#and when I (re)watched the video

[smile-files]

kris - headcanons, theories, and analysis (a jumbled mess from yours truly)

kris has selective mutism and is semi-verbal: they have the capability of speech, but the extent to which they are willing and eager to speak at any given moment is highly dependent on their current mental state as well as the people around them. generally speaking, kris is not very talkative and infrequently starts or participates in conversation, even when in the presence of people they are comfortable with and when feeling fine; it is noted, though, that kris only ever actively wants to speak and is eager to do so in such situations -- when uncomfortable, kris will not speak unless direly necessary (and even then, their ability to speak is not guaranteed). also worthy of note is how unexpressive kris's face tends to be; they rarely wear anything other than a blank expression. exceptions only occur under extreme, catastrophic distress, or when around friends and family -- kris has been known to laugh, especially since they would like making mischief.

in kris's youth, they had close, warm relationships with their adoptive mother, toriel, their adoptive father, asgore, their adoptive brother, asriel, their next-door neighbor and friend, noelle, and, to a slightly lesser extent, noelle's sister, dess, and father, rudy. while still quiet most of the time, kris would actively want to speak to them on some occasions, and would often be happy to point out things to them (kris is a very observant person, noticing small details in their environment) and play games that had some minor speaking component (such as playing a video game in which comments are often exchanged between players). given their emotional proximity to kris, these individuals knew kris well enough to have a general sense of how they were feeling, even in moments when kris wasn't in the mindspace to speak; asriel and noelle could tell what kris was feeling better than anyone else, asriel especially understanding why kris felt what they did (noelle always knew what kris felt, but often didn't understand why they were feeling it and required an explanation kris wasn't able to provide), and so kris was very attached to them. however, this attachment was wrought with insecurity: asriel was growing up, soon to leave for college, and a well-beloved golden boy; noelle was always leagues better than kris in school, and a darling, endearing girl; kris couldn't help but fixate on asriel and noelle leaving them someday.

unfortunately, a cascade of events eventually pulled the majority of kris's loved ones away from them, including azzy and noelle. dess disappeared, splintering the relationship between kris's family, the dreemurrs, and noelle's family, the holidays; kris and noelle began to grow apart as their families lost touch; asgore was fired from his position as police chief, and toriel divorced him; finally, asriel went off to college. the only close connection kris maintained from their childhood was toriel -- and even if toriel never understood them quite as thoroughly as azzy or noelle, kris was still strongly attached to her and her ability to understand them at all, to the point that, in the absence of anyone else to connect with, kris became very clingy to her. kris has been massively lonely and depressed, fixated on the great time asriel must be having in college and how happy and beloved noelle seemed to be -- while they've been alone, with nobody to truly know how they feel when they're uncomfortable. oh, and how often kris is uncomfortable! basically friendless, constantly sleep-deprived, and harboring a hidden self-loathing stewing in their soul since their childhood… since asriel moved away, kris has been quieter than ever, unable to express the pain festering within. they were never that expressive, but that seemed to have come to a head, with kris becoming almost completely unresponsive to any emotional stimuli. kris seemed completely unfazed by susie's cruel bullying when she joined the class… however, her words seemed to strike a chord deep, deep within them, and they couldn't help but laugh.

since the player has taken control over kris's soul near the beginning of the game, however, kris's verbal "self"-expression has increased. the player can compel kris to speak -- not only in moments where kris would choose to speak themselves, in which the player just directs what it is they are to say (possibly contradicting what kris wants to say), but also in moments where kris would be uncomfortable and wouldn't even be willing to speak at all. the player seems to not have control over kris's facial expression, however -- so, despite having suppressed most show of emotion in recent months, kris now has the chance to take advantage of their ability to communicate their true feelings through their face, and might well seize it… though, why would kris not take the player's manipulation as another sign from above that they will never be understood? why even try? regardless what they think, though, a certain primal desire to be understood overrides any logic or loss of hope: like always, if disturbed enough, kris's face will show it; likewise, if something strikes their funny bone -- or if it strikes a chord deep, deep within them -- kris will laugh.

