#I still feel bad for advertising a sims story I was then asked not to make | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sweetsunshinedarling · 7 months

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Posted with no tags because I honestly just want to post my thoughts into the void, plus don’t want to upset the crowd that put blog peter on a pedestal as they’re entitled to their opinions and everyone has different thoughts on the same thing. Mostly just ill today and getting my thoughts down somewhere.

Ok, so I very occasionally see people state that they believe the Tumblr blog was false advertisement and/or Blog Peter is too different to game Peter. Everyone has their own impression and opinions but I just don’t see it or get it? I think it down to 4 major things.

1) People read and took in what they wanted to from the blog. Ignoring the implications of any darker posts.

2) Peter lacks agency in the blog. There is no player character to interact with for him to actually do anything and therefore you can assume he wouldn’t do anything to bad.

3) There were a lot of lighter, fluffier questions because that's what people wanted to ask. Game Peter is also sweet, but he’s on a time limit and has agency so you don’t get as much as the blog. While blog Peter went from 2019 till 2021, had no agency and got mostly sweet questions.

4) the games time to tell a story is limited the blog went from 2019 till 2021 and had all the time in the word to focus on more mundane things. While the game has to, you know, tell a story, keep you hooked etc.

There's more to it then just the above but I think these are the 4 key points. I’ll go into each in more detail but for transparency my introduction to the game was seeing day 1 played, reading the website, reading through the blog in full, looking through the deviant art stuff, THEN playing the game.

I surprisingly didn’t get day 2 or 3 spoiled until I played them. I can’t usually stand dating sims when they are just dating sims. I cringe and dialogue etc BUT I really like dating sims with some kind of twist, so like horror or comedy. I mostly stick to more traditional video games and not really VN.

So, I looked into this because it seemed interesting but also to try and figure out if I would like it. I went into it wondering how much it would be horror and how much it would be a dating sim. I personally had no expectations of it falling either way. Even after reading through the Tumblr. Basically, I figured it could go full horror with the fake dating sim opening or just a spice of horror but mostly dating sim and anywhere else on that spectrum.

1) Ignoring the bad. Lots of these are from 2019.

Again important that this version of Peter is UNABLE to do anything physical. The ask blog just had him stuck in a white void. There is no player character to act as avatar for the player. He is behind the screen ONLY able to use words. He is also unlikely to say anything to scare away his audience and yet he is still threatening to do exactly what he would go on to do in the game. Posts like this are scattered throughout the blog.

I will show more examples. But yeah, I do wonder how people think he would manage to tie you to the bed but in like a soft none hurty way. Like blog Peter threatens to take away my agency, but he's super vague about it and therefore not as cruel as game Peter :)

He’s also skipping out the middle man here, he isn’t talking with Y/N and he isn’t talking to any other NPC that would just resurrect when the game loops around again. He is talking to YOU.

And some more examples! These are from 2019 when the blog started. Just Peter threatening murder, doing “Anything” to keep you and also disregarding your feelings in a threatening manner!

And again important note THIS PETER HAS NO AGENCY. He isn’t able to take any action against you. There is no vessel for the player. He is behind a screen and still threatening to do stuff.

The horror element of the blog came from leaving that up to your interpretation of what he could do. A basic rule of horror is to sometime leave stuff up to the imagination of the viewer! We have a tendency of (for survival) imagining the worst possible outcome. However, if you had solely focused on the cuter posts you MAY also simply over look these posts or give him the benefit of the doubt that he surely wouldn’t do anything to bad. But like come on these were absolutely advertisements for the horror element of the game.

Plus, you know, the whole manipulation thing. If he can’t do anything to keep your attention then he’ll be all bubbly and sweet to keep you there and these asks are likely a glimpse into a less controlled version of him slipping through.

2) Peter lacking agency.

I have already touched on this in the above but its exactly what it says on the tin. Blog Peter had to rely more on manipulation then anything physical because he had no avatar of the player and therefore no (almost) physical access to them.

Side note: I feel like I should also point out that I personally don’t see Peter as someone that would point blank commit r*pe or do more damage then he thinks he has to.

It is however important to point out that he is aware that Y/N is an avatar for the player. He is aware that none of them are real in the same sense that we are and therefore he is able to manipulate himself into thinking his actions aren’t THAT bad or at the very least excusable to get what he wants.

What does it matter if he kills TK, they’ll be back when the game loops. Knocking Y/N out is just a game mechanics to get from one place without issue to another. He’s would do ANYTHING (refer to image 3 above) to keep YOUR attention. That's were the horror element comes from. How corrupted can he get, how much of this is our fault? I mean we are the one playing the game over and over. Putting him through this over and over to the point that its corrupted him. Etc. Etc. Like really all of this is for another post, but thought it best to mention.

3) Fluffier questions. They were answering what people asked and a lot of questions were the typical, “What's your favourite colour Peter!” kinda thing. The game doesn’t have the time to focus on any of this. It also would be horrible story telling if it just randomly had a 20 minute section of just this stuff. So peters sweeter moments are far narrowed down. Examples of questions for the blog below that you just could fit the same quantity you got in the blog on the game.

Also, if you just so happened to focus on these questions and focus less or point blank ignored the implications of darker questions then I can understand if you thought he was practically harmless, but it isn’t as if it wasn’t advertised. You just ignored it.

And in some cases they still tried to use darker wording to allude to shit

Or just point blank suggest he watches you masturbate etc through the computer. But you know, I guess overstepping these boundaries is fine?

Like the nice posts aren’t wrong. Peter would 100% do all this nice shit for you. In game Peter even does nice stuff and would likely will do more if given the opportunity.

Like this is 100% canon. This is what Peter truly wants. HES JUST WILLING AT THIS POINT TO DO ANYTHING TO GET IT.

ANYTHING. Also, People commit violence against him isn’t often brought up? Peter is just manipulating a game mechanic when he does shit, everyone but him will reset, but he remembers everything that's happened to him.

Like ???

4)The games time to tell a story is limited the blog went from 2019 till 2021 and had all the time in the word to focus on more mundane things. While the game has to, you know, tell a story, keep you hooked etc.

Again this is kind of on the tin. Not much I can add to this. The game has multiple routes. To try and make it make sense they have to be careful about what they put into the game and the more they put in the more complex it is and the more they open themselves to plot holes etc.

You do get examples of Peter being sweet but they also have to crack on with the story and actually get to the horror, the game to me was ALWAYS advertised as a horror dating sim. I don’t think there was false advertisement at any point. At least not on purpose. There were always plenty of warnings. Its not like DDLC which had a health warning followed by 3-4 hours of a dating sim and then a horror game. The signs were there form early in the blog in 2019! A lot of these post are from 2019! And the website etc always showed it to be a horror dating sim. Even the character designs lean towards horror over dating sim.

Some minor points as well are the idea that if you followed the blog and didn’t go through it, there is a good chance you could have missed some of the darker posts and saw more of the wholesome posts as they were posted. Unintentional from the creators, but you would have ended up with a different impression and once you have a set thought on the guy you tend to down play or ignore anything that contradicts the idea of him being a good boy and focus on stuff that proves that point of view.

I also don’t think Peter is capable of really extreme shit that you see in games that are JUST horror. He is very corrupted and WILL do fucked up shit, but usually it’s if he’s pushed (abuse route or running out of options) and again, he’s working in a universe were none of them are real, his actions don’t have any lasting impact and Y/N isn’t actually their but just a device for the player to be attached to. He knows all this. The guy has likely gone through the game already like a zillion times at this point with no sign that it’s going to stop and he is programed to be obsessively in love with you by a creator that fucking loves to destroy him. And YOU are putting him through this again and again. Maybe even torturing him a bit each time. He has like groundhog day morals at this point, because none of it’s gonna stick anyway and he has to have you. All stuff that makes it a horror game in different ways.

So, I personally don’t get the false advertisement argument like at all? Also, hopefully goes without saying, either way I do not condone anything Peter does in either the blog or game that is morally wrong, but I think part of the horror comes from how much you the player and Peter’s moral compass can be corrupted based on circumstances. Like what he and you the player are capable of doing while talking yourself around to thinking its ok or that it’s somehow deserved.

Just thoughts on something I didn’t ever get when I saw it. Posted without tags on a blog with zero followers because this blog is just to shoot my thoughts into the void to be honest. If this is found, I am also not trying to shit on anyone’s opinions, these are just my thoughts and I am not saying my views are anymore right than anyone elses! It just always confused me that people make excuses/ play up blog Peter to be a completely different character than the game version? But maybe it’s because I came into the game from a background of playing video games in general, with a good helping of horror.

#adding tags so I can find #ybg peter #ybg #thoughts

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doberbutts · 2 years

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Tag to make sure I don’t forget: @alliered asked for my review of Harvestella [so far] and I didn’t want to write a whole huge long scroll monster for those who want to skip it. So for those who don’t care about videogames, here’s a readmore

I’m about halfway through the first season (I think? This will be a point later) and mid chapter 3 of ??? so keep in mind I am pretty early on in the game still.

As said in my original post about the game, it’s not really a Stardew clone, so anyone expecting that going in is inherently going to be disappointed. I did not see any advertising for this game (intentionally- as stated I prefer going in 100% blind if possible) so I don’t know if it was advertised specifically as a Stardew clone or if it was just supposed to be a farming sim with Final Fantasy elements. Which personally I would say it’s a Final Fantasy game- and a FF offshoot game at that- with farming elements. Think Crystal Chronicles and Tatics when thinking of the tone and “feel” of the game, with gameplay more akin to CC or even some of the Mana games.

It has a fairly robust job system which, so far, is mostly a stance dance. Mage is good against some enemies and bad against others. Lancer is better for these enemies but Fighter’s better for those. And so on. I haven’t really seen any indicators to tell me which job is best for which enemy but you can switch on the fly (you’re supposed to switch on the fly) and your appearance and weapon change accordingly. Kind of like how in X-2, the different costumes gave you different abilities. I’ve been defaulting Fighter/Mage because those are the first two classes and they give you pretty beefy hits for many of the beginning enemies, but I’m sure as the game rolls on I’ll probably find something I like better.

