#anyway much sympathy and fellow feeling to you op <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[calandrinon]

The thing about being demi bi non-binary is

The thing about being demi bi is people get to tell you thats not a real thing twice

[antiloreolympus]

13 Anti LO Asks

1. ok but thats seriously what bugs me so much about LO, it never actually lets serious moments be serious, it's always lampooned by rachel's insistent need to force in her juvenile "humor" and never actually depicting how pressing things are. even the following moments from persephone's r//pe was undercut by hades making stupid puns! i understand if rachel cant write something more serious than "[x] is bad" but if thats so, then dont try it? because thats how you end up with this pretentious mess.

2. since when did lo hades have earrings??? i legit do not remember this ever being a thing??? is he trying to be hip with the kids 😭my man you still look like a crusty old man the earrings arent helping 😭

3. lo hermes looks and acts like flaky from happy tree friends and no thats not a compliment (TW for gore, blood, and violence if any of you google it)

4. Even though the earlier art style was better there are still some cursed panels from the earlier pages that still haunt me. Especially the way Persephone was drawn differently in so many of the panels.

5. lo hades has such "how do you do fellow kids" energy and im not sure why

6. im also confused on the fertility goddess stuff because how stupid is persephone if she didnt notice? she can create life and nature without even thinking and shes implied to be a genius in biology, so how would she not even notice this? if RS really wants to go with this plot, then why have her professor bring it up in class? why not show persephone going to her uni's library to research the topic and pouring over it? that's an easy way to show persephone's intelligence, yet LO doesnt even try.

7. What I wanna know in LO was how Demeter and Hestia were compensated after the war. The three brothers got to be kings and Hera is queen, but what we know of Demeter is that she had a millionaire dollar business that’s probably made it on its own (unless she was helped out) and then Hestia all we really know about her is that she runs that TOGEM and idk if there’s only 4 of them, Hestia really had a group by herself for a bit since Athena is Zeus’ (assumed) daughter, Artemis (Zeus’ assumed daughter) and persphone (newest member) which seems shitty since they won a war together

8. I think what happened with LO’s art style was RS got “lazy” (I’m lacking the right word). I feel like without the colors all of the men in LO have the same body type, and Hermès and Apollo may even have the same face if they smile the same. So to compensate for that lack of body diversity, RS doubled down on Hades’ features to make him stand out more to really show he’s the male lead. However, even in her own words he looks like Persphones’ “dusty ass dad”

The women use to be a little different but they’re all starting to blend with body types. Her was small, but now she’s short and busty like Persphone. RS makes Persphone look short and busty all the time but almost childlike. Minthe was skinny but her last moments she was busy. Aphrodite I feel was just busty but then tried to make her look small also with Ares and Hades beside her. Hestia stayed the same but is still small and busty. Athena was tall and thin (?) but now she’s tall but busty (and her relationship with Hestia looks like it mirrors HXP). Idk I just feel like the longer screen time the female characters get the more they start mirroring Persphone’s look. Like even Artemis was getting empathized on being small next to her brother Apollo. Like all the girls gotta look small but curvy as the story goes on. 

9. Demeter: watched her friend get ripped in half. Watched her friend get continually cheated on, paying the price for not hiding a mistress , watched metis get eaten, her back clawed, fought in a war. Later made a daughter who’s a fertility goddess (probably an accident) and now has to raise her. That same daughter then went on a rampage and isn’t really remorseful

Fans: Demeter is such an overbearing mother who gets in the way of our ship.

10. on regards to ace characters, asexuality is a spectrum like everything else, so a lot of asexuals actually do enjoy and have sex, so the maidens doing so isnt inherently a problem, its the fact rachel is clearly viewing it through a strict binary where she assumes asexuality is something that can be "fixed" over time/when the right person comes along. its also a bad modern reading of it, as "virginity" in an ancient sense meant via marriage, not via sex, but I doubt rachel cares to factcheck it.

11. Imagine an elf is given a job to do at a human institution. The humans think elves don’t need bathroom breaks, since they know they can hold it for days, but this elf has been traveling to reach their job, and has already been holding it to the point they are in pain. They ask for a break, but their job is important and time sensitive, so they admit they can still hold it when asked. After a full day of work, the elf tries to reach the bathroom in time, but they were never told where it is.

