#Like I said I am HALF JOKING

[characteroulette]

Loudly LISTEN OKAY I have only had Hershel Layton for like a month and change but if you don't commit to his bit then WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING DOING

Man is a puzzle fiend!! Thinking about puzzles 25/7!! If you don't write him as thinking about a puzzle even during *ahem* intimate moments then what's the fucking point

[yardsards]

i needed to express a sentiment in the creative stylings of @dunmeshiminimumwage

[codenamethebird]

More Hades 2 rambles from me! Though this time round it's a continuation of a point I made in this post.

Specifically, that I think the final boss of the Surface will be a living human mortal.

A couple people on that post disagreed that it would be a human, mostly just because of boss fight mechanics. Which I do get, but this is my not so little refute of that idea (all in good fun of course, I very well might be wrong! I just have thought a bunch about it since then and wanted to ramble about it).

I'll be getting into later how the game could have a hard mechanically satisfying human final boss later, because first I want to talk about how it would make sense naratively. Not because anyone remotely argued this point, I just think it's interesting haha.

So let's go back for a moment to Hades 1, and it's final boss, Hades himself. On a mechanical sense, it makes total sense, Hades is the god and master of the underworld Zag is trying to escape. He would be the final obstacle. But what really makes Hades work as the final boss, is the story and emotional reason he's there.

The plot of Hades is ultimately about Zag's messy relationship with his dad. And that final boss fight is an ongoing conversation with him. While irl you and your questionable dad constantly fighting to death is not a great way to fix your problems, these are weird bound to underworld greek gods. Death is their weird love language for like half this cast haha. There is a reason Death is one of, if not the main love interest.

Okay now that I've established that, let's look at the one final boss we do know from Hades 2, Chronos. Now it's Grandpa's time to shine. Unlike Hades 1, he fits a lot cleaner into a more traditional villian role. The monster who literally takes over your house and takes your family hostage.

In that way, it is a personal fight for Mel to save her family, but Mel lacks a specific personal connection to Chronos himself. Obviously there's the whole Grandpa thing, but she wasn't like raised by him or anything. He is a convient big bad she can hate simply and wholeheartedly. While he does try to challenge her beliefs at times, Mel will never listen to him because of the whole family kidnapping thing, and Gramps equally doesn't want to engage with her either. He just wants to be a dick to her.

While I'm a firm believer in the "We (the gods) are actually the bad guys" theory, I don't think Chronos is secretly an angel. He did you know eat his kids and that entire scene with Hades and him just reeked of shitty dad vibes. While Chronos might be better for humanity, I think he really is using them as a prop and doesn't genuinely care about them. (This is a derail, but I do think the human army side of things including Prometheus will turn on Chronos at some point. Specifcally that they are already planning to).

But yes, basically, while I adore Chronos as a villain, you get none of the character growth from either party that you got between Zag and Hades in the first game. Obviously, we are still in early access, so there's more dialouge to be had. But from what we have seen, those two are not changing the other. So this is my roundabout way to say that must mean the Surface boss is the one that is going to be all about Melinoe's character growth.

I don't think I need to explain why fighting a human would be a fascinating place for character growth for humanities #1 hater Melinoe. Mel's the Hades equivalent in this game (not the Zag), who will not listen to anyone who disagrees with her. Getting beat up by a human might actually start to get it through her head.

But also I want to dig into why I don't think the final boss will be another Titan. I've seen Atlas thrown around a bunch as a possible final Surface boss. Also Typhon... I'm certain there are others. But I don't know what they would add to the narrative, especially as a final boss? I think there's more evidence for Atlas, so I'll focus on him.

It would make some sense, he was the leader of the titan rebellion and much like Prometheus, in certain versions of the myth he was also freed from his punishment by Heracles! Which considering Heracles suspicious lack of dialouge so far, and the dialouge he does have being a god hater, I do think he's the one who freed Prometheus in this game.

But other than those connections, what does Atlas add to make him an interesting antagonist to Mel? He's not particularly tied to humanity, and while his punishment sucked he did lead a rebellion against the gods (and traditionally the reasons have nothing to do with humans).

Mostly, in my opinion, if the game was going to have a titan also be the final boss for the Surface, it wouldn't be Atlas. It would be Prometheus. He's the powerful titan who has a legitimate gruge against the gods and who can engage with Mel in interesting ways, challenging her stance against the gods. But they have already used Prometheus, I don't know how they could write Atlas (or whatever titan/god) in a way that would be more interesting than Prometheus, and rival the Hades boss fight for thematic weight. Also, it would be 2 titans in a row, which isn't nessisarily a bad thing, but still.

I've also seen people throw around it might he Ares, which I will admit would I would be way more excited for that another titan. Theres some interesting ideas to be had with an Olympian who has betrayed the gods. But we already have dialouge with Athena where she says how Chronos' armies motivations wouldn't line up with Ares'. And I feel like going from a dude only obsessed with war to someone fighting for some kind of higher cause would be a jump in character. Not impossible, but a little weird.