Farming is fairly simple, and this is where I think a lot of people were disappointed. You’ve got a house and a field you can upgrade and put stuff on, yes. But those used to the level of customization found in later Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons/Rune Factory games, and even Stardew Valley, are going to resent the fact that there’s nothing really to mark it as “yours”. There’s a set number of places you can put things and a set number of things you can put. You can upgrade the house but so far I’ve not found any fun decorative options and it doesn’t really seem like that’ll be a thing here. It’s much more early Harvest Moon in that way, actually as I’ve been playing I’ve been thinking about how similar it is to Innocent Life, which I thought was fun enough but a lot of people really didn’t like it. That game’s sitting at a 5-6/10 even nowadays, and it came out in 2007 [in the US].

Anyway, the farming aspect is mostly just so you can make money. On one hand they do flat-out tell you that (”but you must make money somehow, so why not grow and sell vegetables”) and plot-wise it makes sense in the grand scheme, but I do think at the current moment you could take out the farming elements and it would play mostly the same with little detraction of quality, and that kinda sucks for a game marketed as a “farming sim”, you know? It’s just a chore to do so you don’t run out of money while you’re off adventuring every day. In fairness, that’s also what crops turn into towards the end of Stardew, where if you’re doing it right your farm is mostly automated and you’re fucking off 99% of the time to one of the dungeons or running around after villagers or chasing elusive difficult-to-catch fish.

Speaking of- villager NPCs. I understand why they made them this way but I do think that it will put a lot of people off. The vast majority of NPCs are nameless, with no portrait or unique quality whatsoever, and there is no relationship/friendship system with them. Important NPCs are named, have a portrait, and also have a serious case of Main Character Syndrome where they stand out from everyone else. These are the people you can build social connections with, not the others (outside of cute little sidequests that are 100% optional). This is in part because there are multiple towns and giving each of these 20-ish person towns unique, fleshed out characters is, well... super fucking annoying and a waste of time especially knowing that many of these characters are gunna have maybe 3 lines. Also, gone are the days of memorizing your future spouse’s daily routine just so you can chase them around and throw a turnip at them every day and making sure you enter a map by the south exit at exactly 3pm on a sunny day (yes I’m looking at you, Kai romance in FoMT)- you level up your social connections via doing quests and completing the story.

Fishing is: buy book about fishing, select “fish” when at a designated fishing area, wait, press “A” when you hear a big splash, ta-da you have a fish. So there is no fishing minigame which I know some folks were sad about but also that is more or less how fishing has worked in the various Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games for decades so... Also I distinctly remember when Stardew first came out everyone hated the fishing minigame because it was poorly explained and also super hard, and there’s still mods to make fishing easier in Stardew to this day, so maybe the lack of a minigame is not such a bad thing.

Plot is pretty standard fare Final Fantasy shenanigans. The crystals are Being Weird and You Have Amnesia But Seem To Be Connected To It All and The Religion Is Heavily Foreshadowed To Be Bad. I do like that your friend Aria has a backstory so far that’s pretty much I’m The Main Character, but she’s not the main character. I thought that was an interesting subversion of the isekai trope where someone else was brought from our world into this one and our job is getting her back [heavily implied that we, also, don’t belong in this particular world, of course].

Combat... well. This is actually a pretty legitimate problem- we’ve established that it’s not really a farming game, it’s a Final Fantasy game with farming elements. Okay, so we’re fighting monsters and going home to water the turnips got it. Except... the combat system is... incredibly simple. Press button, hit monster. Press button a whole bunch of times to hit monster until it dies. But without a dash, dodge, or combat roll (there is, technically, a dash if you tap the “run” button but I found that by accident, no tutorial told me that I had a dash) that means that you’re mostly standing there getting wailed on by a monster and trying to out-HP the damned thing while shoving food in your face to keep yourself from dying in the mean time.

Your NPC buddies are often not incredibly helpful- they don’t aggro enemies on their own but that also means that if you aggro an enemy by accident, they’re not helping until after you hit it for the first time. Enemies usually target the player character, so the option of running up to something, hitting it, and retreating so your buddies can absorb the damage while you whittle down their HP is not readily available either. I’ve only died once and it was because I aggro’d a level 9 enemy while I was level 3 (oops) so it’s not unworkable, but it is annoying. The folks on Steam complained about the lack of haptic feedback, meaning that the feel of the hits don’t really feel like you’re hitting anything, and while I do agree that on Switch at least it’s not as good of a feel as other games (AC Valhalla and that bow tho...) it’s also not the worst I’ve experienced either. I will say that it’s much better now that I’m in chapter 3 and have a third party member, rather than just having a singular partner, but still.

Time... so remember the “I think I’m halfway through the first season”? There is no calendar I can find so how long do the seasons last? Well I don’t have any idea but I’m on day 16 so clearly longer than 15 or 7, both of which have been season limits in other farming games I’ve played. I’m assuming either 28 or 30 now but, genuinely, I just don’t know. This is kind of a problem in the first season because without knowing how long the season lasts, I can’t determine if it’s a good idea to grow those crops that are high valued but take 6 days to grow, over crops that are low value but are ready in just 1. Again, this is an important factor in the farming aspect, so while I’m sure I’ll be just fine once I hit summer because I’ll have an idea of what the change of seasons looks like, right now I have absolutely no clue what’s ahead of me. What happens when I run out of time? Are we talking Rune Factory 5 where all crops grow in all seasons but some crops grow extra good in certain seasons? Or is this a Stardew hard limit? What about crops that say they can grow in both spring and summer, will they die or will they continue to grow if I plant them in spring but they’re not done til summer?

A lot of people complained about the clock being way too fast and, maybe it’s just the seasoned farming sim player in me, but I think it’s fine? You don’t have a lot of time to fuck around but I cleared the first dungeon in a single day and that was even with me taking the time to do the time-penalty repairs on shortcuts etc. At first I thought maybe it was a holdover from people who’d played the demo, because apparently there was a day-one patch that lengthened the day timer, but there’s folks with 20 hours on record on Steam saying it’s too fast and I just don’t agree.

Similarly, initially the game starts pestering you to go back home at 6pm, and the first day it forced me to go home and sleep at 9pm, and that was very jarring. I understand that it’s trying to teach players to watch the clock and not get caught out past the day-end timer, but I can see why someone would dislike that. But that was just the first day, and it didn’t force me home after that, and after I cleared chapter 1 it stopped pestering me about sundown at 6. It does still poke you at 9pm and 10pm by chapter 3 but, again, other farming sims do warn you albeit less blatantly as you get close to the day-end timer. It’s also an earlier time- midnight- than a lot of the competition which lets you stay up til 2-4am depending on which one, but I never understood that since I literally come from a farming community and there is absolutely no way someone can continuously go to bed at 2-4am and wake up at the penalty 10am (instead of regular 6am) and feel rested enough to do it again the next day when it comes to farms.

The stamina system also pisses people off which I don’t understand because a lot of them are Stardew players and Stardew has a stamina system. And, again, I’m coming from the oldschool Harvest Moon games where you took a stamina penalty for fucking running in the rain. Long story short, everything except walking and talking costs stamina. You do have a lot, and the game also tells you first thing that you need to eat in the morning so you can recover stamina as you work throughout the day. I eat a single sandwich in the morning and I have yet to have a stamina crisis. I’ve been down to the wire a few times if I was doing a lot of farming, then went into a dungeon and fought a bunch of enemies, then stopped and harvested a bunch of stuff, without eating. But I can do all of those things on one sandwich and still have more than half my stamina by the end of the day. Just make sure you eat.

A big complaint a lot of people had is that the towns and the dungeons feel large but empty, with nothing really to do. I both agree and disagree- again my other farming sim this year was Rune Factory 5 which I would absolutely agree felt large but empty and like nothing I was doing really made a huge difference. Compared to that, this was an improvement, with more stuff to do around the towns and more people to talk to and more variety than three seasons of giving people their favorite gifts and getting the same weirdly aggressive and distrusting dialogue as when I first booted the game. But I do also agree that many of these maps feel very big but with very little to do in them. I find myself wanting to interact with people’s shelfs and wardrobes and assorted pots and pans, even just a little popup saying “[NPC]’s bookshelf, lined with medical texts”, and there’s nothing like that. It’s a little detail but I think it goes a long way to make a world feel lived-in instead of sterile. Animations when interacting with things in the dungeons, rather than a black screen and flavor text, would help as well. And, yes, giving some of these characters some variety- on x day [NPC] will be here between 6am and 10am, on y day [NPC] will be in their bedroom, etc would make me want to really pay attention to the layout of the town and interact with the town more. It doesn’t do any of these things, so it just feels... empty. The NPCs I want to talk to are always standing in a specific spot, unless I’m about to start a quest in which case they’re standing at the <!!!> on the map.

Weirdly there’s no voice acting for cutscenes, but there is voice acting for both just wandering around and also combat. Seems like a strange choice but ok. I’m not someone who needs voice acting in order to enjoy a game, again I am from the era of the Gameboy where we didn’t even have fucking color on our non-backlit screens, but it’s odd to hire voice actors and then not... use them...

And on that note, this is a personal pet peeve, but TEXT DIALOGUE TAKES TOO LONG and there is no way to make it go faster or skip it. So while I’m reflex-mashing “A” to try and hurry this along because the text boxes stick around long after I’m done reading them, invariably I will accidentally select a dialogue option I didn’t want, because there’s also a delay between what’s displayed on the screen during cutscenes vs what the buttons are doing. Probably a minor annoyance for most people but this is a big one for me. If you’re going to make me read a bunch of text I don’t mind, but you have to give me the option to rapidly click through it because I read faster than developers think people read. It’s like they made it so the text boxes stay up for long enough to be subtitles for voice work, and then... decided not to do voice work, and so now we just have text boxes that stay up forever.

