#and two kierans team is built for double battles

[eucalyptus-gl0bulus]

from my takes on this

Penny can have any mum other than mine that's just weird

I managed to take one look at carmine, see the pink-purple eyes and go "oh there's a plot to brainwash everyone" but it's still less obvious than chairman rose being the villain of SWSH.

Arven, Penny and Nemona have the strongest parts of their personality leaking out when controlled. Arven's flustered in the battle and will only talk about mabostiff (when you kill it again lmao or after the battle)

Penny still managed to call her pokemon VeeVees.

Nemona literally saying Match? Battle? Fight? makes me think that her brain had 2 thoughts while brainwashed and one without (obey pecharunt, battle everything you see)

The blueberries' grandparents were given names. so were shigeru and aya, 2 random town NPCs.

The Lousy gay baby jail prisoners cause pecharunt to react while in the battle, but I haven't seen it (Maybe on the alt, eh?) but i lead with ogerpon and she was fucking PISSED. Tera Fire +1 252+ Atk Ogerpon-H Ivy Cudgel vs level 88 pecharunt

the only base stat on pecharunt to not be 88 (pecharunt's level is also 88) is the defense, which means it was built to tank an ogerpon hit.

The grandma had failed to feed anyone at the festival's stalls (or the npcs that are there for that matter) any mochi, because theyre ALL NORMAL.

Kieran saying he can't hold off the villagers much longer (you have a doubles team idiot, just send out all 6 and autobattle the humans) wouldve been better had i not been two shotting all of pecharunt's pokemon and then the pecharunt itself

Pecharunt to be considered the second Pokemon Trainer after first movie mewtwo

Overall if someone's being hypnotized the easiest answer is to give them a swift blow to the head and knock them out because when they wake up it'd be like a computer restarting right? honestly if i were arven at carmine's first appearance i would done the classic turn-punch where you turn and punch at the same time while building momentum from the turn for a harder hit. then again, the implication of sending A Letter and having carmine be like that for days means she probably wouldnt be fixed by the brain damage

Mochi Mayhem (spoilers under the cut)

Well... THAT was horrifying.

All throughout, I kept finding myself saying "Oh no..." because I knew something horrible was about to happen... I liked it! It was genuinely suspenseful!

A few thoughts...

Non-Spoiler Thoughts:

I may actually start shipping Florian, Nemona and Kieran as a polyship now, considering how well Nemona hit it off with him!

Arven was real jealous of Kieran lol. He even called him "the enemy" at one point!

Penny thinks our mom is hot (bi/pan Penny real???) and has a sweet tooth, which makes sense given her characterization.

I was able to breeze through most of the battles, but that's mainly because I kept my level 100 team and Ogerpon as the main fighters lol

Spoiler Thoughts:

I feel bad for Carmine. She missed out on the adventure because Pecharunt was controlling her the whole time.

I felt REALLY bad for Kieran, since he had to watch his family being possessed one-by-one.

It's officially confirmed: Peony is Penny's dad.

Nurse Joy was the only one besides us who wasn't affected, which I'm grateful for.

Ogerpon gets pissed when she sees Pecharunt, as she should.

The fact that Arven gets flustered at the weird little dance Pecharunt makes him do really freaked me out, because it signaled to me that he was aware of everything and couldn't control himself.

I named Pecharunt "Peachy" just to spite it and put it in the same box I put the Loyal Three in. Here is said box:

Get fucked asshole lol

[365footballorg-blog]

Scotland win 'a step forward - now they have to take another'

A scratchy 1-0 would have done. A flat, ugly grind. A late fluky winner. Given the mood of the nation, and the now customary soul-less atmosphere at Hampden, Scotland would have settled for that.

It was grey and damp and it was a little bit cold on Monday. Safe to say that many in the 17,000 crowd would have arrived in the expectation of seeing more of a slog than a show.

For Alex McLeish and his players the mission couldn’t have been simpler. Just win. Just find a way – any way – of avoiding the catastrophe of dropped points at home against Albania, a draw or a defeat that would have finished McLeish’s Nations League campaign at the first hurdle and brought with it a new kind of venom directed at the manager.

They did. What happened was, in the recent context of the national team, a pocket of joy. We were concerned that these players might have suffered psychological damage by being coursed around Hampden by Belgium three nights earlier. No.

We were concerned that the ability McLeish had in his first incarnation as Scotland manager of getting his team to play brave and ambitious football was gone forever. Hopefully not.

