#and not really played out in the base game

[krashlite]

The absolutely delightful realization this post gave me was that each member directly reflects a member of the other team

Scar + Grian

They’re known to find ways to circumvent the rules, often being the first to discover loopholes in the games (Grian killing in 3L as an extension of Scar’s red name, Scar figuring out he can torment Grian in DL via the soulbound + torching the ranch despite being on green, Scar convincing Grian to let him reroll for hard in SL before the rules were fully fleshed out, etc). They push against the boundaries of each series in one way or another, often as a way to gain control over their own agency.

Which makes it all the more tragic that neither of them wanted to win in their respective seasons. Grian’s reaction was regret, saying he doesn’t feel good and immediately ending his own series. Scar’s first response was surprise, almost disappointment. “Really? How’d that happen? How did the guy with no friends win?” They won through their actions being outside of their control, decisions made by outside voices (ghosts in 3L, tasks in SL). They were put in a position where they had no choice but to fight, even if it meant killing those they cared about.

Now they’re in an environment they can’t control, they know they can’t control, and they both decided they don’t need to. They’re focusing their efforts on their team and on their own stability instead of worrying about the world outside

Lizzie + Mumbo

Both of them entered during LL, the most chaotic and hectic season of the life series. During that season it was made clear to them that loyalties mean nothing, it’s every man for himself. The Fairy Fort meant nothing to BigB when his life was at stake or to Cleo when they’d been betrayed, the Southlands meant nothing to any of them when threatened by the outside world.

This played into how they approached SL, with Lizzie remaining alone for the entire season and using the few alliances she had for her own gain (main example being trapping Joel’s base even though he’s was her main ally). Mumbo held his alliance with the Mounders for most of the season, but immediately turned on them once he turned red.

But in the current season, the both of them are fully focused on their team. Lizzie’s trying (often in vain) to keep Scar and Jimmy alive, no matter who she has to trick, rob, or harm in order to do so. Mumbo’s been on the paranoid side, fearing that either Grian or Skizz are going to leave him any time they’re away for too long. They’ve never had a functional group that stays functional and they’re doing the best they can to keep things together.

Jimmy + Skizz

Oh, the optimists of the series. Both of them are the cheerleading type, focusing on one goal the group can mobilize against. However, neither of them seem to know how to transfer this into actual leadership. They either overshoot, back down too soon, or set the wrong objective entirely.

Skizz is used to teams that fall apart because they set their sights too high, or his plans being so ambitious that they backfire (dogwarts sought to take over the server, turned the server against them. BEST set out to be the heroes of the server, ended up imploding. TIES, via skynet, thrust the server into chaos and ended up impaled on their own spear. Heart Foundation got taken advantage of time and time again via the raffle).

Jimmy is used to his plans backfiring because he either isn’t allowed to follow through on them, or backs down too quickly. (3L, he was consistently stopped from going on the offensive by Scott, either being made to retreat or being benched entirely. LL, he was overly cautious when carrying out the plans of the group and underperformed. Then, when he took a life from Martyn, he immediately caved and gave it back). It’s something he started to repair in DL and LimL, but the world was pitted against him and Tango in DL and he was under the Bad Boys’ command in LimL. It’s only in SL that he was able to have full agency over his actions, as well as the conviction to follow through with his plans.

So in the current season, Skizz has been dialing back his goals and Jimmy has been more ambitious with his. In that, Jimmy’s finding A LOT of success (5 KILLS!!) and has a team that backs his decisions. Most of the decisions Skizz makes are either sidestepped or undermined by his team, even though his team is consistently trying to defend him. Without an objective, Skizz is someone that becomes more volatile (storming the Crastle, going on a rampage in LL, flying into battle during the boogeyman apocalypse, etc), and this has been apparent with this season!

SO WE HAVE

Spanners

Grian: focusing on his team’s needs and treats the outside world as entertainment

Mumbo: anxiously holding onto his team for security but fearing their betrayal

Skizz: slowly spiraling from a lack of focus and direction

Bamboozlers

Scar: controlling his environment through acts of recklessness and using that to his team’s advantage

Lizzie: supporting her team at all costs

Jimmy: focusing his recklessness on one goal/target

Dysfunctionally Functional:

Functionally Dysfunctional:

[dedalvs]

Top 3 Games That Don't Exist Anymore

LEMMINGS (1991)

Absolutely incredible puzzle game (based on the great lemming myth) where you attempt to guide a horde of lemmings to their home. Obstacles get in their path, so you have to give them jobs (building staicases, bashing through walls, digging, through the floor, stopping other lemmings from moving) to help them get home. It was cute, simple to understand, and INCREDIBLY difficult—especially once you got to the difficulty level "taxing".

WHAT HAPPENED TO IT

Folks just forgot about it and it kind of bounced around, never getting picked up when things like the Wii online store came out. After some remixed variants it never got a proper release.

HOW TO PLAY IT NOW

Aside from emulators, there's a free (with purchases) iOS/Android version of Lemmings now. The functionality is similar, and it's definitely cute, but it's not exactly the same in terms of gameplay, sound (the music!), and the levels are different. I'd love to be able to play the original levels again.

BOOKWORM ADVENTURES (2006)

Utterly incredible spelling game. You play a cute little bookworm who has to travel through time and literature to battle beasties by spelling words. The longer the word you spell (and the more value the letters have as in Scrabble) the more damage you do. It's cute, it's educational, it's fun, it's competitive (there are records for biggest word, most damage, etc. so you can compete with friends); it's a nearly perfect game. And there was a sequel, too!

WHAT HAPPENED TO IT

EA purchased PopCap games and then, one day, for apparently no reason, removed it from their online store. And that's it. It's gone. Forever.

HOW TO PLAY IT NOW

You can pirate it, but otherwise, the closest I've found is a mobile game called Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey by Bacon Bandits. The core functionality is there, but it's not really as clever or as cute or as fun. There's an Easter egg for fans of Bookworm, and bless them for creating a very similar game, but it is just not the same.

UNIRACERS (1994)

Also called Unirally, this was am awesome concept that was perfectly executed. You're unicycles that race really fast and do crazy tricks. All the stunts have names, you get points for them, there's track obstacles. It's simple, pure, unadulterated fun.

WHAT HAPPENED TO IT

This absolutely drives me up a wall. Pixar sued the makers of Uniracers because they said their unicycles looked like the unicycle in their short film Red's Dream from 1987. Like ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Thematically, the two things aren't similar at all, and, as the creator of the game said, "[t]here's not a lot of ways you can bring life to a unicycle without looking like the one Pixar did". Like...duh. The judge who made this ruling did irreparable damage to video games.

HOW TO PLAY IT NOW

There's no legal way to play this game, and, thanks to Pixar, there likely never will be. I've never encountered anything similar. It was such a unique play experience.

[sepublic]

I remember hearing that Dana was inspired by True Crime, amongst other things and people IRL, when writing Belos. And it seems that contrary to the notoriety of True Crime fans, she actually understood the assignment.

Because she opted to demystify the serial killer as this dark, unusual psychology that operates outside of societal borders and rules, disturbed by some secret reason, and instead literally pull off the mask to reveal he’s just some white manchild who hates women and minorities to a violent degree, because he feels threatened by them and their ability to say No in his entitlement. There’s nothing special or unique about his motives.

He’s no exception to the status quo, he is it unmasked of the veneer of civility, he’s the lynch mob and the cop (all of whom inherit the violence of white supremacy and colonialism) and fittingly a lot of serial killers were clocked by women and PoC as dangerous, but cops —largely white men— dismissed their claims because look at this dude, he seems like an upstanding citizen! And that’s really how he got away.

And because his victims were people the system was less likely to believe because they both operated on the same biases, you see why a lot of cops who commit brutality are drawn to an institution where they’re given violent power over brown and/or queer communities who are labeled as ‘suspicious’, because they enjoy easy targets they know the system doesn’t care about, and are enraged by body cams and accountability.

It doesn’t matter if they’re intentionally bigoted, their support of an inherently bigoted institution makes them the same; Internalized biases and “I don’t see race” and all that. You see how Philip wanted to be a witch hunter —the prototypical cop who is not exclusively violent towards women but still has a clear slant— or colonial savior so bad, because his violence could be legitimized by the authority of the state.

He leans into it hardcore when he feels threatened by the presence of an outside girl who challenges the Christian narrative of Gravesfield, to the point of violence; It’s a position that validates killing anyone who doesn’t agree with him in general, hence Caleb and the Grimwalkers, but of course his and society’s biases slant towards women and PoC. And while it ultimately doesn’t matter whether he’s intentionally racist/misogynistic, it’s worth addressing that he very much does have the intention due to his blatant Conservative backdrop.

And seeing how charming Philip is and the portrayal of him as a little kid playing games in his youth, a perception Caleb might’ve still had which led to his death, I can see the direct line to families who find out their sons are school shooters and are in disbelief because he was such a nice kid! While ignoring the obvious Red Flags because white men are allowed to express these without being immediately scrutinized by the community, by having it brushed off. On some level cops don’t suspect him because he’s the same type of guy as them.

Part of that denial comes from the fact that he’s not an “unfeeling sociopath” who’s wired differently. Philip can feel empathy and guilt like anyone else, but he’s still a hateful prick and these aren’t mutually exclusive; Not when people can be perfectly selective about who they extend these feelings towards, or even do things in spite of these feelings, because other ones —anger and pride and hatred— exist and they choose to prioritize those. There’s an assumption that empathy and guilt inherently make you a good person, but they don’t; That ultimately comes from what you do about it, not how you feel.

You could even say Dana and the other writers wrote him too well, because true to life, we have a similar issue but on a micro-scale via the abstraction of fiction regarding a very dedicated fan base who loves to romanticize him and his actions, attributing his issues to some secret trauma in childhood, a young man failed by society! While also scrubbing him of his racism and misogyny and reliance on the status quo, to make him ‘apolitical’ and you can see the same not just with fans but also in society.

Because society doesn’t want to acknowledge serial killers as just the truth behind their white sons and the system that absolved and encourages them, because that would require them to admit their guilt in how they’re structured. Rather, they’ll say these men reflect some dark truth inherent to humanity, and don’t exist within a certain sociopolitical framework.

And so he was a ‘loner’ whose problems can be pathologized via mental illness, his trauma can be traced back to a specific incident in his youth he just couldn’t get over. So you see how school shooters are made into victims, how serial killers are also made apolitical and even alien to distance them from the status quo.

And then you can lean into how unusual they are by writing characters like Dexter or Hannibal Lecter, you can not just defend the system but feed into it via the commodification of their violence as entertainment and consumption, and thus fuel the white supremacy train by letting their violence towards women and minorities be praised as something fascinating and interesting and conveniently clean of bigotry. This is the dichotomy of the hypothetical, romanticized Fantasy Serial Killer, and the banal IRL Serial Killer.