From OP: I think this might be a nymph allegory? Anon never specified so I'll put this here anyway.

12. ya know if hades has to lie to make apollo seem worse (who does not need much in this comic) its like??? why is he persephone's lawyer then?? lawyers are literally told not to lie, this is basic law 101. thats why they dont want their clients to mention to them if they actually did the crimes because then the lawyers have to say it in court. if hades lies so casually just to keep persephone away from justified punishment, then thats bad actually!  both in being a decent person and as a lawyer!

From OP: Hades didn’t lie but he was definitely out of line. RS liked a tweet saying that the wife thing was “subconscious” so it probably was. (Still doesn’t make it right but I doubt he’d say those things on the stand.)

13. I know Minthe was written in a way she was suppose to be unlikesable, she’s rude, she yells and she doesn’t hesistate. HOWEVER RS wrote her character badly. Minthe is so unliked? How was she able to be a bad gf to hades and Thanatos? Like yes it’s an affair but how was she able to pull 2 gods?! We don’t hear Hades or Thanatos say what they like about her BUT they both still had a fling with her. (Honestly I feel it’s cause RS can’t bare writing one nice thing about the female anatangoist without trying to make Persphone look good)

The other thing bothering me was everyone knew about her relationship with Hades after she put it on fatesbook, but everyone talked about the kiss in such a positive light IN FRONT OF HER. Aren’t they suppose to be scared of her? Why did the girls in the yoga class/dress shop had so much to say about that kiss? Because they knew persphone? Did they know every other detail too? What was their actual beef with Minthe?

I feel like realistically some more characters would have sympathy for Minthe if they didn’t know her that well because of Hera. Everyone knows Hera is a pill to deal with and she’s the goddess of marriage who hasn’t really tried bringing Minthe and Hades to the alter. That right there should let everyone know that Hera probably doesn’t help the situation.

Idk, I feel like RS could have gone deeper and made the character not such HXP shippers cause most people wouldn’t cheer for cheating nor an old ass guy getting with a 19 year old. (Idk how fast the news of the slap spread, but I doubt it made it to every place in their fictional world)

[captainscominglookbusy]

rant about Dead Space 3!!

Let’s just take this part by part, shall we? I could go stream-of-consciousness style, but then we’d be here all day.

Without further ado, why Dead Space 3 is the most disappointing video game of all time. Full spoilers below, for Dead Space 3 and Mass Effect 3. 

THE STORY

The story is sad because it’s a worse version of Mass Effect 3.

Our grizzled hero, despite his heroic actions, is now stuck back in the midst of civilization until he is whipped back into the action by a big strong Latino man, who helps him get off the planet just as it is attacked. He must leave behind his civilization in order to save it.

He must then reunite with old and new characters alike in order to find some crapshoot plan where no one knows how it works - they just know it’s the only way to stop the Eldritch Abominations that are threatening life as we know it, the ones that show up once a civilization has advanced beyond a certain point and then wipe them out for Generic Evil Reasons.

People needlessly die along the way, the hero must confront the pain of failing to save his friends, and in the end he must sacrifice himself in order to give the war An End Once And For All. Except also he might not be dead.

Despite my tone, that story’s alright on the surface. I actually really liked Mass Effect 3. Say what you want about the ending, the game as a whole is pretty solid. Dead Space 3 just executes all of those things worse.

At no point are you given a really clear idea of what’s happening on the moon in the first level, or in humanity’s civilization at large. Have the Unitologists taken over? Are they ALL militant? Is it moon-wide, or just in the city Isaac’s in? Or just a few city block’s worth of revolution? What’s their goal? Are they just trying to create more Markers, or are they trying to kill Isaac? Does Isaac know any of this before Carver and Norton show up? If so, why is he just sitting in his apartment? If not, WHY NOT? Nothing ever gets explained. Instead, never mind that, we must now venture forth into space.

There’s some derelict ship exploration for the first third of the game - the ships all have the same design, so it’s really boring, but the concept is fine. If it got diversified and revamped, it would have made a solid base for Dead Space 4’s gameplay, which I believe was kinda the plan if Dead Space 3 hadn’t been awful and tanked the franchise.

Then you go to the scariest place of all places you could go in a horror franchise - Hoth. And you spend the rest of the game there. You just walk in circles around this one snowy science base, trying to figure out what happened. Oh wow, they got killed by Necromorphs. Whoa.

