#Maybe I'm mentally fucked up

[mooblybloom]

Danny: But it is an origin stor-

Jazz: no

Danny: okay.

It's fair to assume that these kids may have some trauma- (also yay get to draw the trio's lineup yippee been wanting to do that)

and ok I'll admit, I might have gone a bit crazy with the blood but- ok I have a background in Warrior Cats which can get gorey and blood is honestly kinda fun to draw-

[eveningrainstorm]

People often talk about Rio Ranger as if he's the doll version of Sei but what I find super fascinating is that he isn't, not in the same way Fake Reko or the Dummies are replications of their human counterparts.

Ranger resembles Sei on a surface level — same physical appearance, just an unclear amount older; same way of speaking. But he is unmistakably different. Ranger is an incomplete being, missing his positive emotions, but even the true Ranger is Rio Laizer rather than Sei, because there's still something different.

Rio Ranger is, fundamentally, inhuman and yet desperate to be human. He was created to be jealous of humanity and despite his hatred for them, humanity is what he is always striving for. But it is something that he doesn't possess, and is forced to steal instead. He takes clothes from the dead and uses drawings on cards to feign emotion; he is the Dress-Up Doll, Rearranger, not possessor of anything of his own.

While the other dolls based on humans in the game have identity issues based on their personhood being defined by someone else, being merely a copy of another person, Ranger is not even allowed Sei's identity to base himself on — it's very likely he doesn't even know who Sei was. He does not have Sei's clothes — nondescript and tied to Asunaro as they are — and he does not have the capacity for expressing emotion that Sei had.

When comparing Ranger and Sei in terms of personality, differences are obvious. There are similarities, naturally — besides the abrasive way of speaking, there's the jealousy and desire for validation. But in Ranger, these are present to an extreme — they're all he has. (And, ironically, this is what Gashu claims to believe makes him so human, even when Ranger's inhumanity comes through most clearly in this lack of anything else.)

In Sei, on the other hand, these traits are tempered by logic, to put things in YTTD's beloved logic vs. emotion dichotomy. Despite his outwardly emotional nature, from what we see of him he appears realistic and focused on survival in a way that Kai isn't. He's aggressive and overly casual about killing people, but he doesn't express the glee at violence that Ranger does, only a fierce desire to prove himself and survive. Sei is jealous of Kai and desires Gashu's affection, but also has an understanding of the situation he's in that both Kai and Ranger lack — he can tell that Gashu doesn't care about him as much as he does Kai, and recognizes that the way Gashu treats both of them is wrong. Ranger believes Gashu truly loves him, a fact proven blatantly false by his eventual demise at Gashu's hands. Ironically, this blindness is more similar to Kai as we see him in his minisode, rather than Sei.

Of course, this understanding isn't simply a part of Sei's basic nature, but rather the fact that unlike Kai and Ranger, he has past experience to go on. Sei wasn't born into the Satou family — though his exact origins are unclear, based on his grief for his birth father and how he talks about Asunaro ("all this shady organization crap"), it's possible he wasn't even born into Asunaro at all. Before being sent to Gashu, he had his own father, one who we don't know anything about but whom he apparently loved. He doesn't accept Gashu's treatment of him and Kai the way Kai does because he has known a different father and a different way of life. This doesn't free him from Asunaro's influence — he still accepts the role of assassin they give him and resigns himself to becoming a killer. What choice does he have, after all? But he carries no illusions about Asunaro or his role in it. He knows that the training is cruel, that he is viewed only as a tool, that Asunaro is wrong even if they are also not worth resisting.

This is a major part of why Ranger isn't Sei, why he cannot be; because Asunaro is all Ranger knows. They are his creators, who he was literally built to serve. In Ranger's mind, he is not only Gashu's son and heir, but his creation, his masterpiece. And of course he wouldn't have been created with Sei's memories — why take that risk? Why give him any sort of knowledge of a life outside Asunaro or reason to be disloyal to them?

Ranger is not Sei — so why model Ranger after him? Because Ranger is the idea of Sei, what Sei was meant to be: a counterpart to Kai, a rival, a second choice. Gashu preferred Kai, once; Kai won out over Sei. But Kai has proven himself a failure and betrayed Asunaro, leaving Gashu with no choice but turn once more to Kai's long-dead competition. Ranger is, like Sei, the opposite of Kai, temperamental and vulgar while Kai is stoic and polite, and perhaps more importantly, capable of murder while Kai steadfastly is not.

And yet Ranger isn't Sei. Sei was jealous of those — specifically Kai — he saw as superior or at least as being treated as such; Ranger is this idea taken to its natural conclusion. Sei had lost everything he had outside of Asunaro; Ranger never had anything else to begin with. Sei was a human; Ranger will never be, doomed to forever long otherwise. Ranger is Sei only in the ways Sei was useful — desperate for recognition, willing to kill, a perfect rival to Kai — but something entirely different, an inhuman machine, in all the ways Sei was a liability.

Sei was human, and he knew that he deserved to have that fact respected. Ranger isn't human and gets only the wanting, desperate to be as good as a human even humanity itself is unattainable. Of course, it isn't being a doll that is actually Ranger's problem — it's Asunaro, who view humans and dolls alike as disposable. Sei's humanity didn't make him any less of a tool as far as Asunaro was concerned, it only made him more difficult to control. All Sei wanted was to be seen as an equal to Kai, a person worthy of respect — and this is what he gets, in the end: his face and voice used as a base for one of Asunaro's weapons, while his true identity and personhood remains forgotten.

