#I'm lying sorta

[artdumpss]

It's been forever since I played this game but I still really love Asra <3

[g-luztrash]

On my rewatch i finally finished the show! so here's my little tribute to commemorate my achievement

[canisalbus]

How do you find pose references for all those gorgeous and cute and aaaaaaa drawings. H o w. Where. (<-from someone struggling to draw characters interacting)

(if you don't use references, take it as a compliment to your godly anatomy and posing skills)

I don't really use references for poses that much. I'm not sure how to explain this without sounding weird but when I'm about to draw something, I visualize it in my mind, and when it's character art I sort of see them as 3D models that can be posed and rotated. And I just sort of try to replicate that on paper, sometimes it's easy and sometimes it doesn't work out at all (a good reminder that when you browse someone's art, you usually only see the pieces that the artist is at least passably proud of, not the piles of failed projects that went nowhere).

[billiuspendragon]

Okay I'm kinda talking out my ass/projecting my own autism onto Saiki here but:

Though Saiki is an unreliable narrator and truly loves his friends, I think some of his resentment over hanging out with them is real, and I can understand it.

I am a person who can readily admit I love my friends, and I do like to socialise, but I need plenty of warning beforehand and time to recuperate afterwards, because socialising takes effort. When I'm invited to do something or hang out with friends, I almost always feel a shadow of resentment about it - even if it's a thing I want to do and with people I like. It still feels like I'm losing out on a day of doing jack-shit. Cancelling on doing jack-shit is still cancelling on plans, even if those plans were just "wake up, write fanfiction, draw pictures, etc." and it throws me off. I feel like I can't enjoy spending time with my friends unless I give myself time to get excited about it, and if it happens too suddenly I find myself shutting down or floating away a bit.

Now, if we look at Saiki, who's friendship with all these people was pretty much built on these kinds of interactions, and add those to his deep-rooted belief that he doesn't deserve friends, that resentment and anxiety must be even more strong. I think the fact that Saiki obviously grows to care for his friends really shows his deep desire for connection, even more so if we go with the interpretation that some of his negative feelings about them are real.

My point with this ramble isn't to say "Saiki really does find the others annoying and therefore doesn't like them" but rather the opposite. On some level, Saiki is "tolerating" being out of his comfort zone, but the fact that he's willing to do this for his friends shows that he really does care about them.

[milkyberryjsk]

begging technically works

[danganronpa96]

The reason why Luigi started the killing game because he was sick and tired of being constantly kicked around, mocked, belittled and insulted by everyone and having no respect from anybody and Mario couldn’t bare having Luigi being treated horribly and felt bad for his little brother so he decided to help his brother with the killing game.

I really find it interesting (in a good way) how complacent Mario is towards the idea of a killing game for his brother. I can see this vision of a protective character that's like "you mess with him you mess with'a me" for Mario that's presented in this morally gray manner. He's not doing it because he wants to watch people suffer, or because he's going to experience the same satisfaction Luigi will orchestrating the killing game, but simply because... he wants to support someone he cares for, no matter the lengths he goes to do so.

You could make parallels to canon DR69 and how Teto had the same sort of motivation to work alongside Miku. But here, does Mario ever break like she did? Deep down, does he feel killing all these people in such horrible ways isn't justifiable, even if it's for his brother? Or, does he just not care, as long as Luigi is happy?

I mean, yeah, canon Super Mario doesn't really have much of a deep dive into the specifics of Mario and Luigi's brotherhood (unless there is a game that does that, I don't really follow the more story-heavy games like paper mario, the mario & luigi titles, rpg etc.). I think we all can infer they do care for each other, though. There are some fangames like Mario the Music Box that develop on these characters in this way (especially in the more fucked up sense which is always a treat). Maybe I'm just rambling because I've been indoctrinated into Mario angst 👍

[franeridan]

the whole one hour and forty minutes of op stampede are worth it even just for that half a second of interaction between mihawk and zoro actually thank you and amen 🙏

[journey-to-the-attic]

Sorry if this in an insensitive question, but I'm curious is Astaroth completely unable to walk, or is he wheelchair-bound for pain reasons?

the first one! his legs just don't work because of something going kinda funky when he was born (i.e. the dark matter in the nursery layer didn't quite get the memo while he was forming - this is referred to as a 'matter hiccup')

they're not completely paralyzed - so he can, like, wiggle his toes, or angle his legs differently, but if he wanted to cross them he'd have to use his hands to position them properly. the movement of his tail is also a little restricted, though not to the extent that his legs are

he does have leg braces that are enchanted to, in theory, help him walk - there's a range of this sort of magical mobility device available in the devildom, since matter hiccups are actually relatively common! but astaroth's in particular is on the extreme end

the way they function isn't super intuitive, and they rely on the user at least having walked before - similar to ik with her prosthetic hand, you just have to use them as if you're just walking normally, but since astaroth's never been able to do so, he can't accurately conjure that mental instruction - so he lurches a lot, and is liable to lose balance

he does occasionally use the leg braces, but only when absolutely necessary, and he has to use a cane alongside them to stay on his feet. sticking to his chair's usually just more convenient (and comfortable) for him!

