heisman in college as the lead scorer for their conference. Most of the African-Americans that thought this were pretty lean going into their Freshman year and would work to get a starting position so they didn’t have to be like the Linenmen which they thought were fat, slow walls of tub (Most of weren’t or at least I wasn’t and you couldn’t as a lineman. Sure we can’t sprint like a Running Back, but we have to be quick off the snap to block the defense and have a ton of strength in upper and lower body muscle groups to not just keep the Defense back ,but drive them back and open up running routes). Now it’s not to say all thought like that (I can remember for the longest time a High School senior would regularly thank me as a Sophomore for helping him break our school’s and region’s rushing record telling me that “when the left side failed there was always an opening to break away on the right”)., but most.

Now what about punters/place kickers? Generally in my school and the surrounding area football coaches would get their kickers from the soccer team as they already had to necessary physical training needed to learn the proper technique to punt and kick. Generally they (being the soccer players) would jump at the opportunity as the spring players would use the fall Football season as extra training for the upcoming soccer season (they could practice/condition with the football team getting use of the gym for longer hours, spend all practice long kicking field goals and place kicking and then get the added benefit of playtime football games to show their long range kicking for when they go to college-level teams on both sports) and generally the soccer team was white. “Why?” you might ask again. Well again it comes down to personal preference. It’s not a race thing because all around the world soccer is played (though I am not a fan of it) and widely played in, oh, say Africa. Why not here? Well at my soccer they (being the African-American) athletes would prefer football, basketball and at times track & field:

Fooball during the fall, basketball during the winter and track & field in the spring to train for football/basketball’s next season.

So “okay that’s a lot of fucking info, but what does this have to do with the claims of white supremacy in the NFL/USA?” you might ask if you’re an idiot or don’t feel like reading. Well quite simply it has to do with everything. The point is that the NFL and NCAA is primarily compromised of African-American players. Going back to the article from 2008 about NFL’s position composition most white wide receivers and running backs are overlooked making them cheaper to be picked up by teams like the Patriots or the Denver Broncos that have a larger white player composition. This is mainly due to stereotypes, you know the one from like old sitcoms and bad sport movies that a team of rejects get one African-American teammate for football or basketball and all of a sudden it’s like the coming of the Moses to lead them to the promise land of victory. It’s generally thought (mostly subconsciously) that the black player will be better than the white player because whatever reason they’re spewing now. I don’t doubt that most of the current makeup of the NFL have earned their careers through their hard-work, but it’s a bit sad that scouters and coaches kinda think like this and overlook other deserving players that could be as good if not greater than their preconceived notions.

But really when you break this all down: the Pats won not because of racism or white supremacy in America. They won because out of the two teams that both have players that are professional-level athletes one of the two came back and outplayed the other. Simple as that and looking at these stats of position/roster makeup, salaries, recruiting and the top paid players I’d say it’s almost equal if not a bit on the reverse side of racism and position make up also takes into account exactly who wants to play what role and if they have worked for it or not. Simple as that.

#NFL #cringy #facts #stop whining #Seriously are you all that stupid?

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eulogy34-blog · 6 years ago

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How Much You Need To Expect You'll Pay For A Good hair loss in women

A good comb can harm the sensitive new growth and bring about abrasions with your scalp. While extensive-tooth wood comb is much more gentle (compared to the plastic kinds) in your hair and scalp. Huge tooth comb also gives massaging outcome and assist distribute sebum (natural oils) with the scalp to hair. Bear in mind these are generally the first indicators that the physique doesn’t perform very well Using these foods, hair loss is often a symptom that occurs even more down the line, on account of extended-expression autoimmune responses and inflammation. five to five years. Whilst regrowth appeared to peak by 12 months one, and little by little declined ever 12 months afterward, As outlined by research findings, “servicing of nonvellus hairs past that viewed at baseline was nonetheless evident”. I next the hair therapeutic massage workouts several occasions every day, I take in fruit/ huge kale salad day by day, drink an abundance of water and also have a kambuchi consume day-to-day, I ONLY use Poland spring bottle h2o on my hair to soaked it for three months and only wash it when weekly AFTER I utilize the dermaroller and set the hair cocktail on and evening and snooze having a shower cap on- clean it off in morning with bottle h2o. Alternately, a mix of warm olive oil, cinnamon and honey can do the job very well to be a hair mask. Apply it to moist hair, leave it on for 10 minutes, then shampoo and situation as common. What this means is the hair falls out extra conveniently, grows thinner, as well as the scalp could become so inflamed that the hair presents up and doesn’t grow whatsoever. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-SiXXn3EKKI2t7btdwEplw what I needed, and to the top of this informative article I’ll explain a little more regarding the closest matter which i’ve found to that. During this in-depth report I’m gonna show you each and every treatment that is definitely even truly worth considering to be a cure and I’m intending to rank them to be able of how very I rank them. Received a question and can’t come across the right remedy on line? Fret not as Answeropedia welcomes you to raise a query and you'll see a wide array of real solutions right away. I started using a derma stamp previous evening and possess one question: could it be Alright/recommended to make use of the scalp elixir I acquired from you once the derma stamp, or can it be superior to make use of the do-it-yourself Variation that you just lay out in the equilibrium application? Is either Okay? Once more, thank you much. Even so, occasionally there aren’t case scientific tests to again up the treatments, but in these instances this is one thing Now we have tried, tested and accepted for use ourselves.Generally speaking, I recommend the next natural strategies over the conventional and breakthrough cures. Hair follows a specific growth cycle with 3 unique and concurrent phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen. Each individual phase has precise features that determine the duration on the hair. Vitamin E, an antioxidant that assists neutralize cost-free radicals,* is frequently often called the “superior skin” vitamin,* but its assistive Attributes go much further than the skin. Vitamin E also aids your body’s blood circulation by expanding oxygen uptake, which in turn aids the human body in manufacturing new hair. It’s essential to Be aware that using the term ‘cure’ is not really an exact description of how hair loss works.