kris, no matter what, does not like being suppressed, and even if the player isn't hurting them (which can certainly, certainly happen), kris will have some negative opinion of them. they want to be loved and understood for who they truly are, more than anything else in the world, and the player, even if unintentionally, is actively undermining that. if we imagine some alternate timeline, where kris made friends with ralsei and susie all on their own, that friendship having formed at all would imply that kris believes that ralsei and susie either do or will love and understand kris for who they truly are; why would kris become friends with them otherwise? in this hypothetical, kris would learn that they aren't truly alone, and that there are always people to connect and relate to, if they believe they're capable of being understood -- that they don't have to wait forever for people like asriel. however, as the "friendship" kris has with ralsei and susie is entirely manufactured by the player and the game, it is little more than a distant dream. as we control kris's body and words, it's as if kris's self is watching what "they" do from within themselves, looking at the friendships "they" have and wishing they were truly theirs: it is dissociation, a feeling that these relationships aren't real.

at the same time, though, kris desires these relationships as they currently are, even in their apparently empty state, or wants to desire them; kris desires a world in which they aren't constantly craving understanding, in which closeness was taken for granted, in which they were open and talkative, in which, perhaps, they were a different person who isn't such a weird, quiet loser. this is what the player provides; this is what the dark world provides; this is what the game provides. the dark world is a game that kris is playing: it is doubtful that kris summoned the player to control them, but the player's control is what gives kris these relationships, and so, in some strange way, kris might desire the player as much as they hate the player. kris has never been good with people, but now they can be piloted by someone who, via the game (which, notably, is a path ralsei sets for us: the prophecy), follows a relatively stable path in which they must be good with people. chapter 1 always ends with kris being "friends" with ralsei and susie, with kris doing the "right thing", with kris being "happy". perhaps kris can come out of chapter 1, half-satisfied with having lived vicariously through themselves. chapter 2 is largely the same for basically every player, and would perhaps result in noelle genuinely, earnestly reconnecting with kris (kris themselves) through their adventure in the dark world; however, if the player tries hard enough to defy the game's path, they can force kris to do terrible things to people: to emotionally abuse noelle right as she was about to rekindle something with kris, manipulating her into killing someone. this, obviously, would f*ck kris up, the main reason for which need not even be spoken. but there is something more subtly tragic about it all: that the one genuine, non-vicarious, non-player relationship kris might foster through the game -- their faded friendship with noelle -- was forcibly dashed on the rocks with kris's own, puppeted hands. is that not horrible?

no matter what path the player makes kris take in either chapter, kris removes their soul each night (twice during chapter 2) and, shambling like a silent zombie, performs some impulsive, violent act with their knife -- cutting a pie, slashing toriel's car tires, or opening a dark fountain. worthy of note is that the soul the player controls is still kris's soul, and yet they are willing to literally remove their soul, the culmination of their being, to be free of us from a little while. in two of three cases, kris clearly returns the soul to their body; in the third at the end of chapter 2, they hold it up as their handmade dark fountain billows smoke, and it is ambiguous what they do with it. are they gazing at it in awe, or glaring at it in disgust? how much do they need the soul, and how much can they act without it? will they return it to their body? the player, the dark world, and the game are what allow kris to reconnect with noelle -- or break her. in the former case, kris might be opening a dark fountain in the hopes that perhaps more good will come out of this strange system of control at which they are centered; in the latter, they might be opening it to spite the player's attempts at closing dark fountains, in accordance to ralsei and the game's will. true, the path that leads kris to manipulate noelle is one that defies the game's central intent -- but the game still allowed it to happen, tantalizing the observant player with a secret route. or, in both cases, kris just might want to create a dark world where their mother is present, given that the dark world has either brought people closer to them, or left them completely alone…

[theygender]

I've got too many games I want to play and not enough free time 😭 I still need to finish my BG3 playthrough but since Endless Ocean: Luminous came out I've been playing a lot of that instead. Also just got back into Wizard101 last night. Started playing House Flipper again last weekend. Still need to finish BOTW so I can start a TOTK playthrough and finish Pokemon Shield so I can start on Pokemon Violet. I've been fighting off the urge to start up a new Skyrim playthrough for weeks. My brother just told me that Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is getting ported to the Switch. And now I'm suddenly feeling inspired to replay DAI... And throughout all of this I'm also playing the hell out of DragonVale on my phone. Someone just pay me to play video games all day please

[mailperson]

On some level I guess I can understand that any conversation at all on sex/gender, gender roles, and modern forms of expression can sometimes be very complicated or confusing. Gender or sex depending on your term of preference is a loaded term for most folks and carries a lot of meaning no matter who you are.

