#all boiling down to this

[dricacchi]

some arthur lester design ideas and doodles

[ravenlilyrose]

I have a theory that if Tim ever fully stopped stalking Dick/breaking into his apartment on a whim/occasionally staring at him with blatant hero worship/generally obsessing and being objectively creepy, Dick would take it as a sign that Tim had finally figured out he was a failure of a human being and now hated him.

[helenvaughans]

[luxlightly]

"If you're hurt by finding out that a person you admired did something bad or are worried about the idea they might, it shows you need to not form attachments to people you don't personally know."

I have bad news for you about how literally the entirety of human socialization and the human mind work. You can say "here's a stick from off the ground. his name is Stanley and he has a loving family" and then break the stick and people will feel hurt because they formed a positive connection to Stanley. Humans project attachment onto everything. Asking people not to feel connections to other humans is not feasible. It's not possible and, if it were, it sure as hell wouldn't be healthy.

You didn't do anything wrong if you feel hurt that someone you didn't personally know did something wrong. You're not parasitic or obsessive for wanting people you don't personally know to be good people. Being devastated that someone you liked did something horrible isn't a sign you liked them too much, it's a sign you have the basic human ability to form emotional and social connections. Your responsibility is being aware of those connections and behaving in ways that are healthy, respectful, and keep you and others safe.

Trying to just not admire people or not feel a connection to other humans won't work. Focus instead on being aware of what your relationships to other people are, what actions on your part are acceptable given that level of relationship, what actions are acceptable on their part, and what level of relationship it's realistic or healthy to project. And be ready, as with all things in life, to change your views on something or someone when presented with new information, even if you have very strong emotional connections to the subject. For example: "I'd love to get a cup of coffee with the celebrity I don't know and talk with them about a film they're in. I imagine that would be nice." <- normal human emotion "I will go to this celebrity I don't know and ask them, apropos of nothing, to get a coffee with me/I expect this celebrity I've never met WILL go to coffee with me" <- Unrealistic level of projected relationship. Crosses boundaries of normal human interactions between strangers.

"I'm devastated this actor I liked was an abuser" <- normal human emotion

"I won't believe that this actor was an abuser because I like him and therefore can tell he wouldn't do that" <- Unrealistic and unhealthy level of projected relationship. Unsafe for you and others.

You can't just "not admire" people, yes, even people you don't know personally. Instead, be careful to make sure your admiration of someone doesn't affect your ability to make judgements about them.

[emiko-matsui]

I think Adaine and Aelwyn are so compelling but what I find compelling about them is the stuff no one is talking about. I find it really compelling how Aelwyn was the single person Adaine hated most in the world and didn't even blink before sending her to federal prison. I find it compelling that Aelwyn never backed away from the hate, fuelled it even, while being of the honest opinion that her little sister was the best diviner in the entire world. How disguised it was in season one because of Adaine's anxiety disorder and bad socialisation, but she's just as mean and as big of a true bitch as Aelwyn is, but she is still somehow flying under the radar with it. How their character art in season one was almost identical to each other when they clashed the most, but now, per season three, that they've been allowed to grow into their own people they've started to differ drastically in appearances but grown closer in how they behave

[folkdevilism]

I'm perpetually in awe at the number of people who are well in to their twenties and beyond who still think an on-screen portrayal of something, regardless of nuance or background context, automatically equates to inherent glorification or real-world endorsement of the actions being portrayed.

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[carlyraejepsans]

Now that Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 are out, how much would you say Deltarune has gripped you compared to Undertale?

listen. undertale has several multipliers. it's something i played when i was a kid. it's how i taught myself english and why i became an artist. it's something that is completed and that i have absorbed into my bloodstream, so I'm a lot more comfortable navigating it in terms of fanwork/fanfiction etc. just by virtue of being a work in progress, i am limited in how much i let myself get caught up in the transformative side for deltarune. I'm the kind of fan that needs to know everything before i put my hands on the story.

but once the game is complete? easily matched. this is insane

[wolfythewitch]