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junker-town · 6 years ago

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Every team in the MLB postseason, ranked

Let’s take stock of the rooting situation before the Wild Card games.

After a wild final weekend for the National League in which the spoilers failed to do their jobs at all, resulting in two Game 163s that were also exciting, all of the 2018 postseason teams are finally locked in. That took long enough. RIP Cardinals.

So now that we not only know which teams are in the playoffs but their opening round positions as well, we’re going to rank each team for a fun yet completely arbitrary list of who to root for this postseason.

We already covered a ranking of every possible World Series matchup elsewhere on this fun site, so this isn’t dependent on who the teams are playing in any given round. This is just based on the levels of fun and rootability of each team, with points removed for any racist logos or alleged domestic abusers they might have hanging around. Every round, I’ll update these rankings based on the events of the previous round.

Feel free to yell at me about the rankings in the comments, but know in advance I won’t care and also probably won’t remember my ranking logic and reasoning by the time you get around to complaining. It’s the postseason, let’s have fun.

10. Cubs

The Cubs are ... sigh. They haven’t been especially fun this year, and that’s before the Addison Russell situation flared up again (which the team handled poorly) or they traded for Daniel Murphy (which the team also handled poorly). Cole Hamels is doing alright, so that’s fine. And, oh boy, is Javy Báez a lot of fun. Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant remain their enjoyable Bryzzo selves even through slumps and injuries.

But other than that, the Cubs aren’t really a team you’re drawn to this postseason. Even some Cubs fans are having a bit of trouble supporting the team right now because of the aforementioned poorly handled player situations. They just won a World Series, so they’ll be fine without any extra fans on their side.

9. Indians

Besides José Ramírez and Francisco Lindor’s bats, one of which has been very sleepy heading into this postseason, the Indians don’t have a ton to latch on to this year. Gone is the team that rattled off an AL record of consecutive wins with a lineup to be feared.

Now they have Corey Kluber sans beard, Trevor Bauer rejoining the roster in time for the playoffs, and a racist logo they won’t drop and which some fans will still be wearing throughout their postseason run. All of that and every other team in the American League race is more fun by one metric or another. Just not a great year to latch on to Cleveland, there are better options.

8. Astros

One of those options is the Astros. They just won so there’s no desperation in their hunt, which is why they’re this low on the list, but they still have people like Jose Altuve, George Springer, and Alex Bregman being joyful on the field and in the dugout.

Yet where the “they could repeat as champs!” bonus should push them a little higher on this ranking, the “they traded for a domestic abuser at the deadline while he was still suspended by the league and court proceedings were ongoing, then pretended they still had a zero tolerance policy” thing cancels that bump out. At least watching Justin Verlander ruin batters’ lives throughout the postseason will still be fun, which is always an upside.

7. Brewers

The Brewers are ... fine. They’re fine! There’s nothing to really root against here other than Josh Hader succeeding in any way, shape, or form in October. Yet when you think about it there’s not really something to root for either besides Christian Yelich continuing to be a force to be reckoned with at the plate.

That Craig Counsell’s success with this Milwaukee team is a shock is a bit of a backhanded compliment but it also explains why they’re not the most enticing team to root for this year. Congrats to Jonathan Schoop for getting out of Baltimore? Mike Moustakas and Eric Thames still exist? Zach Davies still seems cool? Not much to work with. Sorry, Brew Crew.

