#also i toyed with the idea of them having different weapons but i decided to split the bow into three different bows instead

[bogkeep]

fletcher from this episode of drawfee!! jacob keeps designing characters that really appeal to me...

[bubsmiraculousau]

These are my OT5 brainstorm pages. Elaborations on how I got to these below! I reference concept pages so if you see any pictures you don't recognize that's why. <3

First up is Cat Noir who I think is already perfect lmao. For my version though I wanted to lean closer to his PV design because I love it, like his larger triangle nose (you can't really see it at the angle in my drawing but it's there I swear!), the bigger bell, the more elaborate belt, etc.... so basically everything ... just in my style instead.

With my designs I think that whenever someone transforms into their miraculous persona it's based on what they think a hero looks like or what they think is cool. I think Adrien reads a lot of comic books and is a fan of characters like Batman (relatable for him LOL), Catwoman, and Nightwing, so his suit reflects that kind of vibe.

Extra: I decided that Ladybug and Cat Noir's masks go all the way up their foreheads because it looks nicer in my 2D style with their bangs haha.

Next up is the one and only Ladybug! Unpopular opinion but I actually like the all red suit! My hypothetical series would be a webcomic, and I feel like in action scenes the red differentiates her from Cat Noir esp at a distance, and more red style keeps their color ratios even.

I like the ladybug designs with a bunch of black sections they're very cute! Just not for my au. (I think it's just me but I find drawing the ladybug designs with inverted red dots to feel sacrilegious in a way,,, just my neurodivergent brain lol)

And I am a long ribbons truther, I love them and they can be very expressive. Also I knew I wanted Marinette to have a more vertical circular eye shape because her shape vibe is definitely a circle (Adrien's is triangle) and it reminded me of the eyes for the main girl in princess jellyfish (I've never seen it, love the style tho)

Her hair is a more bright blue to contrast her hair against her suit, and make her look more cartoonish. I imagine her idea of a superhero comes from kids shows and some magical girl anime. So her hair has a plastic shiny texture to it because when she thinks 'superhero' she thinks of kids toys. Also I just like color! The blue kinda gives comic spiderman vibes imo (the version with the light blue instead of the navy)

Queen Bee definitely changed the most throughout the design process. I really like her in-show design so I just tweaked it to be more my vibe. Adding a crown because she's a Queen.

Something that I've noticed is that Alya and Chloe actually share a lot of traits (There's even some old concept notes where I believe Alya and Chloe either switch names or roles at some point?? The miraculous concept info rabbit hole is real y'all) and I think this comes through in their final designs.

Like they both share a middle part, which bothers me for some reason, so I decided to give Chloe a little Ariana Grande side part into a ponytail.

I wanted each character to have a cool little piece on their costume, so I tried these little hip things to make her more commanding and girlboss, but currently her weapon is similar to ladybug's (but more like one of those hair ties w the little disco balls on them) and it would sit on her hip and would clash w her hip thingies, so I just decided to make her weapon the hip things instead, combining the two.

Something else that bothered me a lot was that Rena was the only one with white on her costume. Everyone has black but she's the only one with white... my brain says that this cannot be. So I tried to give Bee some fun white fuzzy bits but the texture just was too different...

And then I had the mega-brain idea to make her hair white to tie in the white from Rena. Her and Cat Noir both having blonde hair irked me as well LOL so this hit two birds with one stone. I wanted her hair to be sharper and more aggressively drill shaped because of her abrasive personality haha.

After that, is Carapace. I had an idea for him from the start because I felt like his in-show design just doesn't match his personality... I couldn't make his outfit all loose because I wanted to stick generally to the miraculous suit formula, but I feel like 'skin tight suit' just isn't his vibe. So he has a kind of hammer pants situation.

I think they capture Carapace's b-boy ninja turtle vibe while still looking like a miraculous outfit. Though I decided later that I wanted the pants to be a lighter color for contrast and the visor to be white (to tie in that Rena Rouge white).

Lastly is Miss Rena! Something that bothered me (back on the similarities to Chloe) was that they both have ponytails (yes I know I'm crazy). Even though they have very different textures I just wanted each of them to be distinct from each other. So I put her hair down and just dramatized her regular hairstyle.

Also her and Queen Bee both have black gloves to their upper arms, which, you guessed it, bothered me. So I shortened Rena's to just reach her elbow.

I wanted her to look like a magic-man, her illusion powers evoke a showmanship energy to me. I imagine her and Cat Noir are quite the dramatic theater kid-esque duo.

So, for drama I tried some flowy arm bits, which I think ended up just looking a little strange, so I'll pocket that idea for something else. Then, I tried to add her coattail from the show, but it ended up looking a little frumpy, not the drama I wanted.

I ended up making her coat more triangular in the front, to give off the vibe of a magician's vest, and changed it to solider red/orange double coattails, which I think makes her more magic-man-ish. And I think the white ends made it too busy.

So those are my hero designs! I'm still working out Hawkmoth and Mayura, esp Hawkmoth because I am not good at drawing masculine older men...

If y'all want LESS of the artistic process let a girl know lol! I know some ppl like it but this is very long,,, all my drawings will not have text this long! thx for reading if you did tho xx

[plsdonttakemyname]

You dont have to feel like you gotta do this, bc i know sm ppl r too out of their comfort zone with it, but would you consider:

Poly!Soukoku? Like Dazai / reader / chuuya?

Fluff HCs?

Ig if you wanted more fun stuff (pls dont do it this is too much!) What do you think would be a good ability for an S/O of them to have?? :0

I have this one idea where their just a sort of puppet master and have strings that they can latch onto ppl and physically move them around, or even mess with memories (the non-passionate/deep seated ones) bc i thought Dazai would like the different ways it could be applied, and Chuuya would think it's badass to watch you just, lower the glowing strings coming out of fingertips attached to like a group of armed enemies and they just like, drop their guns and bow.

Feel free to have fun with this however you want, or delete the request if its too much!

Also the ability i talked abt doesnt have to be readers ability, and these could just be chill headcanons abt their relationship! Whatever works!

Hope youre having a great weekend so far, and I really like your writing!!

Cheers,

Poly Anon ☢️

Poly!Soukoku X G!n Reader

— — — — — — — —

A/n; Hi Anon! Tysm I really appreciate it! I'm glad you like my writing! I hope you're having a great weekend so far too :D

— — — — — — — —

Genre; Fluff, Hcs

Pairings; Chuuya X Dazai X Reader

Warnings; Mentions of Suicide(Dazai), my bad writing, Might has some grammar mistakes 😭

Now how do I start with this chaotic relationship...

Chuuya would try to kill Dazai from time to time and you have to be there to stop them because of it 😭

I feel like s/o would toy with their opponents with the use of their ability

Mori had assigned you three on another mission together even though one was already enough since the three of you were strong enough but who knows why he assigned you three on a mission like this

Chuuya would be surprised and amazed at the same time when he first saw your ability with his own eyes, sure he has heard about this ability before but he’s never actually seen it for himself before.

Chuuya thinks that his s/o is so badass when they puppet the enemies, making them bow down and drop all of the weapons carried to the battle.

Dazai on the other hand would not really get surprised since this is his first time actually seeing this ability with his own eyes and not hearing it from some stupid book, but he still knew from the beginning

But when the three of you are all bored and out of missions to carry out, you'll all hangout in a bar to spend some time with each other

It's either one of yall ended up drunk OR you all ended up drunk and passed out in the bar 😭

The three of you will always go out to the mall or on expensive dinner dates

You all share the same apartment and that's where things are starting to get really wild

When getting into bed, there is never peace...The three of you would be kicking each other off the bed and slapping each other in the middle of the night 💔

"GODDAMN CHUUYA STOP KICKING ME" *SNORES*

Chuuya Is the kicker,Dazai is the pusher and you're the one that's suffering 😢

Just imagine this, suddenly you woke up at an ungodly hour because you felt a hand slapping your face just to find out it was Dazai slapping you in his sleep and Chuuya is almost on the floor still dead asleep after a long day in the Port Mafia.

You had enough one night and decided to kick them both off the bed and acted as if you're still asleep 😭

It's legit 4am and suddenly you just kick them off the bed "OW" "what...the..fuck..." *Y/n fake snoring noises*

Besides that when it's really peaceful it's either they're both on a long mission or they're ACTUALLY not kicking or pushing each other off the bed.

The three of you likes to cuddle and fall asleep in each other's warmth

"Will you,Y/N L/n, Come double suicide with me?" "no." "OI MACKEREL IF YOU WANNA DIE I CAN KILL YOU NOW STOP ASKING Y/N TO SUICIDE WITH YOU JACKASS" "YOU HURT MY FEELINGS CHIBI.." while you're just busy typing up a report and also trying to calm down

When one of you are on a mission alone you all definitely give each other a goodbye and goodluck kiss before heading out

Besides all of those chaotic stuff happening in your relationship, You all are an unbreakable trio

— — — — — — — — —

That's all I hope you like it </3

[ch3ry-b0mb]

Basic Summary - W's first day in and... she's already into mess...somehow... :D (This could either go well....or not (depending on the person's POV) @tmntaucompetition

(disclaimer, it's going to be very long when you click on 'Keep Reading')

Also this is my idea on what the staff area would look like.... I have no idea what a proper staff area would look like so.....yeah...

