#I mean the british definition

[egophiliac]

OMG EGO HAVE YOU SEEN THE BOOK 7 CATER CARD YET

80s britpunk Cater is such an incredible direction to take. his Sid Vicious jacket! his little british police cap! I wouldn't have anticipated that going full-on Sex Pistols would be his alternate self but it is SO fitting actually. 😭

(also th-the crown symbol?! the gavel?! is housewarden Cater real because I will TRANSCEND --)

[walkingstackofbooks]

uh for your ask game – either DS9 or Voyager for who would make the best roommate?

Oooh, I'm gonna DS9 this!

(I'm ranking this without taking into consideration any partners or kids that would usually be sharing a character's space - for this, everyone's the singlest of pringles :P )

Sisko - He's respectful of your space, easy to get along with, and he loves to cook and feed anyone within touch range. 10/10 could not ask for a better roomie.

Ezri - Only downside is that it's possibly a bit awkward to get counselling... but she's great, a super lovely roommate.

Odo - He doesn't *want* a roommate, but if it's really necessary he'll put up with it... and avoid the room as much as possible. He'll probably organise your schedules so you can avoid each other too. Great if you want a roomie you never see.

Kira - She tries to be a good roommate - and most of the time she's great! - but isn't the best at compromising when she thinks she's right. (Also, while it's not her fault, she has awful nightmares, so when your shifts line up to sleep at the same time...)

Miles - He's fine. Your room has a tendency to get awfully cluttered with weird shit when you've been away on a mission for too long though...

Worf - Fine. He doesn't want to have a roommate and it shows. He's mostly respectful of your space, but exposure to Klingon Opera is a hazard of being in this room.

Julian - He really tries hard to be a good roommate, and he loves having a roommate!! Just... a bit too much... Whenever you're both in the room he wants to talk to you. Plus if he can't sleep he'll start doing weird research and muttering to himself until he remembers that he has a roommate now and should probably be quiet.

Jadzia - She's lovely, but not overly concerned about how good a roomie she is: honestly, she doesn't realise it, but she does have a tendency to think of it firstly as "her" room and secondarily as yours. If you pointed that out to her, she'd try and correct that though. And then there are the parties. (Honestly, if you love parties she's probably way higher up the list but I'm a grumpy old so-and-so who goes to bed before 9 most nights so anyone stopping me sleeping is automatically on my nope list :P)

Quark - The first honestly bad roommate. I can't help feeling he'd be loudly irrated at even having to have a roommate in the first place and then he would try to wheedle his way into getting you to give him oo-mox at least once a week and every little annoyance would have him demanding compensation in latinum and he'd milk his "sensitive hearing" for all it was worth on that count and no. I'm not dealing with him. I'll sleep in a jeffries tube instead.

Garak. Forget choosing to sleep in a jeffries tube - you'd be forced to upon returning to your quarters and finding yourself locked out because of all the extra security measures he's added without asking you. And even if forced to let you in, he doesn't want a roommate and is more than happy to use every passive aggressive move in the book to make you ask for a transfer. Or if that doesn't work, he'll be aggressively nice instead until the paranoia of if he's going to snap and assassinate you someday starts to drive you crazy. Don't get me wrong, Garak would make a wonderful friend... But roommate? Definitely not!

Man there's so much room for disagreement here though - I'd be super interested to hear anyone else's takes!!

[darkfire359]

What could have been: sympathizing with Ed in season 2

I've talked before about how much I love Ed and all his complexity. I've written more fanfic about him and Izzy than any other characters, in my entire history of fandom. And unlike many people, I wasn't unprepared for the dark direction his arc took in season 2; I wanted him to commit MORE atrocities, and I happily made comparisons between him and another one of my favorite characters, Hannibal Lector.

But one of the key things I wanted after he committed atrocities was for him to feel bad about it. And I thought we'd see that! After all, S1 Ed was so tormented about killing his dad (who was abusive and violent towards) him that he never killed (directly) again! He was so broken up about trying to kill Stede in s1e6 that he ended up crying in a bathtub. Just like he cried in the window sill after committing all the kraken horrors in s1e10. It seemed like this was a guy scared of his own inner darkness, convinced he was a monster, who would go around saying things like "I'm not a good person" and "You were always going to realize who I am."

And so even when s2 went darker than anyone expected—when he cut off more of Izzy's toes, and shot him in the leg, and made crewmen fight to the death for experiencing love, and sailed the entire ship into a storm to murder-suicide his crew—I was still ready to accept all that moral ambiguity and give him a hug afterwards. Because of course, I figured that after Ed was brought out of that dark place and those suicidal urges, he would feel horrible remorse. How could he not?