At one point I actually started to appreciate the story’s twist on certain things - up until now in the franchise, Big Establishment Things like the The Church and The Military were the bad guys, whereas the good guys were generally normal people, often with the power of SCIENCE on their side (you come across several evil scientists as well, but the general trend still stands). And for the first while of DS3, it seems like the opposite is true - you find out this science division was trying to turn on some Machine that might lead to an outbreak, and the military general is the one trying to stop them. His way of doing this is by murder, but still, I found it to be an interesting twist that the military seemed to be fighting against scientists for what was best for humanity this time around, a reversal of what the Dead Space universe has catered up to this point.

But then it turns out that turning on the Machine is the right thing to do, science was right, the military were just being jerks and not listening to reason, because why explore different angles of the same themes the franchise has already covered. Let’s just do the same thing again but worse. I love it.

Eventually you find out that there was an alien civilization that did the exact same thing humans are doing now with the Markers, and that they tried to stop the Markers from taking their final form…A MEATBALL MOON MADE OF ALL THE ZOMBIES PILED TOGETHER LIKE IT’S KATAMARI DAMACY. HOW SCARY.

Why would the Moons work like this? Like, on a biological level? Why design a Marker that creates deadly vicious monsters, if building more Markers through non-zombified people is required for the process to work? How could a species evolve to function in such a way? Don’t worry about it, aren’t you scared?

So anyways, after you’ve found the Codex to turn off The Machine (no, those are not made up names for the MacGuffins, those are the ACTUAL generic names they decided to go with), you let the bad guy activate the Moon beam (instead of just shooting him once he gives up his hostage, which the heroes have at least five seconds to do without any risk), and then fight the moon. And fall from space back down to the planet. And live.

*sigh*

Moving on.

THE CHARACTERS

Dead Space has always had two separate schools of bad guys; the Marker side, and the human side. In Dead Space 1, you have a deceptive hallucination manipulating you on one end, and crazed scientists and secret government agents on the other. In Dead Space 2 you have Nicole, no longer hiding as a messenger for the Marker haunting you at every turn in a fantastic representation of PTSD, and you have a provincial overlord willing to contain a deadly outbreak at any cost, not to mention an INCREDIBLE character in Stross, a fellow inmate whose scrambled brain and his tendency to lash out can’t overcome the fact that he truly does want to help make things right.

In Dead Space 3 you fight evil people with guns and a moon. Such depth.

Danik is this game’s main antagonist, and he just shows up to make things more complicated and less fun. He’s sane enough to taunt Isaac with generic evil monologues, but insane enough to believe that necromorphism is the ideal form of humanity. They try to have their cake and eat it too, and in doing so they’ve curb stomped the cake. None of his ideology is any more interesting than what players already found out in the Unitology church in DS2, and that didn’t even require a living character to give us exposition.

I should reiterate that Danik, also, has no idea what THE MACHINE Macguffin does, but he’s convinced he’ll be able to activate it the EVIL way, instead of the GOOD GUY way.

The Brethren Moon twist is an attempt at cosmological horror, a stab at Lovecraftian abominations, but it falls completely flat. There’s nothing intimidating about a moon, aside from I guess being big.

Cthulhu is not scary because he’s big.

Cthulhu’s scary because his very presence can drive you insane, can take you into the abyss, can make hallucinate and rave and kill. Sorta like the Marker we’ve been dealing with for two games. An effective, creepy looking icon inherently tied to the franchise. So what’s the point of revealing the Marker’s Final Form?

The Moons add nothing to the story, aside from providing something that can technically be considered a plot twist and giving Isaac something bigger to fight and upping the ante so that the final boss of Dead Space 4 would probably be just fighting space itself. Dead Space. OoooOOoooOOOOoooh.

The good guys are only slightly better. Isaac’s character, while not developing all that much (he’s just mopey the whole game), isn’t completely sabotaged, and Carver is a fine character in his own right, particularly if you play co-op (so I’ve heard). The two have some decent dialogue with each other - their sort-of-friendship feels unearned, but looking at it on its own, it’s written well.