And ultimately, I just think that a Human would serve the purpose better as an antagonist to Mel who would shake her worldview on living mortals in particular. A fight with Ares would mess with her relationship with the gods, but not as clearly with humans.

Okay now that I've talked about themes, how about what people actually had an issue with lol, how would a final boss with a human make sense from a boss fight perspective. I have three main ideas, that don't really contradict each other and could all exist in the fight.

1st idea: multiple enemies. We've heard that there are human armies, the final boss could possibly be a leader of them. We could have hords of enemies, could have select recognizable commanders that have different skill sets, etc. None of the Surface boss fights have multi bosses in them (they have random mobs but none like the sirens or Theseus and Asterius), so I don't think it would be strange to have it. And while stretching the definition of a human boss a bit, these other bosses could be ghosts and other kinds of beings (I just think the main boss should be a breathing human).

2nd idea and tbh my main one. Have them be a Witch! Or some other kind of magic user. I feel like this should be obvious, but a lot of the theming around Hades 2 is witchy/magic stuff and it's wild we don't have a major witch enemy yet (other than obviously Hecate, but for obvious reasons I don't count her).

I'm thinking some kind of High Priestess of Chronos kind of character, we still don't know exactly how Chronos was revived and this could tie in, but there's a bunch of ways you could spin a magic user! I think it would be a prime place to put a narrative foil to Melinoe. A fellow Witch whose family was stolen away by the gods who is looking for justice. Maybe when finally looking into a mirror, some of the stuff Melinoe's been told will finally breach her thick headed skull haha.

I don't think I really need to get into the technical about how a witch fight could be cool. But one idea, tying into my first point, a magic user could have mind powers and compell powerful beings to fight for them. This could be the Zag boss fight of borderline crack theories or even maybe the aforementioned Ares who maybe got captured during his war path. A magic fight doesn't need possessed enemies, but it could be cool.

And finally, my 3rd idea. You might be going, but how could a human be more powerful than Prometheus? Well first point magic, but more seriously, just have them be boosted by Chronos and/or other allies. I mentioned a theory about a high priestess sort of character (the power of God and ani--), but more specifically, if they do go the route of a foil to Melinoe, she has her boons from the gods. Much like Theseus in Hades 1, the final surface boss could gain the boons of Chronos/Prometheus/and the like. Maybe even a Chaos boon, they have already aided Chronos once, and there's a decent chance the humans might betray Chronos at some point so Chaos might be chill with them. This could also be a way to introduce more titan characters and the like without needing to make models for them haha.

But yes, tldr, magic human gives us both the thematic weight of it being a human, witch stuff to parallel Melinoe, and just cool powerful magic fight as a final boss (and it could parallel the Hecate boss fight, the first boss u fight and the last being magic based).

[miaoqing]

Okay, I've been thinking a lot about that whole thing with using the term "unreliable narrator" for Shen Yuan, and I want to throw in my two cents.

(looong explanation under the cut)

There are two layers to storytelling - narration and focalisation.

A narrator is the voice telling the story; it will usually be either a character inside the story (intradiegetic narrator) or a being outside of the story (extradiegetic narrator) who usually knows at least some of the things that the character/s are thinking or feeling.

Focalisation is about the being whose thoughts the narrator is conveying. A story written in the 1st person pov where a character is narrating their own life would have homodiegetic focalization. A 3rd person pov where the narrator is someone outside of the story would have heterodiegetic focalization. A story where the narrator's knowledge is unlimited has zero focalization.

What we have in SVSSS is a story narrated by a (seemingly) omniscient being, so an extradiegetic and heterodiegetic narrator. Thus, the narrator is someone outside the story, not SY, and calling him an unreliable narrator is wrong. Right?

No! SVSSS has internal focalization, meaning that the narration is focused on the thoughts and feelings of a character, in this case Shen Yuan. (As opposed to external focalization where the narration is limited to just the setting, what characters are doing, etc without delving into their thoughts).

What we read in the story are Shen Yuan's thoughts and feelings in the 3rd person. So far so good - nothing weird there. The trouble comes in the form of the fact that obviously, somewhere along the way, SY's actual thoughts/feelings get filtered/censored, so to speak, and we read a stripped down/edited version of them. This means that somewhere along the line, someone is unreliable. But we don't know who - maybe we are reading a straight up transcription of SY's thoughts and he is just that much more delusional than we thought. Maybe the narrator is leaving some things out, or isn't granted access to his "true" thoughts. It's impossible to tell.

The only thing we know for sure is that we are reading what we are meant to believe to be what SY sees happening/thinks about/feels. What we do not know is whether or not that is the objective truth.