I was looking forward to seeing him break down crying, convinced he was an irredeemable, unforgivable monster. (Which of course, would make it all the more touching when people inevitably did forgive him, and when he did redeem himself). Maybe Ed would even go too far with trying to atone, like in Mercy, one of my favorite post-s1 fics. Probably, I figured, Ed's quest for redemption would be one of the main themes in the second half of season 2.

So it was strange to watch e4, when Ed looked nothing but annoyed at everyone for chaining him up and banishing him, and then he went to hang out with his old friends like he'd done nothing wrong. When after the crew unanimously voted him out, Stede brought him back to the ship literally that same evening, and Ed saw no problem with that. Okay... maybe he's still processing?

Then e5 came, and that episode was about Ed's redemption. Yay! Except... Ed didn't seem to care? Other people made him wear the bag and the bell. He asked how long it'd take people to get over it, guessing "like a day." He gave an influencer-esque non-apology to the crew. He said "I took a man's leg" rather than calling Izzy by name. He literally doesn't remember the circumstances of pushing Lucius off the boat. He does ultimately give a real apology to Fang—for tormenting him years ago, rather than anything from his actual kraken era. I love e5 for the Izzy+Stede dynamic, but watching Ed be an unrepentant asshole here is painful. There is nothing about this that convinces me Ed wouldn't slide right back to being evil if Stede were to leave again.

And the thing is, it didn't have to be like this! We could have gotten Ed breaking down crying with guilt like in s1e6, and it would have made him much more sympathetic—not to mention the fact that Ed really is just an adorable cryer. Alternatively, we could have had some real deep diving about why Ed never apologizes (is he afraid of seeming weak?) or why he's so uncaring about others' pain (has he seen too many friends die over the years, to the point of going numb?)

By episode 6, it seems like most characters have moved on. Stede says something about Ed turning poison into positivity, which feels completely unearned. He pays for the party—but he'd previously tried to make the crew throw their cut of the loot into the ocean. He makes some attempts to best Ned and protect Stede, but Stede ends up saving the crew instead—from a pirate who only showed up in the first place because Ed was intentionally trying to piss him off. Ed is sad that Stede kills someone, and this would be a great time to again make Ed sympathetic! To have him talk about how he doesn't want that for Stede, because his own violence has weighed on him so deeply. But nope.

E6 does see Ed actually apologize to Izzy—and he's terrible at it. He's just like, "Sorry about your leg," makes no eye contact, and flees immediately afterwards. We do see some hints that this shitty apology isn't really indicative of Ed's true feelings, given how he has those flashbacks to the scenes of hurting Izzy seemingly haunting him; but it's very brief. It would be a great time to address Ed's horrific tendency towards conflict-aversion and avoiding awkward conversations in relationships—the same tendency that made s1 Ed never inform Izzy that the plan to kill Stede and the Revenge crew had changed. This would be another great opportunity to help us sympathize with Ed again—to have us see how it's not that he doesn't want to communicate these things, it's that these conversations are terribly stressful and anxiety-inducing for him. But nah, why would OFMD need to include those things for Ed?

E7 happens, and still nothing. If anything, there was a great opportunity for Ed to at least show himself to be a kind person to Stede—maybe nobly stepping in to save the day, even though he's annoyed that Stede's getting all this attention now. You know, like Stede did for him back in s1e5, when the situation was reversed. But nope, Ed runs off to be a fisherman, not having learned any of the earlier season's lessons about whims. He only stops being a fisherman because he's bad at it.

I was still hoping for something big in e8��some huge selfless, gesture that Ed would do to cover for all of his inability to do the little gestures. Ed is good at grand gestures! Swimming back to the ship after he left, then taking the Act of Grace in s1 was HUGE. Very selfless, very sweet! He could have done something like that for Izzy, Lucius, and the traumatized crew. Some kind of heroic gesture to help others more than himself. But nope. In some sense, Izzy dying is one of the greatest indications of Ed's wasted potential, because we narratively had a great opportunity for Ed to be able to save someone... but he didn't.

(Admittedly, Ed is not a complete dick here—he helps Izzy when he's limping, he says some genuinely apologetic stuff when Izzy's dying, and he finally gives Izzy his attention and care. But then after the funeral, he's still like "Well, that's that.")

It's so frustrating. It's not that I don't want to like Ed, or that I don't want to sympathize with him. I really, REALLY do! I don't even need Ed to successfully do anything to earn forgiveness! I'd take Ed trying and failing. I'd take him wanting to try, but being so convinced of his monstrousness that he never makes the attempt. But give me something. Anything other than the unexamined apathy that he has so much of the time.

The thing is, s2 lost the ability for Ed's mistreatment of people to be just another "of course he's violent, he's a pirate" quirk. They were pretty explicit about how abusive Ed was (Jim's comment in e1, the joke in e4 people assumed Ed had hit Stede) and how much he traumatized people (Lucius and the whole crew very clearly have PTSD in episodes 4 and 5). This is serious stuff, which he did to other main characters, which is going to make a lot of viewers look at him pretty harshly.