And then, Ellie…

The game flat-out tricked me. Ellie, the awesome cool amazing standout character of Dead Space 2, becomes a complete damsel-in-distress in this game, and I say it tricked me because I didn’t even notice. When she first showed up as “stranded and in need of rescue,” I figured “okay, once we finally find her she’ll start kicking butt and taking names again,” but I was SO DISTRACTED BY HOW BAD THE REST OF THE GAME WAS THAT I DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE how nothing of a character she is in this game. She gets rescued, she gets upset with Isaac, she cries, she talks to him over the intercom, she has A BIG FAKE SACRIFICE FOR NO REASON, then gets captured, is used as a hostage and bargaining chip, and then she gets sent away on a shuttle. I don’t think she fires a gun once in the whole game. She’s there for Isaac and Norton to fight over, because that’s right, Dead Space 3 has the AUDACITY to introduce a LOVE TRIANGLE AS PART OF THE MAIN PLOT. I understand that emotions are heavy in stressful scenarios, and that people act irrationally even in important, large-scale moments, but some of the dialogue plays out like a fricking soap opera.

“I know you two [Isaac and Ellie] had a “thing,” but she’s mine now.” - actual dialogue from Norton. THE DRAMA.

As far as the other characters, even Isaac and Carver don’t care about them.

At one point Isaac finds the corpse of Rosen, a former squadmate, and says “Oh thank god” because it’s not Ellie’s corpse. What kind of monster do you have to be that THAT’S your only reaction to seeing your ally’s dead body? They don’t become good friends, but good Lord, Isaac, show some sympathy. The guy drove you around space for the first third of the game.

Another side character, Buckle, the group just leaves to freeze in a building, even though it takes Isaac about 2 minutes to find the heater for the building and turn it on (AFTER said character dies). And the other side character, Santos, Carver actively tries to stop Isaac from saving because “it’s too risky.” 

Let me clarify: Carver (and also Ellie) just stand and watch Isaac try to help her for about 30 seconds, before stepping in and forcing Isaac to stop. Santos falls off a cliff and dies because Carver decided to criticize Isaac’s sense of morality instead of actually helping. These are the heroes, let me remind you.

And Norton’s just stupid. He’s an annoying a-hole, who is then revealed to be a spy, whose life you then save, who then tries to BLAME YOU EVEN THOUGH HE KIDNAPPED YOU TO COME ON THE MISSION IN THE FIRST PLACE, and then you shoot him. And Ellie’s sad about it for ten minutes, despite all of the above.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the spy was a character you had grown to trust and like, like in Dead Space 1? Or even one that you were mostly apathetic towards until the twist, when his character suddenly becomes ten times more interesting, like in Agents of SHIELD?

But no, they just picked the character you already hated. Because that makes for a GREAT character and a SHOCKING TWIST.

There’s nothing satisfying about it. The character is a jerk to Isaac the entire game, then is revealed to have sold you out to Danik, then gets starts trying to shoot you, and you’re STILL somehow supposed to feel bad when you kill him.

What?

Also, there’s just…dumb stuff that happens.

Isaac has a gun pointed to his head. Point blank. You want to know how he gets out of that situation? This genius engineer that has survived by the skin of his teeth for two games?

He waits. And waits. And then right as the bad guy’s about to shoot, he just moves really fast out of the way.

Kinda dumb, right? A pretty anticlimactic way to resolve a supposedly tense scene?

What if I told you he does that THREE TIMES throughout the course of the game?

*shuffles cue cards* alright, what’s next? Oh, right, yes-

THE GAMEPLAY

The gameplay is the scariest part of the game.

Because it’s bad. Everything that feels crisp and neat and unique about the first two games is gone.

You know things are going wrong when the first weapon Isaac shoots is an automatic pistol. Not a plasma cutter. Nope. One of the most interesting things about the last two games, where Isaac the engineer is forced to improvise mining tools in order to create efficient weapons? Out the window. Here’s a normal regular gun. And also all the ammo is the same. That inventory management that actually created an effective level of anxiety in the last two games? The one where you had to cleverly balance how much of each type of ammo you carried based on what you were expecting to encounter, and how comfortable you were with each gun, and how running out of one type of ammo would challenge you to confront the situation differently than you normally would? Gone. Shoot whatever gun however much you want. Which begs the question, why even craft more than two guns?

WHY EVEN CRAFT MORE THAN TWO GUNS?

WHAT’S EVEN THE POINT?