6. Rockies

Rockies fans are going to be mad at me that they’re this low and that’s OK. But the Rockies end-of-season push can only place them so high in entertainment value and there’s no overarching story or theme that makes them more enticing to root for than the teams above them.

Nolan Arenado, Charlie Blackmon, CarGo, and German Márquez are all nice and fun and entertaining. Their pitching has mostly avoided the Coors Field Curse (hello, Kyle Freeland’s 2.85 ERA) and they’re more or less completely inoffensive as a team to get behind. They’re definitely the team most likely to move up these rankings as the postseason goes on though.

5. Yankees

A healthy Aaron Judge, pitching that runs very hot and very cold in the same game, 100 wins without winning the division, and the single-season home run record. The Yankees are good, and they are entertaining, but they are also the New York Yankees and if you are looking for a team to root for because you don’t have one I can’t in good conscience recommend them.

Yet, similar to last year, they’re a fun Yankees team. So I also can’t be mad if you decide you’d like to bandwagon them right now. You’d be wrong and unoriginal, but I’d at least understand. They’re most likely to launch up these rankings if it ends up being a Yankees-Cubs World Series or something. Oh god, can you even imagine?

4. Red Sox

The Red Sox are fun for the same reason the Yankees are (young stars, lots of dingers, facing their biggest rivals in the opening round) with the added bonus of being historically good. “They had to paint new number panels for the scoreboard” good is a type of good you don’t get to see that often.

They have two MVP candidates in Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez, Chris Sale remains magical even in a slightly down year for the ace, and they have other young, entertaining guys like Rafael Devers, Jackie Bradley Jr., Andrew Benintendi, and Xander Bogaerts. But they are still the Red Sox and that’s understandably a tough pill to swallow for many people.

They also just won a World Series in 2013 (and two more before that, of course) so they wouldn’t come close to qualifying as an underdog even if they didn’t win 108 games. Boston is this year’s “wow are they fun to watch play baseball but no one wants them to actually win any games” team. Which is fair.

3. Dodgers

The Dodgers are this high by their sheer howdidtheyevengethere quality. If you put the Dodgers’ howdidtheyevengethere in a town’s water supply it would immediately qualify as unsafe levels for humans to consume. Their pitching situation alone should be classified as toxic waste.

For a team that barely made it to the postseason, they could also easily win the whole thing and avenge 2017’s seven game loss.

If they can get out of their own way of course. Which makes them way more interesting than many teams on this list. They are neither an underdog nor a steamroller, they are both. They are every possible outcome for a playoff team at any given time. They are so entertaining because they could swing between farcical and world beating within a two inning span.

2. A’s

The A’s have this weird thing going on where they are really fun as a team but when you break them into individual entities they’re not as purely awesome. Khris Davis won the home run title this year and is by all accounts very nice but could you identify one awesomely fun thing he did this season besides hit dingers?

Matt Olson and Matt Chapman are both defensive marvels and Olson can rake, but the most entertaining thing about the both of them is pointing at the screen and saying “that’s Chappie” when Chapman does something impressive. Jed Lowrie will always be Jed Lowrie, and we love him for it. But there’s also no one unsavory on this team and besides their ongoing ballpark situation ownership is doing a decent job of hiding all of the things that make people dislike baseball owners.

Their last World Series win was in 1989, long enough ago that it’s definitely a drought that we want them to end, and they’re gone through more than enough down seasons since then that the desire for them to win it all is boosted accordingly.

1. Braves

The Braves are at the opposite spectrum of the Cubs, and they’re here because in a lot of ways they are the opposite of this year’s Chicago squad. They haven’t won a World Series since 1995, which is long enough we can call it a drought and say it would be fun if they ended it, they’re ahead of schedule in their rebuild rather than battling a closing window so there’s not much downside if they don’t win it this year, and they’re fun.

They’re so much fun! Between Freddie Freeman, Ronald Acuña, Jr., and Ozzie Albies, they have players that electrify games and force you to root for their happiness just through sheer charisma and talent. Thanks to the Phillies not living up to their rebuild promise this year and the Nationals being the Nationals, the Braves are in the postseason and poised to do something special thanks to a mix of talent and blind confidence.

If your team gets eliminated before the World Series and you’re looking for a group to invest in, you can’t do much worse than the Atlanta Braves. Bandwagon away. Just don’t look at the Tomahawk Chop and taxpayer money used to pay for their unnecessary new field behind the curtain.

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