Haiii - just wanted to ask, how many people have told you you’ve altered their religious beliefs? I’m debating being Christian bc of you (and some other influences like the fallout new Vegas man lmao)

Um! A few! Which is very fascinating but I would like to put a little disclaimer that I don't do art to convert people 🙏 hahaha a lot of it genuinely stems from my interest in the bible. I'm very critical of the church and the religion as a whole while still being part of it! So if you genuinely do want to try being christian, then yeah definitely go explore it, but you have to understand that it is a Very tumultuous environment and I'd say spirituality comes before religion in a way. Make sure to do your research and find a good community to connect with

[autumnrory]

She's often accused of playing the victim, that's a big line in like the Kanye stuff, and so on, like she's self-victimizing. But to me, what's actually kind of interesting, and it's almost an artistic flaw of hers, is that she is unable to be the victim. Like, in Dear John, which is one of her best songs, she has that, you burned all the other girls you date out, but not me, I got your matches before you could burn me. And so like, she actually doesn't play the victim, she's just kind of honest. Like, if somebody releases a music video of you with like, a giant nude wax Taylor doll, she'll be like, that's kind of revenge porn and I don't like it. That's just hitting back, right? So like, what actually irritates people about her is her refusal to be the victim of a situation, but like, they call it playing the victim.

B.D. McClay, Know Your Enemy: Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome

[elbiotipo]

Nameless Bandits are perhaps the worst of Bethesda's (and other RPGs) design. I hate it so much. In an RPG, you cannot put yourself in the role of a good person if you have a kill count in the hundreds, and you cannot do anything about it because those Nameless Bandits cannot be talked to or even avoided. You HAVE to kill them. They are there to provide you human targets so you can play shooter. There is no story behind them (they outnumber named NPCs by magnitudes), no names, nothing. You cannot try to cross peacefully, they will attack you, always.

And perhaps if it was a FPS game, where you are in a combat situation (though that's a whole another thing), you could understand there's no much time for dialogue or peaceful options. But in an RPG, you can't put yourself in the role of a 'hero' if you're mowing down hundreds and hundreds of people. I wanna just say, for once, 'hey, can we talk this out', but you can't. It just takes me out of it.

Starfield also has featured them, so I've lost hope that this piece of design will go away anytime soon.

[stardreamt]

I’m bout sick of these people

[ahappydnp]

dan and phil seem to understand phandom quite well but do you think there are things that they don’t get (yet?) at the moment?

oh my fucking god where do i start

i think sometimes they revert back to the assumption that we only care about their romantic relationship/we want more than they're comfortable showing and we're only around for them to ~perform~ the ship for us? especially when they are a bit more vulnerable and gentle with each other, obviously we react and get very excited because they're just. a stunning example of what could be and a beacon of joy for queer people but i get that for them the reactions can still feel like people screaming PHAN IS REAL when they made eye contact. but like...it's just not and it never was that for so many people? i do think they fundamentally understand the difference and have said they appreciate the support, but sometimes you can just feel the walls going back up just a bit (which is fair, easily startled feral cats vibes) but like!!! i don't want you to fuck on youtube actually!!!

them going from (incorrectly) assuming the entire fanbase was 14 to now incorrectly assuming the entire fanbase is 22 when they've literally talked about half their demographic stats being their age or older!!! blah blah blah it was the loudest demographic and most vocal and the whole 'dan and phil are my dads' thing but it's also a self fulfilling prophecy when they don't speak to their own age demographic and constantly pull focus to younger crowds this isn't necessarily a bad thing but i know it used to bother dan in particular when it was kind of his own doing like girl why were you making school exam videos in 2016 asdafsdgjk i think also hanging out in pjs streams where he vibes with his own demographic more is so chill and nice and i think dnp would also really enjoy that? like the peers instead of parental vibes

"OMG THEY TOUCHED" IS AN INSIDE JOKE WE ARE ALSO IN ON BTW

semi related to that but i think they sometimes forget we're just as sarcastic as them? like dnp make a joke and then we joke back and then they're like "ugh you guys didn't get it we were joking obviously :/" (lovingly)

[coalballbaby]

