#and is also too dark imo

[nylarac]

wdym no one is selling resin gummy sharks on etsy..

[artsy-1diot]

drawing kudos managers as I beat them part 7 (+satellite investors)

IM FINALLY FREE FROM THIS DRAWING OH MY GOD i had to learn how to draw skelecogs just for this drawing and it took like four days to make.

also fun fact one of my besties is named nix :3

[harbingersecho]

Lasombra fashion show?

Now how did you know I've been meaning to draw fashion 'shows' for all the clans…?

But! Here's some Lasombra fashion stuff for you!

+ bonus because I love bullying Lasombra abt their tech issues (:

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[anxiously-sidequesting]

Okay all of you are geniuses because a lot of you who see my necromancer posts brought up a super interesting concept that even u hadn't thought about in length, which is the possible discrimination that ALL necromancers in Wizard City probably faces due to past events, not just Malorn

Like ofc this isn't seen in canon but it's super likely that Death students in particular face certain hardships that other Schools may not. And the questions that I asked myself about this topic is super interesting:

Do Death students deal with a certain stigma surrounding their choice of study, or even their character? Are Death students in particular the only group that goes through a different type of treatment that others don't? Do Death students suffer from rumors or beliefs that are harmful to them in any way? Are Death students unwelcome in other groups of students, do they suffer from double takes or ostracization when they do or say things that typically aren't an issue if other students do them?

And another interesting part about this is the source, the fact that a majority of the essential or impactful villains to the plot are all Necromancers that come from Ravenwood. Like of course everyone in Wizard City has to know about Malistaire, but do they know about Morganthe years back, or Duncan when he drops out and is recruited in a cult?

Like I can imagine people back then have heard of Morganthe being expelled; I wonder if there had been any rumors or speculations surrounding her following her expulsion. Nobody was there except for Morganthe, Malistaire, and Ambrose; maybe there were whispers and twists to the story of what actually happened. It's unfortunately very easy to spin an exaggerated tale that maybe Morganthe was purposely violent and unreasonable, and following that, "Maybe it's because she's a Necromancer."

And Duncan, who was never really popular in the first place, after spewing all of that hot air about being Malistaire's best student, suddenly Malistaire becomes a criminal and Duncan is left with what? Was Duncan ever treated differently after that? Were people then possibly AFRAID of him? Perhaps maybe, that he'd soon end up like Malistaire in the future? And imagine how much worse it would get, if it somehow came out that Duncan took up with some bad people and attacked Wizard City's own hero. It wouldn't be about, "Duncan was manipulated during a dark time in his life and did bad things because of that", it would be about, "Duncan, who revered the former evil Death Professor, turned to a life of crime and followed in his mentor's footsteps". By the way, notice how they were both Necromancers?

And then it really puts it into perspective when you realize, why hasn't the Death School been repaired by now? How come no one has looked for Dworgyn or Mortis, despite him having been MIA for a while?

This would have been a cool topic to explore within the game if handled correctly imo, it opens up so much more into the characters and their perspective, the trauma they might be facing. It's sad and definitely unfair and unwarranted but it's realistic and a very blatant thing that just happens. TL;DR, more trauma to Malorn, Duncan, Morganthe, and every single Death student ever from me because I have brainrot

[museenkuss]

OCTOBER. the first lines in a new notebook. chestnut mousse. studying runway shows. the scent of leather. rainy nights spent reading. mini perfume atomisers kept in overstuffed handbags. chai. hunting down the perfect paisley scarf. poached pears with vanilla sauce. jotting down thoughts on scraps of paper that’ll be found inbetween the pages of a book, years from now. honey face masks. learning poems by heart. dark chocolate and red wine. Draculean nightmares and Wildean dreams (opulent, melancholic, homoerotic).

[dazais-guardian-angel]

kinda wild to me that one of the most compelling aspects of both Chuuya and Kunikida's characters to me, that I never really see talked about, is how they're heavily set on a doomed crash course towards complete and utter destruction, and how I am so, so worried for them both.....

[four-eyed-floozy]

So I've been a horror rpg nerd for like YEARS and if you're new and want to get into it, it might be hard to know where to start (in light of my last post)

These are my general recommendations, I also recommend OFF and Ao Oni fangames as well. There's a lot of creativity in some of the fangames. This is BY FAR, not the definitive rpg horror game rec list, but I think I have most of the popular ones.

[mister-lucky-bunny]

I don’t wanna throw the baby out with the bath water, but damn Mouthwashing has already reached the “fandom infighting” stage of its life cycle huh

[cocoabubbelle-newblog]

Rings of Power S2

Spoilers

Arondir: *stabbed*

Me: NOOOOOOOOOO 😭

Adar: *prettified by Nenya and has possibly his conscience restored, his thirst for vengeance cooled down, alludes to an older name, and has VIBES with Galadriel*

Me:…*remembers that Celeborn was supposedly killed off centuries/who-knows-how-long-ago*…wait. WAI-!!

Adar: *also stabbed*

Me: NOOOOOOOOO(dangit there goes my headcanon)OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 😭😭

Arondir: *alive actually*

Me: …wait wut

[tsuchinokoroyale]

[paunchsalazar]

Fire Emblem Awakening families in my play through…

[littlebluejaydraws]

Cas + Faith 9/?- 5x16: Dark Side of the Moon

The alternate quotes are from the discussion of this moment in episode 23 of @thecascast, Dark Side of the Cas. The idea of doing a series following Cas' faith journey had been floating around in my head for a while, but this discussion is what lead to me actually doing this series so thanks y'all.

ID: Three images of a digital drawing of Cas from episode 5x16 of Supernatural. The drawing shows Cas' head and shoulders, viewed from above, with his face turned upwards towards the viewer. His expression is upset. The background is in shades of orange and the drawing is set within a circle, with a quote around the outside. In the the first image, the words read "Fuck you. I believed in-". In the second image, the words read "You son of a bitch. I believed in-". In the third image, the words read "You coward. I believed in-". The difference in the quotes is the only difference between the three images. End ID.

[primordial0riginator]

Me, the only Ares and Nyx shipper on planet earth: 😏

[sn0wbat]

Just for fun if you’d like:

If you put your vampires into the Pokédex what types would they have?

well, considering the vampirism, they'd all likely end up with dark type just by default... so let's get a little more creative!! (some still get dark type because it fits their vibe)

morten: fairy. absolutely a fairy type

einarr: psychic/water (huge nerd scholar. mindreader. thrives at sea)

bat: flying/dark (goes bump in the night :3)

rune: normal/ghost? (sure is an undead mystery boy)

helena: fire.

loki: dark/fire (literally runs a cult)

eli: grass. bug? just got those cottagecore vibes

stone: rock.

rupert: water/ghost

tiberius: water. just pure water. aquarius man

the lord: dark/dragon (evil. menacing and terrible)

laugar: poison/bug :)

kvikindi: bug/dragon (they're a lil shapeshifter who turned into a dragon sometimes)

and then my uhh. vampiresona-

ice/flying. sure

[paraesol]

New pfp for Instagram

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