Graphics are pretty usually. The first couple days for whatever reason sometimes the textures wouldn’t load and so I just had low res avatars walking around and I was like “whoa this looks like garbage suddenly” and then that? Stopped? So idk what that was about but I’ll bet if people are in chapter 1 or 2 and are saying the graphics are shit, that’s probably happening to them too. It went back to normal but it was very strange and I can more than understand being really put off by that. Do really like the art style, I’ve always liked the art style of the older FF stuff and this feels very similar with a bit of a modern twist. I especially like the way they’ve done the character portraits and I think that’s just my love of linework and pretty shading but who’s to say. I do really like that the choices for protag are so identical- too many games have radically different male vs female models and this model is more or less “has boobs” and “doesn’t have boobs” and that’s it. The outfits are slightly, slightly different as is the hair but it’s mostly boob or boobn’t.

So, yeah. I’d say a 7/10. Certainly some optimization issues. I think either the combat or the farming should be beefier- either give me a Final Fantasy game with actually good combat and some really simplistic farming, or a farming game with actually good mechanics and some really simplistic combat, but don’t give me a combo of both with simplistic combat and farming. Could be a little more fleshed out and it shows that it wasn’t. Dunno if this specific game had crunch but if it did (willing to bet it did, Squeenix is really churning them out this year), that’s probably why the lack of little details and also voice acting. Overall it’s fun, I don’t regret the purchase so that’s the important part, and out of the various new farming sims I’ve played recently this was the most fun. Not interested in the nostalgia-bait of A Wonderful Life (which I logged far too many hours on my gamecube) and RF3′s re-release doesn’t have gay marriage so I’m not into that either. Maybe into Fae Farm next year, it’s apparently really similar to Fantasy Life (another game I logged far too many hours).

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mangosimoothie · 2 years

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ik u said to ignore it but i cant ignore it because im a natural snoop and i fucking love reading tags. its where people show their colors and i think everyone has a rainbow inside them. which prompts me to say that u dont have to answer this. hell, u can ignore this.

anyway, maybe its coz im using tumblr wrong. i literally only come here to grab some *feels* (good and bad) at the popular reblogs and then occasionally join in the simblr "oooh" and "gaaah!!" eras that i feel like im missing out on what u call the Back in the Day tumblr era. tumblr was advertised to me as a blogging site so like lmfao.

maybe its also because of the power of the anon feature that i can actually make myself be able to enter ur ask box without feeling too shy or scared that im here to comment on ur post. is it because we're far too scared to interact beyond the comments or is it because drama (not sure if theres a better word for it, controversy maybe?) has scarred us and being able to comment on things without the anon feature kind of scares us all now?

regarding simblr drama posts that blow up, u could probably also contribute it to bandwagon, right? like obv, its not the only reason it blows up but bandwagon helps. its far too easy to join in the opinion that everyone agrees on and parrot it around. like idk if im making sense but isnt it kinda easier to "not have an opinion" but rb that other person's opinion/fact that the rest of the community has deemed correct or right as if its your own (ok maybe this sentence sounds bad and i could probably phrase it as "i have an opinion about it but this other person has worded it so perfectly that i will rb this instead". anyway i'll leave it in coz the previous one could be true to some people). not that its bad, im honestly glad most of us agree on smth, it just sometimes loses that sense of discussion u probably meant if we're all just parroting everything.

i mean, i've seen it happen. especially during certain major events here where my dash was full of the same post being reblogged by myself and a couple others with no additional ideas (even tags sometimes, like i said i love tags i think tags hold a lot of unspoken but spoken ideas if u get it).

i had a point here somewhere. anyway what i meant to say was, i think i have similar feelings with u regarding discussions (lmfao look at this long post). but im far too scared to get out of anon to actually have it with u or anyone else in simblr.

have a good day/night tho :"D

Hahah no thank you for snooping on my tags 😅 what I meant to say is, I notice that most engagement happens through likes instead of comments, which is just really frustrating because yeah, I am used to tumblr being more of a forum so likes feel very empty to me. Unless it’s “”drama”” then yeah like you said, people are more inclined to comment. Like my first post that blew up was literally just “not someone charging $3 for sims nipples” or st like that which was really funny but also a little sad bc I would’ve loved to engage like that on posts I actually cared about and that weren’t just me being cheeky lol. That said, I understand what you mean about feeling too shy. I asked about this earlier - why ask questions on anon if they’re not mean - and for most people yeah, it boiled down to being shy or not wanting to seem over eager. But I LOVE when people are eager about my nonsense, I LOVE when people ramble like this in tags or comments or my inbox about my story/sims. That is the sole thing that’s kept me active here tbh - the couple people who comment and send me asks instead of just throwing a like here and there. I’ve been told many times that engagement on simblr is a lot lower than it used to be which is a little discouraging. I’ll look at my friends with large blogs and even though their stories get 100s of likes there’s still only 2-5 comments! I’d be pulling my hair out!! Maybe it’s a pet peeve that’s kinda specific to me lol but it does bother me sometimes especially when I put a q like hey tell me what you thought about x or whatever the case may be. Like even going so far as to be like “instead of a like tell me about x :) “ and that still not working. I guess that’s just not the way people engage on tumblr anymore :/ 🤷🏾‍♀️

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bao3bei4 · 4 years

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kpop music videos that gave their fans sexual brainworms

OR accidental fetish pop and its fringe fanbase: meditations on gendered desire

large warning here: i am someone who has been into kpop for the past 10 years. however, i have always been an extremely casual fan. i do write fic, but not rpf. if any of that makes you not want to hear me talk about kpop rpf (or you don’t want to hear about it in general), please keep moving.

anyway, obviously pop is corporate, soulless, and manufactured. but sometimes some truly bizarre shit gets past the committees and destroys a generation. these are their stories.

the video that started this is all is got7’s just right, released july 10th, 2015.

yes that’s all 7 members of got7 (one is out of frame) shrunken down for your viewing pleasure. they live in your room and tell you you’re just right.

this sheer fetish power of this video is nerfed only by how utterly sexless it is.

they’re styled like and dance like this. it’s a totally unironic sendup of the seminal work that preceded it by four years, “what makes you beautiful” by the white kpop group “one direction.” the chaste energy of the whole thing makes you legitimately wonder if the good people at jyp have just never heard of microphilia. (during a dramatic reading of this piece, here a friend interjected seriously, “i think it’s korean culture not to talk about things like this, fetishes in the workplace.”)

it’s for the best, honestly, though because the actress in the music video is lee ja in, who was 11 when the video was shot. considering that the members themselves ranged in age from 18-23 at the time, i think it’s actually very impressive that we only have to cancel one.

you receive absolutely no prizes for guessing that it’s jackson wang we’re sending to social justice prison. why’d he do this? no one asked.

at any rate, got7 fans, or “gans” (they actually call themselves igot7s which is too twee for me), have much to think about here: all 7 very small members of got7 sneaking into their room, possibly weird age play, and jackson wang eating a very large cake.

let’s see what they actually did.

twitter was actually very tame. the most charged thing i found was (unsurprisingly) from a bts fan (“ban”). i don’t actually know what it means, but i think it means something.

so, of course, i turned to the internet’s last bastion of free speech, where you can say whatever the fuck you want and receive cheers, or as the kids say, “kudos.” that is, i read fanfiction.

for those of you who don’t know your herstory, i started my journey at Asianfanfics.com, where, at the time of writing, there were 12,067 got7 stories. i want to start this by saying that i think feminism won, because someone was paying real human dollars to advertise their irene/wendy fanfiction on a banner ad, which is quite possibly a win for women for everywhere.

anyway, Asianfanfics.com’s search engine sucks ass (i kept on finding stories about different combinations of bts members worrying about their weight and being reassured by another member that were entitled “just right”), so i decided to look through all got7 stories written between july 2015 and december 2015.

but, alas, not a single got7 microphilia fic to be found.

also, some genre commentary while i’m here: i think the stories i respect the most are the “[y/n] is a ordinary girl who’s assigned to be got7’s manager! can she make them into superstars? as sparks begin to fly, can she keep it professional?” like fuck yeah that sounds like a kickass dating sim. it almost definitely already is one. i salute all the teens around the world for buying into the fantasy of dating a boy band member that they themselves sell you.

however, i don’t think i respect the “[member a] and [member b] are mafia/jocks and nerds/college students/high schoolers” concepts. in my opinion, the whole fantasy of boy band member is their personas, their hidden real personalities, their celebrity, and the show business setting. find a different intellectual property if you wanna write about school. i even respect the “yugyeom drank girl juice [not estrogen] and turned into a sexy girl” story more, because at least it knows exactly what it wants, and also because they’re all still boy band members. well, band members. shout out to yugyeom.

so, anyway, i looked elsewhere. at the time of writing, archive of our own only had 11,645 got7 stories, but it does have a better search, so it effectively has more. as an aside, i think it’s so funny, and mildly disorienting at first, that archive of our own separates the “music & bands” section from the “celebrities & real people” section. boy band members aren’t real people.

the first problem i encountered is that only 20 or so stories were written within a year of just right’s release. absolute cringe gans. don’t you care about your boys? there were zero stories tagged “vore” or “microphilia” either. stories containing the word “tiny” that were rated either “explicit” or “mature” were all normal (“normal”) size fetishization rather than, you know, just right.

however, i learned my lesson from twitter. i realized that what had happened was that watching this video had created sleeper agents, just waiting for their activation phrase. that activation phrase? bangtan boys. and yeah, lo and behold, there was one! unfortunately (fortunately?) it had nothing to do with got7, let alone just right, so i’m not going to talk about it.

basically what i learned is that this video may have actually been very normal, and my brain has just been destroyed by being too online at a young age.

however, there are plenty more videos in this genre. i present to you exo wolf, a banger from may 30th, 2013. i say banger, because in a comedic inversion, it’s actually fucking terrible.

this video is pretty self-explanatory in terms of why it might induce certain responses.

let’s get the formalities out of the way. this video, the member who’s getting cancelled is kai. he has braids in this video :/

also skating on thin ice: xiumin and chen. guys what was up with the whole exo-m thing? like, we’re gonna have a cpop subgroup, but it’s going to be part chinese members and part korean members that we’ll give a chinese name? unsurprisingly, the three exo members who have departed from the group are all chinese. they weren’t able to stand the microaggressions probably. but xiumin and chen remain uncancelled as an official chinese apology for five thousand of years of on-and-off invasions of korea. sorry guys that was kinda fucked up. our bad!

anyway, there are basically three avenues for exo fans to take: 1) humans with wolfish characters (usually wolf pack dynamics, which even wolves themselves don’t fucking use so i think all of you should shut up. the real omega here is your brain), 2) werewolves (duh), and 3) wolves with human characteristics (i.e. standard furry fare).

exo themselves let all these possibilities exist at the same time, superimposing them over each other, which is very woke and egalitarian of them. let’s see what the people decided. awoo.