And that's manageable—Hannibal Lector managed to be most textbook-abusive asshole in the world, committing atrocities and generally being unrepentant left and right, and viewers STILL found him lovable and sympathetic. You can do that! But you need to:

a. make it clear that anyone with the relevant information calls them out for being awful, even multiple episodes later

b. make it clear that they care deeply and genuinely about their wronged loved ones

c. make them willing to actually make REAL sacrifices

I watched so many people start to dislike or outright hate Ed in season 2. It made me really sad. But I couldn't blame them for feeling that way. For all that Ed is supposedly one of the two protagonists in OFMD—a character whose mistakes should be the most understandable, whose mental state should be the most resonant—the show seemed to entirely drop the ball on writing him as such.

[elminster-big-naturals]

"what kind of law did astarion pass to piss off the gur so much 😂"

aside from the fact magisters don't pass laws, the implication that cazador was just kind of casually waiting around for his moment bc knew astarion was Such a dickhead that someone was going to beat his ass to death eventually is extremely funny

[rxttenfish]

god the reddening was a book that i wanted to like so bad. and yet. and yet.

[k1ngl30n]

Doing Physics homework with @nickydoesadraw Obviously, there was no possible universe where we could be normal about it

It starts. Relatively normal

Gets a bit messier. Obviously had to have him fishing in the hydroelectric power plant

We were originally going to have him say something here but dear Nick decided that it is a whole lot funnier if we just left it (I wholeheartedly agree)

Oh! Uh oh! He's not doing so well! (The lengths I went to in order to get that FUCKING SCREENSHOT is not a story that you want to be retold! Believe me!) My favourite bit from that slide is the fact that we're completely going to ignore how it's getting a bit Will's clock-esque and the 'Renewable energy resources are unreliable. This can be counteracted by taking lots of aspirin.' We're literally just going to read over it and pretend like it isn't there

Then, suddenly! And without warning! His encephalitis is fixed!

Thanks for listening to our presentation

[desperatepleasures]

HASUMI!!!!!

[bibleofficial]

me realizing that the slang term i’ve used to say ‘get scammed’ a) isn’t spelled that way & b) is actually a slur

[5mcsinatrenchcoat]

I remember back in 2015 it was a popular talking point that the american voice for fem Inq was apparently only fit for qunari and maybe dwarves, 'cause it's so low and ungirly. Which, raises several unfortunate implications in that line of thinking alone, but that's not the point.

The point is the excitement I'm seeing for Erika's Rook is healing my soul. (Granted, she's genderfluid, and their voice won't be restricted to 'fem' Rooks this time, but you know what I mean).

[perilegs]

i love those annoying ass 2007-ish action protagonist guys with their shitty one liners and bad attitudes towards everything and mediocre growth all tied into a story that's not very good but overall enjoyable

[capaldiera]

:/

[pebblezone]

About to serve absolutely abysmal cunt

[googletranslateofficial]

Being as vague as humanly possible by telling people the fandom I write for is “20th century RPF”

[skyburger]

best day of my life was when vimms lair let other regional versions of games be on the site u have no idea how happy i was. like yes finally i dont have to send people digging through a huge archive.org dump of DS games so they can play professor layton & not suffer thru lukes american dub voice 😭

[marinerainbow]

@wicked1will0sparkles this is the TP cousins.

Penny and Percy are the first two that are freaking out, "Did mum say anybody was coming while she was gone??" "No!"

They turn to Lottie, not noticing a certain look in her eyes, "You??" ".... No-" "Hit the deck!"

Penny and Percy are grabbing their unkles spare bat while Lottie's watching them, before the baby Jewel comes strolling into the room, "What are you imbécils doing??" "Get down, you idiot, somebody's at the door!"

Which, yes, Jewel is the evil genius child... But she is still the baby of the group, and may or may not be eager to see her cousins react to intruders, "Mierda!" *shuts light off before rushing into the living room*

Lottie, not saying a word while Percy stalks towards the door with the bat raised, while Penny keeps the little cousin behind her, "I'm going in..." "You don't have to do this!" "No, I have to."

Percival, pushing his dread far into the back of his mind as he peeks out the peephole, ready to strike whoever dare came to harm his family... Until he sees exactly who it is, "Oh thank fu-"

"What??"

"It's just Teddy and their stupid friend!

From behind the door, "I heard that, Percy."

And Lottie, now that the gig is up, just offhandedly mentions, "Oh yeah, Teddy's coming over. I forgot to mention that."

"Oh, you 'forgot', huh??"

I can only imagine how their parents would react to this XDDD

[i-like-gay-books]

in studying abroad again right now (not for a whole semester, just for three weeks in an intensive program) in france and actually having such a good time in a way i almost never was in england and not to brag but i do actually think the fact that i didnt like england means i pass the vibe check