[keeps-ache]

lost vocation: fish

[missingn000]

ok so i finally caught up with tpg and. ough. nanami really do be out here taking on battles above his weight class for the sake of his loved ones huh. also can't wait for the sukuna wet cat domestication arc- i mean bullying sukuna club.

SUKUNA WET CAT DOMESTICATION ARC

[cosmic-ships]

Boy, did I ever not sleep well....

[shirogane-oushirou]

love watching river otter videos and my brain just being like "👆🏻 ren my boyfriend ren!!! that's ren!!! it's him, my little otter guy!!!"

and it isn't even his fursona i'm picturing... it's just Human Man Ren but like... giving off otter energy. Human Man Ren elegantly gliding through the water. Human Man Ren cutely wiggling in the dirt. Human Man Ren crying and whining and chirping if he isn't actively getting scritched on his head. Human Man Ren growling and hissing and lunging at anyone who gets near his food / the object he's holding / his partner. man idk.

maybe i should draw these out to see if i can interpret what my brain is seeing and so i can have a pic on hand of him in a bathing suit.... who said that

[ranvwoop]

its wallowing hours! again.

[kdramamilfs]

one day i might learn how to not get attached to fictional characters i already know will die but today is NOT the day

[heartbeatbookclub]

It's 2 am as I start this, and I feel the need to put pen to paper on this thought, so to speak, because it's something I think about with relative frequency.

This is going to be more of a personal musing on my experience with Doki Doki Literature Club, and why it had such an impact on me when I first played it, as opposed to any more concrete analysis, so I guess you can keep reading if you want to know more about me as a person and my overall personal relationship to it.

Something I think about often in reference to DDLC is its status simultaneously as a satire on visual novels and all of the tropes therein, as well as a love letter to that genre, explicitly. It's very readily apparent if you've played a good few "weeb" visual novels that it very much fits that bill. I think my first experience with it makes it especially funny in that respect.

To give context, I first experienced Doki Doki Literature Club like a month or two after it came out, in a Skype call (shows how old I am) with 2 or 3 of my friends. During this period of my life, me and this small group of friends spent lots and lots of time just hanging out in Skype calls like this, doing whatever we pleased, spending time well into the next morning just enjoying each other's presence and seeing what fun shenanigans we could get into on the internet.

One frequent passtime of ours was playing visual novels. Not just any visual novels, no; we went looking for the most low effort, mediocre, low hanging fruit of visual novels we could download for free. The goal wasn't to enjoy a good story, the goal was to find something amusingly bad, whether in cliched, awkward, lazy writing, or in sheer absurdity. I still do this sometimes, though it's admittedly with a different thought in mind now.

I don't think this perception we had of visual novels, being that they're typically sloppy, cringe-inducing messes is necessarily uncommon even now, but it was especially common back then. It was "weeb shit", simple as, but even deeper than your typical weeb shit. The perception was something like watching High School DxD unironically; it's just weird.

And I don't really think the perception of visual novels being that way is necessarily inaccurate; there is a very low bar to entry to actually creating a visual novel just by the nature of the medium, so really, anyone with enough passion for a project and time on their hands can make one. As a consequence, there are a few egregiously bad visual novels, there are a few really excellent visual novels, but there are a great many just sort of okay, somewhat mediocre visual novels, and lots of visual novels created with not so honorable goals in mind.

And one thing we really enjoyed was just exploring what existed in the depths of unpopular visual novels slipping through the cracks of what people saw. For most of it, we were making fun of it, but there were a lot of points where we found stories which were mediocre, but ended up really enjoying our experience with it. I think an important thing to understand with that lower barrier to entry is that it enables people who really are passionate about telling a story to tell a story that has a lot of heart, and you can see all of that heart as a diamond within the rough of the actual construction. Even in VNs with more polish, typically there are still cracks right around the edges, where you can see just a little bit of the humanity that goes into it. It's sort of magical.