Ranger has nothing to hold him back from doing his duty for Asunaro, nor does he have anything to hold onto outside of it. In that sense, Ranger is an ideal asset for Asunaro — at least until the very jealousy and hatred Gashu programmed into him goes too far, and he is, once again, deemed a failure. Ironically, Gashu shoots Ranger for attempting to kill a participant, when willingness to kill was perhaps the one true advantage Sei had over Kai.

In the end, Ranger is offered no more humanity in his death than Sei is — they are both merely pawns of Asunaro, set to die at its whims. But while Sei dies in the arms of his brother, receiving one final act of kindness as Kai refuses to kill him, Ranger has no one in either of his deaths but his creators: in his death as Rio Laizer the dubious kindness of Tia Safalin, making his final moments full of agonizing guilt, and of course in his first death, as Rio Ranger, nothing but Gashu's coldness, the bullet in his head a sort of culmination to the favoritism Sei found weighed against him, and a demonstration of just how far Gashu has come from the father who once genuinely cared for Sei. Sei was human, Ranger was not, but as far as Asunaro is concerned, they are exactly the same: tools, easily thrown away as soon as they stop being useful.

[tankgotstuckinthecircusgate]

my n1 guilty pleasure is thinkin that post m2 lauretta moved deeper into criminal after several years & ended up sentenced to jail somewhere in the middle of 1970s

[triglycercule]

horror has KR dust can't be affected by KR unless it's by another version of himself. horror's (somehow) still a judge dust wants repentance for his wrongdoings,,,, someone must see where i'm going with this

i just wanna imagine like if dust ever feels like he's doing something wrong (like having thoughts about gaining LV again or something,,,,) he'll just ask horror to give him like. a quick little punch. hit him with a bone fragment because he needs to feel his sins crawling on his back from a true judge,,,,

and then horror's more than happy to do it 😁😁😁 he winds that shit up before he bitch slaps dust :33 oh you need to be judged DONT WORRY DUST horror is a totally impartial judge that totally won't find your situation both ridiculous and entertaining 😁😁

[thousandyearphantombunker]

i hate the fact the term karen went from describing a bitchy entitled customer to basically the modern day equivalent of calling a woman a harpy (misogynistic as fuck) and that people use the term on people out in public who are at the end of their rope emotionally from stress or a shitty day. I get it just because your having a rough time doesn't mean you get to be a dick but sometimes I think people are seriously lacking in empathy and I get it a lot shit the customer might be dealing with isn't your responsibility but like if a customer is struggling with something simple maybe don't be a dick? Just a thought.

[crypticscarecrow]

OMG CROW SO LIKE

i keep looking at your storyboard w Jax (bc it’s so good obvi) and is it like, lore related or did you just make it for fun or smth :3 /genq

Mostly for fun if I gotta be real bhdcjhb- I'm learning storyboarding, perspective and a whole bunch more, so I was messing around with a 'what if' animatic. It DOES have some bits of lore in there tied with lyrics! So my own current takes on what may have happened, some things are subject to change since I'm figuring out the au myself, but the Kaufmo bits stayed the same since the start :]

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

Sure he does. Somehow. 😂

[squisheebugdoodles]

Okay Here Is The Problem: everything costs money and yet money is something that i just literally never have. solution? kill the idea of money so that nothing costs anything Please. i'm so tired

[pardonmydelays]

"what's your role in the fandom" i am a clown who writes the most terrible posts only liked by two of my mutuals out of pity

[icewindandboringhorror]

sometimes looking at like Self Help Strategies lists for the symptoms I'm having is always just like:

thing that I already do

thing I have tried 10 times

thing I already do

thing that I don't have the money to do

thing I already do

thing I've been doing since I was 10yrs old to no avail

thing that is impossible given my situation

thing that doesn't apply to me

thing that I already do

thing I have already tried

hrmm, oh wait, maybe finally- OH, yeah.. okay. thing that I already do but it was just phrased slightly differently

thing I have already done

[uncanny-tranny]

If you truly want to do what's best for mentally ill people, you have to learn that you often won't be able to separate the "salvageable" parts of ourselves with our illnesses, and you can't pretend like we are sane people underneath the façade of insanity, like we can flip a switch and magically erase the differences that make us "disordered"

[ranger-kellyn]

can i PLEASE get my creative drive back ;~;

[hungerpunch]

i love how every single month, around the same time, i think something cataclysmic is happening to my mental health and then i realize it's my period. so i probably don't need to be researching like, ketamine clinics, bc i'm fine. every single month this happens. like clockwork, i am gripped by panic over how depressed i suddenly feel. it's routine! and yet i never fucking remember that.

[anaalnathrakhs]

love this part of my life where the things that are difficult but challenging and good for me are things i can stop and skip and halfass, but the things that are difficult and painful and pointless are the things i have to live with no matter what

[vaguely-concerned]

just going about my day idly contemplating how some of the ways hawke can interact with a romanced anders are not at all unlike how they interact with leandra (and a bit of carver too, especially with a purple hawke), and then thought about my hawke in the timeline where he romances anders and was hit straight in the face with 'was he ever actually in love, or was he just desperately trying to renegotiate with his mother's ghost in any way he could' and now i need to lie down. this is the power of dragon age 2

[tearlessrain]

seriously can catastrophes stop happening for five minutes my brain is already fried from the ones we're already experiencing