Asianfanfics dot com had many stories in this vein. i feel very validated that this time i was able to correctly predict a fetish. that said, briefly returning to my earlier comment regarding alternate universes: it’s intense psychic whiplash reading about these vampires and werewolves, and going okay okay luhan is a vampire this that whatever, and then seeing the actual real performance photos the author attaches at the bottom of each chapter. bro i forgot these were actual people.... it breaks immersion so bad... i’m sorry, i just can’t believe that any of these dancing boys are having weird vampire sex with wings or whatever.

archive of our own also had many stories in this vein. and i think there are some important difference between the two sites worth talking about.

first of all, i think the higher engagement rate of archive of our own really enables some of the authors to get super bold. it makes Asianfanfics.com seem a little quaint, actually. like the wordcounts are waaay longer, for one. it’s uncommon for a story hosted on Asianfanfics.com to be more than a few thousand words long (most of them could easily be published in the new yorker), whereas some of these archive of our own people have written full length novels about if the members of exo were werewolves. i guess it’s just intensely demoralizing for the aff.com crew to get, like, three comments per story.

the second big difference is that i’m noticing more common themes between the ao3 crew’s writing. like stan intertextuality, or plagiarism, or whatever, but they seem to be implicitly engaging with each other’s characterizations, storylines, and tropes. i think it is because they probably all follow each other on twitter. (i have been active on twitter for three weeks now so i am an expert on fanfiction twitter.)

anyway, like not that i am a particularly big gan (cannot even list all the members), but these people seem to have reached a very specific consensus on how jackson wang, for instance, would react in a variety of situations that really surprises me? if i were to sit down and write a got7 story, i think the fuckboitude, the douchebaggery is a big part of his charm. not to be nationalist or anything, but for god’s sake, he’s from hong kong. but these people have him as very sensitive, lots of protective instincts. not that i understood what anyone on aff.com was doing with his character either, but they did all seem to be doing different things. “kudos” to that, i guess.

but: exo. wolf. i searched the “wolves” tag. this filtered the list down from 33459 stories to 52 stories. and the “wolves” tag was very different from the aff.com “wolf” tag. for the most part, aff.com liked stories where a member was a wolf (usually shapeshifting), feral boy, lots of y/n, lots of y/n dating a feral boy who is secretly a wolf.

ao3 really, really, really likes alpha/beta/omega stories. sorting by the most popular stories, only five on the first page weren’t a/b/o. and one of them was a cis f!baekhyun story, so i think the intended effect was communicated. anyway, let’s talk about some of the themes.

first of all, i’m disappointed. today’s bonus cancellation is of ao3 “wolves” writers. why the fuck are you drawing so heavily from european wolves?? there are wolves in asia!! you don’t need to keep giving their packs and ranks weird latin names. i will kill you. i hate italy. korea literally has a native wolf. i hate all of you!!! if you want to write caucasian wolves go watch that dumbass cw show!!!! my god.

the second theme (the first one was white supremacy) is that no one wants to be a wolf who fucks. i think that we need a sex positivity movement, or something, for omega rights. like, are all of you doing okay? you’re queering misogyny by inventing new genders to oppress. another level to “no one wants to be a wolf...” is the “who fucks” part. there are so many consent issues. and not even in like, a sexy intentional way? in a “i genuinely do not think this author understands how their writing comes off” way. unfortunately i am sensitive to untagged sexual coercion, and there was a lot of that.

at any rate, the aff.com wolves were at peace with being wolves, very self-actualized. the ao3 wolves know that every minute they spend alive on this bitch of an earth is suffering, and also sex.

the third theme is the evolution of y/n. y/n, who, in a startlingly woke move for aff.com, is almost always korean, is a girl main character stumbling into love, boy bands, and wolves (i think it’s because aff.com is oldschool kpop fandom, so therefore heavily asian itself in userbase). but y/n is not the main character in ao3 stories. she is the straight best friend. in what i think is a hilarious move, ao3 authors invert the gay best friend paradigm to give the gay main character a straight girl as best friend. she usually calls him “a gay,” she has lots of thoughts on boys, and she knows his sexuality better than he does and before he does. (sidebar: if all the men are gay, and all the women are straight...)

there’s a really fun twist to this, though, because the main character is always a self-insert in fanfiction. but where older fanfiction like aff.com was at peace with this and literalize it via y/n shenanigans, modern fic writers who haven’t finished distangling their complicated relationship with wanting to be a man who loves other men instead simply imbue their main character with their essence. a little voodoo doll sehun, with a lock of y/n hair.

this creates a deeply ambivalent relationship with gender in these stories. the main character is usually an omega, but one who resents being an omega. their body and its parts is usually described, if at all, as ostensibly intersex (except more offensively), but in practice, these discourses inscribe a trans body. (nb: i think cis writers approach this in a really fucked up fetishizing way, but i hope by this point we know that that goes without saying) it’s incredibly straightforward to read this, and see the underlying desires and fears in a heady cocktail of unfiltered writing that’s deeply confessional. you know when freud had people say whatever the fuck they wanted and figured they’d eventually free associate into releasing their subconscious into reality? yeah.

okay, and while we’re on the topic, let’s talk f(x) nu abo, released on may 4th, 2010.

this is a blitzy, maximalist, amped up dance hit that even has its own applause and cheers built in. it’s so fucking annoying, and i love it.

this song is on here because the second most popular kpop a/b/o story on ao3 is called “nu abo” except it’s about bts. that’s offensive enough in its own right. write something about f(x) (702 works). when will women win the right to have their own self-lubricating holes.

anyway, even though f(x) is probably innocent in all of this, i’m still cancelling amber liu.

for queerbaiting. who told her to look like ruby rose but hot? and for what? i’m also cancelling her for racism, but that wasn’t in this video.

moving on to a double feature: vixx voodoo doll and vixx chained up, released november 19, 2013 and november 9, 2015 respectively. this is because while voodoo doll is more formative, i think the fans who write fanfiction today got into kpop more recently, so we are casting a wide net.

anyway, voodoo doll is jam packed with weird pseudo-medical imagery, blood, vivisection, bondage, puppet shit, femdom, sharps, piercings, asphyxiation, dollification, stabbing/penetration metaphors, and a really sick and catchy dance. god that looks like the list of tags on the a/b/o wolf stories.

for this song, we’re cancelling you, for being way too into this song when you were 13.

vixx voodoo doll made me goth i guess! insert that pic of the your music saved me sign, except it saved me from getting into emo or pop punk probably.

chained up, comparatively, is much more tame. the only thing of note about it is that there are around 10 completely different chokers and choker looks the members wear in this music video. also they’re singing about being chained up, but that seemed a bit obvious.

we could argue that voodoo doll is gay while chained up is gay (derogatory); that voodoo doll is queer while chained up is gay; that chained up is a sensitive masterpiece of omega4omega sexuality. but we’re not going to.

we’re going to talk about what voodoo doll fanfiction was and was not. first, Aff.com had plenty of it. however, i was extremely disappointed to see that much of it did not hew to the spirit of vixx voodoo doll. my god, the voodoo doll becoming the one preying upon you disgusts me. the fantasy of the voodoo doll is that of absolute power. the idea that the doll itself has agency? instantly breaks the fantasy. i’m even not into voodoo dolls and i’m offended.

i also don’t think it’s part of the voodoo doll fantasy to release the doll. the only story on there that involved Y/N kidnapping vixx members like in the music video was unavailable because the author deactivated their account. come back qxeen what did you see.

i think this got off track, actually, in that i was mostly wondering why these people imprinted differently onto vixx voodoo doll than i did. like i don’t think you’re supposed to actually like straightforwardly absorb the morals and aesthetics of music videos like it’s propaganda. however, it’s more entertaining if you do. i hope ao3 doesn’t let me down.

out of the then 5932 works in the vixx fandom (the least out of every group so far, excluding f(x) because they’re women), 59 of them included the word “voodoo” somewhere. that’s 1%. i legitimately can’t tell if that’s high or not.

after some more cursory reading through the first page of popular results, my big takeaway is that people watched that video and wanted to be tortured and enslaved? but not, like, in a sexy way where the torturing is the point, the way where the point is to suffer bravely and beautifully, to endure the world’s harms like jesus on the cross, and then to fall into the arms of a beautiful boy who may or may not be the one hurting you in the first place.

there’s a certain predictability to these fantasies. like it’s not even masochism, which would be fun at least, it’s literally just like the desire to be beautiful, even as you suffer. and i do find that a little boring. (but, i mean, you can’t help being a woman!)

sidebar: on chained up. what’s interesting about chained up, is that most of the then 38 “chained up” works (likely because the video has no storyline) are about the members fucking during chained up promotions. no one’s ever actually chained up, but whatever. it’s fine. it’s fine!

anyway, here, more than ever, the nature of desire is stripped bare. i’ve written before [elsewhere in the unreleased tshirt cinematic universe] on how kpop boys are, through fandom, re-formed as white, or more strongly, i guess, blank slates. it’s really interesting to me how so much of this dynamic of projection is enabled by the fact that they’re asian men. they’re infantilized, feminized vessels; they’re seductive, but childlike, oblivious to their own charms, so nonthreatening; they have uncontrollable desires for sex, they’re scared of sex. and above all else, white women submit themselves to them, insert themselves into them. basically kpop fans tend to rework old school yellow peril and emasculation fantasies to reenact their own desires, often white, often cishet on them.