Thus we have the same cycle of white men’s violence being praised and validated by the system, and white men feeling entitled to this fame as a delusional fantasy. Because you’ve never heard of a black serial killer; Because black people are violent, that’s just the way they are, right? But if white men are violent, this is sensationalized as somehow unusual and fascinating and worth dedicating countless books and shows and movies towards. Obviously.

And even going back to witch hunters, sometimes I wonder about the constant consideration of, What if witches did exist? What if they were evil? Things like The VVitch or The Conjuring series, which have some framing of the Salem Witch Trials’ IRL violence towards women as legitimate in another universe, because of Satanism’s genuine predatory threat towards women, and how evil women sacrifice theirs or others’ God-given gift of a child, and now threaten another white Christian family.

And again there’s the the demystifying of the real life witch hunter too when we have a historical reenactment declare verbatim that IRL witch hunters were motivated by economics and other banal factors, not by any genuine belief in the dangers of demons; And even in a setting where the demons were real, they were not the predatory threat IRL witch hunters made them out to be, and so their very real biases and ulterior motives still apply in cumulative insincerity.

Hence, the Titan correcting Luz by explaining Belos as someone who only cares about being the hero in his own delusion; The fascist wet dream of a hidden invader here to corrupt even young white men, an outside monster to vanquish and whose destruction justifies the state, when in reality the monster IS the state, and before he was even presented as a witch (much less the human truth), his system’s destruction was called for.

Ultimately, a lot of True Crime and similar narratives are criticized for focusing more on this apparently inevitable mystique behind the perpetrators, who warrant far more attention than their victims. So when the villain is an example of True Crime, it’s worth noting how the show is so much more focused on the ‘weirdoes’ he targets, on women and/or PoC. The lives of Luz Noceda and her friends, them getting along and their psychologies, are just so much more important, and it really isn’t about that guy, who is informed as much as he needs to be.

But again, the True Crime fans dilemma; People genuinely salty at the show for not focusing on their favorite serial killer and his troubled backstory, his tragic motives and Puritan repression. The framing of his murders and motives isolated through the lens of his violence on undeserving white men, and not on the out-group he is specifically targeting and has committed much more violence on, esp if you look at the narrative’s actual framing of his impact on our protagonists, but also other victims who are witches or demons, and even his own self-professed motives; Hence, ‘Fratricide Georg’ as a joke depoliticized of his colonial violence, a violence that is not just adjacent to but fulfilling racism.

Because he hallucinated only those white men out of guilt, but that’s his biased perspective and priorities; And so you see how this is contrasted with a refusal to empathize with people like the Collector or Luz, who are put into the same situations as his white male victims via shared cinematography, yet are just as rejected. Luz is only put into this situation as convenient to Belos’ narrative, the closest replacement to a white male human he can get, but again if this girl of color says No, he tries to murder her and even does.

Yet again, people take genuine, personal insult at the creator for finding Belos to be her least favorite character to write, while ignoring that she still found him necessary to the story she was trying to tell; She just found the framing and focus should’ve been shifted to his actual victims’ deep and meaningful lives, how they matter. So people hate that S3 cares more about Luz Noceda’s relationship with her parents of color, as well as her female mentor and demonic brother, or her queer relationship with her girlfriend, etc.

And even when they get a bone of white boy Hunter, it’s still not enough; Fans inevitably gather themselves into an almost frenzied state of personal victimization, rallying into harassment of PoC who criticize their portrayal and discussion around their colonial serial killer fave, organizing dedicated trends and months to giving their white men the focus they ‘deserved’, because this is just White fandom in general.

Look at the entitlement campaigns regarding Ben Solo or Billy Hargroves deserving better, these young white men violent to women and minorities. It’s just the same thing but on a micro-scale, at least filtered via fictional characters. But Jesus you see how internalized biases bleed into everything. You’ve never heard of a black serial killer and fandom doesn’t fight for characters of color.

[poetryvampire]

✨️trop men and if they could get you off based mostly on vibes ✨️

💕Now to level the playing field let's give a simple y/n on if they could get the job done during your first time together and the overall mood of the evening. Mildly nsfw (I'm not gonna get too detailed...unless 👀)

Adar💀 Yes. Woof, not to get too crass right off the bat but daddy is the name he earned so yes absolutely. Also brace yourself it will be kinkier than you think and it will awaken something in you. And it would start off painfully slow just easing you into it lightly. Seems like a great opportunity to try things you've been curious about but beware you're getting into like five kinks that haven't even crossed you mind before. One minute you're having a romantic candle lit dinner then Bam youre wearing a chain collar with his name on it.

Elrond 😇 Oh, god bless. No. Baby I'm sorry but no. That being said it would still be a great time with really positive vibes. But Elrond would get too in his own head thinking about options and the best 'plan of attack' to actually deliver. Plus he would play it super safe not wanting to off put you in anyway and thus would kill the passion a bit. Still would be the biggest sweetheart and over all give you a fun time. (Give him time to build his confidence though lotr Elrond Fucks for sure)

Halbrand 🐶 LISTEN Listen listen...No. Hear me out. I just-I feel it in my blood that this guy will rizz you so hard and talk such a big game and than when he time comes it's just ok at best. Like he's made at least one person come before and thinks he has cracked the code. Still his heart's (seemingly) in the right place and its pretty romantic over all. Lots and lots of cuddling.

Annatar 🐱 Yes. And it's amazing but the vibes are terrible. He gets way too intense too fast. He's the kind of guy to say some really weird shit during. Like not even anything dirty just waxing poetic about how you're part of each now and the bond of your bodies is inescapable even in death. And he waaay into talking about how you belong to him now and you're just like?? Is he just talking crazy in the heat of the moment or ?? Also no aftercare and he's 100% gone when you wake up.

Arondir 🏹 Yes. And it's Good but not as romantic as you were hoping. He's into you but Arondir def doesn't realize what a catch he is and is surprised that you're so here for him. Also buddy's got a lot going on so he's still gonna be pretty guarded emotionally. Still he's extremely respectful and such a good kisser like he's got your head spinning and you've barely started.

Elendil 🗡 No. But he tries hard and it's a great time. He's kinda got that big puppy Halbrand thing going on but like genuine. Def more into you than you are him. Elendil will rizz you with care. Pays very close attention to what you like/want. Even if it doesnt happen he's fine with talking about it, even makes a few light jokes at his expense. He's terribly good at putting you at ease. By the end of the night you're more smitten than you first thought.

Celebrimor 💍 Yes. Are you kidding me?We're talking mastery, we're talking attentiveness, we're talking about a very smitten old man that's going to court you with his whole heart. The vibes are impeccable and he's going to make it known that taking care of you is his top priority. Additionally I can't explain why but you know this man's head game is god tier.

Gil Galad 🏵 Yes. Don't even get me started on how this man is gonna rock your world. The high king is a big guy so it's go big or go home when it comes to love and affection. He doesn't allow himself to pursue romance often but when he does he goes hard. In terms of the act itself and the amount of extravagance and detail he'd put into wooing you. Plus cmon you know he's stressed and pent up as hell. Brace yourself for being be absolutely worshipped All night. You're in for a wicked case of jelly legs and you're not going anywhere.

[drdemonprince]

I remember a while back you did a fun ask game where people sent in kinks and you rated how good an investment they are and it keeps popping into my mind because of how chill you were about kinks that even kinky people tend to view really negatively in the sense of ethics. I was wondering if you had any advice on how to *feel* chill in terms of my own kink ethics. I intellectually believe that fantasies can’t be immoral and that kink with other adults is moral as long as there is consent (and appropriate risk awareness).

But I am still pretty triggered on the topic when it comes up. Eg, earlier a friend told me they are cutting someone they love off for being friends with someone who “sexualizes trauma”. And yeah, that is definitely where some of my darker kinks come from—though not all. They’re entitled to that opinion and action of course! But hearing all the things they said against this person triggered me, making me feel like I’m dangerous and that it is wrong of me to interact with them going forward even though this isn’t a topic I would discuss with them anyway. Until writing this I hadn’t even considered if they are still a person I *want* to interact with given this. Though I’m sort of unclear on whether it is actually wrong of me to interact with them still.

I am working with my therapist on this. And I know it will take some time to work through. I was just wondering if you had any words of wisdom on the topic.

My thoughts are that if I had a friend who cut people off for having problematic (or in this case, just like, unsettling?) kinks, I would not feel safe around that friend. It would seem to me that they were judgemental, moralizing, and had a completely different viewpoint on how the world operated than I did, and that sooner or later they would demonize me for things I thought, fantasized about, felt, and so on. I might have sympathy if the person was a trauma survivor early in their recovery, as it's quite common for people to think in very dogmatic, black-and-white ways about morality in order to protect themselves and to be highly reactive to perceived threat. But their feelings of safety are their own business to guard over, and mine are mine, and I just wouldn't be able to get along very intimately with someone like that. I'd have to give them a wide berth until they started to get over it, if they got over it.

Recently, a friend of mine was completely ostracized from their local queer community simply for writing a piece that touched on a taboo fantasy -- a taboo fantasy they had concocted as a way to cope with some really gnarly early childhood abuse. They lost performance gigs and friends, had hate campaigns erected against them, had mobs of people threatening all their remaining friends and colleages, all based on a rumor about a piece that they never even got to perform anywhere because someone had heard it was about a taboo subject and even the IDEA of what it might be made them uncomfortable, and so they assumed my friend was condoning abuse when they were literally just describing what had already happened to them and how they found healing from it. Shit like this sucks, and it comes down most heavily against queer people, especially trans femmes, and I've seen the fear mongering ruin enough lives that I try to steer really clear of it.

My life has been so blessed by inclusion of people with really intense, taboo, stigmatized kinks into my life. I was afraid to even breathe a word of my hypnosis fetish to anybody until I was in my late 20s, because I thought it was so freakish and evil. and now I routinely talk with people about really animalistic feral fantasies, harkness rule violating monsterfucking, rape play, necro fantasies, abdl, age regression, incest roleplaying, blood, eating bodily fluids, and everything else that freaks people out but harms no living being. Even when it's not my stuff, even when it's something I might personally find a little squicky to actually be in the room with, it makes me feel seen, safe, and free to express the depths within me. I think surrounding yourself with more people like that or just consuming their stories can help a lot. And trying to find some mental distance from the people who do fear monger and get triggered. They have their reasons for feeling as they do. But that doesn't mean we have to align with their values or actions.

[dogtoling]

General life- and blog update , since I assume at least a few people might have been wondering where I've been and what i've been up to recently. I obviously haven't been posting or drawing much this year in general. This will probably be an important post if you care about stuff on this blog, and I already rambled on Sheezy, but that site isn't very populated yet and it's also very good at hiding journals so let's just ramble again...

