#all the pain just to survive

[daemon-in-my-head]

Ik its confusing, but I wholly enjoy Elli having 2 names. Cuz to me it just makes sense yk?

Bhaal killed off Durges entire family/those they knew. Almost eradicating their entire existence as soon as the Urge awakened. So it makes sense to me Durge would drop their real name the second Bhaal reveals himself and his plans. 'Father wanted them to die, so die they shall,' kinda way.

But ofc you can't simply exist with just a title, even if just for your own sanity and sense of individuality/humanity. So you need an alias. An alias is no name. It's alright. It's not the same name either. Father would tolerate that. If you want the world to end, you need to play politics and shit lest you get caught beforehand, so an alias is required even.

But then, when everything's lost to them, when barely anything of them remains, and Orin performs a Durge factory reset... They lose those memories, too. The ones of them killing their own being. Their own person. Abandoning their true name. So they can remember it again, use it again. It's theirs again, simply because they don't remember the sin it would be to reclaim it.

Also the whole true name holding powers and all that. And while it's not a 'true name' in the sense that you actually hold power over them and that it's smth inherent and absolutely unique, it's still powerful in that it would allow wizards or clerics to perform a true resurrection and shit. It's still their name. Their real name. It's their person summarised.

Names hold meaning, after all—much more than we usually contribute to them. So Durge surrendering their name to Bhaal is perhaps their greatest sacrifice and act of devotion. It's the moment in which whatever person they once were without the Urge truly stoppdd existing for good. Just how the Lord of Murder wanted. And them receiving a new name, perhaps from Gortash even, was the moment that marked their inevitable rebellion and fall.

[qiaolingz]

Because I'm a Villain...

My interpretation of Luka's POV - Villain Song by Stella Jang

[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.

[vaguely-concerned]

shathann fucked up in so many ways with raising taash but she also makes me. so so SO sad. welcome back deeply flawed dragon age mother figures in various shades of 'well. I mean you tried. I guess' (from 'not at all' to 'I can see what you thought you were going for at least' as appropriate) we tango once more

[turquoisemagpie]

Appreciate the little things.

Not to ignorantly deny all of the big bad things in the world, but to survive them.

[heartsgettingwiser62]

So when are we as a fandom going to stop pretending that jonathan byers isn't one of the best written and most interesting characters in st

[barghest-land]

very tired of being in pain, however, the line between "i chose to be happy" and "i'm gaslighting how i feel" is very thin

[domokunrainbowkinz]

shipping yhk not in a romantic or platonic way but a secret third way (⬛️⬛️)

[candied-cae]

Real talk y’all?

They musta put something extra special in his water this season because - lord have mercy - he is GLOWING and I am ON MY KNEES. I keep coming back to this one just to look at him. Look at him, y'all. LOOK AT HIM!

HE'S SO FUCKING GORGEOUS I'M GOING TO DIE!

JUST ONE CHANCE- JUST ONE CHANCE IS ALL I ASK-

[akuma-tenshi]

oh i am OBSESSED

[transmechanicus]

Really fucked up that two ppl can care about each other and make their best efforts to communicate and still end up hurting each other so badly they cannot stand to be in the same room.

[thebestusernamepossible]

I’m mostly staying off the Mouthwashing fandom bc I personally don’t want to put myself through whatever discourse is ever going on there. But know I love Anya and Mouthwashing is one of the best games I’ve played that had an SA survivor AND was respectful about it!! The abuse Anya suffered is never portrayed as a spectical for the audience to leer at. They use the art of implication VERY well, and in the end Anya gets to go out dignified. She’s not just Jimmy’s tradgic victim, she’s her own character who makes her own decisions. Jimmy doesn’t get to kill her, she expresses her own agency to do so. She’s also the one who kept the gun away from him for so long. Also she’s SO fucking strong, she’s so cool. Anya I love you.

Also the game’s overarching (but subtle) commentary on rape culture, enabling, and how capitalism almost makes a set dressing for it is peak.

[majimaisms]

thinking about the lord of the night persona as a therapeutic tool for majima to process and cope with his trauma from the hole and his life afterwards. he essentially created a character who will grovel and humiliate himself to no end, who has no pride or dignity, because that is what majima has been doing since '85. but those things are an asset for the lord of the night. he turned what would have been an otherwise impossible-to-recover-from blow to his dignity and self esteem into profits. to regain some modicum of power, some control over his humiliation. calling the lord of the night persona necessary would be an understatement, it was downright lifesaving. and talk about resourceful. my god that man is nothing if not resourceful

[nyxi-pixie]

something something yosano toeing the thin line between being wanted and being needed. she has an everpresent desire to help, she loves the agency, she wants somewhere she can Fit. she wants to be wanted somewhere.

but if shes needed. if people rely on her completely. if people expect from her that they can throw themselves into the crushing jaws of Death unconcerned again and again and again because she will be there to force those teeth to unclamp and rip them back out of its mouth, then all shes doing is reducing the value of life. death is natural, its human. what do you call something that turns it into nothing more than an inconvenience?

[vaguely-concerned]

Thinking about the symbolic weight of smoking in the TLT universe that comes to the fore in The Unwanted Guest -- the way it moves through from person to person: Pyrrha smoked, and Augustine wanted to impress her in all her stone cold fox MILF James Bond glory (and tbf who wouldn't) so he started too. and even though as far as he knows she's been gone for a myriad and is never coming back, he keeps the habit. Ianthe sees something in the hollowed-out Faberge eggshell of Augustine that resonates with her, all that gilded eloquent emptiness and disdain through the ages, so she picked it up from him to try to emulate it. She picked it up so hard that Palamedes -- the exact spiritual antithesis of the 'smoking! on a space station! what a powermove' ennui Ianthe so admired -- spontaneously unnerded enough to even known how to, simply from a sort of contact contamination of the soul.

G1deon and Augustine sharing a jittery smoke after their near-Harrow experience during soup night, and it's the closest thing to any real sense of brotherhood that remains between them. Pyrrha going ten thousand years dying both literally and for a smoke (and then Camilla sold her fucking cigarettes (for a third of what they were worth, probably Pyrrha's own good, and also more importantly grocery money). what an entirely haunted time to be alive etc.). Augustine and Mercy trading a cigarette back and forth in the middle of their collusion over the love and murder of god.

An act of small and measured self-destruction in the name of something a little bit like connection when you're stuck somewhere in yourself where love itself dares not or cannot tread (ritualized, transmissible)..........

[lunar-wandering]

standing here sitting in my bed halfasleep trying to work up the mental power to go to uni for 7 hours,