There’s no point, is the point. I created a plasma cutter and an assault rifle on my first play through. And I pulled out the rifle like three times. One gun was enough, and I felt no desire to try out anything else. Because what’s the point. It’s all the same now.

And not just the ammo. Every enemy encounter feels the exact same. Within a single side quest I lost track of how many times I entered a room and three to four Slashers crawled out of the vents, one by one. Every room felt the exact same. After a certain point, the game just stops trying to surprise you.

In boxing, an uppercut can take you by surprise, if it’s thrown in at the end of a chain of jabs and crosses. But imagine you’re sparring with someone who only uppercuts.

Ever.

That’s not a challenge. It doesn’t matter how hard the uppercut is. You just lean your chin back a few inches and counter.

Every. Single. Time.

Every element of spice and variety in Dead Space’s 1 and 2 feels gone, or at the very least watered down.

And speaking of variety, let’s talk about the enemy design.

Dead Space 2 was fantastic about upping the ante with enemy design. It added at least five new kinds of necromorphs, and every one of them was a change in gameplay. The Pack can be killed in a single shot but swarm you in massive numbers. The Stalkers rely on predatory, velociraptor tactics; every new enemy introduction is cool.

Even Dead Space: Extraction has Grabbers that hide under the water and Fliers that soar around the room and swipe down at you. (For the record, Extraction as a whole is a little cheesy, but still a lot of fun and clearly trying out new ways of exploring the Dead Space universe that are fun and interesting. Unlike a certain other entry in the franchise).

Compare all that to Dead Space 3, which outside of bosses, introduces two enemy types: the Fodder, which are essentially slashers that can turn into Lurkers by exploding into tentacles, and Aliens, which are (to be fair, legitimately scary) minibosses in the last few levels of the game.

Everything else is either the exact same or a slight redesign. The Lurkers are dog zombies, not baby zombies. The swarming enemies are now emaciated adults instead of children. But everything still feels…the same.

There are even little swarmer necros that, this time around, can take over a body and start haphazardly shooting the gun its holding.

But that’s made entirely moot by the NON-haphazard gun-shooting human enemies you fight in the first level! What’s interesting or scary about a zombie that can’t aim?

Oh, also, that satisfying squishing noise when you killed a Swarmer that was crawling on you? It’s just gone. Isaac just swats them off silently. No sound effect at all. Minor gripe, but it’s stupid.

There’s a recurring Giant Enemy Crab that is just annoying to fight, and one boss sequence against the Nexus that’s legitimately fun. Because it’s just the final boss of Dead Space 1 with a bit of a twist. Almost everything good about this game is lifted directly from previous games, and almost everything new and innovative about it falls flat.

There’s three new types of puzzles, and only one of them is decent.

And also, one more random note - and by random I mean it felt just as random to me as it does in the middle of all this - Dead Space 3 is incredibly proud of its ladders. It’s weird.

Someone real high up the corporate Ladder (heh, ladder) was really pleased with how the ladder mechanic worked out.

In case you’re wondering, the ladders are nothing special. They’re fine, they didn’t ever glitch for me or anything, but like…there’s ladders everywhere.

Dead Space’s 1 and 2 handled elevation through stairs, inclines and lifts, but someone was REAL happy that they came up with the idea of adding ladders. They’re bright blue, they’re generally required to use in order to progress, they halt momentum because Isaac climbs ladders slowly, and did I mention they’re everywhere?

At one point there’s a wall of ice, or rock, or tightly packed snow or whatever, that comes up to a bit above Isaac’s head.

A fairly physically fit person could pull themselves up. And you’re playing as Isaac. Who can curbstomp limbs straight off of bodies in a single go.

But nope, we need to throw a ladder in there for no reason.

Don’t have an animation where Isaac can pull himself up. Don’t just desiGN THE LEVEL WITH A SLIGHT INCLINE. GOTTA REALLY MAKE THE MOST OF THIS HOT NEW LADDER TECH.

It doesn’t ruin the game. It’s just bizarre. And it’s bizarre that someone’s proud of it. And once you’re looking for it, it’s blatantly obvious that someone is DEFINITELY super proud of it.

So now we can go into glitches.

Let’s start small. Sometimes there are just little hiccups, like environmental elements loading in late.