The summary of this post if you hate reading: I'm heavily considering just stepping away from Splatoon. That decision obviously would affect this blog (mostly, my OCs, which is kinda most of the blog at this point). I don't think the blog itself will go anywhere, and I'll probably use it for something in the future... alternatively i'll cherry pick stuff from here into an archive for people who like the worldbuilding.

Longer post under cut:

So what have I been up to this year? The answer is quite simple: NOTHING. Like, actually absolutely nothing. Aside from Art Fight, this has probably been one of my worst art output years of all time, which is really frustrating. That's between my horrendous mental health and depression chasms this year and a complete lack of both focus and inspiration (which can also get chalked down to the depression to a degree, yeah). So the very real reason to why there hasn't been much activity on this blog this year is because I just haven't Done Anything in general.

Now because I know there will be a few people who think "that's fine! you shouldn't judge yourself based on productivity!" you're right! I also agree. However the issue for me specifically is that most (if not all) the time I spend NOT drawing or creating, I spend sitting around wishing I could start drawing or creating, because that is like the 1 thing that keeps me sane on this freaking earth. Unfortunately coming up with OC scenarios in my head doesn't really result in output I can feel fulfilled by in any form as much as I wish it did, lol.

Now; The Issue. It doesn't take a genius to see that if you spend 9 months trying to finish like a dozen OC pages that you COULD do in a week or 2 if you wanted to, then there's probably more than just the problem of executive dysfunction (even though that's at least 60% of it for sure). Obviously my other major problem is that I live by imaginary rules and structures that make sense, but aren't actually useful at ALL in reality and are more than a hindrance if anything (the mental to do-list in my head that says i can't do X until I've done Y doesn't do very much if task Y takes 10 months and I also don't want to do it, and it also has no structured ending).

How does this tie into stepping away from Splatoon, you may ask. Well, the issue is that I have foreseeably fallen out of love with the series. Which isn't exactly news lol. Currently, I'm not even sure i will get the next game, if and when the time comes. Yes, the loss of interest is also expected, given that Splatoon 3 has ended and every fandom has this kind of downtime and lukewarm in-between-titles period. But the truth is that modern Splatoon (almost 10 years old!!!!) is tangibly different from the way the series was back when I fell in love with it. That was Splatoon 1, and while the series has improved in a lot of aspects and is thriving, it's grown in a direction that I just don't really like. Splatoon 3 had the most freaking horrendous, immersion breaking story mode they could've done, then they followed it up with a DLC story that was pretty cool but also compounded a lot of my fears about the series' future and played into every single thing i do not want Splatoon stories to be - fully character focused, random fucking villain, mundane event that's unrealistically world-threatening just because a kids video game needs a scary climax even though it's immersion breaking AGAIN, the whole thing taking place in cyberspace and thus offering basically no worldbuilding even though there is SO MUCH WORLD. I COULD GO ON.

The gist of it is that nowadays, rather than playing Splatoon and being inspired and excited at what comes next, I mostly find myself dreading what dumbass plot they will do next to throw a wrench in the otherwise good stuff. And when that's like THE main approach I have to what's supposed to be my favorite series, it is HARROWING. I can't even really blame the game for this; the story is NOT its selling point, the developers probably do their best to get the bits to us that they really want to tell, and at the end of the day the game is unfortunately a product. Worldbuilding for Splatoon is fun to a point. It's less fun when in order to actually write or create something coherent, instead of filling in the blanks, the blanks are 90% of the freaking thing. At that point you're just better off making something of your own instead of being anchored onto an IP that gives more problems than answers and occasionally shoots you with like a machine gun. Working in the realm of Splatoon is frustrating because more often than not, the questions I have ARE NOT MINE TO ANSWER, and the likelihood that the specific-ass questions I need answers to will ever be actually addressed is really low.

Tying this back to my OCs. Obviously I love my OCs more than I love myself which admittedly isn't that high of a bar but you get the point. The problem is that I spend a lot of time mulling over worldbuilding that, again, frankly isn't mine to do. Because if I want it to be Splatoon, then it should be mostly accurate to how Splatoon is! But the problem with that is that there's really not THAT MUCH worldbuilding in the series that you can work with, and most of the core game mechanics are just abstract enough that it's actually horrendous to try and come up with workarounds and ways for things to make sense that don't require just constructing a full knockoff version mirror dimension of the game and saying fuck everything that's in place here because Inkopolis Plaza literally has no roads in or out of there and I have no fucking idea how that's allowed when your only option is to jump the fence (or, nowadays, take the train which also isnt connected to a street as far as I remember). Between the face value issue and the lack of REALLY IMPORTANT worldbuilding, like - I will always come back to this - THE INK TANK'S FUNCTION 10 YEARS DOWN THE LINE - there's a goddamn ocean of plot holes and things that end up being obstacles to creativity rather than inspiration. I feel like I'm pretty solidly at the point (and have been for a while) where hanging onto Splatoon is really only contributing to creativity block and frustration with lack of freedom and the ability to actually do things.

So I guess those are my reasonings that I've put together just sitting here for the time being. The TL;DR is that I wish I could just do stuff without Splatoon's canon getting in the way, which is a really stupid problem to have if you're making Splatoon OCs. I feel this frustration extremely strongly every time I have to work with actual bigger aspects of the world; we still don't have an Inkopolis map, we don't know what the world around Inkopolis looks like, we don't know what the wilderness is like aside from Just Normal Forest and Desert and very few snippets as to what modern wildlife MIGHT be, I still don't know how the fuck the Inklings teleport to the goddamn arctic ocean to play a turf war at Shipshape Cargo co. These are all actually really important things if you're trying to establish a setting in any kind of storytelling that's outside of immediate city bounds (and even there, you need to know the layout of the city and its important areas). Also a fucking mutant bear and a baby salmon and a squid not wearing suitable gear went to space and fought on a rocket in space. These are some things that would give me peace of mind to not have to deal with in my own writing, probably.

So where do we go from here? Unsure. I haven't really made a decision on this front yet, though right now I'm leaning more towards actually going ahead with trying to do my own thing. That will result in obvious design and setting changes for my OCs whenever I get around to it. This blog probably won't go anywhere (again, unless I impulse delete it during a mood swing like i've almost done on like three separate occasions this year), but it will probably get less use, and I will probably end up making a new blog to post about whatever I end up doing once I get to a point where it feels like it makes sense. There's a chance that I will delete this blog and put all the interesting stuff on an archive blog for the people who are here just for the worldbuilding. My actual true passion for a long time now hasn't even been Splatoon anymore, it's just been cephalopods. I'm kind of done having Splatoon get in the way of the cephalopods, as thankful as I am that it introduced me to them...

If you read this to the end heres a treat for you = 🍪

[n30n-l1ghts]

Tokyo revengers basic NSFW headcannons pt. 1

characters- Mikey, Draken, Mitsuya, Baji, Kazutora, Chifuyu, Hakkai, Nahoya, Souya, Hanma, Kisaki

Mikey-

Packing a respectable 5.8 inches, with a light pink tip and a couple of small bluish purple vains that aren't really noticeable unless he's painfully hard, he doesn't really curve to one side or the other, but he has a subtle upward curve. He doesn't strike me as the type who tries too hard with grooming, but he at least tries every now and again. But the hairs down there are the same pretty strawberry blonde as his hair, pretty thin and a little wispy with a slight curl towards the end.

Draken-

PUH-LEASE. This boy is fucking HUNG and he knows how to use it too. Curves hard left as well. He doesn't have the most experience as I can't imagine him sleeping around much, but he's heard the girls at the brothel complain enough that he generally knows what to do and what not to do. 7.9 inches holy GAWD. I think he stays pretty on top of grooming, manscapes at least once every other week. Also blonde, but I think he's got more curls than Mikey. Definitely a lot thicker. Also, completely random, but I feel like he'd totally fuck with coconut body wash and shampoo.

Mitsuya-

Another man who's got a rather mid-sized length, I'd say probably like 5.4. The prettiest pinkish lavender tip, and oh my god I mean it when I say this man's cock is beautiful. It deserves to be worshipped. Not all that big, BUT he makes up for it by knowing all the sweet spots. Not to mention he's the KING of foreplay and aftercare. He for sure stays on top of his grooming game, he can't stand feeling like he looks sloppy. He's got a pretty tuft of curly white hair right at the base of his dick, very well maintained and usually actually smells pretty good. Again, this man is on top of his hiegene and he wants all of him to smell good and look good at all times. (Not that he could ever look bad)

Baji-

I'd guess about 6.3 in size for him, and his tip is red and angry like his face (I'm joking. Mostly, but he does get painfully hard very quickly) there's a thick ass pinkish vein that runs from base to tip, and he will full body shiver if you lick the whole thing. I'm sorry, but I cannot for the life of me imagine that this man gives a singular fuck about grooming down under. He might trim a little or shave on occasion, but that's only if it gets annoying. However, his hair is effortlessly shiny and beautiful no matter where it is on his body. I have no idea how he does it. But, if it bugs you, he would (begrudgingly) start manscaping more often.

Kazutora-

LITTLE DICK SUPREMACY

Okay- little known fact, but I kind of have a thing for subby guys with little dicks, that and I want to give some variety so I'm not making them all unrealistically huge. So I'm gonna say this man sits at about 4.2. Not rediculously small, but definitely not big either. But it's okay, because he'd much rather be under you anyways. Slightly unrelated but this boy has trust issues so please be kind to him, hold his hand and tell him how good he's being, he will absolutely start crying. Never really even thought about his hair down there, never paid any mind to it, and probably wouldn't unless you brought it up. But I see him being super understanding and chill with it if you want him to groom more often.

Chifuyu-

Another one on the slightly smaller side, probably only around 4.5 to 4.6 with a sort of muted pink tip. He's actually kind of self conscious about it, so he's a bit sensitive if you make fun of him for it, but he'll fold instantly if you praise him in any way, shape, or form. I feel like he's the type to get all embarrassed and blushy super easily despite trying to play it cool. Would not admit he's a bottom out loud but everyone can pretty much tell anyways. Honestly pretty clean, I feel like pubes might bug him. He might try to keep a small tuft down there just because he feels it's more masculine, but I'd reckon he'd prefer it clean shaven. Less of a hassle and it doesn't get on his nerves that way.

Hakkai-

Oh, this poor sweet boy. So much dick that he has no idea how to use 🥺 I can't imagine him topping for the life of me, so it's almost adorable how his monstrous 8.3 inches just hangs there uselessly hanging as he gets pounded into his next life, squealing like a little bitch, whimpering and whining and pleading and- *AHEM* anyways. I imagine he's pretty alright with grooming, mostly because he super looks up to Mitsuya, who had told him at some point or another that it was important to look clean everywhere. But I don't think he's quite that good at manscaping though to his credit, he does at least try. He's got a decent sized tuft of thick, curly black hair that he trims maybe once a month or so when he remembers. But he'd get better about it in a heartbeat if you asked him to and gave him some basic block of instruction. Smells like vanilla though, so there's that.