what i am saying is that there’s another thesis about forced feminization and its racialized subtext in here. obviously gender is a racialized construct to begin with, but like it’s fascinating to argue that when white women remake asian men according to their own desires, that is, into themselves, they (hopefully) unintentionally echo these old fears about the sexual order.

it illuminates, it seems, the underlying dynamic in the denigration of asian men, which is of course the fear of miscegenation. now, my breathtaking ability to make everything about me aside, miscegenation is interesting because it presents a racial synthesis, beginning to collapse and trouble the artificial designations of purity. so we make asian men into white women, and end up with an unsettling hybrid. i’m sure this has deep implications for me personally.

but i think we already knew that quite a few of these people had yellow fever, so let’s talk about the gender dialectic at play. basically, the above dynamic, of making men into women (whether literally, in body; or subjectively, in mind; or even relationally, as they are objectified into passive vessels for your desire) coexists with the ostensibly converse dynamic, in which the straight women desires to be a gay man. these aren’t necessarily in conflict: it could easily be that these are different writers writing different stories, that both are ways of expressing discontent with existing in a raced, gendered body, or even that the end product of both is the same.

it’s been a while without a picture. all of you now have the legal right to hunt and kill me for making a d&g joke.

anyway, what i want to talk about is how these two fantasies can coexist. that by making a man into yourself, you can speak on your own desire in a passive way. my normal interest is analyzing forced masc fantasies (albeit in chinese opera lol), and they bear little to no resemblance to this kind of fantasy. this kind offers plausible deniability, of course, because wanting things is embarrassing. but also the fantasy isn’t about wanting to be a man, it’s about having no choice but to be a failed one. the gender pessimism running through these stories is palpable. basically andrea long chu wants what wolf fanfiction writers know: everyone is an omega, and everyone hates it.

at any rate, this racialized dynamic is one that i wasn’t sure how to bring up throughout this piece, mainly because there is no definitive way for me to tell the race of any individual writer, beyond just like the clear and present vibes that i receive. but i think it structures a lot of the fantasies contained in this essay. (i felt more comfortable bringing up the gendered dynamic, because it was fairly trivial to find out the current gender of the person writing each story i was reading.)

obviously we should return to the specter haunting this conversation: the very much alive david eng. i think this sort of argument is familiar to readers of racial castration, especially his chapter on m. butterfly. btw sorry for mentioning that play 2 out of 3 posts on this blog. i have problems.

let’s talk about the parallel imagery between the depiction of gallimard’s final speech and the fanfiction i’ve described above. in it, gallimard makes himself into his own dream woman, dressing in yellowface and robes, the costume of puccini’s original madame butterfly. and he laments his lost love:

there is a vision of the orient that i have. of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. who are born and raised to be the perfect women. who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally.

in that, i see the self insert, and i see the sufferer of vixx voodoo fic. the fantasy that gallimard has about asian women is repeated, this time about asian men and a helpless identification with them. and on some level, gallimard’s women do have something very compelling to identify with: they suggest that there’s a way to endure white male violence without sacrifice, and even more potently, to enjoy it on some level.

but onward to the titular racial castration. eng argues that gallimard’s wilful ignorance of song’s true gender is a psychic castration -- song’s masculinity is diminished so that his own can be enhanced within their relationship. this, eng believes, acts out “richard fung’s contention that in western imaginary ‘asian and anus are conflated.’” this process stabilizes the relationship between the asian man and the white woman: they occupy the same place within the sexual dyad.

this is, i think, why some people are addicted to writing from the bottom’s perspective. again -- not implying that irl bottoms don’t exist or that bottoms are psychically castrated lol -- but rather that you can fantasize about this ideal asian man that you can come to embody. in kpop rpf, rather than it being between a white man and an asian man (unless someone’s started writing chad future fic), it’s between two asian men. so this transformation is performed. whiteness is always intruding and so i think eng is helpful here to making it visible again.

this essay isn’t a callout or actual cancellation or anything like that, i do wanna be clear. i guess i just like talking about fantasies, even the embarrassing ones, and where they come from. i think oftentimes in fandom spaces, we write a lot of stories off as idfic, and i think virtually every single one of the stories i referenced to write this fairly uncontroversially fall into that category. but i think calling something an “id” something or the other naturalizes the satisfaction it gives as purely instinctual and unconscious, when i do think there are deeper narratives at play. while i didn’t ever actually reference the base here (sorry), i do think it’s worth talking about how real world power shapes & maintains the superstructure, and thereby our fantasies.

anyway in conclusion, maybe i was the one with sexual brainworms the whole time.

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tripstaysnoided · 4 years

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Flow Just Like Water

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Story and writing-related transparency update and my many shames...

The Question on Everyone’s Mind

“Hey you haven’t updated No Stars over Uptown in almost a year...”

Hmm, I hate it when you’re right. (This section has been rewritten ad-nauseam to curb back the bitchiness by the way)

So back in early/mid 2018, the idea was to divorce Uptown from a person who influenced it (and myself) heavily. She was my most important audience member, the closest friend I ever had, and unfortunately someone who used her power to bully, ostracize, and hurt others with my help. I cut contact when the hurt + some self-awareness finally reached me. Apologies were made and I feel like my work will never be done with it, but there was still Uptown.

Between censored comments, entirely recasting Axel’s save, different plot threads, and a load of disclaimers, there was nothing that would scrub her influence from the story. There was no way to cleanly drop everything because of how deep her influence went. It disgusted me to look back at it, and I had to private the blog because I feared what it endorsed, even if just in the past.

I pulled back from that sims writing community. I had its main thread on the Official Forums removed too (I guess if that was a mystery to anyone). It was a surrender that I never wanted to do, but I had it in my mind that if I was gone, then she wouldn’t be there either. Uptown became this cursed item, and as I quietly retired it, I noticed that she went quieter too. Not gone, but enough to make me sleep easier at night and even occasionally say hello to old friends.

And I hope deep in my heart that no one else is getting hurt in my place, but now this is gonna haunt me all day huh!

The two paths forward...

1) Complete Uptown rewrite that I’ve been threatening everyone with all year. While it won’t ever be clean because I can’t undo time, I do have a sound outline for a story that is much more true to my actual vision and how I’ve evolved, with a few necessary boundaries in place that are going to be there for all stories moving forward: no more casting calls and no more collaborative efforts. I am not going to open myself up to this happening again, even if the people have changed.

2) Same as above, but I continue the original Uptown as a favor to loyal readers alongside the rewrite. I would try to put the effort into it that I initially did, but with no promises on an update schedule and no advertising. I did ask myself “is there Patreon but without pledging money, just the private posts function” but it could operate as part of a private forum, a members-only part of a website, etc.

Also readers of the original would be beholden to a rule of “don’t spoil the rewrite for new readers, c’mon guys”. I mean, not really, but it is a good courtesy to extend to people.

Priority on this isn’t high but you at least will see what is!

I will probably make the blog public again either way due to the many broken links on my Tumblr but we’ll see. There are other things to deal with as I shall list!

Where Life’s Been Regardless

Been spending more time with my grandpa every weekend. Life’s pretty good and he’s warming up to my dogs.

Shiny New Webbed Site

Cucumber Fields Forever is a site I own now. We have a full domain, cucumberfieldsforever.com, a blog with one post, and the framework needed to host stories the way I want to and still through WordPress. The functionality of likes, comments, and following should still be the same but you know...I’ll take feedback too...

The main blog still has an undefined purpose though I do have drafts sitting around about:

The maybe/maybe not hoax band that was on the Metal Archives and the history of Funeral Doom Metal.

The curious case of when Sims 4 babies get their genetics and my only collaboration (read: was talking about it with a friend and might quote her if needed, it’s actually a bit of a doozy)

Amazon.com’s fake dried udon noodles, an actual issue by the way.

Things I’m reading! (This’d be a monthly feature if so)

For the sake of unity, I am thinking of solutions for hosting old and shameful content there including Uptown and for the real fans in my followers feed, Eight Cicadas...a world I totally have plans for too (not really). I don’t want them to be front-and-center, and that’s why I mentioned forums/members-only content. I finally have that power! Maybe.

Ooooh but what are the costs? Not too much to handle, that’s what. 😉 (Like really, I don’t need any hand-wringing about this, I can manage my finances)

Project Queue (In Order of Confirmedness)

Outrun the Scythe: have you seen me post out-of-context Sims 3 pictures? Did you want more? Did you hope it was Linda in Custody? If the answers are yes, yes, and “meh, whatever you want”, then you’re in luck.

Outrun the Scythe is a Sims 3-based tale of a young gay man and his zombie grandma, as they are both offered separate roles of being the undying intermediaries between the world of humans and the influence of a race of space daemons. It’s pretty familiar if you’ve been following me pre-Uptown, taking some cues from stories I’ve kept under lock and key like Eight Cicadas, The Chains of Lyra, and the not-so-locked-up Ironstar Immortals (of which Outrun is just the direct sequel to sans any retconning...ah the smell of early 2013 and performative heterosexuality)

Ah, back to my roots.

It’s a hybrid of gameplay, story, and lore about my little race of daemons with a lot of my own idiosyncrasies that I’m not really ashamed of: basing it off a super-polarizing Sims 3 challenge from a site I moderate, using a lot of EA’s pre-made townies and their genes, lots of unnecessary posemaking, stupid references. It’s a comfort to have in my roster.

While the first few chapters are in the middle of revision, I have around six in the queue and will be making this public when I have ten. I’m guessing December then?

Undocumented Black Widow Challenge: I just did this for fun/forum kudos (yes, in fact I have joined many forums), there was going to be a short story but it was quickly becoming something against my code of ethics. I mean, sims die and all. (read: I had to choose between “heterosexual widow” and “widow with some same-sex marriages that still end in tragedy, reinforcing negative stereotypes to the public for the sake of me not getting bored and detached during gameplay” so there were no good choices. Except for her affair with the mailwoman, 10/10) I hope to finish this before October ends and get my medal on Boolprop, I’m pretty far through it all. I might upload the sims involved anyways. This is for TS4.

