#Man vs Self

[sinceyousawvienna]

dreaming of myself

[hyba]

I'm struggling against myself lately because I've got the Shiny New Object thing happening where I just found Adventure Game Studio and I've also just agreed to help someone script their visual novel and I'm just. I need to not overstretch myself. But at the same time all of these things are so intriguing and fun for me so I want to work on them. But also I have other things I want to complete. So I shall keep struggling against them. :)

[gildedbearediting]

A Look At: The Bully

Written in first person past tense by James Reaney. The story is set in the small town of Partridge. The main character lives there with his sisters Noreen and Kate, his father, and aunt Coraline in a small farmhouse. His mother died of TB, and he describes his father as an ‘afternoon farmer’ that sleeps in the kitchen. Jargon and Flowers Clapboard are the thin, flat pieces of horizontally…

[pitch-and-moan]

Manatee Against Self

[rotruff]

wising you a very sleeping on your f/os chest so you can hear their hearbeat or vice versa. wishing you a very instinctively moving towards one another and pulling eachother close and holding on tighter in sleep. wishing you a very one quietly talking to the other who's spouting off sleeptalk-nonsense in loose responses. wishing you a very ignoring blankets in favor of eachothers warmth. wishing you a very kisses to the crown of the forehead and the cheek and the collarbone and the shoulder and the crook of the jaw right where it meets the neck. ok?

[notsofrozt]

Save me God Shang Qinghua. Oh, save me System!SQH...

TY @anachronismstellar for the idea

[lesbianfakir]

HE FELL IN LOVE WITH HER AFTER LEARNING SHE WAS JUST A BIRD

The whole show. The whole show. We have this long running character beat of Duck beloved she, as she truly is, is unloveable and once people see her to her very core they will abandon her. But simultaneously!!!!! We have this subtle plot building of fakir, fully aware the girl has feathers, falling in love with her! And it’s so slow it doesn’t come to the forefront until the very end and AAAAAAAAA the amount of times Duck laments how no one would care about her as a bird meanwhile fakir looks at her with the most adoring eyes shut up!! Shut up literally shut up!!!! People will love you for the things you hate about yourself and you’ll have no goddamn idea because you’re so wrapped up in how YOU see yourself!!!!! HE LOVED THAT LITTLE BIRD MORE THAN SHE HATED HERSELF

[knightmareaceblue]

The chaotic father-child duo, guest starring my terrible experiments with applying faces to sticks.

[andi-o-geyser]

all my favourite characters are just me seeing them and going "damn you sure do clean up well but I'd much rather see you grinning with blood between your teeth"

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[artflameball]

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO MICHAEL AFTON DRAGGING HIS FATHER TO HELL TO TORTURE HIM FOR ETERNITY 🎉🎉🎉🎉HERE'S A BUNCH OF VENGEFUL SPIRIT MICHAEL ART IN CELEBRATION + WILLY BOY GENERALLY GETTING TORTURED

[Commissions for Palestine are open! Check my pinned for details!]

[unraveling-plot]

Been thinking a lot about how I love Seven x Thirteen yet they're basically a two-for-one combo of two tropes I hate ("incompetent man x competent woman" and "competent woman x even more competent man who upstages her")

And I think part of it is that it is both of those at the same time so it PEMDASes, but I think it's also that it's like

Thirteen: this man's very existence is challenging my worldview. He was a brutal killer but still he has friends who love him and he chooses simple joy. I must kill him or I'll fail my master and I have no one other than my master. But this guy keeps trying to help and protect me and keeps forgiving me. Not having the resolve to kill him is breaking apart my sense of self. I've only ever killed to survive but he makes me want to fight to protect. Could I be valued beyond my usefulness?

Seven: whoa pretty lady :D sick sword moves. Wanna go to the beach?

[greenlaut]

i hope you suffer.

my take on pre-war abm michael (the michael lucifer fell in love with) angels before man written by @nicosraf

[jade-len]

shen qingqiu from svsss 🤝 protagonist from 'a man who defies the world of BL' with...

- realizing you're in a (sorta crappy) book/specific genre

- doing thorough research about the world and actively avoiding as many stupid plot points as you can

- running away from problems and constantly lying to save you and your poor ass from raging homosexuals

- low-key being the only "sane", "normal", and "straight" one there

- just trying to live life peacefully as an unimportant character to hopefully be forgotten about

- somehow, someway, despite all of your efforts, have a mentally ill queer teenager fall utterly and hopelessly in love with you. just because you helped 'em once by giving them a small amount of basic human decency and *insert lonely backstory and an older man thing*

[nicorobinphd]

stg, being an enjoyer of jane twdg is like being forced into an expert-level course on the way misogyny manifests in video game spaces.

god forbid a woman be complex or difficult or provably mischaracterized (see tags) at the end of her arc to service the culmination of a man’s storyline.

[p1ctur3]

Can't believe it has been a full year since I starting posting AvA/M fanart

so I redrew my first piece of fanart :]