Staff Board (These are the only ones that I know of, at the moment) @emptybeb, @littlemissartemisia and @iobsesswaytoomuch

Missing Board (Again, only ones that I know are missing/ 'missing') @littlemissartemisia and @tangledinink 's Swanatello Grown Apart! Leo - @chiscribbs

[ID : Panel one - it shows W coming from another hallway into a new one, with a missing board behind her that shows Swantello and Misa with a chain around her neck but next to it (within big bold letters) says 'Not missing' and her scarf just flying through the air and her bag just following along Panel two - An announcement is heard 'ATTENTION ALL STAFF' however W was lost within her thought as she talked how 'Everything here is so confusing' in the background we see a Staff Board and still the same missing board along with a rubbish bin. Panel three - Small backflash on how they first got hired with both Alex and W in the Owners room with the Owner slamming their hand onto the table and saying 'Hired!', with a confused/ shocked W with her scarf standing tall to following along with her shock and an Alex who muttered 'Hehe, called it'. With W saying how 'Ever since we've been hired' (literally a day hired) Panel four - W continues 'Alex decided to leave me'. And Alex is leaving W and saying 'Heading out' and W really confused Panel five - W continues and 'I've mostly been looking around here to learn my way around here' and a clear image of the staff area is shown Panel six - W finishes off saying 'But I still don't get it'. W looks pissed off as she's still lost with the staff area. Within the background a turtle appears to be going through something. Panel seven - W walks off as a proper image of Grown Apart! Leo is shown just looking through the box Panel eight - W prays that 'If only there was som-'. W was still walking with GA! Leo still looking through the box Panel nine - W then stops at her trackers when her brain finally processes the fact that someone was there with her scarfs sort of going in Panel ten - It shows a small bit of the scarf coming along side a board of pictures Panel eleven - W peaked in, having half of her body in the image whilst the scarf is still travelling in Panel twelve - W is scanning Leo within her mind as a few thoughts are in her mind 'Box full of weapons', 'Staff?' 'Intruder?' 'Random Turtle' and the biggest one out of them all 'SUSPICOUS?' Panel thirteen - W calming herself from doing something impulsive as she says this to herself 'Okay, just calm down and breathe'. W takes a deep breathe Panel fourteen - W exhales letting some of panicking escape her mind

Panel fifth-teen - W talks to herself 'Remember, you have your spray with you, incase of anything happening'. A clear image of inside of the bag with a big spray bottle that has a big red circle crossing out the word 'SAS', along with some fidget toys and plushies Panel sixteen - W enters the hallway with one hand clinging onto her bag and another just guiding her into the hallway as she thinks to herself 'You got this!' Panel seventeen - A determined face is shown on W's face as the words 'You got this' covered the background Panel eighteen - One singular hand is reaching out to GA! Leo as she's still muttering to herself 'You got this' within the background once again Panel nineteen - W within her mind says 'You-' but it's cut of when GA! Leo looks at W who both freeze up when being caught. A close up image of the weapons that were taken from different versions of turtles and W's scarf is slowly getting closer to GA! Leo. Panel twenty - W has a face of drought as she rephrased the next words 'Don't got this' Panel twenty point five - W's scarf wraps itself onto the ankle of GA! Leo without either knowing about it Panel twenty one - 'QUICK! IMPROV!' was the only thoughts that was within her as she has an customer service act trying to not get her act up as she askes him 'Hello, is there anything that you need help with?' whilst still having no idea on who this turtle is]

...This was something...congrats on reading all of this

[blueikeproductions]

So with TFONE attempting to simplify the Primes and some recent cartoons trying to theme some shows around them, it has led to a thought how this could work.

The biggest problem the Primes have is that nobody really knows or cares that much about them. The only one most actually care about is The Fallen because of the Bay film. Vector Prime via Galaxy Force is fondly remembered by TF fans, but that version also predates the modern Prime mythology.

Transformers Prime was intended to look more into what it means to be a Prime, but never truly does so. It also introduced the modern 13 Prime lore, but also does very little with it. It’s mostly limited to Solus’ Forge being a reoccurring weapon, Megatron grafting a Prime arm on to him, with creatives unable to decide who it’s supposed to be, and Alpha Trion making a cameo (more so to reference G1 than do much with the Primes).

RiD15 also uses the Primes, with Micronus (the main rep and Optimus’ life coach) and The Fallen (the first season’s main villain) as the stand out ones. Despite Micronus being the first Mini-Con, he has no influence on the cartoon’s Mini-Con gimmick it adapted later in its run. Liege Maximo appeared in chapter books and is the only (not Fallen) one who got to properly do something. I still greatly insist Onyx Prime should’ve been the rep due to the Beast theme instead. Also Thundertron, but that’s a different problem.

Cyberverse used Alchemist Prime specifically, but while being one of the better characters, he’s not very memorable. Onyx and Alpha Trion have minor roles, with Alpha Trion getting a toy… that nobody bought. He was also there for G1 ‘memberberries, in a role similar to the old cartoon. The Cyberverse staff were not shy admitting to only writing the show for themselves and like minded fans and not actual children.

And now EarthSpark uses Quintus in a major role… but it feels like there’s some conflicting ideas about who he is. Storyboards suggest he’s more benevolent having everyone’s best interests in mind, while the show keeps insisting he might be shady and a dead beat dad.

And like the aforementioned Onyx, the series isn’t great about using Primes better themed to a show. Combiner Wars opts to NOT use Nexus Prime, when instead perhaps they could’ve made him into the evil leader of the Combiners, forcing them to wipe out non Combiners so Cybertron is theirs to rule. Vs the show just having them fight… because reasons. He also never got a toy in the Combiner themed line. This could’ve also been tinkered with once more in RiD15 for its Combiner Force, casting him as a neutral who gifts power of combination to the Bee Team and the Pack, seeing who’s more worthy to use the Enigma for an upcoming problem involving an ancient Combiner unique to the show. (Also having Chop Shop as a minor villain again.)

I think the problem is largely NOT letting the other Primes being proper characters. Vector Prime and The Fallen are allowed to be characters, with Vector allowed to be part of the Autobots, make bonds with them and the kids, and have a little arc of his own, remembering the value of life throughout time.

I think if we went back to that, having a surviving Prime join the Autobots and find their footing in the modern era on Earth during the battle against the Decepticons would help.

It’s actually kind of shocking in the current “DEI” era that they don’t have Solus Prime in such a role, working alongside Optimus. The downside to this is current writers would probably make her into a more arrogant Captain Marvel type, but ideally Solus should be cast in a role similar to Vector in Galaxy Force. I feel like it’d be funny if she especially bonded with the kids, a loving but firm grandma, who drives them around, with the gag being the kids are ferried around in a big purple construction vehicle. Solus is also happy to fix things with a gentle tap of her Fixit Felix hammer, usually the kids’ phones, but an episode sees some repercussions, where the phones and other gadgets start Transforming into semi sentient-semi automatic weapons.

Think the Appliance Bots from ROTF.

Amalgamous is really the only one that’s too abstract to use as he is. I feel like the trick is to create an in-story reason why he can’t infinitely Transform, limiting him to being a Six Changer like Sixshot. This way the writers and artists can be more creative, and have a character arc where Amalgamous learns to be one of the Autobots with a running gag he forgets he can’t change into whatever he wants anymore and turns into a car or dinosaur that isn’t appropriate to the situation.

Liege is easy enough. He’s the Sideways trying to nudge the Autobots, Decepticons and humans into doing what he wants for nefarious reasons.

I feel like Prima would be a hybrid of TFA Ratchet & TFA Ultra Magnus, a cranky foxy grandpa that means well and tries to guide Optimus and the kids, but he’s quite literally an overbearing helicopter parent trying to dictate what Optimus should be doing. While still powerful in his own right, Prima does get overwhelmed by Megatron’s sheer rage.

The 13th Prime is up in the air. It could be Zeta, Rodimus, Adaptus, Mortilus or a brand new Prime for the scenario. I got nothing.

I am a bit concerned about Vector. He was already used effectively, but his schtick is time travel and manipulation, and to move the story of TFONE along that didn’t help him against Quints or Sentinel. Can you even use time travel effectively anymore? Maybe if Vector was more in line with Time Patrol Bon, not that anyone watched the Netflix reboot of it.

[whimsicalcotton]

Also I started getting into the namesake song of polluted marrow (Spiracle by Flower Face) and it's so good... I wanna give you the green light to ramble about how you think this song relates to the fic/the characters/etc bc I'm very curious to hear how it inspired you 😊

[cracks knuckles] Okay so,

for starters this AU is kinda old. i think i started toying w the general idea in 2016ish, and the want to write it got hardcore resurrected when i decided to watch an lis1 playthrough for the first time in fucking ages last year. i happened to find Spiracle recently after finishing up so there was already like a 60% chance i'd start associating it w lis through just that, but then i was smacked in the face specifically by this last line

so hard that i was immediately like Oh God I Need To Write That Timelooper Max AU Right The Fuck Now. (like seriously. "i want you butterfly, i want you sailor." what am i supposed to Do after hearing that if not wail over pricefield)

as a whole for me the song is about The Devotion (tm) and how Max loves every last little part of Chloe, good or bad, for better or worse, so goddamn much that she's willing to put herself through all this fucking bullshit several times over. Yearning On A Cosmic Scale kind of vibes.

but then after a few listens i Realized. that some of these lines are really good for Rachel + the admittedly unhinged amberfield dynamic i have brewing. imo Max is definitely not immune to the whole putting the idea of Rachel on a pedestal problem, but she does it Different than everyone else bc her image of Rachel is informed mostly by how important she was to Chloe. which is to say i read some of these lines in an "and i want you, too. i want every part of her and you're a part of her," sort of way.

also this one line is very Max @ both of them

and to bring it back to that last bit again, i feel like the butterfly/sailor line is pretty self-explanatory but "i am your lover, and i am your jailor," to me is the crux of all those conflicting gnarly gay timelooper feelings. no one loves you like me, no one hurts you like me. i'm saving us, i'm keeping us trapped here. i'm the one who pulls you from your grave, i'm the one who throws the first shovel of dirt onto your coffin. i'm your lover, i'm your jailor.

also! even the title easily lends itself to lis imagery bc A) english is stupid and there are too many words that look the damn same so i think of spirals every time i see it. and more concretely, B) spiracles are little holes in an insect's body that they use to get oxygen and ofc,, both butterflies And the chrysalis itself have them. i'm mentally unwell about this actually. truly i wasn't aware i could be emotionally damaged by looking up caterpillar facts but that's what writing does to you i guess.

and lastly i picked out 'polluted marrow' as a title for the whole AU because

could be Any Of Them.

for Max it's "i'll still want you if you're nothing; i'll still want you if your insides are rotting." for Chloe it's "i want to know what's hurting you; i want to take it away." for Rachel it's "i want to see the depth of your sickness; i want you to hold it to my throat like the weapon you've made it into."