I mentioned it because it’s keeping me busy. But not for long!

NaNoWriMo 2020: Dipping my toes into that again! It’s not sims-related, just a tale of lesbians, nosy neighbors, a haunted beach house, and some light murder and kidnapping. And I actually got my brother to scout out locations for me this weekend. If there’s any demand, I can share chapters as the rough drafts are finished, especially for the sake of proofreading.

Not saying I’m publishable, but wouldn’t it be nice? Will keep me occupied for much of November.

Untitled “Dear Diary” Challenge: Tired of feeling left out of the fun on the Boolprop forums, their “Dear Diary” challenge was the one that appealed to me the most on first glance. Why? Probably once I found an idea that let it be set in the early/mid-2000′s to begin with and explore some interesting characters through diary entries (which I have mixed feelings on as a literary device but I think that’s just me saying “well I didn’t like Dracula”, yes you get bonus points for writing it like a diary)

Also writing is the one skill I’m good at across multiple games. Wanna hear me bitch about the cooking skill tree in TS4 or riding in TS3? I’ll spare you.

I guess I could have included “spending time on Boolprop with old and new friends” in where my life has been. It’s a nice lil community if also a place with its own idiosyncrasies as well. So it doesn’t feel like I’m promoting another community if/when I make a thread there for Outrun the Scythe, I want to have a couple chapters of this ready to go by Outrun’s release, though it’s not gonna be the highest priority compared to it nor as long because I think I can blast through the gameplay quickly.

This one will be played in TS4 due to it having the easiest writing skill/I dunno variety is the spice of life. And hopefully another December release.

Defunded or Forgotten?: Oh shit I actually released stuff in 2020 and told no one? I do have a “mortifying ordeal of being known” sinking feeling whenever I get a site hit because it’s not my best work (but good enough) and veered sharply into issues I may be over my head in, though I try to be a good noodle with research and listening. Maybe hiding is bad after all.

Being based off a very flawed and incomplete Sims 3 challenge I found in the annals of the Official Forums, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work just making sense of things. And I’m scared of working on reconstructing the house but I haven’t abandoned the project yet. The story has eight chapters so far and is pretty game-based with some additions here and there. Scared of how long it could be though!

Date for this unknown.

Untitled Sunlit Tides Decadynasty: another year-long abandoned TS3 project with a much stupider reason why. Last update was about Hua getting ready for her wedding, and I wanted to do some poses for a bait-and-switch wedding chapter because to put it mildly, her real one was an absolute disaster.

Blender decided to fuck up its interface again, I got discouraged (this probably does account for some of the Uptown delays too), and when I decided to plow forward, it was for other projects instead.

Meanwhile I played all the way to Gen 5′s teenhood and the only thing stopping me is time (it takes almost 30 minutes to load the file right now, though they’ll be looking at moving towns in a couple gens) and maybe fear of the Logic skill.

Date for this also unknown but it’s easy to pump out updates once I’m in the groove for it. My third heir had a difficult life so maybe I’m just trying to bury it.

Also I just noticed the view count there was really good and probably because I linked it here on Tumblr last year. Thank you so much guys. I can’t really fret over views on Carl’s forum these days thanks to the years-long death spiral pretty much every forum anywhere has been riding on. But it’s a nice surprise. And it’s an alright little challenge recap to read during your lunch break or whatever.

The Wawas

I figured I’d end on the real news everyone wants! Both the chihuahuas are a year and a half now and reached their adult size around a year ago. For the most part, they are happy and healthy dogs.

#state of the uwunion #long post

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thesims4blogger · 4 years

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The Sims 4 Star Wars Journey to Batuu: Community’s First Impressions

When EA revealed The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey to Batuu during today’s Gamescom Opening Night Live, players in the community took to social media to let their opinion on the game be known. The Fansite Simsvip ask players on Twitter what their initial thoughts were, so here is a collection of thoughts from players around the community…

It’s basically Strangerville but with a super niche audience. No one will get most of the references unless they’re a Star Wars fan. It’ll probably provide an hour of gameplay and that’s it. Ngl though it looks well made

�� Sugar G (@appIause) August 27, 2020

I personally don't see a place for it in the Sims franchise as an actual in-world location. The Sims is supposed to be a life simulation at heart with fantasy thrown in. Not a badly disquised advert for a completely different I.P. If I wanted to play a Star Wars game I'd buy one.

— Alistair Stuart (@Alistu_Sims) August 27, 2020

It's a cool idea. For some reason I love shameless branding like this. It will probably be a nice change of pace at the very least.

— Paul (@ThePJBentley) August 27, 2020

It's not my favorite theme. But since it's here.. I'm going to take full advantage of it 😊

— Mimy S Flores (@mimysf1111) August 27, 2020

Definitely not a pack I would enjoy. Either for the game content. Storyline or the build and buy it all looked very uninteresting, I may still enter in some giveaways for the pack but this will be the 2nd pack including bowling I will never purchase. Just not enough in it:)

— JoJo🕵️‍♀️ (@JoJoPandaX) August 27, 2020

I’m not a fan of the movie series but this pack actually interests me

— Akane (@Aka_RoseGaming) August 27, 2020

Its unexpected but i think it'll be fun. And it also means i can make my swtor characters in sims so thats honestly what I'm looking forward to most with this.

— Shey (@Shey_Shen) August 27, 2020

I’m excited! I love the idea of missions to influence which side wins. I do think it will be fun to play with still might wait for a sale 😅

— Sophie is not Social (@SophienotSocial) August 27, 2020

I've sat idly by while knitting and laundry and university packs rolled around. They weren't my cup of tea or first choice, but I never tore down and ostracized those who were excited because the DLCs didn't fit my own personal expectations. I'm really excited for this pack! 😊

— LanceChristophr (@lancechristophr) August 27, 2020

Literally the first pack I have absolutely no interest in buying. I am very disappointed. It's fine for those who are fans and all, but I feel like this pack is so specific. I usually can find SOMETHING I like even in the packs that really aren't my gameplay style but this? NO :(

— Louise Laursen (@PurpleMio) August 27, 2020

Feel like we already had enough star wars content in the game. I feel like a into the future pack mightve been more well received. At least there are people who enjoy it though so can’t say no one’s getting anything good!

— bag of bones (@savantavocado) August 27, 2020

I hoped it wasn't going to be star wars when I heard. I don't have anything against the franchise, it's the fact that it' so highly specific and caters to a different audience is what baffles me. It's obvious that it's something that was pushed by EA to advertise their new game.

— 🍞𝙇𝙀𝙀💕 (@imCement) August 27, 2020

My thoughts were "Where is my Harry Potter pack?" Like boarding school for children sims, werewolves, fairies, etc.

— 🌈Jordan aka Snow🌈 (@Bookfangirl742) August 27, 2020

I 100% didn't need it right now. I feel like this was more an EA/Disney move rather than the core Sims team. Mainly because we need so much more in terms of gameplay, representation and playability. I could've got behind it if it was released sometime next year instead of now.

— Camille (@CraftyGamer89) August 27, 2020

I think the reason everyone has such an issue is that there are so many things the sims 4 is missing as a life simulation game and then they choose to put the time and effort into a star wars pack..i happy for those who want it but i get why everyone else is so upset

— Lauren Attwood (@LaurenAttwood69) August 27, 2020

We wanted more realistic gameplay and the gave us Starwars?!?! Why??!?!

— willemijn kroon (@williekr2000) August 27, 2020

im just... wow, at least I wasn't mad but rather sad how EA is so disconnected to the Sims fanbase desires and pleas for our favorite game

— I build anything and I stan OT9, OT4, & OT7! (@J_Lanz16) August 27, 2020

im just... wow, at least I wasn't mad but rather sad how EA is so disconnected to the Sims fanbase desires and pleas for our favorite game

— I build anything and I stan OT9, OT4, & OT7! (@J_Lanz16) August 27, 2020

Not feeling optimistic about it at all tbh, looks like it may have about as much replay value as Strangerville buuuuut at the same time it opens up the option to lightsaber duel Judith Ward so I guess I’ll give it a shot

— Dex (@Theyhrite) August 27, 2020

Excited for the droids and lightsabers. Seem like they can be fun and I image there will be a mod out soon for a lightsaber death since the sims will probably not give us one

— 🐁 ғᴇᴀɴᴏʀ ⟴🐀 (@_neonheart_) August 27, 2020

maybe if the game was more complete then sure but, the sims feels very empty and is lacking a lot. the last thing we need is a star wars pack right now

— heather (@heathermk_) August 27, 2020

i think it could be cool if your sims could actually live on batuu (maybe after completing the story or smth idk) but if it just turns out like a vacation world you go to once and then forget about it's gonna be disappointing

— cali (@caligumu) August 27, 2020

baffled, honestly. like. why is this a thing?! I have zero interest in farming or "better babies" but this just feels *really* out of place?? Strangerville has its appeal and Eco Lifestyle was just a very very bad case of "poor marketing", but this is just. 🤔🤔🤔

— Fae (@fae_of_the_rose) August 27, 2020

I said this before but... They are going to add light sabers before inclusive skin tones... let that sink in.

— Lil Ass Kicker (@Firelillx) August 27, 2020

THE SIMS 4 IS NOT IMMERSIVE ENOUGH FOR THIS TYPE OF NICHE GAME PACK!! They have refused to fix some of the most basic features (skin tones & babies) but they have the time and resources for these new special aliens??????? Make it make sense.

— whatamievendoin (@whatamievendo14) August 27, 2020

We already have Sixam which is not exploiting. Why take a franchise that does not reach the players. pic.twitter.com/aPhd1QBmZs

— The Queen alien -🛸 sims - (@The_Queen_Alien) August 27, 2020

Not at all interested.