Every time I see somebody shit on Autobots for being ‘the upperclass’ and shill the Decepticons as being a ‘rebellion movement’ in transformers I cry out in pain and 100000 angels lose their wings. Do not forget about their G1 origins where the Autobots started as the working class that all exchanged a look when the military (Decepticons) began getting a little too bold. IDW’s decision to start the Autobots/Decepticons like That is still an absolutely horrible idea

[sodaneko]

i love being a fangirl like i can’t remember not being one and i just know i’ll turn 100 one day and still be a fangirl

[blorbologist]

Y'know, I think I figured out why the Hells still feel like a new low-level party to me, even though they're level 13 and almost 100 episodes in.

I don't quite think it's the lack of conversations, or the fact half the party's plot hooks are big ties to past campaigns - though that definitely plays a part.

... Bell's Hells still primarily rely on quest givers.

Most of their goals are given to them and do not feel organic to the party, and constantly remind us that the Hells are pretty much never the most powerful people in the room. Which is usually something you see with a low-level party.

NPCs offering jobs is not a bad thing; it's a very common plot hook. Matt has been extremely skilled with using NPC quest givers in those two campaigns. Not only do they provide an obvious plot thread, but they can put the party in the path of others (say, the Nein running into the Iron Shepherds while doing a job for the Gentleman and everything that came of that). And the Hells had a solid start with it too - Eshteross was an excellent quest giver!

The problem is that Bell's Hells have never really not had a quest giver.

Maybe it's a byproduct of the more plot-heavy structure of this campaign? But while prior parties have felt like they decided on their course of action and what they prioritized, Bell's Hells feels less like level 13 (13! Level 13!) experienced adventurers and more like an MMO group clicking on the exclamation point over an NPC's head. Where does the plot demand we go next? Who do we report back to?

They're level 13.

At level 13, Vox Machina had just defeated a necromantic city-state to clear their name and Percy's conscience. And, you know, the Conclave just destroyed Emon. No one was explicitly telling the group to gather Vestiges and save the world (though Matt guided them there), and they were usually among the most powerful people in the room. They chose which Vestiges to prioritize, which dragons to tackle when, even if the over-all plot was pretty clear.

At level 13, the Mighty Nein were celebrating Traveler Con (another PC goal, I'll note) after brokering peace between two nations, accidentally becoming pirates and heroes of the Dynasty. The Nein regularly chose what to do based on personal goals, not grand ones. Though definitely smaller fish than Vox Machina at this level, they were very independent and gaining solid political clout.

While we're at it: level 13 is one level lower than the Ring of Brass, who had a huge amount of sway over Avalir. They ended the world, and also saved it, while in the grand scheme of things being only a smidge more powerful than Bell's Hells are now.

Can you really see the Hells wielding that amount of influence, when they're constantly being told what to do next?

The god-eater might be unleashed, so Bell's Hells have no time to do anything but what is asked of them. No time for therapy unless stolen from Feywild time, no travel on foot and late-night watches. They haven't even had time to grieve FCG. Percy was grieved in the middle of the Conclave arc. Molly was grieved when half the party was still in irons.

Matt is in the very unfortunate spot of not being able to give the Hells the same agency as the other two parties. Not only because of the world-ending plot introduced so early on; they are surrounded by characters they know (and the cast knows) are stronger and wiser than them - the familiarity of the past PCs and NPCs is to their disadvantage.

Why would the party reasonably ignore Keyleth's task that will help save the world and go off on a romp? Why would the cast when they know well Keyleth has to be sensible and with the best intentions in mind? The stakes are just too high.

It means that the Hells still feel like they're running errands instead of pursuing their own destiny. Their accomplishments are diminished as just being parts of a to-do list, and any stakes feel padded by several level 20 PCs/NPCs standing 5 steps away ready to catch them.

This isn't Bell's Hell's fault, nor is it Matt's. It could be amended, I think, if the Hells are really left to their own devices for a long period of time without support and shortcuts (like during the party split)... which would be really tricky to pull off at this point in the campaign.

They're level 13. They're big fish, but they're stuck in a pond full of friendly sharks, so they don't feel big at all.