[jester-creates]

thinking about that Mechanisms persona 5 au again. The one where it's the mechs cast in p5. So I might as well put who I think should go where.

This is also a college au. I guess. It just fits better

The phantom thieves- the Mechanisms. This is obvious why. They choose the Mechanisms as their phantom thieves group name first, but after a certain someone kept basically saying to everyone that they were the Mechanisms in public, they made the band as a cover and now they have to manufacture beef between themselves as the band and themselves as phantom thieves and that the phantom thieves definitely stole their name.

wildcard- Jonny D'ville. He's the narrator of the Mechanisms and one of the first members of the Mechanisms. He's up there for most roles over all the albums, so wildcard. I'm half tempted to make his persona Prince Charming because one, it would tick him off to no end and two, it the role he as himself played in ouatis.

0 fool - I think Yog Sothoth or one of the elder gods would make the best fit for Yaldy. No idea who Igor would be though

1 magician - the Toy Soldier. It is the least organic of the Mechanisms which is in line with Morgana's origins. I'd say it was given instructions to find the wildcard and eventually found itself in the first Palace pretending to be a Shadow or something. Haven't decided on a persona for it yet though

2 high priestess - Ashes O'Reilly. They have mob connections (though a lot different from how Makoto's went). Ashes would slso manage to become the student president at their college. Their persona would probably be Hades

3 emperor - Raphaella la Cognizi. She and Yusuke are both eccentric weirdos (/pos) in their fields. She has probably neglected herself and her finances in her focus on science as well. Haven't decided on a persona for her yet

4 empress - Nastya Rasputina. A princess and an Heir to a food company are basically the same thing right? (I almost had her be the futaba of the group due to Out, but I figured that being the Haru of the group fit her better. Plus she deserves to be the most terrifying member of the group. And also a big weapon.) Haven't decided on a persona for her yet.

5 Hierophant- Dr. Carmilla (unless I find someone better). She is somewhat of a parental figure? I'm not too sure on this one.

6 the lovers - Gunpowder Tim. His whole thing with bertie parallels Ann's thing with Shiho pretty well.

7 chariot - Baron Marius von Raum. He seems like he would be the most like Ryuji. He does do the talking about the phantom thieves out loud thing which results in them having to make the band as a cover.

8 strength- the Aurora. As the most inhuman of the crew, she gets to be Jonny's attendant in the Velvet Room. They do figure out that something is up with the VR and rescue her much earlier than lavenza gets rescued in p5. (Aurora and Nastya are together in this au still)

9 hermit - Ivy Alexandra. She would definitely be a Navi type.

10 fortune - undecided maybe loki?

11 justice - drumbot Brian. He gets to be akechi due to the whole 2 modes thing, so two personas. To keep in line with his mostly robot thing I am going to make him a anti shadow weapon (think aigis from persona 3)

12 Hanged man- the pendragon trio (or at least arthur). the thing with mordred could be a good parallel between iwai and his kid

13 death- Oedipus. tae and oedipus are both doctors who do kinda have a similar storyline. plus the image of oedipus in tae's outfit kills me

14 temperance - undecided. maybe cinders?

15 devil - Ulysses. Ohya and them have a very similar starting point when we meet them. And Ulysses is a gumshoe (a detective) so that would take the place of ohya's investigative journalism.

16 Tower - undecided. Maybe Heracles?

17 star - undecided. Maybe rose red? Maybe Guinevere?

18 moon - undecided. Maybe pilchard? (Though he'd do better as a Palace ruler or the Shadow that leads them to the second palace)

19 sun - snow white. She and Yoshida both are politicians campaigning for peace and better stuff.

20 judgement- Lyfrassir Edda. They and Sae are both long-suffering people in kaw enforcement who have to deal with the Mechanisms/phantom thieves and all their shenanigans.

[lobotomy-lady]

hey I'm thinking about buying a gun for safety reasons and I'm wondering if you have any pointers in getting started like is there a shooting range you went to first to train or whatnot?

I did go to a shooting range on many occasions before eventually buying my gun, my cousin owns several guns & was willing to let me shoot them. But depending on the laws wherever you live & if you have your FOID already, you might be able to just rent different guns to try at your local range? I think some of them offer that. It's good to get a feel for them before purchase esp as a woman, like some of my cousins handguns were terribly uncomfortable for me bc my hands were just too small lol.

Definitely sign up for a proper class in firearm training once you've decided to buy one though, that's an absolute requirement. Also! Idk if you're this type of person, but just in case-don't get a "cute" gun. I very much wanted the sparkly purple gun I saw but my cousin told me it was an awful idea bc people (not just kids either) may mistake it as a toy or an airsoft/paintball gun rather than a real weapon. ideally you want to use your gun as a deterrent & never have to actually fire it so it needs to actually be recognizable as a threat.

[non-operator]

Not sure if I mentioned this before on my blog, but some valorant thoughts. Which is that, I'm kind of curious if the lore team has any plans to talk about pre-Valorant Protocol, because it feels like there had been a war before the events of Valorant.

Maybe it's just that they want to create a reason why some of the members are so good at combat, so they have military training background, but also it sounds like there had been enough big conflicts while they were active soldiers?

We know Brimstone started as a fire fighter and then went into the army. First of all, it seemed like he had already decided on a career path, so what's with the shift to the military? I can kind of see the connection, but it's not like fire fighters are trained to fight people, right? I feel like there's an implication that there was an active reason for able-bodied people to start joining the military. Even if there wasn't, during his time in the Special Forces, it seems like his group (Ragged Ravens) were partaking in battles/missions often enough that his friend Tariq Porter died in action. (I will be honest here though, I don't actually know what the military is up to when there isn't an active war happening. So maybe there wasn't a war and this is just regular army shit, but what the fuck is the military sending them out to shoot and be shot at for?)

The same thing kind of goes for Sova. It seems clear that he has a military past, but there's also his dossier that points out he used to be called 'Filin', which kind of feels like a callsign. He also had to be around other people who would call him that callsign, presumably the army. Considering that he had to be on missions to miss a shot, it also seems that he had been an active soldier.

This one is a bit of a stretch, but one of Cypher's voicelines seems to hint towards a past war (or maybe even current? who knows). Like, his match start line "the back alleys, or the streets of war. There is no difference. Just nicer toys", indicating his experience of participating in warfare. Or perhaps he had lived in a warzone?

In any case, that's like three places where a (possible) armed conflict/war took place. Though, it's unclear how recent it was, considering that Brimstone had managed to take at least one job as a Kingdom security member before he founded VP, and we don't know the time in-between military/past life Sova and Cypher had before they joined (if they had any).

Maybe before Kingdom Corporation had fully settled into their place as energy provider monopoly, the idea of a better energy source made countries start wars over radianite? Or perhaps did radianite fuel weapon development in a Cold War-esque period that eventually burst into war, like the arms race before WWI?

It's not really relevant to the current story being told I guess, but I'm just curious about the worldbuilding/history. I wonder if the lore team will ever reveal more info on that beyond like, dead Tariq Porter and the dossiers?

[teecupangel]

In a cozy neighborhood nestled between rolling hills and lush meadows, there lived a friendly, golden retriever. He had a heart full of love and an insatiable desire to connect with the world. His wagging tail and bright eyes spoke volumes, but there was one thing he yearned for – the ability to send letters to his canine friends in far-off places.

One sunny afternoon, the dog gazed longingly at the mailman delivering letters to his human family. The idea struck him like a lightning bolt: he wanted to send letters too! However, his lack of opposable thumbs made this dream seemingly impossible.

Undeterred, his determination caught the attention of a clever ferret who lived nearby. The ferret was known for his knack for solving problems, and he couldn't resist the opportunity to help his canine friend.

Approaching the dog with a twinkle in his eye, the ferret proposed a solution. "Dog," he said, "what if I became your paw-sistant? I can help you write letters and even deliver them to your friends!"

The dog's tail wagged furiously with excitement. And so, the dynamic duo embarked on their letter-sending adventure. The dog would dictate his heartfelt messages to the ferret, who translated them into beautifully written letters. Together, they crafted tales of squirrel chases, park adventures, and the joy of belly rubs.

The ferret, being nimble and quick, scurried through the neighborhood, delivering the dog's letters to the mailboxes of his furry friends. The recipients, surprised and delighted, responded in kind, creating a heartwarming exchange of stories and friendship.

One day, the dog decided to send a letter to a faraway place but the ferret could not travel that long so they had the mail courier deliver it for them so the courier went, into a journey that we will witness... in another story.

Inside his bag, where the letter is neatly tucked with other mails, the letter says: "Team Fortress x Assassin's Creed Au? I think it would be pretty funny considering what TF2 is like and please don't rush anything, prioritize yourself first than us."

The courier of this quaint little town had a simple job.

Make sure every delivery was on time.

Their little town didn’t really get a lot of parcels before so he could just laze around after he was done until…

The alchemist took residence on top of the hill and started completing requests from people that sent letters addressed to the little house on the top of the hill.

The alchemist had been busy for weeks now and each time he would visit to deliver the daily mail, there would be enough items and concoctions to fill his cart.

And today was no different.

His eyes stayed on the flower bed with red flowers almost in bloom.

“That’s for tomorrow.” The alchemist said as they handed him the latest of batch of deliveries, including a…

“Uuuhh… I’m not sure if they’ll deliver weapons?” The courier said awkwardly.

The alchemist turned to stare at him as they say, “It’s a toy.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“It’s a toy.” The alchemist repeated in the same even tone they usually have.

The courier sighed and rubbed the top of his head as he said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll take note that it’s a toy.”

He eyed the alchemist as he added, “I’m sure it’s quite a fragile toy that shouldn’t be rattled a lot, right?”

“It is of grave importance that it does not jostle at all.”

The courier sighed once more.

He’d wrap it in bubble wrap and lots of heavy blanket before sending it then.

===================================

Funny thing, Desmond’s voice actor, Nolan North, voiced Soldier and Engineer in ‘Expiration Date’ so now I’m just thinking Desmond would get a class that’s focused on building things to aid his team but he has a rocket launcher that has low damage capabilities as it’s mainly used to create things (hitting them with his rocket launcher also heals them). So he’s like… a long ranged version of Engineer which needs more time/shots to build stuff to combat his ability to build from afar.

