#NOW YOU DO

[bunnyspine]

small blood warning!

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My twist on the nightmare milkman aka Yog Sothoth! I took inspiration from Nosferatu and Edward Scissorhands ^^

[necrominn]

get metal gear solided idiots

[wayward-banana]

ring ring it's a difficult gun to draw calling

[deviousdrtruffles]

just a reminder that Punko gave us permission to make fan merch (once it isn’t art taken directly from the comic)

[antoniosio]

joined @/maikol.with.a.bee 's 2k dtyis on instagram!!

[omg-hellgirl]

David and I may in fact have been the best-known bisexual couple ever. We were certainly the most famous couple ever to admit and celebrate our bisexuality so publicly. So if you didn't know before, now you do.

Angie Bowie, Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie.

[ayy-junipei]

Day 2 | Death

[cosmorom]

hi.

[picsfortheday]

[rorydrawsandwrites]

WHY ARE YOU SO GOOD AT MAKING AUS I LOVE ALL OF THEM especially timebomnb au…. Hodls a special place in my soul….

Oh shit fr? 👉👈

[red-cavalier]

Maybe I proved drawing Innes. Science isn't back on that one, yet.

[mothpendragon]

Hey so uhhhhh I may have posted my first ever fanfic 👉👈

This is a rewrite of a scene from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 so it contains spoilers!! Read at your own risk!

(This film changed my brain chemistry fr)

[whitherwanderer]

. : r i t u a l i s t : .

[mooblesandsoups]

A Disguise (a life series poem)

A wolf in sheep's clothing

That's what they call me

I watch from afar

I Blend with the others

I laugh with the others

I make friends

I bite the traitors

I am but a mere traitor myself

But I have to survive

I have to kill

From 3 to 2 to 1 to none

From green to yellow to red to grey

I have to tear them from limb to limb

I have to finish their remains

I'm a wolf in sheep's clothing.

But I do not want to be

I'm a sheep in Wolf's clothing

People fear I might bite

Fire in my hands that burns to the touch

I'm all bite no bark

I'm an ally to the Wolf's

I cherish them all

I love them like family

I Appear strong so I can protect them

But the Wolf's realize I'm a mere sheep

They strike

And I let them as it was planned

As long as they're safe

As long as they're happy

As long as I won't have to live any longer

I let them tear me apart

I'm a sheep in Wolf's clothing.

But it's all I had to be

[ceejaykayess]

SMTV:V Vengeance Route Minor Late Game Spoilers (and some minor Creation True Neutral spoilers)

I've been playing SMTV:V for the last month and finally got to put it down yesterday finishing all six routes after initially only wanting to do the True Neutral ending then grab both (or just one depending on how satisfied I felt) Vengeance endings. I liked it enough that I'm honestly kinda sick of it.

But a certain series of conversations in Taito with a certain character pushed me to make a post to push out a message to the sea of souls.

To start, let's bring up the original release of SMTV in 2021. Now, while plenty of people praised the gameplay, the game's story was near universally reviled, or at best ignored. The biggest symptom of this was the lacking, if not outright shitty, characterisation of our cast. The player was, ultimately, left with no real reason to care about any of these chumps on a personal basis outside of maybe Tao and Aogami (and Ichiro, but his shit went wack super hard so it kinda evened out), and could only really care about them in terms of what they think the game wanted from them. Comparatively, the demons in the game got much more of a spotlight, being almost entirely who you got sidequests from, as well as who you interact with the most, not even in a gameplay sense but in a cutscene one too. Bumping into Fionn over the course of the story was cool, and him eventually accepting you as his king was a nice conclusion. Amanozako, annoying she may be, turned out to, at least conceptually, be pretty interesting in her relationship to the protagonist. Plenty of the demons you met had strong personalities that, when combined with their gameplay styles, left a strong impression on the player, and made them more important to (You) as a person than the "main characters".

So, along comes the True Neutral ending of the game, the closest to a "definitive" ending in terms of gameplay experience, with the secret final boss showing off his chops as probably the hardest non-superboss. And in this ending, you... create a world for humanity alone. Which means you... get rid of all of the gods and demons plaguing your world, made more or less certain by absorbing the secret final boss' Knowledge. The gods and demons you've spent upwards of 50 hours running around for, fighting with, fusing, studying, refining, even just watching.