We were concerned about a lot of things. The lack of wit and goals and victories. The fatalism that is Scotland’s curse – Gollum in football boots. McLeish didn’t wave a magic wand and dispel all doubt on Monday, but what his team achieved was an entertaining and at times classy win that gave life to their Nations League hopes. That was enough. It was better, a lot better, than many would have imagined.

Scottish FA opts to keep games at Hampden[1]

‘I’m building a wall, not papering cracks’ – McLeish[2]

Scots’ ‘energy’ a blueprint for success[3]

McLeish has to be commended. He went with Kilmarnock’s Stephen O’Donnell and O’Donnell was a buzz-bomb, a terrific presence in the team. He went with Steven Naismith and, his eye-watering missed sitter apart, the Hearts striker scored one and assisted with the other, even if he was offside at the time. A slice of luck? Scotland will take it all day and all night. He made big calls in his team selection and he called them correctly.

The Scotland manager has cut a bit of forlorn figure as he’s tried to cut his way through the thicket of friendlies that were placed in front of him like thorns growing through barbed wire. Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Belgium. Only in the world of the SFA would that schedule make sense when you’re trying to build confidence after another failed campaign.

He has some respite now. That high-energy performance against Albania has to be added to in Israel next time out before the national team can hope to win back the disaffected among their support, but it was an impressive beginning.

If McLeish is trying to do his bit with the team, then his bosses have to play their part elsewhere. Ticket prices and choice of venue remain a major turn-off for supporters and that’s something they need to address, something that McLeish can do nothing about.

McLeish ‘ready to create a new team and new formation’

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McLeish said he is trying to build something new[4] rather than papering over the cracks of what he inherited. He’s right. Scotland’s team against Albania was full of vast experience at club level but precious little experience at international level. That’s an issue and it looks like the manger is intending to attack it.

Five of his starting line-up on Monday are still in single figures in terms of caps. Two more who began against Albania – Kieran Tierney and John McGinn – are just about in double figures. Others who might come into the reckoning in the near future are callow in the ways of international football. Scott McTominay, Ryan Fraser, Ryan Jack, Stuart Armstrong, Graeme Shinnie, Tom Cairney, Jack Hendry, Jamie Murphy, Scott McKenna, Oli McBurnie and Kenny McLean. None of them are battle-hardened in the Scotland jersey.

McLeish looks like he’s ready to create a new team and a new formation. He appears to be keen on picking his 3-5-1-1, or tweaks therein, and a core group of players and sticking to it as much as form and injury allows. He wants to build the feeling of a club in the frame of a country and work on familiarity and togetherness. A bond, in other words. A bond that might get them through some tough days ahead.

So, Allan McGregor is his goalkeeper and he starts the important games. And, in most instances, he plays three at the back – John Souttar, Charlie Mulgrew and Tierney with McKenna another option when he’s fit.

He is wedded to giving the Tierney and Andrew Robertson combination on the left a proper chance as opposed to ripping it up and putting Tierney to right-back in a flat back four. It looks like Kevin McDonald, John McGinn and Callum McGregor are his go-to guys in midfield. Some more excellence from O’Donnell and he could well join that group.

When the Northern Ireland manager, Michael O’Neill, was asked about the reasons behind the success of his very moderate team in reaching Euro 2016, and then progressing into the knockouts, he pointed to their canniness on the field.

Most of them had 30, 40, 50 caps. Some had many more than that. They weren’t rock ‘n’ roll footballers, but they knew the reality of the international game and as players, and as people, they were close. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts. They had an underdog spirit and it took them to a place where Scotland haven’t been in two decades.

O’Neill fielded a team rather than a collection of individuals and that’s where McLeish wants to go, too. In fact, he’s been there already. In his first stint in the job, Scotland won a lot of games because he built on the culture that was created by his predecessor Walter Smith. For that little spell, Scotland became hard to beat in the first instance and then added the bells and whistles – or James McFadden to give it another name.

One victory is a mere crumb in a time of famine, but it was fun watching on Monday night and how long has it been since we’ve said that watching Scotland has brought a smile to the face?

McLeish has taken a step forward. The challenge is to make sure the game in Israel next month sees him taking another.

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References

^ Scottish FA opts to keep games at Hampden (www.bbc.co.uk)

^ ‘I’m building a wall, not papering cracks’ – McLeish (www.bbc.co.uk)

^ Scots’ ‘energy’ a blueprint for success (www.bbc.co.uk)

^ build something new (www.bbc.co.uk)

BBC Sport – Scottish

Scotland win 'a step forward – now they have to take another' was originally published on 365 Football