Nahoya-

Nahoya's got a relatively solid 6.2, with a slight curve to the left and a pale tip. I feel like he'd probably be more experienced with it than his brother, even though his twin is a little bigger. He just strikes me as much more of the playboy type. (Probably gets hard after a good fight, I don't make the rules) super duper curly hair down there, ginger just like the hair on his head. Probably keeps it moderately well groomed. Enough to be presentable for the ladies (and the lads-)

Souya-

Similar to his brother (no shit they're identical twins) but with slight differences. For starters, he's ever so slightly bigger, measuring up to about 6.6, and he curves pretty hard right instead of slight left. He's not too experienced, but he strikes me as a rather quick learner. He doesn't normally care to groom all that much, but after getting into a relationship, especially if you guys are sexually active, he will actually start to manscape on occasion. Also super duper curly hair, but it's light blue instead of ginger, again matching his hair.

Hanma-

(Definitely gets INSTANTLY rock hard after a good fight, I don't make the rules) 7.9, same as Draken, difference is that Hanma has less girth. A tall, skinny dick for a tall, skinny boy. But he knows how to break you and he will go hard when he's domming. Or alternatively, when he's in the mood to sub, he gets a little bratty (just give his cock a rough squeeze and he'll shut right up) dark brown almost black hair, thick and curly. Contrary to popular belief I feel like he would put at least some effort into grooming, though he does forget sometimes.

Kisaki-

Oh, this boy. Solid middle of the road (just like his height- jk this boy short asf) but I think he'd have maybe around a 5.3 or 5.4 length wise. Pretty average around too, not particularly skinny but not particularly girthy either. Would absolutely fight you for dominance every time, and lose every time. This boy would rather die than ever admit he's a bottom, and he's 100% a brat until you edge him to the point he's sobbing. DEFINITELY clean. Well kept, grooms just about every day to every other day, and I feel like there's a fifty fifty chance he also dyes his pubes blonde. I can see him doing that. But this man hates being dirty at all. And tell me why I feel like his hipster ass smells like pumpkin spice all year round? All in all, a well kept, bratty little bitch.

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

hey you’re really good at explaining viddy games. what’s the full story behind Amanda the adventurer bc it looks really cool but I doubt I’ll ever be able to play

Well first off if this is just based on "can't play game" and not on triggers/disabilities, I would recommend watching CoryxKenshin's playthrough of the first game, and there's plenty of playthroughs of the second, I just haven't picked a fav yet.

But otherwise, here you go:

I'm telling this in two sections: The Story As Told, which details lore as you learn it, and the Summarized, which just spells out everything as simple as possible.

Story As Told

The game starts in the year 2023 with you as the character of Riley Park– gender is left ambiguous, but in the second game Amanda uses they/them to refer to you, so we're probably enby. Our Aunt Kate, a librarian, has recently died, and left us a note that says we not only get her house, but she has something very important in the attic for us to check out, though she's hesitant about actually giving it to us. She tells us to watch some VHS tapes in the attic, but warns us that there's no going back once you do.

In the attic, we play VHS tapes of Amanda the Adventurer, a TV series from the early 2000s starring Amanda and Wooly, an energetic little girl and her more cautious sheep sidekick. However, there are two very suspicious things that immediately pop out: one, viewers can actually interact with the tapes, and our answers to Amanda's questions change how she reacts. Two, Amanda is saying some very eerie things that don't seem good for a kids' show, such as "It's good to be brave [and use knives without supervision] when you're alone!" and "I'm not sure where [my parents] are now."

The third suspicious thing is that after watching the first tape, the attic around you changes; suddenly, a toy oven appears on the table behind you, and when you mimic what Amanda did in the first tape to make an apple pie, you find a second tape. This sort of puzzle-solving is the main gameplay; the tapes change the world around you, and you mess with that world in order to get the next tapes.

Exploring the attic, you can find a newspaper clipping saying that the creator of Amanda the Adventurer was a man named Sam Colton, who had his daughter, Rebecca, star in a live-action pilot version. We also see a note from a girl named Joanne, saying that two years prior, her brother Jordan got addicted to watching Amanda, and then he disappeared without a trace. Now that her parents are dead, she has taken over investigating, and that she believes Kate's paranormal investigations could help.

In playing the tapes, Amanda gets more and more irritable and dark, often making jokes about death or disassociating when she's not snapping at you or Wooly. Wooly is desperately playing damage control, trying to guide Amanda to more child-friendly activities. At one point, Amanda tries to mail cookies to Kate, and Wooly tries to stop her; upon replaying the tape, Amanda is aware that something bad has happened to Kate, and Wooly tries to rewrite the tape so that she's sending him a gift instead. Both of them are also terrified of the Butcher, a stick figure with googly eyes who runs a butcher shop in their town. When you have to go there, Amanda pleads for you to not send her there, and asks, "Why can't I stop it?"

The first ending comes when you play a tape titled "Everything Rots." Amanda explores several things that are rotting, and asks you if everything rots; this is the famous line you might've seen around. No matter what you answer, the tape ends, and a giant Monster emerges from the attic trapdoor, before attacking and killing you. This Monster has the same afro-buns as Amanda, so we'll call it the Amanda-Monster. However, information you got in this ending will help you in future playthroughs. As well as this, doing "secret" activities (such as following Wooly's hints and making a peach pie instead of an apple one) will net you Secret Tapes, which you need to collect to get the true ending.

Here is the information gathered through the regular tapes:

As mentioned, Amanda knows Kate and considered her a friend. When she's aware of something bad happening to Kate, she's upset. Both times, Wooly does not want to talk about Kate or send her anything.

Amanda does NOT like Wooly. At first she treats him with neutral disdain, just kinda ignoring him, but in several tapes she actively encourages hurting him.

Amanda has a fascination with death. In the "Everything Rots" tape, she says, "Sometimes I can feel myself rotting... but it seems far away."

In certain points, if you reference words such as "butcher," "Hameln", "Sam", or "Rebecca", Amanda will have a stunned reaction and Wooly will look uncomfortable, before the tape glitches. Using "Sam" in one instance gets you a secret tape.

In one tape, Amanda encounters a "lonely kitten." She asks Riley if you'll help the kitten. If you say "Yes," she looks surprised and the tape ends. If you say "No," she'll start begging and pleading for you to as the world glitches around her. The tape will end and you will be killed by the monster.

In order to get the tapes, you sometimes have to do upsetting things, such as cutting off a doll's head (causing it to scream), or breaking a toy robot that begs you to stop. At one point, you have to kill a rat in the attic and place it in the toy oven.

And the secret tapes:

Amanda was originally a live-action program starring Rebecca Colton. It was acquired by a company named Hameln to make it into an animated show, but they started having Rebecca say suspicious things into the mic which made her dad uncomfortable. (Such things were seemingly innocuous phrases such as "bye yell," which when said quickly sound like the name of demons like Bael). Sam Colton then disappeared mysteriously, leaving Rebecca in the care of Hameln.

Children other than Joanne's brother have disappeared while watching Amanda; we see a little girl glued to the TV as Amanda plays, and her mother leaves the room for a minute, before returning to find her completely missing.

When you have enough tapes, you get a second version of "Oh No! Accidents!" in which Wooly is supposed to be injured, but isn't. Amanda insists he's still injured, but in the head, and that they need to make him better. She then drugs him and takes him to a dingy hospital set, where she says she's going to use several tools to do surgery on him. Whether you help Wooly of Amanda, she attacks and seemingly kills the sheep. You have to solve a final puzzle, in order to get a tape entitled "We Can Share." In the tape, Amanda is alone, with Wooly edited out of the intro and suspiciously lamb-based products in her lunchbox.

She will then ask Riley if she can share a secret with them. She will ask this three times, giving opportunity for Riley to refuse. Here are the three endings this tape will give you:

If you say "No" at any point, Amanda will get upset, and say "I thought you were different." The tape ends, and when you turn around, the attic is completely empty except for a note that says "Leave."

If you say "Yes" every time, Amanda will then say, in a voice ungarbled by TV static (implying she's in the room with you), "I'm out there. Somewhere." The TV will glitch and start screaming, and you have to throw a brick at it to break it.

If you say "Yes" every time AND have all five secret tapes, the same thing will happen, but a Masked Figure will appear behind you. This is the True Ending as confirmed by the second game.

There is also a final, optional ending: If you pause "What's a Family" during the weather reports and play with the weather toy, the attic trapdoor will start glowing. When you enter, you awaken as a piece of meat in the butcher shop, and the game ends. This is known as the Butcher Ending, and implies that those who disappear into Amanda's world are killed by the Butcher and subsequently eaten, likely by the Amanda-Monster that's been attacking you.

This is the end of game one. The second game picks up immediately afterwords; the Masked Figure speaks in a feminine voice, telling you she was a friend of Kate's and that she'll help you. She drives you to the library, asking you to gather the tapes inside while she keeps watch outside. Once inside, you can indeed find several new tapes while the Figure occasionally contacts you, saying that a monster seems to be following her outside; at one point, she also tells you that Kate's house has burnt down after you both left. Your goal in this game is to get into Kate's office, which is locked.

For the first few tapes, Amanda is alone without Wooly; however, a mysterious Possum will show up and try to mess with her. When it does, she is genuinely surprised to see it, not knowing who it is. Amanda is more open with Riley, often trying to say that she can't go anywhere, that she feels trapped, and that Hameln and the Butcher scare her. In fact, ANY reference to the Butcher will make her terrified and angry, and at one point can softlock you in the game. If you let her have a nightmare in the "Goodnight" tape, you see her nightmare of being watched while the Butcher looms over her; if you give her a nightlight, she calls Riley by name.

In the tape "Let's Practice Patience," suddenly Wooly appears, as if late to the program. Amanda will get angry and attack him, before the tape glitches back to the beginning. As she tries to intro the segment, Amanda snaps and says she doesn't want Wooly there; it will once again glitch to the beginning and they will continue the tape. All following viewings of the tape will have this third intro, as if Wooly was always there. It should be noted that the Hameln logo only appears in the tapes that Wooly does, and that Wooly also does not know who the Possum is.

In a following tape, Amanda will try to hunt for treasure. If you lead her to the wrong place, she will dig up what seems to be Sam Colton's clothes, look distraught, and then rebury it at Wooly's prompting. If you play it normally, Amanda will get angry that she hasn't found any real treasure, and tell Riley to give her something that will make her happy. The Amanda-Monster will then appear from behind the TV, and no matter what you give it, it will kill you, leading to the first ending.

However, once you "start over" the game, the first tape is different, with Amanda asking you to do something different than you did last time. When you do, a train set appears behind you, and having it go to the places Amanda wants to go will get you a new tape. Taking it to a different exit will also get you a secret tape.