But first let’s talk about how this crossover would be like.

The easiest way would be that they all get kicked into TF2 world (although it would be super funny if it was the other way around and it’s the TF2 guys wrecking havoc in the AC world)

The main characters of the main games would find themselves in the TF2 world and have to adapt because their skills and abilities have been changed to be more in line with how the TF2 world operates.

What does that mean?

Well…

The TF2 world sorta maybe no seriously absolutely…

… just got a lot of people with the ability of the spy.

Like, just imagine an elite group of spies, with the ability to be completely invisible by just pulling on their hood, eyes that can see everything around them (even other invisible people) and has a weapon that can kill instant death.

Pyro would have a hard time with them because they have the habit of freerunning on higher grounds, even scaffolding!

And they have this habit of killing people who abuse their power and even go as far as commit atrocities for the sake of their greed or desires.

In other words…

TF Industries is fucked and the Mann brothers can’t do anything but wait for the inevitable.

(This also places them in direct oppositions with the mercenaries)

PS: The life extending machine might react to Desmond like a POE and that’s a whole other mystery XD

[sekhisadventures]

Yvain Steelhammer, Timelost Knight of the Silver Hand

Important Stories:

The Timelost Dwarf: Yvain Steelhammer goes before the leader of the Order of the Silver Hand to take her oaths to become a paladin, but a temporal anomaly rips her from her timeline into one that is wildly different... all because the leader of her Order, King Arthas of Lordaeron, took a much darker path.

Culture Shock: Yvain winds up with several other refugees from across time and space and makes her way to Dornogal, almost attacking the warlock Edwood Vargas before a familiar pandaren stops her...

The Choices We Make: Yvain refuses to believe her father's words about how different this timeline is and rebels against him counting Edwood Vargas of the Forsaken and the death knight Mola'raum as his allies. With Nelen's help to open a portal to Tirisfal Glades, Dareley gives her a look at what happened to Lordaeron.

Race: Dwarf, Ironforge

Class: Paladin, Retribution Path

Eye Color: Green

Birthplace: Ironforge Mountain

Residence: Lordaeron City, Silver Hand Barracks (Alternate Timeline)

Abilities:

Knight of the Silver Hand: Yvain is a powerful fighter, trained from her youth to take up the hammer in service to the Light and her people. She has a strong faith in the Light, though it has been shaken a bit by recent events bit still holds firm.

Blacksmithing, a Family Tradition: Yvain, like her father, knows her way around a forge and is able to repair and maintain her own weapons. She isn't quite skilled enough to craft them from scratch yet. Her father was going to teach her that next but, well, things happened.

History

Yvain Steelhammer, in the Titan's Timeline, is long dead. Rather, she was never properly born. In this timeline her mother died when the Scourge attacked Lordaeron City the day Arthas murdered his father, Terinas Menethil, with Frostmourne.

However, her own timeline was different. In that timeline Arthas rejected Frostmourne and managed to reconnect to the Light, then killed Mal'ganis as a paladin rather than a nascent Death Knight. When he returned to Lordaeron City his father willingly passed the crown to him, abdicating the throne.

Twenty years later, Yvain Steelhammer, daughter of Dareley Steelhammer, was set to take her oath and become a paladin herself. No sooner had she finished than disaster struck.

In the Titan's Timeline, Dareley fought a rouge chronomancer known as Nyloc Athel and his misuse of an artifact of the Bronze Dragonflight caused a massive temporal paradox that ripped Yvain from her home timeline into the Titan's Timeline. Now she's stranded in a world where Arthas Menethil, her mentor and leader of the Order of the Silver Hand in her own time, is known as a monster who almost doomed all of Azeroth.

Trivia

Originally Yvain wasn't going to be a paladin, but rather a priestess. Discipline spec specifically. The thing is... I hate playing Discipline spec. I had hoped it'd gotten better (it had been a while since I last tried it) but NOPE, so I went out of my way to re-roll her and start over as a paladin instead.

I had actually toyed with the idea of Dareley meeting Misti and Yvain's souls in the Shadowlands, but decided against it outside of hearing their voices during Sekhi's ritual in 'For Those We Lost.' That and since Yvain was never properly born in the Titan's Timeline its a big question mark as to whether she'd have wound up in the Shadowlands at all or just been reincarnated into another body immediately. Its also possible she might have just ceased to exist, but thats pretty grim.

[celestiall0tus]

Amaranthine, Marinette

And we get the biggest design out of the way. The others will come later, but Marinette's is the only one that matters rn.

Now, break down. I know I've stated I hate designing armor, however I took this design from an old gemsona from back in my SU days, a Dragon Fire Opal. The base armor is the same, but the coloring, mask, and decals are different.

I went with black as a base to ground the brighter colors as I toyed with them. Originally she was going to be platinum and silver, but decided to go with gold because gold is a power source for magical creatures while iron (the gray) hinders magic. Even though it would have been platinum which is better than gold, I had some difficulty pairing the platinum with other colors, especially the gem pieces.

I'm not the type of witch that works with crystals, so research was in order. I was looking for a love crystal for attracting soulmates as that's Marinette's goal. The most obvious choice was Rose Quartz, but it seemed to have the addon of recovering from a prior heartbreak. I kept looking and found Morganite. A crystal like rose quartz, but primarily opening the heart chakra and attracting one's soulmate.

The vine decals come from Marinette's profession in Amaranthine. After meeting Longg, she discovers in her previous life, she was a green witch that worked with herbs and medicines. In her crusade to find her soulmate again, she mixes design, botany, and alchemy (courtesy of Longg) to manage a herb and flower shop. A place to sell natural, enhanced remedies, make flower arrangements, and sell medicinal herbs. I suppose this could make this a flower shop au too, but I'm primarily sticking to the soulmates bit.

Now, the name is where I'm faltering. Given the set up for Marinette to have been Rose's childhood friend and just as into fairytales, knights, and the whole lot, it raised interesting ideas. Her shop will be called Avalon after the legendary island in Arthurian legend where Arthur was brought to in order to recover from his mortal wounds so he may return to be the one true king (varies upon each telling). So, I had a pair of ideas. The first was Nimue, one of the names of the lady of the lake who gives Arthur Excalibur/Caliburn (depends on version). The other name was Pendragon because dragon miraculous, golden royal armor, and the dragon's weapon being a sword. That is if I don't go with Amaranthine.

So, for some fun, Amaranthine is something of multiple meanings. For the unenlightened, the word amaranthine means everlasting, unfading, eternal, and immortal. It also relates to the amaranth flower that is associated with the same meaning, making it symbolic of unfading affection and everlasting love. So, it's a thought rn.

For other designs, they'll come eventually. I know I will need to make designs for Adonis and the snake villain first and foremost. However, y'all will be waiting a hot minute for Ladybug!Chloe and Black Cat!Zoe

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘If I were an irrealis episode’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about how languages express unreality. But first, thank you to everyone who celebrated our anniversary month with us.

Lauren: We always enjoy seeing what you recommend to people and thanking you for doing that. If you did that not on social media, in your own private media channels, thank you very much. You can share Lingthusiasm with anyone who needs more linguistics in their life throughout the year.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is a conversation about swearing in science fiction and fantasy with Ada Palmer and Jo Walton.

Lauren: I was so excited to hear you talk to two of our favourite authors. We’ve talked about Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning and the Terra Ignota series before. We’ve talked about Jo Walton’s Thessaly books. Getting to hear you talk to them about swearing in fantasy and in science fiction was a whole lot of fun.

Gretchen: This was so much fun. We also have several other bonus episodes about swearing more generally as well as a massive archive of bonus episodes if you’re looking for something to do, and you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes, or you just wanna help us keep making the show. Those are there. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to our full archive of bonus episodes for yourself, or they make a great last-minute gift idea.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, what is real?

Gretchen: That’s a big philosophical question, Lauren, “What does it mean for something to be real?”

Lauren: Mm-hmm. But we could also answer it linguistically.

Gretchen: We could, indeed. Languages have lots of ways of talking about things that aren’t real. Sometimes, this itself can get tricky. If you want to start a fun discussion among your friends at the dinner table, try asking them things like, “Is a toy sword a real sword?”

Lauren: Hmm, I can totally see a context where you’re playing with toy swords – or maybe those big foam swords that people use in live-action role playing. In that context, it’s a real sword. You’re like, “Please don’t hit me with your sword,” or “I’m gonna practice my sword work.”

Gretchen: It is more of a real sword than a mimed sword or an entirely imaginary sword. It is real as in you can touch it, but it is not real as in it could cut people. One of my friends has a cheese plate that comes with these delightful small swords and daggers and axes that you can use to cut cheese with.

Lauren: Cute.

Gretchen: Which is great. This is, by some definitions, a “real” sword because you can cut things with it even if those things are cheese.

Lauren: Probably taken away from you as a weapon if you try to take it on an aeroplane.

Gretchen: Are we letting the airplane security people decide what a real sword is? The solution to all of our philosophical questions is just answered by airline security people.

Lauren: I’m taking a really weird range of stuff to the airport next time I travel just to check what is real. But then there are things that exist but not in this reality. So, Excalibur is a famous sword. But is it a real sword?

Gretchen: Right. Probably there’s a museum somewhere that has something that claims that it’s Excalibur. It certainly is a sword that has a bunch of cultural connotations with it – that has a level of reality that’s different than a magical sword that someone just makes up as a fantasy novel writer for their own novel but doesn’t have a broader cultural existence.

Lauren: I feel in some ways it’s more real than a foam sword or a cheese plate sword because it is more prototypically sword-like in my head. Could you imagine if Arthur went around with a cheese plate-sized sword or a foam sword? That’s the version of King Arthur I’m gonna rewrite.

Gretchen: I recently saw a production of Macbeth in which – so Macbeth has this famous speech which starts, “Is this a dagger that I see before me?”, and he’s not sure if he’s hallucinating or not. He’s about to kill the king, and he’s feeling guilty about it.