In general I do think it’s good to foster a culture where it’s okay to question noticed patterns or trends and what meaning we can derive from them and what is or isn’t worth embracing in that regard, provided that it’s specifically and clearly done in good faith and done genuinely with respect to others,

but I feel like a very odd and common talking point in conversations clearly being had in bad faith is positing that a binary trans person, irregardless of any behavior or presentation, is somehow brutally enforcing harmful ideas about sex or gender just by existing under the label of trans person which is sort of a bizarre conclusion to reach

[hanlight]

[castaccio]

I know people dislike the implications of Shadows of Rose, but consider:

The spirits watch over Rose for her whole life. (Read Left to Right)

[quixoticelixher]

like mannnnnnnnn. Mannnnnnnnn.

[idnull]

hey, so sorry i haven’t been online, i really really overextended myself these past two weeks physically and mentally, and now i’m paying for it by being so sick i can barely function lol

i promise i’m gonna try to be on tomorrow or monday (i have plans on sunday)

i love y’all, thank you for your patience

[novemberthewriter]

was thinking about how i want someone to review cpd as copaganda and i found that the jon oliver team did one on law & order which is basically its parent franchise <3

[royalarchivist]

If you're wondering why I haven't posted many clips from today's events it's because I'm salty that Twitch wiped the 50+ clips I made.

[kindlythevoid]

Oppenheimer spoilers below

Christopher Nolan.

You done it again.

I’m sure I could touch on so many things in this movie. I might later, I might not. But leaving the theater I felt so deeply unsettled, and I wanted to touch on that, from my point of view as an amateur writer and someone starting to feel comfortable talking about cinematography (although I have no current plans to do much more than talk about it).

Now I’d like to start by saying that, if you haven’t seen it or it didn’t make that big of an impact on you, this is a long movie. I, myself, am no stranger to long movies and I think it was marvelously done. That being said, my memory tends to leave things to be desired, so while I am writing this rather soon after I watched and digested it, others may have stronger points/counter points/evidence/what-have-you.

With that out of the way, I’d like to talk about one facet of the movie that Christopher Nolan, imo, harnessed in a way that I did not expect. And it wasn’t color, it wasn’t camera perspective, it wasn’t even the timeline.

It was his usage of sound.

From the very beginning, sound has always been a key factor in this movie. In the trailer, the crackling of the radiation detector is ominously present. It is used less frequently in the movie than I had predicted, but when it makes its “appearance” it most certainly put me on the edge of my seat. It brings a sense of gravity to an already serious situation. Engrossed in the movie as I was, I admit the sound mainly made me uneasy because it demonstrated the presence of radiation. Looking back, I can add to that and say it may have also been used as a foreshadowing tool.

Now, I’m sure we’ve all heard sound used a foreshadowing tool. The little girl screaming for help is actually the protagonist with a shadowy past who can’t get the sound of the daughter/random child he couldn’t save out of his head. The words of an interrogation in the beginning of a movie finally get context half-way through when the timelines finally align. It’s been used, it’s been subverted, it’s nothing new.

Except when it is. In my experience, and I am the first to admit that I haven’t seen enough movies of the genre to have a definitive say in the matter, I have never been quite as unsettled or shocked by the background noises than while watching Oppenheimer.

Let me start with the sound that will not leave my mind. Those damned boots. I’d heard it at school pep rallys when everyone would stomp in the bleachers. I had never expected to hear it in a movie about the man who made the atomic bomb. When I first heard it, I thought it was an aesthetic choice, like picking the music to evoke a certain emotion. And while it is that, all of sound is, I never actually expected for it to be from such a central scene.