An important tape is the one titled "When You're Feeling Bad." Amanda is having a bad day and lying on the couch, snapping at Wooly. Wooly tries to tell her a story about a knight saving a princess from a dragon; if you help Wooly tell the story normally, she will get angry and the Amanda-Monster will kill you. If you follow the story told by Amanda's drawings in the background, a mysterious narrator will tell a more tragic tale, of a princess being turned into a dragon which her beloved knight then slays, which upsets Wooly but makes Amanda happy. She will then tell the Amanda-Monster not to kill you and send it away.

Upon finishing this and replaying the "Hunt for Treasure" tape, you now have the option to give the Amanda-Monster a Wooly toy when Amanda demands treasure. It hears a roar from elsewhere in the building and runs off, breaking open Kate's office door. You can enter and find several puzzle pieces you'll need, as well as a locked desk and a broken tape titled "We Can Fix It!" First playing that tape will show nothing but horrifying glitches, but repairing it makes it only mildly glitchy as Amanda tries to fix Wooly's box of junk. After the Possum attacks Wooly in this tape, he says he's tired of this game and will try to sit down, as if waiting for the tape to end.

It should also be noted that in this tape (iirc), you can see the Butcher figure, telling you to "count backwards from ten," and that you may feel a pinch. If this seems confusing, it's what doctors usually say while putting you under anesthesia before a surgery.

The Bad Ending comes when you reach the final tape without having all of the other tapes, and you have to complete it in order to get the True Ending later. You'll watch a tape titled "Do You Feel Safe?", where Amanda expresses distrust in Wooly and a slight trust in Riley, before hearing the Masked Figure over the radio and saying she doesn't trust new friends, ending the tape. The Masked Figure will enter and tell you that she's gathering a few things, and tell you to finish up. Completing a final puzzle will get you three keys to unlock Kate's desk, which has a tape recorder (which you can't play until the True Ending) and a button that opens a door to a secret bunker, with a ladder leading into the ground.

The Masked Figure will arrive and tell you it's time to destroy the tapes. She will smash one with a hammer, causing light to emerge from it. However, the Amanda-Monster will then attack her, and Riley flees into the bunker at her urging. You'll close the door and descend the ladder as the Figure screams and dies, ending the game.

The True Ending comes with the secret tapes, which give you the following information:

There is a tape of several adults investigating the paranormal activities around the Amanda tapes, as they're noticing several references to demons of multiple religions. They conclude that Hameln is connected to a cult that hasn't been practiced publicly since the middle ages; however, as the adults start disappearing, they get more antsy about what's going on with the company and if they can actually contact "Rebecca" through the tapes. Kate believes she is talking to Rebecca through Amanda, but she's volatile. It should be noted that this tape seems to take place "fifteen years" after the show first aired, placing it in mid-2016, several years before our game takes place.

One tape shows Hameln trying to coerce Sam into telling Rebecca to trust them. They are holding him hostage and refusing to let him see his daughter unless he complies, claiming that his contract allows them to do this. He refuses, saying he did not agree to lie to his daughter.

Someone secretly filming in a hospital shows an adult woman strapped to a hospital bed being monitored by doctors who talk about "incidents." They spot the person filming and chase them; it should also be noted that this tape is labelled in the files as "Rebecca's Room."

Getting all of these will unlock the True Ending, which starts the same as the Bad Ending, with the "Do You Feel Safe?" tape. However, as the Masked Figure talks to you, this time the Possum will arrive, and seemingly recognize the voice. It jumps at the screen, shouting, "JO- JOA-" before playing dead. (It often plays dead at the end of tapes, but whether it's playing or not in this one is unclear.) Amanda and Wooly will throw its body into a dumpster and leave; if you refused to help them, they will be angry at you, and if you did, they will simply ignore you.

The Masked Figure comes in and tells you to collect everything as she gathers items. However, this time, you will be able to play the cassette tape in Kate's desk, and hear audio of her death; she is in a car, having a breakdown and telling you not to investigate the tapes, that everyone who's done so is dead, and "Joanne is dead; she trusted me." You hear the car crash, then, which is what killed Kate.

The Masked Figure enters, stunned, and reveals herself to be Joanne. She says that someone approached her and told her that if she destroyed the tapes, she could free her brother. She went to Kate, who wouldn't let her destroy the tapes, and the Amanda-Monster attacked, likely trying to protect the tapes. She pushed Kate out and told her to run, and while she survived but ended up scarred, Kate died in the following car accident. Joanne suspects that whoever told her to destroy the tapes may not have had the best intentions, and tells you to take one specific tape and run into the bunker, and finally destroy Hameln. As you do, the lights go out and Joanne is attacked. However, you see a different monster than the one that normally attacks; instead of Amanda-Monster, this one looks eerily like Wooly. Joanne's death sounds will be much more brutal and painful as you escape and end the game.

This is where we're left off until Amanda 3 inevitably drops.

Lore Summarized

In the early 2000s, Sam Colton started a local live-action television show starring his adopted daughter, Rebecca, Amanda the Adventurer. It became a local hit, and he partnered with the library and head librarian Kate to use it to promote literacy and exploration. The show was acquired by a company named Hameln, who wanted to turn it into an animated program. However, they started making Rebecca record suspicious lines that sounded a lot like demon names, and Rebecca expressed discomfort at "a man in the headphones" telling her to do bad things. When Sam started showing hesitancy at letting Rebecca do things, Hameln kidnapped and held him hostage, telling the rest of the world that he'd abandoned them and his daughter. It's most likely that they eventually killed Sam and buried his body.

Now with full control of Rebecca, Hameln had her continue their strange experiments until she too disappeared from the public eye. What is most likely is that they had her put under a medically-induced coma that transferred her consciousness into the animated world, literally turning her into Amanda; somehow, this also enabled a demon to enter the physical world with a connection to her.

Rebecca remains stagnant in the animated world, continually luring children to join her in this world, where the Butcher kills them and uses them as a meat source. Amanda doesn't seem to want to do this, and is disgusted and horrified by the Butcher, but she also doesn't seem to have a choice. The Butcher may also be connected to the doctor who put Rebecca into this procedure.

While Wooly is still ambiguous, the leading theory rn is that Wooly was a Hameln employee who was placed inside the world as a way to keep Amanda from questioning them or divulging from the path, and Wooly does not realize how long he's been in there or that Hameln has also abandoned him and made a demon out of him as well. Amanda, however, starts to pick up on this in the first game, which is why she is so violent towards him and eventually kills him.

Kate and her paranormal investigation friends began investigating the tapes after she noticed Demonology in it, but they slowly disappeared one-by-one. Kate became convinced that she could contact Rebecca through the recorded tapes of the show, which Amanda seems to confirm as she references Kate as her friend, but which Wooly didn't like.

In about 2021, a boy named Jordan Cook disappeared while watching the show. His sister, Joanne, became obsessed with finding him, and someone told her that destroying the tapes would free her brother. Kate refused to let her, and the Amanda-Demon attacked, resulting in Kate's death as she tried to escape in a car crash, and Joanne's scarring.

Following Kate's death, her house was given to her nibling Riley Park, who began playing the tapes and piecing together what happened as they also communicated with Amanda. Amanda attempted to kill and eat Wooly to prevent him from returning, but the next game shows this was not a permanent solution. Amanda does communicate to Riley that she is out there somewhere before the TV freaks out and Riley has to break it.

Joanne then meets with Riley and brings them to the library, hoping to get into Kate's office. Joanne is stalked by a monster, likely the Wooly-Demon, while Riley plays more tapes. Amanda shows even more disdain for Wooly, as mentioned, and Wooly keeps trying to steer her onto the scripted path. In these tapes, a Possum will appear and try to stop whatever they're doing; both of them are surprised and confused by its appearance.

If you destroy the tapes, the Amanda-Demon arrives and kills Joanne. But in the True Ending, the Possum hears Joanne's voice over the radio and recognizes it, implying that the Possum is Jordan. When Riley hears the audio of Kate's death, Joanne will break and tell them to run with a tape. They enter Kate's secret bunker, before seeing the Wooly-Demon kill Joanne. Riley escapes into the unknown, until Amanda 3 drops at least.

[mayasaurusss]

TRANSFEM VIRGIN JACKIE TAYLOR X READER PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

Transfem virgin Jackie Taylor blurbs

Contains: transfem Jackie, smut, 1700 k words blurb.

A/N: I'm so sorry to have delayed this for so long anon😥. I promise that next time I'll do it quicker and also more explicit🙇‍♀️ It's not as explicit as my other recent Lucy nsfw blurb, but I hope you guys will enjoy it still! P.s i know that's Rhiannon in the photo, just pretend it's Jackie alright?

Jackie who survived the wilderness, who has come out of it scarred and traumatized. She has seen death and famine, and her personality and mental health become severely affected. She is introverted, shy and her outgoing personality has been frozen under pain and nightmares.

But she pulls through, and manages to go to college like she had wanted. She thinks that she can make a new life for herself, but as it turns out, college life isn't what she is supposed to be: making friends is hard, exams are tough and her professors are just shitty people. After all she has been through, she doesn't think that she'll be able to have any friendship ever again, not like the one she had with Shauna, anyway.

She doesn't have any roommates until you show up. One day you just barge in her room, suitcase in hand and say "I'm your new roommate!". Truth to be told, as much as she wishes for a friend, Jackie would rather have some peace and quiet. That's what she says to herself anyway, until your company starts to grow on her. She didn't really understand how lonely she was. You guys start to spend your nights together, playing card games, chit chatting, watching movies on Netflix and so on. But slowly, something happens to Jackie's heart. Nothing major, of course, but she feels...weird. Why does her heart throb when she sees you? And what about the butterflies in her stomach? Why is she jealous when other guys and girls flirt with you? And why is she so damned angry at you for not realizing their intentions?

Maybe she is just envious or jealous, but the thought of other people trying to get in your pants makes her angry. For a while, she thinks she's being unreasonable: you are her first friend after the incident; of course she'd want to gatekeep your relationship. And after all, she seems only to attract people who will hurt her and who she will hurt. She distances herself from you, thinking that maybe "I'll be a bad influence, I should just leave them alone". But then one day, she makes a connection.

You have been gone to class for half of the day, leaving her alone inside your dorm room. She needs a little bit of space, and she has been stressed for a while.

She watches as two women grind against each other's bodies on her phone, their skin sweaty and their kisses passionate. One of them pulls out a strap and ties it to her hips, sinking it inside the other's. Jackie sits underneath her covers, stroking herself, curling her fingertips downward at the base, when a thought flashes inside her mind. "Wish we could do that..." and her brain immediatley swaps the bottom's face with yours, interchanging you between the dominating and the dominated. Her heart races, thoughts of you two on her bed, together, grinding against each other... and then kissing tenderly after all is done, giggling and falling asleep together. The feeling inside Jackie's heart is warm, so good that it makes her ache. And as she comes down from her high, she puts two and two together: she has already felt this way once, long ago in the cold of the wilderness, and recalls the pain of how she felt when she had-. Jackie stops and understands, an almost guttural "Fuck!" comes out of her throat.