Lauren: He’s not sure if it’s just a cheese board.

Gretchen: Is it just a cheese dagger? In this production – which was also interesting because all of the characters were dressed up as goblins, but that’s a whole other thing.

Lauren: Uh, okay.

Gretchen: We’ll get to that in a sec.

Lauren: Sure.

Gretchen: The staging represented the dagger, at first, as a beam of light – like a tightly focused spotlight – in front of Macbeth, and everything else on the stage was all in red. There was this beam of white light. You’re saying, “Is this a dagger that I see before me?”, and you’re seeing this beam of light. In that context, the audience is supposed to be believing that Macbeth is hallucinating. Then the actor pulls out a prop dagger that I’m sure was probably not very sharp to subsequently be the murder weapon that he’s gonna go kill the king with. So, “Is this a real dagger? Is this an unreal dagger?” Different productions approach this question of “Is Macbeth seeing something real or not?” in different ways.

Lauren: The prop dagger is more of a real dagger than the beam of light dagger. And in the play, it stands in as a real dagger, but it’s less of a real dagger than a sharp one that might stab someone.

Gretchen: Right.

Lauren: I’m keeping track.

Gretchen: Exactly.

Lauren: Just to be clear – were they real goblins?

Gretchen: Well, [laughs] I certainly felt like I had just seen some goblins perform Macbeth. I had to keep reminding myself, like, no, they’ve just got costumes on because, man, those costumes were really great. The actors came out into the lobby and interacted with the audience before and after the show, so they felt –

Lauren: As goblins? In character?

Gretchen: As goblins in character.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Sort of improvising. They felt like they were real goblins. Then I’ve had to explain this show to other people, and they’ve been like, “So, wait, were they humans in the play?” And I was like, “No, it’s complicated. It all made sense at the time, though, I promise.”

Lauren: Amazing. I do have a moment of caution because goblins aren’t real in our world, but also, goblins have been used by a bunch of 20th Century fantasy writers to stand in for, for example, Jewish people in not always the most sensitive or appropriate way. Is that something that was happening here? I say with caution.

Gretchen: No, thank goodness.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: One of the things you can do with something that has a cultural reality is the characters are very careful to say, “These other writers – you may have heard other things about goblins – they were all wrong. We’re the real goblins, and we’re gonna tell you the real story of goblins, which is not at all antisemitic” in the context of the actors wanting to do this play.

Lauren: Okay, so they were more real fake goblins than the fake fake goblins of fantasy.

Gretchen: Exactly. They were laying claim to being the real goblins and being like, “No, these other authors have said nasty things about this, but that’s not who we are.”

Lauren: Hilarious.

Gretchen: Which is something that you can do with something that has a cultural level of reality. “If I had a dog” is a hypothetical statement, but dogs are real.

Lauren: You could have a pet dog if you wanted to.

Gretchen: “If I had a dragon” is also a hypothetical statement, but it has a different level of hypothetical reality.

Lauren: You could put a little costume on a lizard, but yeah, you’re not getting a pet dragon of fire-breathing, winged fantasy fame.

Gretchen: Well, but maybe I have a dragon plush toy, which is a real dragon that I could have.

Lauren: True. Much easier to feed than a real dog or lizard.

Gretchen: My house insurance is a much bigger fan of me having a stuffed dragon. Those have a different level of reality compared to if I say, “If I have a frenumblinger” –

Lauren: If you have a what what?

Gretchen: Well, a “frenumblinger,” clearly, which is the creature that makes it not rain when you bring an umbrella.

Lauren: Ah. I absolutely always take an umbrella everywhere with me, but I didn’t realise I was appeasing this particular deity.

Gretchen: Well, if only you’d realised you were appeasing the frenumblinger – which is a creature that we made up that doesn’t have a cultural reality beyond this podcast.

Lauren: Dragons are more real than frenumblingers, even though both of them are not real.

Gretchen: Yeah. Reality itself is a continuum and depends on the context that you’re talking about.

Lauren: It’s so great that language lets us talk about things that aren’t here and aren’t real.

Gretchen: And that may or may not be real in the future.

Lauren: A lot of the time, we do this with words – like something being “not real” or “There might be dragons.”

Gretchen: Or “fake” or “toy” or things like that – “imaginary.”

Lauren: But languages can also use grammatical marking as part of a way of showing whether something’s real or not in the way that we do our grammar.

Gretchen: This is referred to with a delightful name, which is the “irrealis.” There are various kinds of irrealis markers that happen at a grammatical level in addition to all of the ways you can use words to talk about things that are imaginary or pretend or fake or constructed.

Lauren: There’s lots of different ways that we talk about the “slipperiness” of reality in language. We’re gonna talk about the grammatical structures of irrealis for the rest of this episode.

Gretchen: We’ve talked about stories and deliberately imaginary or fantastical contexts, but there’s also lots of places in everyday language where we wanna talk about things that haven’t happened and may never happen but might happen. We wanna talk about them.

Lauren: For example, “If it rains, I bring an umbrella,” regardless of whether I believe in frenumblinger.

Gretchen: That’s a relatively here and now if-then statement. We can also say, “If it rains, I will cancel the picnic,” which is something that’s even more hypothetical.

Lauren: Disappointing, but fair enough if we have to do that.

Gretchen: You can have more hypothetical conditional statements like “If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gum drops, oh, what a rain that would be!”

Lauren: That sounds horrifying.

Gretchen: Wait, do you not know this children’s song?

Lauren: I do not know this children’s song. It sounds like the start of an apocalypse.

Gretchen: “If it had rained lemon drops and gum drops, the plants would’ve been crushed under the weight.”

Lauren: Not to mention us. I don’t think my umbrella’s gonna be much help here.

Gretchen: Not to mention the effects on the water table.

Lauren: Oh, gosh. This is an absolute ecological apocalypse here. How terrifying.

Gretchen: Conditionals can be used to talk about both relatively realistic hypothetical events – and also very fantastical ones.

Lauren: I’m gonna go listen to this song after this, but I am already scared of it.

Gretchen: You’ll be even more excited to learn that the second verse goes, “If all the snowflakes were candy bars and milkshakes.”

Lauren: How are we even gonna produce that many candy bars and that much milkshake?

Gretchen: “Oh, what a snow that would be!”

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: My favourite type of conditionals are not candy bars and milkshakes, they are, in fact, biscuit conditionals.

Lauren: Delightful.

Gretchen: Going from one food to the next. So, this is a famous example from J. L. Austin, who has the statement, “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them.”

Lauren: Oh, thanks, but where are biscuits if I don’t want them?

Gretchen: [Laughs] This is the thing because in these examples of “If it rains, I bring an umbrella,” if it doesn’t rain, maybe I don’t bring an umbrella, or maybe I bring one just in case to appease frenumblinger – compared to “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them, and if you don’t want them, well, where are they?”

Lauren: There are lots of different relationships between the first half and the second half of a conditional. I do like that biscuit conditionals set you up for a really great mom joke there.

Gretchen: There’s a related xkcd comic which goes, “I’ll be in your city tomorrow if you want to hang out.”

Lauren: “But where will you be if I don’t want to hang out?” I do actually wanna hang out.

Gretchen: I wanna hang out, too. But yeah, this sort of “What happens with the other half of the ‘if’?” This is one of the tricky things about talking about hypothetical events that there are lots of different ways of getting into that hypothetical.

Lauren: Which is why the caption on the xkcd comic is “Why I try not to be pedantic about conditionals.”

Gretchen: Very important.

Lauren: A good motto to live by. A lot of conditionals are slippery when the hypothetical part is in the future, and that’s because the future is quite difficult. It is unknowable by its very nature because we have a linear progression of time. That means that the future and irrealis bump up against each other in really interesting ways.

Gretchen: Right. If you make a statement – a relatively unremarkable future-y statement – like, “I’m probably gonna go to the store tomorrow,” or “I want to bake a cake tonight,” these are fine. These express a future or a desired future, but if you make the past equivalent – so instead of “I’m probably going to the store tomorrow,” “I probably went to the store yesterday.”

Lauren: Are you okay?

Gretchen: Like, was I sleepwalking? Was I consuming a substance that made me forget things?

Lauren: Do you have amnesia?

Gretchen: That’s suddenly a much weirder statement. “I want to bake a cake tonight,” fine. “I wanted to bake a cake last night” is fine, but it implies that it didn’t actually happen. Like, “I wanted to bake the cake last night. In fact, I did bake one.” Okay. Well, why didn’t you just say, “I baked a cake last night?”

Lauren: For sure. In fact, this is where English “will” for future came from. Something like, “I will bake a cake” originally meant something much more like, “I want to bake a cake.”

Gretchen: You still get, I think, sometimes these older, tiny things like, “I know it’s gonna happen. I will it.” That’s the same “will” in origin. The wanting intensely is that future “will” – it became that future “will.”

Lauren: The way that “will” is turning into something much more grammatical in the English future is a nice example of how different languages will sometimes use words and sometimes use grammar for these less-real irrealis contexts.

Gretchen: English still has grammatical past – “I baked a cake last night” – which is different from “I bake a cake right now.” But in some languages, instead of having a past/non-past like we have in English, what you actually have is a realis/irrealis where you have one form of a verb to talk about things that have happened or that are currently happening – any version of it that’s real – and then you have another form that’s talking about any version of it that’s unreal, whether that’s future or hypothetical or that whole class of things. It also makes sense as a way of splitting the conceptual timeframe into things that I have evidence for actually happening and things that I don’t yet have evidence for.

Lauren: For example, Manam, which is an Austronesian language in Papua New Guinea, doesn’t have a tense distinction like past and present and future; it has a realis and an irrealis form. They’re all prefixes on the verb.

Gretchen: There’s one set of prefixes for realis, whether it’s like, “I’m doing this,” “You’re doing that,” “We’re doing this,” “They’re doing this,” and so on. And there’s one for irrealis, which is like, “I might,” or “I will,” or “We might,” or “They might,” or all of these groups of forms. Another example of a language that uses realis versus irrealis as a really important distinction is Terêna, which is a southern Arawak language spoken in southwestern Mato Grosso, Brazil. They have two different forms for every verb, which is “actual” and “potential” – basically realis and irrealis – that have different suffixes. You have things that are realis, which can be translated as stuff like, “He went,” or “when he went,” or “He will go,” which in this case is grouped with the realis.