Other times you take damage from, shall we say, plays that the coach should challenge. Here’s one where I defeated the boss, but (without touching me) it did damage to me as it sprinted over to where it needed to be for the next cutscene to happen.

Oh, also, every time you walk up to a wall and try to melee it, Isaac’s arm and shoulder JUST GO THROUGH THE WALL. For EVERY SINGLE WALL. I’ve programmed games in Unity that avoid that glitch. It looks and feels so lazy, and I don’t think it happens in any of the other games.

The game introduces a combat roll, but doesn’t expect you to use it. I accidentally rolled into a cutscene, and instead of just having Isaac roll in place and complete the animation before standing up, which would have looked fairly natural, I watched in shock as Isaac, like a photorealistic version of Samus’s morph ball, just uncurled in midair and teleported into position so the cutscene could play “normally.”

At another point a cutscene started as I opened a door, and for no reason (unlike the above, which was caused by my rolling), I watched two dead bodies take life and snap into place for the cutscene like extras in the freshmen musical forgetting their cue.

Also the game has these invisible threshold walls that enemies can’t cross. There are points in the game where you’re fighting enemies, and if you back through an open doorway or across a bridge, the enemies will just FORGET YOU EXIST. They literally run the other direction and then just stand there until you cross the line again. It’s ridiculous AI design that I only saw once in any of the other games, but I found four blatant examples of in Dead Space 3.

I didn’t encounter the infamous “main characters get their limbs shot off in the middle of a cutscene” glitch, but I recommend looking that one up as well, because it’s hilarious.

REDEEMING QUALITIES

I never said Dead Space 3 was the worst game ever made. Just that it was disappointing. So here’s everything they did right, that I can remember.

-Isaac’s character, thanks largely to Gunner Wright’s performance, is still pretty good.

-Carver’s character, while a little shallow, still feels “lived-in,” if that makes sense. I got the feeling that this guy had a story as long and complicated as Isaac’s even though we only hear bits and pieces of it in-game.

-Isaac and Carver’s evolving dynamic throughout the game, while feeling unearned in single player, is still well-written if you look at each scene without context.

-Apparently in co-op, the player playing as Carver will hallucinate and see enemies that aren’t actually there, prompting the player playing as Isaac to ask “What the Eff are you shooting at?” A really neat concept.

-The graphics, particularly in the space scenes, look solid, as long as they’re not glitching out.

-While not executed well, the idea of scavenging in a spaceship graveyard is a cool concept. Apparently that was gonna be the basis of Dead Space 4’s gameplay, and provided they make it more interesting, less linear, and more focused on survival instead of just advancing the plot, I think that would have been a good move.

-The scavenger bot is cute and I’m glad it was there.

-The boss fight against the Nexus is a modified version of the boss fight against the Hive Mind in Dead Space 1. And since it’s something stolen from Dead Space 1, it’s better than pretty much everything else about the game.

-The last portion of the game takes you into an underground alien temple. It feels cheesy, like you’re watching a 70’s horror movie, but it adds some change-ups and I actually enjoyed playing through it. They also clearly focused on making that part of the game scarier than the rest, because I actually got unsettled a few times.

IN SUM

All in all, though, Dead Space 3 is a mess of an action game despite having two masterpieces of the horror genre to use as rungs on the Bright Blue Important Dead Space Ladder. The story is cheesy, the characters are good at best and just awfully written at worst, the gameplay mechanics have simplified all the interesting parts of the franchise [re: enemies and inventory management] and complicated the streamlined parts [re: upgrades and crafting], and there are glitches and technical hangups galore. It all adds up to an uninteresting, non-scary, non-fun adventure that sends the franchise out on a note so low the basses in the choir would strain to hit it.

I have my own thoughts on what a Dead Space 4 could and should be, but that’s a separate essay. More than anything I just want it to exist and I want it to be good, so that passionate Dead Space fans who were disappointed by 3 can wash the sour taste out of their mouths and play at least one more game worthy of the first several entries in the franchise.

It’s a long shot, but trust me, EA, you’ll be doing the world a favor.

Because after Dead Space 3 you left a lot of us feeling like this.

Shameless plug for my Let’s Play of Dead Space 3 here. As of the time I’m writing this, the upload schedule is only a little ways in, but rest assured, I saw this monster through to the bitter, bland end.