And as if the situation is not bad enough, you come in a few minutes after her little panic attack. She's still naked underneath the covers, goosebumps travel along her skin when she sees you coming in. She makes an effort in justifying why she was naked underneath, "I just sleep this way when I'm hot, you know?" you make no remark on how it's november and her covers aren't warm enough to sleep under unless she wears something, but oh well.

Jackie who feels embarrassed to masturbate from then on. No matter how hard she tries, you're inside her mind, constantly. She tries to muffle her moans on her covers, stroking up and down her length with you sleeping soundly on your bed. You'd be horrified, she thinks, at the images she has of you in her mind: above her bouncing and with your hands at her throat, beneath her on all fours, cuddled in her arms while she moves from behind...

Jackie who has a hard time going to her lessons because no matter what she does, you just seem to not get out of her head. She needs you to have her in your arms, kissing her. Who has to go out of class early to take care of her little problem.

Jackie, who feels bad about masturbating with you in her mind, who feels dirty and unlovable as she does so, but she can't help it, her body can't help it. And all the while, a little voice tells her that "You're not good enough" and "They won't love you, How could they love you of all people? She didn't love you, he didn't love you; why should they? ".

Jackie who steals glances of you, imagining your hands on her chest, your lips on hers. Who yearns to kiss you so bad it hurts. Who has to go to the bathroom at least once per night whenever you two are spending time together. You don't know what she is doing, but shrug off your concerns.

Jackie who finally gets caught by you. You stand outside the doom room, listening to the sounds coming from the other side. Moans, groans, wet movements and little slips of your name here and there make it obvious to you what Jackie is doing. You slip inside the room, as slowly and quietly as possible, watching how Jackie is bucking up in her hand, hips chasing upwards the feeling. You smile, deciding to approach her with a simple "Hey" but your voice gives Jackie a small heart attack and she shouts, covering her body as best as she can, leaving her chest out in the open and her legs uncovered.

"How...how long have you been there?" she asks, blood freezing with shame and mind racing, trying to understand if you've heard her say your name. "Long enough to understand what's going on" you sit on the bed, too close for her liking, giving her a knowing smirk that she already knows the meaning of. "You were thinking about me, weren't you?" her body stops, missing heartbeats and air. She can feel tears prickling at her skin, but you quickly say to her "I-No Jackie, I liked it". From then on, you tell her how you wished to do the first step, but how you were always so scared that she might've not liked you, how you yearned for her lips on yours. The moment you two are done talking about your feelings, you all but leap into each other's arms.

Jackie who can't help but get hard almost instantly. She can feel blood traveling through her veins, pooling at her crotch, warming her skin and flesh. Who will have to clench her hand around her cock to ground herself, to avoid cumming just from kissing you. She will feel so good from just kissing you that a drop of cum falls from her slit, signaling just how full she is, ready to let all of her pleasure out.

Jackie who feels so incredibly good when you ignore her cock and press two fingers beneath her balls, mimicking fingering her. She's already so hard as it is, and your actions only serve to egg her on more.

Jackie whose hands are shaky as she undresses you, full of eagerness and craving every part of you. Who, as soon as your chest is naked, will plant wet open mouth kisses on any inch of your skin, feeling your muscles harden against her ministrations.

Jackie who will climb on you, cock pressed between your and her stomachs, grinding back and forth. Who will get off like that, grinding on your stomach. Who will spend her time under your crotch, head pressed in between your hips and the mattress. Who will feel euphoric and decide to not touch herself in any way.

Jackie who's cock throbs in need, tip and balls red as she desperately tries to hold it in, wanting only your hands on her.

Jackie who confesses, as you are about to push her length in, that she is a virgin. She sweats and apologizes, already ready for you to leave her hanging, but then lets out a loud gasp when she's finally stilled inside of you.

Jackie who trembles as you ride her into oblivion, hands shaky gripping with force at your sides, short of breath and eyes rolling backwards. She has never felt this way with anyone else, not Jeff nor Shauna, just with you. It's euphoric, it's amazing, and she doesn't wish you to stop anytime soon.

Jackie who has very low stamina but a super high libido. She'll release the precum already five minutes after you start to bounce on her, staining white the condom she wore, panting like she just crossed the line in a marathon run. You haven't even cummed yet, and as you're about to hop off of her, she grabs your hips again and mumbles incoherently, grinding you back against her as she starts to harden again.

Jackie who at one point, decides to move you and fuck you from above, fingers gripping the sheet near your head. She moves erratically, gasping and panting and moaning, her hips pushing into you at a speed you didn't even know she was capable of. Her cheeks are as red as a tomato, lips coming to settle on yours as she moves back and forth, back and forth.

Jackie who, when she cums, sees stars behind her eyelids and feels like she's about to faint.

Jackie who falls asleep almost immediatley between your arms, snoozing off with the knowledge that she has finally found someone to rely on.

[merrycrisis-if]

I have to pop in and put my "two cents" towards Merry Crisis: The visual novel. I think it totally works, and I am very excited about it! Not that you really need approval at all for the new direction. I just thought some encouragement might be nice <3. Even on a conceptual level, it makes sense. There's an emphasis on a clash of environment/homes in Merry Crisis. To move back to your home country or the one that adopted you as its own. I can not overstate the fact that the visual novel format is an excellent way to portray that conflict because they are excellent at highlighting moods with backgrounds. Comparing it to CTOS, which has an entirely different feel to it (a little bit more on the game side than the narrative side) which I don't think would work quite as well if you turned it into a vn (though you're a wonderful writer you would probably make it work!). I do hope this makes sense? English is not my first language... I wish you well ☺️

Hiya all, I've carefully read all the messages that I've gotten re: Merry Crisis, the visual novel, and though I probably won't be responding to them one by one, I want to appreciate and acknowledge all these views.

Now to address some of the concerns:

Writing the latest chapter of Merry Crisis (and beyond) is ongoing and I hope to have an update out by late-Dec.

I hear y'all. Merry Crisis will continue to exist as a text-based interactive fiction game. On a legal basis, this may mean hosting it on twine.

That said, the visual novel version will be playable on mobile phones, and the focus will be to make it easy-to-access and convenient-to-play as possible. I have tested this on itch.io (the current test version can be played on mobile) and am also confident that it can be launched on the Google play store + Apple Store (even though the latter will be quite expensive).

Hope that helps! If you have any other concerns, thoughts, views, do send them in, with the caveat that I will likely not reply to each individual message sent on anon just 'cause I want to make sure that the Tumblr/site is focused on the game content itself and not clogged up by my detailed responses :) If you're on non-anon, I'll likely be able to reply though!

[tunglo]

I would so love to watch/read that! Here's my own little bit of personal history with it:

I went in from Gotham after getting a human/android fic prompt based on the game (after which I ended up watching a run through on Youtube in German, a language I hadn't done more than read an occasional news article in since high school, and that was my only actual engagement with the gameplay...), fully expecting to write Hank/Connor, but I just could not deal with Cole's death. Like, it's a cornerstone of Hank's story, but I can't bear to think about losing a child. (Parenthood ruined true crime for me too. Just gotta stick my fingers in my ears and find something where everyone was an adult instead...)

But! There were a few people trying out Gavin/RK900 instead and, now I'm back on my wireplay bullshit, so I figure I'll give that a go. For ages I had been thinking about writing some Paul/MX-43 (Almost Human) fic but, you know, you've gotta get a new characterisation right, work out how an MX would *think*, etc. Here, on the other hand, I can write basically the same dynamic with little to no restrictions on how I want to characterise, backstory, etc, etc.

At the time there were only a few pages of Reed900 fics on A03, and a lot of them were quite heavy BDSM stuff that just wasn't my thing. I like my characters to be kind of sickeningly, adoringly in love with each other after the obligatory enemy stage - so RK900 would have to drop the cold characterisation that had been gaining favour.

Then I read a Hank/Connor fic (cos that was still overwhelmingly the main ship), I can't remember who by, that was genderswap with the idea that Connor's face was fixed into a polite smile and the resulting restrictions that placed on her.

That! That was the answer. RK900 just had extreme resting bitch face. He's not created to be public facing, it really doesn't matter to Cyberlife whether he can express emotion or not. The more android the better, in my book.

Re. the name. Nines was already widely used (this was late July 2018) but I didn't particularly like it. The designation was nine hundred. It was early enough that I didn't feel compelled to use it though, especially as what I wanted to write wasn't going to fit with much of the existing fic, so I shortened to RK instead.

I didn't really expect to get much response because, like I say, the 'norm' for the ship seemed to be pushing in a different direction and, more to the point, I'm essentially playing in a sandpit with OCs. But, to my delight, my Tumblr inbox quickly filled up with all kinds of prompts for me to write and I churned out nearly 200k before exhausting it and moving onto the next thing.

I was already on that when the first short film was announced, but I had to come back to watch that and the follow ups. It was so wild to see how much the general characterisation, etc, had changed since the beginning. I feel like, if he had the ability, the ruthless RK900 I started reading about would be sick at the thought of the character he became - even if I infinitely preferred it! xD

I need someone to make a 3+ hour video essay about the history Reed900

The origins, where it came from

The first art, fic, other fan content made for it

The most popular head-canons, Nines getting a name, different interpretations of the personalities

How the most agreed upon quality of Gavin Reed, loving coffee, comes from a scene, where the importance of him asking coffee is minuscule and it is not even confirmed that he even likes it, and it leading to the other super popular head-canon of him having insomnia

The mods and modding community

The most influential fics

The comics, and the shear amount of dubbed vids of them on youtube

The movie, the short film and the behind the scenes stuff for it. Neil Newbon engaging with the cast

It becoming the top DBH ship, with basically nonexistent characters

[itsa-me-lily]

First: How sfw/nsfw are we allowed to go with asks and whatnot, as well as stuff you won't write? I'm not intending on sending anything crazy, I just don't wanna cross boundaries

Second: Every guy in my family (minus one), married in or born in, is/was military, and I have heard that it's not uncommon for military spouses to cheat on their partner, especially when deployed. I'm not saying dear reader is cheating or anything of the sort, but I could def see some fresh dumbass recruits trying to pull the legendary Lieutenant's wife, if only for bragging rights. Curious how that would shake out (would the recruits ever be seen again, who knows!)