Lauren: So, it’s definitely gonna happen.

Gretchen: The idea is it’s definitely gonna happen. Then, in the irrealis category you have things more like, “Let him go,” or “when he goes,” which is more hypothetical.

Lauren: What people segment up as realis and irrealis differs depending on the grammar of a language.

Gretchen: Exactly. In many cases, English uses just extra words like “will” or “want” or “let” or “if” to indicate that something is irrealis, but we do have a few verb forms that are also used for hypothetical events.

Lauren: One of my favourites involves both mid-20th-Century musicals and Gwen Stefani.

Gretchen: Great.

Lauren: In English, we have two different structures. We have “if I were a rich man.” That is a slightly different structure to “if I was a rich girl.”

Gretchen: Ah, so these are two relatively famous songs. “If I Were a Rich Man” comes from Fiddler on the Roof, which is a 1964 musical.

Lauren: And “If I Were a Rich Girl” is a Gwen Stefani song from 2004.

Gretchen: This immediately gives us these great dates for when these two forms were more popular – “if I were,” “if I was” – and then these two songs that are influenced by each other.

Lauren: This form that has “were,” instead of just the normal past tense “was,” is something known as the “subjunctive.”

Gretchen: Ah, the elusive subjunctive in English.

Lauren: It is elusive because it is changing into this regular past tense form as we see with Gwen Stefani’s “If I Was a Rich Girl.”

Gretchen: Right. Not everybody says the subjunctive in that context. It’s still optionally there. You have to do it in “if I were” or “if he were” because in all the other forms, “if you were,” “if they were,” “if we were,” it’s just the same as the past tense form. You have to use it with “I” or “he” or “she” – one of the forms that would use “was” in another context – to be able to see it show up, which is probably why it’s kind of fragile and disappearing.

Lauren: Yeah, I think so.

Gretchen: Can we try to do a little bit of antedating? Fiddler on the Roof comes out in 1964, but the title of the song “If I Were a Rich Man,” having now looked into it, was inspired by a monologue from 1902 by Sholem Aleichem, which was in Yiddish, and the title of that was, “Ven Ikh Bin Rothschild,” or literally, “If I Were a Rothschild.”

Lauren: So, I don’t have to speak Yiddish to know that they’re talking about the very rich American Rothschild family.

Gretchen: Yes. Something that I think is interesting grammatically about the title of this monologue, which is a great monologue because it all goes on about how he’s gonna build schools for all the poor children and stuff – it’s a great monologue – but is “ikh bin,” which is the same as the German form “Ich bin,” like “I am,” whereas the German subjunctive form in this context is “Ich wäre,” which is more like “I were.”

Lauren: Yiddish and German are related, but they’re already doing different things.

Gretchen: They’re already doing different things specifically with subjunctive. Yiddish is already following this trajectory that English is following where it’s getting closer to the more usual form for “I am.”

Lauren: And you’re just meant to know that it’s hypothetical because he’s not a Rothschild, and he’s not building schools.

Gretchen: Well, and you have this word “if,” yeah.

Lauren: I also did some antedating on Gwen Stefani’s version of “If I Was a Rich Girl,” which was on her debut solo album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. It turns out that it’s actually a cover of a 1993 song by Louchie Lou & Michie One, where they also sing “if I was a rich girl.” Already by the early ’90s in younger people’s speech you see the subjunctive slipping.

Gretchen: Who are Louchie Lou & Michie One?

Lauren: They’re a British female ragga/soul duo from London in the early ’90s and were linked to the film clip for this track because they’re clearly having a lot of fun with it.

Gretchen: They may have had their finger on the pulse of language change a bit sooner than Gwen Stefani in 2004.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: When I think about the connection between “If I Were a Rich Man” and “If I Was a Rich Girl,” I think of an a cappella mashup from the mid-2010s, which combines these two songs in a very fun music video from some very posh-looking British a cappella singers, which we can also link to because it reinforces – and I hadn’t really realised that “If I Was a Rich Girl” was actually playing on “If I Were a Rich Man,” and they’re using some of the same beats in the background of the song. I hadn’t realised there was a connection between those. I should say, when Gwen Stefani came out with that song, she’d already released some music, and she was already pretty wealthy. At the time, you got some newspaper commenters and so on who were saying like, “Isn’t it a bit disingenuous for you to be saying, ‘if I was a rich girl’? Because you are, in fact, a rich girl.”

Lauren: Yeah, but the lyric “if I were not the rich girl that I am so I can be an avatar for my unwealthy audience” doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

Gretchen: Gwen Stefani at the time explained that as she was talking about the time before she had found commercial success when she used to be broke – which, maybe, you know, okay.

Lauren: A different level of hypothetical there.

Gretchen: Two levels of hypotheticality.

Lauren: We’re seeing this really interesting development over the last century or so in English where the subjunctive is changing in English.

Gretchen: Sometimes people say that this is “losing the subjunctive,” but interestingly, in both cases, it’s a past form. “If I was” and “if I were” are both using the form that is associated with the past – “was” or “were” – to refer to an event that is very much not the past. In fact, it hasn’t happened.

Lauren: Ugh, this is why it’s so hard to learn it as a second language speaker.

Gretchen: The subjunctive is something that often comes up when people are learning languages like French, Spanish, Italian – in German, it’s called the “conjunctive,” but it’s the same thing, the conjunctive and the conditional – because these languages have more fully-fledged forms for the subjunctive that they use to express a range of meanings that English speakers know how to express but aren’t used to thinking as all of the same kind of thing. Sometimes, I think it must actually be really hard if someone speaks one of those languages first and is coming in and trying to learn English, and they’re like, “What do you mean I just have this one easy form that I use for all this stuff, and I have to learn, like, seven different ways of expressing it now?”

Lauren: [Laughs] For sure.

Gretchen: I think this must actually also be hard because English doesn’t have one unified subjunctive. We have a whole range of extra stuff. You can just use the subjunctive for all of them? That’s so easy!

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, you could be like me and whenever anyone talks about the subjunctive, in my head I just hear, “if I was-slash-were a rich man-slash-girl.”

Gretchen: I’m glad that you’re covering the full range of possible forms there with “was” and “were.” I remember feeling confused about this form in the classroom and trying to use the subjunctive where, a lot of the times, the context that you’re talking about things are very remote and seem kind of artificial. The thing that really made me feel more comfortable using the subjunctive and recognising it was just encountering it in the wild in a bunch of contexts where it was like, “Oh, yeah, this is what this has to mean.” There’s a particularly useful song for the French subjunctive, if you like, which is on a classic Celine Dion album from the 1990s.

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: The song is called, “Pour Que Tu M’aimes Encore,” which is the title which translates sort of like, “So That You Love Me Again.” The “you love” is subjunctive. It’s hypothetical. It’s not the case, otherwise you wouldn’t have a song to write, but it’s saying all the things that the speaker would do so that the other person loves them again.

Lauren: Really looking forward to the Celine Dion/Gwen Stefani mashup that really helps people learn the French and English subjunctive forms.

Gretchen: Sounds great.

Lauren: The subjunctive is one of a set of different ways that we can talk about whether things are real or not. They’re also a subset of irrealis categories that are about trying to make the reality that you want to happen. There’s a great list on Wikipedia to check out. I feel like this was written by a linguist who is like me and remembers that there are different types of irrealis categories but never remembers their formal names.

Gretchen: This is definitely one of those cases when it’s like, if you know Latin, you just name everything with Latin roots, and then it sounds fancier than “the wish subjunctive” and the “want-to-make-people-do-things subjunctive.”

Lauren: Yes. We are gonna use the fancy names here, but like me, you’re absolutely not obliged to remember them. You can just click on the Wikipedia link whenever you wanna think about –

Gretchen: Every single time.

Lauren: Yeah. Let’s both pick our favourite two of these categories.

Gretchen: But, Lauren, we’re both gonna pick the “hortative” because it’s so cool!

Lauren: It is, and I just used it with “let’s.”

Gretchen: You just used it. “Let’s” both pick our favourite two subjunctive forms. The hortative is something that exhorts – it urges. It’s often found with “let” in English. Something like “Let us love each other,” “Let it snow,” “Let there be light” – imploring, insisting, or encouraging by the speaker. Sometimes, a language will have a specific form potentially used for the hortative, or this will be one of the categories that something like a subjunctive or another irrealis form can be used for. What’s one of your favourites if you can’t have the hortative?

Lauren: Well, if I can’t have the hortative, I will go for the category where an event is hoped for, expected, or awaited, which is the “optative.”

Gretchen: The “optative.” I want to opt into this coming event. Do you have an example of the optative?

Lauren: Something like, “May I be loved” or “May they get what they deserve,” which sounds threatening or hopeful depending on the context.

Gretchen: Can you use something like a “if only”?

Lauren: In Russian, to do something like the optative it would be literally translated as something like, “if only” – “If only she came back” – to do that expected or hoped for thing.

Gretchen: We have a “may something happen,” “if only something happened,” maybe “I wish something had happened.”

Lauren: I love Abkhaz – which is the language that Sarah Dopierala works on; we interviewed her for a bonus – I love that it has two different optative forms, and they both do slightly different things. In Abkhaz, you have Optative 1, which is to curse and to bless, and then Optative 2 is to express a wish, a dream, or a desire. The first one would be something like – the form of greetings is literally “May you see something good,” which is a blessing.

Gretchen: That’s a lovely greeting, yes.

Lauren: It’s a lovely greeting. I quite like. Optative 2 would be something like, “I wish she’d drink the water.” You get these two different forms that give you an idea of different ways you can do an optative.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess technically – we did a whole episode about the imperative, so that’s things like, “Drink the water,” and “See something good,” “Come back” – that is technically a type of irrealis because if you’re commanding someone to do something, it hasn’t happened yet.