When the boots were first connected to a scene, a short, split-second, blink-and-you-miss-it shot of shoes-on-bleachers, it was early enough in the movie that I thought it was a flashback of a pep rally at one of his schools, maybe as a boy genius, and I let it go. Later on, when they show the full scene, it’s terrifying.

And then you can’t hear the boots at all.

For hours, all you could hear were those boots in the back of stressful scenes and now that they’re there, now that you can see them, suddenly they’re gone. You know what they’re supposed to sound like, so why would you need to hear them again? And it helps build the suspension, the tension that Oppenheimer is feeling during that scene. And so the next time you hear it in the movie, the next time those boots are stomping on the bleacher in the background when they are in a meeting or an interrogation, it pulls you right back into the stress and horror of the bleacher speech.

And then, of course, you begin to realize that while the timelines had been so well interwoven that it seemed like you couldn’t go two scenes without hearing those boots, it was always a very specific scene, a specific timeline that the boots would make an appearance. Because, of course, in one Oppenheimer hadn’t heard them yet, and in another it’s not Oppenheimer at all.

Another prominent sound that I mentioned earlier is the Geiger Counter (I finally looked up the name!). This is a foreshadowing of a different kind, more physically consequential than mental. This, I believe, foreshadows the heavy losses suffered later in the movie by the radiation poisoning. The blast itself only killed so many people, it was the radiation, as they are so fond of pointing out in the movie, that helped round out the total killed in the bombings.

I’ll admit that it’s a bit of a stretch, but I can see it being a small detail that was added in.

On another note, I’d like to address how Nolan also utilized the absence of sound.

Oppenheimer (movie) doesn’t necessarily have jump scares, per se, but rather I jumped a lot during the movie. More startled with a side of deep-seated dread rather than scared. Any way you put it, Nolan does a very good job of keeping me at the edge of my seat. I’ve mentioned earlier the lack of sound during the bleacher scene (containing about half of the many times I jumped during the movie) so I won’t go into that again.

Another part of the movie where he employs this is the bomb test. This is the culmination of years of hard work, the pinnacle of one of three (four?) timelines. And you can’t hear a thing. You get the countdown (a staple from the trailer), the drop, and then… nothing.

It’s a beautiful flash of light and an explosion but the whole time there’s not a sound to be heard. At first it feels like it’s gone just so you can look at the view and then as you’re lulled into security… the shockwave hits.

I can’t remember the last time I jumped so high in a movie theater.

And it’s used for every time you see the shockwave. Silence, wind, and then a force pushes everything back, rattling the house, whipping up the dust. It’s really iconic imo.

Anyway, I walked out fixated on the noises of that movie. And the cackling of the neon did not help my dazed state.

[majorshatterandhare]

Apparently my brain really hates when names have A, U, and R in them, because without fail, every time I go to type Arthur my brain wants to spell it “Aurthur” or perhaps “Aurthr” and every time I go to type Marius my brain wants to type “Mauris” or maybe “Maurius” or maybe “Maurias” its unclear because I *usually* notice my mistake by the end because it’s clear to me those ending are wrong. Brain just really wants “AUR” together.

[aria0fgold]

Bro... what happened to my copy of OMORI...

WHY DOES IT LOOK LIKE THAT??? I use 2x Resolution, Windowed mode (I have a fear of putting anything in fullscreen). And the last time I played the game, it did not look like that. It looked like that when I booted it up and thought loading a random save might fix it maybe but no.

This ^^^ is an old screenshot from last time I played where there's no unnecessary black void wasting space.

SO WHAT HAPPENED TO IT NOW??? THERE'S A VOID EVERYWHERE! I didn't touch this game for nearly a year bro, I also didn't touch any of my Steam settings so what the fuck is that.

[ehnrat]

i was also lookin up the full versions on the KHR songs and i saw that ponycanon uploaded one of my fav endings 3 weeks ago and HRMMMMMM

[brittapcrrys]

hugh laurie is just ...... So ........

[fizzlehead]

GOOD GOD i have got to start watching movies again. haven’t watched a movie in almost an entire month i feel sick

[dnnsrynlds]

this guy really did change my brain chemistry

i’ve had NO libido for about 7 months but he’s the only exception i swear to god