TLDR for the first part, I'm okay with NSFW asks and you can find my list of no goes (as well as the master list for Military Program Spouse) here

Now for the second part

Content Warning; Discussion of size (kind of), discussions of cheating (kind of) (please let me know if I'm missing anything)

Also Reader is fat, like size 18/20 pants, like there's a jiggle no matter what she's doing (remember kids fat isn't a dirty word what size you are doesn't define your morality, your actions do)

Also also please know that my brain does not want to let go of Reader telling Simon "well we wouldn't be in this situation if you could pull bitches" but I don't think it's going to fit in this

Honestly the sex talk had gone better than you had anticipated. In the past when you had tried to explain being demisexual and what that meant for your sexual attraction to other people you'd gotten blank stares, been told you were just picky or that you were just talking about a crush that everyone got. You knew it wasn't, but it got old fast. And while Simon stared as you explained yourself, he didn't push or tell you that it was some new made up sexuality.

It was refreshing.

You weren't even that offended when Simon had stated he had no interest of sleeping with you. You'd come to accept that you weren't everyone's cup of tea, not everyone liked a little jiggle in the wiggle. So you'd be two people who legally shared the last name, roommates, broskis if you will.

You'd agreed that any extramarital activities had to be respectful, discreet, and that if it turned serious divorce was an option on the table. Or well, you listed out your ideas in what you thought was a logical manner and Simon just listened before grunting what you thought was an affirmative and then turning on the TV for some sort of sports game. You were a theater kid growing up, you weren't a fan of sport ball. So the two of you started your married lives with the ever perpetual hall pass.

Not that you ever used yours. Again there was the fact that you only felt any real attraction or desire once you had gotten to know someone, felt a connection that...intrigued your soul for lack of better phrasing. And you are a very self sufficient woman. People weren't typically banging down your door to...well bang, so really you just went about your days.

It was probably why you hadn't noticed the recruit flirting with you at first. At first it was just a polite nod and acknowledgement of who you were when you had to come to base to fill out paperwork. Then there were the times you'd run into him while walking through the neighborhoods. Private (or was he Second Private? You never really paid attention) Pearson was alright, a pretty boy who seemed to know it, given how he seemed to preen with attention once you caught on to what was happening. Yeah he was alright but nothing that really wanted to make you deal with the headache of dealing with two men in your life. Plus you were pretty sure he had mentioned something about working with Simon? You were not a person who shit where you ate.

So you played dumb when he tried to flirt with you, and never took him up on any offers to 'help' you around the house or to show you how to use the gym equipment, after hours of course. The cockiest had to have been when he offered to help you 'stretch' any time. The smile he wore when he offered that one was so slimy you felt like you needed a shower after.

It all came to a head one day in the mailroom. Somehow a random package had been delivered to the house instead of on base, and since Simon was out doing god knows what somewhere in the world it wasn't like he could take it with him. So you were doing your good deed of the day and dropping it off. Only to run into Pearson, who was with friends...even better.

You had tried to just smile politely and wave, acting like you were in the middle of running Very Important Errands. It didn't help much. Pearson and Co still came up to you like you were all the best of friends, Pearson even being so bold as to drape an arm across your shoulders, or he tried you. You side stepped him easily enough to his annoyance.

You lightly chit chatted, looking for an opening to excuse yourself. You'd be blunt if you had to, but you really didn't want to deal with any back lash for being a 'bitch'. Though maybe you should have. He must have sensed your deep rooted desire to get the fuck out of there, because Pearson put on the grosses looking grin, leaning in as if to share a secret.

"The boys and I were going to go out for some drinks tonight. Why don't you come with us? Promise we don't bite."

The last part was whispered liked it was a promise of the opposite. You honestly wanted to barf. A) Drinking wasn't really your scene. B) Pearson definitely wasn't your scene.

"As tempting as that sounds, sorry boys. I uh- I don't drink."

"Oh come on pretty girl, one drink won't hurt you."

You wanted to roll your eyes as Pearson tried to tempt you out, reaching to tuck a piece of hair behind your ear. Thankfully you had heard little rumors that maybe the 141 was coming home. Simon wouldn't mind you using him as an excuse...probably.

"Really I can't. Simon should be coming home soon and I still have things I want to take care of before he's back."

Maybe it was the threat of their CO being back that caused all of them to freeze for a moment, giving you the opening to slip out from their little triangle they made, making your way to the exit. Pearson must have really been desperate, or just that stupid to practically shout after you.

"Come on, you really can't enjoy him more than me right? Doubt he's really all that great and impressive."

Oh that stopped you in your tracks. Simon Riley was a lot of things, annoying, stubborn, an asshole, rude, louder than the fucking heavens when he snored, a person who didn't care if he used up all the hot water, one could even say he was creepy at times. He didn't open up about things, and acted like socializing was the bane of his existence.

He had a sense of humor that people seldom understood, but he still entertained himself. Scared you half to death dozens of times over with how fucking quiet he was, like he was appearing out of thin air, but he'd try to knock to catch your attention if you were in the bedroom or bathroom. Had what was probably a herculean amount of strength in a single bear paw of his, but you'd seen him try to offer a finger for Tombo to sniff when the little curly mop got curious.

You plastered on the biggest polite smile you had, the one that boarder lined on looking a little crazy with how much it stretched your mouth, and spun on your feet to look at the trio of men who really tried to try you this day.

"You all know my husband."

You didn't actually wait for a response as you walked back to the men, who all started to look like they were regretting their choices.

"Lieutenant Riley. You know, Lieutenant "built like a brick shit house" Riley."

You stopped directly in front of Pearson, hands on your hips as you met his stare straight on, before looking him up and down slowly.

"Really what makes you think you can...measure up?"

The scrunch of your face at the end made it very clear that you had decided that the younger man was severely 'lacking' when it came to any kind of measuring. Clearly none of them had expected you to react like this, given that they just stared gobsmacked as you shrugged and waved them good bye with the tips of your fingers, happily making a sassy exit to your freedom.

Simon Riley was a lot of things, and he was your husband. And no one talked shit about your husband except you.

Edit;

There's a second part I want to add to this that I'll probably work on this weekend. I'm very out of the habit of writing so it takes me a hot minute to get stuff down the way I want it. Anyway I hope you like this! And remember

A) Being Fat doesn't make you good or bad

B) I am a greedy greedy goblin who loves getting asks

[italktoomuchxd]

More Simon with dolls because you guys loved it

Check this!-(you may also want to check this hc)

He carefully tucked away the special doll you crafted for him in his room at the base, ensuring its safety from prying eyes and potential harm. He didn't want to lose it again. It meant so much to him, and he wanted to protect it as a cherished symbol of your bond. After all, you had poured your heart into making that doll, and he recognized its significance. To express his gratitude, he took you out for a lovely dinner, which felt like a beautiful celebration of his appreciation for you and the growing connection you shared. That doll wasn’t just a gift; it marked a significant milestone in the evolution of your relationship, something tangible to represent the memories you were building together.

As your birthday came, he found himself in a flurry of anxiety, fretting over what to get you. His mind raced with possibilities. Should he opt for a piece of jewelry? But that felt a bit too forward at this stage of your relationship. Maybe a book? He shook his head, chuckling to himself. Seriously, Simon? A book? You can't be more unoriginal than that. How could he be so mundane when he wanted to show you just how much you meant to him? The pressure was on, and he knew he needed to step up his game to make this birthday special for you.

What are you gonna buy, Simon? Socks?

He's gonna crochet.

He's gonna make you your doll.

He had never attempted anything like that before; sure, he had tackled challenging projects like knitted Christmas sweaters and quirky socks, but amigurumi? That was a whole different universe altogether. The intricate details and delicate shapes required for those tiny, plush creations felt completely outside his comfort zone.

The break room was usually filled with a relaxed atmosphere, where everyone was accustomed to finding their lieutenant leisurely crocheting in the corner, yarn neatly arranged by color. But today was different. He sat hunched over the small table, pushing his glasses down to the tip of his nose, his brows furrowed in concentration. The soft hum of his headphones barely masked the muffled sounds of the chaotic office outside. His eyes were locked onto the bright screen of his tablet, where a YouTube tutorial played on repeat. His expression was intense, almost fierce, as he glared at the video, determination etched on his face as he tried to grasp the technique.

But he managed a week's worth of sweat, blood, and tears, and there it is! A little y/n! Well, it doesn't really look like you, but at least he tried; he even added the sweater he knitted for you on that little doll.

He carefully packed a small box filled with your favorite sweets, that doll he made knowing how much you were going to enjoy it Alongside the treats, he included a heartfelt love note expressing his feelings for you, filled with sweet words that would surely make you smile. Additionally, he added his old shirt—a shirt that you had often worn during his stays at your house, as it always made you feel warm and comforted. It wasn’t one he used much anymore, but he wanted you to have it as a reminder of those special moments you shared together.

[insert-stupid-username]

Ranking drivers based on how well I think they would be in an IndyCar VS F1 dodgeball game. Dont hate yall this is soley for fun:

Logan Sargeant: This man 100% bit people as a child. Also hes american so the tiny bit of school he went to inperson was long enough to give him the dodgeball going apeshit gene. Bonus points becuase of Kyle Kirkwood and the fact that I think the Indycar people go slightly easier on him casue hes going to be joining them soon (fingers cross) (hes also not blatently Europian)

Liam Lawson: he has so much anger in him. That is all you truly need to play dodge ball. Even though his enemy is not in Indycar its so easy to visualize that they are. If your not pissed screaming and cussing out the other side your not playing dodgeball correctly. On that note...

Yuki Tsunoda: Hes small so easy to dodge things, but he has the hate and curssing nessisary for amaerican dodgeball.

Valtteri Bottas: goes with the distraction stradegy and suprisingly it works. (this doesnt work most of the time would not recomend in a true dodgeball game)

Oscar Piastri: Stands off to the side and survives soley on dodges gets out as soon as he trys to throw the balls (this was 1000% me in school)

Daniel Ricciardo: gets super into the game as is suprisingly good

Lewis Hamilton: people are a bit intimidated by him so they dont throw as many balls his way

Franco Colapinto: is protecting lewis half the time gets out but does so in a really cool way

Zhou Guanyu: so quiet that he last a long time hiding

Fernando Alonso: he gets really into it but cant be cool so points lost

Max Verstappen: if he gets nothing out of it and its soley for media than this is so much lower cause hed purposly get out first to not have to do media. Otherwise he trys but its not a video game or car so hes mediocar at it

Checo: doesnt care too much just chatting, he does give other people balls to throw though

Nico Hulkenberg: doesnt care at all just chatting with people around him the whole time

Kevin Magnussen: doesnt care at all just chatting with people, though I feel like hed occasionaly throw a ball so he wouldnt get yelled at

Lance Stroll: I feel like he is the person to try the hang to the side stragety but it wouldnt work

Esteban Ocon: he would be trying to hit pierre, other than that I cant see him getting too into it

Carlos Sainz: He gets out cause Charles getting hit was too funny he forgot he was in the middle of a game.

Pierre Gasly: He gets out cause he was too disctracted laughing at Charles.