Lauren: Ooo, yeah, so now you can go back and look into the whole imperative episode as an irrealis episode.

Gretchen: In principle, we could’ve done an entire hortative episode and an entire optative episode, but we decided to think about the macro category for a while first.

Lauren: My final category is one for when you’re not necessarily sure about the thing that you’re talking about, so you can’t be entirely certain if it’s real or not. This feature shows up in Yolmo. I wrote about it for my thesis. I wrote about it for a whole year before saying it. It turns out that I hate to say the word “dubitative” – /d͡ʒubɪtɛɪtɪv/?

Gretchen: /dubɪdəˈtɪv/.

Lauren: /dubətɪv/. /dubɪdətɪv/.

Gretchen: “Indubitatatative.”

Lauren: I’m very happy to write it for a year, and then I gave a presentation, and I was just like, “Oh, this is a problem.” But it is a grammatical category in Yolmo, and I do have to talk about it because it’s one that crops up in a whole bunch of languages. In English, we use a word like, “might,” you know, “I might make a cake,” “He maybe made a cake.” We use lots of different words for showing a lack of certainty. In other languages, it’s part of the grammar. In Ojibwe, which is an Algonquian language in North America, there is a specific suffix. The difference between saying something like, “aakozi,” meaning, “He’s sick,” or “aakozidog,” which is something like, “He must be sick; I guess he’s sick; Maybe he’s sick.” Like, “I can’t see inside this person’s head. I’m not a doctor. I can’t say for certain whether they’re sick, but they look pretty miserable.” I find having a grammatical form for whether you’re certain about something is so handy.

Gretchen: Technically, if you’d like, I did look up how to say this word. Oxford says /dubɪtɛɪtɪv/, but you know, language is pluricentric. You can say it however you’d like.

Lauren: I’ve definitely heard all of those different pronunciations from different people over time. I guess I will just continue to be uncertain about the way it’s pronounced.

Gretchen: Would you say you have “doubt”? Would you say you’re /dubɪtɛɪtɪv/ or /dubɪdətɪv/ about how to say “dubitative”?

Lauren: I would definitely use a dubitative grammatical form about my certainty about pronouncing it if we had one in English.

Gretchen: Excellent. I think my final form that I’m excited about – because I’m not counting imperative because we did a whole episode about that – I want to talk about a form that you can use to express a desire or a wish of the participant. If you wanna say something like, “I wish she loved me” – you have desire – you can use a /dəzɪdɹ̩ətɪv/ – I think that’s the only way it’s said. There are languages from Japanese and Mongolian to Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European that all have desiderative forms of some sort.

Lauren: Aww. I like when a nice form crops up across a bunch of languages.

Gretchen: I think that that desire to try to impose order or predict what people are gonna say or what’s gonna be reality is part of what makes irrealis forms, like the subjunctive, complicated and confusing for people to learn is that they’re trying to talk about this whole class of events that haven’t happened yet and may or may not ever happen, which itself is confusing and chaotic to try to predict the future. It’s not the grammar’s fault that we’re using it to speculate about the unknowable.

Lauren: For sure.

Gretchen: One thing that we do know is that there is a fun etymology related to trying to impose order and predict the future of what people are gonna be like.

Lauren: I love a fun etymology story.

Gretchen: Have you ever wondered why the Greek Zodiac and the Chinese Zodiac are both called “zodiacs” even though one is months and the other one is years?

Lauren: I have never thought about this before. Is it something to do with the fact that – I mean, they both have cycles of 12 animals, so they definitely have a lot in common even though they don’t work on the same 12 rotation cycle.

Gretchen: Well, interestingly, it has nothing to do with 12, but etymologically, they come from the Greek “zodiakos kyklos,” or “zodiac circle,” which is literally a circle of little animals.

Lauren: Oh, “zo” as in “zoo.”

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: But “diak” just is the diminutive “little”? Oh, that that is very cute.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s “little animals.”

Lauren: How adorable.

Gretchen: There’re lots of tools that people use to make sense of the uncertainty or unknowability of reality in the future. Some of those tools are grammatical tools. Some of those tools are –

Lauren: Cute little animals.

Gretchen: Circles of little animals. Sometimes, that tool is etymology because people also use the origins of words to try to make sense of uncertainty even though etymology is also not destiny.

Lauren: We believe that so strongly that we made it into a sticker.

Gretchen: When you’re thinking about what’s real and what’s not real, when you’re wondering what’s knowable or unknowable, what’s certain or uncertain, the irrealis is a form that connects you through time and space to generations of other people who have also wondered what’s real.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all of the podcast platforms or go to lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch like our new “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and stickers at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @gretchenmcc on Bluesky, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus episodes include my excursion to linguistics summer camp, a.k.a. the LSA Linguistics Institute, a linguistics advice Q&A episode, and swearing in science fiction and fantasy. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[constantly-confused-queer]

So the Ninja Turtles came about in the 70s when comic books were getting big. These two guys were just doodling and then one of them came up with this:

After a couple weeks of redesigns for fun, they ended up with 4 brother turtles who each had different weapons

Originally, since it was all in black and white, you could only tell the difference between the turtles with the weapons and how they spoke. Raph was usally more angry, Leo was the leader, Donnie was the smart guy, and Mikey was the goober.

They created the comics and it was definitely more of a darker tone. But they were a huge success.

The original comic was a one off story because they didn't think it was going to sell. But it definitely did, and so many stores and people were asking "what's next???"

So they made more. They created villans and a story and made more comics.

Then in the 80s, there was an idea for toys, and a TV series. This was when they decided to get rid of the tails and make the tone more kid friendly and also give them colored masks.

They kept making money and the turtles were such a hit that they decided to make a live action movie. This came out in the 90s.

There were two more movies that came out after that.

Since then, there have been more movies and tv shows and comics. The most popular has been the 2012 CGI show, that lasted for I think 5 seasons. In 2014 and 16 there were two live action CGI movies made

The 80s show and the 90s movies were the Gen X turtles

The '12 show and the '14 movies were Millennials and older gen Z turtles.

The 2012 show was amazing and also really problematic in different ways. It did really well and is a staple in the TMNT set of media. The 2014 movies were not appreciated as much when they first came out, but now that gen Z is on the Internet they are much more well loved.

In 2018, Nickelodeon released Rise of the Teenage mutant ninja turtles.

Now this show was much different from any other TMNT reboot for a multitude of reasons.

Up until this point, the turtles have been the same species. Primarily just box turtles all green. All the turtles were the same age as well. They also had pretty much the same outfit with the exception of the 2014 movies. The origin story has all been pretty similar too. Splinter was similar in each one as well.

But Rise changed all of that. They changed all of it with the intention that this would be something completely new for an brand new generation. This was the first tmnt show that I really watched and got into as well.

In Rise, all the turtles were different species and ages. Raph (17) Alligator Snapping, Donnie (15) Soft Shell, Leo (15) Red Eared Slider, Mikey (14) Box shell.

Raph was the leader instead of Leo

They had magic weapons as well as used martial arts

Splinter was kinda a dead beat dad instead of a all knowing sensei. (Whiched changed later, yay character development)

All the turtles had different outfits.

And most of the villains changed, or didn't exist or new ones were created.

It was HATED for so long and tossed aside. By fandom standards it had a tiny following. All the adults hated it and wouldn't even give it a chance because it was so different.

It wasn't until the movie in 2022 that it began to gain a bigger following. Netflix had taken up the movie idea and released a 90ish minutes movie set in the future for these turtles.

They were all about 2 years older, and the idea was that you could watch the movie without having to see the show first. And the movie kicked ass. It was so good and one of the best animated things I've ever seen.

That is the most recent TMNT media movie and tv show rise. Comics are still being written by different companies. The most popular being IDW.

There was also a short movie with Batman and the TMNT that came out in 2019.

This movie isn't well known as much as the others, but it is absolutely hilarious.

And now we have the 2023, coming August 2nd TMNT mutant mayhem.

And this is the first one where the turtles are seen as younger teenagers and voiced by teenagers. True TMNT fans are very excited, and older TMNT fans are not happy with its existence. The animation style choice for one and also, because April is black.

I can't add any more photos, so I'm gonna send another ask about all the April's :)

Gotta say, I wasn't expecting a crash course on TMNT history, but this is actually pretty interesting, I really like seeing the development of shows and such. I believe I actually saw the 2014 movie, I was 8 and VERY scared of the only scene I remember, so I ended up turning on an Equestria Girls movie

I've actually been considering watching Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cause of how much I've been seeing about it on here. I actually really like the detail of them being different species, I think it's cool

[miloscat]

[Review] Starlink: Battle for Atlas (NS)

An Ubisoft open world... in space! Also Star Fox is there!

Lylat Wars is one of my childhood favs, so I'll play anything if they put Star Fox in it. It just so happens that the Switch version of this open world toys-to-life game included a bunch of Star Fox side content as an extra, so here we are. Now it's taken me a few years to recover from Star Fox Zero, but the characters are handled very well here, enough for me to open my heart to them again.

At the very tail end of the Skylanders/Lego Dimensions/Disney Infinity craze, when shops were cutting back on the shelf space they had reserved for plastic figure after plastic figure of dubious usefulness, Ubisoft decided to launch their own entry in this space... for some reason. This being a customisable space ship game, their implementation involves large ship models that attach to a controller mount. The ships then have slots where different weapons and pilots can be attached, and each component can be swapped on the fly depending on the situation. In practice this is clunky and cumbersome, but luckily the physical models are entirely optional. Instead you can buy the components digitally and switch them around in a menu, and I was pleased to score a version off the eShop that included all wave 1 components at a good discount.

Locking weapons that have situational usefulness, or suit your playstyle, behind a purchase feels a bit scummy; especially when I stuck to just four of the 27 available (double gatlings and double missile volleys). Ships are helpful to have a handful of, as they essentially act as extra lives. The pilots are more understandable as optional DLC, but you do need ones from certain factions to unlock global upgrades and I think questlines. So there's a big FOMO component that feels exploitative, but it does make extra purchases feel helpful in-game. Beyond the "digital deluxe" set I also got the Star Fox team pack that adds Falco, Slippy, and Peppy to the base game's Fox (plus a new questline), and the monkey-like pilot Startail because she looked cool... sadly she had an annoying voice (she's not alone), but I still used her and Falco for most of the game thanks to their abilities.