Even your partner, Aogami, who's the only reason you're still alive.

And people were... not exactly hot on it. Generally people thought all the endings weren't great, and none of them actually felt like they fit their supposed alignment, with Neutral and Chaos seeming mixed in their placement and Law being the most tame it's ever been since the franchise's inception, if the wiki didn't lie to me. Made for great angsty fanfiction at least, but... not exactly a lot to go around.

Now, this brings me to the alignment rep for Neutrality, Shohei Yakumo, and his Life, Nuwa. Nuwa herself wasn't too much of a character, as much as she was a couple pretty good lines and an attempted line of communication between you and Yakumo. Yakumo is the real star of the show here, and... what a star he was.

I don't think anybody liked this guy. Hell, I'm not sure anyone likes this guy even after Vengeance's addendums. He shows up, starts shit, accomplished nothing we actually see or that actually matters, then dies. In the Neutral routes, he dies to fucking Ichiro and Abdiel, like fuck off. His plan, with Nuwa, is to destroy the Throne of Creation, which will make it impossible for a new God to remake the world or rule over humanity (in this way at least, allegedly, but no secret final boss so maybe actually). When we attempt it, we get the Neutral ending, generally accepted as the worst ending, and even to me actively read like the bad ending to the story. The protagonist even has the same evil little smile on his face as when he uses Profaned Land.

Of course, when you fulfill certain conditions (read: have certain fusion recipes visibly unlocked in the World of Shadows) Nuwa will stroll up to you at some point and tell you that the original plan was to make a world for humanity alone, but that they didn't go with it for... some reason. That's the True Neutral ending. Out of universe, a boggling decision to make, and in-universe, one that actively tears at out protagonist's heart.

This leads me to the point of the post: In Vengeance route, we are given, implicitly, the reason why Yakumo and Nuwa did not approach the Throne with the idea of using it to make a world just for humans. It is because, in spite of Yakumo being the victims of demons, his parents slaughtered by a man whose will was weak enough to be possessed by them and resenting demons, as a teenager demons were the only friends he really had. Between him and a fellow in Jouin that tells us about his files, we know he often spoke with things nobody else saw and called them his friends, said that he was never really alone. He is described actively as a contradiction. Demons took everything from him. Demons were all he had. He hates demons. He loves demons. He wants to create a world without demons. He can't bring himself to follow through on that ideal and settles for a much shittier compromise: ultimately keeping the status quo and making sure nobody can really change it. Neutral is the bad end; it's the White Ending of SMTV.

But, don't you think all of that sounds a little familiar? Lost things precious to him because of demons, yet in a sense has demons as his closest companions. Wanting to make a world for humanity alone, yet crushed by the weight of erasing those he holds dear. A contradictory person, when you look at him all up.

Hey wait, that's just our protagonist.

That's right, I think they accidentally made Yakumo a strong mirror to the protagonist, as reflected metatextually by the True Neutral route. It is in this way, then, that I find it striking that the Vengeance route, the one praised for making the characters actual characters, and where you can actually say the MC became friends with his classmates and alignment reps, is the route where you can't choose to abandon demons. (Saying that, I have seen some people compare Vengeance Law to True Neutral in removing all demons, I'm not sure about that actually but I dunno) Instead, it's in the Creation route, where you don't make particularly deep bonds at all with your fellow humans, where demons are those most important, most interesting to you, that you can choose to destroy them.

And all of that made me think of Yakumo as incredibly interesting, actually. Nuwa said, in the diverging cutscene between Neutral and True Neutral, that maybe we could do what they (Nuwa and Yakumo) couldn't. In 2021, that would be read as finishing the fight they lost. But now, it reads like this: "You and Yakumo are incredibly similar people. But Yakumo can't pull the trigger on his ideals. I know you can, though. You won't betray yourself." Which is wild to say to a 17 year old God who probably has a history of flip-flopping on who he thinks is right at any given moment, but hey.