George Russell: again hes just so tall. Also VERY british which makes me think that this is SOOO not something hes super comfortable with

Alex Albon: Hes just so tall, he trys to defend but he is such a good target. though I think whoever gets him out feels slightly bad cause hes a nice guy

Lando Norris: he is the type of guy that trys so hard that he gets himself out. Also when he gets out (hes one of the first) he imedietly trys to fight it (he is the nuh uh it didnt hit me i blocked it kid)

Charles Leclerc: he cant do any sports. Dude would trip over his feet and than acidentally get taken out by another f1 driver

[anim-ttrpgs]

More rambling On the subject of TTRPGs as a disrespected artform.

There’s a bunch of reasons for this disrespect being present that I could get into but I’m going to focus on the most relevant one to this topic: TTRPGs are helpless.

To explain what I mean I’m going to make a comparison to video games, or at least action-adventure type video games. Those have a lot of similarity to “trad” and “neo-trad” TTRPGs, which are nominally the most popular style of TTRPG (even though it seems like half the player base would rather be playing something else but again another tangent). Both of these are usually about protagonists using abilities to avoid or defeat adversaries and avoid traps and progress through a series of hazardous areas.

Video games are not helpless. They can assert themselves on the player. When you lose in a video game and you’re like “Aw no way, I didn’t want that to happen!” The video game can say “No, Mario fell in the pit, Master Chief got blown up by a grenade, Pac-man got caught by a ghost, you lose. According to the rules of the game, you have to try again from a checkpoint.” And you have to do it. The game forces you to start over.

In a TTRPG, if your guy gets killed and you object to that, the TTRPG can at most offer a weak textual protest as you or the game master flips the die over to a more favorable number.

Of course plenty of video games have cheat codes, hacks, mods, etc. that can remove that power from the video game to force you to follow the rules of the game, but not everyone has the knowledge or skills to use those, whereas everyone can flip a die over or just lie about the number. Plus, doing this is looked upon less favorably in the culture of video games than in the culture of ttrpgs. I mean, it’s in the name. “Cheat” codes. You’re cheating.

If somebody brags about how they beat Elden Ring with no deaths but then you mention that you hacked the game to give your character infinite HP, people will go “hey wait a minute,” but if you brag about how your character was so badass when they defeated a hundred cultists at once in D&D5e, because the DM kept saying the cultists missed every time the rules say they should’ve hit and you kept saying your character hits every time the rules say their attack should miss, nobody bats an eye. It’s even more accepted and expected that a DMPC will materialize out of thin air to kill everything every time the party picks a fight they can’t win.

Ultimately, a lot of the urge to cheat like this I think comes from the fact that people are introduced to neo-trad TTRPGs like D&D5e through critical role and also its playerbase’s general fixation on pre-planned plots and heavily scripted scenes that rely on characters never dying(which was not invented by critical role but was heavily bolstered by them). The only way that these goals can be achieved is by cheating, since D&D5e really doesn’t support that kind of thing, so they get into a habit of cheating. They get into the mindset that the rules don’t matter and can only get in the way of their intended gameplay. Which is of course because their intended gameplay is not something D&D5e was made for.

Then gradually they trickle into other games besides D&D5e, and assume that those games’ rules don’t matter either, completely deflecting and disregarding the experience that the designer intended players to have with their art. Or worse, they become TTRPG designers themselves, and write their own rules based on the assumption that the rules don’t matter which not only results in shitty gameplay experiences for people who are trying to follow these thoughtlessly-written rules, but also further reinforces the infectious idea that TTRPG rules don’t matter. But dude. TTRPGs aren’t anything *but* rules. The rules text is the whole game. Saying the rules don’t matter is like saying the paint on the canvas doesn’t matter! Yes! It matters because those colors of paint in those places placed there intentionally by the artists are what makes it a painting and make up the whole experience of experiencing the painting!

So we have a huge demographic in the TTRPG fanbase that thinks that the very artform itself is, at best, valueless and at worst actively bad!

Reading comprehension check!

Things I did not say in this post:

“We need to expel any particular demographic and never let them play.” (But maybe if they don’t like our artform, they should try to find one more suited to their needs instead of twisting another artform into something else.)

“You’re never allowed to adjust or homebrew a rule to fit the intentional gameplay experience you’re going for.” (But if you find yourself doing this all the time, either before you have even played the game normally, or constantly on the fly in most or all sessions, maybe you need to find a different game altogether.)

Exerpt from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. (with art by @theblackwarden )

[exn0bis]

So. Completed Veilguard. I have lots of thoughts.

Regardless, I don't think I'd be saying anything that hasn't already been said.

For my part, I went in with the expectation it was going to be bad. I was pleasantly surprised by some things, certainly by the technical aspects, but it fell about where I expected in most other ways.

But first, the good.

It was extremely refreshing to see a AAA game actually release so well optimized for once. I'm running an older system at this point, with a GTX 1080 TI. Even so, out of the box, I was able to run things on the Medium preset perfectly. After some troubleshooting the latest Nvidia driver, and updating the games native upscaling to FSR 3.x, I was running things on a mix of High & Ultra with minimal to no frame drops. This was way beyond what I expected, and made the play experience more enjoyable. While I do think that, like many games in the past few years, there is some over reliance on upscaling to make it look its best, Veilguard still maintains excellent visual fidelity without it.

On that note, the game is objectively gorgeous, regardless of how one feels about the art style (which I did personally like, too); I'm also extremely impressed how they adapted a simulated strand hair system into something playable in real-time without it being overly taxing. Would love to know the technical breakdown for that specifically, but either way, I would not be surprised if we start to see more games released with something similar going forwards.

Veilguard very much proved you can make something look gorgeous and still have it be playable on more than just the latest and greatest systems, and I hope it will encourage more studios to focus on how they optimize and implement their work.

I also found the general gameplay mechanics to be, overall, enjoyable. I was hesitant going in, as I'm 1) bad at games, and 2) from a CRPG background, so the real-time style of combat is not generally something I'm good at. I was also concerned about the stripping down of party mechanics, etc, that was a big part of the previous games. And while I do wish the party tactics had been a little more varied, I ultimately found combat fun and responsive, and that they struck a reasonable balance between simplicity with party, and overly tactical. It did have way too many buttons & combos for me, but that is definitely a me being bad at games thing and not a fault in the game.

I also was extremely impressed with how smoothly the game transitioned from gameplay to cutscenes, and I really liked the more open maps/elimination of excess loading screens.

Unfortunately, that is about all the praise I have for the game.

I'm not really going to talk too much about the complete disregard for the world state built by previous titles, because I think all that needs to be said about that has been. I agree that, from a development standpoint, they needed to find a way to simplify things. However, going so totally scorched earth that character creation literally states "you don't need to customize your previous choices if you don't want to because it doesn't really affect anything" only serves to insult and infuriate the very dedicated player base.

It's very clear that the goal of Veilguard is to wipe the slate clean for the purposes of rebranding and bringing in new players for future installments/capital. Considering the mass layoffs at Bioware, and EA's generally established business practices, this sort of tactic isn't really surprising, no, and was truthfully only a matter of time. But that doesn't stop it from feeling like a slap in the face.

That being established, the total disregard for existing lore, world state, impact of previous titles, glaring plot holes within Veilguard itself, etc, is unfortunately to be expected. No point in picking it apart individually, as it's all just a symptom of the goal of a clean slate reboot.

Which isn't to say I wasn't cursing at my screen by the end of it, but I digress.

I had hoped I could at least enjoy the game as something new, turn off the part of my brain that associated it with Dragon Age and just play it as a stand alone thing. This even worked for the first chapter or so, as I was really enjoying the exploration and gameplay. And then I started recruiting more people. And the main plot started to really get going. And turning my brain off suddenly stopped helping.

The writing is awful, full stop. It's all incredibly surface level and sanitized, and it treats the player with such ineptitude I started to feel like the game had actual disdain for me for trying to play and enjoy it. If I had a dollar for every time an NPC explicitly repeated a plot point or goal immediately after a cutscene that had already painfully spelled it out for me ended, I would have recouped the price of the game three times over. I get that reading comprehension is at an all time low, but holy shit. I paid for a sweeping fantasy narrative, not a degradation simulator that treats me like a moron.

If we manage to put that aside, we're left with a narrative that spends every spare second trying to convince you of how high the stakes are and how important your relationships will be to get through it... and then never actually manages to deliver on any of it. The game repeatedly shies away from showing you anything actually bad, or building anything actually meaningful.

Yes, we see the Blight being gross and a few choice deaths, but that's it. The mass devastation we're told is constantly happening all over Thedas? The staggering amounts of death taking place? The oh-so-vile practices and punishments of our main antagonists? Anything and everything that has to do with the extremely prevalent theme of slavery? That all happens off screen, if it happens at all. Somewhere nice and clean and safe for it to exist, sanitized of any tension or emotional impact. I cannot decide if the flagrant pacing issues in the narrative are a product of the missing tension, or their own problem.

And those important relationships we're told about follow the same pattern. Even if we ignore how everyone speaks to each other like they're reading the script of an HR Workplace Togetherness video, their personal stories are devoid of the stakes we are assured they have. I wanted so desperately to care about the things these character's cared about, but I left still unconvinced the character's themselves even gave a shit.

And with a shallow plot comes a shallow character; I felt no attachment to any of them, despite telling myself they'd grow on me as I progressed. Of course, I also didn't dislike any of them, either; I just didn't care, and I find that infinitely more damming.

I think what I find most frustrating is that the potential in the characters is there, at least. They're each interesting concepts with interesting themes, and every so often I'd get a cutscene that actually got me to feel something, to react, and I'd get excited thinking 'oh, this must be when it gets good.' But no, as soon as you're out of the cutscene, it's situation normal again. No more feelings, no more tension. That all happened off screen, again. Any emotional turmoil the character in question was in moments before is now gone in favor of Group Togetherness.

Rook is no exception to any of this, either; exactly as tepid as the rest, but coated with an even less polished illusion of substance. This is not helped by the fact that the game makes an active effort to remind you that Solas is the actual main character of this story. Rook, you as the player, are just sort of... there.

The headcanons I've seen from fans do more justice to this entire cast than the game ever does.

In summary, it's sad, I think. It's ultimately what I expected, but it's sad. Many of us have a very deep attachment to Dragon Age, the story and the community that built up around it. I literally met my wife through the Dragon Age fandom. I learned to explore some deeply personal things about myself through how I related to the story and characters because of how much depth and nuance there was to examine. To see all that reduced to what amounts to a very prettily polished turd is just... yeah. Sad.

I'm really happy that there are people who have enjoyed the game. Genuinely. I hope they'll continue to do so. Myself, I'll probably still go on a screenshot binge and enjoy how pretty it looks, too. But Veilguard is very much the end of Dragon Age, for me. And I'm sad about it.