But how does Starlink actually play? Funnily enough it feels a lot like a follow-up to Star Fox 2, Argonaut's SNES sequel that Nintendo cancelled then finally released 22 years later. You have a big star system map with various planets, where the baddies spread to over time. Strategy elements are present but light, where most of the progress comes from the player's direct action. Most of your time is spent ranging over planet surfaces, doing tasks and activities that get you resources and push back the army of robots. These build towards climactic battles with space battleships which you fly inside to destroy (again, very like Star Fox 2). Then follows much rinsing and repeating: this is an open world game, after all.

On the surfaces your ship becomes a sort of hover-speeder. I had more fun with the planet-bound sections than the space stuff, mainly because there's a much greater density of things to do there, and movement and combat is also more manageable when it's constrained by gravity and dimensions. Special mention must be made of how almost seamless it is to transition between ground and space by simply flying up; especially impressive on the Switch which handled the whole thing remarkably well, only chugging when there was an abundance of enemies on screen. The other platforms probably have better overall performance, frame rate, etc., but Star Fox is the winning draw (the other platforms don't have any equivalent extra content of this sort either).

Anyway, in the first few hours you'll get an idea of the loop: zipping around, building up outposts to get map information and resources, and fighting enemies to capture points of interest. All of this builds up a planetwide meter that represents your control vs. the evil alien robot whatevers. I settled into this groove and found it quite fun, never getting too bored of it, although this may vary with your tolerance for repetition. A scant few sidequests can give you some different things to do (and let you hear more voice lines from the actors other than the very oft-repeated expositionary chatter) but a lot of the time it's the ol' open world grind.

The plot is your standard YA sci-fi stuff, not much to write home about. The main team, a set of largely unlikable human schmoes, have uplifted themselves with alien technology to help an alien buddy, and in medias res arrive in the Atlas system. There's some uncomfortably heavy colonial vibes here, as the planets are all some variety of wilderness teeming with settlers, explorers, prospectors, and bandits, and your role as outsiders is uniting these folk under your banner—ostensibly to fight some monster guy and his robot army—and make big decisions about how the system is run before presumably jetting off again after the credits roll. Hmm.

The personal stories of the characters, especially the alien friends you make in Atlas, were the highlight for me, although I feel like they aren't always introduced effectively. As both a game where characters can be spawned in any time from the start and one with some open-ended elements, developments can feel abrupt and the pacing uneven. The Star Fox team and their story is actually integrated very well, although Wolf as the antagonist of this sidestory was, I feel, acting quite out of character from what I would expect. I see him as an amoral mercenary, while here he's set up as a would-be galactic conqueror. Ah well.

Otherwise the Star Fox stuff is excellent: you get a spiffy Starlink version of the Arwing, there's some nice covers of classic music tracks, and the team chatter is top-notch (again, when it's not just open world exposition). The voice actors have mostly carried over either from their original Lylat Wars appearances in a few cases, or the recasts that have stuck since the 3DS remake, and they nail it, especially because they're not just doing weird alternate takes on a reheated script (Zero still hurts my soul so much...). The team are integrated into prerendered cutscenes and there's unique events and missions, plus having them as an addition only makes the overall roster stronger. It's not a full new Star Fox game, but it's pretty much the next best thing. My only complaint is having the characters still trapped in this Lylat Wars/Zero-era setting, continuing the writing-out of Krystal, Sauria, Panther, the Aparoids, everything that Command introduced, etc... but I guess that wasn't really Ubisoft's decision. It's better than nothing, I suppose.

Anyway, Starlink was a pretty good time. As long as you resign yourself to spending more than the normal cost of a game to get a full experience. And you don't think too hard about the themes of the setting. And you don't mind a bit of open world repetition, or the uneven weapon balance, or that obnoxious influencer kid who's on the team for some reason. But let's not focus on the negative; there's a lot to like here. It's a cool sci-fi space game that integrates planet surfaces well, the core gameplay loop is solid and satisfying, and it has a very good crossover with my favourite rail shooter series. I wouldn't get my hopes up for a sequel though, as the retail toys underperformed and five years later the developer is now making Watch Dogs and Far Cry games (as if Ubisoft didn't have enough of those) or assisting on every other Ubisoft release.

[subduethedragon]

Chaos Theory Primer

WHAT IS THIS:

An AU of an AU.

Once upon a time, I came up with a fighting game AU, where a bunch of series I like crossover. While this involves plenty of logistically questionable mechanics/character movesets, it also involves a story and Lore (TM)

Eventually, I decided to turn that fighting game AU into a story. As I am still on Act 1 of 3 and it’s been a year or two since the previous part, you can tell that that is going swimmingly. But, I got the idea for DLC for this AU. Eventually, as I picked up some new interests, and got deeper into the lore side of things, this escalated into what I like to call a “side B/Reverse-Side” of the AU: It’s still got the same fundamental key elements (with some new ones thrown in) but it’s gotten far beyond that: More SRW than fighting game, so to say.

Will I actually be writing this?

I dunno. I’ve got enough fics that I should be working on but aren’t. This project is just as much to unload the concepts in my head as it is to have it out there in some form. One could also argue that it’s also a bit much for a mediocre fanfic writer to handle.

If I get any particular ideas that I got an itch to write (I do have one idea in the wings, in fact) then I’ll definitely go for it.

But as is, think of this as more of a frame work. Maybe something akin to a TTRPG setting or something.

THE PLOT:

There is an overaching plot to Chaos Theory, as well as three different throughlines. Said throughlines aren’t fully thought out in regards to how they interact with the main plot so how it all shakes together at this point in time is… not too developed (cue AUs of an AU of an AU).

The overarching plotline revolves a mysterious space known as The Fantasy World or Minus World. This space twists and warps, creating new realms or shortcuts into existing ones. The result is a labyrinth, and later an “ocean” of structures such as shrines. This is due to the space being a hotbed for various types of energy, such as Star Power, Moon Power and especially Chaos Power.

Through some method, a warlock by the name of Xande found himself in the labyrinth. Seeking to recover his immortality, Xande began toying with the energies at play. While he was fruitless in directly making use of it, he came to understand the nature of the Chaos Emeralds, the Master Emerald and the space-time abilities of the rings. Thus, Xande began to experiment with the rings in hopes of drawing the emeralds to him.

Perhaps by fate, perhaps by coincidence, two parties found themselves within the labyrinth: The Warrior of Light, his four vassals and one of their allies, all of whom stood opposed to Xande previously, and an organization from the World of Darkness known as “World’s Eye” who bear similarities to the “Dark Cloud tribe”, a group of cloud-like aliens who control and corrupt planets, their callsign being their leader’s singular crimson eye.

However, not knowing of Xande’s presence, the two forces assumed that the other was up to some neferious plot. In the end, the Warriors of Light attempted to use Chaos Power against World’s Eye. However, it backfired and the four vanished. At the same time, five new structures arose in the Fantasy World: A treasure filled dungeon, a scholar castle, a lava-filled weapons forge, a manor atop a massive mountain range and a tower made of crystal, the lattermost of which creating a sea of light that makes entry towards it difficult, if not near impossible. One could also see massive airships flying around the space...

To make matters worse, Xande caught wind of his enemies being in the labyrinth and was able to secure biocells from them to create clones to search the world for anything useful. Mostof the clones are focused on their objectives, but other clones seem to be more self-interested. Then there are those that are so independent that it’s questionable if they came from Xande...

Time passes. Word soon spreads of the mysterious “Minus World”. Eventually it catches the attention of certain people. Some are explorers, such as Mag Launcher and Linear Cannon from Pannam Town or Rock Volnutt of the Skylands. It also catches the attention of power hungry people in high places, such as King Bowser of the Koopa Kingdom of Dr. Robotnik of the Eggman Empire. Some people enter for their own personal missions, such as Alex Kidd (& Stella!) of Radaxian, who enters in pursuit of the Bloom; A greedy star who has stolen the stars of planet Aeries. And finally, there are those who find themselves in the labyrinth purely by accident.

With so many people in such a place, chaos inevitably follows...

The three other plotlines/throughlines are as follows:

Plot A: A greedy Star known as the Bloom is absorbing all of the stars in the universe. When Planet Aries’ stars are absorbed, Alex and his good friend Stella set forth into the Fantasy World in order to stop it. But the Bloom isn’t the only villain who has their eyes to the stars…

Plot B: The age of Adventure is alive and well as all manner of diggers and adventurers strive to uncover the lost secrets of ancient civilizations. When the Launcher Clan (Mag Launcher and Linear Cannon) and Rock Volnutt find themselves in the labyrinth, they begin to discover a link between the ever present rings and Chaos Energy. Of course, while navigating the strange new world and unlocking the secrets, they’ll have to contend with ancient mechanisms, imperial forces and sky pirates and even secrets from their pasts...

Plot C: The odd interdimensional nature of the Labyrinth leads to some unforeseen results. When Kirby & Klonoa find themselves at an intersection between awakening and dreams, the two become fast friends. However, they quickly discover a threat that puts the dreams of all in jeopardy and the two set off to protect all good dreams everywhere. However, a certain Wizard is lurking in the shadows and is determined to make Klonoa’s greatest dream into a Nightmare of a reunion…

INVOLVED SERIES:

This rank has three categories to it; “Definitely” means that I envision it as a staple part of the AU. “Maybe” means that, had I been writing this for real, the series probably or probably not would’ve stayed. “Probably” just exists for the game that I want to include but haven’t actually played yet.

Definitely: Mario, Sonic, Kirby, Evolution/Evolutia, Mega Man**

Probably: Skies of Arcadia/Eternal Arcadia***

Probably Not: Pokemon, Legend of Zelda, Madou Monogatari* ***

* Probably the least likely on that list, but I’m putting it there anyway.

** The original AU this is based on had X as the Mega Man series in question. For Chaos Theory, it has been swapped to Mega Man Legends.

*** Have not played at the time of this writing.