And Doki Doki Literature Club was an odd edge case, which successfully played with all of my perceptions of it. DDLC is probably the only game whose story is reliant on a plot twist where I actually went in completely blind. By all appearances, it was a silly little visual novel made with no sense of irony, and I spent a great deal of time laughing at its contents, completely unaware that they were in on the joke.

And my perception of it being this way I feel like colored a lot of what happened next when I looked into it. I forget exactly when our playthrough ended--we didn't make it to any of the deeper stuff, I watched a Let's Play for that--and I forget how the whole series of events following that went, but somehow or another, I learned of some of the true nature. Namely I saw what happened to Sayori.

It reminded me of Corpse Party, when I actually thought about it.

I'm not going to go deep in depth on all of my thoughts about Corpse Party nor any of its history, but to be frank, Corpse Party reeeally sits in that realm of "mediocre, but lots of heart" to me. I don't really think Corpse Party is very good, particularly elaborating on a lot of the lore, but I really enjoyed it when I first experienced it, and it's still something I occasionally like looking back over. It's deliciously dark, and is extremely effective at creating an oppressive atmosphere out of what's ostensibly a collection of happy warm anime character tropes with little serious personality outside them.

So when I say that Sayori's death reminded me of Corpse Party, I mean that the way it paired playing the happy warm visual novel setting straight with extremely grim subject matter was done well.

Really, there were only a few other examples of this kind of media I could think of that really effectively utilized the exact kind of gut punch that DDLC did. Everything about the way the game framed itself around it, up until the final plot twist, really did feel like they were just elements of a visual novel playing themselves out. Sayo-nara really sets that tone for me--it still gives me chills sometimes when I hear it, because it sounds perfectly like what a "Bad Ending" theme for that kind of ending would likely sound like. It plays itself remarkably well into creating the setting, it really effectively feels like it is a normal visual novel falling apart at the seams.

I think that, more than anything, is why DDLC made such an impact on me when I first experienced it (which is remarkably different than the kind of mark it leaves on me now), it played so effectively with a genre I was so familiar with, and simultaneously played "mediocre visual novel with lots of heart" straight while also completely knocking "deep and terrifying existential horror" out of the park.

It's hard to truly describe, but there's just so much that feels so right about DDLC just being as it is. There's such a unique quality to the way it's written, to the way it's constructed, that goes down to its bones. It feels like that exact brand of junk food media you go to visual novels for. You don't necessarily want to think too deeply about the characters, or the setting of the story, or any of the deeper themes surrounding it; you just want to experience a nice story with some anime girls.

And then it yanks the rug out from under you, and makes you think it's junk food media with a side of deep and disturbing horror.

And then it yanks the second rug out from under that one, making you realize it's something much, much deeper.

I think something else it really appealed to, to me, was just that sense of being on the edge of the world which most indie games of that sort always give me. There are a shitload of examples I could give for this, but this sense I'm describing is the opposite of the sense which games like Undertale give me. Undertale's world feels lived in, it feels like it exists in a much, much wider concept of a great, sprawling world where billions of people live.

DDLC feels like you and the 4 girls in it are the only people in the universe. There are all of these environments you inhabit which ostensibly have other people who pass through them, live in them, there are implications of people, but inside this world, there's only you.

I think it just appeals to my desire to be transported to a complete other world for a little while. A limited space, where only things important to this experience exist, for this pure feeling of emotional catharsis. And that's something a lot of these sorts of simple visual novels appeal to; the goal isn't necessarily to tell some deeper story, it's just to present beats as they happen. DDLC takes that, and plays with it, both in a textual sense, as though these fictional characters exist and are somehow aware they're fictional, and in a meta sense, by directly playing around with your expectations and the way the entire thing is framed.

Or something like that.

Fun fact 1: Doki Doki Literature Club (specifically Sayo-Nara, still one of the few songs I can play entirely by memory) is what got me to start learning piano. I taught myself to play, and started mostly with the DDLC soundtrack (Which is very simple to play by ear, by the way, it's pretty much entirely C major.)

Fun fact 2: What initially inspired this thought was this video, which really reminded me of other visual novels we/I played that would utilize this particular style of music.

[decompose1]

i. i avoided watching the springy episode for a WHILE because like. the amount everyone was shitting on it was horrible. it like genuinely ruined any passion i had in ii for a while because it was nonstop. you'd think they SHOT Cabby with the reactions. and then i watch it and it's like. eye-rolly at worst. what am i missing