— Sunshine (@sunshine0375) August 27, 2020

I was a little worried how this would combine with the Sims. It seemed so alien (no pun intended) to the rest of the gameplay. But after seeing the trailer I can’t help with being excited. It looks beautiful and definitely different. The build and buy objects look great so far

— Chantal Noordeloos (@C_Noordeloos) August 27, 2020

I’m still wtf’ing. It’s too niche for a game that is supposed to be a LIFE simulation game, too specific-to-star-wars-fans to appeal to a wider audience. It also makes me sad thinking about the future of the franchise when they seem so disconnected in what the community wants.

— Hayley Marie (@countrystrongau) August 27, 2020

What are your initial thoughts on the The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey to Batuu Game Pack? Let us know in the comments below!

#news #ts4 #sims 4 #the sims 4 #game pack

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faunusrights · 5 years

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OFFAL HUNT REMASTERED LIVEBLOG // CHAPTER 17

IN THIS EPISODE OF CRYING CAT GALLERY:

“Nice?” Cinder laughed under her breath once, and returned to examining her threads. “Oh, come on, Glynda. Favor isn’t in my vocabulary, remember? It’s just a shame about your cape. The emblem looked good, and your new outfit would look much better with it. That’s all.”

CINDER FALL IS REALLY BAD AT NOT BEING GAY ON MAIN

we’re bacc baby B) let’s hop right in

When Glynda awoke from her dream of being consumed,

alright calm down we’ve literally JUST started we’ve literally JUST woken up can we chill Out,

“Cinder?” she yawned, surveying the room.

sneak peek of that Sweet Domestic Life we dream of once this enemies-to-lovers malarkey reaches the ‘lovers’ bit but no we’re just surrounded by enemies. two of them being the writers!

Still, she couldn’t go wandering around Cinder’s apartment in only her underwear, but rooting through the drawers and closet didn’t seem—

STEAL HER CLOTHES BABY!!!! PRACTICALLY MARRIED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The clothes didn’t seem Cinder’s size or style; they were casual and soft, a black t-shirt and steel-gray sweatpants.

okay but the idea of cinder getting up and being like ‘do i have ANYTHING this Unit of a woman will fit into’ and like actually having to think abt it and then folding em up and leaving em there like ‘hope she finds em okay’????? peak. absolutely peak. shes so gay but does she know it? no,

The fabric had enough give to make it work, even if only barely, and she looked in the mirror to see the loungewear looking more like tight athletic wear. Funny that.

kc and diesel envisioning this: oh yes. oh YES. ohhohughohguhghuhu yessssssssss--

She had—trusted? Been trusted? She had told Cinder fragile little things, and had heard similarly earnest words in return. It had been strange. Nice.

i love glynda like. feeling out of the edges of her own comfort and Pleasant Feelings with this almost-wariness? like every word she uses to describe it just Edges a little closer to Softness but she has to taste the word first to see if it fits. her narration is SO fun 2 read yall what the shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

This was Cinder’s house. It wasn’t just any house. These were Cinder’s belongings, Cinder’s resting places, and she was wandering around without Cinder.

Voyeuristic was putting it mildly. Glynda needed to find Cinder, fast.

HJGDKJGHDFSSDF GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! glynda just. losing it at such LITTLE THINGS is so goddamn funny jesus christ. this is cinders house!!! her THINGS!!! fuck she NAPS IN HERE. SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

god i love how soft this is. i know exactly why this is happening and i know exactly how [REDACTED], but i’m living for this moment. living IN it.

Spread out on the table was a wanted poster with a mugshot of Cinder on it, defaced with black permanent marker and crease marks.

cinder: yeah they didnt get the eyebrows sharp enough and im mad abt it

“Well, your clothes are in the wash.” Cinder said, turning around, coffee in hand. It was so…domestic. “It would help if you had more than one set.”

shouting from a distance: you two should get MARRIED

“You’ve been wearing the same dress the entire time I’ve known you.”

look at these lil JABS... the JESTS... the JOQUES... i cant believe theyve been married 10 years already. im also deeply enjoying how very indulgent this section is. I Am Seeing,

Glynda scoffed, and when Cinder reached for the sugar on the counter, she gave it a subtle nudge with her Semblance. It slid out of Cinder’s reach.

JESUS CHRIST LOOK AT THIS WHAT THE HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! soulmates.

Cinder shrugged, still looking elsewhere. “Mercury thought it was funny.”

“Mercury?”

cinder: my son and BOY. and, one day, yr son and boy, tho he won’t take it lying down.

Cinder scoffed. “You just don’t appreciate my good tastes.”

i feel like the evidence is truly stacking up to very much prove this statement wrong but u kno what lets let her figure that one out for herself

“A souvenir from the brats,” she said. “And a letter excusing the mess they made of the place.”

KIDS KIDS KIDS KIDS

She said, “I just didn’t know you had kids.”

KIDS KIDS KIDS KIDS KIDS

“It’s fine,” said Cinder tersely, but not harshly. “It isn’t wise to advertise in my business, so keep it to yourself.”

KIDS KIDS KIDS KIDS KIDS KIDS KIDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GOD YES that little like... indirect admittance that em and merc r basically her own kids is a fucking BLESSING from ON HIGH are you SEEING THIS SHIT????????????? we have been fed today. my crops r watered and my lambs bouncing over the green fields as we feast. what a moment. wow. what a chapter.

When Cinder finally finished hers and rose to get another cup, Glynda allowed some of her thoughts to solidify. She said, “I want new clothes.”

as a side note, i think it rly shows the strength of the writing that the feeling of the narrative can change so much, esp when u take into consideration that we jump between the points of view of TWO characters? like with cinder we’ve gone from sheer fury to gruesome sickness, and with glynda we’ve gone from Complete Dissociation to this gentle and soft morning and you can feel it absolutely fluffing up in every word! still love how good the writing in this fic is its NUTS

Cinder shrugged. Her usual clothes were still in the wash; right now, she was wearing high-waisted black pants and a loose top tucked in.

diesel i want you to know im thinking abt what u said abt the high-waisted pants mods in sims 4 and im giggling

The necklace with Glynda’s earring hung from her throat.

i didnt mention it before but this is the... second time this chapter its been explicitly mentioned? and i know we could be like ‘ah the MEANING’ but honestly im like glynda r u rly not over the bobbies y

“You aren’t dead in there, are you?” came Cinder’s voice.

“No.”

“Well. At this pace, I will be before we get out of here.”

cinder, who probably once spent 7+ hours choosing an outfit: look its only cool if i do it, dipshit,

Unsnapping the lone earring left to her, she brought it to her collar and fixed it there, under the clasped button to dangle just over her sternum.

When she stepped out of the changing room, Cinder looked up. A slow dawn of interest eclipsed the boredom on her face. Glynda stood very still as her gaze flowed up and down again, pausing over the earring.

Cinder touched the matching one hanging from her own neck, almost in surprise. She cleared her throat. Her tone was very deliberately mocking: “Cute.”

OOOOOOOOOOOH MY GOD are we for SERIOUS right now??? jesus christ. jesus christ. we’ve moved on past married now this is ride-or-die shit right here what the FUCK. jesus CHRIST. theres- i- i have THOUGHTS on this matter that are spoilery and so i will SIT ON THIS EGG but HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLY SHIT

“Nothing,” Cinder said, smoothing her expression into something unreadable. “I was just thinking—nevermind.”

no, no, go on, speak yr mind, please do, because if u were abt to offer to embroider that shit then PLEASE say it aloud for the audience at home

“If I was a cop, you’d already be in jail.”

“You’re welcome to try to take me in, darling.”

im sure its obvious but im BESIDE myself @ this flirting. im losing it. this is SUCH a treat and i KNOW that [REDACTED] [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] but AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

“That’s because of your—” Cinder was already gone. Glynda pressed her lips together, but watched her go. Rolling her eyes, she finished, “—Grimm tattoos.”

Whatever. She could gloat about figuring it out later.

/CHOKES

WHAT

@kc and diesel: CALL ME RIGHT NOW WHAT THE FUCK

okay okay. wait. okay. wait. theres. wait. okay. i cant. am i safe to say anything. probably not. so. im not gonna. but. you WILL be seeing me in dms, friends,

okay okay im moving on im gonna. keep going. okay. okay. im going. (but i will be in dms)

there was a brief discussion of dinner: namely, that neither of them wanted to make it.

oh god why is this me

“Give me your new cape.”

“What?”

Finally looking up, Cinder said, “Your cape. Let me have it, and I’ll put your emblem on it.”

THANK YOU MA’AM AND THANK YOU FOR READING THE FIC HAS ENDED ITS ALL OVER WITH!!!!!! WE DID IT!!!!!!! WE RODE THIS WHOLE TRAIN TOGETHER!!!!!!!!!!!!! UNFORTUNATELY IF ONLY IT WERE SO EASY.

Glynda ignored it for the time being and sent the vector of her emblem to Cinder.

i deeply love the idea of all hunters and huntresses carrying a vector of their emblem JUST IN CASE,,, SMTHNG HAPPENS,,, its right alongside the list of their next of kin and their will and testament,

Cinder Fall was a name built on Dust and money and extravagant demonstrations.

But Cinder Fall was also a woman with a family. A home. A favorite blend of coffee.

this is absolutely kicking me in the dick for reasons i cant say but also for reasons of SNOFT because oh my god. this is. like. this is why i rly vibe w. cinder in this fic and is also like one of my favourite characterisations of cinder of ALL TIME (which is why all my fav cinder fics typically have it as a Theme). shes SO good and SO dimensional and i just. god. GOD. i LOVE HER!!!!!!!!! ID DIE FOR HER!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAA CINDER FALL IS MY ANGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEL

It felt like being told a secret, like being told a thousand secrets, and not knowing what to do with them. All she could do was hold them in her palms, delicate as she could, trying not to break anything.

GIMME ARMS TO PRAY WITH INSTEAD OF ONES THAT HOLD TOO TIGHTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! /goes apeshit

And because of that, Glynda asked, “Do you have any more stories?”

Without looking up, Cinder drawled, “About Witches?”