So - even though Shen Yuan isn't the "narrator" by definition, it is still through his eyes that we see the events of SVSSS happening. There are no truly objective statements in SVSSS - it's all composed of Shen Yuan's thoughts, and who knows how much of the truth is lost to his mental gymnastics. As I said before, we don't know where exactly the unreliabilty comes from, but unless you want to have to write out this entire explanation every time and still not even have a definitive answer, let's just say that Shen Yuan is the unreliable one for simplicity's sake.

TL;DR it's fine to call Shen Yuan an "unreliable narrator" and to pull the "oh but he isn't narrating the story" is to pointlessly argue semantics. We all know what we mean by "unreliable narrator". it's not that deep. just laugh at the joke and move on. thanks for coming to my tedtalk

[autistic-beshelar]

ah yes dungeon meshi, the manga where an autistic man gets repeatedly bullied by people he thinks are his friends and not a single person supports him

[eerna]

honestly Noragami deserves some kind of an award for being the most intense downward spiral of "it can't get any worse than THIS, right???" I've ever read. I haven't known peace since Kazuma did that stupid spell on Yukine and it's only gone downwards from there

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

yeehaw just wrote over 3k and i can't publish Any of it without miles of fantasy au context

[dormiloncito]

the consequences of my actions are upon me

[rauchendesgnu]

...I don't think you understand what I mean when I say I need Jon to have more eyes. I mean. I mean more. More. It's never enough eyes. If that man still has a face, it needs to go. More eyes! Is there a bit of skin on his palm that is smooth? Not anymore, there's an eye now. You say no more space on his eye-filled body? Make 'em floating spectral eyes, I don't care.

[beneathashadytree]

I have a confession to make…

The best fanfic I’ve ever written—and the only multi-chapter, comprehensive one too—is a Brian May fanfic that I’ve been writing on Wattpad (yikes, but you gotta understand that Wattpad used to be all the rage) for the past nearly half a decade. To be entirely fair though, I went on hiatus for a long while (since 2018 I think!!) and only got back to writing it last summer.

Yes, this Brian May. Queen’s guitarist, funnily enough.

[dayurno]

[july-19th-club]

ok dean's do as i say not as i do ass in the cassie episode when sam realizes that not ONLY is his supposed playboy brother actually a guy who will drop everything and reveal The Secret to the first girl who spends more than a month with him but . he will reveal The Secret at all, a thing he's spent the past six months loudly saying there is never any use in doing because we can't keep friends in this life anyway

[swagging-back-to]

not sorry. i extend very little sympathy and patience towards tras who are underage, and the only ones who do get said sympathy are TIFs. but again. it's MICROSCOPIC levels of sympathy.

[ialwaysknewyouwerepunk]

.

[seafoam-taide]

jury trulystill out on whether in stars and time made me worse or better. Arguably, reasonably, in the long run the answer is better. But I have felt like so much shit since finishing that game oh my god. Siffrin. Siffrin why are you like that. This is awful

[f0xgl0v3]

Kleos cries over plates.

Kleos here, dear 5 people who read this you may be asking “Kleos why are you crying over plates? Whose plates are you mourning??” And I say, Camp Half-Bloods plates.

Specifically like here- I’m writing notes about stuff I want to post so I can have drafts that I can just shoot off when I’m on a plane or busy or just need something to put out. Pages 14-17 (as of now) are about mealtimes/the dining pavilion in CHB. Why does this affect the plates? Well, we all know about the Dryads and how they come over with the beef and the strawberries and all that jazz. Fine all good and dandy the plates are just plates.

And that’d be good, I could go off context clues and stuff and ramble about the diets of children at CHB with that. If Leo didn’t come barging in talking in MoA about the magical enchanted plates they got from CHB along with the cups that magically summoned food. I’ve been (not actually) crying over this for the past 2 hours because it hurts my brain to decipher what this means. Because we have the many instances of the very average plate plates and then the magical girl plates.

This in my head means two things. Either all the plates are magic at CHB except they don’t use the magic plates or those plates Leo has have been locked in Chiron’s china cabinet in the big house for display- which obviously the wording of the 2nd option is a joke but like. The lore implications of what the plates magical status to me in this fictional universe is somehow halting me completely in any progress which is stupid. “Kleos it’s just something Rick didn’t think of,” “Kleos as your peers say, tis not that deep bro” and I say to that. Yeah no duh, but who cares other arbitrary strawman me (the one worm in my brain that is realistic).

So, as I cried over what was going on with Michael Kahale all those months ago. Now I cry over plates. Fucking plates, because either option in my brain makes me ask “why aren’t they using the magic plates” when they use the magic cups??? I can just go with “they are in majority of canon seen as normal plates. Therefore they are normal plates and Leo was just on something/j” but this is my plate conundrum. Maybe in a few days I’ll answer my own problem but this has been “Kleos cries over a plate issue rather than actually writing that Bryce Lawerence fic or continuing to work on the first chapter of SoN re-imagined” thank you.