“Or dragons.”

Gold flickered her way.

👈😳👈

“They’d already been built by the Witches that came before her,” Cinder replied. “But she’d been a headmaster at one of them, and a teacher before that.”

Something in Glynda’s chest gleamed.

lore lore lore lore LORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lets GET THAT LORE as i peer blearily thru tears,

“...You haven’t just been pretending not to remember things, have you?”

firstly: called out lmao JHGSDFKJHGFSD and SECONDLY:

“The moon?” Cinder made a face. “I’m not sure if it’s that literal. Your soul is powerful, but it’s not a physical thing. Besides, the moon is…”

“Broken,” Glynda finished for her.

“Yeah.”

hm what a fascinating thing hm how interesting hm hm HMMMM 👈🤔👈

Even as they ate, they both seemed lost in their own heads, but somehow, to Glynda, it seemed perfectly clear that both of them were wondering the same thing.

wait glynda. hey glynda. did u uh. ever. did u uh. text winter back or w

WE DID IT CHAPTER 17!!!!!!!!!!! this was a Lot (4,500 words? yall better be careful before those 10k chapters return to Haunt Us) and was also, a Lot. holy shit. theres. i. id make a spoiler edition but tbh its just the SAME SPOILER thats like. rly driving this chapter. i know what its for. i know it. i feel it. dont trust winter more like dont trust the writers

ANYWAY I LOOK FORWARD (?) EAGERLY (???) to chapter 18, unsure when the vibes will turn rancid for the worse. when. honey. theres a big storm coming.

#rwby #offal hunt #liveblog #what the HELL just happened

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setsunanoroi · 7 years

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Dream Daddy... issues

So, here’s the thing. I don’t think I’m okay with this. I’m really not. I just bought this game and loved it at first. Bought two copies even, one for me and friend. I played Robert and then Joseph ending where he chooses to stay with his wife, and now I’m learning about all this cult stuff.

And I have to say I’m disappointed. Really, really disappointed. The Christian guy who is gay or at least bi, who’s doing his damn best to be happy and okay dad turns out to really be the devil or something? Why? Why did this have to be done?

And I get it. Dating sim games often have the death routes and the secretly crazy characters. I’ve played lots of dating sims so it’s not even that big of a shock.

But really, a game that was advertised as lighthearted fun? The game that was shown to be a first for the lgbt community, where people were going “Yes, finally we have something that can show us in a good light” and a gay Christian character who a lot of people identified with? Then you make him into this... thing.

It just feels slimy. It feels like it was a lie to make sales. People asked about the tag of physiological horror and Game Grumps said it was a glitch. They didn’t tell the truth to warn people about it, people who would be genuinely upset and that’s why they asked, because they were concerned.

Maybe they didn’t mean it that way. Maybe it was just to keep the secret. Maybe it was just for the fun of the story, but it is still just so wrong. It’s not okay. This was just a game yes, but it was also one of the first to really let you explore something that still some are ashamed to talk about. And the fact people are saying to ones who are genuinely upset “Oh shut up. It’s just a game. You don’t like it, play someone else’s route” feels wrong too.

Because we were promised a game that was supposed to show that yeah, gay men can just be happy and normal too. Instead it’s a story about cults and devils, and how each gay guy is actually a deadly sin, and the guys who developed it directly lied to us? Yeah, no. It just isn’t right.

On top of that, the opening is so long, and it would take you so long to find this out, it will almost always be past the two hour mark that you have to have by requirement by Steam to get your money back. That’s right, find out this game that was advertised to you falsely is not what you thought you were paying for? Too bad. These guys have your 15 dollars already.

Why couldn’t the Game Grumps just be honest? Why couldn’t they just say what the game was really about? Not blow the ending or surprises but just say, “Yeah. It’s true. There are going to be physiological horror elements to this.” I don’t think they were trying to cheat anyone out of their money, but it was still very insensitive. It’s not like lighthearted things they did didn’t suddenly take a dark turn in their projects before. Look at Cool Patrol Dance. It’s the same bit as before. I think they just really thought it would be a interesting twist, but it was the wrong twist for the wrong kind of thing. There’s so little out there that’s positive for people in this situation. There aren’t a million games like this. Heck, there isn’t even a hundred games like this. Couldn’t you have just given us what you advertised?

No, instead you guys had to promise us something sweet and wholesome and instead gave us Bible Black. Not cool.

I can understand how people got upset. I can’t understand why these guys would make the conscious decision to make one of the first dating sims to cater to these group do this, and I can not understand why so many people are of the opinion that real people looking for POSITIVE characters in similar situations (ie gay Christians) are genuinely hurt. Hurt, not saying “OMG GAME GRUMPS YOU ASSHOLES!” Just hurt and expressing disappointment, and are being told to shut up.

There are kids terrified to even come out to their friends and family, Christian or not, and this is what Game Grumps decided to make? There are people aching for positive gay characters in fiction and this is what Game Grumps makes? There are people fighting for the right to even be with someone they love... and this is what Game Grumps makes?

Oh, but if this hurt you, then shut up. It’s just a game.

Guys, you just... just stop it. Leave these poor people alone. They’re allowed to be hurt by this frankly insulting slap in the face.

#Dream Daddy #joseph christiansen #Game Grumps

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the-kipsabian · 7 years

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dream daddy: a dad dating simulator

"Baby's first visual novel" That's honestly what this game feels like, and it shows in painful ways at times. The idea behinds DDADDS is great: you are a single dad moving into a new neighborhood with your teenage daughter, and you meet other single dads who to romance and make friends with. Simple, yet effective, and since mlm relationships aren't too often represented in these types of games, that's a special bonus point this game gets. And it's done in a lovely way where the relationships between characters aren't hyper sexualized, and the stories between characters are much more build on other aspects of their relationships. It's a fun, lighthearted game if you are just in for some dad puns, cute art, and a quick storyline or two.

While there is seven dateable dads, there isn't too much of any kind of gameplay to speak of. Of course, since the game is more of a visual novel, majority of the gameplay includes clicking through text boxes, watching art move slightly on the screen with characters throwing different expressions at you depending on their mood while you talk to them, and occasionally you have a choice to make or break the scene with few selections of answers you can give to the situation at hand, or a question you were asked. Basic visual novel stuff, but also pretty much the only kind even closely resembling "gameplay" if you want something to call that. The features mention mini and microgames, yes, but honestly? The "gameplay" is even closer to nonexisting in those. What little game there is in the end then? One single route spends half the time repeating the same opening sequence where you meet the dads and probably make bad choices, and the other half is spent on three dads with the dad of your choice and then watching the epilogue that pretty much only tells you if you were a good dad to your daughter, and if you managed to woo the dad of your choice. So overall, when you spend maximum of two hours on a single route, that's... Not much time spending on actually dating those dads as the very title of the game says you'd be doing. The dates themselves vary between the dads a lot, in both content and length, but if you play your cards right you actually get quite a lot out of each one. Get to know their dad, their story, their children, maybe get them fall in love with you if things have been going alright so far. It's actually not very hard at all to get the good ending per dad, as long as you rank dates around A and S - which isn't hard at all if you know how to pay attention to context clues and their character traits - you should be pretty much okay in the end. The stories for each dad are charming, their routes, despite the short lengths of each since you are only granted three dates per dad before its time for the ending and epilogue, are all nicely different enough from each other, some routes still include other characters too so it's not locking you in on just timeline at a time but the world actually moves on around you too, and everything comes together pretty nicely. Yes it would be super great fun to spend more time with your significant dad other than the three dates you go on and build up some more of that relationship on later stages, but you take what you get, and what little you get, is still for the better part greatly written and filled with heartwarming, charming, and very dadly moments. + the dads (and Amanda) look really nice, their art is gorgeous and done in a very fitting, visual novel-ish style which is great. It's especially a plus the models are almost full body ones + the music is really jamming and sounds great + all dads are different, we get vast representation on so many fields + Amanda. I'm not a dad, and I'm never going to be one, but I will protect my daughter with my life. She's precious and amazing and I love her - all the art is really clashing in styles in the game and it can get super jarring at times. Especially with how different the custom dad looks compared to pretty much everything else. The art styles are so vastly different it just doesn't work - customizable dad is a great idea, but again, the art style doesn't fit, and the options are super limited. Also all the eyes look terrible. I get it, it's a dad, but even dad's do have normal eyes. But apparently not in this game - certain game mechanics are just absurdly confusing, or don't exist at all. Feedback on certain minigames? It's not there. Actual feedback about the progression of your dates? Doesn't exist. Feedback on the actual endings you've gotten, and if it was a good or a bad one? Have to determine that yourself! And I know I'm not the only one with these problems either - you can't sell the game with promised voice acting if it's not there. Yes they have some lines, at least at the end of the dates most of the time, but that doesn't count. Grunts and single words are voice acting, yes, but don't advertise a game including voice acting if that's all you're going to give (as a good thing though, the few actual lines the dads say are nice and fitting for them, and voice actors are recognizable too which is nice. And the voices do fit the dads they are given to) It's not worth of the $15 price tag. It's a nice game, definitely worth a shot if you are into dating sims/visual novels, and up for a quick few rounds of fun dads and maybe recognizing some people doing the voices, but not for the full price. Not a disappointing purchase in the end after dating three dads so far, but it could be improved a lot, especially with feedback and game mechanic-wise. Then again, there's only as much as you can do with the genre, but you shouldn't let that be your limit though. For a small teams first game, it's not awful, I've honestly played worse, and it's very well written in the end despite certain things falling short, but not for the full price. Ten bucks, go for it. Full fifteen, I'd tell you to wait. Are the dad's worth dating though? You should ask that from my addiction with Knife Dad.

#ddadds #dream daddy #dream daddy: a dad dating simulator #im kinda hesitant to post this but i didnt write this for half an hour not to do that tbh #just my two honest cents after three dad routes ive gotten through #so heres a review i guess you could call it #wanted to write it for steam originally but it got so long i dont dare anymore lol #anyways #heres thoughts on dads #mads yells

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